For me, it always comes back to the media and the moral values implicit in throwaway news stories — the ones we barely notice as we move through our day.

“A series of missile strikes killed at least 19 suspected insurgents Saturday in Pakistan's tribal borderlands, signaling that the new year would bring no respite in a relentless campaign of U.S. attacks employing unmanned aerial drones to target militants.”

What a smooth glide these words from the LA Times, reprinted in news outlets throughout the English-speaking world, give us over the terrain of life, death and geopolitics. The story’s payload isn’t simply information, but dissociation: The reader, or news consumer, is not expected to feel more than a mild jolt at such words as “killed” and “target” or smell the smoke on the ground or see a face or sense the heartbeat of a dying “militant” or ponder the sanity of assassination by robot-delivered missile or question the pristine and righteous accuracy of a U.S. military operation or worry about the strategy of social disruption that it serves or wonder how any of this is keeping us safe.

(Note: The five boys I met in Kabul, Afghanistan, from the Afghan Youth Peace Volunteers were young – the oldest only 20 – and as charming and well-mannered as teenage boys can humanly be. Their mentor, Hakim, displayed patience and tireless compassion.

I found it easy to settle into a comfortable relationship with them for 10 days, but during the event described below, it became clear that these young men were a courageous lot, going against many cultural norms in Afghanistan and doing so publicly. People in places like today’s Afghanistan have been “disappeared” for less.

Welcome to 2011. A new year, and a new Republican led United States House of Representatives. And what it all means is that one body of Congress will now attempt to overturn every single measure enacted during the last two years by President Obama and Democrats. Health-care reform is the first pig on the legislative rotisserie for the new House Speaker John Boehner and his merry band of rapacious repealers.

Republicans have been on the warpath over Obama's historic health care bill, and campaigned in the recent midterm elections on both repealing and replacing it. They're out there spinning their disingenuous rhetoric, trying to convince Americans that guaranteed insurance, no caps, no exclusions for pre-existing conditions, donut-hole coverage for seniors, extended care for children to age 26 are bad for them. And they're promising to replace it with something "better."


The Ohio State Medical Center (OSUMC) is performing unnecessary surgeries on women and the world-renowned doctor who blew the whistle on the practice is about to be fired. 


Well-respected gynecological pathologist Dr. Gerard Nuovo has provided public records showing that the decision to give women unnecessary surgery on their cervix or endometrium depends upon the diagnosis of an inexperienced pathologist. It has been suggested by the National Organization for Women (NOW) Education and Legal Fund that this is done to maximize profit.

Nuovo has been a tenured professor in the College of Medicine at the Department of Pathology in the OSUMC since 1999. Dr. Nuovo has written a textbook on gynecologic pathology and co-wrote a textbook entitled "Human Papillomavirus and the Relationship to Genital Tract Neoplasms." He has published over 260 peer-reviewed articles and has written 37 chapters in various medical books. 


The fall and decline of an empire can take many years, but certain "benchmarks" (as imperial courts have been known to call them) can measure the progress in one year alone. Take, for example, the year 2010.

This year opened with the United States Supreme Court claiming further power to rewrite the U.S. Constitution, specifically by further opening up elections to the highest bidder. The year closed with congressional elections that cost more than before and in which money spent by third parties to influence the elections was more decisive than before. Election advertisements, in the view of myself and many others, also became uglier, baser, and more hateful than before, while the positions advertised moved a big step rightward. These were all trends that could be measured in previous years as well, and which we will probably see advance further in years to come, barring a change of course.