Illegal Japanese whalers in Antarctica

Latest on illegal Japanese whalers in Antarctica, targetting the huge Fin whale this year and the humpback next. Sea Shepherd and Greenpeace put aside some of their strategy disagreements to co-operate in obstructing the pirate whalers.

Clemency denied: unimaginative, cowardly decision

Like Clinton during his presidential campaign before him, Arnold Schwarzenegger has followed his political advisers line, with an eye to his political future. He has chosen to stay within the pseudo security the world of Southern California radio talk show demagogue style politics which first promoted his candidacy, instead of taking a risk that might open up new and constructive alliances.

Interesting guest on KPFA Berkeley's coverage, Murder victim families for human rights . At a protest outside Tommy Thompson's ( who was quite likely wrongfully convicted on the evidence of an offender with a violent past who received leniency for testifying) San Quentin execution in the 90s, a woman whose son or daughter was murdered spoke and said that as soon as the prosecutors' met her, " they told (me) a lie: That (I) would only get closure when the murderer was executed. " Thus the crass manipulation and use of victims suffering is a standard prosecution technique in the USA.

It is disturbing to think about murder and violence, and about injustice in the legal system that purports to protect us. The death penalty saps the problem-solving energy of the American public in emotional disputes, whereas the truth in sordid and sometimes convoluted fatal violence is more likely to come out over time. Effective, detached analysis and enlightened, hard-nosed public debate about violent crime are more likely to flourish in the majority of nations that have left state sanctioned killing for crime behind, along with the rack, debtor's prison and the gallows for pickpockets. The USA has the death penalty, an incredibly high rate of incarceration, yet continues to have one of the highest rates of violent crime in the world. What gall to pretend the debate in the US need not look beyond the narrow borders of the country.

Williams Execution - Governor decison tomorrow

Clemency hearings for Stanley Tookie Williams are happening today at 10:00 am Pacific time. Snoop Dog, Jamie Foxx and many others continue to devote a lot of time and energy on this case. If you are reading this and want to express your views to the governor, today and early tomorrow are the last chance. If clemency is denied, the state will kill him MONDAY at midnight; yes that is midnight Monday the 12th or specifically, as soon as it is legally Dec. 13th. I just signed the petition and called the governor's office using the information on save tookie web site. If you call, you will talk to a real person at the governor's office. I got through first try and spoke to a real polite attentive person in under 1 minute. Faxes also are very effective at getting attention. I worked in Canadian provincial governments for 10 years and handled letters from the public, and I can tell you that phone calls, letters, faxes and petitions always have a real impact, whatever the final result. The pro-execution forces in this case are mobilizing and the governor's office will be counting the for and against phone calls, so this is a rare time frame where individuals taking the trouble to express themselves makes a difference.

I got through on the first dial in under a minute told the polite attentive governor's rep (even answering the calls like this costs money; you can tell they are concerned because they have enough people answering) that, as a Canadian criminology researcher i have seen that rehab is not the only reason in this case for clemency. Several judges expressed doubts about the trial of WIlliams, even in the recent decisions which he lost. Pricipal figures in his case had other important convictions thrown out because of similar racially biased juror rejection and racist remarks. Rotten features of the conviction include at least 2 witnesses who received outright immunity and others who received reduced sentences. Cases like this take up to 50 years before the truth comes out. Ultimately, witnesses get older, they finally talk about what happened to somebody and the often surprising truth comes out. It is in the public interest for the truth to come out and for plea deals not to determine so often who takes a rap. In the David Milgaard case in Canada, Milgaard was convicted of a nurse's rape and murder in the early 70s. His lawyer asserted that a convicted offender who lived nearby might have done the crime. Even though I was a human rights advocate who supported Milgaard's clemency, I doubted his lawyer's argument, because he was an unsympathetic character who had admitted standing around the area where the murder was committed,looking for a women whose purse he could snatch. 25 years later, in the mid 1990s new DNA tests that worked on the tiny frozen sample from the crime scene proved that Fisher, the convicted offender the lawyer mentioned was the murderer. He was convicted but he had spent decades free and had committed other violent crimes against women.

William F Buckley on Pacifica's WBAI in 1970s

In 1970. William F. Buckley was one of numerous celebrities who read portions of the entire War and Peace Reprehensible in hindsight, considering how the National Review was financed and staffed, which was not known at the time. The invitation to him was not so bad, but he gave them a perfect excuse not to include him by refusing to come to the studio for fear of appearing to support leftists. So the WBAI people extended themselves by going to his New York mansion to record him and then compounded their obsequious behaviour by accepting a limo ride back to the station, and lamenting that no one was there to see them arrive. Good for the notoriety of the program, bad for integrity. I am all for dialogue with opposing views and accepting challenges to see how the other side arrives at their point of view, but a little parity and dignity please. (click on title above to find the audio of the interview)

Stanley Tookie WIlliams Execution hearing - Dec. 8

This is hopefully first of a series of posts in the runup to Gov. Schwarzenegger's private clemency hearing Dec. 8, 4 days ahead of the scheduled execution date Dec. 13. (My math is not wrong- executions in California usually occur at 12:01 am on the scheduled date, so really at the end of the day before, as soon as possible after the legal date begins)

More about the case at save Tookie web site.

This case is already very high profile with Jamie Foxx, Snoop Dog and many others going to bat for the popular author of anti-gang children's books, but no mistake, the hard line pro-death penalty faction will fight hard as well, and public opinion in California, when given specific facts about the death penalty will back away from it, but when asked the general question favours the death penalty, So the pro-death penalty side will avoid the details of how the penalty is administered, the bias against the poor and non-whites, the many exonerations, the rare tip of the iceberg cases where DNA is available, one estimate being 1 in 7 wrongfully convicted. See Barry Scheck's innocence project to get a flavour of how things go down.

The right conclusion from the exonerations is not that the system works, but that death penalty cases put so much pressure on the system that the path of least resistance often determines who is prosecuted and what the punishment is, and this is often not consistent with a thorough intelligent investigation and prosecution. I will try in the next 2 weeks to highlight a half dozen renowned cases in Canada where incredibly famous life sentence cases were shown only decades after the fact to be entirely bogus.

Buy nothing Day meanderings

On this Buy Nothing Day. as I stay at home not shopping, I allow myself a utopian reverie, with the thought that religious and other freedoms were once utopian reveries of the past. I went to U of British Columbia for 2 years way back, and have tried since then to get a job there and move back. Latest attempt is 3 visits in past year to a coastal logging town near Vancouver (which is too pricy for me I think right now). Every time I talk to real estate people or locals about it I am impressed at the gulf between them and me about how I feel about the place. My latest plan is to live and be environmentally active there, until I am satisfied I can do no more, then be a good example and move to Israel or Russia and be active there. The good example is: it would be nice if everybody from Europe and Asia who voluntarily (or whose ancestors voluntarily) moved to the Americas would back off, have no or a maximum of 1 children for a few generation and then back off North America by moving back to where we came from, there of course to shrink the population further and help reduce all of our global footprint. Wealth through shrinkage is to live like pirates rattling around in all the space and abandoned houses and possessions of the heirless as the selected cities crumble and are overgrown by the admittedly less diverse forests or grasses than were there 500 to 5000 years ago. Aim to be heirless.The declining Buddenbrooks family, but with pride and optimism while writing and imparting family culture to the shrunken next generation, cherished and well cared for children of the few who have children.

Jane Goodall's Harvest for Hope

Flying to Seattle from Oakland in the late 90's, I noticed a woman who looked like Jane Goodall waiting in the lineup for the cut-rate, no frills, cramped Southwest flight. I thought, "gosh, she looks like Jane Goodall, but Jane Goodall, one of the most famous and recognized scientists in the world heads a multi-million dollar foundation and mixes with the rich and famous around the world. No way flying on Southwest, where you have to scramble for a cramped seat because no reserved seating."

After the woman bought her ticket, she took a large stuffed animal from under her arm and stood by the front of the line, talking to each passenger, particularly the children. It was a hand made gorilla.

I congratulated her on speaking out on the treatment of research primates some years earlier, saying it took courage in the face of many Canadian and American academics' opposition to any mandatory guidelines such as Britain's. I had been surprised at her stance, but it turns out I was ignorant of her personal history.

In a nice interview played today promoting her new book Harvest for Hope, Thanksgiving, on Democracy Now, it turns out she has been a vegetarian, or at least avoided factory farmed meat, since the 70s, having spent time on a traditional free range farm as a child and loving the animals.

She was knowlegeable about animal liberation and food issues and talked about speaking to Percy Schmeiser, the Canadian anti-GMO farmer who crossed swords with Monsanto over the last decade. More name dropping, Percy Schmeiser's family owned a house I rented for 4 months in Saskatoon in 1979. I discovered he was an incredibly hard-working tractor dealer/prairie farmer, who personally deliverd 17 tractors that summer.

Wal-Mart movie

I saw part of Robert Greenwald's : WalMart:The High Cost of Low Price last night at a union screening at a local community college, 400 seats about 2/3 full for the early showing. It was very professional, entertaining, high production values, amazing compilation of information and full coverage around the US and of factory workers in China and Bangladesh. A little use of raw numbers discussing crime in Wal-Mart parking lots, similar to Bowling for Columbine where I would like to see relative numbers like percentages. However, Bowling For Columbine remains one of my favorite movies in spite of my criminology research background and my carp that he should show the less dramatic but no less apalling per capita gun murder rate differences between Canada and the US ( I estimated about 3 times the rate vs 30 times the raw number; Canada has about one tenth the US population). These films are passionate, sometimes humorous essays about serious important issues, like an editorial page feature story which contains many facts but is not an exhaustive monograph. A ll in all a powerful case that the local success story of Sam Walton, who had a buy American policy has grown into a corporate monster which is far too monomaniacal about profits and far too powerful for the USA or the world's good, the very situation for which our great grandparents in their wisdom implemented anti-trust laws. Thus another carp is that I think it should have covered the impact of going public and the US law that nothing but shareholder profit, not environment, not community, not employee good can legally be considered by corporate decision makes, as described so well in the Canadian documentary, The Corporation and made the distinction between the family owned company and the public corporation, but maybe it did. I missed the first half.

Nestle kills babies again?

On daytime TV during the Martha Stewart or Ellen DeGeneres show first daytime ads for formula in a long time. Clever ad - Nestle's formula contains special calming proteins. So will this new defiant push in America revive the opposition that successfully forced Nestle to back away from their worldwide ads promoting bottle feeding, especially in developing countries?

Also, freetrader highlights BUY NOTHING next Friday Nov.25. (Beware of a somewhat silly site squatting inexplicably on the buynothingday/org url). The real longstanding international effort is http://www.adbusters.org/metas/eco/bnd/, affiliated with the wonderful artistic Adbusters magazine out of Vancouver, British Columbia. This real link has all kinds of reports on activities around the world and local actions. I envision some year buy nothing day concerts, where tickets are handed out at shopping centres between 9:00 am and 10:00 am diverting young shoppers to all day concerts with the many great musicians who have resisted commercialization and corporate sponsorship and endorsements. Neil Young's anti-sellout song, "This song's for you" could be an inspiration.

Robert Fisk: Torture's out: abuse is in

Reading the news, everything seems confusing and disheartening. After reading analysis by Robert Fisk, just clear-eyed outrage. Without the history firmly in mind, we are rudderless flotsam. (Click above title to see the link)

Fairtrader on Class in America

Click above title for blogger fairtrader's sorely needed discussion of the playing field for newborns in different developed countries. Bill Gates, and other billionaires opposed dropping the estate tax, a few years back, and were ignored for once by lawmakers and scorned by pundits. One really covoluted comment used against the argument: they have so much, they can afford the estate tax.

Heifer International

The above link is one of my favorite charitable organizations. They have great ideals but are not "idealists" . I am skeptical of many such charities that seek to help the poor around the world, but, like Oxfam, they are so transparently astute economically and politically, try as I can, I can find no weakness in their projects, detailed thoroughly on the site. They have by far the most specific, clearest and most understandable examples of some of the unnecessary and negative consequences of trade agreements like WTO and of ill-considered corporate globalization.

Rats, I have no excuse not to give generously! :>

Tactical Voting

Canadian politics (click the link in the title) is all about what is usually called strategic voting. People vote for a pretty corrupt party in fear of the excesses of US style laissez faire neo-coservatism. I call it tactical voting, because you can win battles with tactics, as in the originally Chinese game Go, but to win the war you need strategy. Just doing tactics is not enough. You have to do the really hard work of thinking about and building a long term strategy, and in modern politics in developed countries, that means the Herculean task of getting the public to look deeply into issue like crime and health care/ Otherwise, good things like the Canadian health care system will suffer the death of a thousand cuts.

Open voting; the next crisis?

The paper trail and other necessities for a democracy. Progressives and Democrats hopeful for meaningful change need to declare now that they do not recognize votes decided by no-paper-trail voting machines, nor candidates elected that way, however they turn out. This is a serious gauntlet to throw down, and the sooner the better to sort out the implications the details of non-recognition.

Coutnries around the world could also declare a similar non-recognition and what sanctions they plan to apply, as already have been with countries whose elections and governments are not seen as legitimate. in past decades.

Al Gore at Net Impact Conference

I found a huge photograph of Al Gore on the front of the Saturday Nov 12 2005 San Francisco Chronicle business section with a very short caption describing what seems a medium expensive but very interesting, possibly important conference this weekend, where " participants discuss themes including corporate social responsibility, social entrepreneurship, community development and environmental management" according to the site. Click on the title of this post for the conference web site. It is sold out. Kudos to the Chron business section for featuring the photo with the headline "It's not about the money."

Hoping the speech was late last night and this is just the beginning of coverage ,not shallow celebrity journalism with no story beyond the big photo and caption (nothing at all I can find on the web version). Maybe it is out of their purview because it is not about the money, but hopefully they will have more coverage tomorrow or Monday.

Web idealism, real low quality, elites

The well-reviewed contrarian blog "The amorality of Web 2.0" by Nicholas Carr, you can see by clicking on the title above, is thought provoking. The missing dimension in this stimulating debate in my view is elites and access to "Salons" of the intelligentsia. An important architect of Wikipedia agrees with Carr in the first link below it, citing the random Wikipedia search, which gives mostly sketchy stubs (stub- mere ideas for items) but also asserts its superb quality in selected articles. Intellectual elites from Lao Tzu and Ecclesiastes onwards largely ignore and decry the quality of 90-99% of what is written, asserted, and believed by the throng in favour of a saving remnant's luminous thoughts and dreams, So the pessimistic view of an inevitable decline in quality of "journalism" , in its literal meaning of the daily scribblings of individuals, and the advocates like TIm O'Reilly of a Web 2.0 renaissance, can be reconciled to a degree in that the web has and will allow a shortcut to bright isolated passionate individuals around the globe to at least a taste of the intellectual back and forth that might have taken years before or never happened, just as public libraries, free lecture series, television , the printing press and cofee houses have done in the past. Thus the curious and passionate will seek and find quality intellectual nourishment and avenues for self-expression, in spite of the overall prosaic noise levels.

At the same time, some may get lost in the forest of banal background noise. Try hitting "next blog" above a few times for a random tour of blogs. Last time I did it, it seemed to be a preponderance of literate, exhausted grad students wondering if it is worth it , the time before that, depressing Aussie and Brit drunken weekend descriptions:>

Bono In New York TImes Magazine

Good article. Too long but I read whole thing.

Everything that is beautiful and terrible about limo lobbying. The preaching is dead on, and the story about Jesse Helms which I read before, amazing. Jesse Jackson does it too, quite well, but Americans discount him because of familiarity. Maybe Bono is partly the white Malcolm X I dream about, though not the ass-kicking voice reaching the poor and lower midle class that I think is needed. Now you should have seen Zbiggy Brezhinski on one of the first CNN town meeting type shows about 1992 nakedly insulting the Atlanta audience and, subsequently, the audience's wild cheers for him. Like excitable children who badly needed a firm parent. The audience had been applauding questions from the crowd, and he said, " I can understand you applauding a particularly good answer, but when you applaud each and every question you look like a bunch of trained seals!" He was not smiling. He was absolutely sincere and annoyed. The audience was stunned and sat in total silence after the reprimand. But as the show continued they listened raptly to Brezhinski's insights and gave him thunderous applause and cheers at the end. Too bad his main idea to save the world, to empower Islamic Mujhadeen to humiliate the Soviets, a brilliant tactical move, was not part of a broader strategy which took into account the devastating impact on the Islamic countries of vast influxes of resources to their most extreme religious fanatics, while secular mostly leftist elements were still being subverted, persecuted or killed by friendly regimes like Mubarak, Musharaf and King Hussein and the Israelis. Oh hindsight. Too bad for average working families in the middle who now had to demonstrate allegiance to the fanatics n varying degrees.

One thought - Bono needs to get at Cheney - maybe that is why Cheney is so elusive. Does he remain untouched, a virgin to feelings of humanity, by design, and yanks everybody back to the dark side if they get swayed by the likes of Bono. Does he say to the others, "remember our deal! Your soul in exchange for unlimited power. No backsliding into having a conscience or soul."?

The most interesting story is Paul O'Neill who opened up to Bono and the African reality and ended up frozen out of the Bush administration and wrote a very important, perhaps pivotal book that pulled the curtain aside on the administration, still influencing how irreverent many even mainstream journalists are getting.

Eery echo: Fatal Flood on PBS American Experience

Many amazing, but not mysterious, parallels. I pray that PBS will show Fatal Flood (the american experience) this week. Read the timeline from the documentary by clicking the title of this post above. Photos from the documentary show 13,000 poor blacks trapped on a levee under guard by by armed whites and I immediately thought of the photo when I saw the civilians and prisoners on the expressway ramp outside the Superdome with the national guard around them.

The documentary is about a levee busting flood in 1927 with uncanny echoes today(especially the photos) that brought racial and class differences to a violent climax. Tens of thoudands of black prisoners and farm workers were forced at gunpoint to work day and night to shore up levees on the Mississippi, which may be why the song Aaron Neville sang Friday night, Louisiana 1927, refers to "They're trying to wash us away/They'retrying to wash us away.". When the levee broke many were swept away. Then 13,000 poor blacks were trapped on a levee without food or water further down the Mississippi and promised by a businessman that barges would come to take them to safety. The businessman's father colluded with local whites to block the rescue and only a handfull of white women and children were allowed on the barges. They feared their cheap labor would never return. A black leader was shot in the back for refusing to work a 24 hour shift, and whites and blacks armed themselves amid rising tensions.

Two Americas

Just saw Jesse Jackson on MSNBC, interviewed by the African American woman, with long curls who has been hosting Countdown subbing for Olbermann. Real TV, like Kanye, real things going on. First of all he rips into her for calling them refugees, these are not refugees; these are American citizens. Then she asks a good question: why is this story, like the Rodney King and OJ stories uncovering 2 Americas, black and white, who view things very differently. He answers, because we have no black newsperson who hosts a show on CNN, MSNBC, not one.She responds, I'm working on it.

Rev. Jackson's point about refugees was spot on. How easily the we slipped into the habit of calling them refugees. The only other recent poor black refugees, from Haiti, were sent to Guantanamo and then back to the violent, poverty stricken island where they now live at risk of massacre by US and UN supported death squads. I would avoid being thought of as a refugee given the treatment of the Haitian refugees.

In Levitt's style

My unprofessional observation that reminded me of the best seller:

If biodiesel catches on, there will be competition to pick up used oil at fast foods outlets, so the task of disposing of used oil will go from an expense to a revenue. This in turn could lower the cost of french fries dramatically and result in more obesity, especially among lower income people, heart disease etc. and more people who use their cars to get everywhere, because it is a greater effort with their extra weight.

Counter to this, French fries are already pretty cheap.

Nifty speech about another anarchic achievement

The internet, conceived by the military as a headless (in Greek, anarchic) network resistant to atomic attack continues to generate powerful anarchically organized entities, and as such is the one of greatest conscious achievements of anarchic thinking. Another example is this speech from a Google scientist about how decentralized "dumb" data sources will dwarf the capabilities of centralized databases like Oracle in the next few years.

British Columbia real estate

I went to U of British Columbia for 2 years way back, and have tried since then to get a job there and move back. Latest attempt is 3 visits in past year to a coastal logging town near Vancouver (which is too pricy for me I think right now). Every time I talk to real estate people or locals about it I am impressed at the gulf between them and me about how I feel about the place. Real estate in BC to me is inherently unethical unless one is intensely carrying out a plan to reverse the impact of real estate on this amazing surviving temperate rainforest. In most of Europe the old growth is reduced to little grottos with an understandable mystical element - the relatively intact natural world having been lost in Roman times or in the centuries thereafter, alnog wiht the lion, the wolf, or reduced to a shadow of its former self, like the timid European brown bear.

Star Wars Lament

Darn! How could I have been so intent on immediate gratification, so childish. It was right there on the screen, before the first episode that was released, began. Why did I not walk right out of the theater as soon as I saw EPISODE IV.

WARNING, SPOILERS below: even though I have not seen Revenge of the Sith, the following contains spoilers for those of you wise enough, unlike my foolish impulsive young self, to have waited the few decades until the opus was complete.

How I envy the mature souls who waited, They have now viewed episodes I and II on DVD before taking in III at the cinema, and then rushing back home, depressed and ucertain whether this is ultimately a tragic story, with baited breath watching IV to VI in one glorious sitting, finally collapsing exhausted but satisfied with the rich reward of their patience.

The gospel according to the Christian right

Matt.
21 Then Peter came and said to him, "Lord, if my brother sins against me, how often should I forgive him? As many as seven times?" 22 Jesus said to him, "I tell you, not seven times, but three strikes and you're out!"

Beware of sleepwalking samurais

You want to stay out of their way.

Greener fast food cutlery and dishes

Fast food places and sidewalk hot dog stands etc., which I think do a fair amount of "regular customer" business, should offer a discount to customers who bring their own cup and bowl.Objections will be raised about hygiene and practicality. The food could be passed to them via a spatula which never touches their bowl-plate. Rather it is deftly slid from under the hamburger or whatever and drops onto the plate. They could also sell an inexpensive beautiful rugged ceramic cup.bowl/plate and cutlery kit with lock-on lids for bowl and cup.

Japan has those awesome lacquer bento boxes. Anybody know if those are re-used somehow? If so, how do they clean them enough.for public health.

"red" states should define meal

I am proposing ballot initiatives in several bible belt states that would define a meal as only a union between meat and vegetables. Dishes consisting of vegetables and vegetables would lose their legal status as meals.

Activist dietitians are redefining the American meal. We need to take back our traditional meat and potatoes values!