Dear Friends and Readers

After 9 years of posting to the the Ruth Group blog, during trying times and trying to change the times, it is time for me to move on.

Since Feb of 2003 when I started, a month before the Bush invasion of Iraq, I’ve posted over 13,000 articles, pointers, links, commentaries and howls.   Bob Zuber, while he was with us, contributed over 6,500 posts from the news of mid-city America. Others have contributed points of view, news of events and most importantly kept readers in touch with Ruth Group projects, such as helping to fund Soldiers of Conscience, and bringing a young Iraqi boy to California to restore his hearing, lost in a US bombing attack.

It’s a good record, even if the blog never grew to be the community gathering place I’d hoped it might become.

Since those early months, when “blogging” was  little known and certainly not a phenomenon, many many new news and opinion sites have appeared on the Internet.   We users have incorporated our information gathering and discussions with such sites.  Major news corporations have had to include websites and blogs as part of their offerings.  Many new and interesting voices have found a home without needing investments of capital or phalanxes of editors deciding what is “news.”  We are all richer for it, if sometimes, overwhelmed.

Some of my regular favorite are:  Glenn Greenwald, Hullabaloo, War in Context, Tom Dispatch, Juan Cole and Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now.  Common Dreams and Alternet continue to pull together articles from many sources.    I love to make regular drive-bys to English language news sites in Pakistan, India, Germany, France,  Greece, Turkey and others.  Perhaps the most important places to remember are those of vitally important public interest groups like CREW and OpenSecrets and human rights organizations like Doctors Without Borders, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International.  This far from exhausts the sites that should be at our fingertips — to learn from, to join in actions, and to support.

The most important climate change sites are 350.org and ClimateProgress.org

Some, like Huffington Post have turned disappointing….

I will continue to post at my own site, All In One Boat, where I have concentrated on longer-form writing, book and movie reviews, stories, translations and poems.

I’ve also just started The Last Dog Watch, where I can post news and current events I just can’t ignore.  Even though part of my reason for stopping here is  to allow time for long postponed interests to gestate and come to fruition I’ve already found that it isn’t in the nature of this beast to not look, or to ignore what is going on.    I don’t know how regularly I’ll post, but it will serve at least as someplace for me to go to shout some news, holler about egregious or dangerous behavior from the powerful, or simply to flag events that seem to me to be of significance outside my own small pond.

This site, Ruthgroup.org, will be left up for a year, as an archive.

All the best, and as everybody’s hero, Albert Einstein told us

Never do anything against conscience even if the state demands it. 

Will Kirkland