The Secret Museum

Disturbing Domestic Tranquility

Last week, six Greenpeace activists were charged with multiple state and federal felonies following a direct action. The activists scaled a Pennsylvania smokestack to hang a banner reading "The Bush Energy Plan Kills – Clean Energy Now!” Charges include burglary, rioting, and interfering with the function of a power plant--which the Greenpeacers did not actually do. Nor did they burgle or riot, needless to say. Greenpeace has always avowed and followed a philosophy of non-violence, including no damage to property.

These arrests follow the recent dismissal of a Justice Department indictment of Greenpeace under an obscure 19th century maritime law.

Apparently the FBI considers "ecoterrorism" (including animal-rights actions) to be the leading domestic terrorist threat in the United States. This is a disturbing announcement, coming as it does on the toes of a summer of intense non-violent activism to protect ancient forests in the Pacific Northwest.

Property destruction as an environmentalist tactic, one often employed by Earth Liberation Front and Animal Liberation Front, is easy to reject. The Southern Policy Law Center, a pretty unimpeachable source for good information, reports on the more violent nature of the eco-fringe in Europe, noting that research scientists--people I tend to respect--are particularly worried about their projects and safety.

I don't say that it can't happen here.

However, as things currently stand in the U.S., Earth Island Institute notes that "the sum total of people killed or injured by ALF and ELF is, not to put too fine a point on it, zero," while "[L]iterally hundreds of incidents of violence - or threats of violence - against environmentalists fill police blotters nationwide."

Why doesn't the FBI consider anti-abortionists the most dire domestic terrorist threat? The fringe of that movement includes people who have actually mudered a doctor and a police officer, injured health care workers, and physically harassed private citizens trying to use women's health clinics.

As reported recently by Paul Krugman in the New York Times, the Justice Department seems to be keeping quiet about less politically expedient arrests, such as the foiling of a right-wing domestic terrorist plot in Texas in April 2003.

Independent progressive media group Common Dreams reports on the off-kilter priorities of domestic anti-terrorism efforts, which seem to emphasize surveillance, harassment and curtailing the free speech of dissenters from various Bush administration policies.

Iraq's Civilian Death Toll

A group of UK researchers and geeks have put up Iraq Body Count, to keep track of the civilian deaths in Iraq:

This is a human security project to establish an independent and comprehensive public database of media-reported civilian deaths in Iraq resulting directly from military action by the USA and its allies in 2003. In the current occupation phase this database includes all deaths which the Occupying Authority has a binding responsibility to prevent under the Geneva Conventions and Hague Regulations. This includes civilian deaths resulting from the breakdown in law and order, and deaths due to inadequate health care or sanitation

The U.S. military has refused to provide such counts. Don't know the position of the British military.

Surveying the wreckage

When I played high school soccer, we would ride the bus from our township to the other team's township. Our coaches would try and get us all fired up to win the game. What I thought was: someone's gotta lose the game. Why should it be them instead of us?

(It turns out this isn't necessarily true in soccer, but you get the larger point.)

How do people marshall their courage and just be something? Be an artist, be a writer? I need to figure that out.

Small Creature on Big Sidewalk

Seen last night, walking home from the subway just after the rain:

I didn't want it to get crushed by some kids running by with a basketball, or nosed by someone's dog on the way to the park.

So, I found a leaf, and put it in front of the snail. The snail crept up onto the leaf, and as I took hold of it, began to shrink into its' shell even as it crept.

I thought about walking the shell-snail-leaf over to the park, which was still most of a block away, and maybe, not exactly what the snail was looking for. How to know. Right next to us was an ivy-and-hedge shaded front garden, which is kind of where the snail was headed. So I put the leaf, with the snail stuck to it, onto the stoop in front of the garden.

Trance To The Prisoner

Fun: Theme music from 60's cult show The Prisoner, including some modern mashups.

Now, where's Rover?

Signal Orange

People continue to inspire me with imaginative engagements against the current political situation.

Signal Orange represents the dead with the living — wearing T-shirts in their names. There is one shirt for each soldier who died. The front states how he or she died, the back reads, “(Rank) (First) (Last) can’t vote anymore.”

Signal Orange doesn’t say that these soldiers or their families condemn or support the war, and it doesn’t speak for them. Whether they opposed or supported the war, they were fighting for our right to decide democratically whether a war is just or not. They’ve been buried twice—once in the ground, and once in the media. If we can make them visible in the media through Signal Orange, we can demonstrate that they had voices that have been lost.

Friday June 11, 2004: National Day of Mourning for Those Who Died Thanks to the Policies of President Reagan

It would be macabre to celebrate the death of Ronald Reagan, but I can't join in this national orgy of sentimental remembrance, either.

Let us instead take time this coming Friday, a day decreed a "National Day of Mourning" in honor of Reagan by George W. Bush, to remember the 60,000 who died of AIDS during the Reagan administration. The President was silent on AIDS for the first six years of his administration.

Or, on Friday, let us mourn the tens of thousands who died in Central America in the 1980s as a result of Reagan administration anti-Communist policies that entailed supporting brutal dictatorial regimes in the region, including the arming and training of Contra forces to unseat the Sandinista government of Nicaragua.

Pet Architecture: 1 West 13th

Great tiny little food store! You can get a sense of just how snug this place is by the relative size of the woman by the door (although the lens of my Palm Zire 71 warps the image a bit).

Every single surface of this establishment, except perhaps the ceiling, seems to be deployed to satisfy the insatiable New York City demand for Food To Go.

A bench has been provided in case you really want to Stay And Eat.

Also, very elegant address: 1 West 13th Street.