Straight Out of Big Rock

Nuclear renaissance blows (up the spot)

2008-04-28T12:30:00.000-07:00

Those of you who recall the 1980s will no doubt remember not just the horrible day glow fashion and hideous hair but also the international specter of radiation that overshadowed daily life. Ionizing radiation, from a theorized nuclear holocaust or nuclear power reactor accidents, was at the top of media reports and at the top of public fears.

However, radiation, in and of itself, was neither a new nor unnatural phenomenon. Also, the life cycle of radioactive elements is not confined to the narrow sphere of weapons or energy and they continue to pervade our everyday lives – in manufacturing processes, in health care and even in your living room smoke detector.

In these ways, radiation is far from just an inconvenient environmental and social liability, it is part of our convenient modernity in which we seek to eradicate human suffering through a domination of nature, including the nature of the atom. Along the path from uranium ore to industrially, medically or militarily useful materials to radioactive waste, there is a dynamic mix of benefits, liabilities and economic opportunities.

The common perception is that if we avoid nuclear power facilities and research and testing sites that we’re generally safe from exposure to radiation. The reality is that we are all exposed to ration on an ongoing basis. Just by being on Earth, we come into contact with a certain level of ionizing radiation. The United States Environmental Protection Agency has even put together a system of radiation risk assessment that breaks conveniently allows people 360 millirems per year, or about one a day.

Twenty-six of those come naturally from cosmic sources and another 23 to 90, again without human cause, from the ground you walk on. You are also expected to ingest about 40 millirems of radiation from your food and water and calculated to breathe in an astounding 200 millirems from the alpha particles from radon gas. If you get medical x-rays you can expect to absorb about another 70 millirems annually. There are also a whole range of lifestyle factors that you may not expect to affect your millirem exposure, like porcelain crowns or false teeth, the mantels of gas lanterns and living in a stone, brick or concrete building.

The one that we all fear and had 80’s nightmares about – reactor meltdowns and fallout from the more than 500 above ground nuclear explosions between 1945 and 1990 – gives us only one millirem a year. That is about the same as the LCD display wrist watch that you wear.

This is not to say that certain locations and events, such as the 26 April 1986 accident at Chernobyl in Ukraine or the attacks on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, on 6 and 9 August 1945 respectively, have not resulted in irrevocable and incomprehensible death, suffering and disfigurement. However, the environmental and social fallout from these events has not precluded the continuation, and even proliferation of nuclear and radiation technologies.

In many ways the first decade of this century is a renaissance for nuclear development, both as rumors of the United States’ efforts to develop small scale “bunker buster” nuclear weapons and as North Korea seems to have brushed the United States off its back with its combination of long range missiles and a demonstrated nuclear weapon test in October 2006. Also, Russia is helping Iran build a nuclear reactor as it continues with the development of its nuclear capabilities, whether those be aimed at electricity or weapons production and last August the United States signed a bilateral agreement with India regarding India’s “civilian” nuclear technology. And in the United States 17 companies are laying the groundwork to build 33 new nuclear reactors – possibly just the right solution for energy in a market in which oil will probably not see the low side of $100 a barrel ever again and biofuels continue to conflict with food markets.

If the question is “How do we ensure our military capabilities and our energy needs?” then the answer, for many, seems to be the same as last century – go nuclear.

In the shadow of this answer, we may also renew our nightmare scenarios, though they will now be lined with advanced radiation technologies like praseodymium-147 to measure the thickness of our textiles, americium-241 to detect smoke in our homes, californium-252 to measure moisture content in the fields where our food grows and iodine-131 for radiation therapy.

Further down the half life of these military, industrial, political and medical innovations, there are results both more curious and more sinister.

In Washington state, in the US, courts have ruled in favor of those exposed to radiation as a result of working at or living near the Hanford Nuclear Site, which produced plutonium for much of the US arsenal. Such a ruling opens the way for further “downwinder” cases related to nuclear weapons production and testing in the United States.

Radioactive waste dumps and tailings from uranium mining and processing are also a huge issue related to our dependence on radiation. The waste is often a fiscal liability and this translates into an environmental liability as well, as it has been dumped and abandoned around the world, from South Africa to Central Asia and the Sea of Japan.

Posted: 4/9/08

It's true. I usually write about local crap. But not like this.

Last week a team of international scientists, including UO Museum of Natural and Cultural History senior archeologist Dennis Jenkins, published findings about some crap they found in the Paisley Caves in Central Oregon. In a way this is just ordinary crap that we flush every day - some human took a dump in a cave.

Looking at it from another perspective, however, this team of academics studied the six pieces of poop - also known as coprolites - and determined that these feces-cum-artifacts are actually 14,300-year-old evidence of human inhabitance of the Americas. Radiocarbon dating and DNA analysis provides the basis for the team to make claims that this is the oldest DNA evidence found in the "New World," and that its genetic path leads back to Siberia or Asia. This in itself may be just another load of crap to some researchers.

A DNA study published in mid-March on the online journal PLoS One claims that most Native Americans can trace their ancestry to six women, and that those six "apparently did not live in Asia because the DNA signatures they left behind aren't found there." Instead the researchers claim that they probably migrated 20,000 years ago from "Beringia," which is now under the waters of the Bering Strait.

So this story of local crap found in a cave may be the evidence of what humans were eating and doing here in what we call Oregon; or it may be a story of what we as contemporary people are wondering about ourselves. The connection of our existence and our DNA to humans of one or two millennia past may belie the facts of who we are, or the ways in which we ask where we came from.

My students and I are carrying on a three-week discussion about origins in the composition class I teach at the University. On Monday I asked my students whether or not there is a direct connection between our individual bodies and the terrestrial body of Earth, in the context of whether actions we take that impact the Earth results in impacts upon ourselves.

There was a general silence.

I don't know if this was a result of the 9 a.m. class time, general disinterest, or if the question came across as rhetorical. After another prompt they voiced a concurrence on the reality of the concept that our world and existence is not a compartmentalization of human and nonhuman, unnatural and natural, but one continuous interwoven chain of reactions.

We went on to discuss, in short form, the idea that testing nuclear weapons in Utah and Nevada could result in parallel effects in both Earth's environment and Earth's self-righteous inhabitants; or if humans could cause the release of radiation yet remain insulated from atmospheric fallout and resultant cancer. If a team of scientists 14,000 years from now finds some crap from the 1950s, they will probably try to ask the same questions about origin, continuity and the relevance of what is present in the coprolite, be it digested plant matter, DNA or radiation.

In a world in which truth of human origin and existence is claimed and determined by science as a way to address our own contemporary situations, we may be overlooking more mundane universalities. Despite all the time that has passed since the theorized land mass of Beringia, we still do so many of the same things. We eat, we look for shelter, we exist between our origin and our destination and we poop.

So, if so much has stayed the same, what is the core of what has changed? The implied and touted progress of modernity has been promoting egalitarian society, humanity free from poverty and injustice of other humans, and nature at work for humans, human nature in tune with itself.

However, we seem to be stuck with the paradox that human nature is perhaps the most unnatural "thing" of all, as we consider the anonymous cave pooper of 12,292 BCE more natural than the hypothetical Utah pooper of 1950 with Uranium 238 in his crap. Both are leaving evidence of their world, evidence of themselves, and as such the pooper of 1950 leaves evidence of humankind's attempt to dominate the "nature" of the atomic structure.

In the tale of these two poops there is no physical separation between humans and "nature," because the concept of humans being apart from the rest of existence is a cognitive invention. We are evidence of our environment as much as we are evidence of our actions.

That is why the coprolite team can determine what that human ate and what grew in that environment before it became the desert it is today. And that is also why, as we examine that old crap, we should consider the questions we assume we're asking, and see if there is evidence of what we are in the fresh crap we flush every day. We will never definitively determine our origin, but in asking, we need to consider why it is more interesting - and safer perhaps - to wonder where we came from than where we are.

jgrenzsund@dailyemerald.com

Ousource yourself.

2008-04-07T10:31:00.000-07:00

Written by Joshua Grenzsund

Economy says: “Outlook not so good, seek something overseas.”
Thursday, 03 April 2008

It’s a wide world of work out there. In an employment environment where people are lamenting the loss of jobs outsourced overseas, the best move may be to get ahead of the curve and outsource yourself.

If you’re planning on graduating from college — which, chances are, if you’re in school that is part of your plan — then you’ll have to face the eventual question of what you’ll do next. Despite repeated reassurances that our country is not heading into a recession — or even worse, a depression-scale economic meltdown — even President Bush has admitted that our “economy obviously is going through a tough time."

And Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson had to commit about $30 billion to “maintain the stability of our financial system” through this “tough time.” In light of this situation, you may be experiencing a sinking sensation, in which case you should seriously consider folding your degree into a life raft and making for elsewhere. This can be done in two main fashions. Either you can keep close ties with Uncle Sam and work for the US Government in some other country, or you can choose to cut the cord with the Uncle and become a bonafide free-market ex-patriot.

For those of you who can’t make up your mind, there’s always the Peace Corps, which gives you the feel-good satisfaction of living at the host country’s poverty level and feeling completely detached from the US while also providing you with the opportunity to partake in the bureaucratic circus and possibly take advantage of government-provided mental health care at the end of your service. The Peace Corps is actually celebrating its 47th year, after more than 190,000 volunteers have answered John F. Kennedy’s 1960 call to University of Michigan students to “make the greatest possible difference” in the world. Though the origin and mystique of the organization may sound like the epitome of strange bed fellows — humanitarian endeavor and aggressive patriotism — many returning volunteers actually report that it has a lot more to do with sex, drinking, drugs and crapping in your pants than with lofty ideals and accomplishments.

A Peace Corps volunteer in Honduras summed up this universal Peace Corps experience in a message posted on the Peace Corps’ forum. He writes, “Well, I am officially a Peace Corps volunteer as I swore in on August 25 (and officially shit my pants on September 13).” And he doesn’t mean that he was metaphorically scared or surprised about something. He pooped in his pants. Ask a returned volunteer about his or her official moment.

Of course, a lot of you will want to work overseas in a situation in which you are not likely to have semi-chunky diarrhea inconveniently running out of your ass. Cross the Peace Corps off your list, bone up on your language skills, and try to avoid working for the government all together. Teaching English and nursing are two hot areas to get you abroad. In the case of teaching, you will need to plan to get certified to teach English as a foreign language (TEFL) and in many cases also get ready to live where two-ply toilet paper may be in short supply, though it is possible to land a gig in France and other countries that may seem closer to home. For you nursing students who want to change the world, you’re in luck. Pretty much anywhere you can speak a local language and stab someone with a needle, you can get yourself a position.

And you business and information technology folks may want to forget global investment firms like Bear Stearns join the rest of us who want to get out in the world in a first rate manner with salary and full benefits. To do this, just follow the money — $340 million a day doesn’t just disappear into our war efforts, it shows up in the pockets of workers who have followed the trend overseas. There’s an opportunity for just about anyone. If you can dream up a skill set or a job description, Halliburton is waiting for your resume, with 277 job openings in over 50 countries. And if contractor’s pay is what you want, there’s well over 200 organizations that have federal contracts to do everything from delivering jet fuel to managing computer networks to shooting at security threats, all overseas.

For some of you, however, the only worthwhile place to combine your patriotism, salary requirements and appetite for adventure is literally on the front lines — accepting the paradox that there is little that resembles a front line of conflict any more — and again the US Government has no shortage of opportunities for you to turn your degree into an overseas career. You could enlist in the Army or Marines and spend the rest of your life overseas, working up from where your BA would start you at $21,006 a year. Or if you would rather develop your diplomatic skills more than your trigger finger, the State Department could have you participating in foreign affairs for around $40,000 a year to start. On the other hand, if you would like to put your communication and persuasion skills to use in a field that actually requires you to carry a handgun and will politely allow you to interview people with a bucket of water and the back of your hand, the CIA is always taking applications, bonus if you already speak a foreign language and know how to manipulate ambiguous situations. Pack extra briefs, though, because I also hear you’re not a real intelligence officer until you crap your pants in a third world country.

So there’s something for everyone out there — though most of it involves compromised hygiene — and if things ever look up back here, you can paddle on home and find work at a Starbucks.

Pave the Town 'Green'

2008-04-02T10:03:00.000-07:00

University's push for 'green' Trials just a facade

In my opinion | Duceré Useré Clycleré

By: Josh Grenzsund

Posted: 4/2/08

The road to sustainability is paved with green intentions. In the case of the upcoming Olympic Track Trials, known as "Eugene 08," that road has been paved over with good old-fashioned black tar.

The conflicting goals and ideals embodied by the track trials, in the end, will not produce a "zero waste" or fully sustainable event because in the flurry of activity surrounding the event, short term profit is placed before the long term philosophical and social goals of sustainability.

This does not mean that there are no sustainable efforts, or that the efforts of those involved in those efforts are meaningless; however, those efforts are overshadowed by the unrelenting and all-invasive need for profit in a capitalist system.

The excitement about the "green" and "sustainable" aspects of Eugene 08 have given way to more practical concerns about making money. The peak of green energy seems to have waned near the end of last year. In November 2007 KLCC broadcast a report about sustainable efforts that are part of the Olympic event.

A critical fact given in the report is that the Sustainability Committee does not have a dedicated budget and must rely upon volunteer efforts. In other words, a failure to dedicate funds to a sustainability effort is a conscious decision to give lip service to a lot of the sustainable catchphrases, hoping that people's passion will be cheap investment capitol where cash can be spent elsewhere.

One place the University put some resources to support Eugene 08 was directly into the sustainable image-building that many have become familiar with over the last several months. Last year the University's Event Management Research Team, on behalf of the 2008 Olympic Track & Field Sustainability Committee, conducted research to find out what logos would best represent "the sustainability aspects of community events," specifically Eugene 08, and how it may be portrayed to relate to sustainable policies in "transportation, energy, water, waste management, social justice, labor, purchasing and community legacy."

In the story reported by KLCC, Sustainability Chair Alex Cuyler explained how many of the sustainable aspects, those that focus on environmental, social and economic sustainability, are engineered deep into the planning, along with how fans and athletes will arrive to Hayward Field by shuttle or bike, eat organic food with compostable utensils, presort their recyclables and trash, refill their water bottles, and drop off their old shoes to be turned into track surfaces.

Of all these "sustainable" aspects, the conflicted ideology is most apparent in the last - that being the idea that fans should fly or drive old shoes to Eugene and leave them to be transported to another location and reused as track surfacing. It seems the idea is that this feel-good publicity event will help "save our planet." The reality is more along the lines that fans are expected to go to the local Nike store and buy a new pair of made-in-Taiwan shoes. This feel-good ideology further breaks down when you realize that Nike is moving its store from Eugene's ailing downtown to Oakway Center, which relies more on vehicle traffic than pedestrian or bike-riding shoppers.

A truly laudable effort, however, are those made in remodeling Hayward Field using recycled materials and economic design, especially in regards to the new lighting systems. Eugene 08 is also attempting to use only "green power" for the three-by-one block area of the event.

In spite of all the "green" energy behind Eugene 08, the ideological conflicts can be crystallized in the Sustainability Committee's efforts to have fans buy carbon offset credits to make up for the "carbon footprint" of their flights to Eugene. This desperate attempt to "greenify" everything with a sort of Green Giant Midas Touch is more embarrassing and painful than laughable. While "greenies" attack air traffic as a cause of global climate change, local investors understand it is this same air traffic that is key to local economic and social sustainability.

On March 30, the Register-Guard published a small piece on new air services to Eugene - United 737 flights. The story reports that, according to airport manager Tim Doll, the renewed service "will be a boon for the U.S. Olympic Track and Field Trials this summer." This may be an indicator that Eugene is on the path to revitalizing its local economy by luring in investors, visitors and new residents who can help reverse the sort of decay that is epitomized by the gaping holes in Eugene's downtown area.

It also demonstrates the hyper-ambivalence of our catchphrase and logo-heavy sustainability movement. So in the midst of this rush to cash in on the trials, and the conflicts between environmental, social and economic sustainability, we may all be telling the environment "Just Screw It," while we wear our sustainable logo T-shirts, sport our new imported Nike shoes, and get ready to fly back home and tell everyone how they should catch a comfortable 737 flight to Eugene and make some carbon footprints in America's number one Green City.

jgrenzsund@dailyemerald.com

Beer too expensive? Toke up for change

2008-03-28T11:08:00.000-07:00

Written by Joshua Grenzsund

Thursday, 27 March 2008

This is a global issue. People don’t treat it with the level of concern that they regard climate change, economic collapse and war; however the rising price of beer may very well be interconnected with all of these. Additionally, with the skyrocketing prices of key beer ingredients like hops, barley and malt, we are realizing that we can no longer be dependent on an international brewing materials market. A possible solution? Domestic, local, organic, renewable marijuana.

Beer is itself a key ingredient in social life and national identity, but with the price of hops increasing from averages of $3-$5 a pound a year ago to as much as $35-$40 a pound in early 2008, breweries and pubs from England to the United States to Amsterdam must face the reality that they may not be able to survive.

Barley costs have also increased about 30 percent over the last year and combined with the increase in distribution costs because of the all-time high price of oil, craft brewers and pubs have to face tough decisions on whether they can salvage very small profit margins — usually about 9 percent for brewers — by cutting back in other areas, or if they have to raise prices at the tap.

Average price increases of one to two dollars a six pack may in fact drive beer drinkers toward larger brands like Anheuser-Busch, Coors and Femsa who have the clout to buy up hops supplies and the deep pockets to shave a profit margin but expand market share at the same time.

All these factors reveal that though many brands and craft brewers manufacture a regional image or a national identity, they do so only through international trade of hops and grains. Your favorite import that demonstrates your refined tastes may very well get that hoppy bite from Tasmania or Washington state in the US. Likewise, your favorite US domestic may depend on imported hops varieties to give it its characteristic bite and flourish.

Add to this the concern of all the pesticides used to cultivate and all the fossil fuels used to transport beer materials to breweries and then package and ship it to the consumer. Some even argue that higher beer prices are in part due to the amount of corn diverted to ethanol production, which then pits brewers, bakers and livestock growers against each other for the shrinking supply of grains.

Enter marijuana.

Many people, worldwide already enjoy pot as one of the top four recreational substances — the others being alcohol, nicotine and caffeine — and there are several reasons why it is poised to come to the rescue of beer connoisseurs who long for the aroma of a pungent flower.

Hops, the beer ingredient that gives it its bitterness, high points and aroma, is actually the flower of the hop plant, and its pungent aroma itself can be as enticingly intoxicating as that of the flowering bud of a marijuana plant. For the beer drinker who enjoys a bit of hoppy skunkiness in his or her drink, the shift to some dank bud will probably be an easy one.

Despite the huge and obvious drawback to marijuana’s illicit status in many places around the globe, that it is so popular and available does make it an economical replacement for craft beer. If you spend $30 to get a bit of a buzz on one night a week at the bar, you may be saving a lot of green if you’d just switch to weed. Many times you can get 3.5 grams (1/8 of an ouce) of fairly locally-grown pot for around $50 — or less if you make the right connection — and instead of blowing it all in a night, you can smoke up your crew and yourself for a couple days, or even a week if you’re stingy, for that half-a-Benjamin.

Also, if you do shop around, you can be sure to support local organic farming — or grow a plant or two yourself — and keep your money in the local economy, thereby cutting back on all sorts of problems associated with international import-export and petroleum-based transportation.

Sure, it is illegal, and many people would argue that such black market activity contributes to an unsafe society, reckless behavior and, in this case, undermines the craft brewing industry that already faces huge hurdles in the current economy. However, this change should be seriously considered.

We’re at the point where our old ways have led us to two terms with a President whose policies and actions have led us to many of our current troubles with the economy, foreign policy and the environment. Yes, a loss of craft brewers would be a devastating shock to national and regional identity, but a change to more marijuana recreation in its place could change illicit drug laws — remember the US prohibition of 1920-1933? — and bring about a growth in legal craft farmers.

You may have to wait until November to vote on the president, but you vote every day with your dollar, and where you choose to spend it can change the world.

Spring Break for the Soldiers: A Four Day Break from War

2008-03-20T12:30:00.000-07:00

Written by Josh Grenzsund

Thursday, 20 March 2008

Doha, the capital of Qatar, where those serving in the Middle East can go for a four-day spring break.

It's the time of year for college students to relax (or get wasted) over spring break. World Writer Joshua Grenzsund discusses the difference between a spring break from college and a spring break from serving in the Middle East.

College is stressful, no doubt about it, and spring break is a chance to escape the normal pressure of school for a few days. Some of us will either sleep for a week straight to make up for lost time, or drink and screw and save all the sleeping for when class is back in session.

But this year, the few days away from lectures and exams has me thinking about those serving in our combat zones and how badly they may need a break from the business of killing and staying alive.

Not long after Operations Enduring Freedom and Iraqi Freedom were rolling across Afghanistan and Iraq, the Pentagon recognized the need to give people a few days’ break in order to keep them motivated, productive and—in many cases—sane. They selected the United States base As-Sayliyah near Doha in the Persian Gulf emirate of Qatar to serve as their year-round Central Command spring break.

Most troops on a 12- to 18-month tour of duty in Afghanistan, Iraq and the Horn of Africa get at least one four-day rest-and-recuperation pass. Many of them elect to spend it on a military-sponsored trip to Qatar rather than stay locally in their post or a nearby base. I made one of those trips myself, in October 2004, on break from duty with the Army in Afghanistan, though I got out altogether in 2005.

For me, the choice to spend two miserable days of traveling in the back of a C-130—one each way from Bagram, Afghanistan to Doha, Qatar—was hinged on two key factors. First, there would be no chance of running into unstable colleagues still carrying their weapons and live ammo, and more importantly, there was a 100 percent chance I would be able to get my hands on a real beer—three beers a day to be exact.

Despite these factors, you have to consider nothing in the military is done without its extra layers of bureaucratic fun-sucking. And in the words of one Lieutenant Colonel who made notes of his trip to Qatar, once you arrive, you have to expect to “be processed like beef cattle at the slaughterhouse and move from one room to the next and one briefing to the next, 'Do this, don't do that, watch out for this, look out for that.'”

The adventures with Vorpal Bunny, his human counterpart and others provide good examples of how the average person gets cycled through the on-post fast food shops and swimming pool, and the off-post chaperoned trips to play golf, go dune busting, walk thought the mall with an indoor ice rink, and for some reason go to see a 20 foot statue of a clam pearl.

I saw the clam statue myself, but the whole point of this trip was not so much tour Qatari culture, but to be re-oriented to the shocking concept that there was a peaceful and functioning modern world out there, outside the combat zones. CW2 Bert Stover wrote a blog for The Washington Post and in one of his postings he described sitting down to watch TV in civilian clothes, drinking a beer and how “memories of life in the U.S. came back instantly. I forgot everything about being in Iraq: the flying, the heat, the people, all of it.”

When I got my pass to Qatar, I had been in Afghanistan for nearly six months without a day off, working 14-hour days in old Soviet buildings with dust blowing through cracks in the walls, or in mud Afghan huts with rotted corrugated tin ceilings, making decisions about people’s lives and probable deaths each day. My pass had been revoked once before, and I was aching to escape for even just a couple hours of mindless solitude.

My moment of personal escape to the reassurance of the westernized world came on my first full day in Qatar when I found an ex-pat sponsor to take me out on the town. It was the second full day of Ramadan, and there had been mild threats towards U.S. personnel, so many of the usual outings had been canceled.

Instead of going to the dunes or the Qatari markets he took me to an ordinary western-style grocery store. I spent the better part of an hour walking up and down the clean brightly-lit and colorfully-stocked isles, just touching things, buying things, lost in the marvelous experience of not carrying a gun, knowing nobody’s life was in the balance, and just shopping.

A guy blogging on Going Down Range wrote about other startlingly pleasant experiences that civilians don’t know how to fully appreciate, like when he could “sleep in without the fear of a rocket attack, use real toilets and take a nice long hot shower.”

Coconut Commando posted a thorough account of his trip to Qatar on his blog. Though he recognized the artificiality of the oasis of U.S. fast food in the desert, he also pointed out the genuine contrast of being on R&R and life in a combat zone that most service members take notice of.

“I sat on a berm for about two hours, and just listened to the wind blow," he wrote. "I know it’s the simple things in life that have the most impact.”

In the end, there can really be no comparison between taking a spring break from school and a four day pass from war. If anything though, looking at what we give to and expect from our service members—especially on this fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq—it helps put our academic lives in perspective. As university students, we take our few days of getting wasted and then get back to the task of earning a degree. The guy blogging at Going Down Range, however, sums up the difference of responsibility and expectations.

“It was nice to relax for a few days,” he wrote. “Now it is back to the task to helping Afghanistan to join the 21st century.”

Forget Tibet: the bullshit factor

2008-03-12T13:02:00.000-07:00

Written by Joshua Grenzsund

Monday, 10 March 2008

Earlier this month Icelandic musician Björk grabbed headlines for herself and for the world’s pet cause as she shouted " Tibet! Tibet!" after her song “Declare Independence” at a concert in Shanghai, China, earlier ths month. No doubt many will applaud her move as the most meaningful and provocative statement by a musician since Ireland's Sinéad O'Connor had her way with the Pope’s picture in 1992.

However, the more interesting story lies not in what human rights injustices may be exposed in Tibet, but rather in what can be overlooked and ignored while people chant, cheer, and hang flags on their front porches for that sparsely populated region of Asia.

“Freedom” is a rallying cry for just about any political cause you might choose to pick up. You might want to “free Iraq” with 140,000 US troops and a five-year occupation during “Operation Iraqi Freedom.” Or you may prefer a slightly more justified cause and support a “free Afghanistan” with NATO and “Operation Enduring Freedom,” now nearing its seventh full year. But if you think military intervention is, well, passé and overall just bad for karma, then you’re probably one of the many who want to “Free Tibet” with bumper stickers and prayer flags.

The problem with all of these freedom movements is the heavy bullshit factor that each of their supporters try to overlook in order to foreground the feel-good factor. The Western movement to liberate Tibet, a.k.a. the Xizang Autonomous Region of China, tops the list.

Sure, there are plenty of feel good reasons to support a “free Tibet.” China did conduct a violent take-over the country, ending in 1959; Tibetans’ traditional lifestyle and religion are increasingly threatened in their own homeland; and they do subscribe to a belief system that condemns violence and sounds like it could really help people live overall harmonious and peaceful lives.

But a layman’s way into the underlying bullshit here is actually through Showtime’ program "Bullshit" in which the co-hosts Penn Jillette and Raymond Teller examine the Dalai Lama’s back story. They claim the Dalai Lama's apparent benevolence doesn't address the reality of a traditionally class-based society in which the peasant class in Tibet was little more than a population of slave labor. China’s official position mirrors this. Penn and Teller do concede, however, that Communist China’s policies may not be much better for the two million Tibetans who still live there.

So while this image of peaceful enlightenment draws hordes of international supporters for “freedom” in Tibet, the truth behind Tibet’s domestic tradition of governance is second to the duplicity of the Tibetan resistance with the United State’s CIA — an organization certainly known not for peaceful humanitarianism but rather its government-sanctioned “subversion against hostile states, including assistance to underground resistance movements.”

Several books and declassified documents detail a history of the CIA helping the Dalai Lama’s retreat into exile and Tibetan fighters training with the CIA in Colorado. Few Hollywood stars and average US peaceniks would slap a CIA sticker next to their Tibet paraphernalia, so this inconvenient history is largely ignored in favor of the robes, smiles and karmic promises.

But aside from situational awareness, none of that is even worth dwelling on in the discussion of why US liberals’ ego-stroking love affair with Tibet’s ostensible freedom movement is problematic. While the world demonstrates their humanistic awareness by cheering for Tibet, sitting on that autonomous region’s northern border is another separatist situation — much more significant and almost entirely invisible to the world’s do-gooders.

Uighurstan — a.k.a. Xinjiang, a.k.a. East Turkestan — makes up a full 20% of China’s land mass and has a native Uighur population of about seven million, which is about three times that of Tibet’s native Tibetan population. They also face displacement by Han Chinese and a loss of traditional lifestyle, language and religion. However, where Tibet was annexed in 1959, Uighurstan was fully absorbed in 1949. Where Tibet has mountains and the headwaters to China’s great rivers, Uighurstan has minerals, fossil fuels and access to the markets and resources of Russia and the former Soviet Republics of Central Asia.

In short, Uighurstan is under a “harsh illegal colonial rule” that would be a wet dream for peace and freedom activists to rally around — except you've never heard about it. Oh, and one more thing: Uighurs are traditionally Muslim and as a result of their geographical location the separatist activities of their independence movement organizations tend to be tied to and lumped with what the US generally characterizes as unsavory “Islamic extremists.” Not many tie-dye Euro-Americans tend to pick up Islam as a fashion statement the way they do with Buddhism.

But there's a more basic reason for the lack of attention. In the December 2002 Congressional Research Service report titled “China ’s Relations with Central Asian States and Problems with Terrorism” the CRS summed up the main reason you never heard of Uighurstan is because the “Uighur community lacks a single charismatic leader like Tibet’s Dalai Lama.”

No superstar, no superstar attention.

But you may hear more of them in the lead-up to the Beijing Olympics. As Tibet had hoped to send athletes, Beijing authorities are instead expecting more terrorists or, as it were, freedom fighters from Uighurstan, as they claim to have recently stopped a Uighur “terror plot targeting the Beijing Olympics.”

So after all this, iyou can see that all this attention on freeing Tibet pretty much takes up all our karmic energy and small bills for colorful flags — there’s nothing left for supporting a free Uighrustan, much less anything left for looking a little closer to home for people who have had their land forcibly occupied and their lifestyles, languages and religions nearly erased.

If, however, you do genuinely care about these humanitarian concerns and are not just concerned with massaging your ego and throwing up a façade of peace and compassion to fit into co-opted neo-liberal norms, think about the dozens of Native American Nations in North America, the war, violence, 500 years of injustice; put your energy and karma into a "Free America" campaign. Otherwise, change your “hippie” into just plain “hypocrite” and keep your fashion politics to yourself.

Why ELF should stop burning

2008-03-12T12:51:00.000-07:00

More power in the spark of an idea than a lit match

In my opinion | Duceré Useré Cycleré

By: Josh Grenzsund

Posted: 3/12/08

They're back - back in black. Just when many believed that we had seen the last of Earth Liberation Front-style arsons, last week four luxury "eco-friendly" homes near Seattle, valued at about $2 million each, were set ablaze.

Several news agencies reported that ELF had struck again, and Seattle's KING-5 news station showed footage of a white sheet with red spray paint spelling out a "green" message - "Built Green? Nope black! McMansions in RCDs r not green. ELF." RCD stands for rural cluster development, and these unoccupied homes were built in forested land in what some consider a sensitive groundwater area.

Despite the calling card, the FBI is withholding judgment on who may be responsible. ELF, often referred to as a "leaderless resistance movement," can hardly be held responsible for this arson, because it doesn't really exist. And as far as membership to the non-organization, all you have to do to is claim that you're acting in the name of the ELF cause and you're in. It may take the FBI 10 years to find you and give you your full membership package of being declared a domestic terrorist, but the point is that these are the actions of irresponsible individuals.

But even aside from the headline drama of ELF vs. FBI (and whether 21 and passionate can outwit 41 and nearing a pension), the real issue here is determining the best methodologies for affecting environmental awareness. Arson, as a methodology, cannot affect political and corporate movement toward environmental conservation and sustainability because the application of destructive means bolsters those who resist environmentalism, alienates non-violent activists, fractures the would-be environmental movement and triggers overwhelming punitive legal and legislative responses.

No doubt the key component to choosing arson over more low-key activism is the shock value and the certainty of drawing international press coverage to the cause. Arson does get coverage, but it is completely counter-productive attention. Not only does arson associate eco-activism and conservationist movements with destructive radicalism; it's lazy, unimaginative and is easily used by law enforcement, lobbyists and congress as an excuse to obstruct legitimate pro-active environmental moves, as well as justification for undermining all US citizens' constitutional rights to speech, assembly and redress of grievances as guaranteed in the First Amendment.

Violent, destructive eco-activists have long held to a mantra of paradox, that to destroy is to preserve. But really, it's time to embrace a new paradox: To develop is to conserve. The new green has to be profitable and widely marketed. If all our products are developed in line with sustainable and eco-friendly principles, then these principles will dominate our lifestyle. On the other hand, if you torch to protest, you gain nothing but a fleeting ego trip and a prison sentence.

Business and development are ignorant organs that will orient themselves to wherever market demand will make money. This weakness is our strength, if we can find the innovation and insight to take advantage of it. If you want corporate practice to reflect your ideals of eco-sustainability, then create products, practices, markets and demands in a positive sense. Instead of burning luxury homes, spend the money for spray paint and torching materials on a few dozen eco-friendly light bulbs, send out a press release (on recycled paper) and donate those bulbs to someone who has been using traditional bulbs and thereby using more electricity from generation facilities - in short, encourage less impact constructively.

The maligned tokenism of arson is something eco-activists have to really talk one another out of. Torching of SUVs in the early '00s did not bring hybrid and smaller vehicles onto the road - they were encouraged by general environmental concerns, gas prices and, more importantly, it is market demand that now drives the growth in hybrid and electric vehicle development. Some will say that this approach is selling out to "the man," but in fact is actually a much more satisfying and intellectual manipulation of "the man" because "he" becomes the tool of your view for the future, rather than a hegemonic "Big Brother" of some dystopian apocalypse.

On the other hand, eco-motivated arsons are actually the very grist that the Department of Justice and the U.S. Congress need to justify their dystopian moves, like the Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007 which amends the Homeland Security Act of 2002 and classifies as terrorism any "use of force or violence by a group or individual to promote the group or individual's political, religious, or social beliefs." The recent arson clearly qualifies, and probably meets USA PATRIOT Act federal sentencing guidelines for terrorist arson as well.

Under the broadest terms of that open-ended 2007 act, even persuasive force or written or spoken rhetoric in order to promote social beliefs could be subject to prosecution under domestic terrorism law. This very column could be violating federal terrorism law right now.

Clearly eco-arsonists have not thought this through. To derail the threats to both our environment and to our liberty we have to recycle the idea of destructive resistance and move forward with intellectual, critical, marketable and legal methodologies.

jgrenzsund@dailyemerald.com

Campus' pet trees have deep roots at University

2008-03-05T07:22:00.000-08:00

Campus' pet trees have deep roots at University

In my opinion | Duceré Useré Cycleré

By: Josh Grenzsund

Posted: 3/5/08

Last week I attended a lecture on campus, in which guest professor Elizabeth Heckendorn Wood spoke about "trees as profit, trees as pets." It's easy enough for us, living in a logging region, to understand how trees translate into money, but a concept of trees as pets is really quite easily dismissed.

That is, until you start to look around and see individual trees that have symbolic value attached to them. A pet tree isn't just the one outside the window that gives you shade and something pleasing to look at and would not really consider using as timber or fuel. It is the tree that you planted to commemorate the birth of a child, the memorial tree dedicated to veterans, or the oldest tree in the area that is a living artifact, older than the first European settlements in the region.

We take these pets for granted and rarely consider the significance of how they function in our social environment. These days we are starting to think of trees in terms of carbon sequestration and as a way to offset greenhouse gas emissions, but the trees that we plant and keep around our homes, schools and places of work characterize who we think we are and what history we think we have. In a way we use trees to create social and mnemonic value and form a decidedly human environment with one of the most basic symbols of what we think defines nature.

"The babies always get the attention."

The University of Oregon has long recognized the social and symbolic value of trees. From the University's beginnings in 1876, trees on campus have formed an integral part of selling the aesthetics here. In 2001 the University integrated an official Campus Tree Plan into its planning processes, and all decisions that may impact campus trees now have to pass through a flow chart to ensure that the aesthetic, environmental and historical aspects of trees are considered.

According to the Campus Tree Plan, students initiated the first tree planting program in 1883, starting the tradition of trees at the University and laying the foundation for its current reputation. Though most of those trees did not survive through the next year, in 1884 the University janitor was commissioned to plant and care for more trees, and as of 2001, the plan claims that the "big-leaf maple near the southeast corner of Deady Hall is the sole survivor of this planting effort."

This is an example of the official "significant trees" on the UO campus. It is an interesting symbiotic relationship that this tree takes on a new significance just by having social meaning attached to it, and once that story is attached to it, we look at it differently. Many of you will walk over to Deady Hall in the coming weeks to see if that 1884 maple is flushing green with its 124th Oregon spring. You'll stand under it and wonder about the janitor who cared for it all those years ago, finding it interesting that he was paid only for the trees that survived. You'll imagine the world back then, before electricity, before autos, before Oregon's eastern neighbors were afforded statehood, back in a world as changed as that barren pasture that is now a 4000-tree arboretum. You may even reach out and touch its bark to see if an essence of that history and time between may be hanging there like moss.

This maple is an example of our pet tress because it is possible for us to identify this individual tree and create a social space and social significance for it. To value it in dollars or board feet or BTUs it could produce if used for firewood would be considered by many as blasphemy, tantamount to chopping and burning that unnamed janitor, the University's history, or even our entire sense of identity as an institution with a past. But it is not the only pet tree on campus.

Others include the Douglas Fir "Moon tree" south of the EMU, germinated from a seed that orbited our moon 53 times on the Apollo 14 mission; the English Oaks on the Memorial Quad; the Pin Oaks from 13th and University to Lawrence Hall; and the Douglas Fir, which line the walkway from Deady Hall to Kincaid Street.

If any of these were cut down, it would have significance far beyond just nondescript wood fiber destined for a lumber or pulp mill - it would be a death of social significance. But it is not so much what would be lost if we cut these trees. The whole point of examining our pet trees is to then ask why and how it is so easy to disregard any intrinsic significance of non-pet trees that make up our national forests, our building materials, and our economy.

jgrenzsund@dailyemerald.com

Rap in Russia: The new standard for democracy?

2008-03-04T15:59:00.000-08:00

Written by Joshua Grenzsund

Tuesday, 04 March 2008

Russia's music scene is seeing a wave of influence from the United States' rap music industry. World Writer Joshua Grenzsund explores the influence rap music has on bringing ideas of freedom and democracy to Russia.

This past November, Antonio Maria Costa — director of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime — criticized musician Amy Winehouse for contributing to international drug problems by glamorizing drugs. If the U.N. has the time and insight to focus on the influence of Western music in the world, they should look at how it actually serves their ostensible interests of freedom and democracy. The next music-related announcement they make should have something to do with the inroads that music paves into even the most stolid tyrannical regimes — like rap in Russia.

There may not be democracy or free elections in Russia thanks to Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and his hordes of 40-somethings who have a stranglehold on the neo-Soviet government, but a growing number of young artists and everyday youth are taking up a decidedly Western medium — rap music. Many in this new generation were not even born in the U.S.S.R., which broke up in 1991, and though they engage rap and hip-hop in a decidedly Russian style, the genre has within it the roots of social change that even Putin might not be able to control.

Radical social change at the hands of Western music has happened in Russia before. When Soviet counterculture in the 1960s and 1970s gravitated toward Western-style music like Motown, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and Jimi Hendrix; the music not only influenced inspired Russian musicians and trends in style, but was also considered as having played a decisive role in the Soviet collapse. The circulation of Western thought — along with albums, clothing and concert ticket sales — amplified the capitalist black market and eventually helped undermine communist ideology.

At the same time the social force of rock music peaked in the decidedly analog world of the late ‘80s and early ‘90s' rap music from the United States was making its first inroads behind the Iron Curtain. With the proliferation of the Internet and digital music production capabilities in the late ‘90s and into the ‘00s, the crosscurrent of hip-hop culture between Russia and the West has seen both an explosion of United States artists like 50 Cent and Beyoncé performing to sold-out shows in Russia while professional and amateur Russian acts produce their own singles and albums. This popularity is apparent not only in Saint Petersburg and Moscow, but far into the oblasts, republics and autonomous regions.

The recently published Encyclopedia of Rap and Hip Hop Culture places the recognizable inauguration of hip hop in New York City in the early 1970s. Zulu Nation is credited with being the most important original hip-hop crew and the impetus for its formation was one of exchanging weapons for lyrics and violence for a competition of musical skill. Although hip hop has since been fractured among political rap, apolitical escapist rap and club and gangster hip hop that glamorizes violence and drugs, all of these have within them the particular force of artistic momentum that finds its inspiration and rhythm of expression in a freedom and individuality that is corrosive to hegemonic authority.

Within Russia there are thousands of hip hop and rap groups who upload new tracks and singles to file sharing sites and YouTube as well as forums, Web sites and Internet radio channels dedicated to Russian rap and hip hop. This upsurge represents a third wave of Russian rap — the latest in a drive to create and share that has been going on for about two decades.

Whether rap can really be Russian is similar to the debate in the U.S. as to whether white rappers are anything more than posers and thieves of cultural currency. But forum entries on Hip-Hip.ru going as far back as 2000 discuss this question and many fans and artists conclude that the freedom embodied by rap music is something very central to their projects of social expression and hope to be a part of shaping Russia in the 21st century.

The biggest names in Russian hip hop emulate a US west coast style of rap and are very commercialized. Timati — a international transplant who has moved back and forth between Moscow and Los Angeles — and Seryoga epitomize the mixture of gangster rap and tracks meant for club play. Timati’s hit “V Klube” ("In the Club") is a current big hit, as is Seryoga’s “King Ring ” which is being used in the video game "Grand Theft Auto 4." Other examples of this style of hip hop are Legalize and De Maar.

The more hardcore gangster rap with darker overtones and more overt references to drugs, violence and guns are represented by more independent groups whose recordings and videos are generally less produced, though this tough image fits with Russian machismo. Some of the more notable artists are Kasta, Yujnie Krai, Mafyo and Triada. Generally, more Russian instrumentation and visual elements are integrated by these artists, despite still solidly imitating U.S. rap.

Other notable subgenres include lighthearted rap epitomized by Семён and Brate Ulibaete, party rap that moves into more poetic sentiments by acts like Rayon Moey Mechty, St1m, UG, Detsl and other work by Seryoga. A last, but very important aspect to Russian rap is the small and fairly hard-to-find representation of women rap artists. Rena, Gidroponka and Amira are three of them. A review of this breadth of Russian rap reveals both the ways in which rap has infiltrated every level of Russian social life and the ways in which it may help bring about future social change.

The appetite and capacity for rap and western ideals, in all its various forms, is something that Minister Putin and President-elect Dmitry Medvedev will have to work to keep contained within their vision for Russia’s identity and future. If they don’t, it will help catalyze new change in Putin’s Russia as much as it did in Soviet Russia. In the mean time, if Western nations want to embrace Russia in democracy, all they have to do is tune in to the newest Russian rap.

Is anybody out there? Politics on the U.S.-Russia border

2008-02-29T10:38:00.000-08:00

Written by Joshua Grenzsund

Thursday, 28 February 2008

A shot of Russia's Big Diomede, also known as Ratmanova Island, which is only two miles from United States soil.

How are relations between Alaska and Russia affected by high-powered presidential elections in both countries? World writer Joshua Grenzsund explains the relationship between Alaska's Little Diomede Island and Russia's Big Diomede.

In the lower 49, it’s easy to forget Alaska’s shore is only 58 miles from the Chukotka Autonomous Region of Russia’s mainland. Additionally, few of us have probably realized that Alaska’s Little Diomede Island, which is nearly in the middle of the Bering Strait, is only two miles distant from Russia’s Big Diomede — or Ratmanova Island. As tensions renew between the United States and Russia — both of which are conducting high-profile presidential elections — Diomede and Ratmanova, though connected by winter ice and located more closely to each other than to their respective countries' mainlands, remain completely isolated from each other and the alternate reality of national politics.

It seems all the world is riveted by presidential elections. The US election almost feels like a reality TV show with Senators John McCain, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama insinuating that the future of democracy hinges on who becomes the next commander-in-chief.

On the other hand, Russia’s election turns more into a tragic comedy each day. In a very neo-Soviet move, Russian President Vladimir Putin hand-picked his successor, First Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev. Medvedev quickly asked Putin to be his Prime Minister, and many speculate this position will become the de-facto seat of power in the new government.

Russia’s election is Mar. 2, and the results are a foregone conclusion. Opposition candidates have been marginalized, intimidated and even jailed, and Medvedev said he will not even run a traditional campaign because he does not have time. However, a recent poll shows almost 70% of Russians plan to vote for Medvedev.

Russia Today reported that the government already started collecting ballots as early as Feb. 15 in the most Northeastern reaches of Russia, starting with Ratmanova Island — one mile from U.S. soil. Eastern Russia’s Koluma news agency reported that although the Siberian oblasts are sparsely populated, it is expected that as many as 160,000 votes will be cast over the next few days by nomadic herders and those living in remote towns, working in petroleum or stationed at military outposts.

There is little doubt the official vote from this region will be staunchly pro-Medvedev. The Governor of Chukotka is Roman Abramovich, a 41-year-old billionaire oligarch who received his appointment in October 2005 at the recommendation of Putin. Abramovich fits the profile of the powerful and loyal young men Putin has used to consolidate Russian power politically and economically over the past several years.

While the border station on Ratmanova appears politically secure under Russian-style democracy (or so it seems in the Russian press) the scene across the short stretch of ice in the village of Diomede - the United States’ most Western outpost - is ambivalent to say the least. In a recent phone interview, Henry Soolook, a 43-year-old life-long resident of Little Diomede and employee of the Diomede Tribal Council, spoke about the political atmosphere on the island.

In contrast to daily, or even hourly updates bombarding those living closer to the core of the presidential elections, Soolook said the roughly 150 inhabitants of Diomede live without television or radio and with only limited Internet access. Within this isolation, the villagers are not paying any particular attention to who wins each party’s nomination in the US, much less who will be the next Russian president. He expects that although there are plans to cast ballots in November's general election, most people in Diomede could not name any of the remaining presidential candidates.

But this distance from the politician’s names and the greater machinations of national elections only served to understate what Soolook considered the common concerns of Diomede’s population – being cut off from relatives living in Russian territory and the impacts of changing ice conditions, with thaws coming in mid-May.

According to Soolook, there was an exciting time in the 1980s when relatives on both sides of the international border were able to visit each other with relative freedom. However, all travel has been cut since the end of that decade. Diomede residents no longer cross to the Russian side, not even while hunting, and the short distance truly marks a world apart. The outcomes of both nations’ elections will affect these sorts of border tensions, as a hawk like McCain in the White House and Putin taking up the Prime Minister seat at the Kremlin would likely drive relations closer to a renewed cold war.

Similarly, the early thaws of arctic ice affect the residents of Diomede as residents hunt bearded seals and polar bears. Soolook reported there has only been one polar bear sighting this winter, an unusually low number for the area. While national politics may be ineffective in addressing global climate change, political campaigns certainly invoke it as a way to round out their image and garner votes.

The fact that these concerns of political borders and environmental change come directly from constituents living on the furthest extremes of ice and isolation on the U.S.-Russia border should help remind us of the significant connection between national elections, international relations and personal contact.

2008 thecampusword.com

Inside Iran's Parliamentary Election

2008-02-26T08:18:00.000-08:00

Inside Iran's Parliamentary Election

Written by Joshua Grenzsund

Monday, 25 February 2008

As Iran prepares to hold its majles (parliamentary) elections on Mar. 14, the Islamic fundamentalist establishment continues to cull reformists from the vote. During the last several months crackdowns on rallies have pressured supporters of reformist movements and now, according to Radio Free Europe Radio Liberty, the Interior Ministry has blocked over 2000 candidates, mostly reformists, from running for the legislative body’s 290 seats. Though the government claims these disqualifications are on legal grounds, it seems to be a move to keep the conservative majority in power.

A power shift in the majles could set the stage for a reformist presidential candidate in 2009, much like the conservative shift in 2003 helped Mahmoud Ahmadinejad take power in 2004. But given the fate of reformist movements, such a shift is unlikely. According to Amnesty International, dozens of students and other supporters of reformist movements arrested in December and January are still being held without cause at Evin Prison north of Tehran. Allegations of torture at the prison are rampant and as recently as January a student arrested by the government died shortly after being taken into custody.

Despite a February decree by the Iranian judiciary that bans arrest without cause, such arrests and torture are unlikely to stop. Agence France-Presse reported the decree reads that authorities should "Refrain from summoning people without sufficient proof, [and] refrain from holding people under arrest without pressing charges." Such an announcement, however, may represent unrealistic hopes when viewed in the light of those who actually hold power at this time. Tehran’s current mayor, Mohammad-Baqer Qalibaf, is a former Brigadier General in Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps.

According to Iran Focus, when Qalibaf was still in the IRGC he co-authored a 1999 letter to then-president Mohammad Khatami urging the use of “every available means” to put down a pro-democracy student protest movement, or the Corps “would take matters into their own hands.” Since becoming Tehran’s mayor, many residents complain that police often conduct raids, beatings and arrests — that people “disappeared” if they were involved in trying to bring about lasting reformist change.

In the context of these recurrent incidents, it is clear the disqualification of reformist candidates is yet another move by conservatives to hold power. AFP reported that Iran's former-president Mohammad Khatami called the mass disqualification a “catastrophe” for democracy and is evidence of a widening rift between the Iranian people and the Iranian state. Among those disqualificatied was Ali Eshraghi, the grandson of deceased leader of the 1979 Iranian revolution Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Though this may be a surprise disqualification, Eshraghi has gained a reputation as being outspoken against military involvement in politics. Both Qalibaf and Ahmadinejad are former military members.

In addition to trying to hold power within their borders, the conservative government is also trying to reinforce its regional alliances. With the United States in effect encircling Iran with its occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq, Iran has solidified its ties with Russia as that country re-asserts itself on the global stage as the ideological, economic and military rival to the US. Most notably, Russia has supplied the nuclear fuel for Iran’s reactor that is expected to start producing power this summer.

Though Russia has taken notice of a recent test launch of a long-range missile, ostensibly part of a space program, as a possible nuclear weapons program, they show no signs of trying to distance themselves from the Islamic government. In fact, in late January Radio Free Europe Radio Liberty reported that Russia’s Deputy Foreign Minister Aleksandr Saltanov proposed a possible “regional security system that will take into account the interests of all littoral states and interested countries.” Such an organization would offer a Russian-led alternative to the United States' influence in the region. If a reformist majority were to take power in the parliamentary elections, it would certainly influence both this sort of development as well as Iran’s 2009 presidential election and its overall relationship with the West.

The certainty that seems to surround a conservative hold on power in Iran is contrasted by the uncertainty about whether a conservative or more liberal candidate will take power in the US’s own presidential election in November. France's Le Monde newspaper reported that Ahmadinejad is watching the US election. According to the newspaper, he said that "if there were free elections in the United States, if the American people had various choices, not just two, we think they would opt for a different policy than the one implemented now by the United States." That policy is openly antagonistic towards Iran. In addition to the 2002 declaration by President Bush that Iran was part of an “axis of evil,” there has been a more recent development that indicates even a Democratic-led congress may continue in this anti-Iranian stance. In September, 2007 the US Senate voted on a nonbinding ammendment to designate Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a terrorist organization.

All three of the leading US presidential candidates — Hillary Clinton, John McCain and Barack Obama — were senators during this vote. Clinton voted for the amendment, while McCain and Obama both missed the vote. Clinton adopted up a hawkish position, but she is not likely to be outdone by McCain, who infamously answered a question last year about possible military action against Iran. In news reports and in video clips around the Internet it is clear he quips, "That old, eh, that old Beach Boys' song, 'Bomb Iran': Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, anyway, ah … "

Of the three, the only one who is interested in direct diplomatic negotiation with Iran, regardless of whether reformist or conservatives are in power, is Obama. He recently gained the support of former Secretary of State Colin Powell, whose own diplomatic approach to foreign affairs led to his ouster from the Bush administration. In a recent interview, Powell said, in reference to Obama’s and Clinton’s opposing positions, "You have to talk to folks that you may not necessarily like, and you can't put down impossible preconditions for conversations."

It seems to be a foregone conclusion that

Iran

’s Islamic fundamentalist government will stay in power in the Mar. 14 elections, but that government’s future relationship with the West will have much to do with the outcome of the

’ own 2008 election — as if it wasn't heated enough.

2008 thecampusword.com

Northwest Electricity

2008-02-20T09:04:00.000-08:00

To stay turned on longer, turn it off more often

In my opinion | Duceré Useré Cycleré

By: Josh Grenzsund

Posted: 2/20/08

Our modernity is as unstable as the next power outage. In an electrically dependent world, discordant appliances humming in your office or home environment can affect your mood, and the various power stations churning out voltage for us day and night affect our larger environment.

This last point is the one that takes up so much space in news reports, community meetings and campaign speeches. Everything is becoming connected to global climate change. Given that our appetite for the markers of convenience and modernity result in the alteration of our Earth's environment, we are beginning to think about each decision that we make as having an impact on our ecological systems.

Even more than that, we're recognizing that environmentally motivated lifestyle choices don't just affect the 'natural' environment, but have interrelated impacts on economic and political systems. All of this is often simplified under the current buzz word "sustainability" as people and organizations look for ways to provide convenient and modern goods and services while minimizing environmental impacts.

A common factor in all sustainability equations is energy. A lot of attention is given to liquid petroleum fuels and possible renewable replacements, but if one had to make the decision of giving up either the convenience of trucked products and personal vehicles or the convenience of electricity, people would realize the understated importance of electricity.

As far as electrical energy goes here in Eugene, our dominant hand seems safe for the time being. With so much pressure on the energy industry to clean up emissions, we are blessed by geography. While about half of our nation's electricity comes from coal-fired plants, we get about 95 percent of our electricity from sources that do not produce greenhouse gasses.

This number is a not only a result of our region's bounty of hydro-electricity, but also a result of environmental foresight nationally, regionally and locally. In 1980 Congress passed the Pacific Northwest Power Act, which authorized Oregon, Washington, Idaho and Montana to take steps to maintain power supplies while mitigating the impacts of hydropower on fish populations.

The act reads that "Priority shall be given first to conservation; second to renewable resources; third to generating resources utilizing waste heat or generating resources of high fuel conversion efficiency; and fourth to all other resources." The Eugene Water and Electric Board has integrated this list of priorities deep into its strategic planning and uses them to guide its infrastructure, investment, and marketing efforts.

As a result, the bulk of Eugene's electricity comes from hydropower, about 7 percent from nuclear power and only about 5 percent from the Bonneville Power Association's natural gas and coal-fired resources. In order to decrease even this small percentage of electricity use that results directly in greenhouse gas emissions, EWEB's objectives over the coming years include substantial increases in wind and solar thermal power.

But the quest for developing new, even renewable, sources of electricity can be seen as dubious wisdom. Yes, we have to find better ways to support our convenient and modern lifestyle, but making more electricity from alternate sources may lead to unforeseen consequences. In the 1930s, hydropower was seen as the ecological and renewable solution for our country's power needs, but now these dams across our land are at the center of serious environmental debates.

The best solution, the retro '80s idea, one with not nearly the flash and marketing pizzazz of "sustainability," is still conservation. As the entity that harvests and distributes our shocking fuel for modernity, we should be thankful for a power board that remembers the one good idea from the 1980s. In our drive to make cleaner, faster energy more sustainable, we forget that conservation is the best investment for lessening our impact on our environment and ourselves.

Someone once said that the cleanest energy is the energy you never use. So, back here in our fully-electrified lifestyle, at the same time that you make decisions to try and reduce greenhouse gas emissions and create sustainability, figure in the basics and remember to find ways to use less electricity in the first place.

jgrenzsund@dailyemerald.com

Afghanistan's Character Shreds NATO Ideals

2008-02-14T12:15:00.000-08:00

Afghan student journalist's death sentence upheld: a rejection of open democracy?

Written by Joshua Grenzsund

Wednesday, 13 February 2008

Source: NATO

On Jan. 30,

Afghanistan

’s Meshrano Jirga (from the country's House of Elders) issued a statement endorsing the death sentence of journalist Sayed Perwiz Kambakhsh and criticizing the international pressure to nullify the Balkh provincial court’s ruling. The following day, the jirga withdrew its statement, as legal experts pointed out the unconstitutionality of the parliamentary body’s involvement in judicial affairs and 200 protesters marched in Kabul to protest Perwiz’s sentence. However, the jirga, headed by President Hamid Karzai’s ally Sibghatullah Mojaddedi, maintained its support for the prosecution of anti-Islamic activities.

This succession of statements coincides with the release of three reports on the political and military state of affairs in Afghanistan, all of which assess that things are going poorly. The analysis released by the US Afghanistan Study Group flatly claims that “the mission to stabilize Afghanistan is faltering.” Additionally, Afghanistan recently rejected the United Nation’s choice of Paddy Ashdown as an envoy with expanded authority. Taken together, all these represent the country's wholesale rejection of Western ideals at the same time that NATO powers struggle with their own commitment to Afghanistan’s stabilization and democratization.

The ASG analysis warns that “Afghanistan stands today at a crossroads,” citing theTaliban’s “anti-government insurgency that has grown considerably over the past two years” as well as public opposition to the war in several NATO countries that is “threatening to fray the coalition in the next two years.” Most recently, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper notified US President George Bush that Canada will not renew its troops’ mission, in the violent south, unless it receives more support from other NATO nations. Their mission is scheduled to end in 2009.

In response to the rejection of Ashdown, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice acknowledged that “the international community has not yet found a way to coordinate its effort in a way that is effective and efficient and can fully support the Afghan government in reconstruction." This failure to maintain the momentum built up from the 2001 invasion through the 2004 parliamentary and presidential elections has opened up the space for the inertia of Afghan independence on its own terms. The Taliban’s disturbing resurgence in Afghanistan’s south is matched by the government’s legislative and judicial branches’ equally disquieting use ofShari’a law as a cover for corruption and intimidation.

The death sentence of Perwiz illustrates this brash confidence flies in the face of the country's recent foreign occupation. Half a decade is all the country’s leaders needed for the mujahideen-like tenacity and patience to wear down international resolve. Perwiz has been convicted of blasphemy for printing, and sharing with friends, an Internet blog article that criticizes a passage of the Koran. Shortly after his arrest this past October, his case was, unusually, referred to the Balkh Shura-ye Ulema (Council of Religious Scholars) instead of a civil court. The council recommended a death sentence for apostasy and rejection of Islamic faith — a civil court later heard the case and convicted Perwiz of blasphemy. Though Perwiz is afforded three appeals, he was denied counsel at his initial trial and many are deriding the harsh sentence as a blatant move by corrupt judges and lawmakers to intimidate Perwiz’s brother Sayed Yaqub Ibrahimi, a journalist who has been critical of several Afghan politicians in northern Afghanistan.

Yaqub’s reporting for the Institute for War and Peace Reporting has covered alleged human rights violations, killings, kidnappings, armed robberies and other instances of intimidation carried out by warlords-turned-leaders in Baghlan and Faryab provinces. One of Yaqub’s articles reports that “a former regional strongman was now ‘masquerading’ as the head of a security firm” and that these armed fighters, possibly 25,000 nationwide, are equally dangerous to the population, whether they are recognized as outlaws or as legal private security personnel.

Yaqub has also been openly critical of General Abdul Rashid Dostum, an ethnic Uzbek who is very influential in the country’s north. Though Dostum currently serves as chief of staff to the commander-in-chief of Afghanistan's armed forces in Kabul, several of his former sub-commanders have expanded their influence in the north at a time when most international attention is focused on the Taliban in the south. One of Yaqub’s articles characterizes Abdul Rahman Shamal, a former Dostum lieutenant, as “a king … accompanied by armed men on horseback.” The article also describes private prisons, extortion and widespread abuses. The growing intimidation of Yaqub, peaking with the sentencing of his brother, demonstrates the extreme lawlessness that existsunder the faltering veneer of western-style stabilization.

In the context of Perwiz’s and Yaqub’s treatment by religious scholars, the courts and now the Afghan jirga, Jean Mackenzie, IWPR Afghanistan Program Director, said that this indicates “a frightening new level of attacks on freedom of speech and the media in Afghanistan.” This crackdown on free press is just a symptom of a more elemental reality that the fractious country is fueled by guns and drugs. Those in control of the money and fighters cannot tolerate the depth of corruption exposed to the public to any degree; they turn to the severe punishments of Shari’a law to discourage investigative reporting.

As a seemingly final insult to the international efforts to institute a free democracy in Afghanistan, IWPR reported that those most pleased with the government’s posturing is the Taliban, who have posted praise on their website saying that they encourage the “jihadi and brave Afghans toadminister severe chastisement to the perpetrator of this action.” Many previous occupiers of Afghanistan have been likewise blindsided by synchronous turns of events that repeatedly reveal a reality that runs counter to would-beliberators' or occupiers’ aspirations.

Though President Karzai must approve Perwiz’s death sentence for it to be carried out, he has so far been largely silent on the issue, even amid growing international concern. This failure to lead his nation towards democratic ideals indicates

Afghanistan

’s reassertion of its indomitable, if fractured, identity and its final preparation for throwing out this latest wave of foreign occupation and foreign influence. Though the warlords and the Taliban are not likely to unite in the absence of an international occupation, they will do so in order to achieve their individual short-term goals and force out the foreign body within their borders.

2008 thecampusword.com

Pondering Our Connection to Electricity

2008-02-13T08:52:00.000-08:00

The loss of our white noise

In my opinion | Duceré Useré Cycleré

By: Josh Grenzsund

Posted: 2/13/08

Thank you! Welcome back! I'd like to pick up right where we left off last week. We were in the midst of the completely organic, sustainable, zero-emissions, locally grown alternative to the mass-marketed awards shows: the Golden Carbon Sequestration Device Awards - formerly known as the Golden Tree Awards.

Before the break we had announced the winners in the emissions and energy categories. Now let's move on to the nominees in -

And just like that it's gone. Black. Quiet.

It may have been power lines knocked over in a storm or toppled in a forest fire. Maybe it was a terrorist attack or a disciple of Ted Kaczynski, or maybe it was just someone between here and Bonneville Dam with a half-flask of whiskey and a penchant for shooting high tension power line insulators.

Whatever the case, we have been cut off from the source of our electricity and now we have to make do for the next 800 words. Getting along without electricity is one thing if you're camping, or otherwise deliberately separated from it. But it is a wholly different situation if you are cut off against your will.

The loss of electricity can be very isolating. Without our computers, televisions and radios to bring the world into our homes, we are cut off. In the '80s, each time there was a blackout I would hypothesize that the electromagnetic pulse from Soviet bombs exploding on the U.S. Minuteman missile silos just north of my hometown had knocked out the power stations. How were we to know for sure, without broadcast radio and TV to tell us?

Losing power can also be very inconvenient. In an instant all the modern comforts of heating, cleaning, entertainment, cooking and refrigeration can be reduced to mocking irony - the heater will not comfort, the stove will not cook, the idiot box will not entertain, and the refrigerator will become the place you keep food to have it rot rather than to preserve it. In a worst-case scenario it can be life threatening. Sure, hospitals have emergency power, but for how long? And in my case, we have aquariums in our home and without filtration, the fish will either be poisoned or suffocate.

In the 1930s the Bonneville Dam on the Columbia River was constructed as part of President Franklin Roosevelt's Rural Electrification Administration. Electricity was seen then not only as a way to ease the labor of rural life, but also as a marker of civilization and modernity. Though we may no longer think of the former so much, we certainly still consider the latter. Often a region or country without electricity is considered a backwater, a third world, or even a humanitarian disaster. We define our culture by its dependence upon electricity, and we have lived a fully electrified existence for more than three generations. However, we live on a precarious edge - we don't know how to function if we lose power.

But a blackout is not all bad. If nothing else, it can provide an opportunity like this, to reflect upon the role of electricity in our lives, and the sense of civilization and modernity it brings to us. Very often we do not understand the subtle influences of electricity on our lives precisely because we don't experience life without electricity.

When the electricity goes off in your home or office there is a different sort of silence. National Public Radio recently aired a story about how the appliances around us emit hums and buzzes of differing pitches. We are often not aware of them, but if you have a computer, television, refrigerator or other appliances around you, their sounds can combine into a very discordant symphony. Other times they are reminiscent of minor-key horror film music. The subtle cacophonous noise pollution actually affects your mood and the way you feel about your home and work environments.

These same sorts of effects are part of our larger modern environment as well. It's hard to bring up without seeming to state the obvious, but all of our electricity comes from somewhere. Whether it's hydroelectric, coal fired, nuclear, natural gas, wind or solar, there's a facility somewhere that is churning out voltage. From the resistors in your computer, down the power cord, back through the wall, out onto the street, to a substation and out into the wilderness of electricity production and distribution, you have a direct connection to that anonymous facility. As such, the kilowatt hours that you pull from the nether of this infrastructure affects the source, ever so subtly. Whether it is from one of the Columbia River dams, the nuclear powered Columbia Generating Station near Richland, Wash., or from other hydropower, wind or gas generation facilities, the presence of those facilities in turn affects the environment in which they, and we, all coexist.

The Northwest Power and Conservation Council Web page addresses the discordant affects of hydropower on the Columbia River. It cites Nisqually Indian leader Billy Frank, Jr. as having said that when we turn on our light switches in the Pacific Northwest, "salmon come flying out." It certainly may not be as dramatic as he suggests, but we do have to stop for a moment and consider the sources of our electricity, the sources of our modernity.

Next week I will do just that, with an investigation into the University's and Eugene's electric power sources.

jgrenzsund@dailyemerald.com

Roll out the green carpet for awards

2008-02-06T14:57:00.001-08:00

Roll out the green carpet for awards

In my opinion | Duceré Useré Cyceré

By: Josh Grenzsund

Posted: 2/6/08

Do you remember the '80s, when environmentalism was code for dealing with toxic waste, stopping the clubbing of baby seals and protecting spotted owl habitat? Well, the spotted owls have taken roost in new-growth forests, the baby seals are a dead cliché, and addressing toxic and radioactive waste just never had the sex appeal of our new cause de decade - green, sustainable, zero emissions carbon sequestration. Sorry, Captain Planet.

While the sheer marketability of the new environmentalism may be its undoing, it is also the core of the plan. The whole idea of keeping the environment in a condition that will keep us alive means that we have to live in, wear, want, build and buy new stuff that will emit zero greenhouse gases. So, if this sexy marketing is really well done and we literally buy into a product cycle that is all that, then we will have achieved our goal simply by continuing to consume. It sounds a lot like President Bush compelling us to go shopping in late Sept. 2001, but really it's the same logic - if we don't buy "green" products, then global climate change has already won.

We can already recognize that we live in a changed world. The Golden Globes were canceled, and we can imagine a night without the Oscars. In light of these developments, we can see it is the time for the new environmentalists to intervene.

In fact, it has already begun. What I'm presenting to you now is a completely organic, sustainable, zero-emissions, locally grown alternative to the mass-marketed awards shows. So here it is. Based on their noteworthy achievements and performances, I am proud to present the Golden Carbon Sequestration Device Awards - formerly known as the Golden Tree Awards - given out to those who would give the appearance of doing something for the environment, but can't for the fact that gold does not grow.

Energy is always near the top of the list, so here we go. The nominees are: The MidAmerican Nuclear Energy Company, Eugene Water and Electric Board, and the Oregon State Law requiring 10 percent ethanol in all gasoline.

Backed by Warren Buffet, MidAmerican scrapped plans to build a nuclear reactor on the Oregon-Idaho border. However, it wasn't because they wanted to invest in wind or solar; it was because they couldn't find cheap enough parts due to an upsurge in nuclear power's new popularity. Also, another company, Alternate Energy Holdings, is still trying to fund a new reactor south of Boise, ID.

EWEB has decided not to include photovoltaic panels on its new operations complex. The company says that it is too costly, but earlier in the month they attended a neighborhood meeting to sell Eugene residents on the idea of investing in solar energy panels for their homes.

Oregon State Law now reads that by fall 2008 all gasoline sold in the state must be 10 percent ethanol. However, corn is still the main raw material for ethanol production, and the petrol and chemicals needed to grow the crop merely displace the carbon emissions and air pollution to elsewhere in the state or nation.

And so the GCSDA for energy goes to - EWEB! If it's really a worthwhile investment, which I believe it is, then you'd better step up and help lead the way, otherwise you're just selling us dirty product, giving only the façade of emissions change. On the other hand, rather than a GCSDA, a Breath of Fresh Air goes to Lucky Lab Brewing Company in Portland, which installed a solar thermal unit on the roof of its operation to help brew its beer. They plan to install units at their other locations as well.

In the emissions category we have two nominees - the Environmental Protection Agency and the United States. The EPA rejected a petition by Oregon and 16 other states to require tougher tailpipe emissions than federal law. Though several EPA staff members termed California's petition "compelling and extraordinary," the final official answer was that the petition in fact did not meet these "extraordinary conditions," and that in effect requiring stricter standards would cramp the federal style.

In addition to failing to step up at the Bali Climate Talks in December, the U.S. is ranked a mere 39th out of 149 countries in terms of ability to manage its natural resources and control pollution - beneath all other G8 countries, based on the Yale and Columbia University ranking. The GCSDA for emissions goes to - the EPA! What a shocker! But on the flip side, another Breath of Fresh Air goes to Oregon Governor Kulongoski, for working with other western states and Canadian provinces to implement a regional cap-and-trade system to reduce greenhouse gases, possibly serving as a model or incentive for a federal, even international, program.

Stay tuned, we'll be right back after this short break.

jgrenszund@dailyemerald.com

Afghan Journalist Sentenced to Death

2008-02-04T12:52:00.000-08:00

Afghan journalist, Iranian students face prison and death

Written by Joshua Grenzsund

Monday, 04 February 2008

Sayed Perwiz Kambakhsh

The Jan. 22 announcement that a Balkhprovincial court sentenced an Afghan journalist to death for distributing“blasphemous” material signals that

Afghanistan

,and other nations in the region, are collectively stepping back from ensuringfreedom of the press. Sayed Perwiz Kambakhsh, a 23-year-old Afghan,had been attending Balkh University and working at the daily Jahan-e Naw (NewWorld) newspaper in the northern city of Mazar-e Sharif when he was arrested thispast October on charges that he printed an article from the Internet thatquestioned the Koran’s position on unequal treatment of men and women andshared it with others.

Though thearticle was actually written by an online journalist – an Iranian-born studentwho lives in Europe and goes by the name of ArashBikhoda, or "Godless," in Persian – the court ruled that Kambakhshwas guilty of, and had already confessed to distributing anti-Islamic material. The BBC hasreported that the provincial deputy attorney, Hafizullah Khaliqyar, threatenedother Afghan journalists with arrest if they attempt to interfere in the nexttwo hearings that are required to affirm Kambakhsh’s death sentence. Meanwhile,the France-based Reporters Without Borders and theLondon-based Institute for War andPeace Reporting are both reporting that Kambakhsh’s arrest and sentencing areactually intended to intimidate Kambakhsh’s brother, Sayed Yaqub Ibrahimi, whois also a journalist. Ibrahim recently published an article that implicates anAfghan legislator in a series of killings and kidnappings.

This is notthe first time that claims of the Afghan government and clerics using religiouspretexts to arrest and imprison journalists have surfaced. In October, 2005 Ali Mohaqeq Nasab, Afghan journalist and the editor of the"Hoqoq-e-Zan" (Women's Rights) monthly, was arrested andsentenced to two years in prison on charges of blasphemy. Nasab had publishedarticles that argued that giving up Islam, apostacy, was not a crime andquestioned Shari’a law and its harsh punishments, such as stoning a woman whois found guilty of adultery. Though clerics had originally demanded the deathpenalty for Nasab, he was released in December 2005 after he apologized for thearticles and an appeals court succumbed to international pressure and gave hima six month suspended sentence.

In an interview with Radio Free Europe Radio Liberty after his release,Nasab claimed that the clerics and the courts arrested and charged him onorders “from oneof Afghanistan’s neighbors” and that the charge of “insulting Islam was only anexcuse” that served at once as a reason to attack him personally, as an ethnicHazara, so that no Hazaras “should grow and reach success” and also to attack “issuessuch as freedom of expression, democracy, and civilization.” His concerns echothe eerily similar Kambakhsh’s case, as Nasab said that “those who are incharge of enforcing democracy and freedom of expression are people who do notbelieve these [principles]. They are even the enemies of these principles [and]that if it goes on like this, freedom of expression may be no more.”

Thepractice of detaining, and even killing, journalists is a tactic shared byseveral of Afghanistan’s neighbors, including Khazakstan, Kyrgyzstan,Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Iran, each of which has been cited, bythe Committee to Protect Journalist, as being among the most censored or mostdangerous places to be a journalist. This common characteristic is not so muchan issue of simply obstructing free press, but is rather the visible byproductof governments which are eager and willing to oppress their citizens to stay inpower.

While thegovernments in former Soviet Republics of Central Asia fight any reporting that mayencourage either democracy or Shari’a-based government, as they try to hold onto communist dictatorship in the 21^st century, their neighbor, Iran,is mainly fighting movements that challenge the entrenched Islamicfundamentalism. Afghanistan, then, is a confused amalgamationof these two – with both a Soviet legacy and a strong Taleban resurgence – inwhich President Hamid Karzai’s government seemingly has to take a stand againstany press or reporting that could encourage democracy, Shari’a, orcommunist-style dictatorship. This situation of having to suppress everythingsatisfies no one and demonstrates the ineffective and paradoxical position thatKarzai’s government is, unsuccessfully, attempting to occupy.

In Iran thesituation is much more straight-forward, and the systematic dismemberment offree press and dissident movements is apparent in the hard-line conservative policiesof President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Tehran Mayor Mohammad-Baqer Qalibaf, aone-time Brigadier General in Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard, which arespurring arrests of dissidents to a new level. Though conservatives won controlof the Iranian Parliament in 2004, reformists and others who oppose Ahmadinejadhave since won the majority of seats in Tehran’s municipal government. Many ofthese opponents cite the president’s failure to focus on domestic issues,especially as the lower classes are being hit by high energy prices, inflation,and gas shortages during an unusually hard winter. As Ahmadinejad himselfstepped from the position of Tehran’s mayor into the presidency, it isclear that such a shift at his powerbase is extremely threatening, withparliamentary elections scheduled for Mar. 14.

As aresult, the pressure on dissidents, reformist, and journalists has increased.One recent crackdown involved about 60 university students across the country,four of whom were expelled, for what they claim are false accusations takingpart in unauthorized demonstrations. But many students have actually beendetained for similar activities. In a public statement released by AmnestyInternational, the organization claims that between 20 and 30 studentsassociated with Students for Freedom and Equality (Daneshjouyan-e Azadi Khahva Beraber Talab), were detained for participating in demonstrations forNational University Students’ Day on December 7, 2007 and have yet to be released. Thisdetention has led to fears that the students “could be tortured or otherwiseill-treated in detention” at the notorious Evin prison, north of Tehran, which has been connected withnumerous political detentions and deaths. RFERL reports that one portion ofEvin, section 209, where many political dissidents are held, is controlledentirely by Iran’s Intelligence Ministry.

The fearsare not unfounded. On Jan. 18 Radio Farda reported that a student activist detainedin Iran’s Kurdistan province, Ebrahim Lotfollahi, forreasons authorities have not explained, died in custody. Officials report thathe suffocated, an apparent suicide they say, but no autopsy was performed, thegrave was quickly covered with concrete. Reuters reports that his family isdemanding that his body be exhumed to determine the cause of death.

But it is no longer just groups who endorsedemocratic reforms who are facing detention and torture. Even Marxists students,who had been tolerated by the government because of their shared anti-Westernsentiments, are now facing scrutiny, possibly because of their growing size andinfluence and the fact that their leftist ideology is, at heart, contradictoryto the Islamic government. To hold power in the March elections, the governmentfeels it has to come down hard, but arresting journalists is evidence more evidence of weakness than of strength.

2008 thecampusword.com

Focus the Nation, Climate Change

2008-01-31T13:18:00.000-08:00

Turn on, tune in, stand up: It's time for change

In my opininon | Duceré Useré Cycleré

By: Josh Grenzsund

Posted: 1/30/08

"Turn on. Tune in. Drop out."

I've used this Timothy Leary quote before, to poor effect, but it's appropriate to use today as we face global climate change and have a nationwide one-day opportunity to realize a critical mass of social awareness.

Thursday, Jan. 31 is Focus the Nation, a nationwide "teach-in" that organizers hope will be the '00 environmental equivalent of actions in the '60s and '70s that resulted from the civil rights movement, women's rights movement and protests against the U.S. war in Vietnam. The hope of this "teach-in" is to influence not only how the issue of global climate change plays in society, but also how this issue plays in the selection of each party's presidential nominee.

This organizational pitch of a "teach-in" theme made me think of other ideas that were flowing through college-aged social consciousness, some three or four decades back, that have recognizable parallels to the closing edge of this decade. This is where we need to consider Leary and his impact on the way we remember the "hippie era."

If we're actually going to realize wide-sweeping social, industrial and economic change, in terms of our concern about the climate, we've got to capitalize on the inertia of ideas that are already present in our consciousness.

While many people consider Leary's catch phrase as a call to drop out of college and drop acid, his own account of the idea behind this call to action is much more nuanced, which he explained in his autobiography, "Flashbacks."

Leary advocated that each individual individual should "turn on" by finding ways to "interact harmoniously with the world." Once turned on, the individual could then "tune in" to the significance and presence of her or his personal existence by becoming "sensitive to the many and various levels of consciousness and the specific triggers that engage them." The subsequent "drop out" was in effect little more than "self-reliance" in so much as it was "an elective, selective, graceful process of detachment from involuntary or unconscious commitments."

If you set aside Leary's drug use and drug advocacy for a moment and look at this call to action logically and structurally, it is very similar to what many of our politicians, scientists and environmental activists are telling us right now. We need to find ways to cause less impact on our environment and live more harmoniously with the cycles that have sustained our existence up to this point - turn on. We need to become aware of how our individual and collective actions impact the quality and quantity of future human life - tune in. And we need to implement these solutions in our lifestyles and industrial and economic systems - drop out.

These parallels, substituting intellectual thought and creative entrepreneurial acuity for LSD and mushrooms, hold the potential for us to change the world. That's why most of us came to college in the first place, right? So how do we make the next move?

Well, it's you - especially all you University instructors and professors - you need to take your students to the Focus the Nation events tomorrow because the one-time opportunity to academically and seriously address climate change issues far outweighs the 20-or-30-times-a-term opportunity to address coursework.

This is our future that we're dealing with here, and it cannot be dealt with lightly or delayed indefinitely to "another day, sometime." Focus the Nation is that day, and that day is Jan. 31, 2008.

Take the initiative. Use your professional skills to demonstrate how life, academics, learning and simple presence on a university campus are relevant to each individual's contribution to creating a global climate change problem, or realizing a global climate change solution.

If you ignore this call to action, then on Friday, Feb. 1, 2008, and later, on Thursday, Feb. 1, 2018, and even on Tuesday, Feb. 1, 2028, a little voice in your head will whisper, "what if?" What if you had invested one hour of class time, way back in 2008 to spark a little inspiration in the mind of a University of Oregon student? What if?

If you choose to teach class instead of take your students to Focus the Nation, in 20 years you will not remember what you taught that day. You will not even remember what class you were teaching that term. But you will remember that you made a conscious decision to place the importance of one hour of class time over the importance of the chance to initiate positive social and environmental change on a national scale.

Opportunities like this do not come often.

Embrace this moment, when Al Gore's decades of advocacy have given us a hunger to do good, when Barak Obama, in his historic move toward the presidency, implores "everybody to be involved with [Focus the Nation]… the largest campus teach-in, on global warming, in U.S. history," and when even George W. Bush, freshly showered in sweet crude, calls on us in his State of the Union swan song to "complete an international agreement that has the potential to slow, stop, and eventually reverse the growth of greenhouse gases."

Now is not the time to hesitate and think that somebody else will do something. You and your students are those "somebody elses," so go, tune in, and on Monday, Feb. 1, 2038 we will all look back and remember, "Yeah, I was there."

jgrenzsund@dailyemerald.com

Mission in Afghanistan Dwarfs, Outpaces the US Commitment

2008-01-23T11:46:00.000-08:00

Joshua Grenzsund - The Campus Word

Wednesday, 23 January 2008

If one hasn’t been particularly paying much attention to the

United States

’ first war of the 21st century, perhaps distracted by Iraq (or by the writers’ strike), one might just believe the claims being made by Secretary Gates concerning US operations in Afghanistan.

When first made public, Gates said that the possible deployment of additional troops to the country was simply to make up for numbers that nations participating in the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force Allies were unwilling or unable to provide, which left a gap of about 7,500 troops short.

Sure, we may be able to accept that, but first we’ve got to ask what numbers have already been provided? According to news reports from early 2005, and according to information posted on NATO’s own website, ISAF troop levels in February 2005 topped out at about 8,000 troops, less than 100 of which were American. At that same time, about 17,000 US military personnel were conducting training and counter-terrorism combat operations. Now, three years later, the NATO-led force has expanded its area of responsibility, most notably in the south, and its numbers have grown to about 40,000, of which about 14,000 are US. Additionally, the US still has about 13,000 troops dedicated to hunting Taliban and al-Qaida forces, and when the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit and part of the 7th Marine Regiment arrive, that number will return to about 16,500. When we break down the numbers like this, we see a five-time increase in the number of NATO-led forces and a near-level number of US troops serving as part of Operation Enduring Freedom.

When faced with this sort of analysis, Secretary Gates said that the real reason for the US Marine deployment was that NATO, as a whole, “has not trained for counterinsurgency operations,” implying that the US troops would be able to handle the mission better. But lost behind all the exchanges over which troops and which numbers, there is the actual question of why more than 50,000 troops are unable to do the job or have the apparent effects that about 25,000 had just three years ago when the Pentagon was planning US troop reductions thanks to a growing Afghan Army and increased NATO presence. If there was a moment of opportunity to realize an enduring and democratic freedom in Afghanistan, it was during the 2004 Parliamentary and Presidential elections. But that moment is very much in the past.

The scale of the US mission in Afghanistan, as a whole, is underwhelming, and is justifiably dwarfed by the lofty goals that we have set up for ourselves and for Afghanistan. For more than six years we've claimed success in helping establish a just and sustainable democracy in a region edging to the far end of three decades of continual war, not to mention the century previous to that. But in 2004 we sent just 1,000 extra soldiers from the 82nd Airborne to help stabilize things during the elections, and now we send just 3,200 Marines to fend off the perennial “spring offensive,” when the snow melts in the Afghan mountains and it's easier to pack around a PKM and RPG and set up a roadside bomb or make-shift rocket tube. One could continue to argue that it’s not numbers, but tactics and strategy, but in any case what little has been thrown at Afghanistan over the last three years has not been calculated for a full military, political, economic,or social achievement of our freedom-minded goals. In light of all this, the deployment of these Marine units on an unscheduled tour indicates that the democratic goals of the mission in Afghanistan are not viable, specifically because the strength and tactics of US and Coalition Forces are not able to keep pace with the growing insurgency.

The US and NATO are quickly losing real, political and symbolic ground because they are not adapting to the insurgency; because Afghanistan is not a priority for either the US or its NATO allies; and, increasingly, because the instability in Pakistan is a psychological victory for extremists and a defeat for a US that is cobbled to the increasingly tyrannical Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf. At best we can hope, or I should say, those in Afghanistan who have risked their political and physical lives should hope — and all those US and ISAF personnel who are likewise risking their lives should hope — that we arrive at a mix of strength, tactics and strategy that will bring a lasting peace to that nation.

But this hope alone will almost certainly prove futile, as prior to the recent assination of Benazir Bhutto only two of our presidential candidates, Barak Obama and John McCain, were forwarding policies that actively pursue that enduring end. Since then Hillary Clinton has also voiced her concern for specific "success" on the Afghan-Pakistan front in the "War on Terror." But Republican candidates Mitt Romney and Rudolph Giuliani do not see Afghanistan as a foreign policy priority, which resembles Secretary Gates' own position. He is concerned with

Afghanistan

only as a third priority, after

Iraq,

and a top priority of maneuvering the US Military into “a sustainable position.” Given that prioritization, it appears that it will only be a position that sustains our lessening influence against the insurgencies in

Afghanistan

and

Iraq

, but doesn’t end the occupations one way or the other.

2008 www.thecampusword.com

Impacts of Marketing Cloned Meat

2008-01-23T08:57:00.000-08:00

Will that cheesburger cost society its soul?

In my opinion | Duceré Useré Cycleré

By: Josh Grenzsund

Posted: 1/23/08

We have taken a small step closer to "the future" and a giant leap away from a "natural" or "traditional" relationship with the animals that we feed upon. If you think that shrink-wrapped supermarket meat already separates you too much from the life, the animal and the death that created your juicy New York strip steak, you won't like this latest dish.

On Jan. 15 the US Food and Drug Administration announced "meat and milk from clones of cattle, swine, and goats, and the offspring of clones from any species traditionally consumed as food, are as safe to eat as food from conventionally bred animals." Though it still encourages companies to keep the products that come directly from the body of a cloned animal, they are fully endorsing the sale of products from any "traditionally" conceived animals that the clone may have parented.

And the US is not alone in this move. On Jan. 11 the European Food Safety Authority released a draft opinion on cloning that reads "food products obtained from healthy cattle and pig clones and their offspring" are similar to products from "conventionally bred animals" and can be marketed to consumers.

Livestock owners who applaud this move liken cloning to just a different sort of selective breeding. Instead of breeding an animal with desirable qualities and hoping you can keep the bloodline going and thus grow flocks and herds of plump, fast-growing, disease-resistant flesh, you can simply make exact genetic copies of the best breeding stock, using somatic cell nuclei transfer, and be almost guaranteed copious high-quality results.

What this means for your shopping basket is that you will be able to buy cheese, milk, steaks and processed meaty treats that are of the highest quality and best value because the consumption-bound animals are the "natural" offspring of a multitude of blue-blood clone breeders who have passed on their tastiest traits.

But this FDA decision will also certainly re-invigorate conspiracy theorists' claims that somewhere some companies already have Matrix-like factories of chicken breasts growing in vats of synthetic amniotic fluid, plucked off when they reach 14 ounces and packaged for sale.

While that may seem unrealistic, the theory probably has its origins in the 1995 feat of University of Massachusetts' Dr. Charles Vacanti. The Journal of Cellular and Molecular Medicine published a tribute to Dr. Vacanti in 2006, recalling the groundbreaking experiment when he manipulated cells to "produce tissue-engineered cartilage in the shape of a human ear on the back of an immuno-compromised nude mouse." So sure, terrible/terrific things are possible.

And if we have or do develop processes to the point that we can grow cloned parts without the help of the non-desirable excess - a whole animal - we'll have a new conundrum. On the one hand, there will logically no longer be the issue of animal cruelty in growing meat-for-food-and-skin, as a piece of flesh with no central nervous system to process stimuli can't be considered a conscious being. But on the other hand, we will also have dismembered the system of what we understand to be the "natural" order for living creatures, whether you keep chickens as pets or like to munch on their tender flesh.

However, cloned meat, in any fashion, should not be allowed into our marketplaces because it is a move that helps shift the center-mass of our social and consumer inhibitions further away from a world in which the realities of death as part of life and killing as part of eating are visible and understood. Not only does it disrupt the utopian idea of the "golden age" of how we imagine life used to be, it also sets the stage for some new socio-political crossbreeding that could produce some strange offspring.

It just happens that also last week, here on campus, animal rights activist group PETA had some representatives go near naked in front of the EMU in protest of fur, and by extension, meat products and the supposed exploitation of animals. So, if we could grow just the finest cloned fur, would people still be able to protest that it is unethical treatment of an animal - no brain, no pain? But if PETA would protest cloned parts, or cloning at all, as a cruel disruption of "natural" animal lives, then they may have an ally in environmental activists or local-natural-foodists who advocate against genetic modification, cloning and other developments that may threaten more "natural" species or "traditional" relationships with food.

However, PETA President Ingrid Newkirk's plans, which, according to her will, include having her own body dismembered and parts of it cooked or sent to those with whom she particularly disagrees, may be too extreme for "local food" people.

So while such a nexus may be unrealistic or unsustainable, other developments may create collaborations that are more long lasting. One of these, which have been gaining a lot of momentum in our area, is the work among forestry conservation advocates and climate change activists. As a product of the focus on climate issues, this cooperation seems to have staying power that a PETA-local food collaborative may not.

jgrenzsund@dailyemerald.com

Rogue tree-huggers, board room suits join forces

2008-01-16T13:40:00.000-08:00

Rogue tree-huggers, board room suits join forces

In my opinion | Duceré Useré Cycleré

By: Josh Grenzsund

Posted: 1/16/08

In the late 1990s and early 2000s Eugene gained a reputation as the center of a radical, active, and sometimes destructive environmental movement. This extreme breed of environmental activist defied establishment authority and challenged business development in a series of direct actions, from tree-sits in town and in regional forests, to a 1999 riot during “rush-hour” traffic and eventually a string of arsons.

Now many of those trendsetters are in prison, some as convicted “terrorists,” the FBI has reestablished its authority, and Eugene’s activists are finding it necessary, even beneficial, to take a different approach in a radically changed social environment.

For one, it is now totally cool, and increasingly profitable, for the same governments and businesses who stirred up such ire a decade ago with their policies of expansion and development to tag their operations with leafy green logos and buzzwords like “organic,” “sustainable,” and “eco-friendly.” This is a sure sign that the message of the 90s has at least been at least partially assimilated, but Eugene’s new breed of environmentally conscious activists dare not leave it at that. Instead, they are following this eco-image on its descent straight into the deepest bureaucratic and industrial reaches.

Near the core of this effort on the UO campus is the ASUO organization known as the Survival Center. The name may conjure visions of grizzled men and women snaring bunnies with their fists and trekking through the wilderness, but the center was actually formed in the 1970s and has a mission that is “geared towards the education of the campus community around issues of social justice and environmentalism.”

Housed in Suite One of the Erb Memorial Union, the Survival Center shares a tightly-packed space with The Student Insurgent, a self-proclaimed “radical newspaper,” and the Oregon Student Public Interest Research Group. The place exudes an energy that will likely raise your hackles the first time you step through the door, as though the fury of ’99 or ’01 still breathes from the walls. It does.

Some of the posters plastering the wall date back at least a decade and the racks upon racks of zines and radical newspapers form a density of independent thought and determination that is unequalled on campus, and likely unparalleled anywhere in Eugene. Even some organizers who see the Survival Center as a second home admit that a first visit can be over-stimulating, or even intimidating. But that impression is not lasting.

If you can make it past the gauntlet of literature and pamphlets, the next thing you are sure to find is a smiling face, and for good reason. Suite One is an authentic safe space, with comfortable couches, computers to use, and an all-inclusive, open-access policy centered around the ideals of social and environmental justice. But the individuals and groups who operate out of this room are far from satisfied in keeping these ideals confined to four walls and a low-slung ceiling.

Last week I met with two of these smiling faces, two individuals who are, dare I say, hell bent on marking every mind they meet with mental graffiti that spells out a simple message – think about your actions, and the reactions of those actions.

Tara Burke and Jesse Hough are both involved in two relatively new movements whose UO activities are based out of the Survival Center – the Cascade Climate Network and the Sustainability Coalition. The CCN was created this past October by 20 student representatives from 10 colleges in Oregon and Washington when they met and drafted a four-page Cascade Climate Declaration. The Declaration identifies the “window of opportunity” that is available to affect the outcome of a climate crisis and outlines several principles which we need to follow to reach a “sustainable, just, and prosperous future.” Those 20 students are currently soliciting signatories to the Declaration and will present it to their states’ governors concurrent with Focus the Nation on January 31.

While the CCN is a regional movement to help focus on climate change, Burke and Hough also recognize the need to reduce redundant efforts and create synergy among the dozen or so campus organizations involved in social and environmental justice movements. The next Sustainability Coalition meeting, this Friday at 4 PM in EMU’s Rogue River Room, will bring together groups with seemingly disparate philosophies – some leaning towards radicalism and direct action while others advocate much more mainstream approaches.

In their own activism, Burke and Hough epitomize this new ideal of conjoined extremes, with Burke acknowledging her radical inclinations and Hough showing his administrative bent with his button-up shirt and clean-shaven face. But rather than being an anomaly, this dynamic is now the norm, and a beneficial one at that. Each extreme learns from the other and we are all learning that everyone, in a real sense, is a direct activist. We all have to make conscious choices about our lifestyles because our lifestyles already have direct repercussions on our environment and the future of human existence. Your action already is direct action – direct towards precipitating climate crisis, or direct towards averting it.

Where the argument used to be one concerned with saving “nature,” we now understand that the challenge is in fact one of saving ourselves. So turn off your computer at night, reuse your water bottles, and become an instant activist because, as Burke and Hough agree, “peak oil” is inevitable and “the revolution is here.”

jgrenzsund@dailyemerald.com

Don't look for heroes in Afghanistan (not the old kind, at least)

2008-01-16T13:30:00.000-08:00

Tuesday, 15 January 2008

Joshua Grenzsund - The Campus Word

The US needs to lose its self-image as a gallant hero to make real progress in Afghanistan and the rest of Central Asia.

A soldier—US Army Special Forces—rides on horseback under the Afghan sun amidst gunfire, explosions and falling enemy fighters. If you think back about six years you’ll remember those images from the news in late October of 2001. The

, attacked and threatened, was overtly sending troops, our country’s rugged Western heroes, to a ravaged and dangerous land to fight the “evil doers.”

But if you browse through your local video store or NetFlicks you’ll remember it was actually 13 years earlier, in May of 1988, that Sylvester Stalone acted out these same scenes in "Rambo III," fighting Soviet troops with his US muscles.

After the 1991 Soviet collapse, many in the US saw Afghanistan as the battle that ended the Cold War. Though US involvement was officially covert, there was a feeling that the US won the war. That embellishment prepared us to accept, or even cheer, the 2001 images of our soldiers on horseback. The imagined invincible Special Forces hero, John Rambo, who fought alongside the Mujahideen in 1988, had become the actual Special Forces fighting alongside the Northern Alliance in 2001. However this realization of cowboy bravado in Afghanistan has given way to another change.

Through the 1980s the US was interested in prolonging the guerrilla war with the Soviet military as part of its general Cold War strategy (and incidentally recently chronicled in the much-hyped film “Charlie Wilson’s War” starring Tom Hanks), but now the US military, along with the Afghan National Army and their NATO and ISAF partners, are on the receiving end of a similar guerrilla strategy on the same battlefields. Six years after the country of Afghanistan was “liberated” and “stabilized” there are increasing signs that the US has started playing the same imperial role the Soviets did in the '80s. They don’t ride horseback any more, but they try the same balance of infrastructure rebuilding and large scale human hunting that failed the Soviets.

The pressure and trials of the extended conflict neared their climax in the seventh year of Soviet Union occupation and ultimately forced their withdrawal. Though Soviet tactics were admittedly more brutal, there are many similarities in the detentions and raids of the ‘80s and the ‘00s that arguably create more resistance to an occupying force than they resolve. No one can say for sure, at this point, that the US and its Western allies will fail to achieve the stated goal of fostering a stable democracy in Afghanistan, but given history, the outlook is less than encouraging.

One major factor that leads to this assessment is the Afghan peoples’ defiance of foreign influence. Among the Afghan population the Pashtun, those who traditionally live along the Afghan-Pakistan border, have a reputation of being defiant and proud fighters, and this reputation is well supported by anecdotal evidence. While I was in Afghanistan in 2004 I met several Pashtun men who had faced detention and interrogation not only by the Soviets in the 1980s, but also now, by US forces. These men were often unfazed, emboldened, and bragged of their ability to defeat transient superpowers.

But an even more ominous aspect of the situation is that the US now occupies Soviet-built airfields as its main bases in Afghanistan. In a Hollywood sense, we know the heroes of the Afghan-Soviet war were the ones who attacked these bases, not maneuvered from within them. And in a political sense, one only need imagine the challenge the US would feel if Russia occupied similar positions not too far from our borders. From 2001 until late 2005 the US also used a former Soviet airfield at Karshi-Khanabad in Uzbekistan. However, after Uzbek President Islam Karimov refused to allow a full investigation of the May 2005 massacre in Andijan and faced US criticism, Karimov demonstrated a shift away from ties with the West by ordering the US to vacate the airfield.

Karimov is a holdover from Soviet leadership who shows no signs of letting go of his 16 year “democratic” rule and his continued control is evidence of a longing for Soviet-style government and influence. Russia, with President Vladimir Putin at its helm, certainly welcomes this sort of hold-over cohesion within former Soviet territories.

While the US exudes ambivalence about its desires of influence in Central Asia while claiming to support Afghanistan’s sovereignty, Russia is more open about its intentions. While it is now the world’s tenth largest economy, Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) reported in December on Russia’s intentions to “be among the world's top five most-developed countries” by 2020. Such a move will not come through bashfulness or allowing US influence into former Soviet territories. It will be accomplished by a consolidation of power in Russia and within its former spheres of influence, focused greatly on fossil fuel resources.

A marked recent development that underlines the willingness to follow through on this is the parallel between Putin’s choice for Russian President, Dmitry Medvedev, and the newly appointed Kyrgyz Prime Minister, Igor Chudinov. Medvedev ,42, served as chairman of Gazprom, and First Deputy Prime Minister before becoming Putin’s candidate. Chudinov, 46, is an ethnic Russian who does not speak Kyrgyz and was a former director-general of Kyrgyzgaz.

Though Putin’s announcement about Medvedev has received world-wide press coverage and RFE/RL and several Russian language news outlets have reported on Chudinov, there has been little mention, so far, of how Chudinov may play into Russia’s attempts at a wider economic reconsolidation. The placement of these young men with experience in the petrol sector is not a coincidence when viewed with Russia’s goals by 2020 and beyond.

The US presence in Afghanistan and its desire to spread western-style and western-friendly governments in Central Asia run counter to Russia’s interests and will meet with increasingly strong overt and covert resistance. The US has to come to terms that they are no longer the dashing heroic liberators on horseback in Afghanistan, but rather occupiers in the shadow of a strengthening Russia, facing mountain fighters who have driven out every occupying force in history.

Moving a plan moves life. And if the plan went right - which it rarely does completely - my brother left for Iraq last night.

I've made a similar trip myself - not to Iraq, but to Afghanistan. I'm looking over that old journal right now, analyzing it to see if there is the same mixture of fear, excitement and awe that I remember feeling on that first long dark flight to the other side of the planet.

My notes from that trip seem so pragmatic, never raising a note of critique as to why exactly I was going to this Central Asian country, nor a bit of wonder as to if I would make a return flight. I wrote about the immense darkness, the surreal experience of drinking beer and watching movies at 32,000 feet on the way to a war-torn land of dust and rock where I would help kill people - but I left out the killing people part.

I'm not surprised by the absence of critique early on in my journal. I remember feeling it, living it, but I also remember knowing that I would only remain sane if I kept it at a distance by joking about it, shunning its emotional appeals, and, as often as possible, preventing it from leaving the tip of my tongue or the tip of my pen. Erase, delete, and move on.

I can recognize this split, this desire to separate beliefs and ideals from obligation and action, not only in myself, but in our country as a whole. And I think it is easier for a country to live with this conflict than it is for an individual to justify it to her or himself, especially over long periods of time. The most valid question I ever get is why. If I do not agree with the theory of war, why did I join the military and allow myself to be made into a soldier? I have no fully sufficient answer, only a confused sense of duty to the country that raised me, and of course, curiosity.

I mean, who does not want to experience the thrill of a meaningful life? While our nation places rock stars, presidents, inventors, activists and millionaires as historical markers, military members also hold this mystique as a way for the average person to make history, to be involved in actually shaping the world. I resisted this pull for years, putting in my best effort to become a rock star, but in the end, enticed by college money, I bit into the military myth. I would face death, and thereby know life.

When we invaded Afghanistan in October 2001, I accepted the inevitability that I would walk the ground where Alexander the Great led his army, and the Mujahideen defeated the great Soviet Bear. I would be a part of history.

Once the first six months in Afghanistan went by, the critique of my actions crept back in. But it was cynical, limping, crippled - the best of my human compassion beaten daily, lied to, denied food, rest, and exposed to the anxious elements of war. Just do your job. We're making a great difference. It can't be changed. The better we target, the fewer lives will be lost. Threats from mortars, rockets, bombs, the unseen, the fellow service members who declare they have snapped, yet still carry live ammunition. The plan of war is words, and it is easy to critique words. The action of war is people, their tools, and their beliefs and orders, and it is much more complex to critique people.

The point I need to make here is that if I had never partaken in the action of war, I would probably believe that I could critique the words of war and remain separate from its actions. My disagreement would somehow separate me from the action, and absolve me of responsibility for the war. I could critique without participating. The fact is that citizens cannot absolve themselves of responsibility for U.S. foreign policy, because basic participation in, and dependence upon the economy, government, and society binds their personal, daily, individual movements to the country's larger historical movements.

If civilians could truly absolve themselves from responsibility because they have not walked foreign soil with loaded weapons, veterans could logically do the same because they did not make the war plan. We are all just people with ideas that may or may not be at odds with our actions.

But we have to take responsibility for those particular actions. Paying taxes, carrying a passport, voting, not voting, spending money, questioning enemy combatants - none of these are disconnected from our country's existence. Holding and espousing personal and political beliefs that are contrary to U.S. policy is not enough to disconnect oneself from one's country, or even its most aggressive and violent foreign policy. It is all connected.

Through economic, political, and even philosophical connections - while I am now living comfortably and safely here in Eugene, paying taxes, not worrying about rockets - my brother is arriving in Iraq. I believe in his safe return.

But so what? Even the three front-running Democratic candidates for president now say they do not think they could get the U.S. out of Iraq by the end of their first term. Don't let their words absolve you of your responsibility for how you affect our country's actions.

jgrenzsund@dailyemerald.com

Censorship

2007-10-13T15:16:00.000-07:00

Fire this... FUCK CENSORSHIP

Editorial | The purpose of the headline on this editorial is to show that we support college newspapers' right to run profanity

By: Emerald Editorial Board

Posted: 10/2/07

Because of a printing error, Page 2 of the Emerald's Monday edition was replaced with a page from The Daily Barometer, the student newspaper at Oregon State University. The content that should have run on that page has been re-edited and appears in today's issue. View a PDF of Monday's Page 2 here.

Usually the Emerald won't run the word "fuck" at all, much less in a bold headline. Desperate times call for desperate measures, however, which makes this the perfect moment for a strong statement in support of free speech.

Our bold text is not meant to be sensational, but is in response to another strong statement, one from the editorial board of the Rocky Mountain Collegian, the student newspaper at Colorado State University. Their statement was written in response to the Sept. 17 Tasering of Andrew Meyer, a student at the

Original Source

View a digital copy of what the Rocky Mountain Collegian's editorial looked like here.

Posted: 7/2/07

Tune in. Turn on. Keep them out.

This is the catch phrase for the Unites States' nationalistic culture of xenophobia. Self-deluded, misanthropic and doomed to fail, this anti-immigration sentiment has much in common with former Harvard professor Timothy Leary's endorsement of a drug culture in the 1960s.

During his lifetime Leary dropped more than 5,000 hits of acid in his quest to discover a way of life and living that was better than what U.S. society had made of itself. He thought that use of LSD could be a productive way to become sensitive to our individual and collective human capacity, to attune ourselves with this harmonious potential, and to purge ourselves of artificial and involuntary social impulses and regulations.

The current movement against immigration is based on equally heavy doses of mind-altering "substances" - economic and racial power. We've all heard people dose themselves with these ideas on radio, in print, and in person. "They're taking our jobs. They don't even speak our language." That's all you need to espouse and believe to start trippin' hard on a dangerous reality.

The more a person speaks like this, the more she or he is apt to assemble a version of reality that will support such views. Convinced that such a view is a viable reality, the more extreme and passionate a person is willing to argue that 'this is the way it is.'

This is the state of mind you hear about when people are so high that they believe they can fly, so they leap from a building or bridge. But then gravity takes over and the consequences occur not in the mind's hallucination, but in the hard physics of moving bodies. The economic fear and greed that feed xenophobia work like potent psychedelics, and the leap occurs when we allow or prompt our government to enact immigration and citizenship laws based on racial and economic factors.

We could concede that maybe, just maybe, anti-immigration advocates begin with an innocent attempt to make life better, but especially here in the United States, such an "ignorance-is-bliss" view is at least hypocritical and at worst nauseatingly immoral. According to the U.S. Census Bureau we are a nation that is 98.5 percent immigrants, and you can rest assured it is not the 1.5 percent Native American population that is drafting and enacting immigration laws, though they may be the only group logically entitled to do so.

Instead, current policies and tendencies are being endorsed by a United States citizenry that is continuing the centuries-old tradition of expansion and consolidation of the country's political borders. The United States spent much of the 19th century occupying, invading, negotiating and annexing lands to form a contiguous territory from the Atlantic to the Pacific and this impulse for expansion is manifested in the 21st century as a compulsion to maintain security for this cobbled homeland.

Economics, land and race have never been separate concerns for this country - from a constitution that partitioned rights along lines of race and citizenship, to the displacement of native populations to reservations, to bureaucratic manipulations that denied citizenship and land rights to former Mexican citizens after the northern half of Mexico was lost to the United States by the 1848 treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. This desire to preserve "America for Americans" has been increased by current social fears.

Adding global economic volatility and the Wars on Drugs and Terror to our traditional national insecurity is like the introduction of freebased cocaine to our national psyche, or maybe like dirty methamphetamine cooked up in a motel bathroom - we are a paranoid country, determined to keep "them" out, and not willing to admit that we are them. We are the immigrants of past decades, who came to this land for the opportunities it is rumored to afford. Instead of seeking to mitigate the difficulties encountered by new immigrants entering this mongrel land, we are jealous of our citizenship.

Encouraged by fears of terrorism we are watching this country carry out a de facto militarization of our southern border, local governments are enacting laws requiring proof of citizenship to rent an apartment, and our federal government is unable to come to terms with the historical reliance upon immigrant population and labor, be it legal or illegal.

Laws are an unavoidable part of our social organization, but when we approve laws, we need to recognize the root impetus for their creation, as well as the ways that they can be manipulated and perverted. Measures ostensibly intended to protect citizens and citizen-workers' rights may actually operate as systems of exploitation - refusing rights and protections to non-citizens, greatly based on racial and economic factors.

All these factors and movements are relevant here in Oregon, a state very proud of its 19th century 'pioneer' immigration that led to statehood in 1859. And as inheritors of this legacy, we have to recognize that most Oregonians, being non-Native American, are immigrants to a foreign land. Population statistics show that the state's new immigrant population is growing and Oregonians' individual and collective behavior in this time of change will demonstrate if we are deluded or not, if we are tripping on economic and racial power or not, and if we deserve to call ourselves citizens of this land.

jgrenzsund@dailyemerald.com

Hate your job?

2007-10-13T14:22:00.000-07:00

Hate your job? The feeling appears to be mutual

In my opinion

By: Josh Grenzsund

Posted: 6/25/07

Numbers are all about perspective. According to a press release from The Conference Board, half of all Americans are satisfied with their jobs. This could mean that we each have a 50 percent chance of liking our job, but it really means that half of us have a 100 percent chance of hating our job. So if you're looking for work right now, you know what you have to look forward to. For seasonal students, you'll hate your job for three months. For you recent grads, well, it will be a bit longer.

But there is a very good reason why people hate work- it hates us first. If we believe Karl Marx, each person is destined to spend life as a labor source, producing products and delivering services in an economic system that erases any trace of the individual's labor and inspiration. Your coffee this morning could not relate to you the aspirations of the person who picked it. The files you alphabetized show no sign of your efforts to educate yourself. Nobody looks at the floor you sweated to mop and wax and says, "Wow, what grace and expression - that's an Arthur Nash original for sure." In effect this system of work transforms the essence of one's humanity and soul into an abstract exchange value.

When you look at it that way, it's a wonder anyone retains any motivation to go out and participate in the process. But the other part of the equation is of course the need for the liquid of life-cash. Apart from the few who probably manage to live off the grid out there somewhere on the frontier between industrial capitalism and the Cascades, we all look desperately, fall over each other even, to secure our place in the soul-sucking machine.

College students know this well. Far from being liberated from the cash labor grind, college students not only have to negotiate the summer rush for jobs, but they also have to cut themselves out of the market for most jobs that are not 'temporary' or 'seasonal.' One may go to college on the pretext of seeking enlightenment and a better world and all that crap, but if you've finished even a term and a half you've learned that all the world is a slow machine of pain and toil and you're just delaying the inevitable with a few more years of education. The gears and levers of the machine are patient and they will be there when you get out. When you do leave, or if you have just left, there is that admirable moment of hope when one believes that she or he has truly increased his or her marketable exchange value, but a four-year degree is a meal ticket for a painful few.

Even without a finished degree, you hit the mean streets of Eugene last week with your polished resume and hair just right, and meaningful work, work you think you will like, may be a priority for the first week or two of the search, but in the frantic early summer scramble most job seekers will be edged out and soon you'll settle for any job at all. When desperation sets in, the system has already won. Look in the mirror and in your pocket book - you're not even working yet and the little vacuum tubes are pulling hard at your soul. Your 30 or 90 credits, BA or MA may be rounding out your character and expanding your mind, but they're not paying the bills and filling your accounts.

There's no way to beat this work thing, but if you want to settle the account a little closer, take a hint from Marx and treat the job market for the soulless machine it is. Sure, it will pay you $7.80 an hour, but it won't flirt with you or take you home, so don't try to impress it. Take this little theory to heart - don't assess the jobs out there against yourself and what you want, assess yourself and what you are willing to do to get the jobs out there. It works like this: You scan the want ads and circle a bunch that you're nearly qualified for and might get if you can nail the interview. You'd be happy with any one of them because they're all related to your field of study and the pay is decent. Cross all of these out. You'll spend hours on applications for naught.

Now circle the jobs that pay a little less than you'd like and are of a type you swore you'd never do again or just plain despise. Narrow these down to two or three. These are the jobs you'll be reduced to begging for in two weeks anyhow, so now you're two weeks ahead of the game. Revise your resume and go to the interview ready not to impress them with special skills and future aspirations, but a ruthless willingness to work any hours and no plans to ever look for any other job.

Some may call this pessimistic or defeatist because they say 'aim for the stars' and 'follow your heart,' but I call it smart - you've got to deceive yourself a little to get along in the machine. At least when you hate that job, you have a job to hate and you can move to a better one later.