Tuesday, April 22, 2003
Earth Day
This picture was done in 1989, hand-drawn on a Macintosh computer. It is a view of Mt. Hood, from the shore of Trillium Lake. It was featured in “The Verbum Book of Digital Painting”, for which I wrote a chapter describing the process of creating it. It was also featured in Verbum magazine’s “Earth Gallery” in their 20th anniversary tribute to Earth Day in 1990.
This is the future of that scene if the so-called “Clear Skys” and “Healthy Forests” schemes are allowed to be put into practice by the Bush regime. Global warming, air and water pollution and clearcutting have decimated this formerly pristine beauty. Don’t let it happen!
For Earth Day this year, I recycled all my old computer gear through Free Geek, who will repair and reuse components, instead of dumping them in a landfill. Ironically, it included the computer used to draw the first Mt. Hood picture, it was 14 years old and still ran fine (gotta love Macs!), but was way too old and slow to do what I do today. And I started my bike-riding to work earlier this season.
Saturday, April 19, 2003
Bad Science
It seems these days that scientific research, which is supposed to be all about finding the truth, no matter what it is, is being bent to the political agenda of the Bush regime. They don’t want to have anything found that doesn’t support their narrow view of the world. As an example I’ve previously noted before, when 15 of the 18 members of the Advisory Committee to the Director of the National Health Center for Environmental Health were replaced last year. This committee assesses the health impact of exposure to environmental chemicals. Among the new members are representatives of the chemical industry. Can you say “conflict of interest”? I knew you could.
I’ve got a personal interest in good science and objectivity, as do we all. I may have been exposed to DES - a synthetic estrogen, before I was born. It was touted as a “miracle drug” that would supposedly prevent miscarriage of a pregnancy. As my mother had a miscarriage before she became pregnant with me in 1953, she spent half of the pregnancy flat on her back, and may have been given DES. I’m in the process of trying to access her medical records. 30 years ago, she mentioned such a treatment to me but now can’t remember exactly what she was given 50 years ago. However, most of the clinical studies of DES usage were done in the hospitals in the area where I was born, and 1953 was the peak year of it’s use.
The typical dosage given was equivalent to about 700 birth-control pills a day! Millions of children born between about 1947 and 1971 were exposed to this, with sometimes profound physical and psychological effects, ranging from cancers to birth defects and gender issues. Obviously, there is a huge potential here for future litigation, which the pharmaceutical manufacturers will do anything to head off.
In the case of DES daughters, many were infertile due to reproductive abnormalities, and many died from a rare form of vaginal cancer, which led to the cessation of its use in 1971. Now it appears that the effects may possibly go on into the 3rd generation. DES sons aren’t as well documented, but there is a very high percentage (as high as 90%) of mental genders being in variance with the physical, gynecomastia (male breast development) and a heightened risk of reproductive cancers and abnormalities.
Up until now, the government hasn’t interfered in getting out information about this. Go to the CDC DES Update site to see some background on DES. But I’m afraid this may change, and I’m not comforted by the “foxes in charge of the henhouse” attitude of this administration. Good or bad, I want to know the truth, not have it held hostage to some corporation’s profit imperative. And in particular, I don’t want the government conspiring with the corporations to suppress the truth.
About anything.
And a little aside, after some more research - studies into DES and it’s effects suddenly dried up a year or so into the Reagan administration. Was it a coincidence that the former CEO of Lilly (the largest manufacturer of DES) was George H.W. Bush, who stepped down to become Vice President and later President?
Like father, like son:
Certain Words Can Trip Up AIDS Grants, Scientists Say
April 18, 2003
By ERICA GOODE
Scientists who study AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases say they have been warned by federal health officials that their research may come under unusual scrutiny by the Department of Health and Human Services or by members of Congress, because the topics are politically controversial.
The scientists, who spoke on condition they not be identified, say they have been advised they can avoid unfavorable attention by keeping certain “key words” out of their applications for grants from the National Institutes of Health or the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Those words include “sex workers,” “men who sleep with men,” “anal sex” and “needle exchange,” the scientists said.
Bill Pierce, a spokesman for the health and human services department, said the department does not screen grant applications for politically delicate content. He said that when the department singles out grants it is usually to send out a news release about them. But an official at the National Institutes of Health, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said project officers at the agency, the people who deal with grant applicants and recipients, were telling researchers at meetings and in telephone conversations to avoid so-called sensitive language. But the official added, “You won’t find any paper or anything that advises people to do this.”
The official said researchers had long been advised to avoid phrases that might mark their work as controversial. But the degree of scrutiny under the Bush administration was “much worse and more intense,” the official said.
Dr. Alfred Sommer, the dean of the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University, said a researcher at his institution had been advised by a project officer at N.I.H. to change the term “sex worker” to something more euphemistic in a grant proposal for a study of H.I.V. prevention among prostitutes. He said the idea that grants might be subject to political surveillance was creating a “pernicious sense of insecurity” among researchers.
Dr. Sommer said that if researchers feared that federal support for their work might be affected by politics, whether it was true or untrue, it could take a toll. “If people feel intimidated and start clouding the language they use, then your mind starts to get cloudy and the science gets cloudy,” he said, adding that the federal financing of medical research had traditionally been free from political influence.
At the National Institutes of Health, for example, grant applications are evaluated and rated by a panel of independent reviewers. The grant application is then given a score.
In another example of the scrutiny the scientists described, a researcher at the University of California said he had been advised by an N.I.H. project officer that the abstract of a grant application he was submitting “should be “cleansed” and should not contain any contentious wording like “gay” or “homosexual” or “transgender.”
The researcher said the project officer told him that grants that included those words were “being screened out and targeted for more intense scrutiny.”
He said he was now struggling with how to write the grant proposal, which dealt with a study of gay men and H.I.V. testing. When the subjects were gay men, he said, “It’s hard not to mention them in your abstract.”
The titles and abstracts of federally financed grants are available to the public on a computer database maintained by the national institutes. The database, called CRISP, is also frequently read by Congressional staff members on the lookout for research on topics that are of concern to the politicians they work for. Over the years, studies on cloning, abortion, animal rights, needle-exchange programs and various types of AIDS research have been criticized by members of Congress.
But researchers said they feared that the concerns of individual members of Congress were now being taken more seriously by the health and human services department.
John Burklow, a spokesman for the N.I.H., said project directors at the agency were responsible for “providing advice and guidance on myriad issues related to grant applications,” but he did not confirm or deny that the project officers were cautioning researchers about the language they used.
He said that the health and human services department “from a management perspective has a right to oversee N.I.H. affairs” but that department officials “have not interfered with the awarding or renewing of any N.I.H. grant.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/18/national/18GRAN.html?ex=1051683149&ei=1&en=bea77f345a3374cf
Friday, April 11, 2003
The Big Picture
I don’t doubt that the residents of Baghdad are happy to see Saddam go, I’d be happy to be rid of a brutal dictator, too. What I do doubt is the authenticity of the joyous pulling down of the Saddam statue in Fardus Square. While the shots that were shown repeatedly on TV were tightly cropped, here is the big picture.
Taken from the Palestine Hotel where the international press was quartered (which, incidently, was hit the day before by fire from US tanks), the picture shows how small the crowd actually was. Also, there are reports that many in the crowd were members of an Iraqi exile militia group airlifted in by the Pentagon in recent days.
This was a carefully staged media event. Unfortunately, this totally manufactured image will be used as justifification of our attack on Iraq.
Thursday, April 10, 2003
Michael Moore
Dear friends,
It appears that the Bush administration will have succeeded in colonizing Iraq sometime in the next few days. This is a blunder of such magnitude—and we will pay for it for years to come. It was not worth the life of one single American kid in uniform, let alone the thousands of Iraqis who have died, and my condolences and prayers go out to all of them.
So, where are all those weapons of mass destruction that were the pretense for this war? Ha! There is so much to say about all this, but I will save it for later.
What I am most concerned about right now is that all of you—the majority of Americans who did not support this war in the first place—not go silent or be intimidated by what will be touted as some great military victory. Now, more than ever, the voices of peace and truth must be heard. I have received a lot of mail from people who are feeling a profound sense of despair and believe that their voices have been drowned out by the drums and bombs of false patriotism. Some are afraid of retaliation at work or at school or in their neighborhoods because they have been vocal proponents of peace. They have been told over and over that it is not ‘appropriate’ to protest once the country is at war, and that your only duty now is to ‘support the troops.’
Can I share with you what it’s been like for me since I used my time on the Oscar stage two weeks ago to speak out against Bush and this war? I hope that, in reading what I’m about to tell you, you’ll feel a bit more emboldened to make your voice heard in whatever way or forum that is open to you.
When ‘Bowling for Columbine’ was announced as the Oscar winner for Best Documentary at the Academy Awards, the audience rose to its feet. It was a great moment, one that I will always cherish. They were standing and cheering for a film that says we Americans are a uniquely violent people, using our massive stash of guns to kill each other and to use them against many countries around the world. They were applauding a film that shows George W. Bush using fictitious fears to frighten the public into giving him whatever he wants. And they were honoring a film that states the following: The first Gulf War was an attempt to reinstall the dictator of Kuwait; Saddam Hussein was armed with weapons from the United States; and the American government is responsible for the deaths of a half-million children in Iraq over the past decade through its sanctions and bombing. That was the movie they were cheering, that was the movie they voted for, and so I decided that is what I should acknowledge in my speech.
And, thus, I said the following from the Oscar stage:
‘On behalf of our producers Kathleen Glynn and Michael Donovan (from Canada), I would like to thank the Academy for this award. I have invited the other Documentary nominees on stage with me. They are here in solidarity because we like non-fiction. We like non-fiction because we live in fictitious times. We live in a time where fictitious election results give us a fictitious president. We are now fighting a war for fictitious reasons. Whether it’s the fiction of duct tape or the fictitious ‘Orange Alerts,’ we are against this war, Mr. Bush. Shame on you, Mr. Bush, shame on you. And, whenever you’ve got the Pope and the Dixie Chicks against you, you’re time is up.’
Halfway through my remarks, some in the audience started to cheer. That immediately set off a group of people in the balcony who started to boo. Then those supporting my remarks started to shout down the booers. The L. A. Times reported that the director of the show started screaming at the orchestra ‘Music! Music!’ in order to cut me off, so the band dutifully struck up a tune and my time was up. (For more on why I said what I said, you can read the op-ed I wrote for the L.A. Times, plus other reaction from around the country at my website)
The next day—and in the two weeks since—the right-wing pundits and radio shock jocks have been calling for my head. So, has all this ruckus hurt me? Have they succeeded in ‘silencing’ me?
Well, take a look at my Oscar ‘backlash’:
-- On the day after I criticized Bush and the war at the Academy Awards, attendance at ‘Bowling for Columbine’ in theaters around the country went up 110% (source: Daily Variety/BoxOfficeMojo.com). The following weekend, the box office gross was up a whopping 73% (Variety). It is now the longest-running consecutive commercial release in America, 26 weeks in a row and still thriving. The number of theaters showing the film since the Oscars has INCREASED, and it has now bested the previous box office record for a documentary by nearly 300%.
-- Yesterday (April 6), ‘Stupid White Men’ shot back to #1 on the New York Times bestseller list. This is my book’s 50th week on the list, 8 of them at number one, and this marks its fourth return to the top position, something that virtually never happens.
-- In the week after the Oscars, my website was getting 10-20 million hits A DAY (one day we even got more hits than the White House!). The mail has been overwhelmingly positive and supportive (and the hate mail has been hilarious!).
-- In the two days following the Oscars, more people pre-ordered the video for ‘Bowling for Columbine’ on Amazon.com than the video for the Oscar winner for Best Picture, ‘Chicago’.
-- In the past week, I have obtained funding for my next documentary, and I have been offered a slot back on television to do an updated version of ‘TV Nation’/ ‘The Awful Truth.’
I tell you all of this because I want to counteract a message that is told to us all the time—that, if you take a chance to speak out politically, you will live to regret it. It will hurt you in some way, usually financially. You could lose your job. Others may not hire you. You will lose friends. And on and on and on.
Take the Dixie Chicks. I’m sure you’ve all heard by now that, because their lead singer mentioned how she was ashamed that Bush was from her home state of Texas, their record sales have ‘plummeted’ and country stations are boycotting their music. The truth is that their sales are NOT down. This week, after all the attacks, their album is still at #1 on the Billboard country charts and, according to Entertainment Weekly, on the pop charts during all the brouhaha, they ROSE from #6 to #4. In the New York Times, Frank Rich reports that he tried to find a ticket to ANY of the Dixie Chicks’ upcoming concerts but he couldn’t because they were all sold out. (To read Rich’s column from yesterday’s Times, ‘Bowling for Kennebunkport,’ go here. He does a pretty good job of laying it all out and talks about my next film and the impact it could potentially have.) Their song, ‘Travelin’ Soldier’ (a beautiful anti-war ballad) was the most requested song on the internet last week. They have not been hurt at all—but that is not what the media would have you believe. Why is that? Because there is nothing more important now than to keep the voices of dissent—and those who would dare to ask a question—SILENT. And what better way than to try and take a few well-known entertainers down with a pack of lies so that the average Joe or Jane gets the message loud and clear: ‘Wow, if they would do that to the Dixie Chicks or Michael Moore, what would they do to little ol’ me?’ In other words, shut the f--- up.
And that, my friends, is the real point of this film that I just got an Oscar for—how those in charge use FEAR to manipulate the public into doing whatever they are told.
Well, the good news—if there can be any good news this week—is that not only have neither I nor others been silenced, we have been joined by millions of Americans who think the same way we do. Don’t let the false patriots intimidate you by setting the agenda or the terms of the debate. Don’t be defeated by polls that show 70% of the public in favor of the war. Remember that these Americans being polled are the same Americans whose kids (or neighbor’s kids) have been sent over to Iraq. They are scared for the troops and they are being cowed into supporting a war they did not want—and they want even less to see their friends, family, and neighbors come home dead. Everyone supports the troops returning home alive and all of us need to reach out and let their families know that.
Unfortunately, Bush and Co. are not through yet. This invasion and conquest will encourage them to do it again elsewhere. The real purpose of this war was to say to the rest of the world, ‘Don’t Mess with Texas - If You Got What We Want, We’re Coming to Get It!’ This is not the time for the majority of us who believe in a peaceful America to be quiet. Make your voices heard. Despite what they have pulled off, it is still our country.
Yours,
Michael Moore
www.michaelmoore.com
Wednesday, April 09, 2003
The Glass Teat
I guess I didn’t realize how little I take part in the so-called “mainstream” of American life until recently. I don’t watch TV much - never have, maybe a couple hours a week and almost never the broadcast networks, mostly educational stuff. I’m not sure whether it’s the cause or effect of that that I’ve never bought into the soulless void that passes for “American culture”. I’ve never believed in the unspoken mantra of existence in this country - “Eat, Work, Consume, Die”.
Unplug from the boob tube, that stuff will just rot your brain anyway. Sitcoms, game shows, so-called “reality” shows, unquestioning parroting of approved government sources. The level of propaganda on the cable news channels has been appalling, to the point that I call it “war pornography”. Step away from the TV and take a deep breath…
There, doesn’t that feel better now?
Want to exercise those newly invigorated brain cells?
Go check out some independent news sources.
My favorite is Indymedia.
Reporting by the people, for the people.
Not filtered though official censors or responding to corporate anything.
No advertising.
Everybody’s own version of their truth, for themselves and anyone else who cares to read it.
Passionate reporting, by those who experience it first hand.
Yeah, the “signal-to-noise ratio” can be a little low at times, but when things are hoppin’ around town, they’ll have up-to-the-minute updates and upcoming stuff there for you. Our local site for Portland is at portland.indymedia.org. You’ll notice that I find some of the stuff you see on this site there. That’s OK, they use some of my stuff as well. Share and share alike, that’s what that “copyleft” thing is about…
Go to some of the European news sites like the Guardian in England. Get some other views of what’s happening. Many sources are brought together at informationclearinghouse, which is a good jumping-off place for “news you won’t find on CNN and Fox”, the corporate media are little more than parrots and whores these days. You’ll see things that don’t even make it into the U.S. newspapers or TV, whether through official or self-censorship.
Listen to KBOO (90.7 FM), and while you’re at it, support them with your money and time. I’m proud to be a member and therefore part-owner.
feed your head…
