Black on the Seventh Day

Fundraiser

2010-07-27T19:01:00.000-07:00

2010-07-27T16:43:00.001-07:00

My Fundraiser

2010-07-27T16:15:00.001-07:00

My Money Acceptor

2010-07-27T16:08:00.000-07:00

Letter to the President of Peru

2009-06-17T15:00:00.001-07:00

Jim Steitz

357 Vista Street Apt. 5

Ashland, OR 97520

United States of America

June 17, 2009

S.E. Alan Garcia
Presidente de la República del Perú
Palacio de Gobierno
Plaza de Armas
Lima 1, Peru

Dear President Garcia,

I write to demand that the government of Peru cease and desist its genocidal campaign against
the native people and lands of the Amazon. You have explicitly declared that the native peoples are second-class citizens, and that they may be forcibly evicted from their ancestral lands. This is a blatant violation of human rights, and contravenes the international standards of human rights that the western world has adopted over the past 50 years. The government is Peru is not allowed by the common-law standards of humanity to viciously assault a native people and their lands in this manner.

I have learned to my horror that the Peruvian police have massacred native Peruvians who were exercising their legitimate property rights over their native ancestral rainforest home. You are responsible for the deaths of at least 25 native people at the "Curva del Diablo" site near Bagua Grande, where native peoples were enforcing their legitimate property rights. These native people have issued you no license or permission to exploit their lands, and you have no right to trespass upon sovereign native territory. You have been quoted as saying that a small number of natives cannot resist the wishes of the much larger population of Peruvians. You cannot suspend the human and environmental rights of a native people by invoking the surrounding nation's greater population size. The rights of the native people of Peru are not dependent upon their demographic power. They are absolute human rights and not subject to political interference by officials such as yourself.

Moreover, the Amazon rainforest of Peru is a critical component of the Earth's life-support system. The destruction of the Peruvian Amazon rainforest is tantamount to an act of aggression against all humans whose lungs inhale the oxygen from this forest. Neither Peru nor any multinational corporation has any right to destroy the ecosystem that is a common endowment of all humanity. The Peruvian rainforest is part of the Amazon ecosystem that plays a key role in the regulation of Earth's atmospheric chemistry, weather, and hydrologic cycle. These functions are of vastly greater value than any amount of lumber, oil, or minerals that could be extracted from the Amazon rainforest. Humanity depends upon these forests for its survival, and their presence inside Peru's borders confers no right upon Peru to destroy them.

Your attempt to open Peru's native lands to exploitation by multinational corporations is illegal, illegitimate, and cannot subordinate the rights of the native Peruvians to lands they have inhabited since time immemorial. The sustainable inhabitation of a land for generations beyond memory endows the natives of Peru with senior rights to the continued enjoyment and utilization of these lands, free from the interference of foreign peoples, including the current Peruvian government. The native peoples of Peru are not a party to the "free trade" agreement with the US, and you cannot invoke this treaty in attempting to seize their land and resources.

As a citizen of our world, I demand that you immediately order a stop to the violence against native Peruvians, including the government troops that are believed to plan another massacre in Achuar territory. I further demand that you respect and acknowledge the rights of native Peruvians to control the lands they have inhabited since time immemorial, and to ask their permission and consultation before issuing any legal rights to corporations seeking the resources found thereupon.

Sincerely,

Jim Steitz

A Tidbit of Life Wisdom

2009-05-25T20:51:00.000-07:00

As the Rogues point out, this seems like common-sense wisdom. However, most people certainly don't behave as if they believe it. Perhaps the Fannie Mae executive and South Korean ex-President who recently took their own lives would be happier if they had learned this lesson beforehand.

The Banality of Evaded Responsibility

2009-05-23T16:34:00.000-07:00

This is an excellent NY Times article from an auto mechanic.

The Case for Working With Your Hands

The world would be a better place if people were exposed to the full consequences of their actions on a daily basis. Diffusion of responsibility among market "actors," whose actions are by definition OK if someone will pay for it, is at the heart of many problems.

Moreover, the excusal of people from meeting their own physical needs or otherwise interacting with the tangible reality of the world has truly warped our sense of identity and our relationship to the earth. When people become "specialists" in just one segment of the economy, and trade their salary for the other segments, it distorts our sense of what things actually cost and of what material indulgences are physically permissible.

Medical Cranks Finally Slapped Down For Once

2009-05-16T00:05:00.001-07:00

Homeopaths, vaccine refusalists, and other cranks are the achilles' heel of the left's claim to scientific currency and intellectual responsibility. It is wonderful to see that a judge is stepping in to prevent homicidal neglect. People should engineered with some kind of mRNA interference gene, just prior to puberty that suppresses sperm or egg maturation, and given an antidote only after passing some kind of parental competence test.

Judge rules family can't refuse chemo for boy | DailyTidings.com

Corporate Pricks and Tax Evasion

2009-05-13T14:34:00.000-07:00

Are corporate pricks really that evil? Yes.

So I've resolved to get back to blogging. Let it lapse for 3 months, school and such.

On Human Nature....In Politics and in Life

2009-02-13T23:02:00.000-08:00

If you want to become something, you need only act "as if" you were that something - and soon you will be so. If you want to be a happy person, you start acting like a happy person, and soon you'll be happy. If you want to be a physically fit person, you start acting like a physically fit person, and soon you'll be so. In either case, there's no intermediate task or program or vehicle to carry you to the destination - no diet, no pill, no self-help book - just be there. Thoughts and words follow actions, not the other way around.

Politics and environmental stewardship follows the same logic. There's no treaty or symbolic gesture that can compel nations to stop global warming or respect the Earth. If we want to be a society that lives sustainably, we need to start acting like a sustainable society. There's no intermediate step, task, program, or bureaucracy that can compel this transition from above. If a society has internalized the norms and standards of ecological accountability, the symbols and treaties and legislative flourishes will flow naturally.

"My administration will not deny facts. We will be guided by them"

2009-01-27T00:10:00.000-08:00

What a revolutionary thing for any politician to say. Actual empiricism as policy.

"Elections Have Consequences" - Updated 3/5

2009-01-25T21:21:00.000-08:00

For this count, I do not include purely procedural or symbolic actions, such as the open-government rules or treaty signings.

1. Obama reverses Global Gag Rule, restoring funding to family-planning groups that provide abortions, including UN Population Fund in China. This will provide some incremental benefit in slowing global population growth, the second-most-powerful determinant of human impact.

2. Obama grants (pending rulemaking completion) California the right to regulate carbon dioxide emissions from automobiles. This will marginally reduce global warming, and hopefully more significantly create some momentum in the industry toward more efficient cars nationwide.

3. Interior pulls 77 pending oil leases in Utah just before BLM was to cash the checks. Keep your fucking hands off my desert. And my new idol is the kid from the U of U who walked into the bidding, passed himself off as an oil rep, and messed with the petro-prostitutes at BLM.

4. Interior slow-walks the leasing of the OCS - this is the primary east and west coast federal territory whose moratorium lapsed in 2008. Technically he didn't cancel it, but when you extend the comment period by 180 days (the easiest way to intervene in a rulemaking), the message is clear.

5. Interior suspends oil shale leasing in Intermountain West. Some leases are on the books already, as are the underlying leasing regulations, but hopefully Secretary Salazar has sent the message that the BLM is not open for business in selling the dirtiest fuels in the world.

6. FWS restores the consultation rule for the Endangered Species Act. I hope and pray we will get the word any day that BLM will by sent back to FWS for consultation on WOPR.

7. Salazar suspends the oil shale leasing, pending a new rulemaking.

8. EPA makes official finding that carbon dioxide endangers human health and welfare. Duh. This doesn't have any immediate policy effect, but it moves the policy momentum global warming so significantly that I include it here.

9. (PENDING) EPA proposes new rules for accounting for the full-lifecycle impact of biofuels, which would exclude a lot of US corn ethanol from the federal ethanol mandate. It's quite heartining that Obama's science advisors "get it" on a complex issue like this so early in the Administration.

Fighting for What Doesn't Count? (aka Apoplepsy About Warren)

2009-01-20T21:58:00.000-08:00

A note on the left's outcry over Rick Warren being invited to the inaugural prayer. The American left has devoted far too much time and energy to fighting symbolic battles over whose cultural iconography will reign. From school prayer to flag burning to the visibility of fundamentalist loonies, the left has fretted and frenzied over the cultural influence of the right, draining energy from the substantive contests over policy and power, and simultaneously offering kerosine to the right's bonfire of its particular enemy effigies.

Of course, the right exerts even more time and energy into this fight - to see entire elections revolve around whether stone inscriptions of the Ten Commandments will be publicly displayed in a Georgia courtroom attests to this. But these symbolic cultural tugs-of-war are a winning strategy for the right and not for the left, and we must recognize this key asymmetry in the playing field of American politics. To engage the right on their terms, fighting over whether or not a prayer is said before the high school football game, is a stupendous tactical error. It is political suicide, akin a tribal guerilla army donning a uniform and walking straight into a Soviet armored regimen for an open firefight. To fight over cultural symbols is to engage the right on their terms, within their cognitive framework of the world. Successful progressive coalitions have always been constructed around a scaffolding of pragmatism, practicality, fairness, and a broad agreement to ignore one another's quirks, peculiarities, and creeds, even when and if they assume a noxious dominance in the popular culture. Politics that concerns itself with the latter is not really a progressive politics at all, but really an expression of personal wishes and cultural discomfort masquerading as enlightened liberalism.

I say, let Warren have his day. From the grade school locker-room, to incongruent and abusive human relationships, to the rocky terrain of American politics, the most efficacious disarming of a bully is often achieved by simply walking away, and constructing your own better future. Without the cultural bogeyman of the "other" to fight, whether they be called "Communists", "Hollywood," "Atheists," the right's raging cultural and religious fires will diminish to a whimpering ember deprived of fuel.

My New Blog

2009-01-18T23:37:00.000-08:00

This is my new Blog. This is my place to express what normally incubates inside my head, without the quaint annoyance of pen and paper, or the campy, self-consciously superficial strictures of Facebook or Myspace. I am writing for myself and for anyone at all. I am writing for the witness of anyone or anything that is keeping score or taking names.