Sorry for this horrible post. I’ve just watched two people I hate on tv: Katie Couric and George W. Bush.

I hate Katie Couric because she sounds patronizing and uncaring. She asked George Bush a question and then laughed as she said, “You can take the man out of Crawford, but you can’t take the, (he he he) Crawford out of the man.” I’m not sure if she knows her current events, but there is no Crawford in that man, he grew up in Connecticut.

I hate Katie Couric Yahoo Group

I hate George Bush because he smiles the most and almost laughs when he says things like, “The war on terror will be the focus of the 21st Century.” Now, I’m not saying it won’t, but I find it odd that this guy’s biggest smile sweeps across his face when he says this sentence, as if he and his friends may have something to gain from this idea…oh wait a second…

I hate Bush Site on Yahoo Groups

Have you ever wondered why people claim that income taxes are illegal, or why people would want to refrain from paying their taxes in the first place? I mean, don’t our income taxes go towards providing schooling, health care and other social programs?

The answer from Aaron Russo (Producer of The Rose, Trading Places, and Teachers) may make you want to do your own research into this realm. For instance, the 16th amendment (which allows the IRS to demand that people pay income taxes) was created the same year that the Federal Reserve Act was passed. Is there a relationship between the two, and is it possible that the reason for us paying our income taxes is to pay off interest to the “FED”, interest that if our government printed its own money we wouldn’t even owe?

And was the 16th Amendment actually ratified? Didn’t the Supreme Court declare that collecting income taxes was illegal since the 16th Amendment was never ratified?

If you’re curious about these questions (or their answers) click on the image above to see where you can see the new movie “From Freedom to Fascism” by Aaron Russo.

Once a Day is back from Vacation…Hope everyone’s well rested and ready for more Blaahhhging.

I’m working on a theory: We’re all involved in a cult where its perfectly normal to sacrafice our time to the gods of “Work”. I started putting this together in the middle of a hellacious work-week where I put in over 90 extra hours within a week and a half. I started feeling resentful that I had to get up early every morning and return home late every night, rarely seeing my spouse and my cat. Then I started wondering why I do it even when I’m not working extra. Why am I sacraficing so many hours of my day?

The Answer: I’ve been involved in a job-cult ever since the day I was born; I’ve been brainwashed with kiddie books and quotations about the merits of having a job, and how there’s no way that humans could live without them. Think back to how often adults used to ask you what you were going to be when you grew up, as if you weren’t anything or anyone as a child, without that “job”. I have had the mantra “there’s no such thing as a free lunch” quoted to me so often I began to believe it was true. So instead of sacraficing babies on an alter to our pagan gods, we instead sacrafice our precious days to the god of “Job”.

So, among the many goals in my life, I’ve added a new one: Figure out how humanity can thrive without “jobs”. Who’s with me?

So, I just found out that Jesus didn’t exist.

Also, Christianity is all built on lies and falsehoods.

(Okay, this is all speculation. But visit the site, see the movie and tell me what YOU think.)

You can even view the trailor here: The God Who Wasn’t There

- The early founders of Christianity seem wholly unaware of the idea of a human Jesus

- The Jesus of the Gospels bears a striking resemblance to other ancient heroes and the figureheads of pagan savior cults

- Contemporary Christians are largely ignorant of the origins of their religion

- Fundamentalism is as strong today as it ever has been, with an alarming 44% of Americans believing Jesus will return to earth in their lifetimes

Recently, Noam Chomsky released a text indicating the downfall of America. Because this text is not going to be on the net for long, I decided to copy it for your reading pleasure. He gives three points that are the crutial demise of our country. Very interesting and hopefully could lead us into a positive direction, now that we know what’s wrong…
Don’t just get mad at me, get mad at our stagnant population, sitting on their lawn chairs and watching their empire crumble. “We’ve tried nothing and we’re all out of ideas, man!” –Ned Flander’s beatnik dad.

An inability to protect its citizens. The belief that it is above the law. A lack of democracy. Three defining characteristics of the ‘failed state’. And that, says Noam Chomsky, is exactly what the US is becoming. In an exclusive extract from his devastating new book, America’s leading thinker explains how his country lost its way

The selection of issues that should rank high on the agenda of concern for human welfare and rights is, naturally, a subjective matter. But there are a few choices that seem unavoidable, because they bear so directly on the prospects for decent survival. Among them are at least these three: nuclear war, environmental disaster, and the fact that the government of the world’s leading power is acting in ways that increase the likelihood of these catastrophes. It is important to stress the government, because the population, not surprisingly, does not agree.

That brings up a fourth issue that should deeply concern Americans, and the world: the sharp divide between public opinion and public policy, one of the reasons for the fear, which cannot casually be put aside, that, as Gar Alperowitz puts it in America Beyond Capitalism, “the American ’system’ as a whole is in real trouble - that it is heading in a direction that spells the end of its historic values [of] equality, liberty, and meaningful democracy”.

The “system” is coming to have some of the features of failed states, to adopt a currently fashionable notion that is conventionally applied to states regarded as potential threats to our security (like Iraq) or as needing our intervention to rescue the population from severe internal threats (like Haiti). Though the concept is recognised to be, according to the journal Foreign Affairs, “frustratingly imprecise”, some of the primary characteristics of failed states can be identified. One is their inability or unwillingness to protect their citizens from violence and perhaps even destruction. Another is their tendency to regard themselves as beyond the reach of domestic or international law, and hence free to carry out aggression and violence. And if they have democratic forms, they suffer from a serious “democratic deficit” that deprives their formal democratic institutions of real substance.

Among the hardest tasks that anyone can undertake, and one of the most important, is to look honestly in the mirror. If we allow ourselves to do so, we should have little difficulty in finding the characteristics of “failed states” right at home.

No one familiar with history should be surprised that the growing democratic deficit in the United States is accompanied by declaration of messianic missions to bring democracy to a suffering world. Declarations of noble intent by systems of power are rarely complete fabrication, and the same is true in this case. Under some conditions, forms of democracy are indeed acceptable. Abroad, as the leading scholar-advocate of “democracy promotion” concludes, we find a “strong line of continuity”: democracy is acceptable if and only if it is consistent with strategic and economic interests (Thomas Carothers). In modified form, the doctrine holds at home as well.

The basic dilemma facing policymakers is sometimes candidly recognised at the dovish liberal extreme of the spectrum, for example, by Robert Pastor, President Carter’s national security adviser for Latin America. He explained why the administration had to support the murderous and corrupt Somoza regime in Nicaragua, and, when that proved impossible, to try at least to maintain the US-trained National Guard even as it was massacring the population “with a brutality a nation usually reserves for its enemy”, killing some 40,000 people. The reason was the familiar one: “The United States did not want to control Nicaragua or the other nations of the region, but it also did not want developments to get out of control. It wanted Nicaraguans to act independently, except when doing so would affect US interests adversely.”

Similar dilemmas faced Bush administration planners after their invasion of Iraq. They want Iraqis “to act independently, except when doing so would affect US interests adversely”. Iraq must therefore be sovereign and democratic, but within limits. It must somehow be constructed as an obedient client state, much in the manner of the traditional order in Central America. At a general level, the pattern is familiar, reaching to the opposite extreme of institutional structures. The Kremlin was able to maintain satellites that were run by domestic political and military forces, with the iron fist poised. Germany was able to do much the same in occupied Europe even while it was at war, as did fascist Japan in Man-churia (its Manchukuo). Fascist Italy achieved similar results in North Africa while carrying out virtual genocide that in no way harmed its favourable image in the West and possibly inspired Hitler. Traditional imperial and neocolonial systems illustrate many variations on similar themes.

To achieve the traditional goals in Iraq has proven to be surprisingly difficult, despite unusually favourable circumstances. The dilemma of combining a measure of independence with firm control arose in a stark form not long after the invasion, as mass non-violent resistance compelled the invaders to accept far more Iraqi initiative than they had anticipated. The outcome even evoked the nightmarish prospect of a more or less democratic and sovereign Iraq taking its place in a loose Shiite alliance comprising Iran, Shiite Iraq, and possibly the nearby Shiite-dominated regions of Saudi Arabia, controlling most of the world’s oil and independent of Washington.

The situation could get worse. Iran might give up on hopes that Europe could become independent of the United States, and turn eastward. Highly relevant background is discussed by Selig Harrison, a leading specialist on these topics. “The nuclear negotiations between Iran and the European Union were based on a bargain that the EU, held back by the US, has failed to honour,” Harrison observes.

“The bargain was that Iran would suspend uranium enrichment, and the EU would undertake security guarantees. The language of the joint declaration was “unambiguous. ‘A mutually acceptable agreement,’ it said, would not only provide ‘objective guarantees’ that Iran’s nuclear programme is ‘exclusively for peaceful purposes’ but would ‘equally provide firm commitments on security issues.’”

The phrase “security issues” is a thinly veiled reference to the threats by the United States and Israel to bomb Iran, and preparations to do so. The model regularly adduced is Israel’s bombing of Iraq’s Osirak reactor in 1981, which appears to have initiated Saddam’s nuclear weapons programs, another demonstration that violence tends to elicit violence. Any attempt to execute similar plans against Iran could lead to immediate violence, as is surely understood in Washington. During a visit to Tehran, the influential Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr warned that his militia would defend Iran in the case of any attack, “one of the strongest signs yet”, the Washington Post reported, “that Iraq could become a battleground in any Western conflict with Iran, raising the spectre of Iraqi Shiite militias - or perhaps even the US-trained Shiite-dominated military - taking on American troops here in sympathy with Iran.” The Sadrist bloc, which registered substantial gains in the December 2005 elections, may soon become the most powerful single political force in Iraq. It is consciously pursuing the model of other successful Islamist groups, such as Hamas in Palestine, combining strong resistance to military occupation with grassroots social organising and service to the poor.

Washington’s unwillingness to allow regional security issues to be considered is nothing new. It has also arisen repeatedly in the confrontation with Iraq. In the background is the matter of Israeli nuclear weapons, a topic that Washington bars from international consideration. Beyond that lurks what Harrison rightly describes as “the central problem facing the global non-proliferation regime”: the failure of the nuclear states to live up to their nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty (NPT) obligation “to phase out their own nuclear weapons” - and, in Washington’s case, formal rejection of the obligation.

Unlike Europe, China refuses to be intimidated by Washington, a primary reason for the growing fear of China on the part of US planners. Much of Iran’s oil already goes to China, and China is providing Iran with weapons, presumably considered a deterrent to US threats. Still more uncomfortable for Washington is the fact that, according to the Financial Times, “the Sino-Saudi relationship has developed dramatically”, including Chinese military aid to Saudi Arabia and gas exploration rights for China. By 2005, Saudi Arabia provided about 17 per cent of China’s oil imports. Chinese and Saudi oil companies have signed deals for drilling and construction of a huge refinery (with Exxon Mobil as a partner). A January 2006 visit by Saudi king Abdullah to Beijing was expected to lead to a Sino-Saudi memorandum of understanding calling for “increased cooperation and investment between the two countries in oil, natural gas, and minerals”.

Indian analyst Aijaz Ahmad observes that Iran could “emerge as the virtual linchpin in the making, over the next decade or so, of what China and Russia have come to regard as an absolutely indispensable Asian Energy Security Grid, for breaking Western control of the world’s energy supplies and securing the great industrial revolution of Asia”. South Korea and southeast Asian countries are likely to join, possibly Japan as well. A crucial question is how India will react. It rejected US pressures to withdraw from an oil pipeline deal with Iran. On the other hand, India joined the United States and the EU in voting for an anti-Iranian resolution at the IAEA, joining also in their hypocrisy, since India rejects the NPT regime to which Iran, so far, appears to be largely conforming. Ahmad reports that India may have secretly reversed its stand under Iranian threats to terminate a $20bn gas deal. Washington later warned India that its “nuclear deal with the US could be ditched” if India did not go along with US demands, eliciting a sharp rejoinder from the Indian foreign ministry and an evasive tempering of the warning by the US embassy.

The prospect that Europe and Asia might move toward greater independence has seriously troubled US planners since World War II, and concerns have significantly increased as the tripolar order has continued to evolve, along with new south-south interactions and rapidly growing EU engagement with China.

US intelligence has projected that the United States, while controlling Middle East oil for the traditional reasons, will itself rely mainly on more stable Atlantic Basin resources (West Africa, western hemisphere). Control of Middle East oil is now far from a sure thing, and these expectations are also threatened by developments in the western hemisphere, accelerated by Bush administration policies that have left the United States remarkably isolated in the global arena. The Bush administration has even succeeded in alienating Canada, an impressive feat.

Canada’s minister of natural resources said that within a few years one quarter of the oil that Canada now sends to the United States may go to China instead. In a further blow to Washington’s energy policies, the leading oil exporter in the hemisphere, Venezuela, has forged probably the closest relations with China of any Latin American country, and is planning to sell increasing amounts of oil to China as part of its effort to reduce dependence on the openly hostile US government. Latin America as a whole is increasing trade and other relations with China, with some setbacks, but likely expansion, in particular for raw materials exporters like Brazil and Chile.

Meanwhile, Cuba-Venezuela relations are becoming very close, each relying on its comparative advantage. Venezuela is providing low-cost oil while in return Cuba organises literacy and health programs, sending thousands of highly skilled professionals, teachers, and doctors, who work in the poorest and most neglected areas, as they do elsewhere in the Third World. Cuba-Venezuela projects are extending to the Caribbean countries, where Cuban doctors are providing healthcare to thousands of people with Venezuelan funding. Operation Miracle, as it is called, is described by Jamaica’s ambassador to Cuba as “an example of integration and south-south cooperation”, and is generating great enthusiasm among the poor majority. Cuban medical assistance is also being welcomed elsewhere. One of the most horrendous tragedies of recent years was the October 2005 earthquake in Pakistan. In addition to the huge toll, unknown numbers of survivors have to face brutal winter weather with little shelter, food, or medical assistance. One has to turn to the South Asian press to read that “Cuba has provided the largest contingent of doctors and paramedics to Pakistan”, paying all the costs (perhaps with Venezuelan funding), and that President Musharraf expressed his “deep gratitude” for the “spirit and compassion” of the Cuban medical teams.

Some analysts have suggested that Cuba and Venezuela might even unite, a step towards further integration of Latin America in a bloc that is more independent from the United States. Venezuela has joined Mercosur, the South American customs union, a move described by Argentine president Nestor Kirchner as “a milestone” in the development of this trading bloc, and welcomed as opening “a new chapter in our integration” by Brazilian president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva. Independent experts say that “adding Venezuela to the bloc furthers its geopolitical vision of eventually spreading Mercosur to the rest of the region”.

At a meeting to mark Venezuela’s entry into Mercosur, Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez said, “We cannot allow this to be purely an economic project, one for the elites and for the transnational companies,” a not very oblique reference to the US-sponsored “Free Trade Agreement for the Americas”, which has aroused strong public opposition. Venezuela also supplied Argentina with fuel oil to help stave off an energy crisis, and bought almost a third of Argentine debt issued in 2005, one element of a region-wide effort to free the countries from the control of the US-dominated IMF after two decades of disastrous effects of conformity to its rules. The IMF has “acted towards our country as a promoter and a vehicle of policies that caused poverty and pain among the Argentine people”, President Kirchner said in announcing his decision to pay almost $1 trillion to rid itself of the IMF forever. Radically violating IMF rules, Argentina enjoyed a substantial recovery from the disaster left by IMF policies.

Steps toward independent regional integration advanced further with the election of Evo Morales in Bolivia in December 2005, the first president from the indigenous majority. Morales moved quickly to reach energy accords with Venezuela.

Though Central America was largely disciplined by Reaganite violence and terror, the rest of the hemisphere is falling out of control, particularly from Venezuela to Argentina, which was the poster child of the IMF and the Treasury Department until its economy collapsed under the policies they imposed. Much of the region has left-centre governments. The indigenous populations have become much more active and influential, particularly in Bolivia and Ecuador, both major energy producers, where they either want oil and gas to be domestically controlled or, in some cases, oppose production altogether. Many indigenous people apparently do not see any reason why their lives, societies, and cultures should be disrupted or destroyed so that New Yorkers can sit in SUVs in traffic gridlock. Some are even calling for an “Indian nation” in South America. Meanwhile the economic integration that is under way is reversing patterns that trace back to the Spanish conquests, with Latin American elites and economies linked to the imperial powers but not to one another. Along with growing south-south interaction on a broader scale, these developments are strongly influenced by popular organisations that are coming together in the unprecedented international global justice movements, ludicrously called “anti-globalisation” because they favour globalisation that privileges the interests of people, not investors and financial institutions. For many reasons, the system of US global dominance is fragile, even apart from the damage inflicted by Bush planners.

One consequence is that the Bush administration’s pursuit of the traditional policies of deterring democracy faces new obstacles. It is no longer as easy as before to resort to military coups and international terrorism to overthrow democratically elected governments, as Bush planners learnt ruefully in 2002 in Venezuela. The “strong line of continuity” must be pursued in other ways, for the most part. In Iraq, as we have seen, mass nonviolent resistance compelled Washington and London to permit the elections they had sought to evade. The subsequent effort to subvert the elections by providing substantial advantages to the administration’s favourite candidate, and expelling the independent media, also failed. Washington faces further problems. The Iraqi labor movement is making considerable progress despite the opposition of the occupation authorities. The situation is rather like Europe and Japan after World War II, when a primary goal of the United States and United Kingdom was to undermine independent labour movements - as at home, for similar reasons: organised labour contributes in essential ways to functioning democracy with popular engagement. Many of the measures adopted at that time - withholding food, supporting fascist police - are no longer available. Nor is it possible today to rely on the labour bureaucracy of the American Institute for Free Labor Development to help undermine unions. Today, some American unions are supporting Iraqi workers, just as they do in Colombia, where more union activists are murdered than anywhere in the world. At least the unions now receive support from the United Steelworkers of America and others, while Washington continues to provide enormous funding for the government, which bears a large part of the responsibility.

The problem of elections arose in Palestine much in the way it did in Iraq. As already discussed, the Bush administration refused to permit elections until the death of Yasser Arafat, aware that the wrong man would win. After his death, the administration agreed to permit elections, expecting the victory of its favoured Palestinian Authority candidates. To promote this outcome, Washington resorted to much the same modes of subversion as in Iraq, and often before. Washington used the US Agency for International Development as an “invisible conduit” in an effort to “increase the popularity of the Palestinian Authority on the eve of crucial elections in which the governing party faces a serious challenge from the radical Islamic group Hamas” (Washington Post), spending almost $2m “on dozens of quick projects before elections this week to bolster the governing Fatah faction’s image with voters” (New York Times). In the United States, or any Western country, even a hint of such foreign interference would destroy a candidate, but deeply rooted imperial mentality legitimates such routine measures elsewhere. However, the attempt to subvert the elections again resoundingly failed.

The US and Israeli governments now have to adjust to dealing somehow with a radical Islamic party that approaches their traditional rejectionist stance, though not entirely, at least if Hamas really does mean to agree to an indefinite truce on the international border as its leaders state. The US and Israel, in contrast, insist that Israel must take over substantial parts of the West Bank (and the forgotten Golan Heights). Hamas’s refusal to accept Israel’s “right to exist” mirrors the refusal of Washington and Jerusalem to accept Palestine’s “right to exist” - a concept unknown in international affairs; Mexico accepts the existence of the United States but not its abstract “right to exist” on almost half of Mexico, acquired by conquest. Hamas’s formal commitment to “destroy Israel” places it on a par with the United States and Israel, which vowed formally that there could be no “additional Palestinian state” (in addition to Jordan) until they relaxed their extreme rejectionist stand partially in the past few years, in the manner already reviewed. Although Hamas has not said so, it would come as no great surprise if Hamas were to agree that Jews may remain in scattered areas in the present Israel, while Palestine constructs huge settlement and infrastructure projects to take over the valuable land and resources, effectively breaking Israel up into unviable cantons, virtually separated from one another and from some small part of Jerusalem where Jews would also be allowed to remain. And they might agree to call the fragments “a state”. If such proposals were made, we would - rightly - regard them as virtually a reversion to Nazism, a fact that might elicit some thoughts. If such proposals were made, Hamas’s position would be essentially like that of the United States and Israel for the past five years, after they came to tolerate some impoverished form of “statehood”. It is fair to describe Hamas as radical, extremist, and violent, and as a serious threat to peace and a just political settlement. But the organisation is hardly alone in this stance.

Elsewhere traditional means of undermining democracy have succeeded. In Haiti, the Bush administration’s favourite “democracy-building group, the International Republican Institute”, worked assiduously to promote the opposition to President Aristide, helped by the withholding of desperately needed aid on grounds that were dubious at best. When it seemed that Aristide would probably win any genuine election, Washington and the opposition chose to withdraw, a standard device to discredit elections that are going to come out the wrong way: Nicaragua in 1984 and Venezuela in December 2005 are examples that should be familiar. Then followed a military coup, expulsion of the president, and a reign of terror and violence vastly exceeding anything under the elected government.

The persistence of the strong line of continuity to the present again reveals that the United States is very much like other powerful states. It pursues the strategic and economic interests of dominant sectors of the domestic population, to the accompaniment of rhetorical flourishes about its dedication to the highest values. That is practically a historical universal, and the reason why sensible people pay scant attention to declarations of noble intent by leaders, or accolades by their followers.

One commonly hears that carping critics complain about what is wrong, but do not present solutions. There is an accurate translation for that charge: “They present solutions, but I don’t like them.” In addition to the proposals that should be familiar about dealing with the crises that reach to the level of survival, a few simple suggestions for the United States have already been mentioned: 1) accept the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court and the World Court; 2) sign and carry forward the Kyoto protocols; 3) let the UN take the lead in international crises; 4) rely on diplomatic and economic measures rather than military ones in confronting terror; 5) keep to the traditional interpretation of the UN Charter; 6) give up the Security Council veto and have “a decent respect for the opinion of mankind,” as the Declaration of Independence advises, even if power centres disagree; 7) cut back sharply on military spending and sharply increase social spending. For people who believe in democracy, these are very conservative suggestions: they appear to be the opinions of the majority of the US population, in most cases the overwhelming majority. They are in radical opposition to public policy. To be sure, we cannot be very confident about the state of public opinion on such matters because of another feature of the democratic deficit: the topics scarcely enter into public discussion and the basic facts are little known. In a highly atomised society, the public is therefore largely deprived of the opportunity to form considered opinions.

Another conservative suggestion is that facts, logic, and elementary moral principles should matter. Those who take the trouble to adhere to that suggestion will soon be led to abandon a good part of familiar doctrine, though it is surely much easier to repeat self-serving mantras. Such simple truths carry us some distance toward developing more specific and detailed answers. More important, they open the way to implement them, opportun- ities that are readily within our grasp if we can free ourselves from the shackles of doctrine and imposed illusion.

Though it is natural for doctrinal systems to seek to induce pessimism, hopelessness, and despair, reality is different. There has been substantial progress in the unending quest for justice and freedom in recent years, leaving a legacy that can be carried forward from a higher plane than before. Opportunities for education and organising abound. As in the past, rights are not likely to be granted by benevolent authorities, or won by intermittent actions - attending a few demonstrations or pushing a lever in the personalised quadrennial extravaganzas that are depicted as “democratic politics”. As always in the past, the tasks require dedicated day-by-day engagement to create - in part recreate - the basis for a functioning democratic culture in which the public plays some role in determining policies, not only in the political arena, from which it is largely excluded, but also in the crucial economic arena, from which it is excluded in principle. There are many ways to promote democracy at home, carrying it to new dimensions. Opportunities are ample, and failure to grasp them is likely to have ominous repercussions: for the country, for the world, and for future generations.

This is an edited extract from Failed States by Noam Chomsky (Hamish Hamilton), £16.99. To buy it for £15.50 (inc p&p), call Independent Books Direct on 0870 079 8897.

Deadly immunity
When a study revealed that mercury in childhood vaccines may have caused autism in thousands of kids, the government rushed to conceal the data — and to prevent parents from suing drug companies for their role in the epidemic.
By Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Here is the link:
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2005/06/16/thimerosal/print.html

June 16, 2005 | In June 2000, a group of top government scientists and health officials gathered for a meeting at the isolated Simpsonwood conference center in Norcross, Ga. Convened by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the meeting was held at this Methodist retreat center, nestled in wooded farmland next to the Chattahoochee River, to ensure complete secrecy. The agency had issued no public announcement of the session — only private invitations to 52 attendees. There were high-level officials from the CDC and the Food and Drug Administration, the top vaccine specialist from the World Health Organization in Geneva, and representatives of every major vaccine manufacturer, including GlaxoSmithKline, Merck, Wyeth and Aventis Pasteur. All of the scientific data under discussion, CDC officials repeatedly reminded the participants, was strictly “embargoed.”
There would be no making photocopies of documents, no taking papers with them when they left.

The federal officials and industry representatives had assembled to discuss a disturbing new study that raised alarming questions about the safety of a host of common childhood vaccines administered to infants and young children. According to a CDC epidemiologist named Tom Verstraeten, who had analyzed the agency’s massive database containing the medical records of 100,000 children, a mercury-based preservative in the vaccines — thimerosal
— appeared to be responsible for a dramatic increase in autism and a host of other neurological disorders among children. “I was actually stunned by what I saw,” Verstraeten told those assembled at Simpsonwood, citing the staggering number of earlier studies that indicate a link between thimerosal and speech delays, attention-deficit disorder, hyperactivity and autism.
Since 1991, when the CDC and the FDA had recommended that three additional vaccines laced with the preservative be given to extremely young infants — in one case, within hours of birth — the estimated number of cases of autism had increased fifteenfold, from one in every 2,500 children to one in
166 children.

Even for scientists and doctors accustomed to confronting issues of life and death, the findings were frightening. “You can play with this all you want,”
Dr. Bill Weil, a consultant for the American Academy of Pediatrics, told the group. The results “are statistically significant.” Dr. Richard Johnston, an immunologist and pediatrician from the University of Colorado whose grandson had been born early on the morning of the meeting’s first day, was even more alarmed. “My gut feeling?” he said. “Forgive this personal comment — I do not want my grandson to get a thimerosal-containing vaccine until we know better what is going on.”

But instead of taking immediate steps to alert the public and rid the vaccine supply of thimerosal, the officials and executives at Simpsonwood spent most of the next two days discussing how to cover up the damaging data. According to transcripts obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, many at the meeting were concerned about how the damaging revelations about thimerosal would affect the vaccine industry’s bottom line.

“We are in a bad position from the standpoint of defending any lawsuits,”
said Dr. Robert Brent, a pediatrician at the Alfred I. duPont Hospital for Children in Delaware. “This will be a resource to our very busy plaintiff attorneys in this country.” Dr. Bob Chen, head of vaccine safety for the CDC, expressed relief that “given the sensitivity of the information, we have been able to keep it out of the hands of, let’s say, less responsible hands.” Dr. John Clements, vaccines advisor at the World Health Organization, declared flatly that the study “should not have been done at all” and warned that the results “will be taken by others and will be used in ways beyond the control of this group. The research results have to be handled.”

In fact, the government has proved to be far more adept at handling the damage than at protecting children’s health. The CDC paid the Institute of Medicine to conduct a new study to whitewash the risks of thimerosal, ordering researchers to “rule out” the chemical’s link to autism. It withheld Verstraeten’s findings, even though they had been slated for immediate publication, and told other scientists that his original data had been “lost” and could not be replicated. And to thwart the Freedom of Information Act, it handed its giant database of vaccine records over to a private company, declaring it off-limits to researchers. By the time Verstraeten finally published his study in 2003, he had gone to work for GlaxoSmithKline and reworked his data to bury the link between thimerosal and autism.

Vaccine manufacturers had already begun to phase thimerosal out of injections given to American infants — but they continued to sell off their mercury-based supplies of vaccines until last year. The CDC and FDA gave them a hand, buying up the tainted vaccines for export to developing countries and allowing drug companies to continue using the preservative in some American vaccines — including several pediatric flu shots as well as tetanus boosters routinely given to 11-year-olds.

The drug companies are also getting help from powerful lawmakers in Washington. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, who has received $873,000 in contributions from the pharmaceutical industry, has been working to immunize vaccine makers from liability in 4,200 lawsuits that have been filed by the parents of injured children. On five separate occasions, Frist has tried to seal all of the government’s vaccine-related documents — including the Simpsonwood transcripts — and shield Eli Lilly, the developer of thimerosal, from subpoenas. In 2002, the day after Frist quietly slipped a rider known as the “Eli Lilly Protection Act” into a homeland security bill, the company contributed $10,000 to his campaign and bought 5,000 copies of his book on bioterrorism. Congress repealed the measure in 2003 — but earlier this year, Frist slipped another provision into an anti-terrorism bill that would deny compensation to children suffering from vaccine-related brain disorders. “The lawsuits are of such magnitude that they could put vaccine producers out of business and limit our capacity to deal with a biological attack by terrorists,” says Andy Olsen, a legislative assistant to Frist.

Even many conservatives are shocked by the government’s effort to cover up the dangers of thimerosal. Rep. Dan Burton, a Republican from Indiana, oversaw a three-year investigation of thimerosal after his grandson was diagnosed with autism. “Thimerosal used as a preservative in vaccines is directly related to the autism epidemic,” his House Government Reform Committee concluded in its final report. “This epidemic in all probability may have been prevented or curtailed had the FDA not been asleep at the switch regarding a lack of safety data regarding injected thimerosal, a known neurotoxin.” The FDA and other public-health agencies failed to act, the committee added, out of “institutional malfeasance for self protection”
and “misplaced protectionism of the pharmaceutical industry.”

The story of how government health agencies colluded with Big Pharma to hide the risks of thimerosal from the public is a chilling case study of institutional arrogance, power and greed. I was drawn into the controversy only reluctantly. As an attorney and environmentalist who has spent years working on issues of mercury toxicity, I frequently met mothers of autistic children who were absolutely convinced that their kids had been injured by vaccines. Privately, I was skeptical. I doubted that autism could be blamed on a single source, and I certainly understood the government’s need to reassure parents that vaccinations are safe; the eradication of deadly childhood diseases depends on it. I tended to agree with skeptics like Rep.
Henry Waxman, a Democrat from California, who criticized his colleagues on the House Government Reform Committee for leaping to conclusions about autism and vaccinations. “Why should we scare people about immunization,”
Waxman pointed out at one hearing, “until we know the facts?”

It was only after reading the Simpsonwood transcripts, studying the leading scientific research and talking with many of the nation’s preeminent authorities on mercury that I became convinced that the link between thimerosal and the epidemic of childhood neurological disorders is real.
Five of my own children are members of the Thimerosal Generation — those born between 1989 and 2003 — who received heavy doses of mercury from vaccines. “The elementary grades are overwhelmed with children who have symptoms of neurological or immune-system damage,” Patti White, a school nurse, told the House Government Reform Committee in 1999. “Vaccines are supposed to be making us healthier; however, in 25 years of nursing I have never seen so many damaged, sick kids. Something very, very wrong is happening to our children.” More than 500,000 kids currently suffer from autism, and pediatricians diagnose more than 40,000 new cases every year.
The disease was unknown until 1943, when it was identified and diagnosed among 11 children born in the months after thimerosal was first added to baby vaccines in 1931.

Some skeptics dispute that the rise in autism is caused by thimerosal-tainted vaccinations. They argue that the increase is a result of better diagnosis — a theory that seems questionable at best, given that most of the new cases of autism are clustered within a single generation of children. “If the epidemic is truly an artifact of poor diagnosis,” scoffs Dr. Boyd Haley, one of the world’s authorities on mercury toxicity, “then where are all the 20-year-old autistics?” Other researchers point out that Americans are exposed to a greater cumulative “load” of mercury than ever before, from contaminated fish to dental fillings, and suggest that thimerosal in vaccines may be only part of a much larger problem. It’s a concern that certainly deserves far more attention than it has received — but it overlooks the fact that the mercury concentrations in vaccines dwarf other sources of exposure to our children.

What is most striking is the lengths to which many of the leading detectives have gone to ignore — and cover up — the evidence against thimerosal. From the very beginning, the scientific case against the mercury additive has been overwhelming. The preservative, which is used to stem fungi and bacterial growth in vaccines, contains ethylmercury, a potent neurotoxin.
Truckloads of studies have shown that mercury tends to accumulate in the brains of primates and other animals after they are injected with vaccines
— and that the developing brains of infants are particularly susceptible.
In 1977, a Russian study found that adults exposed to much lower concentrations of ethylmercury than those given to American children still suffered brain damage years later. Russia banned thimerosal from children’s vaccines 20 years ago, and Denmark, Austria, Japan, Great Britain and all the Scandinavian countries have since followed suit.

“You couldn’t even construct a study that shows thimerosal is safe,” says Haley, who heads the chemistry department at the University of Kentucky.
“It’s just too darn toxic. If you inject thimerosal into an animal, its brain will sicken. If you apply it to living tissue, the cells die. If you put it in a petri dish, the culture dies. Knowing these things, it would be shocking if one could inject it into an infant without causing damage.”

Internal documents reveal that Eli Lilly, which first developed thimerosal, knew from the start that its product could cause damage — and even death — in both animals and humans. In 1930, the company tested thimerosal by administering it to 22 patients with terminal meningitis, all of whom died within weeks of being injected — a fact Lilly didn’t bother to report in its study declaring thimerosal safe. In 1935, researchers at another vaccine manufacturer, Pittman-Moore, warned Lilly that its claims about thimerosal’s safety “did not check with ours.” Half the dogs Pittman injected with thimerosal-based vaccines became sick, leading researchers there to declare the preservative “unsatisfactory as a serum intended for use on dogs.”

In the decades that followed, the evidence against thimerosal continued to mount. During the Second World War, when the Department of Defense used the preservative in vaccines on soldiers, it required Lilly to label it “poison.” In 1967, a study in Applied Microbiology found that thimerosal killed mice when added to injected vaccines. Four years later, Lilly’s own studies discerned that thimerosal was “toxic to tissue cells” in concentrations as low as one part per million — 100 times weaker than the concentration in a typical vaccine. Even so, the company continued to promote thimerosal as “nontoxic” and also incorporated it into topical disinfectants. In 1977, 10 babies at a Toronto hospital died when an antiseptic preserved with thimerosal was dabbed onto their umbilical cords.

In 1982, the FDA proposed a ban on over-the-counter products that contained thimerosal, and in 1991 the agency considered banning it from animal vaccines. But tragically, that same year, the CDC recommended that infants be injected with a series of mercury-laced vaccines. Newborns would be vaccinated for hepatitis B within 24 hours of birth, and 2-month-old infants would be immunized for haemophilus influenzae B and diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis.

The drug industry knew the additional vaccines posed a danger. The same year that the CDC approved the new vaccines, Dr. Maurice Hilleman, one of the fathers of Merck’s vaccine programs, warned the company that 6-month-olds who were administered the shots would suffer dangerous exposure to mercury.
He recommended that thimerosal be discontinued, “especially when used on infants and children,” noting that the industry knew of nontoxic alternatives. “The best way to go,” he added, “is to switch to dispensing the actual vaccines without adding preservatives.”

For Merck and other drug companies, however, the obstacle was money.
Thimerosal enables the pharmaceutical industry to package vaccines in vials that contain multiple doses, which require additional protection because they are more easily contaminated by multiple needle entries. The larger vials cost half as much to produce as smaller, single-dose vials, making it cheaper for international agencies to distribute them to impoverished regions at risk of epidemics. Faced with this “cost consideration,” Merck ignored Hilleman’s warnings, and government officials continued to push more and more thimerosal-based vaccines for children. Before 1989, American preschoolers received only three vaccinations — for polio, diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis and measles-mumps-rubella. A decade later, thanks to federal recommendations, children were receiving a total of 22 immunizations by the time they reached first grade.

As the number of vaccines increased, the rate of autism among children exploded. During the 1990s, 40 million children were injected with thimerosal-based vaccines, receiving unprecedented levels of mercury during a period critical for brain development. Despite the well-documented dangers of thimerosal, it appears that no one bothered to add up the cumulative dose of mercury that children would receive from the mandated vaccines. “What took the FDA so long to do the calculations?” Peter Patriarca, director of viral products for the agency, asked in an e-mail to the CDC in 1999. “Why didn’t CDC and the advisory bodies do these calculations when they rapidly expanded the childhood immunization schedule?”

But by that time, the damage was done. Infants who received all their vaccines, plus boosters, by the age of 6 months were being injected with levels of ethylmercury 187 times greater than the EPA’s limit for daily exposure to methylmercury, a related neurotoxin. Although the vaccine industry insists that ethylmercury poses little danger because it breaks down rapidly and is removed by the body, several studies — including one published in April by the National Institutes of Health — suggest that ethylmercury is actually more toxic to developing brains and stays in the brain longer than methylmercury.

Officials responsible for childhood immunizations insist that the additional vaccines were necessary to protect infants from disease and that thimerosal is still essential in developing nations, which, they often claim, cannot afford the single-dose vials that don’t require a preservative. Dr. Paul Offit, one of CDC’s top vaccine advisors, told me, “I think if we really have an influenza pandemic — and certainly we will in the next 20 years, because we always do — there’s no way on God’s earth that we immunize 280 million people with single-dose vials. There has to be multidose vials.”

But while public-health officials may have been well-intentioned, many of those on the CDC advisory committee who backed the additional vaccines had close ties to the industry. Dr. Sam Katz, the committee’s chair, was a paid consultant for most of the major vaccine makers and shares a patent on a measles vaccine with Merck, which also manufactures the hepatitis B vaccine.
Dr. Neal Halsey, another committee member, worked as a researcher for the vaccine companies and received honoraria from Abbott Labs for his research on the hepatitis B vaccine.

Indeed, in the tight circle of scientists who work on vaccines, such conflicts of interest are common. Rep. Burton says that the CDC “routinely allows scientists with blatant conflicts of interest to serve on intellectual advisory committees that make recommendations on new vaccines,”
even though they have “interests in the products and companies for which they are supposed to be providing unbiased oversight.” The House Government Reform Committee discovered that four of the eight CDC advisors who approved guidelines for a rotavirus vaccine laced with thimerosal “had financial ties to the pharmaceutical companies that were developing different versions of the vaccine.”

Offit, who shares a patent on the vaccine, acknowledged to me that he “would make money” if his vote to approve it eventually leads to a marketable product. But he dismissed my suggestion that a scientist’s direct financial stake in CDC approval might bias his judgment. “It provides no conflict for me,” he insists. “I have simply been informed by the process, not corrupted by it. When I sat around that table, my sole intent was trying to make recommendations that best benefited the children in this country. It’s offensive to say that physicians and public-health people are in the pocket of industry and thus are making decisions that they know are unsafe for children. It’s just not the way it works.”

Other vaccine scientists and regulators gave me similar assurances. Like Offit, they view themselves as enlightened guardians of children’s health, proud of their “partnerships” with pharmaceutical companies, immune to the seductions of personal profit, besieged by irrational activists whose anti-vaccine campaigns are endangering children’s health. They are often resentful of questioning. “Science,” says Offit, “is best left to scientists.”

Still, some government officials were alarmed by the apparent conflicts of interest. In his e-mail to CDC administrators in 1999, Paul Patriarca of the FDA blasted federal regulators for failing to adequately scrutinize the danger posed by the added baby vaccines. “I’m not sure there will be an easy way out of the potential perception that the FDA, CDC and immunization-policy bodies may have been asleep at the switch re: thimerosal until now,” Patriarca wrote. The close ties between regulatory officials and the pharmaceutical industry, he added, “will also raise questions about various advisory bodies regarding aggressive recommendations for use” of thimerosal in child vaccines.

If federal regulators and government scientists failed to grasp the potential risks of thimerosal over the years, no one could claim ignorance after the secret meeting at Simpsonwood. But rather than conduct more studies to test the link to autism and other forms of brain damage, the CDC placed politics over science. The agency turned its database on childhood vaccines — which had been developed largely at taxpayer expense — over to a private agency, America’s Health Insurance Plans, ensuring that it could not be used for additional research. It also instructed the Institute of Medicine, an advisory organization that is part of the National Academy of Sciences, to produce a study debunking the link between thimerosal and brain disorders. The CDC “wants us to declare, well, that these things are pretty safe,” Dr. Marie McCormick, who chaired the IOM’s Immunization Safety Review Committee, told her fellow researchers when they first met in January 2001.
“We are not ever going to come down that [autism] is a true side effect” of thimerosal exposure. According to transcripts of the meeting, the committee’s chief staffer, Kathleen Stratton, predicted that the IOM would conclude that the evidence was “inadequate to accept or reject a causal relation” between thimerosal and autism. That, she added, was the result “Walt wants” — a reference to Dr. Walter Orenstein, director of the National Immunization Program for the CDC.

For those who had devoted their lives to promoting vaccination, the revelations about thimerosal threatened to undermine everything they had worked for. “We’ve got a dragon by the tail here,” said Dr. Michael Kaback, another committee member. “The more negative that [our] presentation is, the less likely people are to use vaccination, immunization — and we know what the results of that will be. We are kind of caught in a trap. How we work our way out of the trap, I think is the charge.”

Even in public, federal officials made it clear that their primary goal in studying thimerosal was to dispel doubts about vaccines. “Four current studies are taking place to rule out the proposed link between autism and thimerosal,” Dr. Gordon Douglas, then-director of strategic planning for vaccine research at the National Institutes of Health, assured a Princeton University gathering in May 2001. “In order to undo the harmful effects of research claiming to link the [measles] vaccine to an elevated risk of autism, we need to conduct and publicize additional studies to assure parents of safety.” Douglas formerly served as president of vaccinations for Merck, where he ignored warnings about thimerosal’s risks.

In May of last year, the Institute of Medicine issued its final report. Its
conclusion: There is no proven link between autism and thimerosal in vaccines. Rather than reviewing the large body of literature describing the toxicity of thimerosal, the report relied on four disastrously flawed epidemiological studies examining European countries, where children received much smaller doses of thimerosal than American kids. It also cited a new version of the Verstraeten study, published in the journal Pediatrics, that had been reworked to reduce the link between thimerosal and autism. The new study included children too young to have been diagnosed with autism and overlooked others who showed signs of the disease. The IOM declared the case closed and — in a startling position for a scientific body — recommended that no further research be conducted.

The report may have satisfied the CDC, but it convinced no one. Rep. David Weldon, a Republican physician from Florida who serves on the House Government Reform Committee, attacked the Institute of Medicine, saying it relied on a handful of studies that were “fatally flawed” by “poor design”
and failed to represent “all the available scientific and medical research.”
CDC officials are not interested in an honest search for the truth, Weldon told me, because “an association between vaccines and autism would force them to admit that their policies irreparably damaged thousands of children.
Who would want to make that conclusion about themselves?”

Under pressure from Congress, parents and a few of its own panel members, the Institute of Medicine reluctantly convened a second panel to review the findings of the first. In February, the new panel, composed of different scientists, criticized the earlier panel for its lack of transparency and urged the CDC to make its vaccine database available to the public.

So far, though, only two scientists have managed to gain access. Dr. Mark Geier, president of the Genetics Center of America, and his son, David, spent a year battling to obtain the medical records from the CDC. Since August 2002, when members of Congress pressured the agency to turn over the data, the Geiers have completed six studies that demonstrate a powerful correlation between thimerosal and neurological damage in children. One study, which compares the cumulative dose of mercury received by children born between 1981 and 1985 with those born between 1990 and 1996, found a “very significant relationship” between autism and vaccines. Another study of educational performance found that kids who received higher doses of thimerosal in vaccines were nearly three times as likely to be diagnosed with autism and more than three times as likely to suffer from speech disorders and mental retardation. Another soon-to-be-published study shows that autism rates are in decline following the recent elimination of thimerosal from most vaccines.

As the federal government worked to prevent scientists from studying vaccines, others have stepped in to study the link to autism. In April, reporter Dan Olmsted of UPI undertook one of the more interesting studies himself. Searching for children who had not been exposed to mercury in vaccines — the kind of population that scientists typically use as a “control” in experiments — Olmsted scoured the Amish of Lancaster County, Penn., who refuse to immunize their infants. Given the national rate of autism, Olmsted calculated that there should be 130 autistics among the Amish. He found only four. One had been exposed to high levels of mercury from a power plant. The other three — including one child adopted from outside the Amish community — had received their vaccines.

At the state level, many officials have also conducted in-depth reviews of thimerosal. While the Institute of Medicine was busy whitewashing the risks, the Iowa Legislature was carefully combing through all of the available scientific and biological data. “After three years of review, I became convinced there was sufficient credible research to show a link between mercury and the increased incidences in autism,” says state Sen. Ken Veenstra, a Republican who oversaw the investigation. “The fact that Iowa’s 700 percent increase in autism began in the 1990s, right after more and more vaccines were added to the children’s vaccine schedules, is solid evidence alone.” Last year, Iowa became the first state to ban mercury in vaccines, followed by California. Similar bans are now under consideration in 32 other states.

But instead of following suit, the FDA continues to allow manufacturers to include thimerosal in scores of over-the-counter medications as well as steroids and injected collagen. Even more alarming, the government continues to ship vaccines preserved with thimerosal to developing countries — some of which are now experiencing a sudden explosion in autism rates. In China, where the disease was virtually unknown prior to the introduction of thimerosal by U.S. drug manufacturers in 1999, news reports indicate that there are now more than 1.8 million autistics. Although reliable numbers are hard to come by, autistic disorders also appear to be soaring in India, Argentina, Nicaragua and other developing countries that are now using thimerosal-laced vaccines. The World Health Organization continues to insist thimerosal is safe, but it promises to keep the possibility that it is linked to neurological disorders “under review.”

I devoted time to study this issue because I believe that this is a moral crisis that must be addressed. If, as the evidence suggests, our public-health authorities knowingly allowed the pharmaceutical industry to poison an entire generation of American children, their actions arguably constitute one of the biggest scandals in the annals of American medicine.
“The CDC is guilty of incompetence and gross negligence,” says Mark Blaxill, vice president of Safe Minds, a nonprofit organization concerned about the role of mercury in medicines. “The damage caused by vaccine exposure is massive. It’s bigger than asbestos, bigger than tobacco, bigger than anything you’ve ever seen.” It’s hard to calculate the damage to our country
— and to the international efforts to eradicate epidemic diseases — if Third World nations come to believe that America’s most heralded foreign-aid initiative is poisoning their children. It’s not difficult to predict how this scenario will be interpreted by America’s enemies abroad. The scientists and researchers — many of them sincere, even idealistic — who are participating in efforts to hide the science on thimerosal claim that they are trying to advance the lofty goal of protecting children in developing nations from disease pandemics. They are badly misguided. Their failure to come clean on thimerosal will come back horribly to haunt our country and the world’s poorest populations.

link
Two weeks ago, Neil Young released his latest album, “Living with War”. It’s a bold piece of work, proving that he isn’t Burning Out or Fading Away anytime soon. The album is a brilliant throwback to his Ohio days and will surely illustrate to our children a pivotal point in our country’s history. If it’s received well (which it probably won’t be) it has the potential to serve as the cadence for a brave change in our administration and the minds of our passive public body. Check out the 100 voices with him in “Let’s Impeach the President…” Despite Neil’s Canadian roots, he’s more American than most will ever be. I really hope “Living With War” gets some national airtime. Tell me if you hear it on Clearchannel!

Thank You Neil Young.

I heard on the radio yesterday that every American “owes” $28,000 to get us out of the current deficit. (keep pushing refresh to watch it climb!) The money we are borrowing to fund the war and sustain us comes from China and Japan, with high interest rates. Imagine what their economies will be like if/when we pay back the 8 trillion we owe!

This guy also illustrates my feelings more concisely than I could write them right now. ENJOY.

There’s been some ink spilled lately denigrating so called ‘angry liberals,’ that is, people who have allegedly lost their right to be taken seriously because they are ‘angry.’ And they are ‘liberal.’
Well, I hereby declare myself a charter member in the ALC (Angry Liberal Club).

Sure, at first I felt guilty — what right do I have as a patriotic American to be angry? Or liberal? Oh, I tried to repress the ‘angry thing,’ I tried — if I was asked, I claimed I was a ‘peeved moderate.’ Or a ‘mildly upset centrist.’ But after much work through ‘BIT’ (Blog Immersion Therapy), I stopped feeling the shame. I’m coming out of the closet to announce I am an Angry Liberal Guy. And I am pissed.

You might be saying “Man, what are you so angry about, Angry Liberal Guy?”

I’ve compiled a short (and by no means complete) list just so I could see it all in one place:

I’m angry about the shredding of the constitution…illegal wiretaps…falsified intelligence…secret prisons… use of torture as an accepted means of interrogation…Terry Schiavo…the war on science…denial of Global Warming…the fascistic secrecy of our elected officials… presidential signings that declare the President above the law…the breakdown of the wall between church and state…the outing of a clandestine CIA agent for purely partisan political gain…the corrupting influence of K Street… the total sell-out of the legislative process to corporate interests… appointments of unqualified cronies at every level of government…Harriet Miers…Brownie…Abu Ghraib… Scooter …the complete mismanagement of the war in Iraq…the lies about the complete mismanagement of the war in Iraq…the grotesque budget deficits… the pathetic response to Katrina… a civil rights division dedicated to undermining civil rights…an environmental protection agency that refuses to protect the environment… (Take a breath, Angry Liberal Guy.)

And I’m angry about a smug, simple-minded, incompetent, unqualified President, and a press that denies the obvious fact that we have a smug, simple-minded, incompetent unqualified President.

If these things don’t make you angry, I have to ask — what the hell is the matter with you?

And what would it take to make you angry?

– C.B. Shapiro

and if you want to see Bush’s schedule for the next few days, here you go. (pdf format)

Jorge couldn’t post yesterday because his computer blew up. Cross your fingers that he is able to retrieve all that stuff.

Keep on, Jorge!

This one’s for my boys in the Boroughs.

Between 2003 and 2005, 1,662 murders were committed in New York. Men and boys were responsible for 93 percent of the murders; their victims tended to be other men and boys; and in more than half the cases, the killer and victim knew each other.

In addition, an interesting, though uncommon, group of murders involved a handful of victims who died of injuries one or more years after being stabbed, shot, beaten or burned and were counted as murder victims in the year in which they died. Click on the map to view all of the homicides by borough.

I know it’s not my day to post, but I thought I’d throw this one out there, as it looks like an bone crusher!

Link to trailer

Congress, at long last, is turning its reactionary eye onto the vast amount of junk food widely available in American public schools. Bipartisan legislation has been introduced in the Senate to push the USDA into upping the standards it sets for what ends up on lunch trays and in vending machines.

Dangerous weight is on the rise in kids. This week, the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said the rate of obese and overweight kids has climbed to 18 percent of boys and 16 percent of girls. Four years ago, the number was 14 percent.

Lawmakers blame high-fat, high-sugar snacks that compete with nutritious meals in schools.

“Junk food sales in schools are out of control,” Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, senior Democrat on the Senate Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry Committee, said Thursday. “It undercuts our investment in school meal programs and steers kids toward a future of obesity and diet-related disease.”

Could this be the beginning of a national Upchuck Rebellion?

“…[A] big change is coming. With little fanfare, a grassroots ‘farm-to-cafeteria’ movement has been spreading from school to school. More than 400 school districts and 200 university cafeterias are now building their menus (and, in many places, their educational curricula) around fresh, local ingredients, much of which is organic. In nearly every case, the change has come because some parent, farmer, nutritionist, or other individual rose up to ask, ‘What the hell is going on here?’”

Check out the Farm to School website to learn more and see if you’re state is on board yet.

I received this series of emails this morning from my Almer Mater. I’ve changed the names to protect the ignorrant, but the rest is exactly as it came to me. This gives those that weren’t there a sense of what kind of bullshit both teachers and students have to put up with. (look at me, I still end sentences with prepositions!) Truly amazing that these converstaions still occur between teachers, but it’s a peephole into some of the people teaching our future.

Faculty and Staff:
It has been brought to my attention that clarification is needed on how we calculate grades. Adding the two quarters or nine weeks together and dividing by two will calculate the semester average. For instance, a student might earn a 90 for Q1 and a 95 for Q2. Therefore, the average is adding the two together and dividing by two, 92.5 =93.
Adding the semester averages for each semester twice to the final exam and dividing by five will calculate the final grade. For example, if a student has a 93 for first semester, an 89 for second semester and a final exam grade of a 78, the following would be used to calculate the grade:
93 = 442
Now, we take the 442 and divide it by 5=88.4 or an 88.
In talking with Mr. Keyserling and Mr. Stowe, these formulas should be incorporated into the IGPRO spreadsheets. If this is not the case for your spreadsheets, please contact Mr. Keyserling, Mr. Stowe, Dr. Jackson, Ms. Krauer, Mr. Allen, Mr. Lentz or myself. We will be happy to assist you in correcting the spreadsheets.
Thank you for your time and cooperation.

Dr. Mona Lisa Dix
Assistant Principal
“It’s about creating an environment of teaching and learning.”

Ms. Dickson:
There is a need for further clarification and or justification for why we are adopting a grading calculation policy that penalizes the students instead of helping the student. This new formula takes approximately 4 percentage points from the student as demonstrated in a recent issue about a students grade, i.e., the old formula gave the student a grade of 72.5%, but the new formula gave the student a grade of 68.5%. I question are we helping or hurting the student. It is my understanding that this calculation was arrived at by yourself and Ginger Hopkins; is this a new formula for the entire county or just something for Beaufort High School? Further, is this the formula utilized by the State of South Carolina and when was it published that this change would take place?
If we truly intend to create an environment of teaching and learning, every consideration must be given to giving the student the advantage and not penalizing them. I by this e-mail am filing a notice of my personal dissent to this unfair change in the grading policy and request that we take another look at this to make certain that all of us in the county and the state are on the same page when it comes to student evaluation.
There is never a inconvenient time to do the right thing.

Dr. Walter Eagle
Vice Principal
School Test Coordinator

Dr. Hawk, I agree with your assessment. This new formula is not good. It penalizes the students.
The old formula works to the best interest of the students.
Policy changes like this must be handled much better than this. This is a major policy change.

More people need to be involved in this process than Ms. Dickson and Mrs. Hopkins. According to Ms. Dickson, she and Mrs. Ginger Hopkins discussed the need for the new formula because they felt that the students were being tested to much.

This is not good. This is a trap set for students to fail. Students already have many traps set up for them to fail by some of the very people who have been entrusted to teach them. They do not need another one.

We must have a serious discussion on this matter. We are suppose to be in a democratic society, the collected should have been involved in this process. This includes students, parents, teachers, school board members, and general public.

This is pure madness. It must stop. Let us actually try to help the students instead of hindering them. The new formula hinders.

I applaud you Dr. Hawk for having the intestinal fortitude to stand up for what is right. I which there were more people like you in positions of authority. The children need you.

O. Adejola

While we are all sounding off on the grading policy, I guess I’ll throw in my two cents. The grading policy is great! It’s easy and straight-forward. As far as a grading policy “penalizing” students, I think only poor grades and lack of studying penalize students. I mean, I could make up a grading policy that gives every student in this school an “A” in every class. It doesn’t directly PENALIZE anybody, but is it ethical? Just because the new policy gave the kid a lower grade doesn’t mean that the old one was right. Who says the old one wasn’t severely flawed and now you are using it for comparison? I think “creating an environment of teaching and learning” is about holding students accountable. “You want good grades kids? Here is our school’s grading policy. You will have a final that is weighted this much…fail it and you will be penalized.”

Thank you for your two cents. It shows exactly how much compassion you have for student success and their self-esteem.

Unjust policies also penalizes students. History demonstrates this fact repeatedly.

Supposedly, you are a student of history. Therefore you must be aware of the policy that was put in place during the inhumane system of chattel slavery. This policy said that if a slave ran away from his master, then he was stealing himself. This policy was put in place by European slavemasters.

Because the slave wanted to be free from bondage, he stole himself. He went against a policy that penalizes him for wanted to be free.

This clearly indicates that policies can be penalizing. Although you can acknowledge that poor grades and the lack of studying penalize students, you fail to acknowledge how policies can also penalize.

Once again, I thank you for revealing how much compassion you have (2%).

Parents need to be made aware of your thoughts.

O. Adejola

Truly tempting, but I don’t care to make a business discussion a matter of personal attacks.

A fascinating article was recently published listing the nations that are on the brink of collapse. The study states that economically stable nations should be more concerned about these countries than the superpowers with the fancy technology.

How do you know a failed state when you see one? Of course, a government that has lost control of its territory or of the monopoly on the legitimate use of force has earned the label. But there can be more subtle attributes of failure. Some regimes, for example, lack the authority to make collective decisions or the capacity to deliver public services. In other countries, the populace may rely entirely on the black market, fail to pay taxes, or engage in large-scale civil disobedience. Outside intervention can be both a symptom of and a trigger for state collapse. A failed state may be subject to involuntary restrictions of its sovereignty, such as political or economic sanctions, the presence of foreign military forces on its soil, or other military constraints, such as a no-fly zone.

The report goes on to name the 30-45 endangered countries (depending on whom you ask) and raises some good questions to what should be done. Free elections don’t seem to be working so well for most of them.

The index does not provide any easy answers for those looking to shore up countries on the brink. Elections are almost universally regarded as helpful in reducing conflict. However, if they are rigged, conducted during active fighting, or attract a low turnout, they can be ineffective or even harmful to stability. Electoral democracy appears to have had only a modest impact on the stability of states such as Iraq, Rwanda, Kenya, Venezuela, Nigeria, and Indonesia. Ukraine ranks as highly vulnerable in large part because of last year’s disputed election.

The part that struck me the most was the last paragraph, where there is a description of the factors used to determine what was defined as a failing state.

What are the clearest early warning signs of a failing state? Among the 12 indicators we use, two consistently rank near the top. Uneven development is high in almost all the states in the index, suggesting that inequality within states—and not merely poverty—increases instability. Criminalization or delegitimization of the state, which occurs when state institutions are regarded as corrupt, illegal, or ineffective, also figured prominently. Facing this condition, people often shift their allegiances to other leaders—opposition parties, warlords, ethnic nationalists, clergy, or rebel forces. Demographic factors, especially population pressures stemming from refugees, internally displaced populations, and environmental degradation, are also found in most at-risk countries, as are consistent human rights violations. Identifying the signs of state failure is easier than crafting solutions, but pinpointing where state collapse is likely is a necessary first step.

Sound familiar? I realize that the countries they are referring are in a further state of collapse than us, but the same signs could be applied easily to the state of our overcaffinated economy, the polarization of the people, destruction of our forests and wetlands, (not to mention the latest Alaskan oil spill), hurricane refugees, and our consistent human rights violations.

Link.

I haven’t watched an episode of The Simpsons in years, which seems strange after it was a regurlarly scheduled and significant portion of my day for several college semesters and beyond. Nearly every situation could be emphasized with a Simpsons quote, and I sometimes found myself alienated when I’d bring one up and no one would get the reference. I still whip one out on occasion, but they’re from 1994, and I have found that they are best kept in my head, as most of my jokes should be. Anyway, I ran across this article this morning and it says a lot about what is making it into the heads of US citizens, and what seems to be filtered out, intentionally or not.

By Rich Lewis, Mar 02, 2006

The latest in this endless string of gripes about our collective ignorance was in the headlines just yesterday. The McCormick Tribune Freedom Museum in Chicago released a study showing that 52 percent of Americans can name “at least two members of ‘The Simpsons’ cartoon family” but only 28 percent can name two of “the five fundamental freedoms granted to them by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.”

The museum glumly reported that 22 percent of Americans can name all five members of the Simpson family while only one-tenth of one percent can name all five of the freedoms.

OK, so when they got a phone call out of the blue asking them to name the five freedoms — speech, religion, press, assembly and petition — only 28 percent of Americans could remember two of them.

You’ve probably exercised all five of those rights in the past year and knew darn well nobody could stop you because “they’re in the Constitution.” Somewhere in there.

And yes, 45 percent said the right to own a gun was guaranteed by the First Amendment. Actually, it’s the Second Amendment, but on the bright side, that’s only off by one.

And sure, 21 percent said the right “to own and raise pets” is in the First Amendment, and 17 percent said the right “to drive a car” is in there. If they aren’t, they should be because Fido and the Ford are just as American as the flag.

But what grinds my gears isn’t the suggestion that the country is falling apart because the citizenry got a D on a pop quiz in civics.

No, what ticks me off is the suggestion that we should be ashamed of knowing so much about “The Simpsons.” In fact, the headline on this study shouldn’t have been: “Ignorance of First Amendment spells doom for America.” It should have been: “Knowledge of cartoon show proves America on right track.”

Because those who watch “The Simpsons” are far better citizens — and human beings — than those eggheads who could win a few bucks on “Jeopardy” by cleaning up on the “Obscure Facts about the First Amendment” category.

No matter what the topic — politics, economics, religion, relationships — if you want the skinny, the Simpsons have it. For 17 years, Homer, Bart, Marge, Lisa, and all the other Simpson characters from Mayor Quigley to Mr. Burns to Ned Flanders have unerringly revealed the truths and consequences of American life.

You have the right to speak and assemble, and that’s important — but the beating heart of American life is all about D’oh! and doughnuts.

In fact, “D’oh” — Homer’s trademark expletive and the ultimate expression of the esteemed American tradition of achieving enlightenment through blockheaded error — is now enshrined in the Oxford English Dictionary.

How important is “The Simpsons”? Well, in 1998, Time Magazine TV critic James Poniewozik named it “the best TV show ever” in the magazine’s roundup of the greatest artworks of the 20th century.

And if the Freedom Museum thinks it’s important for us to grasp basic political and civic principles, well, as Poniewozik wrote, the political lessons in the show are “both timeless and au courant,” not just “the comics” but also “the news.”

The show has had a huge influence on popular culture because it evenhandedly exposes the highminded and the hypocritical in the way we actually live skewering the behaviors of those on the left, right, middle and the inside-out.

Jonah Goldberg, editor of the conservative National Review, says “The Simpsons” is “possibly the most intelligent, funny, and even politically satisfying TV show ever” because its satire “spares nothing and no one.”

The show regularly rips America’s consumerist gluttony (those doughnuts), but also mocks the self-righteous abstainers, such as when Lisa encounters a pompous “level 5 vegan” who won’t eat “anything that casts a shadow.”

Having the First Amendment right to practice your religion is certainly important, but remembering that your religion is one of many may require a little needling now and then, and the show gives it to Catholics, Jews, Unitarians and every other religion, right down to Pastor Timothy Lovejoy of the Springfield Community Church, who is described as “a pan-denominational windbag.”

While American media fret about poking fun at ethnic issues, “The Simpsons” regularly visits with Apu Nahasapeemapetilon, the Indian manager of the local Kwik-E-Mart, portrayed, as Goldberg notes, “with his outrageously stereotyped accent, religious oddities, bullet scars, and unapologetic price gouging.”

“I love this land,” Apu declares, “where I have the freedom to say, and to think, and to charge whatever I want!”

Now that’s my America, freedoms included.

You feel bad that you can’t name the five freedoms in the First Amendment? Well, maybe you should, a little. At least keep them on a card in your wallet in case some pollster calls you someday.

But feel bad that you can name the five Simpsons? No way, dude. And I have only one thing to say to anyone who suggests otherwise:

Eat my shorts.

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I attended my field’s annual Policy Symposium this past week in D.C., which focused on addressing child care related issues on local, state, and national levels. As such, we hit Capital Hill on Thursday to meet with our representatives–or at least their fresh-faced staffers–to help them realize the importance of quality child care in the lives of healthy families, and healthy economies.

Our main priority was to push for re-authorization of the Child Care and Development Block Grant, which helps subsidize the high cost of child care for working families. Since this has not yet happened, most states across the country are experiencing high waiting lists for child care subsidy services, including my own, where the parents of over 35,000 children are waiting for assistance. In the meantime, families either lose/quit their jobs because they cannot afford to pay for care out of pocket ($4,000-$10,000 a year) and then draw on already limited local resources, make potentially risky care choices, or simply leave their young children (0-5 yrs) home alone while they go out to earn a living. None of these scenarious, obviously, are good for communities, good for families, or good for children. However, as long as child care subsidy, and other “welfare” programs are framed in the political discourse as “handouts” it’s not going to change a thing in Washington and in your neighborhood.

Our keynote speaker, author and Berkeley linguistics professor James Lakoff, had something to say about this last point. He argued that most political debates are essentially moral battles between a strict father and a nurturant mother, as explained more in detail here:

Lakoff divides people into two ideal types: the strict father and the nurturant parent. The first believes the world is a nasty, dangerous place and that humans are fundamentally corrupt. He protects his family by asserting absolute authority over them; the father’s command is never questioned. Children are taught to be moral, self-sufficient adults through a combination of reward and punishment (often corporal). Once the child reaches adulthood, the father no longer plays much of a role in his life.

The nurturant parent is also deeply concerned with protecting his children and raising them to be upstanding adults. The difference lies in his view of human nature. Nurturers believe children respond best when parents explain their actions and encourage kids to ask questions. Nurturant parents place their highest priority on values like empathy and compassion. Whereas the strict father favors a tough-love approach to child-rearing, the nurturer cultivates deep emotional bonds. Nurturers believe children respond best not to the threat of punishment but to inner motivation and the desire to emulate their parents.

To make the leap from child-rearing to politics, Lakoff posited that people think of the nation as a family and the government as a parent. The way they view government typically follows from their views on child-rearing. So, for example, conservatives believe that single women who get pregnant should be punished by having to bring their child to term; a society that fails to punish women for promiscuous behavior is a society that encourages it. (The idea that abortion is murder becomes a kind of after-the-fact rationalization.) The death penalty is not only acceptable but moral for the same reason: People who commit murder must themselves be punished. Not to take a life in response would only encourage more murders. Conservatives also oppose most social programs because, like strict fathers, they believe able-bodied adults should fend for themselves. Giving them unearned benefits only undermines this ethic.

So you can see how Lakoff’s theory fits into our purpose at the Symposium, especially in my case, arguing for these “unearned benefits” with three North Carolina Republicans, a party known for a “strict father” approach to public policy. Our charge from Lakoff was then to reframe our issue to reflect the ideals of those “Founding Fathers” everyone keeps talking about, specifically their role in forming early States as Commonwealths, for the common good (separate discussion on that point later). Because most people are actually “bi-conceptuals”, a popular Lakoffism, appealing to the nurturant sides of Republican legislators is actually easier than one would think, it’s a all a matter of framing.

Anyway, take from that what you will. I thought it was an interesting speech, especially coming from a guy getting a lot of airtime with Democrats, for better or worse.

This hasn’t made headlines in most places, but seems to effect most of the country. It’s one of those tell-tale signs that we are about to enter into an inevitable recession, despite Bush’s vain attempts to make everything seem rosy in our country. One of the areas slated for sale is right down the street in the Great Smokys Nat’l Park.

The Bush administration on Friday detailed its proposal to sell more than 300,000 acres of national forests and other public land to help pay for rural schools in 41 states.
The land sales, ranging from less than an acre to more than 1,000 acres, could total more than $1 billion and would be the largest sale of forest land in decades.
Western lawmakers immediately objected, saying the short-term gains would be offset by the permanent loss of public lands. Congress would have to approve the sales, and has rejected similar proposals in recent years.
Forest Service officials say the sales are needed to raise $800 million over the next five years to pay for schools and roads in rural counties hurt by logging cutbacks on federal land. The Bureau of Land Management has said it also plans to sell federal lands to raise an estimated $250 million over five years.
Dave Alberswerth, a public lands expert with the The Wilderness Society environmental group called the plan a billion-dollar boondoggle to privatize treasured public lands to pay for “tax cuts to the rich.”

“This is not going to be politically acceptable to most people,” Alberswerth said.

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Busy with errands and the kids, Louise needed more room in her vehicle.
Louise says, “Thank God for my forklift. In my Suburban, I had to take multiple trips to get the groceries and drive the kids to soccer practice. Now, I just stack the groceries over the base of the fork, and pile the kids on top. Wow, that thing can carry a lot! And it’s so easy to load. But most importantly, the kids love riding on it, and that’s what counts.”

Today, I thought I’d talk about our “addiction to oil“, and what a ridiculous reality check the Bush administration thought they were giving the American people, like it was some new idea. Since President Carter, every US president has commented at some point that we need to rid our dependence on foreign oil. So why is Bush’s take on our situation so publicized? Perhaps it’s because it was one of the only strong points of his speech.
BUSH: Keeping America competitive requires affordable energy. And here we have a serious problem: America is addicted to oil, which is often imported from unstable parts of the world.

BUSH:

The best way to break this addiction is through technology. Since 2001, we have spent nearly $10 billion to develop cleaner, cheaper and more reliable alternative energy sources. And we are on the threshold of incredible advances.
So tonight I announce the Advanced Energy Initiative — a 22 percent increase in clean-energy research at the Department of Energy to push for breakthroughs in two vital areas. To change how we power our homes and offices, we will invest more in zero-emission coal-fired plants; revolutionary solar and wind technologies; and clean, safe nuclear energy.

(APPLAUSE)

BUSH: We must also change how we power our automobiles. We will increase our research in better batteries for hybrid and electric cars and in pollution-free cars that run on hydrogen. We will also fund additional research in cutting-edge methods of producing ethanol, not just from corn but from wood chips and stalks or switch grass. Our goal is to make this new kind of ethanol practical and competitive within six years.

(APPLAUSE)

BUSH: Breakthroughs on this and other new technologies will help us reach another great goal: to replace more than 75 percent of our oil imports from the Middle East by 2025. By applying the talent and technology of America, this country can dramatically improve our environment, move beyond a petroleum- based economy and make our dependence on Middle Eastern oil a thing of the past.

Ugh, I can actually hear him talking in my head! When Capt. Obvious stated what his plan was to rid our dependence on foreign oil, there was an instant outcry from the Saudis. The Administration has spent the last few days assuring the Royal family that he “didn’t mean it.”

What I’m getting at, is that we can’t sit and wait for our government to introduce new energy-saving strategies and incentives. Oil is just too profitable right now, and the companies are even admitting it. If you want to make a difference, instead of waiting for the tax credit, do it now. As far as fuel goes, Biodiesel isn’t the final answer but it is slowly bringing awareness to the public of their options. Besides lowering particulate emissions, purchasing biodiesel/biofuel is currently helping local economies as it is not yet made on a national scale.
I believe we are the generation of change. It is up to us to make the difference that our world is pleading for right now. I honestly believe that if other countries saw a peaceful revolution kindling among America’s energetic and unbelievably creative youth, any support they expressed would catalyze a positive change in our country.
This brings me to my next topic: Buying Local, Eating Local, but that will have to wait until next week

You may remember that when ONCE A DAY began, my goal was to focus specifically on Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. To that end, I must say I’ve been thinking a lot about the Danish cartoon controversy.

Some believe that free speech is, in fact, a part of Article 19 which states that all humans have the right to communicate freely. This controversy raises the question–where does that right end? Obviously the Jesus pic is here for a reason. When I Google imaged “funny Jesus” I saw a few pics that offended me (and I’m quite sure would offend a lot of folks–but would they cause violence?)

I honestly don’t have any answers yet. In fact, I really haven’t heard a great argument one way or the other thus far. What are the limits of free speech? Are there limits? If we regulate speech for one group but not another, is that descrimination? Selective Free Speech?

And what of the cumulative effect of racism and “Western” foreign policy? Most muslims in the rest of the world already assume that “The West” hates them (and by “The West” I mean soldiers, instiutions, corporations, and the average Joe). This adds more fuel to that fire (and give a lot of radicals something to talk about). I could be wrong about this but let’s consider these facts:

1) Iraq
2) Afghanistan
3) Israel

Let’s say you’re stuck in a camp in Lebanon, or in a slum in Pakistan, what would you think? Who would you blame for your situation? I could go on. I have lots of questions. Got any answers? Got any questions? The responses of most media pundits have been quick ones. This is definitely not a situation that calls for swift responses–there’s a deep, deep rift here. Bush’s proposed budget? That’s easy. It’s crap. This on the other hand…Everyone needs to slow down…

Your Pal,

Johnny

6 Feb 2056 - Now that all the fossil fuels are definitely gone for good, get used to seeing more of these, our clean and cheap energy future!

Fortunately, our Chairman at Sky WindPower, Australian Professor Bryan Roberts has long been aware of the wind facts and material improvement trends, and convinced that, by application of an appropriate technology, this high altitude wind energy can be captured. He set out to prove that long ago, and has demonstrated that Flying Electric Generator(FEG) technology is practical and should work at high altitudes. This is the “Flying Windmills” technology you may have read about first in the Canadian “National Post”, and since then in major newspapers overseas and many U.S. publications other than newspapers.

[via]

I have been making a conscious effort for the past several months to live by my convictions. As an idealist, it’s easy to come up with a vision of how things are supposed to be and how they aren’t, but it can become much more challenging to actually break through the mold our culture is forming us all to conform with, and begin acting in a way that might lead to a more sustainable world. At this point, it might be a lost cause, as climatologists have just announced that we have reached the point of no return, as our atmosphere has reached a state of irrepaiable change.

Thirty years ago, the scientist James Lovelock worked out that the Earth possessed a planetary-scale control system which kept the environment fit for life. He called it Gaia, and the theory has become widely accepted. Now, he believes mankind’s abuse of the environment is making that mechanism work against us. His astonishing conclusion - that climate change is already insoluble, and life on Earth will never be the same again.

My idealism also might be interpreted as a way to make me feel better about myself, perhaps validating my existence and enabling me to scorn others for their wasteful ways. The way I see it, if I wish to see a difference in my lifetime I have to make choices that not only effect me, but those around me and the generations to come. I feel that we are living on a cusp where people have to make a conscious decision to think about every purchase they make and every intention they have if they want the generations to come to live on the same green, breathable planet most of us take for granted today. This conviction is even printed on my toilet paper.

With that theme in mind, I intend on writing about different principles that I find important in my next few entrees. One issue I have been trying to search is a list of good, green companies that span the spectrum of products and services for the consumer. There doesn’t seem to be a legitimate list compiling these. The one I found was instantly discredited because Exxon was included.

What I did find is a slightly more pessimestic list of the 14 Worst Corporate Evildoers of 2005.
That’s a start, right?