YOWL

Robert McLachlan found this in an old 80's issue of The New Republic, and was even nice enough to convert it to HTML himself! I suffered through the Reagan-happy years of the 1980's, and I think this is a pretty cool parody.

YOWL
On the 30th anniversary of "Howl."

CHRISTOPHER BUCKLEY
PAUL SLANSKY
D.C.-L.A.-D.C. 1986
For Jay McInerney

I

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by stress frazzled overtired burnt-out
jogging through suburban streets at dawn as suggested by the late James Fixx,
career-minded yupsters burning for an Amstel Light watching Stupid Pet Tricks,
who upwardly mobile and designer'd and bright-eyed and high sat up working in the track-lit glow of the Tribeca loft skimming through the Day Timer while padding the expense account,
who passed through universities and saved their asses hallucinating Grateful Dead posters and eating Sara Lee while watching the war on TV,
who were graduated and went on to law schools burning to save the world,
who brewed decaffinated coffee doing their yoga in alligator shirts and listening to the latest Windham Hill Sampler,
who ate chocolate croissants in outdoor café s and drank blush wine on Columbus Avenue washed down with a little Percodan with Dove bars with Diet coke with Lean Cuisine,
stopping by on the way home for a pound of David's cookies telling each other of their fears on intimacy and their need for space and inability to commit - for now,
who watched Mary Tyler Moore reruns and wept for Rhoda and worried about acid rain and the mercury in the swordfish while strung out on cyclamates faces flushed with MSG even after specifically making a point of mentioning to the waiter not to put it in,
who prowled through uncertain money markets chewing Tums and doing lines with the Hispanics in the mail room sitting in the gents with baby-laxative runs while the boss buzzes and the secretary says you're on the phone to Bonn,
who stayed up too late working out their relationships 'n' things feeling the gnawing rat-fear that they hadn't been communicating lately and the urgent pounding screaming need to think about their priorities,
yacketayakking analyzing thinking it through making constructive suggestions as the eastern sky flamed in raw Ralph Lauren pastels, ...

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Musicians seek secret U.S. documents on music-related human rights abuses at Guantanamo

On behalf of a coalition of U.S. and international musicians, including R.E.M., Pearl Jam, Tom Morello and Jackson Brown, the National Security Archive today filed a series of FOIA petitions requesting the full declassification of secret U.S. documentation on the strategy of using music as an interrogation device at Guantanamo and other detention centers.

The Archive also posted several declassified documents and published reports that refer to the use of "loud" music to "create futility" in uncooperative detainees at Guantanamo. A 2004 Defense Department report on abuses at the military base in Cuba, for example, stated that the "futility technique included the playing of Metallica, Britney Spears and Rap music."

Archive analysts filed the FOIA requests with the CIA, U.S. Special Operations Command, and the FBI, among other agencies, requesting all documentation pertaining to how the music was chosen and the specific role it played in interrogations of detainees at the Guantanamo base.

"At Guantanamo, the U.S. government turned a jukebox into an instrument of torture," said Thomas Blanton, the Archive's executive director. "The musicians and the public have the right to know how an expression of popular culture was transformed into an enhanced interrogation technique."

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Second International Assembly of Migrants and Refugees (IAMR)

The Second IAMR in Athens, 01. - 04. Nov 2009, is an assembly where migrants and refugees speak for themselves through their grassroots organizations supported by a broad spectrum of migrants rights advocates, progressive workers' groups and social movements.

The First IAMR held in Manila, Philippines last October 2008, embodied the autonomous voice of the migrants and refugees through their own gathering. It challenged the Global Forum on Migration and Development (GFMD) process and its agenda of promoting migration for development through remittances. The IAMR in Manila presented the true picture of modern slavery in labor migration and debunked the notion of development by exporting human labor.

The Global Forum on Migration and Development (GFMD)

The 3rd Global Forum on Migration and Development (GFMD) will be held in Athens, Greece on November 4-5, 2009. The first was held in Brussels in July 2007 and the second in Manila in October 2008. The GFMD is a multilateral and state-led initiative under the aegis of the United Nations (UN). It purports to facilitate dialogue among sending and receiving countries, but in reality, the rich countries dictate the agenda and main thrusts in the GFMD. They impose their own self-serving concept of development and define the modalities in "managing" the flow of cross-border migration.

Two things make the GFMD in Athens particularly significant. It will take place in the midst of the worst global economic crisis since the Great Depression. It will also take place in Europe where migrant workers particularly the millions of undocumented face an uncertain future in an increasingly unfriendly environment with the imminent implementation in 2010 of the EU Return Directive.

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Dr. Helen Caldicott: The medical and economic costs of nuclear power

Jennifer Nordstrom, co-ordinator of the Carbon-Free Nuclear-Free project has noted “Telling states to build new nuclear plants to combat global warming is like telling a patient to smoke to lose weight.”

A recent study sponsored by the German government (the KiKK study - Kaatsch P, Spix C, Schultze-Rath R, et al. Leukemia in young children living in the vicinity of German nuclear power plants. Int J Cancer. 2008; 1220:721-726,) examined children who lived near 16 of the country's commercial nuclear power plants. The results revealed a strongly increased risk of all childhood cancers, particularly leukaemia, the closer the proximity of the children's residence to the reactor. In particular, the study found that children less than the age five years, living within a 5km radius of the power plant exhaust stacks were more than twice as likely to develop leukaemia compared with those children residing more that 5km away. The KiKK team studied other carcinogenic factors which may be responsible for the cancer clusters but none were found.

Another large study (Baker PJ, Hoel DG. Meta-analysis of standardized incidence and mortality rates of childhood leukemia in proximity to nuclear facilities. Eur J Cancer Care. 2007:16:355-363) - a meta-analysis of the incidence and mortality rates of childhood leukaemia in children living near 138 nuclear facilities in Britain, Canada, Spain, Germany, the US and Japan also demonstrated a statistically significant rate of leukaemia in children less than nine years of age.

A further large review (Laurier D, Jacob S, Bernier MO, et al. Epidemiological studies of leukemia in children and young adults around nuclear facilities: A critical review. Rad Prot Dosim. 2008; 132:182- 190) of children and young adults living near 198 nuclear sites in 10 countries was found to be compatible with the study described above.

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Reviewing Danny Schechter's 'The Crime of Our Time'

"... The Crime of Our Time is his latest attempt to explain "the financial collapse as a crime story (and) the high status white-collar crooks" who wreak havoc on "the lives of hundreds of millions worldwide." He quotes from author and labor activist Jonathan Tasini in his new book, The Audacity of Greed, saying:

"Over the past quarter century, we have lived through the greatest looting of wealth in human history." While an elite few profited hugely, "the vast majority of citizens have lived through a period of falling wages, disappearing pensions, and dwindling bank accounts, all of which led to the personal debt crisis that lies at the root of the current financial meltdown."

The fallout cost millions of Americans their jobs, homes, savings, and futures, the result of a Washington - Wall Street criminal cabal and their scandalous conspiracy against the US public. In the Crime of Our Time, Schechter, once again, does a superb job explaining it astutely, thoroughly, and clearly.

Introduction - Our Time and Financial Crime

(1) In Wall Street We Trust

Once again, the major media betrayed the public by cheerleading the inflating market bubbles, ignoring the cause and Wall Street/Washington's role, then downplaying the severity of the crisis that has a long way to run. Instead their reasoning goes: "we are all to blame, guilty of greed, over-spending and under-saving," so "when everyone's at fault, no one can be held responsible."

Yet capitalism's internal contradictions make it crisis-prone, unstable, ungovernable, and self-destructive because of its repeated cycles of booms creating bubbles, creating busts, then depressions, and inevitably decay and demise. ..."

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