Individual and Community

Why Did An Anarchist Vote For Democrats?
By Ken Bank

It seems unlikely an anarchist like myself would step into a voting booth and vote a straight Democratic ticket. A lot of unlikely things have happened the last few years. The World Trade Center came tumbling down, the world’s only superpower was brought to its knees by nineteen suicidal maniacs armed with nothing more than scissors and boxcutters, and otherwise rational Americans began to think that maybe we did have something to fear more than fear itself. After several months of watching Americans whipped into a jingoistic frenzy by an unscrupulous media and opportunistic politicians, I was beginning to feel like the spaceman character in the cold war era science fiction movie “The Day The Earth Stood Still”. The humanoid spaceman was observing undercover how people reacted to seeing his spaceship. A radio announcer was conducting random interviews, and one after another expressed the same fear and hostility at being invaded. When the interviewer approached the spaceman and asked him if he was afraid the spaceman responded, “I am afraid, but not for the same reason. I am afraid when I see people substitute fear for reason . . . .” The interviewer politely cuts him off, evidently because rational analysis does not attract an audience as much as fear and hostility.
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Updated 11/3/2006 7:44 AM ET
By Elizabeth Weise, USA TODAY
Oversight of commercial fishing must be strengthened or there may eventually be no more seafood.

That’s the conclusion of a report in today’s Science journal that predicts 90% of the fish and shellfish species that are hauled from the ocean to feed people worldwide may be gone by 2048.

Even now, 29% of those species have “collapsed,” meaning a 90% decline in the amount being fished from the sea, said Boris Worm, lead author and a professor of marine conservation biology at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada.
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