Coming
in October
From AK Press
Today's
Stories
September
19, 2003
Ilan Pappe
The
Hole in the Road Map
Bill Glahn
RIAA is Full of Bunk, So is the New York Times
Dave Lindorff
General Hysteria: the Clark Bandwagon
Robert Fisk
New Guard is Saddam's Old
Jeff Halper
Preparing
for a Struggle Against Israeli Apartheid
Brian J. Foley
Power to the Purse
Clare
Brandabur
Hitchens
Smears Edward Said
Website of the Day
Live from Palestine
September
18, 2003
Mona Baker
and Lawrence Davidson
In
Defense of the Boycott of Israeli Academic Institutions
Wayne
Madsen
Wesley
Clark for President? Another Neo-Con Con Job
Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
Wesley Clark and Waco
Muqtedar Khan
The Pakistan Squeeze
Dominique
de Villepin
The
Reconstruction of Iraq: This Approach is Leading Nowhere
Angus Wright
Brazilian Land Reform Offers Hope
Elaine
Cassel
Payback is Hell
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Leavitt
for EPA Head? He's Much Worse Than You Thought
Website
of the Day
ALA Responds to Ashcroft's Smear
Recent
Stories
September 17, 2003
Timothy J. Freeman
The
Terrible Truth About Iraq
St. Clair / Cockburn
A
Vain, Pompous Brown-noser:
Meet the Real Wesley Clark
Terry Lodge
An Open Letter to Michael Moore on Gen. Wesley Clark
Mitchel Cohen
Don't Be Fooled Again: Gen. Wesley Clark, War Criminal
Norman Madarasz
Targeting Arafat
Richard Forno
High Tech Heroin
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Website of the Day
The Ultimate Palestine Resource Site!
September 16, 2003
Rosemary and Walt Brasch
An
Ill Wind: Hurricane Isabel and the Lack of Homeland Security
Robert Fisk
Powell
in Baghdad
Kurt Nimmo
Imperial Sociopaths
M. Shahid Alam
The Dialectics
of Terror
Ron Jacobs
Exile at Gunpoint
Christopher Brauchli
Bush's War on Wages
Al Krebs
Stop Calling Them "Farm Subsidies"; It's Corporate
Welfare
Patrick Cockburn
The
Iraq Wreck
Website of the Day
From Occupied Palestine
September 15, 2003
Stan Goff
It Was
the Oil; It Is Like Vietnam
Robert Fisk
A Hail of Bullets, a Trail of Dead
Writers Bloc
We
Are Winning: a Report from Cancun
James T. Phillips
Does George Bush Cry?
Elaine Cassel
The Troublesome Bill of Rights
Cynthia McKinney
A Message to the People of New York City
Matthew Behrens
Sunday Morning Coming Down: Reflections on Johnny Cash
Uri Avnery
Assassinating
Arafat
Hammond Guthrie
Celling Out the Alarm
Website of the Day
Arnold and the Egg
September 13 / 14, 2003
Michael Neumann
Anti-Americanism:
Too Much of a Good Thing?
Jeffrey St. Clair
Anatomy of a Swindle
Gary Leupp
The Matrix of Ignorance
Ron Jacobs
Reagan's America
Brian Cloughley
Up to a Point, Lord Rumsfeld
William S. Lind
Making Mesopotamia a Terrorist Magnet
Werther
A Modest Proposal for the Pentagon
Dave Lindorff
Friendly Fire Will Doom the Occupation
Toni Solo
Fiction and Reality in Colombia: The Trial of the Bogota Three
Elaine Cassel
Juries and the Death Penalty
Mickey Z.
A Parable for Cancun
Jeffrey Sommers
Issam Nashashibi: a Life Dedicated to the Palestinian Cause
David Vest
Driving in No Direction (with a Glimpse of Johnny Cash)
Michael Yates
The Minstrel Show
Jesse Walker
Adios, Johnny Cash
Adam Engel
Something Killer
Poets' Basement
Cash, Albert, Curtis, Linhart
Website of the Weekend
Local Harvest
The Great Alejandro Escavedo Needs Your Help!
September 12, 2003
Writers Block
Todos
Somos Lee: Protest and Death in Cancun
Laura Carlsen
A Knife to the Heart: WTO Kills Farmers
Dave Lindorff
The Meaning of Sept. 11
Elaine Cassel
Bush at Quantico
Linda S. Heard
British
Entrance Exams
John Chuckman
The First Two Years of Insanity
Doug Giebel
Ending America as We Know It
Mokhiber / Weissman
The Blank Check Military
Subcomandante Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Website of the Day
A Woman in Baghdad
September 11, 2003
Robert Fisk
A Grandiose
Folly
Roger Burbach
State Terrorism and 9/11: 1973 and 2001
Jonathan Franklin
The Pinochet Files
Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Postcards to the President
Norman Solomon
The Political Capital of 9/11
Saul Landau
The Chilean Coup: the Other, Almost Forgotten 9/11
Stew Albert
What Goes Around
Website of the Day
The Sights and Sounds of a Coup
September 10, 2003
John Ross
Cancun
Reality Show: Will It Turn Into a Tropical Seattle?
Zoltan Grossman
The General Who Would be President: Was Wesley Clark Also Unprepared
for the Postwar Bloodbath?
Tim Llewellyn
At the Gates of Hell
Christopher Brauchli
Turn the Paige: the Bush Education Deception
Lee Sustar
Bring the Troops Home, Now!
Elaine Cassel
McCain-Feingold in Trouble: Scalia Hogs the Debate
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Hammond Guthrie
When All Was Said and Done
Website of the Day
Fact Checking Colin Powell
Hot Stories
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
William Blum
Myth
and Denial in the War on Terrorism
Standard Schaefer
Experimental Casinos: DARPA and the War Economy
Uzma
Aslam Khan
The Unbearably Grim Aftermath of War:
What America Says Does Not Go
Paul de Rooij
Arrogant
Propaganda
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click Here
for More Stories.
|
September
20, 2003
Taking a Load Off
in the Sinkyone
Lighten
Up, America!
By ALEXANDER COCKBURN
Watching the high school kids tottering up the
hiking trail under ridiculous burdens I was reminded of the studies
of GIs who jumped into the surf in the Normandy landings with
80 pound packs on their backs and promptly drowned. These days
the overloaded back pack is coming under scrutiny as kids totter
home from school hefting 30 pound loads. I've become a devotee
of the famous long distance hiker Ray Jardine, whose philosophy
of life and loads is set forth in his 1992 classic Beyond
Backpacking, which should be nestling next to the works
of John Muir on your book shelf.
Jardine and his wife Jenny have hiked
all the major trails, Pacific Crest, Continental Divide and Appalachian,
and watched with horror as overloaded plodders lost any sense
of pleasure and often quit the trail altogether. After thousands
of miles and much experimentation, the couple ended up with a
total packweight each, minus food and water, of around eight
pounds.
I read the book in the spring and was
convinced. Out went the heavy hiker boots and in came modestly
priced sneakers. (Jardine counsels you to tear out their tongues.)
Out went the elaborate back pack with scores of irritating pockets
and a metal frame. In came the simple Jardine-designed pack,
weighing l4 ounces.
Jardine is persuasive in his denunciations
of tents and sleeping bags as weighty traps for moisture. His
tarp tent and sleeping cover plus pad, plus the tarp tent are
undr 4 pounds overall. In the end I took to the trail along the
Sinkyone Wilderness on a glorious weekend on California's North
Coast without tent under a pack weighing 15 pounds including
food and white spirit stove and pan.
What a difference! Each stop to drink
water and enjoy the wonderful vistas of redwood stands, Doug
fir, and rock-girt seashore wasn't prelude to the grim business
of once again hoisting a 40 pound load onto sore shoulders. Going
up the up steep grades was a breeze. I gloried in nature's temple
rather than feeling I was on the uphill slope to the morgue.
I was hiking with Bruce Anderson, supreme
commander of the Anderson Valley Advertiser, beacon of freedom
in Mendocino county and in fact America's greatest newspaper.
As we clambered out of sea level inlets up the trail to the 1,400
foot contour level three, four, five, six times across an overall
hiking time along l6 miles of about eleven hours (plus a night
under the stars) Bruce groaned beneath his old fashioned pack,
thick sleeping sack and self-inflating mattress pad. Pad and
bag were abandoned at dawn the second day and his spirits improved
markedly.
Except for that party of high schoolers
trekking up out of the Usal campground at the south end of the
Sinkyone near the end of our hike we saw no one. We had about
ten miles of the most beautiful trail on the Pacific coast all
to ourselves. A neighbor took his grandson on Memorial Day weekend
to camp for a couple of days along a well known trail some twenty
miles north of Eureka. It runs along Redwood Creek and is far
from punishing. They saw no one. Americans have given up hiking.
They stay at home watching Fox or CNN and getting fat. Or punishing
their bodies with Dr Atkins' diet.
I've plenty of agreeable memories from
that outing in the Sinkyone Wilderness: A stately elk, as encumbered
with his vast rack of antlers as so many hikers with their loads;
the bare vestige of Wheeler, a little logging town burned down
by Georgia Pacific for reasons of liability back in the 1950s,
now surrounded by triumphant stands of redwood.
But one image that will stay with me
is of a young, plumpish fellow in that group heading north on
the first steep climb up out of Usal. Already he was tired and
lagging. His pack was large. It was easy to predict that after
five or six miles his life-time pledge to avoid all hiking trails.
There should be a new standard: no back pack over twenty pounds
including food and water and if possible, under 5 pounds. No
American over Well, you figure the appropriate weight to height
standard. We make our stand against the food industry (America's
biggest killer) and the recreation industry, which mostly takes
the fun out of the great outdoors.
Weekend
Edition Features for Sept. 13 / 14, 2003
Michael Neumann
Anti-Americanism:
Too Much of a Good Thing?
Jeffrey St. Clair
Anatomy of a Swindle
Gary Leupp
The Matrix of Ignorance
Ron Jacobs
Reagan's America
Brian Cloughley
Up to a Point, Lord Rumsfeld
William S. Lind
Making Mesopotamia a Terrorist Magnet
Werther
A Modest Proposal for the Pentagon
Dave Lindorff
Friendly Fire Will Doom the Occupation
Toni Solo
Fiction and Reality in Colombia: The Trial of the Bogota Three
Elaine Cassel
Juries and the Death Penalty
Mickey Z.
A Parable for Cancun
Jeffrey Sommers
Issam Nashashibi: a Life Dedicated to the Palestinian Cause
David Vest
Driving in No Direction (with a Glimpse of Johnny Cash)
Michael Yates
The Minstrel Show
Jesse Walker
Adios, Johnny Cash
Adam Engel
Something Killer
Poets' Basement
Cash, Albert, Curtis, Linhart
Website of the Weekend
Local Harvest
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