The Secret History of the War on Cancer: the Book

In her compelling book, The Secret History of the War on Cancer, Devra Davis picks away the layers of collusion, cover-up, denial, lobbying and outright lying that have comprised much of the last hundred years of a conflict between the interests of the large mega-corporations, like DuPont, and the life-saving interests of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of lives that were sacrificed to keep the corporate, chemical secrets hidden.
Telling secrets is never a "friend-generating" sport; and in these cases, Davis takes the gloves off, for many reasons, not the least of which are the preventable deaths of her family members, if the full truth of the dangers of certain elements, compounds and the conditions for working with those chemicals had been disclosed fully, honourably, and at a time when those secrets were fully known.
Isn't it strange, or perhaps not, that while the rocket scientists who had been producing German rockets during WWII found employment in the U.S. immediately after the war, and began seamlessly producing military materiel for the U.S., those German scientists and medical professionals who had done so much to advance the cause of fighting cancer were not so "acceptable," or "needed" in the post-war American consciousness of the dangers of carcinogens. You may recall that the Germany of the Third Reich was as opposed to the known causes of cancer as it was to the existence of "foreign" and particularly Jewish contaminants in their perfect Aryan race war. Hitler, himself, applied mustard dressings to his dying mother's open chest sores, as she struggling, in vain, against the ravages of her cancer.
And yet, the list of virulent elements, especially those used in the production of dyes, like benzidine, and their capacity to inflict savage and mortal damage to those whose livelihoods depended on their working, without adequate protection, in unsafe environments.
And, the legal forces mounted against those who sought justice on behalf of their dead and/or suffering loved ones, were so powerful, so well financed, and so meticulous that many of the "expert witnesses" including Davis herself, were declared incompetent, "because they could not specifically prove that X chemical had caused Y cancer in Z person."

So, when you next hear someone describing the law as a "blunt" instrument in the pursuit of justice, remember that it is only blunt when it needs to be, when, for example the legislators are writing the laws, so that many cases can be heard under the principles of the statute, but in the cross-examination process, any question that can be devised that is not leading, is admissable. And the imagination and nit-picking of the defense attorneys also knows no limits, in pursuit of the exoneration of the complicit corporation, in the pursuit of its profits, using whatever chemicals, with whatever dangers, make that pursuit possible.

Every student of both science, and of business should be required to read, study, digest and debate the contents of this revealing book, so that George Carlin's oxymoron, "business ethics" can be reversed, and we can begin to speak legitimately of the "ethics of business."
Workplace safety, including safety from dangerous substances is, and will likely remain such a difficult and often unsuccessful battle of justice, since the lives of the victims are worth pennies, compared to the "larger value" of the corporation's ability to continue to pursue its profits, in a culture that worships at the altar of the corporation. If the "engine of the economy" is the corporation, or the smaller business entity, and the politicians seek their own re-election, for which they need  the support of both of those business/corporate entities, then it follows that the "safety" of the workers, who also need the dangerous jobs they hold, and will continue to hold, (and remember they voluntarily applied for those jobs) will take a back seat to the profit motive of their employers. And, as Davis documents, justice will come in very small droplets, infrequently sprinkled, and only reluctantly even then, on the graves of its victims.

Elizabeth, the movie

Elizabeth, the movie played on the History channel on Sunday this weekend, followed by Elizabeth, The Golden Age. I could only manage the first, given the depth of religious cruelty, savage brutality and character assassination that created the culture for the physical violence.
Catholics and heretics vying for the "realm" revealed an intolerance in the 'christian' world that makes the contemporary violence perpetrated by radical jihadists look 'normal.' Or at least somewhat normal.
In four hundred years, the people of the world have not moved very far toward authentic tolerance, a kind of celebration of the larger bounty of the world's people, and the natural beauty that confronts everyone every day.
We are a mean little race, jealous, intemperate, indivious, small minded and unrelentingly vicious to those whose background, including their parentage, is held against them, by people in power as role models. We are a selfish race that takes more easily than it gives back; that grasps more than it offers an outstretched hand. Oh, individually, there are many who disprove this thesis; and it is always individuals that generate hope, certainly not groups.
In fact, loyalty to groups, especially groups of religious (radicals) is one of the most virulent forms of human violence that history demonstrates. And when political and religious goals become one, there is no limit to the degree of violence that humans of all colours, stripes, and incomes are capable of perpetrating.
Burning people at the stake for their religious views, as this movie depicts in its opening scenes, is very hard to confront in 2010, yet we all know that similar violence is the norm in many parts of the world, notwithstanding the efforts, some of the successful, that have been expended to moderate violence around the globe.
One cannot watch this film without reflecting on human nature, its addiction to power, and its grasp of the instruments of power, including violence, to seek selfish goals, and the capacity of the individual to withstand so much as Elizabeth I withstood for a very long reign.

Headstrong Immature little boys govern

By Haroon Siddiqui, Toronto Star, August 8, 2010
Still, the U.S. easily retains its record of the highest incarceration rate in the world — 2.3 million vs. 1.6 million in China (despite five times the population). That’s 751 per 100,000 population vs. 627 in Russia and 107 in Canada.

A fifth of American inmates are sexually abused, 16 per cent suffer mental illnesses and another 16 per cent are kids under 18. About 500,000 are there on drug offences alone. Of the 700,000 released every year, more than half return within three years.
Yet the Tories are headed that way, with Day’s Orwellian fear-mongering and Justice Minister Rob Nicholson announcing higher jail terms for a raft of drug-, gambling- and prostitution-related crimes. Creating a clientele for the jails they are building.
Less than 1% of Canadians consider crime to be a major issue, yet the Harper government (through spokesperson Stockwell Day) says it is going to spend $9 billion on new prisons, plus their announced $16 billion on an untendered fighter jet contract with Lockheed Martin of the U.S. and yet Harper says he is going to cut the deficit in half in the next year. That can only be accomplished by a slash and burn of other expenditures, and it does not take a rocket scientist to conclude that those dollars will come from programs Canadians both need and consider important, like watchdogs on government, liasion with the public with government agencies, and perhaps even with the Canada Health Act.
As Siddiqui also writes in his insightful piece, if we thought Mike Harris's policies were destructive in Ontario, just watch what Harper is intent on doing in Ottawa, on a national scale.
More prisons, more military hardware, more severe punishments, and the apparent "manufacture" of criminals as clients for their "crack-down on criminals" agenda.
Lionel Tiger, in his book, The Manufacture of Evil, writes of how the industrial manufacturing system that has fueled the U.S. economy for the last half century or more, has also created a mind-set, and has developed a language and a model for other consequences, such as the industrializing of the human body, with respect to reproduction with the introduction of technological birth control methods. He is not arguing for or against those methods on a religious or moral basis, but he is using the industrial model as the template for many social and domestic decisions.
Using the Tiger approach as metaphor, it is easy to see that the neo-cons are addicted to the financial model of governing, using the balance sheet, and their addiction to strict and literal and simplistic morality (as in growing the prison system with unreported criminals from unreported crimes) as their template for their vision of the future of the country.
Just as George W. Bush ignored and even obliterated evidence of mass destruction, in order to prosecute the war in Iraq, so the Harper conservatives as ignoring and removing the sources of evidence that would force them to pay attention to the needs of the poor, the underbelly of Canadian society, so they can purchase their "boys toys" like military fighter jets that even the Canadian military are not sure we need.
The Harper approach is, on the surface, slick, simplistic, ethically vaccuous and socially and politically immature, and cuts through the fabric and the tissue of the Canadian traditional, historical and cultural preferences, to accomplish their own ideological agenda.

Let's Say "No" to two-tiered Internet

This little "button" comes from an internet site that is working with nearly two million supporters to try to prevent Google-Verizon from creating a two-tier internet.
If their deal is approved, and with an ineffectual Federal Communication Commission, friendly to the industry, functioning under the "leadership" of a George W. Bush appointee, and with the members of Congress virtually "owned" by the big Internet companies, there seems little doubt that it will "fly," then those with the money will be able to make their internet feeds go faster and be read first, and remove the equal access we all have to this new medium.
This blog, and millions of others would be reduced to irrelevant, if the new deal is approved, simply because there will be, once again, a corporately controlled, large money-purchased privilege to capture the eyes, minds and hearts of readers, as the mega-media organs do in the hard-copy publishing world.
This is one blogger who started this project with the understanding that the project was "free" and would have "equal access" to all users of the internet. That was Google's stated commitment in the original presentation on line.
Google has even posted a position that opposes a two-tier internet, but has apparently reversed their position given the prospect of a new deal with Verizon that would see their pockets lined with corporate money for the privilege of "preferred status," in the same manner as cable television.
People like this writer will not be able to afford to produce these blogs, which some critics consider mere "flatuence" anyway, but the principal of multiple perspectives competing merely on the basis of the merit of their content, as opposed to a few giant opinion-makers will vanish.
If you are one of those people who think the internet is one innovation that can justly remain a "public domain" without the undue dominance of those corporates who seek to purchase preferred status, please tell your friends, and if you live in the U.S. tell your congress representatives to say no to the Google Verizon proposed deal.

One Dead Indian, and one shamed Province

Having just watched the film, One Dead Indian, on the aptn network, I am a little in shock.
Born and bred within a few kilometers of the Parry Island Indian Reservation, and having attended both elementary and secondary school with many of the kids from "The Island" as we used to say, and having carried fond and beautiful memories of more than one of their number, specifically,  I can remember Les Tobobadung who played for the Provincial Junior C Hockey champions with elegance, grace, dignity and finesse, and having worked closely with his sister Dora, daughter of the former Chief, Flora Tobobadung in "lawyer Green's" office for several summers, and having eaten fillets of pickerel brought to my father each year for many decades by Solomon King from the Parry Island community, out of his fondness for my dad, I am somewhat familiar with individual First Nations people, and with their culture. For a few years, my family also had a long-term lease on a piece of land on Parry Island where we had a small and very modest cottage on a beautiful sand beach.
I can remember that the band office were less than "orderly" in their file-keeping about land leases; I can also remember that there were long periods of time between road work on the island road; I can also recall a decision, after I left school, when the children from the island, after a band council decision, were bussed 25 miles down the road to a private school in Rosseau, because the band believed that their children were experiencing discrimination at the local high school.
I can also remember the occasional sleeping, and presumed intoxicated, native man on the steps of the local bank on a Saturday morning and I can also remember when another native man was hired to work in a local pharmacy. It was an occasion second only to the hiring of Dora in the lawyer's office. There were small break-through's visible to anyone in the town willing to see.
Violence is not native to the First Nations people I know. Violence is not something they advocate, practice or even contemplate. Dedication to the history and the burial grounds of their ancestors, however, is something they value and honour. And those who might, or would, interfere with their perception of that sacred trust could run a risk of tormenting a generally "sleeping lion."
The conversation that followed the film, reporting on a conversation which included the then premier, Mike Harris, indicating "we have pandered to those people for far too long and this government needs to be seen taking action" is not the history, tradition, culture or memory of the Ontario in which I was raised.
In fact, it is a direct confrontation and assault on that Ontario.
This is the same man, who as Premier, delivered a memo to the then Dr. Allan King, who was at the time designing curriculum for the grades nine and ten history courses to be taught in Ontario secondary schools, directing "that no references to the role of First Nations,  Labour unions or women" were to be included in the curriculum design. In essence, the memo directed that our Ontario students were not be taught about these three subjects in their Canadian history course!
 Appalling? More like tragic!
Ideological? More like adamantine!
And settling the law suit brought against the person of the then premier just might indicate that there is more to the smoke that still rises from these bonfires of the 'vanity' of the government that white lines in the sky.
Ontarians can thank God for Officer Terrien the man who courageously challenged the evidence that "Dudley George was carrying a gun" from a vantage point behind the officer who shot and killed George. He knew and told the "Dean" trial on criminal negligence, that George carried only a stick, and was not a danger to anyone, from the perspective of firearms, nor was anyone else in that Ipperwash encampment. And the judge believed his testimony so there is at least the reassurance that this judge could see the tree for the forest.
Banana republics have constabularies paid to operate in the manner depicted by this film, albeit made by and for the First Nations Cree Band themselves. And we can only hope that this blood on the hands of all Ontarians is the last time our citizens ever have to witness blood on our hands, blood that never should have been shed.

32nd Hymn to Sarah, August 6, 2010

This is the day Christians call
Transfiguration, and the day
remembered in Japan as the day
the bomb fell on Hiroshima...
so there are other reasons why
the date is special for others, but for me
it is the day when I waken to the
memory of walking to the window
in the delivery room of St. Joseph's
hospital with the body of a new
life of only minutes lying serenely
in my arms, not yet named
she was to become
Sarah Jean, after her
maternal and paternal
great grandmothers
Tuck and Nolan respectively
and she has walked now
for thirty-two years giving
that name, and her ancestors
nothing but pride in her
presence, and honour to be
knowing and getting to know
her as a little girl who loved to
help 'Dennis' shovel his driveway,
and play with her friends, sometimes
with her sisters, and go wherever
she was asked with her Dad,
she was the one, at three who asked
from coast to coast, 'how far is it
to the next pool?' and would hear,
about "one Sesame Street and one Mr.
Dressup"...her favourite shows and her
grasp of length of time...and then
there were metronome times for
piano practice and recitals and
festivals even for the wrong piece,and
there were times to drive the golf cart
while her dad tried to hit the ball around
the course, and 
there were seconds,
at the close of a basketball
game as she, point-guard, found her
team-mates and put them, with the ball,
in front of the net, to score
and there were college days, graduation and
a beautiful art-gallery wedding and
now, another new life, on March 17, her
Mila has taken her place on the front of
Sarah's stage, and makes her own
entrance every two or three hours
for nourishment, for bonding and for
the love of her mother that knows no
bounds, and this new grandfather
smiles secretly in wonder at the
thread of life extended again
miraculously to Mila
and her smile graces our lives
as Sarah's once did so
generously like a
flower in constant bloom
when no water or sunlight
seemed available, it was
Sarah who brought the missing
nourishment to every table, and
room and encounter and Mila
is following her mother's
legacy of love and hope and
togetherness as she begins
to weave her own tapestry of
love in her own
design.

Attack Dog Harper, no substitute for a real Prime Minister

By Lawrence Martin, Globe and Mail, August 5, 2010
Mr. Harper’s primary political mission in life, as anyone who knows him well will testify, has been to tear down the historically dominant party. His energies as PM have been devoted excessively to that purpose. It explains his passion for the politics of destruction – the attack ads, the smear campaigns, the attempt to strip parties of public funding, his turning of his Conservatives into what has been called a garrison party – a political/military machine.
The significant problem with a Prime Minister whose prime ambition and goal is to destroy the enemy is, obviously, that the interests of the country are not part of his equation.
While most will agree that politics is a blood sport, and there are certainly political wars and skirmishes fought every day, we like to think, naively, that the issues are merely presented in a manner that addresses the needs of the country, in the widest and most hopeful perspective.
And yet, in recent weeks, Tony Clement has taken pork-barrel politics to a new level, even for Parry Sound, which has known about the approach intimately for decades, given the provincial Tories revival of the Highway 124 construction immediately prior to the next election, for at least the last half century;
Stockwell Day has taken voter gullibility to a new level, with his comments that Canada needs $6 billion plus in new prisons "because many crimes go unreported"...leaving us all with gaping mouths: what crimes are going unreported, and what does that have to do with the need for new prisons;
Or, are am just being perverse, because with the new census, omitting the "invasive" long form, no one will know whatever the government doesn't want us to know, because no one will have ansered the questions that enabled hundreds of business and non-profits to set goals and policy, and then the Day "clarification" will make sense to everybody?
Oh, and remember the attack ads that painted Stephane Dion as "not a leader" because he wasn't Alpha-dog, in the stereotypical archetype....another of Harper's character assassinations, that the gullible public drank, like cool-aid in Jonestown.
With both Liberals and Conservatives polling around 27-28 percent, so close as to be within the statistical margin of error (but who cares about formal statistical norms anyway, any more?), it is just possible that the voters will rouse from their summer slumber, in time for hockey season, and then go back to forgetting how authentic governance used to look, under governments led by Liberal and Conservative Prime Ministers who, while conscious of their political enemies, were not fixated on their destruction, because in some mysterious way, all parties needed all other parties just for a decent, honourable and sometimes even ethical debate...and there was a modicum of honour and decency in the political process of governing the country that made "decency" its signature around the world.
Remember????