There are many others like myself who find much to admire or even fetishize about Japanese culture. One aspect that came to be aware of decades ago is that Japanese culture is not innovative, but rather perfectionist. Given any foreign development, Japanese will work tirelessly to improve and improve and improve until perfection is achieved. That can be a blessing, or, as Anne Lamott noted in Bird By Bird, a curse:

Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life, and it is the main obstacle between you and a shitty first draft. I think perfectionism is based on the obsessive belief that if you run carefully enough, hitting each stepping-stone just right, you won’t have to die. The truth is that you will die anyway and that a lot of people who aren’t even looking at their feet are going to do a whole lot better than you, and have a lot more fun while they’re doing it.

I learned of yet another example this week as I read artist Yoshihiro Tatsumi’s massive 855-page, graphic autobiography A drifting life

Acclaimed for his visionary short-story collections “The Push Man and Other Stories,” “Abandon the Old in Tokyo,” and “Good-Bye” originally created nearly forty years ago, but just as resonant now as ever the legendary Japanese cartoonist Yoshihiro Tatsumi has come to be recognized in North America as a precursor of today’s graphic novel movement. “A Drifting Life” is his monumental memoir eleven years in the making, beginning with his experiences as a child in Osaka, growing up as part of a country burdened by the shadows of World War II.

Spanning fifteen years from August 1945 to June 1960, Tatsumi’s stand-in protagonist, Hiroshi, faces his father’s financial burdens and his parents’ failing marriage, his jealous brother’s deteriorating health, and the innumerable pitfalls that await him in the competitive manga market of mid-twentieth-century Japan. He dreams of following in the considerable footsteps of his idol, the manga artist Osamu Tezuka (“Astro Boy,” “Apollo’s Song,” “Ode to Kirihito,” “Buddha”) with whom Tatsumi eventually became a peer and, at times, a stylistic rival. As with his short-story collection, “A Drifting Life” is designed by Adrian Tomine.

In telling his story (and that of other manga legends) Tatsumi described how western film and storytelling influenced him and his peers. They spent hours in movie houses and poured over the hard-boiled detective novels like those of Mickey Spillane.

Tatsumi’s depiction of the artist’s life, his frustration with producing lesser work so that he could afford to reach for the perfection he sought, is gripping.

The key, I think, is to pick your battle carefully and learn to accept imperfection is all else.

Yesterday I began my reexamination of Sharon Lerner’s Teflon Toxin series for The Intercept. I concluded by calling C8 (Perfluorooctanoic acid) the dangerous precursor chemical necessary to manufacture Teflon a cockroach chemical because the molecule—a backbone chain of eight carbon atoms to which are attached 15 Florine atoms along with one atom of Oxygen and one Hydroxide (OH) molecule—is extremely stable, so much so that the C8 we have manufactured will still be here when our sun goes nova.

Lerner goes on to make another comparison: to tobacco.

Eight companies are responsible for C8 contamination in the U.S. (In addition to DuPont, the leader by far in terms of both use and emissions, seven others had a role, including 3M, which produced C8 and sold it to DuPont for years.) If these polluters were ever forced to clean up the chemical, which has been detected by the EPA 716 times across water systems in 29 states, and in some areas may be present at dangerous levels, the costs could be astronomical — and C8 cases could enter the storied realm of tobacco litigation, forever changing how the public thinks about these products and how a powerful industry does business.

In some ways, C8 already is the tobacco of the chemical industry—a substance whose health effects were the subject of a decades-long corporate cover-up. As with tobacco, public health organizations have taken up the cause—and numerous reporters have dived into the mammoth story. Like the tobacco litigation, the lawsuits around C8 also involve huge amounts of money. And, like tobacco, C8 is a symbol of how difficult it is to hold companies responsible, even when mounting scientific evidence links their products to cancer and other diseases.

Corporations serve one function and one function only: maximizing shareholder value. So much so, that they are legally bound by fiduciary responsibility to achieve that goal. That doesn’t mean that a company can gleefully ignore any and all bad outcomes associated with a product or service—defending against, and paying out settlements in, damage suits is costly and reduces profits—but given the choice between hiding or correcting a threat, a corporation will always take the less expensive choice as Ralph Nader revealed in Unsafe At Any Speed. The chemical industry is no exception.

C8 would prove to be arguably even more ethically and scientifically challenging for Haskell [DuPont’s in-house toxicology facility]. From the beginning, DuPont scientists approached the chemical’s potential dangers with rigor. In 1954, the very year a French engineer first applied the slick coating to a frying pan, a DuPont employee named R.A. Dickison noted that he had received an inquiry regarding C8’s “possible toxicity.” In 1961, just seven years later, in-house researchers already had the short answer to Dickison’s question: C8 was indeed toxic and should be “handled with extreme care,” [Emphasis mine, JH] according to a report filed by plaintiffs. By the next year experiments had honed these broad concerns into clear, bright red flags that pointed to specific organs: C8 exposure was linked to the enlargement of rats’ testes, adrenal glands, and kidneys. In 1965, 14 employees, including Haskell’s then-director, John Zapp, received a memo describing preliminary studies that showed that even low doses of a related surfactant could increase the size of rats’ livers, a classic response to exposure to a poison.

Teflon had become, and continues to be, a huge revenue source for DuPont and while the company had no concerns about the end product, the C8 necessary to make Teflon was a growing liability.

Because of its toxicity, C8 disposal presented a problem. In the early 1960s, the company buried about 200 drums of the chemical on the banks of the Ohio River near the plant. An internal DuPont document from 1975 about “Teflon Waste Disposal” detailed how the company began packing the waste in drums, shipping the drums on barges out to sea, and dumping them into the ocean, adding stones to make the drums sink. Though the practice resulted in a moment of unfavorable publicity when a fisherman caught one of the drums in his net, no one outside the company realized the danger the chemical presented. At some point before 1965, ocean dumping ceased, and DuPont began disposing of its Teflon waste in landfills instead.

What DuPont discovered 10 years later, however, was that the disposal plan wasn’t working. C8 was showing up far afield from Parkersburg.

To get a sense of exactly how extensive that exposure was, in March 1984 an employee was sent out to collect samples, according to a memo by a DuPont staffer named Doughty. The employee went into general stores, markets, and gas stations, in local communities as far as 79 miles downriver from the Parkersburg plant, asking to fill plastic jugs with water, which he then took back for testing. The results of those tests confirmed C8’s presence at elevated levels.

Faced with the evidence that C8 had now spread far beyond the Parkersburg plant, internal documents show, DuPont was at a crossroads. Could the company find a way to reduce emissions? Should it switch to a new surfactant? Or stop using the chemical altogether? In May 1984, DuPont convened a meeting of 10 of its corporate business managers at the company’s headquarters in Wilmington, Delaware, to tackle some of these questions. Results from an engineering study the group reviewed that day described two methods for reducing C8 emissions, including thermal destruction and a scrubbing system.

“None of the options developed are … economically attractive and would essentially put the long term viability of this business segment on the line,” someone named J.A. Schmid summarized in notes from the meeting, which are marked “personal and confidential.”

The executives considered C8 from the perspective of various divisions of the company, including the medical and legal departments, which, they predicted, “will likely take a position of total elimination,” according to Schmid’s summary. Yet the group nevertheless decided that “corporate image and corporate liability”—rather than health concerns or fears about suits [Emphasis mine, JH]—would drive their decisions about the chemical.

That pesky maximize shareholder value had raised its head, and DuPont began circling the wagons.

DuPont confronted its potential liability in part by rehearsing the media strategy it would take if word of the contamination somehow got out. In the weeks after the 1984 meeting, an internal public relations team drafted the first of several “standby press releases.” The guide for dealing with the imagined press offered assurances that only “small quantities of [C8] are discharged to the Ohio River” and that “these extremely low levels would have no adverse affects.” When a hypothetical reporter, who presumably learned that DuPont was choosing not to invest in a system to reduce emissions, asks whether the company’s decision was based on money, the document advises answering “No.”

The company went on to draft these just-in-case press releases at several difficult junctures, and even the hypothetical scenarios they play out can be uncomfortable. In one, drafted in 1989, after DuPont had bought local fields that contained wells it knew to be contaminated, the company spokesperson in the script winds up in an outright lie. Although internal documents list “the interests of protecting our plant site from public liability” as one of the reasons for the purchase, when the hypothetical reporter asks whether DuPont purchased the land because of the water contamination, the suggested answer listed in the 1989 standby release was to deny this and to state instead that “it made good business sense to do so.”

DuPont drafted another contingency press release in 1991, after it discovered that C8 was present in a landfill near the plant, which it estimated could produce an exit stream containing 100 times its internal maximum safety level. Fears about the possible health consequences were enough to spur the company to once again rehearse its media strategy.

Then the cancer clusters became evident.

In 1989, DuPont employees found an elevated number of leukemia deaths at the West Virginia plant. Several months later, they measured an unexpectedly high number of kidney cancers among male workers. Both elevations were plant-wide and not specific to workers who handled C8. [Emphasis mine, JH] But, the following year, the scientists clarified how C8 might cause at least one form of cancer in humans. In 1991, it became clear not just that C8-exposed rats had elevated chances of developing testicular tumors—something 3M had also recently observed—but, worse still, that the mechanism by which they developed the tumors could apply to humans.

DuPont, ever increasingly driven by a bunker mentality resorted to CIA-like tactics, declaring documents top secret and controlling distribution of sensitive documents with tracking numbers. The crack in the dam came, however, not human injuries, but from victims of a bovine kind.

In 1999, when a farmer suspected that DuPont had poisoned his cows (after they drank from the very C8-polluted stream DuPont employees had worried over in their draft press release eight years earlier) and filed a lawsuit seeking damages, the truth finally began to seep out. The next year, an in-house DuPont attorney named Bernard Reilly helped open an internal workshop on C8 by giving “a short summary of the right things to document and not to document.” But Reilly—whose own emails about C8 would later fuel the legal battle that eventually included thousands of people, including Ken Wamsley and Sue Bailey—didn’t heed his own advice.

Reilly clearly made the wrong choice when he used the company’s computers to write about C8, which he revealingly called the “the material 3M sells us that we poop to the river and into drinking water along the Ohio River.” But the DuPont attorney was right about two things: If C8 was proven to be harmful, Reilly predicted in 2000, “we are really in the soup because essentially everyone is exposed one way or another.”

Prescient words indeed.

More tomorrow in Part III of How Poisoned Is My Valley…

Previously in How Poisoned Is My Valley… and from last year: TEFLON ISN’T THE PROBLEM… and WHAT I’M READING: HOW POISONED IS MY VALLEY….

There are two ways to deal with repeated shocks: become numb or become tougher for the fight. In 2017 America, President Donald John Trump and his Republican sycophants, hope for the former; we must deliver the latter.

Naomi Klein, reporting in How Power Profits From Disaster for The Guardian, writes:

This strategy [of using the public’s disorientation following a collective shock–wars, coups, terrorist attacks, market crashes or natural disasters—to push through radical pro-corporate measures, often called shock therapy] has been a silent partner to the imposition of neoliberalism for more than 40 years. Shock tactics follow a clear pattern: wait for a crisis (or even, in some instances, as in Chile or Russia, help foment one), declare a moment of what is sometimes called “extraordinary politics”, suspend some or all democratic norms—and then ram the corporate wishlist through as quickly as possible. The research showed that virtually any tumultuous situation, if framed with sufficient hysteria by political leaders, could serve this softening-up function. It could be an event as radical as a military coup, but the economic shock of a market or budget crisis would also do the trick. Amid hyperinflation or a banking collapse, for instance, the country’s governing elites were frequently able to sell a panicked population on the necessity for attacks on social protections, or enormous bailouts to prop up the financial private sector—because the alternative, they claimed, was outright economic apocalypse.

Klein details how President Trump’s cabinet, his shock troop, is designed to create, exploit and profit (both politically and privately) from implementing a Shock Doctrine. The government’s No. 2 man, the man only a heartbeat (or an impeachment) away from the oval office, is the most threatening of the cabal.

[T]hen there’s vice-president Mike Pence, seen by many as the grownup in Trump’s messy room. Yet it is Pence, the former governor of Indiana, who actually has the most disturbing track record when it comes to bloody-minded exploitation of human suffering.

When Mike Pence was announced as Donald Trump’s running mate, I thought to myself: I know that name, I’ve seen it somewhere. And then I remembered. He was at the heart of one of the most shocking stories I’ve ever covered: the disaster capitalism free-for-all that followed Katrina and the drowning of New Orleans. Mike Pence’s doings as a profiteer from human suffering are so appalling that they are worth exploring in a little more depth, since they tell us a great deal about what we can expect from this administration during times of heightened crisis.

At the time Katrina hit New Orleans, Pence was chairman of the powerful and highly ideological Republican Study Committee, a caucus of conservative lawmakers. On 13 September 2005—just 15 days after the levees were breached, and with parts of New Orleans still under water—the RSC convened a fateful meeting at the offices of the Heritage Foundation in Washington DC. Under Pence’s leadership, the group came up with a list of Pro-Free-Market Ideas for Responding to Hurricane Katrina and High Gas Prices—32 pseudo-relief policies in all, each one straight out of the disaster capitalism playbook.

What stands out is the commitment to wage all-out war on labour standards and the public sphere—which is bitterly ironic, because the failure of public infrastructure is what turned Katrina into a human catastrophe in the first place. Also notable is the determination to use any opportunity to strengthen the hand of the oil and gas industry. The list includes recommendations to suspend the obligation for federal contractors to pay a living wage; make the entire affected area a free-enterprise zone; and “repeal or waive restrictive environmental regulations … that hamper rebuilding”. In other words, a war on the kind of red tape designed to keep communities safe from harm.

And, of course, billionaires from exploding their obscene profits.

The 32 pseudo-relief policies, detailed in a 13 September 2005 email from from chief of staff for Ted Cruz and fired executive director of the House Republican Study Committee and now President Trump’s Special Assistant to the President for Legislative Affairs, Paul Teller, serve as a blueprint for how Trump’s Stosstrupp intend to achieve their objectives. The entire list is vitally instructive, but just consider the first three:

—Automatically suspend Davis-Bacon prevailing wage laws in disaster areas;
—Make the entire affected area a flat-tax free-enterprise zone; and
—Make the entire region an economic competitiveness zone.

This is the Shock Doctrine laid bare.

Then there was that silly debate over fake news global warming:

Though climate scientists have directly linked the increased intensity of hurricanes to warming ocean temperatures, that didn’t stop Pence and his committee from calling on Congress to repeal environmental regulations on the Gulf coast, give permission for new oil refineries in the US, and green-light “drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge”.

It’s a kind of madness. After all, these very measures are a surefire way to drive up greenhouse gas emissions, the major human contributor to climate change, which leads to fiercer storms. Yet they were immediately championed by Pence, and later adopted by Bush, under the guise of responding to a devastating hurricane.

Hurricane Katrina turned into a catastrophe in New Orleans because of a combination of extremely heavy weather – possibly linked to climate change—and weak and neglected public infrastructure. The so-called solutions proposed by the group Pence headed at the time were the very things that would inevitably exacerbate climate change and weaken public infrastructure even further. He and his fellow “free-market” travellers were determined, it seems, to do the very things that are guaranteed to lead to more Katrinas in the future.

Post-Katrina New Orleans is the blueprint for Trump America.

New Orleans is the disaster capitalism blueprint – designed by the current vice-president and by the Heritage Foundation, the hard-right think tank to which Trump has outsourced much of his administration’s budgeting. Ultimately, the response to Katrina sparked an approval ratings freefall for George W Bush, a plunge that eventually lost the Republicans the presidency in 2008. Nine years later, with Republicans now in control of Congress and the White House, it’s not hard to imagine this test case for privatised disaster response being adopted on a national scale.

Including, and not surprising in hindsight, militarized police forces.

The presence of highly militarised police and armed private soldiers in New Orleans came as a surprise to many. Since then, the phenomenon has expanded exponentially, with local police forces across the country outfitted to the gills with military-grade gear, including tanks and drones, and private security companies frequently providing training and support. Given the array of private military and security contractors occupying key positions in the Trump administration, we can expect all of this to expand further with each new shock.

The Guardian article is an edited extract from Klein’s No Is Not Enough: Defeating the New Shock Politics; a book you should be reading. I am.

More than a year ago, on 4 March and 9 April, 2016, I began reading Sharon Lerner’s now 12-part series: The Teflon Toxin, for The Intercept. Distracted by first the Democratic primaries, followed by the general election and then the first 166 days of a President Donald John Trump White House, I let Lerner’s deep dive into the muck that is Teflon, slip. I regret that.

As I noted in my first piece, I have a personal connection to Washington Bottom, West Virginia. My father worked there in the Marbon Chemical plant adjacent to the DuPont facility manufacturing Teflon and my step-grandfather worked in the plant. In addition, my youngest brother and his family lived in Little Hocking, Ohio, across the Ohio River from the plant and one of the communities put in harm’s way by DuPont’s Teflon Toxin.

I begin again this morning—allowing a nod to my previous posts, but with fresh eyes—to the story.

In recent months I’ve written a fair amount about fossil fuel pipelines. First, the Dakota Access Pipeline and now, in my backyard, the Rover Pipeline. (You can also find daily updates here.)

One ubiquitous facet of those stories is the false theme of safety repeated over and over by apologists for the construction of such pipelines. They routinely reuse the tired refrain that pipelines are safer than transporting fossil fuels by trains or trucks. Another excuse is that pipeline companies engage in best practices. Both are true and worthless.

Despite what President Donald John Trump says, Climate Change/Global Warming is real and an existential threat to humanity, and no matter what best practices or degree of safety we impose on the extraction of fossil fuels, their use is inherently destructive.

Teflon present much the same problem. While the product may be safe (although there is some evidence that even that is not the case), the manufacture of Teflon is not.

Perfluorooctanoic acid, commonly called C8, is the culprit.

Lerner writes:

For years, [former DuPont Lab Analyst Ken Wamsley] measured levels of a chemical called C8 in various products. The chemical “was everywhere,” as Wamsley remembers it, bubbling out of the glass flasks he used to transport it, wafting into a smelly vapor that formed when he heated it. A fine powder, possibly C8, dusted the laboratory drawers and floated in the hazy lab air.

At the time, Wamsley and his coworkers weren’t particularly concerned about the strange stuff. “We never thought about it, never worried about it,” he said recently. He believed it was harmless, “like a soap. Wash your hands [with it], your face, take a bath.”

I recognize that attitude. Workers—concerned first with making a living, raising their families—shrug off the dangers of a the job as did coal miners for centuries; weighing in their minds the threat vs. the need to put food on the table. Years of experience, even in the absence of informed risk, can change that. Lerner continues:

Concerns about the safety of Teflon, C8, and other long-chain perfluorinated chemicals first came to wide public attention more than a decade ago, but the story of DuPont’s long involvement with C8 has never been fully told. Over the past 15 years, as lawyers have been waging an epic legal battle—culminating as the first of approximately 3,500 personal injury claims comes to trial in September—a long trail of documents has emerged that casts new light on C8, DuPont, and the fitful attempts of the Environmental Protection Agency to deal with a threat to public health.

This story is based on many of those documents, which until they were entered into evidence for these trials had been hidden away in DuPont’s files. Among them are write-ups of experiments on rats, dogs, and rabbits showing that C8 was associated with a wide range of health problems that sometimes killed the lab animals. Many thousands of pages of expert testimony and depositions have been prepared by attorneys for the plaintiffs. And through the process of legal discovery they have uncovered hundreds of internal communications revealing that DuPont employees for many years suspected that C8 was harmful and yet continued to use it, putting the company’s workers and the people who lived near its plants at risk.

The best evidence of how C8 affects humans has also come out through the legal battle over the chemical, though in a more public form. As part of a 2005 settlement over contamination around the West Virginia plant where Wamsley worked, lawyers for both DuPont and the plaintiffs approved a team of three scientists, who were charged with determining if and how the chemical affects people.

In 2011 and 2012, after seven years of research, the science panel found that C8 was “more likely than not” linked to ulcerative colitis — Wamsley’s condition — as well as to high cholesterol; pregnancy-induced hypertension; thyroid disease; testicular cancer; and kidney cancer. The scientists’ findings, published in more than three dozen peer-reviewed articles, were striking, because the chemical’s effects were so widespread throughout the body and because even very low exposure levels were associated with health effects.

We know, too, from internal DuPont documents that emerged through the lawsuit, that Wamsley’s fears of being lied to are well-founded. DuPont scientists had closely studied the chemical for decades and through their own research knew about some of the dangers it posed. Yet rather than inform workers, people living near the plant, the general public, or government agencies responsible for regulating chemicals, DuPont repeatedly kept its knowledge secret.

Another revelation about C8 makes all of this more disturbing and gives the upcoming trials, the first of which will be held this fall in Columbus, Ohio, global significance: This deadly chemical that DuPont continued to use well after it knew it was linked to health problems is now practically everywhere.

Even if you never lived near a Teflon plant, owned a Teflon-coated product:

including Gore-Tex and other waterproof clothing; coatings for eye glasses and tennis rackets; stain-proof coatings for carpets and furniture; fire-fighting foam; fast food wrappers; microwave popcorn bags; bicycle lubricants; satellite components; ski wax; communications cables; and pizza boxes…

C8 is literally in your blood. Lerner writes:

A man-made compound that didn’t exist a century ago, C8 is in the blood of 99.7 percent of Americans, according to a 2007 analysis of data from the Centers for Disease Control, as well as in newborn human babies, breast milk, and umbilical cord blood. A growing group of scientists have been tracking the chemical’s spread through the environment, documenting its presence in a wide range of wildlife, including Loggerhead sea turtles, bottlenose dolphins, harbor seals, polar bears, caribou, walruses, bald eagles, lions, tigers, and arctic birds. Although DuPont no longer uses C8, fully removing the chemical from all the bodies of water and bloodstreams it pollutes is now impossible. And, because it is so chemically stable—in fact, as far as scientists can determine, it never breaks down—C8 is expected to remain on the planet well after humans are gone from it.

C8 is a cockroach chemical.

More tomorrow in Part II of How Poisoned Is My Valley…

I’ve been a regular shopper at Whole Foods at both the University Heights and Woodmere locations. I made a point recently of stopping in at both stores to inform management that I’ve always enjoyed shopping in their stores and that I was saddened to think that I could not do so any longer. The reason? Whole Foods is now owned by the despicable Jeff Bezos: creator of Amazon, second only to Walmart in reasons for not shopping in a store.

Ralph Nader is not happy with the deal. Writing in The Destructive Power Trips of Amazon’s Boss, Nader explains:

For his smallish stature, Amazon Boss Jeff Bezos has a booming, uproarious laugh. Unleashed during workdays, its sonic burst startles people, given it comes from as harsh and driven a taskmaster as exists on the stage of corporate giantism.

Is Bezos’s outward giddiness a worrisome reflection of what Bezos is feeling on the inside? Is he laughing at all of us?

Is Bezos laughing at the tax collectors, having avoided paying most states’ sales taxes for years on all the billions of books he sold online, thereby giving him an immediate 6 to 9 percent price advantage over brick-and-mortar bookstores, that also paid property taxes to support local schools and public facilities? That, and being an early online bookseller, gave Bezos his crucial foothold, along with other forms of tax avoidance that big companies utilize.

Is Bezos laughing at the bureaucratic labor unions, that somehow can’t get a new handle on organizing the tens of thousands of exploited blue collar workers crying for help in Amazon warehouses and other stress-driven installations? With a Continue Reading »

I continue to be troubled by the silence following the publication of Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Seymour Hersh’s Trump’s Red Line on 25 June.

In an interview with The Real News Hersh is very careful to not speculate or share what he thinks happen.

Midway through the interview, however, Hersh emphatically says what he does know:

Syria did not drop a Sarin bomb that morning.

If that is the case—and right now, until I hear credible evidence to the contrary, I believe Hersh based on his reputation—President Donald John Trump intentionally ordered the launching of 59 cruise missiles worth approximately $82.6 million* based on faulty intelligence he was told was unreliable. Did anyone disagree?

He would not be the first U.S. President to do so.

*Oddly, I remembered the replacement cost of a Tomahawk as $1.4 million, hence the $82.6 million figure. This morning, as I was checking, I found that recent reports are claiming the cost of each missile is $1 million, a savings of $22.6 over the initial reports. I have to say that I’m suspicious about the price shift.

Anyone know better?

When I was in school in the ’60s, the National Rifle Association was an organization that focused on hunting safety. Representatives from the organization came to class to teach us to respect guns, to teach us that they were not toys, to show us how to be safe hunters. According to the General Social Survey, 31.6 percent of American households included at least one hunter. By 2014, that number dropped to 15.4 percent.

While politicians from states like Vermont—where 65,000 residents regularly hunt—get high marks from the NRA for their support of hunters, the latest video from the National Racist Association clearly defines the groups mission as divorced from hunters and hunting.

I don’t like the word race because in the taxonomy of life, there is no such classification. Race is an artificial term created by Europeans who needed a justification for their exploitation, enslavement, murder and genocide of non-Europeans. (The earliest use may have been by the English to justify the occupation of Ireland in the 13th century.) Having said that, I chose to use National Racist Association in this case because the “R” is just there, begging to be repurposed.

I wrote several days ago—following the acquittal of Jeronimo Yanez for the brutal murder of Philando Castile, a lawful gun owner—that the NRA’s silence in defense of Castile was deafening. Why is the NRA silent? Yanez is white and Castile was black. On Twitter, the conservative radio personality, featured in the video below, wrote in response to Castile’s murder:

Definitely not a clear cut case. Not all are. Lots of food for thought.

They use their media to assassinate real news. They use their schools to teach children that their president is another Hitler. They use their movie stars and singers and award shows to repeat their narrative over and over again. And then they use their ex-president to endorse the resistance.

All to make them march, make them protest, make them scream racism and sexism and xenophobia and homophobia and smash windows, burn cars, shut down interstates and airports, bully and terrorize the law abiding—until the only option left is for police to do their jobs and stop the madness. And when that happens, they’ll use it as an excuse for their outrage. The only way we stop this, the only way we save our country and our freedom is to fight this violence of lies with the clenched fist of truth. I’m the National Rifle Association of America and I’m freedom’s safest place.

Here’s my take. Yanez pissed his pants when a black man calmly said that he legally owned a gun and that he had a permit for that gun. NRA members clearly need to invest in depends.

No. Really. Reading the whole document, the genesis of who we are, is vital. We did not happen yesterday. We come from events and passions and responses that, unless we fully grasp their significance, will be rendered meaningless by tyrants. Therefore, I give you, our Declaration of Independence:

IN CONGRESS, JULY 4, 1776

The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America

When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. —That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, —That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. —Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.

He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.

He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.

He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their Public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.

He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.

He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected, whereby the Legislative Powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.

He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.

He has obstructed the Administration of Justice by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary Powers.

He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.

He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people and eat out their substance.

He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.

He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil Power.

He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:

For quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:

For protecting them, by a mock Trial from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:

For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:

For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:

For depriving us in many cases, of the benefit of Trial by Jury:

For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences:

For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies

For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:

For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.

He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.

He has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.

He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation, and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & Perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.

He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become the executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands.

He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.

In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

Nor have We been wanting in attentions to our British brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.

We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these united Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States, that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. —And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.

Share how you feel now, in this moment…

Writing in America’s broken healthcare system—in one simple chart for The Guardian, Mona Chalabi explains:

Healthcare in America is more expensive than in any other rich country. In 2016, the average American spent $4,571 on their health—a figure five times higher than the average out-of-pocket spending of other countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

That fact hasn’t changed much over the years: compared to 35 other countries, Americans have spent more on their health every year since 2000. Even once you factor in government spending, healthcare in the US is still more expensive than elsewhere. Total health spending last year, including private out-of-pocket and government spending, was $8,985 per person in the US while the OECD average was just $3,633.

And yet all that health spending hasn’t resulted in better health. The life expectancy of the average American is 78.8 years, putting the US a fraction ahead of the Czech Republic, where out of pocket spending was just $236 last year.

Again, the reason we spend so much on poor healthcare is profit.

Full stop.

Local television news in Cleveland is about to get a whole lot worse.

Full disclosure, I don’t remember when I last watched a local television news show from Cleveland, but I suspect that I might have last watched one in 1992, the year I tossed my television on the tree lawn. I recognize, however, that I am an extreme example and that millions of Americans get a significant amount of their daily news from local shows.

So, what is the Sinclair Broadcast Group? I’ll leave John Oliver to deliver the gory details, but the nut is that Sinclair is slightly to the right of Fox and insidious in the infiltration and destruction of local news voices.

At present, the Hunt Valley, Maryland-based corporation owns seven Ohio stations:

—WKRC, Cincinnati
—WSYX, Columbus
—WTTE, Columbus
—WWHO, Columbus
—WKEF, Dayton
—WRGT, Dayton
—WTOV, Steubenville and
—WNWO, Toledo

Sinclair wants to purchase another television group, Tribune Media, for $4.4 billion, according to John Oliver. (The precise figure is less certain. I found numbers as low as $3.9 and as high as $6.6 billion depending upon how you read the deal.)

If that deal succeeds, and the Federal Communication Commission approves—far from a stretch in Washington—Sinclair Broadcast will move into Northeast Ohio with the acquisition of WJW in Cleveland bringing Must-Run television with such broadcast luminaries as Mark Hyman, Boris Alexandrovich Epshteyn and the horrifyingly named Terrorism Alert Desk to Cleveland.

Ghoulardi was never this scary…

Thank you Mano Singham…

[Update @ 0533 on 27 July—While reading an old Oliver Burkeman column I came across this quote:

Who was it who said, I hold the buying of more books than one can peradventure read, as nothing less than the soul’s reaching towards infinity; which is the only thing that raises us above the beasts that perish? Whoever it was, I agree with him. —A. Edward Newton, A Magnificent Farce And Other Diversions Of A Book Collector

Me too.]

Long-time readers of Have Coffee Will Write are familiar with these photos taken nearly 15 years ago after I realized a lifetime dream of having floor-to-ceiling bookcases.

Yesterday I eliminated eight of the 16 shelves worth of books in my living room. Many went to Mac’s Backs on Coventry in Cleveland Heights, and the balance are now part of the Kiwanis Club Of Lander Circle 60th Annual Rummage Sale. In the mix are 368 hardbacks, 472 paperbacks and 585 pulp magazine science fiction and fantasy short story collections.

Once I got started I was surprised at how easy the process was. I made my decisions about what to keep and what to give away quickly because I had a criteria in my head: what might I actually read again and what was a useful reference? The sorting took less than an afternoon.

The books are all out of the house now and today I’ll be tearing one of my two floor-to-ceiling bookcase and moving it to the basement to be repurposed.

Fuck recycling, reducing and reusing are the real virtues.

In the Navy, one of the drills we conducted periodically was how to respond to a collision alarm. If properly braced for the shock the crew stands a far better chance of recovering and continuing to service or fight the ship. Naomi Klein, in No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump’s Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need, lays out the drills that will keep us all from dying from the political train wreck that is our President.

Either as an introduction or a refresher, watching Klein’s 2009 documentary, The Shock Doctrine, is a good idea.

Previously…

Here’s the ugly truth, if we as a nation really, really want to slash the cost of healthcare, efficiencies won’t get us there. The biggest waste in healthcare is profit. Full stop. As long as there is money to be made from human suffering, costs will remain high because lowering costs to consumers by reducing profit is anathema to corporations. We shouldn’t condemn corporations for seeking profit—that’s why they exist—anymore than we should damn rattlesnakes for having poisonous venom.

Snakes got to poison and corporations got to profit.

That reality, however, doesn’t mean We The People just sit back and suffer. No we take reasonable measures and precautions to mitigate the dangers of snakebites and we ought to do the same to rein-in corporations for the same reasons.

There are simply some portions of the social contract in which profit ought not to play any unregulated role and the Founders recognized that upfront in the Preamble to our Constitution. They wrote:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare [emphasis mine, JH], and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

Our taxes pay for the common defense, our justice system, our police forces and they ought to also pay for universal healthcare which is the most basic element of our general welfare that I can conceive.

The stumbling block that we face is that there is a cadre of privelged pseudo-aristocrats, the .01 Percent, manning the barricade between We The People and our government. If we want our rights as set out in our Constitution, then We The People have to storm that barricade.

Matt Taibbi, reporting in Finally Everyone Agrees, Health Care Is a Human Right for Rolling Stone, writes:

Ideas like a single-payer system, or ending the antitrust exemption for insurance companies, would be obvious fixes. But when they came up during the Obamacare debate, they were dismissed as politically unfeasible and/or too costly. Because the United States will not do what other countries do as a matter of course—declare health care to be a universal human right and work backward from that premise—we are continually stuck with patchwork political solutions that protect insurance and pharmaceutical company profits while leaving masses of people uninsured.

The first step in storming the barricades is the recognition that healthcare is a basic human right, not a profit center. Taibbi concludes:

Health care is an absolute human right. On a policy level we already recognized this decades ago, during the height of the Reagan era, when the Emergency Medical and Treatment Labor Act made it illegal for public and private hospitals alike to turn patients away in an emergency. There is simply no moral justification for denying aid to a sick or dying person. Any country that does so systematically is not a country at all.

Word.

Back in the spring of 2004 a band of bloggers came together in Cleveland, Ohio following the announcement that Walmart would be the major anchor for a major retail development to be called Steelyard Commons. We thought the development was a horrible idea and created No Cleveland Walmart.

Just to show that institutional memory is important because, you know, Those who cannot remember the past, blah, blah, blah, the second post on that blog was: Walmart Is A Big, Fat, Juicy Softball for Frank Jackson—PD Afraid to use the word “Walmart”

We lost that battle.

From the ashes, however, came The Writing On The Wal.

The bigger fight carries on.

I graduated from Ohio University in 1984 with a B.S. degree in Journalism. (The double irony there is inescapable.) Unlike most of my peers I had the slight advantage of being a bit older than the norm and I think that maturity edge helped me resist the popular drive for objectivity.

Yes, journalists should attempt to be fair in much the same way that judges do, but we cannot escape our individual personal perspectives. Our emotional realities, the lens through which we process our experiences, are unique.

Reading Matt Taibbi’s piece, With CNN Flap, Media’s Trump-Era Identity Crisis Continues, in Rolling Stone this eveing had my head nodding in agreement. As always, the whole article is well worth the reading time, but these two bits struck the chord with me.

First, this:

Eventually, many reporters came to believe Trump was so bad that the press should step out of its normal “detached” role and do more to stop him. But that might have played right into Trump’s hands.

Not all the changes have been bad. Ditching some of the sillier old conventions of “objectivity” has been a good thing overall, as NYU professor Mitchell Stephens points out in a Politico article entitled, “Goodbye, Non-Partisan Journalism. And Good Riddance.”

As Stephens notes, a lot of the old “objective” format had its origins in a commercial strategy from the last century, as networks sought ways to attract wider audiences:

“[News organizations] picked up the habit of reflexively pairing a quote from the Republicans with one from the Democrats. This is a variety of what the sharp-eyed and sardonic press critic A. J. Liebling once dubbed, ‘on-the-one-hand-this, on-the-other-hand-that’ journalism.”

The parsing instinct became so ingrained that media organizations began to feel terror at the idea of having opinions about anything. This was symbolized by the ludicrous evolution of the house editorial at daily newspapers, which often involved nameless editors spinning 700 words in a rhetorical circle before dismounting in an ass-covering question: “Should we do X, or should we do Y? Only time will tell.”

Today, few serious journalists believe in “objectivity.” Every story is filled with editorial choices. Is the article on the front page, or buried inside? Is the headline alarmist, or are horrible things sanitized via a misleadingly academic tone? And are you using words like dissemble when you really mean lie?

For that I would sincerely like to say: Thank you President Trump. He may have rescued my chosen profession from the mire of fair and balanced.

Taibbi’s conclusion is equally important:

For all the flaws in the business, reporters used to have few existential concerns. It wasn’t our job to save democracy. We were taught that our only job was to get things right, and that it was up to others—politicians, activists, voters – to do the fixing. To be useful all we had to do was give people better information with which to make those decisions.

That’s all changed. Journalists for two years now have been trapped between two nefarious forces pushing them out of their natural roles—Trump, and their own profitability model. Both evils have pushed us into this horrid WWE stage of our existence, where reporters too often have been baited into becoming half of a very profitable clown act.

I agree with professor Stephens that we shouldn’t romanticize journalism’s past. But being on nobody’s side wasn’t such a bad thing, either. On top of everything else, Trump has ruined this job.

On this last point, however, I think Taibbi gets the story wrong. Trump has saved our job in much the same way the horrible wake-up call of a heart attack can save a person; providing that jolt to change our lifestyle and perhaps live a bit longer.

Hat tip to Mano Singham…

In 1964, President Lyndon Baines Johnson ramped up our country’s involvement in South East Asia in response to an attack by North Vietnamese naval forces on two American destroyers steaming in the international waters of the Gulf of Tonkin.

The attack was pure fiction.

This afternoon, on the heels of Seymour Hersh’ in-depth revelation, in Syria: Trump‘s Red Line for WELT—thank you Mano Singham—that the 6 April Sarin gas attack by Syrian forces on Khan Sheikhoun was also a work of fiction, comes news that President Trump has intelligence pointing to a second gas attack is imminent in Syria.

Of the attack on Khan Sheikhoun, Hersch writes:

:The available intelligence made clear that the Syrians had targeted a jihadist meeting site on April 4 using a Russian-supplied guided bomb equipped with conventional explosives. Details of the attack, including information on its so-called high-value targets, had been provided by the Russians days in advance to American and allied military officials in Doha, whose mission is to coordinate all U.S., allied, Syrian and Russian Air Force operations in the region.

Some American military and intelligence officials were especially distressed by the president’s determination to ignore the evidence. “None of this makes any sense,” one officer told colleagues upon learning of the decision to bomb. “We KNOW that there was no chemical attack … the Russians are furious. Claiming we have the real intel and know the truth … I guess it didn’t matter whether we elected Clinton or Trump.“

Within hours of the April 4 bombing, the world’s media was saturated with photographs and videos from Khan Sheikhoun. Pictures of dead and dying victims, allegedly suffering from the symptoms of nerve gas poisoning, were uploaded to social media by local activists, including the White Helmets, a first responder group known for its close association with the Syrian opposition.

The provenance of the photos was not clear and no international observers have yet inspected the site, but the immediate popular assumption worldwide was that this was a deliberate use of the nerve agent sarin, authorized by President Bashar Assad of Syria. Trump endorsed that assumption by issuing a statement within hours of the attack, describing Assad’s “heinous actions” as being a consequence of the Obama administration’s “weakness and irresolution” in addressing what he said was Syria’s past use of chemical weapons.

Driving home this afternoon, I listened to news reports that Trump had learned of a second attack in the works. Then the other shoe dropped.

Christopher Woolf, in The risks of war in the Middle East, as the US confronts Syria and Iran for Public Radio International’s The World, reports:

The White House says Syria appears to be preparing just such an attack, the latest escalation in a multisided civil war in Syria since 2011.

“A heavy price,” in this context, is widely seen in foreign policy circles as code for military action.

The Trump administration is also warning Syria’s allies, Iran and Russia, that they would also be held responsible for any chemical attack.

“This is a really dangerous situation,” says Borzou Daragahi, a correspondent for BuzzFeed News in Istanbul. “It’s how big wars start, actually.”

This bit of Darahahi’s report troubles me the most:

We’re still not clear about where the information is coming from. Our military and intelligence contacts say they have no idea what the White House is talking about.

We should all be troubled by this observation because this is, as Darahahi remarks, how big wars start.

There was confusion in Washington on Tuesday morning when sources at the Pentagon and in the State Department told reporters that they had no knowledge of any Syrian chemical preparations and that they were not consulted about the new threat issued by the White House.

“We’re still not clear about where the information is coming from,” says Daragahi. “Our military and intelligence contacts say they have no idea what the White House is talking about.”

That is, of course, unsurprising and terrifying.

Is Syria about to become our 21st-century Bosnia? No. Not this Bosnia, this Bosnia.