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Make Juvenile Justice a Priority

2010-07-05T16:56:00.000-07:00

Save the Date: Wednesday July 7, 2010

Tell Your Congressional Representatives to Make Juvenile Justice a Priority

For too long, "tough on crime" political rhetoric has resulted in juvenile justice policies that are bad for youth and don't keep the public safe.

Juvenile justice programs were the only category of children's programs that received a significant decrease in funding in the President's proposed budget.

More effective ways to deal with juvenile offenders exist. Now is the time for Congress to take action, but we need your help.

Time is running out! On July 7, let Congress know that voters care about juvenile justice reforms.

Three major initiatives remained stalled in the Congress:

Reauthorizing the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act (JJDPA), which is three years overdue for reauthorization. The JJDPA, enacted in 1974, promotes effective community-based alternatives to detention, keeps youth out of adult facilities, reduces the disproportionate involvement of youth of color in the system, and promotes research-driven best practices in the juvenile justice system. Call on Congress to reauthorize the JJDPA bill, S. 678.
Tell Congress States must receive federal support to prevent youth crime and rehabilitate juvenile offenders. States have experienced a steady decline in funding for juvenile justice programs since 2002.
Pass the Youth PROMISE Act to promotes cost-effective prevention strategies to reduce youth crime from the communities facing the greatest juvenile crime through a coordinated prevention and intervention response.

Action item: On July 7th, contact your two U.S. Senators and your U.S. House Representative and urge them to make juvenile justice a priority in the 111th Congress by:

• Reauthorizing the JJDPA;

• Increasing juvenile justice appropriations; and

• Passing the Youth PROMISE Act.

Click here to contact your Congressional Representative and Senators on Wednesday.
After entering your zip code, you will be provided with the phone numbers for your representatives, along with suggested talking points and a feedback form to report on the response you received.

Thank you for your help.

The Sentencing Project is located at 1705 DeSales Street, NW 8th Floor, Washington, DC 20036. Send an email to The Sentencing Project.

The Sentencing Project is a national, non-profit organization engaged in research and advocacy for criminal justice reform.

Stepmother of missing boy tried to have husband killed | NWCN.com | NorthWest Cable News

2010-07-04T17:10:00.000-07:00

Source: Stepmother of missing boy tried to have husband killed | NWCN.com | NorthWest Cable News

Book Review - The Facebook Effect - By David Kirkpatrick - NYTimes.com

2010-07-02T16:33:00.000-07:00

The Facebook Effect - By David Kirkpatrick

Facebook is the second-most-visited Web site on earth (after Google). The average member spends almost an hour there each day. It has more than 400 million active users — over 20 percent of everyone on the Internet — and is growing by 5 percent a month.

Inside A Psychopath's Brain

2010-06-30T20:25:00.000-07:00

A Neuroscientist Uncovers A Dark Secret
by BARBARA BRADLEY HAGERTY NPR

The criminal brain has always held a fascination for James Fallon. For nearly 20 years, the neuroscientist at the University of California-Irvine has studied the brains of psychopaths. He studies the biological basis for behavior, and one of his specialties is to try to figure out how a killer's brain differs from yours and mine.

Inside A Psychopath's Brain: The Sentencing Debate

by BARBARA BRADLEY HAGERTY NPR

Kent Kiehl has studied hundreds of psychopaths. Kiehl is one of the world's leading investigators of psychopathy and a professor at the University of New Mexico. He says he can often see it in their eyes: There's an intensity in their stare, as if they're trying to pick up signals on how to respond.

Handbook of Child and Adolescent Psychopathy

This handbook synthesizes research on child and adolescent psychopathy: its nature, causes, development, assessment and treatment. Leading authorities review findings and questions. Assessment and interventions are examined. Etiological theories shed light on causal mechanisms, including genetics, brain functioning, temperament, family processes, and other factors.

Losing the Owl, Saving the Forest - NYTimes.com

2010-06-27T01:46:00.000-07:00

Losing the Owl, Saving the Forest - NYTimes.com

How the Endangered Species Act saved forests in the Pacific Northwest.

"Environmentalists saw the land as a sacred space, to be venerated and conserved in honor of what Emerson called “the occult relation between man and the vegetable.” But for the timber industry, long accustomed to clear-cutting in federal forests, it was a commodity, a renewable resource to be cut down, regrown and cut down again. There was no reconciling the two philosophies."

Jonathan Raban is the author of the forthcoming “Driving Home: An American Scrapbook.”

Biologists Struggle to Save the Spotted Owl

Lee Hochberg reports on the battle between biologists and loggers over the northern Spotted Owl.

Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man: A Memoir

2010-06-26T21:06:00.000-07:00

'Portrait Of An Addict': One Man's Rise And Fall : NPR

www.npr.org

By the time Bill Clegg reached his mid-30s, he had checked all the boxes that would allow him to be defined as a success. But there was something else: Bill Clegg was a crack addict. His new book, Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man, tells the story of an addiction that almost cost him everything.

Read the free excerpt: 'Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man: A Memoir' by Bill Clegg (Hardcover - Jun.

Crack Facts & Figures The White House Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP)

Joran van der Sloot

2010-06-25T03:43:00.000-07:00

Lima, Peru (CNN) -- Police found skin underneath the fingernails of Stephany Flores.

Full Story and Video

2000s Missing Person Cases: Disappearance of Madeleine McCann, Natalee Holloway, Peter Falconio, Disappearance of Aisling Symes
--
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The Seattle Cyanide Murders

2010-06-24T21:52:00.000-07:00

Bitter Almonds : The True Story of Mothers, Daughters, and the Seattle Cyanide Murders by
Gregg Olsen

Clinging miniskirts, a wild mane of black hair, and cherry red lips... For a forty-two-year old grandmother, Stella Maudine Nickell was hot stuff... Stella Nickell's small-time world was one of big-time dreams. In 1986, her biggest one came true when her husband died during a seizure, making her the beneficiary of a $175,000-plus insurance payoff until authorities discovered Bruce Nickell's headache capsules had been laced with cyanide. In an attempt to cover her tracks, Stella did the unconscionable. She saw to it that a stranger would also become a "random casualty" of cyanide-tainted painkillers. But Stella's cunning plan came undone when her daughter Cynthia notified federal agents.

And troubling questions lingered like the scent of bitter almonds... What would turn a gregarious barfly like Stella into a cold-hearted killer overnight? Why would Cynthia, a mirror image of her mother, turn on her own flesh and blood? Did Cynthia reveal everything she knew about the crimes?

The stunning answers would unfold in a case that sparked a national uproar, dug deep into a troubled family history, and exposed an American mother for the pretty poison she was. Amazon

In 1988 in Washington state, Stella Nickell was convicted of killing her husband Bruce, and Sue Snow, a bank manager, by putting cyanide in Excedrin capsules. The crime was chillingly similar to the Chicago Tylenol murders four years earlier. Seven people died in that case, which was never solved. CBS 48 Hours

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Comanche Nation

2010-06-23T22:44:00.000-07:00

The Rise And Fall Of An 'Empire' (NPR)

S. C. Gwynne’s Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History traces the rise and fall of the most powerful Indian tribe in American history, the Comanches, pioneer Cynthia Ann Parker and her son Quanah, chief of the Comanches. Comanche boys were bareback riders by age six; Comanche braves were the best horsemen and so skillful in war that they stopped Spain, halted the French westward expansion and exterminated settlers and other tribes.

The Texas Rangers and the six-gun were created to fight the Comanches in a war lasted four decades through Spanish colonialism, the Civil War, destruction of the buffalo, and the arrival of the railroads.

"White Squaw," Cynthia Ann Parker, a nine-year-old girl kidnapped by Comanches in 1836 became infamous for refusing to leave the Comanches until her tragic capture by Texas Rangers in 1860. Her son, Quanah, a famous warrior was never defeated.

Justice Policy Institute report on jail growth impact on local communities

2008-04-01T16:18:00.000-07:00

Washington, D.C.--Communities are bearing the cost of a massive explosion in the jail population, according to a new report released today by the Justice Policy Institute. The report, Jailing Communities: The Impact of Jail Expansion and Effective Public Safety Strategies, examines the jail population growth and the serious consequences for communities that are now paying tens of billions annually to sustain county jails.

The jail population has nearly doubled in less than two decades, as jails warehouse more people-many of whom have not been found guilty of any crime-for longer periods of time than ever before. Additionally, people arrested today are much more likely to serve jail time before their trial, in part due to the rising cost of bail.

"Crime rates are down, but you're more likely to serve time in jail today than you would have been twenty years ago," said the report's co-author Amanda Petteruti. "Jail bonds have skyrocketed, so that means if you're poor, you do time. People are being punished before they're found guilty--justice is undermined."

Jails are filled with people with drug addictions, the homeless and people charged with immigration offenses. The report concludes that jails have become the "new asylums," with six out of 10 people in jail living with a mental illness.

Jailing Communities found that the increase in jail imprisonment does not impact all members of a community equally. New data show that Latinos are the most likely to have to pay bail, have the highest bail amounts, are the least likely to be able to pay bail, and are the least likely to be released prior to trial. African Americans are nearly five times as likely to be incarcerated in jails as whites and almost three times as likely as Latinos. Jail overcrowding is exacerbated by the increase in the number of people being held in jails for immigration violations-up 500 percent in the last decade.

In 2004, local governments spent a staggering $97 billion on criminal justice, including police, the courts and jails. Over $19 billion of county money went to financing jails alone. By way of comparison, during the same time period, local governments spent just $8.7 billion on libraries and only $28 billion on higher education.

"These counties just cannot afford to invest the bulk of their local public safety budget in jails, and we are beginning to see why--the more a community relies on jails, the less it has to invest in education, employment and proven public safety strategies," says Nastassia Walsh, co-author of the report.

Research shows that communities that have increased their jail populations did not necessarily see a drop in violent crimes. In some of the country's largest counties and cities, like New York City, falling jail incarceration rates are associated with declining violent crime rates.

"The investment in building more jail beds is not making communities safer," says Derrick Johnson, NAACP National Board member. "Instead these investments serve only to unfairly target communities of color and waste taxpayer dollars."

The report recommends that communities take action to reduce their jail populations and increase public safety by:

* Improving release procedures for pretrial and sentenced populations. Implementing pretrial release programs that release people from jail before trial can help alleviate jail populations. Reforming bail guidelines would allow a greater number of people to post bail, leaving space open in jails for people who may pose a greater threat to public safety.

* Developing and implementing alternatives to incarceration. Alternatives such as community-based corrections would permit people to be removed from the jail, allowing them to continue to work, stay with their families, and be part of the community, while under supervision.

* Re-examining policies that lock up individuals for nonviolent crimes. Reducing the number of people in jail for nonviolent offenses leaves resources and space available for people who may need to be detained for a public safety reason.

* Diverting people with mental health and drug treatment needs to the public health system and community-based treatment. People who suffer from mental health or substance abuse problems are better served by receiving treatment in their community. Treatment is more cost-effective than incarceration and promotes a positive public safety agenda.

* Diverting spending on jail construction to agencies that work on community supervision and make community supervision effective. Reallocating funding to probation services will allow people to be placed in appropriate treatment or other social services and is a less costly investment in public safety.

* Providing more funding for front-end services such as education, employment, and housing. Research has shown that education, employment, drug treatment, health care, and the availability of affordable housing coincide with lower crime rates.

For more information on Jailing Communities, contact LaWanda Johnson at 202-558-7974, ext. 308.

For more information on True Crime and Justice visit KariSable.com

INTERNET addiction is a mental disorder

2008-03-19T04:29:00.000-07:00

The American Journal of Psychiatry, a leading psychiatry journal claims Internet addiction meets the criterion for classification as a common mental disorder and are requesting the American Psychiatric Association to officially recognize these findings.

The three subtypes of Internet addiction are excessive gambling, sexual preoccupation and email or text messaging with symptoms of excessive use, negative repercussions and withdrawal.

See the full story

"Spam King" Robert Soloway- Guilty

2008-03-17T15:51:00.000-07:00

by Kari Sable
http://karisable.com/crime.htm

In Seattle U.S. District Court, Robert Soloway, 28, aka "Spam King" pleaded guilty to a 40-count indictment including seven counts of illegal activities online, aggravated identity theft felony, 13 counts of money laundering, electronic mail fraud and income tax evasion on the estimated $300,000 he made loading email boxes with his junk, according to Mike Carter a Seattle Times staff reporter. Soloway is accused of defrauding customers he sold spam software to, OR for a mere $495, Soloway will spam 20 million addresses for 15 days, OR sell them 80,000 e-mail addresses, most likely including yours.

The government believes Soloway is responsible for sending penis-enhancement ads and pornography. They plan to present this evidence during Soloway's June 20, 2008 sentencing. Even though federal prosecutors dropped all but one postal mail fraud charge in exchange for Soloway's guilty pleas. The most serious charge, failure to comply with agreements he made regarding his e-mail-marketing software, could lock Soloway up for 20-years, in addition to five years in prison for electronic mail fraud, a mandatory two-year prison sentence, and one year in prison for a tax dismeanor. U.S. District Court Judge Marsha Pechman will determine his sentence, the number of victims and the restitution they are entitled to. Assistant U.S. Attorney Kathryn Warma said there were "extensive losses to thousands of victims." His spam business, Newport Internet Marketing, NIM, is ordered to repay $625,000 in fines. He has default judgments against him in Oklahoma in excess of $10 million and owes another judgment of an unknown amount to Microsoft.

For all the money he allegedly made ripping off others and wreaking havoc with people's email accounts, Soloway has pathetically few assets. In an obvious attempt to impress, he rented an apartment near Seattle's waterfront and leased a Mercedes-Benz. In the end, Soloway's financial worth is 24 pairs of sunglasses (in Seattle?), valued at more than $3,700, 27 pairs of shoes, worth $7,400; and $14,200 worth of clothing. I bet he was frequently mistaken for a drug dealer or a pimp. In prison he'll be just another inmate but the rest of his life he'll have the reputation of being a conman--who failed even at that.

Even with those high priced duds the homeworker showed up in court unshaven and in shoes without socks when he was arrested. (Come to think of it there were no socks listed as assets).

Remember that name, Robert Soloway and don't give him your contact information.

References:

Robert Alan Soloway founder of Strategic Partnership Against Microsoft Illegal Spam (SPAMIS)

Warning Against Prestige Replicas On Line Company

2008-03-17T06:57:00.000-07:00

Don't order anything from:

http://www.dedeiooss.com/
http://www.rolexxce.com/
http://www.breittli.com/

aka "Prestige Replicas" --they have shady, sleazy practices. And I would be surprised if you received anything in exchange for your money.

They got my attention by hacking into my Blogs under my email address (about 20 times a week) to post messages to my Blog that appeared to be from me. You can't miss their lack of formating and poorly written ads. They use tags and text to give the impression that they are affiliated with Tiffany & Co.

The website sells highly overpriced knockoffs (they kind you can pick up in Tijuana for change-yet they sell them at designer prices). They have no contact names affiliated with the company, no phone number, no address, no email address--they just expect you to send them money and wait for them to do the right thing... yeah right.

Meanwhile they Spam communities like mine, meant as a service to people like you.

The do have an input form on their "contact us" page that didn't work . I've reported this company to Blogger and will continue to turn them in to every source available to stamp out Spam and seedy Internet rip-off companies. In the state of Washington where I reside Spam is illegal and abusers have been successfully prosecuted.

Encourage 14 to 24 year olds students -- to submit issue-based films to Film Your Issue Competition

2008-03-06T20:02:00.001-08:00

http://www.filmyourissue.com/index.shtml

Encourage Students to Submit Issue-Based Films to Film Your Issue Competition

Now in its fourth year, FYI -Film Your Issue has grown into a global Internet-based competition inviting more than 25 million high school and college students in the United States alone to engage in pressing contemporary issues by creating and uploading two-minute short films on issues that affect their generation.In addition to taking the pulse of young adults on issues, FYI - Film Your Issue encourages young people to add their voices to the public dialog, and underscores how even an individual voice can influence public debate. Films can be uploaded on multiple participating platforms, including MTV, YouTube and AFI Screen Nation. Films are promoted on MySpace and through the Associated Press. The submission deadline is April 14, 2008.

There Will Be Floods

2008-02-28T01:02:00.001-08:00

February 27, 2008
By ALEX PRUD'HOMME
Op-Ed Contributor
There Will Be Floods

LAST month, a 30-foot section of levee ruptured in Fernley, Nev. While the cause of the breach, which swamped 450 homes and forced dozens of people to evacuate, is unknown, anyone familiar with the drowning of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina will tell you this: Levees fail.

Indeed, there are more than 100 antiquated earthen berms across the country in danger of collapsing. What happened in Nevada is a harbinger of a much larger problem nationwide.

In Texas City, Tex., for instance, levees protect 50,000 residents and $6 billion worth of property, including almost 5 percent of the nation's oil-refining capacity. Imagine the consequences, in this day of $100-a-barrel oil, if those defenses fail.

Even more vulnerable are the 1,100 miles of levees in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, north of San Francisco. Cobbled together 150 years ago to provide farmland, they are now part of an intricate, fragile system that supplies fresh water to California, the eighth-largest economy in the world.

On a recent visit, I noticed that the water had risen nearly to the top of the levee on one side, while the land had subsided at least 30 feet below on the other side. The water pressure against the decrepit berm was palpable. Should the levee crack, be overtopped by a storm or liquefied by an earthquake, saltwater will surge inland, destroying lives, perhaps flooding Sacramento and paralyzing California.

A year ago the United States Army Corps of Engineers, which builds and maintains many of these levees, admitted that 122 are at risk of failure. California, with 37 at-risk levees, and Washington State, with 19, are the worst off. But the list includes levees near Albuquerque, Detroit, Hartford, Honolulu, Los Angeles, Omaha and Washington.

These levees were designed poorly and built of whatever material was close at hand — clay, soft soil, sand mixed with seashells. Tree roots, shifting stones and rodents weaken them further. The land the berms are built on often subsides, while the waters they restrain constantly probe for weak spots.

Sadly, America's flood-protection system has long been undermined by bureaucratic turf wars, chronic underfinancing by Congress and a lack of political leadership. The heart of the problem is the Corps of Engineers, which Congress has "streamlined" relentlessly for decades, imperiling its mission through budget cuts and neglect. The Corps has a good set of engineering guidelines for levees, but it doesn't always follow them. Now largely staffed by civilians, the Corps has a backlog of projects it does not have the money to accomplish.

Business has also ignored the levee problem. Developers, abetted by the Supreme Court's vague 2006 ruling on the Clean Water Act, have rushed to fill in wetlands and build in floodplains.

But water is an inexorable force that, sooner or later, will assert itself. This is a lesson others have taken to heart. In 1953, a hurricane in the North Sea breached dikes and flooded the Netherlands, setting off a period of national soul-searching. Realizing that they had suffered from poor engineering and communication, the Dutch spent billions of dollars to create a world-class flood control system and are now armed for a once-in-10,000-year event.

The United States isn't even prepared for a once-in-100-year event. In light of climate change, we need to emulate the Netherlands and make flood protection a national priority.

For starters, we need to reinvigorate the Army Corps of Engineers and give it a mandate to build and maintain a coherent, robust, nationwide flood protection system — as opposed to the ineffective, piecemeal measures that failed so catastrophically in New Orleans.

Second, the laws stemming from the 1928 Flood Protection Act, which immunize the Corps from prosecution when its levees fail, must be repealed. Already, the Corps has quietly begun to decertify some of its levees, effectively abdicating responsibility when disaster strikes.

And finally, citizens and businesses who benefit from levees should apply their skills and resources to their upkeep. For years, we have relied on dredging, bulldozing and building ever-taller walls to control nature. Instead, the Corps should work with other government agencies, businesses, scientists and environmental groups to develop a greener, more intelligent system that integrates traditional engineering with natural defenses like wetlands, islands and reeds. Such an approach will be costly and require maintenance, but will prove far more effective than our current methods.

The need to eliminate dangerous levees gives Congress the chance to rethink land and water use, and how they are connected. We should integrate nature and technology, build only in areas that can be adequately protected and allow some wetlands to return to their naturally unconstrained state. After all, experts say, there are only two types of levees: those that have failed, and those that will fail. If we have learned anything from Hurricane Katrina, it's that we cannot simply wish natural flooding away.

Alex Prud'homme, the co-author with Julia Child of "My Life in France," is writing a book about water.
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Mirror, Mirror on the Wall, Who's the Cruelest Species of Them All?

2008-02-23T18:48:00.001-08:00

By Anneli Rufus, AlterNet
Posted on February 23, 2008, Printed on February 23, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/77543/

Shamu's mother was harpooned.

She was killed in the wild by the crew that captured the first in a series of young orcas that have since been trained to do tricks at San Diego's Sea World marine park, known sequentially as America's most famous performing sea mammals.

And maybe that's all you need to know to realize just how far humans will go. Maybe that's all you need to know -- were you beside me on those bleachers, years ago, cheering Shamu? -- to see blood, even faded and vestigial, on your hands.

Erin E. Williams and Margo DeMello's Why Animals Matter: The Case for Animal Protection (Prometheus, 2007) is a book so jam-packed with literal crimes against nature that it's hard to read more than a few pages in one go. Williams works for the Humane Society of the United States. DeMello is an administrative director of the House Rabbit Society.

Together they have painstakingly assembled statistics, news reports, anecdotes, and observations exposing the sufferings of so many creatures in so many industries -- food, fashion, entertainment, medicine -- as well as hobbies ranging from hunting to ostensibly positive pet-ownership that you recoil from revelation after revelation about Chinese cat-fur coats, say, or "spent" racehorses that are slaughtered for dogfood. On information overload, you blink: Wait … my species does that?

Indeed it does.

It hunts over 22 million mourning doves in the US every year.

It rounded up tens of thousands of pet dogs in China in 2006 and slaughtered them in an alleged health campaign.

It gorges on salmon factory-farmed in such overcrowded tanks that their skeletons become malformed and their skullbones burst through their skin in a condition called "death crown."

Imitating rap stars and other fashion icons, it has enthusiastically revived a moribund fur and exotic-animal-skin industry.

It wears the hides of alligators that were either slashed and bled to death or flayed alive.

It indulges in cosmetics tested by the weeks-long application of toxins to the eyes of rabbits locked in stocks.

It bets on battles between fowl drugged with steroids, strychnine and amphetamine and bred specially to tear out each other's eyes, rip each other's flesh and break each other's bones in fight after big-money fight.

It shoots zebras and yaks in Texas.

We tell ourselves that we already know enough about this: at least the basics, all we need to know. Yet just as car accidents don't let you look away, this book's breadth and specificity compels you to linger and learn more, then more again: collecting grisly tidbits to marvel at. To sling later at idiots. To arrange side by side along those moral lines that will shimmer in some future sand as you wonder which shampoo to use, which clothing brands to buy or what to eat.

This is the rest of the tour that Eric Schlosser began in Fast Food Nation -- paced not quite at a bovine plod but still deliberately, somberly slow -- of that bustling, bloody world-within-a-world in which terrible things happen to animals. The evidence is everywhere: in the bedroom closet, the medicine cabinet, the fridge, the restaurant, the cupboard full of cleansers under the sink. It's at the pet shop, circus, zoo, aquarium, boutique. Even if you're a pleather-clad vegan sitting perfectly still in an open field, you are implicated -- used -- as an ostensible statistic, who by virtue of belonging to Homo sapiens can still be considered a potential eventual customer for countless cosmetics, comestibles, clothes, drugs and other future products whose marketing schemes are already under way. The macular degeneration, diabetes or fondness for fur-trimmed jackets that you might or might not someday develop is reason enough for wealthy powerful companies to justify inflicting untold things on untold creatures: "Even with all of our laws," Williams and DeMello muse, "and even with a nation of caring people, we still tolerate -- and many of us unwittingly participate in -- an unprecedented degree of animal cruelty. How can this be so?

"Perhaps the biggest reason why society tolerates routine abuse of animals is that for the most part, these abuses are hidden."

It's as if a huge mill is in perpetual motion, grinding away behind the scenes, a constant stream of creatures being fed nonstop into its maw.

Rather than "engage in complicated philosophical arguments," the authors stake a claim instead on our "common sense and common decency":

"While we can purchase cheaper meat from animals who never experienced sun or air," they venture (and by using the pronoun "who" in reference to nonhumans they make a deliberate political choice), "while we can buy virtually any animal we want as a pet, while scientists can create mice with human genes and even with human tissue, and while rich hunters can pay thousands of dollars to shoot an endangered, tranquilized animal, most of us, if we knew the realities behind those choices, would take a step back and reconsider … just because we can do all these things, should we?"

Dispensing with analysis, they're all about disgorging details: shock after shock, yuck after yuck, scare after scare in what amounts to a collective elegy for a century-plus' worth of sick, injured and dead animals. Which among the thousands of details in these pages will stick in your mind, as opposed to my mind or that guy's over there, depends Rorschach-like on your personal history, sensitivities and quirks. Because I happen to be a hypochondriac -- don't cough anywhere near me on the bus -- it's the ailments, human and animal, that I imagine oozing and throbbing long after shutting this book. Fur-farmed minks, for example, are susceptible to gastric lesions, tumors, botulism, diarrhea, cysts and eye disease. Egg-farmed hens get osteoporosis, liver hemorrhagic syndrome, and uterine prolapse, in which the womb distends outside the body. From constant contact with feces, dairy-factory cows get a painful and potentially lethal udder infection called mastitis. Marine mammals confined in concrete tanks tend toward pneumonia, bacterial infections, and abscesses. For pet-industry rabbits, it's reproductive cancers.

When animals "defecate or vomit on the workers" in factory farms, "they can spread diseases such as E. coli, campylobacter, and listeria." In case you're curious, campylobacter causes bleeding gums, oral bone-loss and dysentery. "Factory farm workers are also exposed to infectious diseases such as anthrax, psittacosis, brucellosis, leptospirocis, swine influenza A, and avian influenza A," the authors write.

Good to know. And we can only guess at the pathogenic legacy of industrial accidents such as the 1995 spill that sent 25 million gallons of hog waste into a North Carolina river. For you it might not be the diseases that resonate but rather the photographs, say, or the pain: Fur-farmed foxes are killed, for instance, by having metal rods jammed into their anuses and being induced to bite electrodes. Or it might be the pathos: Hunters collecting live specimens for early zoos, for example, "boasted in excruciating detail of … the baby animals who mourned at the sides of their dead mothers until they were snatched away, put into cages or tied or chained up, and transported to Europe. Because most social animals like gorillas, chimpanzees, elephants and hippos guard their young, collectors had to kill the adults (sometimes the females, but often the entire herd) when capturing their babies." This is no longer standard practice, although it's too late for Shamu's mother and the rest.

Or it might be the sheer numbers that get you: over 3.8 million kangaroos killed for their skins every year in Australia. Some 265,000 rabbits and 65,000 dogs used in US laboratories in 2004 alone for toxicity tests, medical-school surgery instruction, dental and heart experiments and more. Sixty billion pounds of sea animals killed and discarded annually by industrial fishing operations worldwide as "bycatch" after being caught in deepwater trawls and purse seines set out for other species. Tens of thousands of dolphins at a time corralled into coves and slaughtered en masse for their meat during Japanese "dolphin drives." Tens of thousands of pet dogs seized from their owners and clubbed, hanged and shot during that 2006 anti-rabies campaign staged by the Chinese government. Thirty-five thousand miles of US rivers in 22 states and groundwater in seventeen states contaminated by factory-farm runoff, according to the EPA.

At the end of each chapter, the authors offer helpful, practical pointers. Report poachers, they suggest. Buy a vegetarian cookbook. Watch animal-friendly TV shows such as Animal Cops and Emergency Vets. Spay or neuter your pet. Buy cruelty-free products. Vote. These tips are peaceful little polyps in what is otherwise an unflinching indictment of human appetites, of our ridiculous desires. It's an indictment of our behaviors and ourselves. They are not named in this book, but it is flesh-and-blood individuals -- mothers and fathers, sons and daughters, friends, husbands and wives -- who flay those live 'gators. And who insist, via groups such as the National Alternative Pet Association, that they are entitled to own skunks, wallabies, hedgehogs, and exotic cats, even to buy tiger cubs online for a few thousand bucks each.

It is mothers and fathers, husbands and wives who Internet-hunt, paying to really shoot real animals in real time via a gun and webcam connected via remote control to their computer mice. And somebody loves them.

Anneli Rufus is the author of several books, including "Party of One: The Loners' Manifesto."

© 2008 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/77543/

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Acquitted of Murder, Neo-Nazi Killer Taunts Victim's Family

2008-02-21T17:42:00.001-08:00

By David Holthouse, Hate Watch

Posted on February 20, 2008, Printed on February 21, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/bloggers/
http://www.splcenter.org/blog//77370/

Even by the twisted standards of the neo-Nazi underworld, Hardy Lloyd is one sick individual. The 30-year-old skinhead, who describes himself as the "doctor of all hate," was kicked out of the ultra-violent World Church of the Creator in 2003 after he was involuntarily committed to a mental hospital. "I do not believe killing is wrong," Lloyd wrote in 2004. "Our new religion must be the worship of death and murder."

Later that year, Lloyd was arrested for murder after he killed his girlfriend. The victim, 41-year-old Lori Hann, was a divorced legal secretary who met Lloyd through an Internet dating service. Lloyd admitted shooting Hann in the face during an argument over another woman, but claimed that she'd threatened him with a handgun minutes earlier and that he fired in self-defense. Prosecutors argued that Hann was gunned down in the street while running for help (she'd pulled over her car and gotten out in front of a stranger's house with Lloyd in the passenger seat), and pointed out that Hann was unarmed when Lloyd shot her (Hann's handgun was found in her vehicle).

Nevertheless, a jury in November 2006 acquitted Lloyd of first-degree murder and voluntary manslaughter, finding him guilty only of carrying a firearm without a license. Narrowly escaping a murder conviction has done nothing to dampen Lloyd's enthusiasm for celebrating violence, including mass murder, on his "Universal Fascism" website, on which he encourages fascists of all colors to unite and kill Jews. But in recent weeks he's sunken to a new sadistic low by taunting Hann's loved ones and bragging about ending her life by posting lyrics to his own sadistic versions of hit pop songs and gangsta rap singles.

Last Dec. 22, for example, Lloyd posted the lyrics to "'Bitch Killer,' as sung by Hardy Lloyd," a take on rapper Ice-T's controversial 1992 single "Cop Killer." Here's a sampling of the lyrics:

I got my 380 cocked off.

I got my headlights turned off.

I'm bout to bust some shots off.

I'm bout to dust some bitch off.

BITCH killer, better her than me.

BITCH killer, fuck Hann's family.

BITCH killer, I know Lori's family's grievin'

BITCH killer, but tonight I got even.

One month later, on Jan. 21, Lloyd posted the lyrics to "'The Heat is On,' by Glenn Fr[e]y, as sung by Hardy." An excerpt:

The heat is on, on the street

Insider her head, she feels the beat

And the beat's so loud, deep inside

The pressure's high, and Lori can't stay alive

Hardy Lloyd with batLloyd's site also displays a photo of him French-kissing his new wife, Lisa Donato, the other woman Lloyd said he was fighting with Hann about the night he put a bullet in Hann's temple. Lloyd, who still resides in Pittsburgh, Pa., where he grew up, is depicted in other photos on the site wearing sunglasses and a bomber jacket while brandishing a variety of weapons. "I hate Americans more than I hate the JEWS!" he writes. "I am not an American! And if I was, I would kill myself!!"

Perish the thought.

© 2008 Hate Watch All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/bloggers/http://www.splcenter.org/blog//77370/

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"When men are pure, laws are useless; when men are corrupt, laws are broken."
- Benjamin Disraeli

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The Moral Instinct

2008-02-20T16:30:00.000-08:00

January 13, 2008

By STEVEN PINKER

Which of the following people would you say is the most admirable: Mother Teresa, Bill Gates or Norman Borlaug? And which do you think is the least admirable? For most people, it’s an easy question. Mother Teresa, famous for ministering to the poor in Calcutta, has been beatified by the Vatican, awarded the Nobel Peace Prize and ranked in an American poll as the most admired person of the 20th century. Bill Gates, infamous for giving us the Microsoft dancing paper clip and the blue screen of death, has been decapitated in effigy in “I Hate Gates” Web sites and hit with a pie in the face. As for Norman Borlaug . . . who the heck is Norman Borlaug?

Yet a deeper look might lead you to rethink your answers. Borlaug, father of the “Green Revolution” that used agricultural science to reduce world hunger, has been credited with saving a billion lives, more than anyone else in history. Gates, in deciding what to do with his fortune, crunched the numbers and determined that he could alleviate the most misery by fighting everyday scourges in the developing world like malaria, diarrhea and parasites. Mother Teresa, for her part, extolled the virtue of suffering and ran her well-financed missions accordingly: their sick patrons were offered plenty of prayer but harsh conditions, few analgesics and dangerously primitive medical care.

It’s not hard to see why the moral reputations of this trio should be so out of line with the good they have done. Mother Teresa was the very embodiment of saintliness: white-clad, sad-eyed, ascetic and often photographed with the wretched of the earth. Gates is a nerd’s nerd and the world’s richest man, as likely to enter heaven as the proverbial camel squeezing through the needle’s eye. And Borlaug, now 93, is an agronomist who has spent his life in labs and nonprofits, seldom walking onto the media stage, and hence into our consciousness, at all.

I doubt these examples will persuade anyone to favor Bill Gates over Mother Teresa for sainthood. But they show that our heads can be turned by an aura of sanctity, distracting us from a more objective reckoning of the actions that make people suffer or flourish. It seems we may all be vulnerable to moral illusions the ethical equivalent of the bending lines that trick the eye on cereal boxes and in psychology textbooks. Illusions are a favorite tool of perception scientists for exposing the workings of the five senses, and of philosophers for shaking people out of the naïve belief that our minds give us a transparent window onto the world (since if our eyes can be fooled by an illusion, why should we trust them at other times?). Today, a new field is using illusions to unmask a sixth sense, the moral sense. Moral intuitions are being drawn out of people in the lab, on Web sites and in brain scanners, and are being explained with tools from game theory, neuroscience and evolutionary biology.

“Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the oftener and more steadily we reflect on them,” wrote Immanuel Kant, “the starry heavens above and the moral law within.” These days, the moral law within is being viewed with increasing awe, if not always admiration. The human moral sense turns out to be an organ of considerable complexity, with quirks that reflect its evolutionary history and its neurobiological foundations.

These quirks are bound to have implications for the human predicament. Morality is not just any old topic in psychology but close to our conception of the meaning of life. Moral goodness is what gives each of us the sense that we are worthy human beings. We seek it in our friends and mates, nurture it in our children, advance it in our politics and justify it with our religions. A disrespect for morality is blamed for everyday sins and history’s worst atrocities. To carry this weight, the concept of morality would have to be bigger than any of us and outside all of us.

So dissecting moral intuitions is no small matter. If morality is a mere trick of the brain, some may fear, our very grounds for being moral could be eroded. Yet as we shall see, the science of the moral sense can instead be seen as a way to strengthen those grounds, by clarifying what morality is and how it should steer our actions.

The Moralization Switch

The starting point for appreciating that there is a distinctive part of our psychology for morality is seeing how moral judgments differ from other kinds of opinions we have on how people ought to behave. Moralization is a psychological state that can be turned on and off like a switch, and when it is on, a distinctive mind-set commandeers our thinking. This is the mind-set that makes us deem actions immoral (“killing is wrong”), rather than merely disagreeable (“I hate brussels sprouts”), unfashionable (“bell-bottoms are out”) or imprudent (“don’t scratch mosquito bites”).

The first hallmark of moralization is that the rules it invokes are felt to be universal. Prohibitions of rape and murder, for example, are felt not to be matters of local custom but to be universally and objectively warranted. One can easily say, “I don’t like brussels sprouts, but I don’t care if you eat them,” but no one would say, “I don’t like killing, but I don’t care if you murder someone.”

The other hallmark is that people feel that those who commit immoral acts deserve to be punished. Not only is it allowable to inflict pain on a person who has broken a moral rule; it is wrong not to, to “let them get away with it.” People are thus untroubled in inviting divine retribution or the power of the state to harm other people they deem immoral. Bertrand Russell wrote, “The infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists — that is why they invented hell.”

We all know what it feels like when the moralization switch flips inside us — the righteous glow, the burning dudgeon, the drive to recruit others to the cause. The psychologist Paul Rozin has studied the toggle switch by comparing two kinds of people who engage in the same behavior but with different switch settings. Health vegetarians avoid meat for practical reasons, like lowering cholesterol and avoiding toxins. Moral vegetarians avoid meat for ethical reasons: to avoid complicity in the suffering of animals. By investigating their feelings about meat-eating, Rozin showed that the moral motive sets off a cascade of opinions. Moral vegetarians are more likely to treat meat as a contaminant — they refuse, for example, to eat a bowl of soup into which a drop of beef broth has fallen. They are more likely to think that other people ought to be vegetarians, and are more likely to imbue their dietary habits with other virtues, like believing that meat avoidance makes people less aggressive and bestial.

Much of our recent social history, including the culture wars between liberals and conservatives, consists of the moralization or amoralization of particular kinds of behavior. Even when people agree that an outcome is desirable, they may disagree on whether it should be treated as a matter of preference and prudence or as a matter of sin and virtue. Rozin notes, for example, that smoking has lately been moralized. Until recently, it was understood that some people didn’t enjoy smoking or avoided it because it was hazardous to their health. But with the discovery of the harmful effects of secondhand smoke, smoking is now treated as immoral. Smokers are ostracized; images of people smoking are censored; and entities touched by smoke are felt to be contaminated (so hotels have not only nonsmoking rooms but nonsmoking floors). The desire for retribution has been visited on tobacco companies, who have been slapped with staggering “punitive damages.”

At the same time, many behaviors have been amoralized, switched from moral failings to lifestyle choices. They include divorce, illegitimacy, being a working mother, marijuana use and homosexuality. Many afflictions have been reassigned from payback for bad choices to unlucky misfortunes. There used to be people called “bums” and “tramps”; today they are “homeless.” Drug addiction is a “disease”; syphilis was rebranded from the price of wanton behavior to a “sexually transmitted disease” and more recently a “sexually transmitted infection.”

This wave of amoralization has led the cultural right to lament that morality itself is under assault, as we see in the group that anointed itself the Moral Majority. In fact there seems to be a Law of Conservation of Moralization, so that as old behaviors are taken out of the moralized column, new ones are added to it. Dozens of things that past generations treated as practical matters are now ethical battlegrounds, including disposable diapers, I.Q. tests, poultry farms, Barbie dolls and research on breast cancer. Food alone has become a minefield, with critics sermonizing about the size of sodas, the chemistry of fat, the freedom of chickens, the price of coffee beans, the species of fish and now the distance the food has traveled from farm to plate.

Many of these moralizations, like the assault on smoking, may be understood as practical tactics to reduce some recently identified harm. But whether an activity flips our mental switches to the “moral” setting isn’t just a matter of how much harm it does. We don’t show contempt to the man who fails to change the batteries in his smoke alarms or takes his family on a driving vacation, both of which multiply the risk they will die in an accident. Driving a gas-guzzling Hummer is reprehensible, but driving a gas-guzzling old Volvo is not; eating a Big Mac is unconscionable, but not imported cheese or crème brûlée. The reason for these double standards is obvious: people tend to align their moralization with their own lifestyles.

Reasoning and Rationalizing

It’s not just the content of our moral judgments that is often questionable, but the way we arrive at them. We like to think that when we have a conviction, there are good reasons that drove us to adopt it. That is why an older approach to moral psychology, led by Jean Piaget and Lawrence Kohlberg, tried to document the lines of reasoning that guided people to moral conclusions. But consider these situations, originally devised by the psychologist Jonathan Haidt:

Julie is traveling in France on summer vacation from college with her brother Mark. One night they decide that it would be interesting and fun if they tried making love. Julie was already taking birth-control pills, but Mark uses a condom, too, just to be safe. They both enjoy the sex but decide not to do it again. They keep the night as a special secret, which makes them feel closer to each other. What do you think about that — was it O.K. for them to make love?

A woman is cleaning out her closet and she finds her old American flag. She doesn’t want the flag anymore, so she cuts it up into pieces and uses the rags to clean her bathroom.

A family’s dog is killed by a car in front of their house. They heard that dog meat was delicious, so they cut up the dog’s body and cook it and eat it for dinner.

Most people immediately declare that these acts are wrong and then grope to justify why they are wrong. It’s not so easy. In the case of Julie and Mark, people raise the possibility of children with birth defects, but they are reminded that the couple were diligent about contraception. They suggest that the siblings will be emotionally hurt, but the story makes it clear that they weren’t. They submit that the act would offend the community, but then recall that it was kept a secret. Eventually many people admit, “I don’t know, I can’t explain it, I just know it’s wrong.” People don’t generally engage in moral reasoning, Haidt argues, but moral rationalization: they begin with the conclusion, coughed up by an unconscious emotion, and then work backward to a plausible justification.

The gap between people’s convictions and their justifications is also on display in the favorite new sandbox for moral psychologists, a thought experiment devised by the philosophers Philippa Foot and Judith Jarvis Thomson called the Trolley Problem. On your morning walk, you see a trolley car hurtling down the track, the conductor slumped over the controls. In the path of the trolley are five men working on the track, oblivious to the danger. You are standing at a fork in the track and can pull a lever that will divert the trolley onto a spur, saving the five men. Unfortunately, the trolley would then run over a single worker who is laboring on the spur. Is it permissible to throw the switch, killing one man to save five? Almost everyone says “yes.”

Consider now a different scene. You are on a bridge overlooking the tracks and have spotted the runaway trolley bearing down on the five workers. Now the only way to stop the trolley is to throw a heavy object in its path. And the only heavy object within reach is a fat man standing next to you. Should you throw the man off the bridge? Both dilemmas present you with the option of sacrificing one life to save five, and so, by the utilitarian standard of what would result in the greatest good for the greatest number, the two dilemmas are morally equivalent. But most people don’t see it that way: though they would pull the switch in the first dilemma, they would not heave the fat man in the second. When pressed for a reason, they can’t come up with anything coherent, though moral philosophers haven’t had an easy time coming up with a relevant difference, either.

When psychologists say “most people” they usually mean “most of the two dozen sophomores who filled out a questionnaire for beer money.” But in this case it means most of the 200,000 people from a hundred countries who shared their intuitions on a Web-based experiment conducted by the psychologists Fiery Cushman and Liane Young and the biologist Marc Hauser. A difference between the acceptability of switch-pulling and man-heaving, and an inability to justify the choice, was found in respondents from Europe, Asia and North and South America; among men and women, blacks and whites, teenagers and octogenarians, Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists, Christians, Jews and atheists; people with elementary-school educations and people with Ph.D.’s.

Joshua Greene, a philosopher and cognitive neuroscientist, suggests that evolution equipped people with a revulsion to manhandling an innocent person. This instinct, he suggests, tends to overwhelm any utilitarian calculus that would tot up the lives saved and lost. The impulse against roughing up a fellow human would explain other examples in which people abjure killing one to save many, like euthanizing a hospital patient to harvest his organs and save five dying patients in need of transplants, or throwing someone out of a crowded lifeboat to keep it afloat.

By itself this would be no more than a plausible story, but Greene teamed up with the cognitive neuroscientist Jonathan Cohen and several Princeton colleagues to peer into people’s brains using functional M.R.I. They sought to find signs of a conflict between brain areas associated with emotion (the ones that recoil from harming someone) and areas dedicated to rational analysis (the ones that calculate lives lost and saved).

When people pondered the dilemmas that required killing someone with their bare hands, several networks in their brains lighted up. One, which included the medial (inward-facing) parts of the frontal lobes, has been implicated in emotions about other people. A second, the dorsolateral (upper and outer-facing) surface of the frontal lobes, has been implicated in ongoing mental computation (including nonmoral reasoning, like deciding whether to get somewhere by plane or train). And a third region, the anterior cingulate cortex (an evolutionarily ancient strip lying at the base of the inner surface of each cerebral hemisphere), registers a conflict between an urge coming from one part of the brain and an advisory coming from another.

But when the people were pondering a hands-off dilemma, like switching the trolley onto the spur with the single worker, the brain reacted differently: only the area involved in rational calculation stood out. Other studies have shown that neurological patients who have blunted emotions because of damage to the frontal lobes become utilitarians: they think it makes perfect sense to throw the fat man off the bridge. Together, the findings corroborate Greene’s theory that our nonutilitarian intuitions come from the victory of an emotional impulse over a cost-benefit analysis.

A Universal Morality?

The findings of trolleyology — complex, instinctive and worldwide moral intuitions — led Hauser and John Mikhail (a legal scholar) to revive an analogy from the philosopher John Rawls between the moral sense and language. According to Noam Chomsky, we are born with a “universal grammar” that forces us to analyze speech in terms of its grammatical structure, with no conscious awareness of the rules in play. By analogy, we are born with a universal moral grammar that forces us to analyze human action in terms of its moral structure, with just as little awareness.

The idea that the moral sense is an innate part of human nature is not far-fetched. A list of human universals collected by the anthropologist Donald E. Brown includes many moral concepts and emotions, including a distinction between right and wrong; empathy; fairness; admiration of generosity; rights and obligations; proscription of murder, rape and other forms of violence; redress of wrongs; sanctions for wrongs against the community; shame; and taboos.

The stirrings of morality emerge early in childhood. Toddlers spontaneously offer toys and help to others and try to comfort people they see in distress. And according to the psychologists Elliot Turiel and Judith Smetana, preschoolers have an inkling of the difference between societal conventions and moral principles. Four-year-olds say that it is not O.K. to wear pajamas to school (a convention) and also not O.K. to hit a little girl for no reason (a moral principle). But when asked whether these actions would be O.K. if the teacher allowed them, most of the children said that wearing pajamas would now be fine but that hitting a little girl would still not be.

Though no one has identified genes for morality, there is circumstantial evidence they exist. The character traits called “conscientiousness” and “agreeableness” are far more correlated in identical twins separated at birth (who share their genes but not their environment) than in adoptive siblings raised together (who share their environment but not their genes). People given diagnoses of “antisocial personality disorder” or “psychopathy” show signs of morality blindness from the time they are children. They bully younger children, torture animals, habitually lie and seem incapable of empathy or remorse, often despite normal family backgrounds. Some of these children grow up into the monsters who bilk elderly people out of their savings, rape a succession of women or shoot convenience-store clerks lying on the floor during a robbery.

Though psychopathy probably comes from a genetic predisposition, a milder version can be caused by damage to frontal regions of the brain (including the areas that inhibit intact people from throwing the hypothetical fat man off the bridge). The neuroscientists Hanna and Antonio Damasio and their colleagues found that some children who sustain severe injuries to their frontal lobes can grow up into callous and irresponsible adults, despite normal intelligence. They lie, steal, ignore punishment, endanger their own children and can’t think through even the simplest moral dilemmas, like what two people should do if they disagreed on which TV channel to watch or whether a man ought to steal a drug to save his dying wife.

The moral sense, then, may be rooted in the design of the normal human brain. Yet for all the awe that may fill our minds when we reflect on an innate moral law within, the idea is at best incomplete. Consider this moral dilemma: A runaway trolley is about to kill a schoolteacher. You can divert the trolley onto a sidetrack, but the trolley would trip a switch sending a signal to a class of 6-year-olds, giving them permission to name a teddy bear Muhammad. Is it permissible to pull the lever?

This is no joke. Last month a British woman teaching in a private school in Sudan allowed her class to name a teddy bear after the most popular boy in the class, who bore the name of the founder of Islam. She was jailed for blasphemy and threatened with a public flogging, while a mob outside the prison demanded her death. To the protesters, the woman’s life clearly had less value than maximizing the dignity of their religion, and their judgment on whether it is right to divert the hypothetical trolley would have differed from ours. Whatever grammar guides people’s moral judgments can’t be all that universal. Anyone who stayed awake through Anthropology 101 can offer many other examples.

Of course, languages vary, too. In Chomsky’s theory, languages conform to an abstract blueprint, like having phrases built out of verbs and objects, while the details vary, like whether the verb or the object comes first. Could we be wired with an abstract spec sheet that embraces all the strange ideas that people in different cultures moralize?

The Varieties of Moral Experience

When anthropologists like Richard Shweder and Alan Fiske survey moral concerns across the globe, they find that a few themes keep popping up from amid the diversity. People everywhere, at least in some circumstances and with certain other folks in mind, think it’s bad to harm others and good to help them. They have a sense of fairness: that one should reciprocate favors, reward benefactors and punish cheaters. They value loyalty to a group, sharing and solidarity among its members and conformity to its norms. They believe that it is right to defer to legitimate authorities and to respect people with high status. And they exalt purity, cleanliness and sanctity while loathing defilement, contamination and carnality.

The exact number of themes depends on whether you’re a lumper or a splitter, but Haidt counts five — harm, fairness, community (or group loyalty), authority and purity — and suggests that they are the primary colors of our moral sense. Not only do they keep reappearing in cross-cultural surveys, but each one tugs on the moral intuitions of people in our own culture. Haidt asks us to consider how much money someone would have to pay us to do hypothetical acts like the following:

Stick a pin into your palm.

Stick a pin into the palm of a child you don’t know. (Harm.)

Accept a wide-screen TV from a friend who received it at no charge because of a computer error.

Accept a wide-screen TV from a friend who received it from a thief who had stolen it from a wealthy family. (Fairness.)

Say something bad about your nation (which you don’t believe) on a talk-radio show in your nation.

Say something bad about your nation (which you don’t believe) on a talk-radio show in a foreign nation. (Community.)

Slap a friend in the face, with his permission, as part of a comedy skit.

Slap your minister in the face, with his permission, as part of a comedy skit. (Authority.)

Attend a performance-art piece in which the actors act like idiots for 30 minutes, including flubbing simple problems and falling down on stage.

Attend a performance-art piece in which the actors act like animals for 30 minutes, including crawling around naked and urinating on stage. (Purity.)

In each pair, the second action feels far more repugnant. Most of the moral illusions we have visited come from an unwarranted intrusion of one of the moral spheres into our judgments. A violation of community led people to frown on using an old flag to clean a bathroom. Violations of purity repelled the people who judged the morality of consensual incest and prevented the moral vegetarians and nonsmokers from tolerating the slightest trace of a vile contaminant. At the other end of the scale, displays of extreme purity lead people to venerate religious leaders who dress in white and affect an aura of chastity and asceticism.

The Genealogy of Morals

The five spheres are good candidates for a periodic table of the moral sense not only because they are ubiquitous but also because they appear to have deep evolutionary roots. The impulse to avoid harm, which gives trolley ponderers the willies when they consider throwing a man off a bridge, can also be found in rhesus monkeys, who go hungry rather than pull a chain that delivers food to them and a shock to another monkey. Respect for authority is clearly related to the pecking orders of dominance and appeasement that are widespread in the animal kingdom. The purity-defilement contrast taps the emotion of disgust that is triggered by potential disease vectors like bodily effluvia, decaying flesh and unconventional forms of meat, and by risky sexual practices like incest.

The other two moralized spheres match up with the classic examples of how altruism can evolve that were worked out by sociobiologists in the 1960s and 1970s and made famous by Richard Dawkins in his book “The Selfish Gene.” Fairness is very close to what scientists call reciprocal altruism, where a willingness to be nice to others can evolve as long as the favor helps the recipient more than it costs the giver and the recipient returns the favor when fortunes reverse. The analysis makes it sound as if reciprocal altruism comes out of a robotlike calculation, but in fact Robert Trivers, the biologist who devised the theory, argued that it is implemented in the brain as a suite of moral emotions. Sympathy prompts a person to offer the first favor, particularly to someone in need for whom it would go the furthest. Anger protects a person against cheaters who accept a favor without reciprocating, by impelling him to punish the ingrate or sever the relationship. Gratitude impels a beneficiary to reward those who helped him in the past. Guilt prompts a cheater in danger of being found out to repair the relationship by redressing the misdeed and advertising that he will behave better in the future (consistent with Mencken’s definition of conscience as “the inner voice which warns us that someone might be looking”). Many experiments on who helps whom, who likes whom, who punishes whom and who feels guilty about what have confirmed these predictions.

Community, the very different emotion that prompts people to share and sacrifice without an expectation of payback, may be rooted in nepotistic altruism, the empathy and solidarity we feel toward our relatives (and which evolved because any gene that pushed an organism to aid a relative would have helped copies of itself sitting inside that relative). In humans, of course, communal feelings can be lavished on nonrelatives as well. Sometimes it pays people (in an evolutionary sense) to love their companions because their interests are yoked, like spouses with common children, in-laws with common relatives, friends with common tastes or allies with common enemies. And sometimes it doesn’t pay them at all, but their kinship-detectors have been tricked into treating their groupmates as if they were relatives by tactics like kinship metaphors (blood brothers, fraternities, the fatherland), origin myths, communal meals and other bonding rituals.

Juggling the Spheres

All this brings us to a theory of how the moral sense can be universal and variable at the same time. The five moral spheres are universal, a legacy of evolution. But how they are ranked in importance, and which is brought in to moralize which area of social life — sex, government, commerce, religion, diet and so on — depends on the culture. Many of the flabbergasting practices in faraway places become more intelligible when you recognize that the same moralizing impulse that Western elites channel toward violations of harm and fairness (our moral obsessions) is channeled elsewhere to violations in the other spheres. Think of the Japanese fear of nonconformity (community), the holy ablutions and dietary restrictions of Hindus and Orthodox Jews (purity), the outrage at insulting the Prophet among Muslims (authority). In the West, we believe that in business and government, fairness should trump community and try to root out nepotism and cronyism. In other parts of the world this is incomprehensible — what heartless creep would favor a perfect stranger over his own brother?

The ranking and placement of moral spheres also divides the cultures of liberals and conservatives in the United States. Many bones of contention, like homosexuality, atheism and one-parent families from the right, or racial imbalances, sweatshops and executive pay from the left, reflect different weightings of the spheres. In a large Web survey, Haidt found that liberals put a lopsided moral weight on harm and fairness while playing down group loyalty, authority and purity. Conservatives instead place a moderately high weight on all five. It’s not surprising that each side thinks it is driven by lofty ethical values and that the other side is base and unprincipled.

Reassigning an activity to a different sphere, or taking it out of the moral spheres altogether, isn’t easy. People think that a behavior belongs in its sphere as a matter of sacred necessity and that the very act of questioning an assignment is a moral outrage. The psychologist Philip Tetlock has shown that the mentality of taboo — a conviction that some thoughts are sinful to think — is not just a superstition of Polynesians but a mind-set that can easily be triggered in college-educated Americans. Just ask them to think about applying the sphere of reciprocity to relationships customarily governed by community or authority. When Tetlock asked subjects for their opinions on whether adoption agencies should place children with the couples willing to pay the most, whether people should have the right to sell their organs and whether they should be able to buy their way out of jury duty, the subjects not only disagreed but felt personally insulted and were outraged that anyone would raise the question.

The institutions of modernity often question and experiment with the way activities are assigned to moral spheres. Market economies tend to put everything up for sale. Science amoralizes the world by seeking to understand phenomena rather than pass judgment on them. Secular philosophy is in the business of scrutinizing all beliefs, including those entrenched by authority and tradition. It’s not surprising that these institutions are often seen to be morally corrosive.

Is Nothing Sacred?

And “morally corrosive” is exactly the term that some critics would apply to the new science of the moral sense. The attempt to dissect our moral intuitions can look like an attempt to debunk them. Evolutionary psychologists seem to want to unmask our noblest motives as ultimately self-interested — to show that our love for children, compassion for the unfortunate and sense of justice are just tactics in a Darwinian struggle to perpetuate our genes. The explanation of how different cultures appeal to different spheres could lead to a spineless relativism, in which we would never have grounds to criticize the practice of another culture, no matter how barbaric, because “we have our kind of morality and they have theirs.” And the whole enterprise seems to be dragging us to an amoral nihilism, in which morality itself would be demoted from a transcendent principle to a figment of our neural circuitry.

In reality, none of these fears are warranted, and it’s important to see why not. The first misunderstanding involves the logic of evolutionary explanations. Evolutionary biologists sometimes anthropomorphize DNA for the same reason that science teachers find it useful to have their students imagine the world from the viewpoint of a molecule or a beam of light. One shortcut to understanding the theory of selection without working through the math is to imagine that the genes are little agents that try to make copies of themselves.

Unfortunately, the meme of the selfish gene escaped from popular biology books and mutated into the idea that organisms (including people) are ruthlessly self-serving. And this doesn’t follow. Genes are not a reservoir of our dark unconscious wishes. “Selfish” genes are perfectly compatible with selfless organisms, because a gene’s metaphorical goal of selfishly replicating itself can be implemented by wiring up the brain of the organism to do unselfish things, like being nice to relatives or doing good deeds for needy strangers. When a mother stays up all night comforting a sick child, the genes that endowed her with that tenderness were “selfish” in a metaphorical sense, but by no stretch of the imagination is she being selfish.

Nor does reciprocal altruism — the evolutionary rationale behind fairness — imply that people do good deeds in the cynical expectation of repayment down the line. We all know of unrequited good deeds, like tipping a waitress in a city you will never visit again and falling on a grenade to save platoonmates. These bursts of goodness are not as anomalous to a biologist as they might appear.

In his classic 1971 article, Trivers, the biologist, showed how natural selection could push in the direction of true selflessness. The emergence of tit-for-tat reciprocity, which lets organisms trade favors without being cheated, is just a first step. A favor-giver not only has to avoid blatant cheaters (those who would accept a favor but not return it) but also prefer generous reciprocators (those who return the biggest favor they can afford) over stingy ones (those who return the smallest favor they can get away with). Since it’s good to be chosen as a recipient of favors, a competition arises to be the most generous partner around. More accurately, a competition arises to appear to be the most generous partner around, since the favor-giver can’t literally read minds or see into the future. A reputation for fairness and generosity becomes an asset.

Now this just sets up a competition for potential beneficiaries to inflate their reputations without making the sacrifices to back them up. But it also pressures the favor-giver to develop ever-more-sensitive radar to distinguish the genuinely generous partners from the hypocrites. This arms race will eventually reach a logical conclusion. The most effective way to seem generous and fair, under harsh scrutiny, is to be generous and fair. In the long run, then, reputation can be secured only by commitment. At least some agents evolve to be genuinely high-minded and self-sacrificing — they are moral not because of what it brings them but because that’s the kind of people they are.

Of course, a theory that predicted that everyone always sacrificed themselves for another’s good would be as preposterous as a theory that predicted that no one ever did. Alongside the niches for saints there are niches for more grudging reciprocators, who attract fewer and poorer partners but don’t make the sacrifices necessary for a sterling reputation. And both may coexist with outright cheaters, who exploit the unwary in one-shot encounters. An ecosystem of niches, each with a distinct strategy, can evolve when the payoff of each strategy depends on how many players are playing the other strategies. The human social environment does have its share of generous, grudging and crooked characters, and the genetic variation in personality seems to bear the fingerprints of this evolutionary process.

Is Morality a Figment?

So a biological understanding of the moral sense does not entail that people are calculating maximizers of their genes or self-interest. But where does it leave the concept of morality itself?

Here is the worry. The scientific outlook has taught us that some parts of our subjective experience are products of our biological makeup and have no objective counterpart in the world. The qualitative difference between red and green, the tastiness of fruit and foulness of carrion, the scariness of heights and prettiness of flowers are design features of our common nervous system, and if our species had evolved in a different ecosystem or if we were missing a few genes, our reactions could go the other way. Now, if the distinction between right and wrong is also a product of brain wiring, why should we believe it is any more real than the distinction between red and green? And if it is just a collective hallucination, how could we argue that evils like genocide and slavery are wrong for everyone, rather than just distasteful to us?

Putting God in charge of morality is one way to solve the problem, of course, but Plato made short work of it 2,400 years ago. Does God have a good reason for designating certain acts as moral and others as immoral? If not — if his dictates are divine whims — why should we take them seriously? Suppose that God commanded us to torture a child. Would that make it all right, or would some other standard give us reasons to resist? And if, on the other hand, God was forced by moral reasons to issue some dictates and not others — if a command to torture a child was never an option — then why not appeal to those reasons directly?

This throws us back to wondering where those reasons could come from, if they are more than just figments of our brains. They certainly aren’t in the physical world like wavelength or mass. The only other option is that moral truths exist in some abstract Platonic realm, there for us to discover, perhaps in the same way that mathematical truths (according to most mathematicians) are there for us to discover. On this analogy, we are born with a rudimentary concept of number, but as soon as we build on it with formal mathematical reasoning, the nature of mathematical reality forces us to discover some truths and not others. (No one who understands the concept of two, the concept of four and the concept of addition can come to any conclusion but that 2 + 2 = 4.) Perhaps we are born with a rudimentary moral sense, and as soon as we build on it with moral reasoning, the nature of moral reality forces us to some conclusions but not others.

Moral realism, as this idea is called, is too rich for many philosophers’ blood. Yet a diluted version of the idea — if not a list of cosmically inscribed Thou-Shalts, then at least a few If-Thens — is not crazy. Two features of reality point any rational, self-preserving social agent in a moral direction. And they could provide a benchmark for determining when the judgments of our moral sense are aligned with morality itself.

One is the prevalence of nonzero-sum games. In many arenas of life, two parties are objectively better off if they both act in a nonselfish way than if each of them acts selfishly. You and I are both better off if we share our surpluses, rescue each other’s children in danger and refrain from shooting at each other, compared with hoarding our surpluses while they rot, letting the other’s child drown while we file our nails or feuding like the Hatfields and McCoys. Granted, I might be a bit better off if I acted selfishly at your expense and you played the sucker, but the same is true for you with me, so if each of us tried for these advantages, we’d both end up worse off. Any neutral observer, and you and I if we could talk it over rationally, would have to conclude that the state we should aim for is the one in which we both are unselfish. These spreadsheet projections are not quirks of brain wiring, nor are they dictated by a supernatural power; they are in the nature of things.

The other external support for morality is a feature of rationality itself: that it cannot depend on the egocentric vantage point of the reasoner. If I appeal to you to do anything that affects me — to get off my foot, or tell me the time or not run me over with your car — then I can’t do it in a way that privileges my interests over yours (say, retaining my right to run you over with my car) if I want you to take me seriously. Unless I am Galactic Overlord, I have to state my case in a way that would force me to treat you in kind. I can’t act as if my interests are special just because I’m me and you’re not, any more than I can persuade you that the spot I am standing on is a special place in the universe just because I happen to be standing on it.

Not coincidentally, the core of this idea — the interchangeability of perspectives — keeps reappearing in history’s best-thought-through moral philosophies, including the Golden Rule (itself discovered many times); Spinoza’s Viewpoint of Eternity; the Social Contract of Hobbes, Rousseau and Locke; Kant’s Categorical Imperative; and Rawls’s Veil of Ignorance. It also underlies Peter Singer’s theory of the Expanding Circle — the optimistic proposal that our moral sense, though shaped by evolution to overvalue self, kin and clan, can propel us on a path of moral progress, as our reasoning forces us to generalize it to larger and larger circles of sentient beings.

Doing Better by Knowing Ourselves

Morality, then, is still something larger than our inherited moral sense, and the new science of the moral sense does not make moral reasoning and conviction obsolete. At the same time, its implications for our moral universe are profound.

At the very least, the science tells us that even when our adversaries’ agenda is most baffling, they may not be amoral psychopaths but in the throes of a moral mind-set that appears to them to be every bit as mandatory and universal as ours does to us. Of course, some adversaries really are psychopaths, and others are so poisoned by a punitive moralization that they are beyond the pale of reason. (The actor Will Smith had many historians on his side when he recently speculated to the press that Hitler thought he was acting morally.) But in any conflict in which a meeting of the minds is not completely hopeless, a recognition that the other guy is acting from moral rather than venal reasons can be a first patch of common ground. One side can acknowledge the other’s concern for community or stability or fairness or dignity, even while arguing that some other value should trump it in that instance. With affirmative action, for example, the opponents can be seen as arguing from a sense of fairness, not racism, and the defenders can be seen as acting from a concern with community, not bureaucratic power. Liberals can ratify conservatives’ concern with families while noting that gay marriage is perfectly consistent with that concern.

The science of the moral sense also alerts us to ways in which our psychological makeup can get in the way of our arriving at the most defensible moral conclusions. The moral sense, we are learning, is as vulnerable to illusions as the other senses. It is apt to confuse morality per se with purity, status and conformity. It tends to reframe practical problems as moral crusades and thus see their solution in punitive aggression. It imposes taboos that make certain ideas indiscussible. And it has the nasty habit of always putting the self on the side of the angels.

Though wise people have long reflected on how we can be blinded by our own sanctimony, our public discourse still fails to discount it appropriately. In the worst cases, the thoughtlessness of our brute intuitions can be celebrated as a virtue. In his influential essay “The Wisdom of Repugnance,” Leon Kass, former chair of the President’s Council on Bioethics, argued that we should disregard reason when it comes to cloning and other biomedical technologies and go with our gut: “We are repelled by the prospect of cloning human beings . . . because we intuit and feel, immediately and without argument, the violation of things that we rightfully hold dear. . . . In this age in which everything is held to be permissible so long as it is freely done . . . repugnance may be the only voice left that speaks up to defend the central core of our humanity. Shallow are the souls that have forgotten how to shudder.”

There are, of course, good reasons to regulate human cloning, but the shudder test is not one of them. People have shuddered at all kinds of morally irrelevant violations of purity in their culture: touching an untouchable, drinking from the same water fountain as a Negro, allowing Jewish blood to mix with Aryan blood, tolerating sodomy between consenting men. And if our ancestors’ repugnance had carried the day, we never would have had autopsies, vaccinations, blood transfusions, artificial insemination, organ transplants and in vitro fertilization, all of which were denounced as immoral when they were new.

There are many other issues for which we are too quick to hit the moralization button and look for villains rather than bug fixes. What should we do when a hospital patient is killed by a nurse who administers the wrong drug in a patient’s intravenous line? Should we make it easier to sue the hospital for damages? Or should we redesign the IV fittings so that it’s physically impossible to connect the wrong bottle to the line?

And nowhere is moralization more of a hazard than in our greatest global challenge. The threat of human-induced climate change has become the occasion for a moralistic revival meeting. In many discussions, the cause of climate change is overindulgence (too many S.U.V.’s) and defilement (sullying the atmosphere), and the solution is temperance (conservation) and expiation (buying carbon offset coupons). Yet the experts agree that these numbers don’t add up: even if every last American became conscientious about his or her carbon emissions, the effects on climate change would be trifling, if for no other reason than that two billion Indians and Chinese are unlikely to copy our born-again abstemiousness. Though voluntary conservation may be one wedge in an effective carbon-reduction pie, the other wedges will have to be morally boring, like a carbon tax and new energy technologies, or even taboo, like nuclear power and deliberate manipulation of the ocean and atmosphere. Our habit of moralizing problems, merging them with intuitions of purity and contamination, and resting content when we feel the right feelings, can get in the way of doing the right thing.

Far from debunking morality, then, the science of the moral sense can advance it, by allowing us to see through the illusions that evolution and culture have saddled us with and to focus on goals we can share and defend. As Anton Chekhov wrote, “Man will become better when you show him what he is like.”

Steven Pinker is the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard University and the author of “The Language Instinct” and “The Stuff of
Thought: Language as a Window Into Human Nature.”

AlterNet: Should Nursing Homes Be for Profit?

2008-02-04T22:55:00.001-08:00

This story has been forwarded to you from
http://www.alternet.org by kari@karisable.com

Few empires are as evil as the corporations that own nursing homes for huge profits gained by cutting staff and the level of care at any cost including intense suffering and premature death.

-------------------------------------
Should Nursing Homes Be for Profit?
http://www.alternet.org/workplace/75107

Is it right that people are trying to make money off taking care of our most vulnerable population?
-------------------------------------

Caught with a Bag of Weed? It Could Cost You More Than You Think

2008-01-26T21:37:00.001-08:00

Caught with a Bag of Weed? It Could Cost You More Than You Think

By Paul Armentano, AlterNet
Posted on January 26, 2008, Printed on January 26, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/74511/

What's the current price for a bag of weed? According to the latest figures from the FBI, the human cost is roughly 739,000 a year.

That's the number of American citizens arrested in 2006 for possessing small amounts of pot. (Another 91,000 were charged with marijuana-related felonies.) The figure is the highest annual total ever recorded, and is nearly double the number of citizens busted for pot fifteen years ago.

Those arrested face a multitude of consequences, primarily determined by where they live. For example, most Californians charged with violating the state's pot possession laws face little more than a small fine. By contrast, getting busted with a pinch of weed in Ohio will cost you your driver's license for at least six months. Move to Texas -- well, now you're looking at a criminal record and up to 180 days in jail. Or if you happen to be a first-time offender, possibly a stint in court-mandated 'drug rehab' (one recent study reported that nearly 70 percent of all adults referred to Texas drug treatment programs for weed were referred by the courts), probation, and a hefty legal bill. And don't even think about getting busted in Oklahoma, where a first time conviction for minor pot possession can net you up to one year in jail, or up to ten years if you're found guilty of a second offense. Thinking of growing your own? That'll cost you a $20,000 fine, and -- oh yeah -- anywhere from two years to life in prison.

Yes, you read that right -- life in prison.

Of course, not everyone busted for weed receives jail time. But that doesn't mean that they don't suffer significant hardships stemming from their arrest -- including (but not limited to): probation and mandatory drug testing, loss of employment, loss of child custody, removal from subsidized housing, asset forfeiture, loss of student aid, loss of voting privileges, and the loss of certain federal welfare benefits such as food stamps.

And yes, some offenders do serve prison time. In fact, according to a 2006 Bureau of Justice Statistics report, 12.7 percent of state inmates and 12.4 percent of federal inmates incarcerated for drug violations are incarcerated for marijuana offenses. In human terms, this means that there are now about 33,655 state inmates and 10,785 federal inmates behind bars for violating marijuana laws. (The report failed to include estimates on the percentage of inmates incarcerated in county jails for pot-related offenses.)

In fiscal terms, this means that taxpayers are spending more than $1 billion annually to imprison pot offenders.

Yet this billion dollar price tag only estimates the financial costs on the 'back end' of a marijuana arrest. The criminal justice costs to taxpayers -- such as the man-hours it takes a police officer to arrest and process the average pot offender -- on the 'front end' is far greater, with some economists estimating the financial burden to be in upwards of $7 billion a year. Naturally, as the annual number of pot arrests continues to increase (according to the latest FBI data, marijuana arrests now constitute 44 percent of all illicit drug arrests), these costs are only going to grow larger.

There are alternatives, of course -- options that won't leave this sort of human and fiscal carnage in its wake, and that won't leave entire generations believing that the police are an instrument of their oppression rather than their protection.

'Decriminalization,' as first recommended to Congress in 1972 by President Nixon's National Commission on Marijuana and Drug Abuse, called for the removal of all criminal and civil penalties for the possession, use, and non-profit distribution of cannabis. Such a policy, if adequately implemented, would eliminate the bulk of the human and fiscal costs currently associated with enforcing pot prohibition.

A second option, 'regulation,' would also significantly slash many of society's prohibition-associated fiscal and human costs. Legalizing the commercial sale and use of cannabis in a manner similar to alcohol, with state-mandated age controls and pot sales restricted to state-licensed stores, could also potentially raise billions of added dollars in tax revenue while simultaneously bringing an end to the more egregious and adverse black-market effects of the plant's criminalization -- such as the production of pot by criminal enterprises and its clandestine cultivation on public lands.

Would either option be perfect? No, probably not. ('Decriminalization,' for instance, might indirectly encourage pot use; 'regulation' might not entirely eliminate the black market sales of pot.) But how can continue with the status quo? Since, 1990, law enforcement have arrested over 10 million Americans -- more than the entire population of Los Angeles county -- on pot charges. Yet, according to federal figures, both marijuana production and use are rising. Isn't it time we began looking at ways to address the marijuana issue that move beyond simply arresting and prosecuting an inordinate amount of otherwise law-abiding Americans? Or must we wait until another 10 million citizens are arrested before our state and federal politicians find the courage to begin this discussion?

Paul Armentano is the deputy director for NORML and NORML Foundation in Washington, DC.

© 2008 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/74511/

Teachers and Students Threatened for Anti-war Student Walkout

2007-11-29T22:01:00.001-08:00

Six teachers from Tukwila are being threatened with termination for
openly discussing the war with their students and then some of their
students participated in a national day of action. Those of us in
education should be concerned about this turn of events.

***URGENT CALL FOR SOLIDARITY*** ***CAMPAIGN UPDATES*** 11/29/07

***CALL OR EMAIL TUKWILA SCHOOL DISTRICT***

On November 16th, more than 125 students from Foster High School
in Tukwila, WA answered a nation-wide call for a student walk out
protesting the war and military recruiters in schools. (See
student-made video below) In response, the Tukwila School District
threatened students with suspension, but their main target was
teachers. Disciplinary investigations threaten the firing of SIX
teachers and administration placed one of the six, Brett Rogers, on
administrative leave. We put out a call for support for the Tukwila
Six and students.

• Hundreds of emails and phone calls of solidarity have had a
MAJOR IMPACT on the Tukwila School Board.

• At a Tukwila School Board meeting Tuesday the 25th, students
and community members jam-packed the room, passionately demanding NO
repression of students and DROP ALL DISCIPLINARY PROCEEDING AGAINST
THE TUKWILA SIX! (See below for video clip)

• Media coverage has brought a spotlight to Principal
Ilgenfritz's REPRESSIVE instincts to the DEMOCRATIC EXPRESSION of
students and against ACADEMIC FREEDOM of teachers.

Because of PUBLIC PRESSURE, the solidarity campaign has won a
partial victory—popular teacher Brett Rogers was been TEMPORARILY
REINSTATED Tuesday. However, the disciplinary investigations continue
and some of the teachers are still in their probationary period, so
pressure must be put on the school district to retain the Tukwila Six
this year AND next. (See Seattle Times article below)

Also Wednesday, when students tried to meet at the Foster commons
after school to discuss the crisis, the principal brought in eight
police to break up and disperse the meeting. Student posters were
torn down by the principal, and students were told that they are not
allowed to hang up posters. Teachers have been told that they may not
discuss the crisis with colleagues or students. One girl talking about
teacher Brett Roger's situation was loudly threatened by Principal
Ilgenfritz with suspension. All these incidents are blatant violations
of students' and teachers' constitutional rights to free speach,
freedom of the press, and freedom of assembly!

The phone calls and emails must continue- this is not over. These
teachers' livelihoods are still at stake and the students' rights are
clearly under attack.

(More detailed information at bottom of email)

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The Tukwila Teachers and Students Solidarity Committee URGENTLY
requests that you again FLOOD the administration with phone calls and
emails with the following DEMANDS

1. Fire NO teachers!

2. Drop all disciplinary investigations against teachers NOW!

3. KEEP ALL THE TEACHERS THE REST OF THIS YEAR AND NEXT YEAR!

4. When politicians lie to us and continue their oil-driven war
against the people's will, student walkouts and other forms of civil
disobedience are justified and necessary. SUPPORT THE STUDENTS'
INITIATE. No discipline for any students who walked out and took a
stand against this war!

5. End attacks on Foster Student Rights to Free Speech and Assembly.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Please call or email NOW!

Foster HS Principal George Ilgenfritz: 1 (206) 901-7905

ilgenfritzg@tukwila.wednet.edu

And Interim Superintendent Ethelda Burke: 1 (206) 901-8000, (206) 901-8006,

burkee@tukwila.wednet.edu

Please CC these Tukwila School Board:

mfertakis@comcast.net
pmaltsberger2000@yahoo.com
jasminkakujundzic@yahoo.com
wahlsea@yahoo.com

Please send a copy of protest emails to us at
tukwila.teachers.solidarity@hotmail.com so we can count how many
protest emails have been sent in. If they refuse to answer your call,
phone Foster HS Assistant Principal Daryl Wright 1 (206) 901-7902 and
Foster HS Office Manager Darlene Aguiluz 1 (206) 901-7915.

VIDEOS:
Student-made Walkout Film:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=IGSDzDF7xoY

Footage on Foster Walkout, Tukwila Six and After School Board meeting:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=XrhRplEvW4w

KIRO 7:

http://www.kirotv.com/education/14714796/detail.html (click where
it says "video")

NorthWest Cable News:

http://www.nwcn.com/video/news-index.html?nvid=196453

NEWS ARTICLES:

Seattle Times Article: "Protesting teacher back at Tukwila
school" Thursday, November 29th
seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/education/2004041566_tukwila29m.html
Seattle Post-Intelligence Nov. 16th Walkout Article:
seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/340003_peace17.html
FOUR articles on walkouts at:

socialistalternative.org

Further background information:

On Friday, November 16th, more than a 1,000 students in
Washington State participated in a nation-wide student walkout to
protest the war and military recruiters in schools. This included
around 125+ students at Foster High School , just south of Seattle .
Foster is part of the Tukwila School District , of which 71% of the
student body is low-income and eligible for the free and reduced-cost
school meals. Since the beginning of the Iraq War, the U.S. military
has been assigning ever greater numbers of recruiters to lure young
people into signing up for this bloody, costly and illegal quagmire in
Iraq, especially in marginalized schools like Foster High School.

· With a "No Child Left Behind" Act of 2001 provision
forcing principals to give up the private contact information of young
people to military recruiters, students and teachers have the natural
right to protest.

· With a bloody and illegal war, where the soldiers that
are killed and maimed are disproportionately minorities and victims of
the "poverty draft," students and teachers of Tukwila have the natural
right to protest.

· With more than $500 billion dollars and the lives of more
than a million Iraqis having been utterly wasted on a failed war, with
schools in marginalized areas falling apart, we should all be
protesting with the slogan: "Money for Schools—Not For War!"

· With 75% of the American people polling against the war
according to the latest Washington Post poll, and a Democratic
Congress still making excuses for why it can't cut off funding to
bring the troops home, we must support the young people who speak out
against their future being bombed away.

· And we MUST support their teachers whose only misconduct
was making their lesson plans truly relevant to the lives of their
students

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
For further background on walkouts organized by Youth Against War
and Racism, go to:
www.YAWR.org

To contact the Tukwila Teachers & Students Solidarity Committee

Email: tukwilateachers@yahoo.com
Call: 253-573-9252

(Please leave a brief message and we will respond as soon as we are able).

MORE BACKGROUND INFO:

Foster is part of the Tukwila School District, of which 71% of
the student body is low-income and eligible for the free and
reduced-cost school meals. Since the beginning of the Iraq War, the
U.S. military has been assigning ever greater numbers of recruiters to
lure young people into signing up for this bloody, costly and illegal
quagmire in Iraq, especially in marginalized schools like Foster High
School.

The memo from Interim Superintendent to at least 6 teachers essentially says:

1 In the next couple days, we will summon you to a meeting because we
are "investigating reports of possible misconduct relating to you in
connection with the student walk-out." There could be disciplinary
consequences pending completion of this investigation.

2 You are not to discuss "this matter with any District students or
staff," or else you could be terminated.

3 You have the right to have a union representative present with you
during the investigative interview in case you feel your rights might
be violated.

The administration is clearly trying to isolate the teachers and
students from one another to try to divide them and weaken them. They
are trying to use the tactic of divide and rule. They are also
blatantly violating the teachers' right to free speech.
The teachers have been careful to abide by the Interim
Superintendent's directive not to talk with any District students or
staff about these matters. But nothing in the Superintendent's letter
said teachers could not talk with their union representatives or
community supporters. In fact, the letter explicitly says they could
talk with the union.

Some teachers who received letters were simply on their lesson
planning hour and therefore were not scheduled to teach class when the
student walkout happened. These teachers went outside just to see
what was going on when the students walked out, but they did not walk
out or promote the walkout. So the school has no evidence against
some teachers who received the threatening letters.

It appears the administration is targeting these teachers in a
political with-hunt because they have spoken their minds in the past
over other issues. For example, two of these teachers were banned in
the past from sending out school-wide emails because they spoke their
minds in school-wide emails that the administrators did not like.

Iraq Veteran
The husband of one of the teachers who received the threatening
letters is an Iraq veteran. He went to Foster High School on November
16th and spoke to the students from first-hand experience about the
truth of the Iraq War that the government and corporate media are
actively hiding from the American people, and he walked out with the
students.

As the Iraq veteran left the building, he was confronted by a security
guard who identified himself as a police officer/veteran/federal
marshall who said: "Don't even start with me, I'm a veteran."

The school administration is disciplining a teacher whose husband is a
veteran whose life was put at serious risk in Iraq and who has now
turned against the war. This is very disrespectful to the veteran,
his family, and the working-class students who are being forced to
shoulder the burdens of this war. The school administrators are more
concerned with trying to having power over teachers and students than
letting the communities who have been hit the hardest by the war speak
out against the war and the predatory military recruiters in their
schools. This—after the American people voted the Democrats into
Congress to end the war, but the Democrats are still making excuses
about why they cannot cut off funds for the war and direct those funds
toward education and other desperately needed social services. When
the leaders of our country will not end this unjust war, then it
becomes up to ordinary workers, parents, students, and soldiers to end
the war.

The attendance secretary at the school also refused to excuse the
absences of students who had permission slips signed by their parents
to miss school, which is a flagrant violation of parent and student
rights.

Principal George Ilgenfritz also told one student that she didn't know
anything about war. (Ironically, the student is from an immigrant
Somali family who has family in the war-torn country of Somalia.)

On the Tukwila School District's website, the following message has
been posted by Interim Superintendent Ethelda Burke: "We believe in
the historic mission of public education within our democracy… Our
schools are expected to encourage and prepare students to be
productive citizens. We believe the challenge is to transform every
child – to give every student a chance to become an autonomous,
thinking person and a self-governing citizen. We are all here to work
together to provide the best education for the most prized commodity
of our fine city – the students of the Tukwila School District."

Yet when the students participate in an act of peaceful civil
disobedience in the best traditions of Martin Luther King and the
Civil Rights Movement who challenged unjust segregation laws, now the
Superintendent is hypocritically trying to discourage students from
being "self-governing citizens" and standing up for what is right.

We need to match the determination of these courageous teachers,
students and the Iraq veteran with all the support we can! Please
take a few minutes now to call and email the Principal and
Superintendent at the numbers and emails at the top of this email!

YouTube video of Foster High School student rally for peace:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOuLz3kKExI

Report on Washington State Nov. 16th student walkouts against the
war:

http://yawr.org/nov16/seattle.html

Articles on Youth Against War and Racism student victories against
military recruiters in schools:

http://yawr.org/victory/victory.htm#tacoma

http://yawr.org/victory/victory.htm#kennedy
http://www.socialistalternative.org/news/article13.php?id=611

Please forward this email widely to supportive organizations and
individuals who might be able to help!

SAMPLE PROTEST LETTER:

Dear Principal Ilgenfritz,

I am writing to demand that the Tukwila School District support
the initiative and moral fortitude of students who took a stand
against the effects of the Iraq war on their communities. The student
march and rally on November 16th were student-generated and entirely
peaceful.

With a "No Child Left Behind" Act of 2001 provision forcing principals
to give up the private contact information of young people to military
recruiters, students and teachers have the natural right to protest.

With a bloody and illegal war, where the soldiers that are killed and maimed are
disproportionately minorities and victims of the "poverty draft," students and
teachers of Tukwila have the natural right to protest.

With more than $500 billion dollars and the lives of more than a million Iraqis
having been utterly wasted on a failed war, with schools in marginalized areas
falling apart, we should all be protesting with the slogan: "Money
for Schools—Not For War!"

With 75% of the American people polling against the war according to
the latest Washington Post poll, and a Democratic Congress still
making excuses for why it can't cut off funding to bring the troops
home, we must support the young people who speak out against their
future being bombed away.

These teachers only misconduct was making their lesson plans truly
relevant to the lives of their students.

On the Tukwila School District's website, the Interim Superintendent
posted the following message:

"We believe in the historic mission of public education within
our democracy… Our schools are expected to encourage and prepare
students to be productive citizens. We believe the challenge is to
transform every child – to give every student a chance to become an
autonomous, thinking person and a self-governing citizen. We are all
here to work together to provide the best education for the most
prized commodity of our fine city – the students of the Tukwila School
District."

Yet when the students participate in an act of peaceful civil
disobedience in the best tradition of Martin Luther King and the Civil
Rights Movement who challenged unjust segregation laws, now the school
district is hypocritically trying to discourage students from being
"self-governing citizens" and standing up for what is right?
You should immediately:
1. Reinstate the teacher Brett Rogers who has been put on administrative leave!
2. Drop the disciplinary hearings against all six teachers who face
investigations!
3. Take no disciplinary action against students who participated in
the walkout!

Please write me back saying that upon further investigation you
realize that there is no need for disciplinary action against these
students or teachers.
Sincerely,

Ramy Khalil

Youth Against War and Racism

Member of the Amalgamated Transit Union, Local 587

Committee for a Workers' International

(206)293-8389

Outrage fatigue? Get over it

2007-11-14T12:52:00.001-08:00

Outrage fatigue? Get over it

Are you sick of being sick? Suffering way too much Bush-induced nausea? Well, tough

By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist

Wednesday, November 14, 2007

I know how it is. You've had it up to here. There are only so many stories about blood and death and pain you can take, only so many times you can hear about random shootings and corporate malfeasance and how BushCo's squad of scabrous flying monkeys have, say, supported torture or endorsed wiretapping or gouged the nation for another $200 billion to pay for a failed war. Your nerves are raw and your heart is tired and the media will just not shut the hell up already about the sadness and the war and the mayhem and the Cheney and the doom doom doom.

It is outrage fatigue, and it is epidemic. It's that feeling that we are being hammered unlike any time in recent history with so many appalling and disgusting and violently un-American incidents and scandals and manipulations that our b.s.-detectors are smoking like an old V-8 engine on a hot summer's day and it's all we can do to get up every day without screaming.

What's more, it's not the mere quantity of moral insults, either. It's the bizarre absurdity of the subject matter, the things we are being forced to consider, or reconsider, that seem to make it all so horrific.

Torture? Are you kidding? Allegedly the most civilized, the most morally aware nation on the planet and we are still debating, in the highest courts and government offices in the land, about whether the United States should strap human beings to gnarled metal benches in rancid foreign bunkers and inflict such inexplicable terror and fear upon them that they confess to things they didn't even do just to get us to stop? Is this the Middle Ages? Are we regressing back to the goddamn cave?

Oh my, yes, plethoric are the reasons you should be outraged indeed, and torture just might be one of the most incendiary reasons in the past few years. If nothing else, its disgusting return to U.S. political dialogue certainly means it's no time to be laying down arms in exhaustion, no matter how tempting it might be.

Take this fine example: Keith Olbermann, as is his wont, executed another pitch-perfect bout of outrage recently on his excellent MSNBC show, taking BushCo to task on the issue of waterboarding like you never hear in major on-air media anymore.

Olbermann only barely held on to his trademark fierce hyper-articulation against the sheer disgust he/we have to endure at the idea that a sitting American president obviously thinks medieval torture is a gul-dang swell idea, no matter what psychologists, military experts, ethicists, the United Nations, the Geneva Convention and Jesus himself all say.

It was wonderful, powerful stuff, a razor-sharp, highly informed media pundit who dares to presume an unusually high level of intelligence among his viewers, speaking truth to power in a way most liberal media-haters complain never really happens anymore. And of course, his subject was one of the most deserving of our moral outrage in recent history.

But then I read some of the reaction to Olbermann's diatribe on various political blogs and on some news-aggregate sites, with many saying, gosh Keith, lighten up already, who cares, enough with all the outrage and the spittle, wow I'm so sick of all this ranting and raving and gosh I'm tired of these smarty media people telling me how to think and hey maybe torture is good let's kill us some more, haw haw haw snort.

On the one hand, it is, you can argue, generally the way of the meaner-than-thou blogosphere, with all but the most professional and intelligent and positive-minded of outposts seeming to suffer an undue percentage of reactionary chyme in their comment areas, hordes of Net-drunk twentysomethings and extremists and shut-ins who have way too much free time and merely chime in to see their sneers "published" and to prove how much more jaded and apathetic they are than the next person, while adding zero to the conversation.

But maybe it's worse than that. Because this is where it can happen, where you can get sucked into the vortex of whining and bitterness and where you might feel part of yourself wanting to wallow too, desiring to avoid doing the actual moral and spiritual work of dissecting and researching and analysing something as politically messy and morally ugly as torture for yourself, opting instead for the easy path, for closing your eyes and sticking your fingers in your ears and going, nyah nyah nyah shut up shut up SHUT UP! Hey, it sure beats thinking.

Or maybe we can flip it around. Maybe, with the right intent, the exact reverse can happen, and you see this ocean of nasty ennui, this pile of oft-misspelled, poorly punctuated reactionary effluvia as, in and of itself, something to be a bit livid about.

Maybe, in other words, you can enjoy, as one blogger put it, a big dose of "fatigue outrage," the feeling of disgust you get when faced with all those people who think mental lethargy and laziness is, like, way funny, dude.

In other words, enough with the childish, frat-boy-grade complaints about media overload and too many rants and outrage fatigue. You have to earn that sort of thing. If you never give a crap about engaging the world, if you never want to think deeply about complex issues and care about ramifications and see what truly resonates with your own informed spirit and then stand up for what you believe, this pretty much eliminates your right to sneer at others who do.

It is, for me, all about modulation. It is about remembering that outrage does not necessarily equal misery. Outrage does not mean you must wallow in fear and fatalism and yank out your hair and wake up every morning hating the world and hating yourself and hating humanity for being so stupid/numb/blind and wondering how the hell you can escape it all.

Outrage is rich with humanistic understanding. It is not some evangelical Christian parent "outraged" that her kid saw a woman's nipple on TV. It is not some right-wing Family Council "outraged" that someone put S&M outfits on Barbie, or that some art gallery is displaying Jesus as a woman, or that scientists dared to say that stem cell research does not equal abortion, or that the mayor isn't taking care of all the potholes and stray kitties. That's not outrage, that's reactionary whining.

True outrage, like Olbermann's, like (occasionally, hopefully) this column's, like what you should ideally be experiencing on a daily basis while Bush is in office, is honed and sharp and poignant. It contains a powerful sense of deeply informed decency, and therefore has a true feel for when that sense has been violated. Outrage has meat and substance and intellectual nourishment. It is actually healthy.

Smart, informed outrage engages you and fires your heart, your mind. It is fuel. It is the reason you claim you enjoy being an American, to question malevolent government actions and take a stand and demand accountability where there has, for the past seven years, been none. Bottom line: We simply cannot let them convince us, by way of an all-out assault on science, sex, love, et al, that the good fight just ain't worth fighting.

After all, the flying monkeys are far from done raiding the closet and stealing your babies and making a mockery of everything wise and calm and open-hearted people hold dear. And baby, if you ain't outraged about that, something is very wrong indeed.

--
The supreme excellence is to subdue the armies of your enemies without even having to fight them.~Sun Tzu

http://www.karisable.com/
http://karisable.com/am.htm

Democrats seek better care for veterans

2007-11-04T22:12:00.001-08:00

Democrats seek better care for veterans

By MATTHEW DALY, Associated Press WriterSat Nov 3, 2:45 PM ET

A Democratic senator on Saturday accused President Bush of "hollow talk" in support of U.S. troops returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, and said the Bush administration has not done nearly enough to provide veterans with the care they need.

Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., said, "The president can call on Democrats to follow him in lockstep all he wants, but when it comes to caring for our veterans, we are not about to start taking advice from George Bush."

Bush scolded Democrats on Thursday for combining spending bills for defense and veterans programs with one for labor, health and education matters. Republicans consider the bill bloated.

The president also lamented that his emergency spending request for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan still languishes.

Murray, delivering the Democrats' weekly radio address, accused Bush of underfunding the Veterans Affairs Department and said thousands of troops returning from Iraq and Afghanistan are "stuck in a bureaucratic nightmare" and aren't getting the health care they need.

The senator said the number of uninsured veterans has skyrocketed in recent years. The administration also lost the personal data of millions of veterans and failed to correct shoddy outpatient treatment and poor living conditions at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, she said.

Murray, the fourth-ranking Democratic senator, defended a Democratic bill that pays for veterans programs and other priorities such as education and medical research.

The bill provides thousands of new case workers to help reduce delays for treatment, improves conditions at Walter Reed and other facilities and invests in new ways to treat ailments such as post-traumatic stress disorder, she said.

--
The supreme excellence is to subdue the armies of your enemies without even having to fight them.~Sun Tzu

http://www.karisable.com/
http://karisable.com/am.htm

Florida murder case drenched in mystery

2007-10-25T01:11:00.001-07:00

Florida murder case drenched in mystery

http://www.latimes.com/

Two men who chartered a Miami Beach boat are accused of killing four crew members. But what was their motive? And where are the bodies?

By Carol J. Williams, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
October 25, 2007

MIAMI BEACH -- The view from the Tiki bar of Monty's Restaurant at the Miami Beach Marina might give a man on the run certain ideas.

The gleaming chrome-and-fiberglass charter yachts promise a luxurious escape. Palm trees lining the marina and sunlit teal waters of Biscayne Bay hint at the island idylls beyond this Caribbean gateway. A whimsical sign points to the nearest Bahamian anchorages: Walker's Cay, Marsh Harbour, Bimini Bay.

Kirby Logan Archer, using a false name and covering his buzz-cut strawberry blond hair with chestnut dye, had been on the lam since January when he turned up at Monty's a month ago.

He spotted the sleek sport-fisher Joe Cool docked at the marina. From there, it can be deduced from what he later told investigators, he plotted a way out of fear and subterfuge.

Two days later, the 47-foot fishing boat was reported missing. On Sept. 23, a Coast Guard cutter found the vessel abandoned, drifting and dragging anchor, 35 miles north of Cuba.

Its interior cabin was in "disarray," with cigarette packs, computer gear, clothing, cameras and cellphones scattered about, according to an affidavit by Coast Guard Special Agent Richard Blais. Its four Miami crew members and two charter clients -- Archer and Guillermo Zarabozo, a 19-year-old Cuban -- were missing.

Archer and Zarabozo were spotted by a Coast Guard helicopter 15 hours later and 12 miles away, on the Joe Cool's inflatable orange life raft where they had a supply of water, $2,200 in cash and six pieces of neatly packed luggage.

They reportedly gave an account of three pirates who commandeered the boat and executed the four crew members. The two men were left unscathed; after the Joe Cool ran out of gas, they told the Coast Guard, another pirate vessel picked up the attackers.

The gruesome tale has captivated and shaken the Florida nautical and tourism worlds, reminding those who make their living acquainting visitors with sun, sand and sea that danger can lurk even in the beauty of the Caribbean.

As officials try to piece together a plausible scenario, they have tried to figure out what Archer was running from.

It might have been the consequences of going absent without leave from the Army four years ago.

He was also wanted for allegedly stealing $92,000 from the Batesville, Ark., Wal-Mart where he worked as an assistant manager. On Jan. 26, he allegedly walked out with the money stashed in a microwave oven resealed in its box. Archer paid for the microwave at the front register, taking his employee discount, then left without a word to his wife, two sons or his parents.

Or did he fear charges of child molestation, which Sharp County, Ark., authorities were investigating?

Prosecutors and federal agents believe Archer and Zarabozo, the bearded, muscle-bound Cuban who has since turned 20, might have been fleeing to Cuba for a new life in exile. Cuba has no extradition treaty with the United States, and their money would go far on an island where $15 is a monthly salary.

Archer and Zarabozo are expected to be charged today with first-degree murder in the presumed deaths of the four other people aboard the Joe Cool: Captain Jake Branam, 27; his wife, Kelley, 30; his half-brother and crewman, Scott Gamble; and first mate Samuel Kairy. The Branams left behind a 2-year-old daughter and 4-month-old son, who are now the subjects of a custody battle among relatives.

No bodies have been found. No murder weapon has been recovered. What motive Archer or Zarabozo might have had to kill the crew remains a mystery -- and a challenge for the U.S. attorney's office, which must prove premeditated murder with evidence that defense lawyers have described as laughably thin and circumstantial.

Four spent Glock 9-millimeter casings were found, and there appeared to be blood on cabin steps leading from the salon to the two staterooms. Federal agents also found a flimsy key that could be to handcuffs or a luggage lock, and a February receipt from a Hialeah, Fla., gun shop for a Glock magazine and bullets.

U.S. Atty. R. Alexander Acosta acknowledges that proving cold-blooded murder will be a challenge but argues that that shouldn't be a deterrent.

Archer's lawyer, Allan B. Kaiser, scoffs at the government's case.

"Having been a prosecutor for 16 years, if this case was dumped in my lap I would have laughed in disbelief," Kaiser said. The prosecution is relying on "inconsistencies" in the two men's accounts of what happened on board, he said.

One man said the pirates wore cargo pants, the other said jeans. Both seemed unsure of the colors of the marauders' T-shirts.

Archer told the Coast Guard and the FBI that he had been sitting on the Tiki bar terrace on the night of Sept. 21 when he spotted the Joe Cool moored at the head of the D-Pier and decided to book it.

But he reportedly told the boat owners that he and Zarabozo were surveyors wrapping up a South Florida assignment and wanted to meet up with their girlfriends in the Bahamas' Bimini Bay, 60 miles east. The men could have flown from Miami to Bimini for $150, but instead peeled off 40 $100 bills for the Joe Cool charter.

"Happens all the time. This is Miami Beach -- there's big bucks around here. You wouldn't think anything of someone paying $4,000 in cash," said Greg Love, who charters yachts through his Club Nautico office across from the marina slip that the Joe Cool occupied.

The criminal complaint filed Oct. 10 against Archer and Zarabozo says investigation of the fishing boat's GPS navigation system showed erratic movements once the vessel was about halfway through the two-hour cruise to Bimini.

Zarabozo told investigators that the Joe Cool was lured into the hijacking by a phony distress call from what appeared to be a disabled vessel.

The Coast Guard has no record of a distress call at that time, according to the complaint.

But Coast Guard spokesman Luis Diaz said it was possible for a ship-to-ship message to go undetected if the communication was made on a different channel.

Prosecutor Michael Gilfarb speculated at a bail hearing Tuesday that Archer and Zarabozo were on "a one-way trip out of the country that resulted in the elimination of witnesses to that flight by way of murder."

Both spoke Spanish and had lived in Cuba. Zarabozo was born there and emigrated with his mother on a lottery visa in 1999. Archer had served as an Army military police investigator at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in the mid-1990s, when Cuban rafters were held at the base while their bids for U.S. migration were processed.

Archer told FBI interrogators that he and Zarabozo met while they worked for Miami private security firms about six months ago.

--
The supreme excellence is to subdue the armies of your enemies without even having to fight them.~Sun Tzu

http://www.karisable.com/
http://karisable.com/am.htm

Nightmares Why We Dream at All

2007-10-25T00:52:00.001-07:00

October 23, 2007

nytimes.com
Basics

In the Dreamscape of Nightmares, Clues to Why We Dream at All

By NATALIE ANGIER

The patient was a 37-year-old man who had been physically abused as a boy by his schizophrenic mother, often while he lay in bed trying to fall asleep. Nevertheless, he had grown into a reasonably normal, gainfully employed adult, and he thought that the worst was behind him, until one night he awoke to find an intruder rummaging through his dresser drawers. After that, his nightmares began — terrifying, recurrent dreams in which the intruder was a middle-age woman and a knife dangled with Damoclesian contempt from the ceiling fan over his head.

"The old fear memories had not gone away," said Dr. Ross Levin, a psychologist and sleep researcher at Yeshiva University in New York. They "were easily reactivated by the recent trauma," and just as readily twisted into the basis of a repetitive nightmare. Dr. Levin urged the patient to reframe the dream and rehearse alternatives to swinging blades and frozen fear, until finally the nightmares abated and the man could regain his footing.

Few of us suffer from nightmares crippling and persistent enough to demand treatment. Yet we all know how bad a nightmare feels, how it surrounds you and surges up to drown you and makes your teeth fall out in chunks and gives you leukemia and look, your 6-year-old daughter is running back and forth through traffic, and oh no, this train is headed the wrong way and it's past midnight, and there you are a cowardly third-grader back on Creston Avenue in the Bronx, no, please, not the Bronx! And you scream and you thrash and you want to wake up.

By all evidence, outrageously bad dreams are a universal human experience. Sometimes the dreams are scary enough to jolt the slumberer awake, in which case they meet the formal definition of nightmares — bad dreams that wake you up. At other times, they are even worse. The sleeper thinks the nightmare is over, only to step into Your Nested Nightmare, Chapter II. Whatever the particulars of the plot, researchers say, nightmares and dreadful dreams offer potentially telling clues into the larger mystery of why we dream in the first place, how our dreaming and waking lives may intersect and cross-infect each other, and, most baffling of all, how we manage to construct a virtual reality in our skull, a seemingly life-size, multidimensional, sensorily rich nocturnal roundhouse staffed with characters so persuasive you want to ... strangle them, before they can strangle you.

A big reason bad dreams offer insight into the architecture of dreams generally is that, as a host of studies have shown, most of our dreams are bad. Whether research subjects keep dream journals at home or sleep in research labs and are periodically awoken out of rapid eye movement, or REM, sleep — the stage most often associated with dreaming — the results are the same: about three-quarters of the emotions described are negative.

Moreover, said Robert Stickgold, a sleep researcher at the Harvard Medical School, we are ridiculously industrious dreamers, spending 60 to 70 percent of somnolence dreaming or in a dreamlike state called sleep mentation, which works out to three hours nightly spent in a state of anxiety or frustration as we show up late for tests or walk barefoot over broken glass because our shoes have melted.

Even bona fide nightmares are more common than most of us realize. Ask people to recall spontaneously how many nightmares they had in the last year, and they might say one or two, said Mark Blagrove, a dream researcher at the University of Wales in Swansea. Ask them to keep a dream diary, and they will report nightmares once or twice a month.

Survey and diary studies have shown that nightmare frequency varies by age and sex. Preschoolers are relatively immune to the bogeyman fetish, but not so their elder siblings. Roughly 25 percent of children ages 5 to 12 report being awakened by bad dreams at least once a week.

Nightmare rates climb through adolescence, peak in young adulthood, and then, like so much else in life, begin to drop. The average 55-year-old has one-third the number of nightmares as the average 25-year-old. At nearly every age, girls and women report having significantly more nightmares than do boys and men, a fact that some researchers say may be related to women's comparatively higher rates of anxiety and mood disorders.

Nightmare content also shifts over time and across cultures. A young man in 21st-century America might not mind the occasional bawdy dream, but for St. Augustine, the fourth-century Christian philosopher, "sexual dreams were nightmares," said Kelly Bulkeley, a dream researcher and visiting scholar at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, Calif. "He considered them threats to his faith."

Cultural specifics can also tweak universal themes. Dr. Bulkeley and his colleagues have found that nightmares about falling through the air are common among women in Arab nations, perhaps for metaphorical reasons. "There's such a premium in these countries on women remaining chaste, and the dangers of becoming a 'fallen woman' are so intense," he said, "that the naturally high baseline of falling dreams is amped up even more."

Using brain imaging devices that are noisy and uncomfortable and less than conducive to a good night's sleep, scientists have nonetheless begun identifying which regions of the brain are active during sleep and which are largely off-line. The brain proceeds through four stages of sleep at night, each characterized by its own pattern of brainwaves and neurochemical activity. REM sleep, when the eyes are flitting behind closed lids, is rightly renowned as the dreaming stage, with at least 90 percent of it spent dreaming. But dreams occur in parts of non-REM sleep, as well.

When slipping into REM sleep, Dr. Levin said, "the whole brain changes." "Neurochemically, it's like the Fourth of July," as cortical precincts shift colors in scanning images to indicate arousal or quiescence, he said, adding, "The limbic system becomes incredibly active, much more so than when you're awake, which is why you're emotionally on edge in dreams."

Blazing with particularly patriotic fervor in the limbic system are the amygdala and anterior cingulate cortex, constituting what Steven H. Woodward, a psychologist at the V.A. hospital in Menlo Park, Calif., terms the brain's "axis of fear." At the same time, the prefrontal cortex, seat of rational thought and critical reasoning, is on lunch break, Dr. Levin said, "which is why you can have a dream where something has 4 heads and 12 legs, and you think, 'No problem, what's next?'"

Also relatively tranquilized is the primary visual cortex, recipient of visual signals from the outside world. The secondary visual cortex, however, which helps process and interpret those signals, remains alert. It is here that the fabulous imagery of dreams probably arises, said Tore Nielsen of the University of Montreal, as the secondary visual cortex strives to decipher the signals ricocheting through it, many of them internally generated, and to splice them into some approximation of a coherent whole.

Other sensory and motor systems remain active in REM, including those that would normally control the arms and legs, which is why motion figures prominently in many dreams. But if you often feel frustrated, as though you can never get to where you're going, well, you can't.

As it happens, one vigilant player in dreaming is a small region of the brainstem that paralyzes most of the body, preventing you from physically acting out your dream. People with neurogenerative diseases that disable this brainstem disabler can end up injuring themselves during extreme dream-driven actions. Most cases of sleepwalking occur in non-REM sleep, when the body is not paralyzed.

With so much of the sleeping body and brain apparently colluding to allow us to wander safely through an ominous dreamscape of extravagant characters, most sleep scientists are convinced that dreaming serves an essential, possibly evolutionarily adaptive, purpose.

In a recent paper in Psychological Bulletin, Dr. Nielsen and Dr. Levin proposed that dreaming served to create what they call "fear extinction memories," the brain's way of scrambling, detoxifying and finally discarding old fearful memories, the better to move on and make synaptic space for any novel threats that may show up at the door. "The brain learns quickly what to be afraid of," Dr. Nielsen said. "But if there isn't a check on the process, we'd fear things in adulthood we feared in childhood."

Ordinary bad dreams rarely recapitulate unpleasant events from real life but instead cannibalize them for props and spare parts, and through that reinvention, Dr. Nielsen explained, the fears are defanged. "A bad dream that doesn't lead to awakening is successful in dealing with intense emotion," he said. "It's disturbing, but there is some kind of resolution to the extent we don't wake up."

By this scenario, nightmares, in allowing you to escape prematurely, represent a failure of the "fear extinction" system. "Bad dreams are functional, nightmares dysfunctional," he said.

If you feel yourself falling, spread your arms out and learn how to fly.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/23/science/23angi.html?ei=5087&em=&en=2d43d3828596b931&ex=1193457600&pagewanted=print

--
The supreme excellence is to subdue the armies of your enemies without even having to fight them.~Sun Tzu

http://www.karisable.com/
http://karisable.com/am.htm

Kari Sable.com

Make Juvenile Justice a Priority

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Read the free excerpt: 'Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man: A Memoir' by Bill Clegg (Hardcover - Jun.

Crack Facts & Figures The White House Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP)

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Encourage 14 to 24 year olds students -- to submit issue-based films to Film Your Issue Competition

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Mirror, Mirror on the Wall, Who's the Cruelest Species of Them All?

By Anneli Rufus, AlterNetPosted on February 23, 2008, Printed on February 23, 2008 http://www.alternet.org/story/77543/

© 2008 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved. View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/77543/

Acquitted of Murder, Neo-Nazi Killer Taunts Victim's Family

By David Holthouse, Hate Watch

Posted on February 20, 2008, Printed on February 21, 2008 http://www.alternet.org/bloggers/http://www.splcenter.org/blog//77370/

© 2008 Hate Watch All rights reserved. View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/bloggers/http://www.splcenter.org/blog//77370/

The Moral Instinct

By STEVEN PINKER

AlterNet: Should Nursing Homes Be for Profit?

Caught with a Bag of Weed? It Could Cost You More Than You Think

Caught with a Bag of Weed? It Could Cost You More Than You Think

By Paul Armentano, AlterNetPosted on January 26, 2008, Printed on January 26, 2008 http://www.alternet.org/story/74511/

© 2008 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved. View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/74511/

Teachers and Students Threatened for Anti-war Student Walkout

Outrage fatigue? Get over it

Outrage fatigue? Get over it

Are you sick of being sick? Suffering way too much Bush-induced nausea? Well, tough

Democrats seek better care for veterans

Democrats seek better care for veterans

Florida murder case drenched in mystery

Florida murder case drenched in mystery

Nightmares Why We Dream at All

In the Dreamscape of Nightmares, Clues to Why We Dream at All

By Anneli Rufus, AlterNet
Posted on February 23, 2008, Printed on February 23, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/77543/

© 2008 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/77543/

Posted on February 20, 2008, Printed on February 21, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/bloggers/
http://www.splcenter.org/blog//77370/

© 2008 Hate Watch All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/bloggers/http://www.splcenter.org/blog//77370/

By Paul Armentano, AlterNet
Posted on January 26, 2008, Printed on January 26, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/74511/

© 2008 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/74511/