I am a citizen of the United States of America. In this country, I can criticize my government as intelligently, as profanely, or as stupidly as I wish. I can call the president of the nation an unintelligent, uninspiring, and incompetent leader — which I have done. I can call my representative in Congress a buffoonish party hack — which I have done — and urge his removal from office by the voters. I can attack the policies enacted by government at all levels as often as I wish.

I can assemble with others to complain about the government. I can petition the government for redress of grievances. I can practice a religion free of government interference. Most importantly, I have the right to speak my mind. I can say whatever I want about the government short of advocating violence against it. I am free to speak or write critically about the actions or inactions of my government.

I can be a critic of my government because for hundreds of years, hundreds of thousands of Americans before me fought and died for my right to do that.
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It might be more difficult for Republicans to bash President Obama for being “timid” in his comments about the Iranian government’s violence against protesters if the U.S. media didn’t consistently censor US-Iranian history.

Take CNN’s recent Iran timeline, titled “A brief look at Iran’s history.”

According to the timeline, which begins in 1979, Iran has “been at odds with the West and some of its neighbors” since the overthrow of the Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. It refers to the Shah as having been “pro-Western.” Yet in the mother of all omissions, CNN leaves out how the US government was directly involved in bringing the Shah to power in a 1953 coup that toppled the democratically elected Iranian government of Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh. Full Story »

This week’s TunesDay featured a couple of new videos from Jeffrey Dean Foster, including one for “The Summer of the Son of Sam,” which is maybe the best song on Million Star Hotel, which is in turn one of the best CDs that way too few people have ever heard in the history of popular music.

Anyhow, it’s always nice when a listener/reader/viewer sits down and truly invests themselves in a work of art, and that’s exactly what happened over at Secondat a couple of days ago. Not only do they examine the music, they also reflect back, in great detail, on the summer of 1977 - the Summer of the Son of Sam itself. That was an eventful three months, to be sure. As the writer points out, a lot happened during

the long summer of 1977: New York City’s historic blackout, the deaths of Elvis Presley and Lynyrd Skynyrd, and a radio telescope reception from deep space. Full Story »

Part fourteen in a fifteen-part series

“You have never been to China until you’ve climbed the Great Wall,” Chairman Mao once declared.

By that definition, the twelve days we’ve spent in the country thus far don’t qualify.

I can see Mao’s point, though: it would not feel like a trip to China unless we visited the Great Wall. We’ve all been looking forward to the chance to finally see it, and now that we’re nearly done with our trip, the Great Wall feels a bit like the grand finale.

The most visited section of the Great Wall is called the Badaling, about fifty miles northwest of Beijing. We’re going to a slightly less touristy section, about forty miles from the city, called the Juyong Pass (also called the Juyongguan Pass).

“Wait’ll you see this place,” my colleague, Carl Case, says. “You’ll see why it’s a little less touristy.” Full Story »

Part twelve in a series

“Tiananmen” means “Gate of Heavenly Peace.” Ironic, then, that most Americans know it, if at all, as a scene of violence and bloodshed.

photo by Jeff Widener, A.P.

June 4 marks the 20th anniversary of the Chinese government’s violent crackdown on protestors who’d gathered in Tiananmen Square. The incident made headlines across the world, and the image of a lone protestor blocking a line of tanks proved especially powerful.

The protesters had camped out in the square since the April death of a pro-reform Communist Party official, Hu Yaobang. By June 4, after a great deal of international attention that embarrassed the Chinese government, tanks and troops rolled in and started cracking skulls.

Western news outlets reported yesterday and today (June 3 and 4) that no media would be allowed near Tiananmen Square on June 4th. Soldiers and uniformed and plainclothes police stood at attention everywhere in the square this morning, and visitors were being searched.

But visitors to Tiananmen Square are always searched. Full Story »

Part eight in a series

Chairman Mao looks a little waxy these days.

It isn’t for lack of trying. The Chinese government has gone to great pains to keep him looking fresh—at least as fresh as a guy who’s been dead since 1976 can look.

Just as the Russians have Lenin on display in Moscow, the Chinese have Mao on display in Beijing. Those Communists, it seems, love their embalmed leaders. (I wonder if Castro is making similar plans.)

Mao Zedong—or, as Americans learn it, Mao Tse-Tung—served as leader of the Communist army during the Chinese civil war of the 1930s, and then became leader of the entire country when the Communists eventually won in 1949. He served as chairman until his death in 1976.

And that’s when the legend of Mao took off. Full Story »

Part five in a series

One day, thirty-five years ago, Yang Quanyi found a head in his well. His discovery helped changed the face of China.

The date was March 29, 1974. Quanyi, a farmer in his thirties, was digging a new well, without much success, when he struck gold.

It wasn’t gold, literally—it was a head made from terra cotta, the same clay material used for making flower pots. And for Quanyi, it didn’t work out so great, at least not at first. When the government swooped in to investigate his discovery, Quanyi lost the lease to his land (there’s no private land ownership in China).

Subsequent archeological work revealed the scope of what Quanyi and his friends had stumbled upon: a lost tomb containing some eight thousand terra cotta statues, all smashed to bits. Full Story »

China changes before my eyes as I fly from east to west.

Shanghai’s ever-present haze is made even grayer under cloudy skies. But after our flight takes off, we punch through the clouds to find plenty of sun. The cloudcover beneath us soon gives way, and I can see the landscape beneath stretched out like a broad canvas.

Farmers have painted square fields, bisected by the thin brown lines of roads and the dark green lines of irrigation channels. I see plenty of bright blue squares that, in America, one would take to be swimming pools, but in China, the squares indicate the corrugated sheet metal popular for roofing. Settlements dot the landscape everywhere.

I can’t spot a single undeveloped plot. That’s not to say there aren’t any, but from my vantage point tens of thousands of feet in the air, it looks like the Chinese have committed every square foot for habitation, business, or agriculture. I have no idea where any wildlife could possibly live.

The broad coastal plain around Shanghai eventually gives way to small clusters of hills that, in turn, grow into an impressive range of mountains. Atop the step mountains and in the deep valleys, I finally see wilderness.

But the topography isn’t the only thing about China that changes. Full Story »

Every region of this beautiful planet has their treasured local festival and celebration. Spring is not officially Spring in Western Washington State without the Skagit Valley Tulip Festival. This year marks the 26th year of this springtime icon. Over 700 acres are planted with daffodils, tulips and irises.

I had my ritual visit early this past Friday morning. The tulips are stunning. They speak for themselves. After a walk around the 3 acre show garden I decided to explore the barn on the property.

Barns are just cool. Full Story »

On 9 September 1944 seven people penned their names to a sheet of paper in hopes of being remembered. Sixty years later builders working near the site of Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp discovered this precious message in a bottle.

We know the names of the evil ones, but for today we know seven other names, six from Poland one from France. Let us honor that request to be remembered.

Bronislaw Jankowiak
Stanislaw Dubla
Jan Jasik
Waclaw Sobczak
Karol Czekalski
Waldemar Bialobrzeski
Albert Veissid

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Part one of a series

April 20, 2009: 11:19 am MDT

Ten years ago a co-worker turned to me and said something that I’ll never forget, no matter how long I live: “Hey, Sammy, there’s been a school shooting in Littleton.”

Since that day a great deal has been written and said about Columbine High School and the events of 4.20.99, and like a lot of other people I’ve tried my hardest to make sense of something that seemed (and still seems) inherently senseless. Tried and failed. Now, ten years on, the grief hasn’t fully dissipated here in the city that I have come to call home, and even if we manage to understand the whos, whats, and hows, there’s a part of us that’s doomed to wrestle forever with the whys. Full Story »

Some time ago, an idea to save Afghanistan floated on a few editorial cycles.  Afghanistan grows some of the world’s best pomegranates, coincidentally the “nature’s miracle” of the moment.  If we could just get Afghans to grow pomegranates instead of poppies, they would become wealthy by exporting fruit to the “developed” world.  Peace would follow economic stability and democracy would follow peace…or something like that.  There are countless plans to “get Afghanistan right”, but they all follow the basic path of the Great Pomegranate Plan.

They all stumble into similar failings too.  It’s hard to get delicate fruit out of a country without significant transport infrastructure.  Not many health-food companies will be overly keen to set up processing facilities in the region.  The plan will only remain successful so long as the pomegranate is not usurped as the king of live forever foods and customers in the developed world can afford to splurge on wildly expensive health food.  Oh, and the fact that huge tracts of mature pomegranate orchards were cut down and replaced with poppies over the course of the good war.

We’re not getting Afghanistan right, and nothing in the latest plans suggest that we will get it right any time soon.  Are we even sure what it is we hope to accomplish or even why we’re trying to accomplish it?

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A couple of weeks ago author and NYU media theory lecturer Douglas Rushkoff penned a provocative essay for Arthur Magazine. Entitled “Let It Die,” the essay explains why we should stop trying to save the economy.

In a perfect world, the stock market would decline another 70 or 80 percent along with the shuttering of about that fraction of our nation’s banks. Yes, unemployment would rise as hundreds of thousands of formerly well-paid brokers and bankers lost their jobs; but at least they would no longer be extracting wealth at our expense. They would need to be fed, but that would be a lot cheaper than keeping them in the luxurious conditions they’re enjoying now. Even Bernie Madoff costs us less in jail than he does on Park Avenue.

Alas, I’m not being sarcastic. Full Story »

Despite the image its name implies, the Wilderness is none too wild these days.

Bordering the southern bank of central Virginia’s Rapidan River, the Wilderness was a seventy-square-mile tangle of dense second-growth forest—a region of scrawny, moss-tagged pines, garroted alders, hoary willows, and wet thickets.

“This, viewed as a battleground, was simply infernal,” a Union solder said shortly after the American Civil War raged through the area in May of 1864.

Today, battle still rages in the Wilderness, but this time, the federal government doesn’t face an army of Confederates—it faces the largest corporation in the world. The foot soldiers, if they arrive, will wear blue smocks adorned with yellow smiley faces and a pledge for low prices every day. Full Story »

There are red brick buildings visible from the Interstate just south of Seattle in an area called Georgetown. I have wished to explore them for several months – so today I did. I had no idea the background of the buildings or that I was about to stumble on a major piece of Seattle’s history. What caught my eye were the bright red bricks exposed by recent demolition and a tall still intact brick smoke stack.

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First, just in case you haven’t seen it, please review the video (in three parts).

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Dear Mr. Buffet, Mr. Gates, Mr. Turner, Mr. Soros, Ms. Winfrey, and any other hyper-rich types with progressive political leanings:

If this essay has, against all odds, somehow made its way to your desk, please, bear with me. It’s longish, but it winds eventually toward an exceedingly important conclusion. If you’ll give me a few minutes, I’ll do my best to reward your patience.
_______________

In the 2008 election, Barack Obama won a landmark political victory on a couple of prominent themes: “hope” and “change.” He has since been afforded ample opportunity to talk about these ideas, having inherited the nastiest economic quagmire in living memory and a Republican minority in Congress that has interpreted November’s results as a mandate to obstruct the public interest even more rabidly than it was doing before. Reactions among those of us who supported Obama have been predictably mixed, but even those who have been critical of his efforts to date are generally united in their hope that his win signaled the end of “movement conservatism” in the US. Full Story »

Washington was caught in the trap that was snaring so many other Virginia planters and that Thomas Jefferson, another victim, described as the chronic condition of indebtedness, which then became “hereditary from father to son for many generations, so that planters were a species of property annexed to certain mercantile houses in London. … If a debt is once contracted by a farmer, it is never paid but by a sale,” meaning bankruptcy proceedings.
– His Excellency George Washington, Joseph Ellis

Most of us know the Revolutionary War was about more than just life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Like most uprisings in fact, it was the expression of a people who felt their economic lifeline was being pinched by the British and their tax schemes. If you’ll recall your high-school American history, the Sugar Act enforced a tariff on molasses and taxed the importation of items such as silk and wine, the Stamp Act — every document or newspaper printed in the colonies — and the Townshend Act: lead, paint, paper, glass, and tea imported by colonists.

Even a personage as august as George Washington had reasons other than unadulterated fealty to Lady Liberty for rejecting foreign rule. In fact, beyond just onerous English taxation, what galvanized him was the eighteenth century version of credit card debt. Full Story »

Future Sock

I knit.

I had my imagination tickled by the story of an eighty-three year old named Mrs. Abner Bartlett of Medford, Massachusetts.

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Today marks the breaking of the siege of Leningrad, and President Medvedev choose the moment to announce that Russia would attempt to finally calculate Soviet losses during World War II.  It will be a large number, but it will just be a number.  Such a scale is necessary to witness in some way or another.  This is a story of stumbling upon the sort of thing that words and numbers will always fall short of describing.

It was three days after my arrival.  I had been enjoying the respite of a classically Russian birch forest after my other walks through blocks of Kruschevnikis and industrial wastelands when i popped out onto a sidewalk.  Ahead was the tricolor flying at half mast.  I wondered what might have happened in the three days i’d been cut off from the outside world.  Then i saw two suspiciously clean buildings.  I approached, turning between them. Full Story »