$64.40 – today
$1066.24 – TOTAL

Reporter Arrested on Orders of Giuliani Press Secretary
Charged with Criminal Trespass Despite Protest of CNN Staff and Official Event Press Credentials at GOP Debate in New Hampshire
June 6, 2007
By Aaron Dykes & Alex Jones

Manchester, NH – Freelance reporter Matt Lepacek, reporting for Infowars.com, was arrested for asking a question to one of Giuliani’s staff members in a press conference. The press secretary identified the New York based reporter as having previously asked Giuliani about his prior knowledge of WTC building collapses and ordered New Hampshire state police to arrest him.

Jason Bermas, reporting for Infowars and America: Freedom to Fascism, confirmed Lepacek had official CNN press credentials for the Republican debate. However, his camera was seized by staff members who shut off the camera, according to Luke Rudkowski, also a freelance Infowars reporter on the scene. He said police physically assaulted both reporters after Rudkowski objected that they were official members of the press and that nothing illegal had taken place. Police reportedly damaged the Infowars-owned camera in the process.

Reporters were questioning Giuliani staff members on a variety of issues, including his apparent ignorance of the 9/11 Commission Report, according to Bermas. The staff members accused the reporters of Ron Paul partisanship, which press denied. It was at this point that Lepacek, who was streaming a live report, asked a staff member about Giuliani’s statement to Peter Jennings that he was told beforehand that the WTC buildings would collapse.

Giuliani’s press secretary then called over New Hampshire state police, fingering Lepacek.

Though CNN staff members tried to persuade police not to arrest the accredited reporter– in violation of the First Amendment, Lepacek was taken to jail. The police station told JonesReport.com that Lepacek is being charged with felony criminal trespass.

Lepacek did receive one phone call in jail which he used to contact reporter Luke Rudkowski. According to Rudkowski, Lepacek was scared because he had been told he may be transferred to a secret detention facility because state police were also considering charges of espionage against him– due to a webcam Lepacek was using to broadcast live at the event. State police considered it to be a hidden camera, which led to discussion of “espionage.”

>Wearing a webcam at a press event is not an act of espionage. Alex Jones, who was watching the live feed, witnessed Lepacek announce that he was wearing a camera connected to a laptop that was transmitting the press conference live at approximately 9:20 EST. When Lepacek announced that he was broadcasting live, Giuliani staff members responded by getting upset at his questions and ordering his arrest.

Freedom to Fascism reporter Samuel Ettaro was also dragged out after asking a question on Giuliani’s ties with Cintra and Macquerie, two foreign contractors involved with the contentious Trans-Texas Corridor under development in Texas.

The entire incident took place in a large press auditorium, apart from the debate stages where authorized media were able to question candidates and their handlers.

Since when do campaign operatives have the power to order state police to arrest someone on false charges or arbitrate who has the right to conduct journalism, a right guarded by the Constitution?

A warning to the press– if candidates or police don’t like your questions, you could be arrested for trespassing and even espionage in the new Orwellian America.

The state police in Goffstown, New Hampshire, where the arrest was made, confirmed that Lepacek is in custody on charges of criminal trespass. Police said information on who filed the trespass complaint was not yet available and would be filed in the police report.

It is clear from talking to multiple eyewitness, as well as the live webcam, that there could not have been a complainant who originated police action, because it happened spontaneously. The police need to be very careful about violating the Bill of Rights and falsely charging someone with a felony crime. This constitutes extreme official oppression and is a total violation of the reporter’s civil rights. It would have been bad enough if the reporter would have just been thrown out, but to arrest him when he had a valid press pass and CNN protested his arrest is an outrage.

The arrest– which clearly violated the First Amendment– was recorded from two separate camera angles, including a live feed recorded remotely– so the episode is on record in the event that police destroy or lose tapes seized from Lepacek in attempt to obfuscate the facts of the incident.

If you doubt that police would assault reporters, seize video equipment and act on political orders, then consider the experience Alex Jones had when Texas state troopers arrested him for asking George W. Bush a question during a press conference while he was governor.

Suddenly, the Paranoids Don’t Seem So Paranoid Anymore
06.07.07
By Tony Long

Have you noticed? We’ve become a people that no longer respects, or apparently desires, privacy. Our own or anybody else’s.

That’s a remarkable thing, when you stop to think about it. We Americans, historically, have fiercely guarded our personal privacy. It’s one of our defining characteristics. Others, who live in societies where personal privacy isn’t so easily taken for granted, have looked on with a mixture of admiration and bemusement. “Mind your own business” is a singularly American expression.

But now we’ve allowed that birthright to be compromised, in a hundred little ways, and in a few conspicuously big ones, by an increasingly meddlesome government — not to mention opportunistic, predatory marketers — armed with the technology that gives them an easy entrée into our most secret places. Why is that, do you suppose? Have we surrendered to Big Brother because “you can’t fight city hall,” or have we been lied to, cajoled and softened up for so long by so much stupid television and the endless drumbeat of consumerism that we no longer care?

Do you think you’re surfing porn at home in complete anonymity? Do you think the government can’t retrieve every single scrap of personal information you own? Do you think The Gap doesn’t know that you’ve moved up to a 34 waist? We’ve been scanned, cookied and catalogued so thoroughly that there are agencies and companies out there who know more about us than we know about ourselves.

Now, thanks to Google, you can’t even expect your privacy to be respected in one of the most paradoxically private places around — the public street.

People who don’t live in big cities often cite the lack of privacy as one reason why they wouldn’t. Actually, the anonymity of living in a community of hundreds of thousands of people affords a lot more privacy than one might expect; certainly more than in of those cute little towns where everybody knows everybody else’s business.

Or at least it did, until Google came along with Street View.

Now the mere act of walking down a public street is liable to get you some unwanted publicity, especially if you’re captured doing something you’d rather not share with the world.

Google says Street View is intended to provide street-level tours of selected cities (currently San Francisco, New York, Denver, Miami and Vegas are so blessed; others are in the works). Why they feel such tours are necessary at all is another question. “Because it’s way cool” will probably suffice.

In an Associated Press story, Google spokeswoman Megan Quinn shrugs off any privacy concerns, saying: “This imagery is no different from what any person can readily capture or see walking down the street.” I don’t know how often Ms. Quinn walks the mean streets of her town, but it’s not comparable at all. For one thing, the casual pedestrian isn’t staring at a computer screen with your image plastered all over it. And being spotted on the street by a single person, someone as anonymous as you are, is a far cry from being available to the prurient curiosity of millions of online peeping toms.

This is just incredibly vulgar.

But just to be safe, Google makes it clear that it’s on firm legal footing; that you have no legal guarantee to privacy on a public street. So if you turn up on Street View as you’re ducking into the local porn emporium, that’s your tough luck. Maybe it is legal. Probably it is. So what? Being legal doesn’t mean being right.

Let’s call a spade a spade here, lay all our cards on the table and use all the clichés necessary to make one thing perfectly clear: Google is invading your privacy for the same reason (and only reason) it does anything. It smells a chance to make money and it’s going to make money, and to hell with you and your privacy. Do no evil? Balls.

Greed, unfortunately, is another American characteristic. One that will eventually destroy us.

also:Irrepressable dot info and Al-Quds Al-Arabi if you can read it…

once again, thanks to my awesome web stats, i learned that i had a recent visitor named 82.201.245.21 (his IP address) who is located here, in al qahirah, egypt… which is southeast of mashful and zagazig…

and another recent visitor named 85.165.124.213 who is located here, in skedsmo, norway, which, apparently, is a suburb of oslo.

and another recent visitor named 88.84.103.28 who is from here, in an un-named city in saudi arabia (jiddah?)…

and another recent visitor named 89.241.69.150 from london…

and another recent visitor named 66.190.222.238 from slidell, louisiana… cool! 8)

and someone named 88.154.97.162 from israel trying, unsuccessfully, to access a hotlinked graphic from psyreactor dot com… 8/

internet is good for all kinds of things that you probably don’t know about… 8)

lilypond is SO cool…

Troll March, with an audio rendition as well as a file that you can email to your cell phone and use as a ring tone… how cool is that?

lilypond is REALLY cool…

i have finished all the parts except the tuba/sousaphone (tomorrow) and the keyboard/guitar (i’m still not quite sure how i’m going to do them… yet…), and i’ve put together a score and i’ve put together a midi file of the music, so that i can listen to it and find out where wrong notes are and fix them before it goes to the entire band… and that’s just in two days!

jumpity skipity yahoo! 8D

thanks !

i was driving home this afternoon (i had an interesting meeting with to help me learn how to do things with lilypond that i didn’t know how to do) – and i had gotten to just north of the I5-I405 interchange at tukwilla when i noticed a car driving on my left side, exactly even with me and the driver, a man who was probably 45 or 50, with a toupée that was extremely obvious (most of his real hair was on the grey side of black, but the toupée was brown) signalling me to roll down my window.

now i was in the exit lane (there was a large traffic jam ahead and i figured that it would be a good time to find a different route), and he was not, but we were not moving at freeway speeds by any stretch of the imagination, so i rolled down my window and he shouted something that i presumed was something along the lines of “what does your car say?” – which is the only reason anybody says anything to me while i’m driving – so i said that it was “the names of ganesha” – because i was driving and had to keep my eyes on the road, and besides, i had enough problems hearing him that i figured he would not be able to hear much more than that anyway. he responded with something along the lines of “who’s that?”, to which i replied “the Hindu God of Removing Obstacles”. he responded “a Hindu God?” to which i replied “yes!”

and here’s the part that makes me really wonder why he even bothered at all. his reply to my statement that it was a Hindu God was to say “it sounds like a demon to me”. by this time, i had reached my exit, so i just said “whatever” and headed on down the exit ramp…

if it really sounds like a demon to him, does he think that telling me will cause me suddenly to change my mind and completely repaint my car? sure, it’s interesting artwork, but if he really thinks it is a demon, then why did he risk his life and mine trying to have a “conversation” about it, while driving down the freeway? does he think that his telling me that it is a demon will make any impression on me? i mean, it’s not as though i decided one day to put some mysterious looking writing on my car, without regard to what its meaning is? and it’s not as though i just slapped it on my car any old how… it is actually something that took a fair amount of time and skill. and it’s something that i have actually put on my web site, and painted the URI on my car, so that i don’t have to have long, involved conversations with people who aren’t in my car while i’m driving, so it’s obviously something that i’ve thought about a good deal, not just some whim that i decided to act on one day…

LJ has suddenly decided that i have a much wider screen resolution than i really have, so everything scrolls off the right side of my screen. thus, the short entry.

i got a new icon from

You Park Like An Asshole dot com

Homeland Security could face transition problem
June 1, 2007
By Shane Harris

On November 2, 2004, top officials from the Homeland Security Department held a small Election Night party at a Washington restaurant to watch the presidential election returns come in on television. Nearly every leader there owed his job to the man then fighting for his own job — George W. Bush.

The department was almost two years old and run almost entirely by political appointees. Twenty-three months earlier, they had been tapped to lash together 22 disparate, frequently dysfunctional agencies, some of whose failures to safeguard domestic security contributed to the 9/11 attacks.

As the returns trickled in, there was an hour or so when it appeared that Bush’s Democratic rival, Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts, might overtake him in the electoral vote count. Rather suddenly, some partygoers recalled, it dawned on them that they might be out of a job.

As they looked around the room, they realized they hadn’t fully considered who would replace them. Who, they wondered, would keep the department running while President-elect Kerry picked a new leadership team? What career officials, whose posts are designed to outlast any one administration, would step in to ensure that planes flew safely, that borders were patrolled, that the government could respond swiftly to a natural disaster? No one could say for sure, because DHS had no plan.

“All the politicals thought we were out,” says Stewart Verdery, then the department’s assistant secretary for policy and planning for border and transportation security. Verdery was an energetic and experienced Capitol Hill staffer who had come to Homeland Security after a stint as senior legislative adviser to Vivendi Universal, the media conglomerate. But DHS was uncharted territory. “There was a definite sense that the transition was going to be rocky,” he recalls.

The department’s top echelons, of course, never had to experience what horrors a clunky handover of power could bring. But whether those leaders knew it or not, they possibly had just averted more than a management disaster.

The 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center and the attacks of September 11, 2001, both occurred within eight months of a change in presidential administrations. (At the time of the first attack, Bill Clinton had been president exactly 37 days.) In March 2004, Qaeda-linked terrorists bombed four Madrid commuter trains three days before Spain’s national elections. Periods of political transition are, by their very nature, chaotic; terrorists know this, and they exploit it. This is the reality: Terrorists strike when they believe governments will be caught off guard.

As of June 2, there are 597 days until the next presidential inauguration, on January 20, 2009. As the Bush administration’s days wind down, the government’s level of vulnerability — and the nation’s risk level — increase, and they will stay high until the next president gets on his or her feet. This is true in any transition. “The first year and a half of a new administration is really the most vulnerable in terms of political leadership,” says Paul Light, a professor at New York University’s Wagner School of Public Service.

Be Prepared
January 2009 has current and former officials particularly worried, because it marks the first time since 9/11 that the reins of national and domestic security will be handed off to a completely new team. At the Pentagon, this changeover doesn’t matter as much. It has an entire joint staff of senior military officers who oversee worldwide operations, as well as regional military commands whose senior leadership stays in place. The Homeland Security Department, however, is another story. It is still run almost entirely by political appointees and stands to be the most weakened during the transition.

“Any of the other main Cabinet departments have civil servants that step in” as acting officials during a transition, says Stephen Flynn, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and a leading expert on the department and its history. “Homeland Security doesn’t have any of those…. And that’s extremely unusual.”

In the four and a half years since the department opened for business, few career officials have been promoted into positions of senior or even middle management. As a result, most of the responsibility for running the department, and its plethora of critical missions, is still in the hands of people who will be walking out the door as the Bush administration wanes or leaves en masse after the election. “The department virtually has no backbench,” Flynn says.

The upheaval that strikes all organizations during presidential transitions will be magnified at Homeland Security, which has the third-largest workforce of any Cabinet department. And because the department’s primary mission is to prepare for and respond to catastrophes, the magnitude of a terrorist attack or natural disaster during the transition could be compounded.

“The attack, when it happens, will be far more consequential,” Flynn says. Light echoes that sentiment, and alludes to the department’s most notorious disaster response. “The odds of a repeat of [Hurricane] Katrina are higher.”

Former officials and experts are alarmed that so few Bush administration officials or lawmakers of either party have fully grasped this, and they worry that come Inauguration Day, national security could suffer.

“My fear is that on January 20, where does that transition team go to triage, quickly, the first 10 decisions they need to make?” asks Randy Beardsworth, who left the department in September 2006 as the assistant secretary for strategic plans. “There’s not going to be a senior official with broad experience to answer that unless the transition team gets a couple of key folks to stay on a while.”

When he departed DHS, Beardsworth was one of the last remaining senior officials who had helped the department stand up. And at the time of the 2004 election, he was one of the few career civil servants — and the most senior one — in a leadership post, and thus one of the few senior leaders who would have stayed on without having to be asked.

What people like Beardsworth — career, nonpartisan security experts — fear now is that another storm is heading the department’s way. It makes landfall in 597 days, and the consequences could be severe. Hurricane Katrina was tracked on radar for several days before it struck; federal officials did make some preparations, but obviously they were inadequate. Will the department be ready for this next season of vulnerability? Some officials and homeland-security experts say that the Bush administration — and even the presidential candidates — should take action now to avoid a crisis.

Political by Design
The predicament in which the department now finds itself is almost entirely of its own and the White House’s making. President Bush, who initially opposed creating a different domestic security bureaucracy after 9/11, ultimately assented amid mounting evidence about what clues the administration missed in the run-up to the attacks. Indeed, the White House changed its stance at the same time that Congress held hearings into pre-9/11 intelligence failures, in the summer of 2002. Before the year was out, Bush signed legislation to establish the department, which opened officially in January 2003.

From its inception, Homeland Security was run by political appointees or by other officials on loan to headquarters from the various agencies the department had absorbed. There wasn’t a lot of time to post job notices and staff the ranks with career employees, who take much longer to hire, former officials say.

DHS had to be fully operational on day one. So, the White House and then-Secretary Tom Ridge largely handpicked their leadership team from the ranks of Bush loyalists. Before the 2004 election, Ridge’s deputy secretary, his chief of staff, and almost all of his assistant and undersecretaries and their deputies were political appointees, people who by design would not stay long.

Former officials and experts recognize that haste dictated those early decisions. The problem, they say, is that the trend toward political appointees never subsided.

According to figures compiled in the quadrennial Plum Book by the Office of Personnel Management, as of September 2004 the 180,000-employee Homeland Security Department had more than 360 politically appointed, noncareer positions.

By contrast, the Veterans Affairs Department — the government’s second-largest department, at 235,000 employees — had only 64. And the Defense Department — far and away the largest department in the government, at 2.1 million employees, including military and civilian — counted 283 appointed, noncareer billets. That figure includes political appointees at the Army, Navy, and Air Force. DHS’s own reports show that since 2004, it has often added more political positions to its ranks, and more frequently, than other large departments.

It’s common in government to find political appointees concentrated in policy shops, public-affairs offices, and legislative liaison posts. But that has never been the case at Homeland Security, where appointees run the first- and second-tier layers across almost all of the department’s units.

“Early on, there was a sense that the administration wanted mostly political people,” Beardsworth says. “They were very much concerned about loyalty and shaping the department where they wanted it to go.” He says he always believed that his boss, Asa Hutchinson, the first undersecretary for border and transportation security, as well as Ridge “had the good of the country at heart…. I never had the feeling that we were making partisan decisions.”

But after the 2004 election, when Bush announced that he “earned capital in the campaign, political capital, and now I intend to spend it,” things changed. Under the new DHS secretary, Michael Chertoff, former officials say that the tone and tenor of political appointments took a turn. Personal connections and political fealty became litmus tests, these ex-officials say. Faithfully shepherding administration policy was to be expected, but the department’s leaders seemed more beholden to individuals with close ties to the White House.

In September 2005, for instance, the administration sought to install Julie Myers, a 36-year-old lawyer with little management experience, as the assistant secretary in charge of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement division. ICE was poorly run and a constant problem for the department, and during her nomination hearing, Sen. George Voinovich, R-Ohio, told Myers she was unqualified to helm the unwieldy agency.

For many critics, Myers’s strong political connections explained her swift rise to power. She is the niece of Air Force Gen. Richard Myers, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. She is married to John Wood, who was Chertoff’s chief of staff and an ex-aide to Attorney General John Ashcroft. (Wood is now the U.S. attorney for the Western District of Missouri.) Despite Julie Myers’s lack of experience, President Bush gave her a recess appointment to the job.

The Land of Misfit Toys
Charges of nepotism, cronyism, and incompetence continued to dog Homeland Security’s senior ranks, particularly after the fumbled response to Hurricane Katrina, which was initially directed by an official with meager experience in disaster response — Michael Brown. Nominees who would normally have slid into their jobs with little notice were now held up to scrutiny and sometimes ridicule. Take the case of Andrew Maner, a former staffer to President George H.W. Bush, who became the department’s chief financial officer. Responsible for a multibillion-dollar budget, Maner couldn’t point to any obvious credentials in accounting and finance on his resume.

And then there was Douglas Hoelscher. The former White House staffer and Republican campaign aide was 28 years old when he became executive director of the Homeland Security Advisory Committee last year. The policy group gathers advice on such critical issues as protecting infrastructure and countering weapons of mass destruction.

Hoelscher had no management experience, but had apparently proven himself as a Bush campaign staffer. At the time of his appointment, he was the department’s liaison to the White House, where, in the words of a Homeland Security spokeswoman, he “made sure [that political appointees] were all placed in the office where they were happiest and … fit best.”

Most recently, Philip Perry, the department’s now ex-general counsel, stirred critics’ ire. Perry is Vice President Cheney’s son-in-law. In February, David Walker, the comptroller general of the United States and Congress’s chief watchdog, told House overseers that his office faced “systemic” and “persistent” problems trying to obtain DHS documents because it had to go through Perry. Walker complained that Perry’s office reviewed documents before their release, and that his staff sat in on investigative interviews with Homeland Security employees.

Of all the departments in the government, Homeland Security has the most notorious reputation for placing political appointees in jobs over their heads. In fact, even before the bungled response to Katrina, critics warned that the department could be come a haven for patronage if officials didn’t work hard to beef up DHS’s career ranks.

Indeed, Homeland Security has earned a reputation as a political dumping ground, a sort of Land of Misfit Toys, where GOP fundraisers or apparatchiks are sent to pad their resumes or to cool their heels. There is more than a little truth to this — the department does have a lot of political appointees whose main strength seems to be loyalty to Bush and connections to the White House. But former officials and observers say that the department has many well-intentioned and hardworking political employees, including in the senior ranks.

Nevertheless, the stain of incompetence and cronyism hasn’t faded, nor has the reality that Homeland Security is something of a revolving door. According to Flynn, of the 60 top officials at the department, only one has been there since 2003 when Homeland Security opened its doors.

“This is essentially the most challenging merger and acquisition in government history, and it’s being managed with this turnover in people,” Flynn says. His fear, shared by other experts, is that the limited institutional memory of the Ridge years was lost under Chertoff, and that that memory will be lost again when a new administration takes over.

The department’s leaders have virtually no playbook for transition, something other departments and agencies of that size literally pull off the shelf every four or eight years. “They’re almost starting from scratch,” Flynn says.

The Exit Strategy
If the department is to weather the storm of transition, it will largely depend on the efforts of one man — Michael Jackson, Homeland Security’s deputy secretary.

“If a day goes by and I don’t use up some of my brain cells focusing on this problem, it’s a very unusual day,” he says. The administration has a set of policy goals it wants to achieve before the transition. But underpinning that, Jackson says, is a plan to leave the department stronger than it is now, “so that people [will] start a new administration with the sense that the department has reached a level of maturity.” The possibility of a major attack before or soon after the transition factors into his planning.

Jackson says he is drawing up succession plans for “every operational component”: the Secret Service, the Immigrations and Customs division, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and others, as well as the top layers of management. The basic idea is to find talented career, nonpolitical employees who can move up into more-senior ranks, and then serve in an acting capacity when the administration changes hands. (It will be the next president’s prerogative to keep or dismiss those officials.)

“We’ve gone throughout the entire organization and looked for people like this to promote,” Jackson says. “We’re trying to nurture a cadre of owners. I am the part-time help at DHS.”

Jackson acknowledges that it hasn’t been easy to keep good help. “We’ve had a significant turnover,” he says. “And that turnover has been below the top-level jobs as well.” But, he insists, preparations for the transition are well under way. “I would say we are well beyond the halfway point in what we have to get done.”

Certain agencies within DHS ought to fare better than others. The Coast Guard, for instance, has an entrenched military culture, so command will shift more smoothly. The Secret Service, although now headed by a presidential appointee, will still likely draw from within its own ranks in the next administration. And in the intelligence directorate, officials have implemented a slew of training programs to cultivate junior officers for more-senior posts.

But it’s the headquarters operation, not the front-line agencies, that has observers most worried. The constant turnover and reliance on political appointees has effectively stunted the growth of a management class.

There are notable exceptions. The current commissioner of Customs and Border Protection, Ralph Basham, and FEMA Director David Paulsion have spent most of their careers in government and have held other senior positions in the department.

But across the top layers of Homeland Security, critics say, the department is still far more reliant on political appointees than other large departments. And this state of affairs causes some national security experts to pose a challenge to the field of 2008 presidential hopefuls: Commit now that if you win the election, you will keep the top leaders at Homeland Security, and across the intelligence agencies, perhaps indefinitely.

Permanence in Transition
It might seem anathema that, say, a President Hillary Rodham Clinton would ask Michael Chertoff or any of his lieutenants to serve in her administration. It might seem even less likely that any candidate of either party, given how forcefully they’ll try to distance themselves from the security policies of the Bush administration, would throw out an open invitation for the architects of those policies to hang around. But that might just be the soundest move in the interests of national security.

“It’s possible,” Jackson says. For example, even if Chertoff left, his replacement could ask the director of FEMA or his deputy to stay. “That would be one thing I’m prepared to advise,” Jackson says. And there is precedent for such a move.

Michael Hayden, now the director of the CIA, served under two presidents — Clinton and the second Bush — as National Security Agency director. Ex-CIA Director George Tenet also held on to his job in that transition. True, Tenet lobbied to stay, and the CIA director’s success has always depended on a personal rapport with the president. (Tenet and Bush got along from the start.) But Hayden and Tenet proved that professionals can overcome politics, at least during a transition.

Members of Congress have considered awarding top intelligence and security jobs political immunity. In the mid-1990s, House Republicans contemplated making the CIA director the head of the agency — rather than an overall intelligence czar as the director was then — and giving the position some statutory longevity. The idea was to make the job more like the FBI director’s post, which doesn’t automatically turn over on Election Day, says Tim Sample, who was the staff director of the House Permanent Select Intelligence Committee at the time.

“The only reason we did not take that step in our recommendations was the issue of the personal rapport with the president,” says Sample, who is now president of the Intelligence and National Security Alliance, a nonprofit intelligence advocacy group. Lawmakers understood that the president and the CIA director had a unique relationship, one they thought should be preserved. But they still believed that, fundamentally, the job should be above politics, and Sample says this is truer than ever today.

This idea is gaining traction again in security circles, especially in the intelligence community, where many current and former officials think that the recent appointments of several seasoned experts to top slots has resulted in a “Dream Team.” Defense Secretary Robert Gates is a former CIA director; career intelligence officer James Clapper is Gates’s military spy chief; former National Security Agency Director Mike McConnell is now director of national intelligence; and Hayden, the ex-NSA chief, is running the CIA.

Former officials and experts recoil at the idea of losing such a deeply experienced, collegial, and by all accounts remarkably apolitical team of leaders at such a critical moment for national security. They want lawmakers and the presidential candidates to consider keeping those officials in their posts.

The same goes for Homeland Security. “The only reason there are all those [political] positions is just because of the way the department came together,” Sample says. “One could argue those should not be political positions.”

There’s precedent for that, too. Before the Office of the Director of National Intelligence was established in April 2005, career assistant directors managed the intelligence agencies, and were charged with overseeing various programs and policies that stretched across administrations. On a practical level, the agencies needed that continuity, but officials also wanted to avoid politicizing intelligence, Sample says. It has always been a difficult goal, inconsistently achieved, but it’s one that all presidents are encouraged to aim for.

Some experts have suggested that Congress cap the number of politically appointed senior posts at Homeland Security as a way of stanching future brain drains. Sens. Voinovich and Daniel Akaka, D-Hawaii, have proposed legislation to elevate the undersecretary for management to the third-ranking spot in the department. The bill would require a career employee to also serve in a five-year term as the secretary’s “principal adviser” on management issues.

Jackson, the deputy secretary, strongly opposes the bill, saying it is unnecessary. He insists that the current leaders understand the problems Voinovich and others have expressed. “This is stuff we all talk about,” he says. “The team gets it.

“I won’t blow smoke at you and say everything is nailed down and perfectly fixed,” Jackson continues. “The day that someone in my department tells you that about DHS is the day that person should get out of his job…. But [the transition plan] is not something I feel anxiety about.”

Opportunity Lost
Those who know Jackson and have worked with him say he has never been one to put partisanship over security, and that he is not biased against career employees. But some have accused him of micromanaging the department and not handing over enough authority earlier to career officials. These failures, they say, have retarded the department’s maturation process. For his part, Jackson says he’s focused on the transition, and has drilled the urgency into all of his lieutenants.

In government, organizations mature by finding the right balance of politically motivated leaders and apolitical bureaucrats. The former have the ability, and the credibility, to make policy, and the latter actually know how to make it work. This is the tension that, sooner or later, leads to equilibrium.

Beardsworth, the former assistant secretary, has always adhered to that philosophy. He’s now a vice president at Analytic Services, a nonprofit research group that advises security and intelligence agencies. Its Homeland Security Institute, a federally funded research and development center established in the same law that created DHS, is counseling senior officials on transition strategies. Knowing the department lacks a playbook, Beardsworth hopes the institute has enough experts to help ease the transition, and he praises Jackson for taking action now.

But like Jackson, Beardsworth isn’t blowing any smoke. “Does the department have the right political and career mix to ensure a smooth transition?” he asks, sounding like a frustrated yet hopeful parent. “No. They’ve likely missed that opportunity.”

another spam call counteracted thanks to the counterscript…

spammer: could i speak to <dramatically mispronounced approximation of my name>

me: who wants to know?

spammer: this is stacy wilson with (some market research company)…

me: and how did you get this number?

spammer: it was provided to us by washington mutual

(i’ll have to speak with them about that… 8/ )

me: is this your full time job?

spammer: yes…

me and do you also live in washington?

spammer: no, i’m calling from chicago. i’m with (some market research company)…

me: and how long have you been in the telemarketing business?

spammer: i’m not a telemarketer…

me: you are cold-calling people and asking them personal questions, and in that sense, you are the same as a person who is a telemarketer. how long have you been in that business?

spammer: but i’m not a telemarketer… i’ve been doing this for 3 years…

me: that’s quite long, and do you like your job?

spammer: sometimes…

me: i can see that. and how much do you earn?

spammer: that is confidential…

me: okay, do you get time off to go to the dentist?

spammer: (brightening) yes.

me: and it important to have good teeth for your position?

spammer: (confused) yes…

me: is there a specific toothpaste that you would recommend?

spammer: i would guess that it’s whatever a person wants…

me: thank you for your information. is there a phone number i could reach you at if i need any further information?

spammer: um, that’s confidential… we’re calling over internet and there isn’t a number that you can call the business, and my personal phone number is confidential.

me: thank you, and have a pleasant day. <CLICK!>

The Bush take on U.S. opinion
May 28, 2007
By JENNIFER LOVEN

Confronted with strong opposition to his Iraq policies, President Bush decides to interpret public opinion his own way. Actually, he says, people agree with him.

Democrats view the November elections that gave them control of Congress as a mandate to bring U.S. troops home from Iraq. They’re backed by evidence; election exit poll surveys by The Associated Press and television networks found 55 percent saying the U.S. should withdraw some or all of its troops from Iraq.

The president says Democrats have it all wrong: the public doesn’t want the troops pulled out — they want to give the military more support in its mission.

“Last November, the American people said they were frustrated and wanted a change in our strategy in Iraq,” he said April 24, ahead of a veto showdown with congressional Democrats over their desire to legislation a troop withdrawal timeline. “I listened. Today, General David Petraeus is carrying out a strategy that is dramatically different from our previous course.”

Increasingly isolated on a war that is going badly, Bush has presented his alternative reality in other ways, too. He expresses understanding for the public’s dismay over the unrelenting sectarian violence and American losses that have passed 3,400, but then asserts that the public’s solution matches his.

“A lot of Americans want to know, you know, when?” he said at a Rose Garden news conference Thursday. “When are you going to win?”

Also in that session, Bush said: “I recognize there are a handful there, or some, who just say, `Get out, you know, it’s just not worth it. Let’s just leave.’ I strongly disagree with that attitude. Most Americans do as well.”

In fact, polls show Americans do not disagree, and that leaving — not winning — is their main goal.

In one released Friday by CBS and the New York Times, 63 percent supported a troop withdrawal timetable of sometime next year. Another earlier this month from USA Today and Gallup found 59 percent backing a withdrawal deadline that the U.S. should stick to no matter what’s happening in Iraq.

Bush aides say poll questions are asked so many ways, and often so imprecisely, that it is impossible to conclude that most Americans really want to get out. Failure, Bush says, is not what the public wants — they just don’t fully understand that that is just what they will get if troops are pulled out before the Iraqi government is capable of keeping the country stable on its own.

Seeking to turn up the heat on this argument, Bush has relied lately on an al-Qaida mantra. Terrorists remain dangerous, and fighting them in Iraq is key to neutralizing the threat, he says. “It’s hard for some Americans to see that, I fully understand it,” Bush said. “I see it clearly.”

Independent pollster Andrew Kohut said of the White House view: “I don’t see what they’re talking about.”

“They want to know when American troops are going to leave,” Kohut, director of the nonpartisan Pew Research Center, said of the public. “They certainly want to win. But their hopes have been dashed.”

Kohut has found it notable that there’s such a consensus in poll findings.

“When the public hasn’t made up its mind or hasn’t thought about things, there’s a lot of variation in the polls,” he said. “But there’s a fair amount of agreement now.”

The president didn’t used to try to co-opt polling for his benefit. He just said he ignored it.

In Ohio in mid-April, for instance, Bush was asked how he feels about his often dismal showings. “Polls just go poof at times,” he replied.

It was the same the next day in Michigan. “If you make decisions based upon the latest opinion poll, you won’t be thinking long-term strategy on behalf of the American people,” the president said.

After weeks of negotiations between the White House and Capitol Hill’s majority Democrats, last week ended with things going Bush’s way. Congress passed and he signed a war spending bill that was stripped of any requirement that the war end.

But the debate is far from over.

The measure funds the war only through Sept. 30 — around the time that military commanders are scheduled to report to Bush and Congress on whether the troop increase the president ordered in January is quelling the violence as hoped. Even Republicans have told Bush that a major reckoning is coming in September, and that they will be hard-pressed to continue to stand behind him if things don’t look markedly better. Also due that month is an independent assessment of the Iraqi government’s progress on measures aimed at lessening sectarian tensions that are fueling the violence.

Between now and then, Democrats don’t intend to stay quiet. They plan a series of votes on whether U.S. troops should stay in Iraq and whether the president has the authority to continue the war.

Bush isn’t likely to stay quiet, either.

Wayne Fields, an expert on presidential rhetoric at Washington University in St. Louis, said the president’s new language exploits the fact that there is no one alternative strategy for the public to coalesce around, which clearly spells out how to bring troops home. Bush can argue that people agree with him because no one can define the alternative, Fields said.

But, with the president’s job approval ratings so low and the public well aware of what it thinks about the war, Bush is taking a big gamble.

“This is a very tricky thing in our politics. We want to think that we want our leaders to stand up to public opinion. But we also like to think of ourselves as being in a democracy where we are listened to,” Fields said. “He risks either the notion of being thought out of touch … or to be thought simply duplicitous.”

NOW can we impeach him?

of course, impeachment won’t actually solve the problem… they impeached clinton and he stayed in office. what’s to prevent the same thing from happening if we impeach bush?

it’s getting so that, even with my consciously ignoring news sources, enough news leaks through anyway, and what i hear has been causing me to worry even more than i do ordinarily. other-than-christians and other-than-heterosexuals violently discriminated against at home and abroad, political mayhem wherever i look… even the strikethrough, subsequent exposure of the dominionist christian terrorists, and LJ/6A “back-pedaling” has sinister overtones. i have to keep remembering something that i learned when i was first entering the seminary: “things are going to get worse before they get better. things are going to become more and more polarised, and you will be forced to adopt one side or the other in order to survive. but not long after that, the saviour will come and ‘straighten everything out’.” i was always lead to believe that it meant an internal polarisation and an internal saviour, but it may be that the microcosm and the macrocosm are reflections of each other…

yesterday was the official fremont bridge re-opening (it has been partially closed for about a year or so due to construction and seismic refits), and the fremont philharmonic’s presence was requested by… i don’t know, fremont apparently doesn’t have a “mayor” (although why is beyond me), but it was somebody or some group of people who had authority to request our presence at the festivities. it was two shows in two states in two days for me, and i was glad when it was all over, but it was fun and everything went more or less according to plan.

jeremy is back from the berklee school for the summer and is planning on going to OCF with us this year, so now i have to put back into Troll March, the baritone part that i arranged out not more than two weeks ago, but it’s all good. the ultimate reality is that jeremy will be playing with us again. of all the people that have played with the phil in the years that i’ve played with them, i think jeremy is one of my favourites, although i can’t exactly tell you why. the plan, such as it is at this point, is to meet with stuart some time early this week to work out some details with lilypond that will hopefully make all this re-arranging of parts a lot easier.

also stuart sent me a MIDI file of amy bob playing the keyboards that he wants me to arrange for the band. how about that? a “famous recording artist” wrote a piece of music for a group that i play in, and i’m the one that is chosen to arrange it. that’s pretty close to being a fulfillment of a dream that i’ve had ever since i was 10 years old. 8)

i’m going to portland today for a performance with the Big Bois With Poise at reed college this evening. see ya’ tomorrow. 8)

quoting :

“Material which can be interpreted as expressing interest in, soliciting, or encouraging illegal activity places LiveJournal at considerable legal risk. When journals that contain such material are reported to us, we must suspend them. Because LiveJournal’s interests list serves as a search function, and because listing an interest enables other people also interested in a similar topic to gather and/or congregate, we have been advised that listing an interest in an illegal activity must be viewed as using LiveJournal to solicit that illegal activity.”

does that mean that listing anything having to do with marijuana puts your journal at risk, or am i just being paranoid?

The Political Economy of the War on Drugs

An early twentieth century writer by the name of Randolph Bourne remarked that “War is the health of the state”. The American founders recognized that government has a tendency to grow and expand over time. Nothing does as much to speed up the growth rate of as war. Throughout American history the greatest expansions of government have occurred during war times. The American Civil War of 1861-1865 consolidated the power of the federal regime over the previously sovereign states. The entry of the United States into the First World War took place at the same time as the enactment of the federal income tax, the implementation of alcohol prohibition, the creation of the FBI and other drastic expansions of federal power. The advent of the Second World War consolidated the welfare state of the New Deal, the cartelization of industry and labor under Roosevelt’s National Recovery Administration (modeled after Italian fascism), the subordination of the domestic economy under war production, the interment of Japanese-Americans in concentration camps and many other ills. The Cold War era brought about the permanent entrenchment of the military-industrial complex, the creation of the CIA in 1947, permanent peacetime conscription (not ended until 1971), the creation of the United Nations and a foreign policy of world wide military interventionism. The war in Vietnam took place along side the advent of the Great Society expansion of the welfare state, the elimination of the gold standard in monetary policy and the COINTELPRO program of repression against domestic dissidents. The acceleration of the arms race during the 1980s coincided with the quadrupling of the national debt. The evidence is overwhelming that war is indeed a great boon to the state. War provides the state with opportunities to raise taxes, eradicate civil liberties, consolidate central power, subsidize elite economic interests, acquire new territory, expand the power of officials, rally the public behind the state and many other benefits.

Historically, states seeking to increase their power have frequently looked for excuses to go to war or hold up the threat of war. The decaying Roman Empire sought the support of its citizens by proclaiming its desire to save them from an alleged threat of invasion by the Germanic tribes of the north. “The barbarians are at the gates” became their rallying cry. States can also claim to be saving society from some ominous threat by waging a war on an alleged “enemy within”, that is, some group within the society that is villified by officials and attacked as a grave danger to “ordinary” citizens. This is what the Nazis did with the Jews, of course. The Nazi German regime denounced Jews as carriers of disease, criminals, purveyors of perversions and decadence, unpatriotic, responsible for the spread of communism, engaging in unscrupulous and ruinous banking and business practices and many other things. The Nazi regime demanded and obtained extraordinary powers in order to combat the alleged Jewish menace. The American regime of today is pursuing an path identitical to that followed by Germany during the 1930s. However, the “enemy within” that is under attack is not the Jewish people but the users and sellers of those particular psychoactive substances commonly referred to as “drugs”.

What is a drug? What is a “drug user”? What is a “drug dealer”? How are these objects/persons portrayed in the rhetoric of government officials and in the media? How consistent is this portrayal with actual fact? A “drug” is simply a psychoactive substance legally prohibited by the state such as heroin, cocaine, marijuana, MDMA (“ecstasy”) or LSD. Using this terminological criteria, other psycho- active, addictive and potentially deadly substances such as alcohol, tobacco and valium are not considered “drugs”. However, medical research shows that tobacco (nicotine) is at least as addictive as heroin and cocaine. Four hundred thousand people die from tobacco use annually in the United States. The addictive intoxicant alcohol is the strongest of any psychoactive substance and indeed is the only one from which withdrawal is potentially fatal. On the other hand, there has never been a documented case of death from marijuana use alone. Also, numerous studies have shown that marijuana use does not severely impair driving while alcohol abuse is responsible for many, many traffic fatalities.

Drug users are typically depicted as thieves, criminals, negligent parents, derilects, degenerates, disruptive neighbors and chronically unemployed bums. Former “first lady” Nancy Reagan even claimed that drug users are accomplices to murder. Former Los Angeles Police Chief Daryl Gates once remarked that casual marijuana smokers should be executed for treason and stated later on that he wasn’t being facetious. However, included in the ranks of drug users are many high school and college students, blue-collar workers, businesspeople, housewives, lawyers, physicians, athletes, entertainers, judges and, of course, politicians. Are all of these people predatory criminals, accomplices to murder and seditious traitors to their country? William F. Buckley has noted that reliable estimates indicate that as many as half of the soldiers fighting in Vietnam were using drugs such as heroin, opium, hashish or marijuana at the time. Were all these folks who were risking their lives in the name of their country criminals and subversives? What is a “drug dealer”? Simply put, a drug dealer is a person who sells a drug to another person who desires to purchase it just as a grocer is a “food dealer” or a bartender is a “liquor dealer” or a tobacco farmer is a “nicotine dealer”. “Drug dealers” are often portrayed as predators preying on the “misery” of their customers. But the vast array of breweries, distilleries, liquor stores, convenience stores, bars, nightclubs, dance halls, restaurants, fraternities and countless other enterprenuers and establishments are not denounced for preying upon the “misery” of alcoholics and problem drinkers. Grocers are not blamed for the woes of anorectics, bulimics and obese persons. Interestingly, when “drug dealers” are prosecuted they are attacked for preying upon and allegedly victimizing drug users. However, when drug users are prosecuted they are denounced for creating the market for drug dealers and perpetrating the illicit drug trade. Hence, the drug user becomes the victim and the criminal simultaneously.

Of course, most people who use drugs are not drug addicts in the clinical sense just as most people who drink are not alcoholics. Even most addicts are not derilects just as most alcoholics are not skid row bums. In fact, most people are drug users of some sort. Rare is the person who completely abstains from alcohol, tobacco, caffeine, valium, prozac, ritalin, marijuana, heroin, cocaine, hallucinogens and other psychoactives all at once. The differentiation between legal and illegal drugs is cultural and historical rather than medical, scientific or ethical. The same is true of the differentiation between illegal drug use and other potentially risky but legal activities such as skiing, skydiving, automobile racing, boxing, football, rockclimbing, bungee-jumping, overeating, motorcycling and cayaking.

Why are some drugs illegal while others are not? The earliest American drug laws begin with attempts to prohibit opium smoking in the nineteenth century. At the time, America was experiencing a wave of Chinese immigration. Opium was their drug of choice. Powerful labor unions such as the American Federation of Labor feared competition from Chinese laborers who were quite hardworking and generally willing to work for lower wages. Labor leaders villified the Chinese as opium-crazed fiends who preyed sexually upon young white girls. Similarly, blacks and Mexicans used marijuana because it could be grown locally and was cheaper than alcohol so marijuana became a target as well. The United States was really the first nation to enact modern drug prohibition and began to use its growing international power to pressure other nations in the same direction. The first federal drug laws began with the passage of the Harrison Narcotic Act of 1914. Not coincidentally, the federal income tax had begun the year before. Drug prohibition has continued in the United States since that time with varying degrees of intensity. Following the repeal of alcohol prohibition in 1933, the Bureau of Prohibition, set up to enforce alcohol prohibition, began to target marijuana instead. The Bureau of Prohibition is now called the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (BATF). Drug enforcement also intensified in the early 1970s. President Nixon realized that substantial political mileage could be gained from the scapegoating of drug users even though his own commission on drug policy recommended the decriminalization of marijuana use. It was the era of the Vietnam-related culture wars and marijuana users were portrayed as dirty, anti-American hippies and communist sympathizers. However, the current version of the drug war, the most intense in American history, began in the 1980s. Like Nixon before them, officials in the Reagan administration understood that a lot of political mileage could be gained from whipping up hysteria against drug users among more “conservative” sectors of the population. As the Cold War began to wind down in the late 1980s, the American government needed a new enemy that it could claim to be protecting the people from and “drugs” provided an easy and obvious target. Public concern regarding drug abuse had been rising because of the advent of the new and highly addictive drug crack, violence related to the new and highly competitive inner-city crack trade and the death of prominent college basketball star Len Bias from an alleged cocaine overdose. The “War on Drugs” in its present form began. A new government agency, the Office of National Drug Control Policy, was created and originally headed up by the neo- fascist demagogue William J. Bennett. The ONDCP became an outlet for anti-drug propaganda generated by the government. Drastic increases in government spending in areas related to drug policy took place. Draconian penalties for the tiniest of drug infractions were implemented.

To fully understand what the drug war is about it is necessary to examine some important and relevant historical precendents. Traditionally, when governments have sought to increase their power by attacking an internal population group the usual targets have been religious and ethnic minorities. This was true of the Romans who attacked Christians, a predominately lower class religious movement at the time. This was true of medieval theocratic states which attacked, alternately, Catholics, Protestants, heretics, witches, Jews, pagans, Muslims, etc. Indeed, we might say that just as medieval states maintained and promoted an official state religion (usually Catholicism) and persecuted and prohibited others (Protestants, Jews, dissident Catholics) so does the current American government maintain official, socially approved and even government subsidized and sold drugs (alcohol, tobacco, ritalin) and prohibits others (marijuana, heroin and cocaine) and persecutes those who use and sell them. The Nazi regime targeted Jews, Gypsies, Communists, homosexuals and other groups and, historically, many American politicians have sought to advance themselves by attacking and scapegoating blacks, immigrants and other minorities.

In contemporary America, it is not socially acceptable to openly engage in the villification of racial and religious minorities as it was in past cultures. This would be in conflict with the prevailing ethos of religious toleration originating from the First Amendment to the United States Constitution and the minority civil rights revolution of the 1960s. Therefore, other cultural groups not considered to be a part of mainstream or “respectable” society, such as “drug users”, are targeted instead. The historian Richard Lawrence Miller has conducted an enlightening study of the parallels between the Nazi war on Jews and the American war on drug users. Miller is more than qualified to comment on these matters. He is the son of an investigator for the prosecution during the Nuremburg trials of Nazi leaders for war crimes. Miller is also the author of several books on both drug policy and Nazi law and jurisprudence. His evidence and conclusions are meticulously researched and documented. No doubt most Americans would find comparisons between the drug war and Nazi persecution to be the result of mere fanaticism. Americans ignore evidence legitimizing such a comparison at their peril. Americans do not want to believe that their country, supposedly the “land of free” who fought and defeated fascism, could have gotten so far off track as to be pursuing a path identical to that of the Nazis. However, the evidence is overwhelming that this is indeed the case. The Nazis blamed the Jews for crime, the spread of disease, urban blight, the terrible conditions in slums and many other ills. The current American regime blames drug users for all of these things. Even the language and terminology employed by leading drug war officials and Nazi leaders is identical. Hans Frank, the Nazi commissioner of occupied Poland, remarked that “Jews are the carriers of diseases and germs”. Likewise, the original American drug “czar”, William Bennett, proclaimed, “The casual adult drug user is in some ways the most dangerous person because that person is a carrier…a non-addict’s drug use, in other words, is highly contagious”. Miller notes that “a person having the status of Jew was forbidden to do things permitted to other persons…they were forbidden to engage in activities inherent to normal life, from driving a car to holding a job”. Similarly, William Bennett announced: “Drug users who maintain a job and a steady income should face stiff fines…These are the users who should have their names published in local papers. They should be subject to drivers’ license suspension, employer notification, overnight or weekend detention, eviction from public housing or forfeiture of the cars they drive while purchasing drugs”. In other words, drug users should be rendered uemployed, homeless and immobile even when it is clear that their drug use has harmed no one and that they are functional and self-sufficient. Nazi leaders even went so far as to claim that Jews represented a type of supernatural evil. The Nazi propagandist Julius Streicher, later hanged for war crimes, remarked, “The Jews are not human beings but children of the devil and the spawns of crime…This satanic race has no right to exist”. Interestingly, the drug war criminal William Bennett told a group of Baptists that “drug users are the product of the devil” and later remarked on television that no trial should be necessarily required before the summary execution of accused drug sellers because “they deserve to die”. Instructively, even the Nazi regime found it impossible to suppress the illegal trade in cocaine and opiates in Germany. Miller analyzes the five steps through which the Germans systematically accelerated their attacks upon the Jews and shows how an identical program has been implemented in the war on drugs. The five steps are identification, ostracism, confiscation, concentration and annihlation. The process is well under way. Consider:

1. Identification- an undesired class of persons is held up to be different from and inferior to others. Nazis denounced Jews as criminals, social parasites, degenerates and other slurs. Drug users are treated in a similar manner. What is the truth here? Just as German Jews were ordinary German citizens in every important sense, the distinguished narcotics expert Jerome Jaffe remarks:

   “The addict who is able to obtain an adequate supply of drugs through legitimate channels and has adequate funds usually dresses properly, maintains his nutrition, and is able to discharge his social and occupational obligations with reasonable efficiency. He usually remains in good health, suffers little inconvenience, and is, in general, difficult to distinguish from other person.”

2. Ostracism-the target group is subjected to institutionalized discrimination because of their social status. German Jews were forbidden to drive cars, hold certain jobs, serve in the military, intermarry with ethnic Germans and many other activities. Likewise, American drug users can have their drivers’ licenses revoked, their children taken away, their employment terminated and many other similar sanctions. Under American drug law, drug users may be denied student loans and welfare but no similar sanctions exist concerning convicted murderers and rapists.
3. Confiscation-the property of the target group is systematically seized by the state. The businesses and homes of German Jews were often seized and forfeited to the Gestapo and other Nazi agents. The homes, businesses, automobiles, bank accounts and personal possessions of American drug users are being taken from them in a similar manner and frequently kept by the police. Even the property of persons never convicted of any drug “crime” is frequently seized.
4. Concentration-the target group is restricted to certain geographical locations and barred from entering others. German Jews were initially confined to ghettos and then placed in concentration camps. American drug users are placed in jails and prisons, mental hospitals, pseudo-military “boot camps” (a practice also utilized by the Nazis) and forced to undergo experimental and unscientific “substance abuse treatment” programs in violation of standards of medical ethics.

   At this point some of the stereotypes hurled at drug users by drug warriors become self-fulfilling. A favorite tactic of the Nazis was to concentrate Jews into segregated ghettos and then remove sewage, electricity and other sanitation and utility services. The predictable result would be an increase in the spread of tuberculosis and dysentary, lice, rodents, squalor and decay. Jews forced to live in these conditions would then begin to resemble the stereotype of the depraved, derilect Jew depicted in Nazi propaganda. The Nazis would then use these conditions as a justification for their racial views and an increase in the persecution. Similar tactics are used against drug users. Prohibition forces addicts to buy their drugs on the black market. Heroin and cocaine are both worth about two dollars per gram at standard market value. But the black market price can often be fifty times greater. Consequently, many addicts, particularly from the poorer classes, have no options but theft or prostitution as a means of obtaining their drugs. When there was a serious shortage of tobacco in Europe following the Second World War, many tobacco addicts began to steal to finance their habits as prices soared and many tobacco-addicted women resorted to prostitution in order to obtain money for cigarettes. The situation that poor addicts face would be akin to one where food were declared illegal and a sandwhich or a hot dog suddenly cost $200 on the black market. What would most people do in such a situation? Drug policy is designed to all but guarantee that addicts become impoverished, homeless, unemployed, unable to care for children and other dependents and intertwined with the criminal underworld. Likewise, drug prohibition guarantees that a disproportionate number of sociopaths and routine criminals enter the drug business and susequently engage in violence as a means of market discipline and the elimination of competitors. This only serves to bolster the bigoted stereotypes purveyed by drug war propaganda. The fifth and final step in the crusade against German Jews and American drug users is the obvious one:

5. Annihlation-the target group is systematically exterminated. German Jews were killed by means of poison gas, firing squads, deliberate starvation, incineration, intentional denial of medical care and prolonged exposure to harsh conditions. The mass extermination of American drug users has not, at the time this essay is being written (early 2001), became a full-scale endeavor. Rather, the killing of drug users is most often a side effect of the general persecution program. Cancer and AIDS patients who might benefit from the medicinal use of marijuana are denied treatment. This seems to have been the central factor in the death of the late author Peter McWilliams. Some people have suggested that overdose victims be denied medical care altogether (most overdoses are the result of adulterated black market drugs). Others, such as New York radio talk show host Bob Grant, have suggested that authorities deliberately place poisoned drug supplies on the street for the purpose of intentionally killing addicts. Officials ranging from former drug czar William Bennett to former Los Angeles Police Chief Daryl Gates to former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrinch have called for the execution of drug “offenders”. Drug users, and even bystanders uninvolved with drugs, are sometimes killed as a result of terrorist activities by thuggish police SWAT teams and narcotics and vice agents. William Bennett has praised the murder of drug users and sellers by private vigilante groups.

The apparatus necessary for a full-scale genocide has already been constructed. A target group has been subjected to every form of threat, harassment, persecution, confiscation and incarceration. Those who view drug users as subhumans deserving mass incarceration are unlikely to be particularly troubled by mass extermination. A vast army of special interest groups has evolved that has a powerful incentive to keep the drug war rolling to its “final solution”. These include:

• police for whom the drug war is a means of employment, career advancement, funding for law enforcement agencies, power, glory, adventure and prestige.
• bureaucrats heading up and employed by a myriad of agencies involved in the drug war ranging from public housing authorities who evict drug using tenants to regulatory agencies who shut down the legal businesses of drug users or dealers to towing companies with contracts to impound the cars of suspected drug buyers.
• lawyers, both defense attorneys and prosecutors, for whom drug cases are a major source of business, prestige and career advancement
• the organized alcohol, tobacco and pharmaceutical lobby who regard illegal drugs as unwanted competition to their own products. Much of the funding for the Partnership for a Drug-Free America, a drug war propaganda group consisting mostly of a coalition of advertising agencies, comes from these elements.
• politicians building their careers on drug war demagoguery and inflammatory rhetoric
• journalists and media outlets for whom the drug war is a source of sensationalistic and therefore ratings-gathering and career-enhancing news.
• construction companies and service industries with lucrative government contracts to build and supply more and more prisons
• corrections officials and prison guards’ unions for whom mass imprisonment of drug users is a source of job security. The prison guards’ union is the second largest campaign donor in California state elections.
• state-subsidized academics deriving prestige from developing drug war policy, gathering statistics and research, and creating an ideological smokescreen for the drug war
• corrupt informants, often criminals themselves, paid to “snitch” on others
• judges (no explanation needed)
• “moral enteprenuers”, that is, persons deriving recognition from pushing the drug war as a righteous moral crusade ranging from Jesse Jackson to televangelists to radio talk-show hosts
• owners and employees of “drug treatment” facilities whose clients are often persons coerced into such programs
• corrupt public officials personally involved in the drug trade and deriving enormous profits from the black market pricing system
• military officials who see the use of the military in both foreign and domestic drug war efforts as means of obtaining job security, power and prestige
• organized physicians and pharmacists who see drug decriminalization as potential threat to the monopolistic prescription system of which they are the main beneficiaries
• foreign policy elites who see the drug war as an excuse for military intervention in other countries (such as Columbia) for other political purposes
• corrupt bankers who profit from drug money laundered by their banks
• parents groups afraid that an end to the drug war will result in the increase in the number of youngsters who use drugs
• neigborhood groups concerned about the effects of the war on drugs in their community who mistakenly blame drugs for the effects of drug prohibition
• religious factions for whom drug use is a strong taboo

Of course, many more elements could be added to this list. At this point, it needs to be pointed out that the drug war is, in a broader sense, a war against traditional American democracy and civil and constitutional rights of every kind. How is this being done? The drug war is being used to attack the First Amendment provisions for freedom of religion, speech and the press. American Indians and Rastafarians for whom peyote and marijuana have sacramental meaning are not allowed to practice their religion. A case of this type went before the Supreme Court in 1989. The Court rejected the claim that Indian groups had any right to use peyote for religious purposes with Justice Antonin Scalia remarking that freedom of religion was “a luxury we can’t afford” if it got in the way of the drug war. This sets a precedent whereby religious liberty may be arbitrarily denied when it is in conflict with state policy of the moment. Similarly, when the late Peter McWilliams was working on a book arguing in favor of the medical use of marijuana the federal Drug Enforcement Administration got word of his project and went to his home and confiscated the computer containing the files for his manuscript. William F. Buckley remarked at the time that it was akin to the DEA going to the headquarters of the New York Times and confiscating their printing presses. The DEA has also pressured newspapers to refrain from carrying columns by Buckley criticizing the DEA.

The Second Amendment protection of the right to bear arms is also under attack because of the drug war. Violent turf wars conducted by drug dealing street gangs and the alleged threat to police by armed victims of drug war raids have led to a call for stricter guns laws, even outright gun confiscation in some quarters. All other constitutional rights-freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures, due process, property rights, privacy rights, states’ rights, exemption from excessive punishment, the provision against double jeopardy-are being undermined and assaulted in the name of the drug war. The United States has five percent of the world’s population and twenty-five percent of the world’s prisoners. The drug war has contributed to a drastic deterioration in the realm of race relations. Even though most drug users are white, blacks and other minorities are arrested, prosecuted and incarcerated for drug “offenses” at a grossly disproportional rate. Forty percent of all black youth in their twenties are either in prison, on probation or on parole. One and a half million children now have one or both parents in prison. Large sections of cities have become virtually uninhabitable because of violence generated by the drug war.

One last thought needs to be considered. As mentioned, the apparatus necessary for a full-scale genocide has already been created. The Nazis managed to exterminate millions of Jews and other groups. The only active armed resistance occurred in the Warsaw ghetto. Originally containing three hundred thousand Jews, the gradual Nazi deportation program eventually reduced the population to forty thousand. It was at this point that an armed resistance movement, armed with homemade weapons and led by courageous youth in their twenties, began. They succeeded in warding off the Gestapo for a month before finally being crushed. So far the only public official courageous enough to advocate genuine resistance to what is being done to America today has been former New Hampshire state representative Tom Alciere. Let’s not make the same mistake as the Europeans of sixty years ago.

Cheney Attempting to Constrain Bush’s Choices on Iran Conflict: Staff Engaged in Insubordination Against President Bush
May 24, 2007
By Steve Clemons

There is a race currently underway between different flanks of the administration to determine the future course of US-Iran policy.

On one flank are the diplomats, and on the other is Vice President Cheney’s team and acolytes — who populate quite a wide swath throughout the American national security bureaucracy.

The Pentagon and the intelligence establishment are providing support to add muscle and nuance to the diplomatic effort led by Condi Rice, her deputy John Negroponte, Under Secretary of State R. Nicholas Burns, and Legal Adviser John Bellinger. The support that Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, and CIA Director Michael Hayden are providing Rice’s efforts are a complete, 180 degree contrast to the dysfunction that characterized relations between these institutions before the recent reshuffle of top personnel.

However, the Department of Defense and national intelligence sector are also preparing for hot conflict. They believe that they need to in order to convince Iran’s various power centers that the military option does exist.

But this is worrisome. The person in the Bush administration who most wants a hot conflict with Iran is Vice President Cheney. The person in Iran who most wants a conflict is Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Quds Force would be big winners in a conflict as well — as the political support that both have inside Iran has been flagging.

Multiple sources have reported that a senior aide on Vice President Cheney’s national security team has been meeting with policy hands of the American Enterprise Institute, one other think tank, and more than one national security consulting house and explicitly stating that Vice President Cheney does not support President Bush’s tack towards Condoleezza Rice’s diplomatic efforts and fears that the President is taking diplomacy with Iran too seriously.

This White House official has stated to several Washington insiders that Cheney is planning to deploy an “end run strategy” around the President if he and his team lose the policy argument.

The thinking on Cheney’s team is to collude with Israel, nudging Israel at some key moment in the ongoing standoff between Iran’s nuclear activities and international frustration over this to mount a small-scale conventional strike against Natanz using cruise missiles (i.e., not ballistic missiles).

This strategy would sidestep controversies over bomber aircraft and overflight rights over other Middle East nations and could be expected to trigger a sufficient Iranian counter-strike against US forces in the Gulf — which just became significantly larger — as to compel Bush to forgo the diplomatic track that the administration realists are advocating and engage in another war.

There are many other components of the complex game plan that this Cheney official has been kicking around Washington. The official has offered this commentary to senior staff at AEI and in lunch and dinner gatherings which were to be considered strictly off-the-record, but there can be little doubt that the official actually hopes that hawkish conservatives and neoconservatives share this information and then rally to this point of view. This official is beating the brush and doing what Joshua Muravchik has previously suggested — which is to help establish the policy and political pathway to bombing Iran.

The zinger of this information is the admission by this Cheney aide that Cheney himself is frustrated with President Bush and believes, much like Richard Perle, that Bush is making a disastrous mistake by aligning himself with the policy course that Condoleezza Rice, Bob Gates, Michael Hayden and McConnell have sculpted.

According to this official, Cheney believes that Bush can not be counted on to make the “right decision” when it comes to dealing with Iran and thus Cheney believes that he must tie the President’s hands.

On Tuesday evening, i spoke with a former top national intelligence official in this Bush administration who told me that what I was investigating and planned to report on regarding Cheney and the commentary of his aide was “potentially criminal insubordination” against the President. I don’t believe that the White House would take official action against Cheney for this agenda-mongering around Washington — but I do believe that the White House must either shut Cheney and his team down and give them all garden view offices so that they can spend their days staring out their windows with not much to do or expect some to begin to think that Bush has no control over his Vice President.

It is not that Cheney wants to bomb Iran and Bush doesn’t, it is that Cheney is saying that Bush is making a mistake and thus needs to have the choices before him narrowed.

US anti-war mother ends protest
Cindy Sheehan, the bereaved mother who became a figurehead for the US anti-war movement, is abandoning her fight after growing disenchanted with the campaign.
29 May 2007

She has camped outside President Bush’s ranch since 2005, demanding a meeting over the death of her son in Iraq.

But announcing the end of her campaign, she also hit out at Democrats and anti-war campaigners who put “personal egos above peace and human life”.

She said she had sacrificed her health, her marriage and her finances.

In a letter on the Daily Kos website titled Good Riddance Attention Whore – a reference to the abuse she says she has suffered, Ms Sheehan said: “I am going to take whatever I have left and go home.

“I am going to go home and be a mother to my surviving children and try to regain some of what I have lost.”

‘War machine’
Cindy Sheehan became a “postergirl” for the US anti-war movement after she set up her protest camp outside the president’s ranch in Crawford, Texas in August 2005.

She said she has spent all the money from the survivor’s benefits paid for her son’s death and everything she earned from speaking and book fees and that she owed large hospital bills.

“I have been called every despicable name that small minds can think of and have had my life threatened many times.”

She said her son Casey, who died in Baghdad in April 2004, was “killed by his own country which is beholden to and run by a war machine that even controls what we think.

Casey died for a country which cares more about who will be the next American Idol than how many people will be killed in the next few months while Democrats and Republicans play politics with human lives.

“It is so painful to me to know that I bought into this system for so many years and Casey paid the price for that allegiance. I failed my boy and that hurts the most.”

Ms Sheehan criticised the US anti-war movement for often putting “personal egos” first.

“It is hard to work for peace when the very movement that is named after it has so many divisions.”

She said that one-time allies among the Democratic Party had turned on her when she no longer limited her protests over the Iraq war to the Republican Party.

The US will rapidly descend into “a fascist corporate wasteland,” she said, if “alternatives to this corrupt ‘two’ party system” are not found.

Ms Sheehan said she was resigning as the “face” of the US anti-war movement.

She said she would “never give up trying to help people in the world who are harmed by the empire of the good old US of A, but I am finished working in, or outside of this system.”

A Call for Direct Action
If America’s true patriots aren’t willing to organize on a massive scale, then we had better get used to business as usual.
May 25, 2007
By Sean Gonsalves

Nonviolence is a universal principle and its operation is not limited by a hostile environment. Indeed, its efficacy can be tested only when it acts in the midst of and in spite of opposition. Our nonviolence would be a hollow thing and worth nothing, if it depended for its success on the goodwill of the authorities. — Gandhi

The GOP front runners gunning for the White House in ’08 were trying to one-up each other on torture at a “debate” two weeks ago.

Former New York Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani said interrogators should use “any method they can think of,” while former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney not only supported “enhanced interrogation techniques” — the contemporary euphemism for torture — he proposed doubling the size of the detention facility in Guantanamo Bay.

McCain’s support for prolonging the illegitimate occupation of Iraq aside, he’s the one torture hold out.

“When I was in Vietnam, one of the things that sustained us as we … underwent torture ourselves, is the knowledge that if we had our positions reversed and we were the captors, we would not impose that kind of treatment on them. It’s not about the terrorists; it’s about us. It’s about what kind of country we are.”

I suppose we should give McCain a little credit for his anti-torture stance, but, given his support for the “surge,” which flies in the face of all the historical evidence that tells us there’s NO military solution to guerrilla insurgencies, short of genocide, he’s a far cry from USMC Maj. Smedley Butler who warned us in 1935 that “War Is a Racket.” Butler wrote about his 33 years of active military service, spending “most of (his) time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.”

High class muscle is what made Mexico “safe” for American oil interests in 1914. It made Haiti and Cuba “a decent place” for National City Bank to do business. “I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street,” Butler continued.

“I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested.” You won’t get that kind of candor in American politics today, including the Dems, save Kucinich.

A Democrat-controlled Congress “compromises” with no troop withdrawal and more money for an immoral and illegal occupation!

As I was saying last week, you can’t expect a chicken to produce a duck egg, which is why massive civil disobedience seems to be the only way to send the message the political ruling class should have got from the mid-term elections.

The nonviolent tactical question I raised was “fill the jails” — gum up the gears of the system to the point of gridlock.

I got tons of response from across the political spectrum and the responses affirmed two things:

1) Many, many people think our democratic system is broke and 2), we need an education curriculum that includes the long and successful history of nonviolent direct action because the ignorance of the basic philosophy, as preached and practiced by people most Americans either worship (Jesus) or say they admire (Thoreau, Tolstoy, Gandhi, and King), is astounding.

(Of course, I received a few unoriginal smart-ass responses suggesting I go to jail first, by myself. That would be cool and all except that it misses the point of massive direct action).

“Fill the jails” wouldn’t work, I’m told, because the government, in partnership with the private prison industry, would just build more jails and do horrible things to those arrested.

I raised the prospect of filling the jails, not the prisons. Two completely different things. That said, a crack down on nonviolent direct action is pretty much the point. Nonviolent direct action usually does provoke the powers-that-be to respond with repression. You think those on the front lines of the Civil Rights Movement were having a tea party? “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win,” is how Gandhi put it.

While repression is the predictable response of authorities, that’s not an argument for why “fill the jails” would not be effective. It’s an argument for why more courage is needed and a call for more than mere letter-writing, vigils and symbolic protests. That’s what Gandhi was talking about when he said “nonviolence and cowardice go ill together. I can imagine a fully armed man to be at heart a coward. Possession of arms implies an element of fear, if not cowardice. But true nonviolence is an impossibility without the possession of unadulterated fearlessness.”

If America’s true patriots aren’t willing to organize on a massive scale, then we had better get used to business as usual.

Let’s suppose a million-plus people — including women, children and the elderly — show up in the nation’s capital or New York City and shut the entire place down with the stated intention of not leaving until the U.S. occupation of Iraq comes to an end. While those brave folks necks would be on the line, think about the network of relationships (friends, family and acquaintances) tied to those million-plus demonstrators who WILL NOT just let their loved ones slip into some “enemy combatant” black hole.

The powers-that-be are forced to make a decision: either we capitulate to the demands or we go Tiananmen Square on our own countrymen and women and completely destroy whatever remaining moral legitimacy this government may have.

“Fill the jails” may not be the right tactic but nothing short of that level of commitment will make a difference.

If America’s true patriots aren’t willing to organize on a massive scale, then we had better get used to business as usual.

Media Coverage of Muslims Bombs
A Pew poll on Muslims in America painted a positive picture. So why was the coverage so negative?
May 24, 2007
By Lorraine Ali

According to a Pew Research Center poll released earlier this week, Muslim-Americans are “largely assimilated, happy with their lives, and moderate with respect to many of the issues that have divided Muslims and Westerners around the world.” The poll showed the majority surveyed have close non-Muslim friends, believe in a strong American work ethic and feel there is little conflict between being a devout Muslim and living in a modern society. Overall, an encouraging picture, right?

Not according to a cavalcade of major media outlets. On Tuesday and Wednesday, coverage of the poll was downright foreboding. “Supporting Terror?” read the CNN crawl at the bottom of the screen as John Roberts interviewed a group of young moderate Muslims about the poll. On CBS News online, the headline incorrectly stated that 26% OF YOUNG U.S. MUSLIMS OK BOMBS. And in USA Today, more misinformation and scare tactics: POLL: 1 IN 4 YOUNGER U.S. MUSLIMS SUPPORT SUICIDE BOMBINGS.

The fear-inducing reports were based on the responses to a couple of questions in the Pew survey: is suicide bombing justified? The outcome: “Very few Muslim Americans—just 1%—say that suicide bombings against civilian targets are often justified to defend Islam; an additional 7% say suicide bombings are sometimes justified in these circumstances,” according to the Pew poll. As for U.S. Muslims under 30, Pew reported that 15 percent believe suicide bombings can be often or sometimes justified. The numbers were tucked inside a 108-page report that also found a large majority of U.S. Muslims rejected the idea of violence against civilians, had very unfavorable views of Al Qaeda and were concerned about the rise of Muslim extremism in the United States.

So why, amid all the other encouraging data, would such a large number of media outlets mine the poll for evidence that Muslims—even the ones next door—are dangerous? Hussein Ibish, executive director of the Foundation for Arab American Leadership, says the answer is as disturbing as it is predictable. “It suggests there is an appetite for negativity about U.S. Muslims in the American media,” he says. “There’s two templates post-9/11 for coverage about American Muslims. One is they are scary—be very afraid. The other template is the sorry, poor pathetic victims of hate crimes. It’s villain or victim—a ridiculous set of choices—and coverage of this poll has fallen into the villain category. It’s irrational, because if you read the poll, it is actually quite positive.”

Yasmin Hamidi, 26, was one of the three young Muslim-Americans interviewed on CNN last Tuesday. “I didn’t see the graphics on the screen until I watched it online,” she says. “I thought, ‘Are you kidding me?’ It was so irresponsible that they put “Supporting Terror?” on the bottom while we’re speaking. Two Columbia Ph.D. students and someone who works full time at an interreligious-understanding NGO—I mean, come on! It’s not surprising, but it’s still upsetting to see.”

Since the 9/11 attacks, U.S. Muslims like Hamidi have become accustomed to gritting their teeth while watching pundits on cable news or reading the paper. The 2001 attacks, the war in Iraq and the babblings of warped political figures like Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad have come to stand for Islam and its followers in the most negative terms. For many Americans, coverage of these issues is the only exposure to the Muslim world they get. Yet surely the media has a responsibility to present the whole picture—the good and the bad—rather than just the titillating, scary bits that help drive higher ratings.

Still, despite the fact that U.S. Muslims are far more assimilated than those in Europe, many large media outlets never let us forget that American Muslims are still a potentially dangerous group. The Pew poll is simply our latest reminder. “There’s absolutely no basis in the poll for concluding it’s a radicalized community,” says Ibish. “I can almost guarantee that the overwhelming majority who were asked the suicide-bombing question were thinking about Palestine—not Iraq or America. They’re not willing to say it’s never OK because they think Palestinians have no other options. They’re wrong, but that’s what they think. It’s exactly the same kind of statistic you’d get if you asked young Israelis about torture, demolition of villages, assassinations—they’d say yes because they know the Israelis have done it but loathe to say it’s wrong. I’m sure, knowing the Muslim community, that if you resolved the occupation in Palestine, that number would go very close to zero.”

Some media outlets also focused on the unusually high percentage of American Muslims (28 percent) who still don’t believe that the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks were Arabs—a result that I, too, find baffling. Still, the overall coverage of the Pew poll was way out of whack. It’s no wonder that when the pollsters asked U.S. Muslims how they felt about American news coverage of their faith and its followers, 57 percent said they felt is was unfair. It’s unlikely that number will make headlines anytime soon.

tired. folklife festival happened, mostly without difficulty. although i had to make two trips to load everything in, i didn’t have to make two trips to load everything out because i gave eddie a ride home, and he helped me carry stuff. also, i was able to find a free parking place between the opera house and the KCTS building. it was still on the opposite side of the fairgrounds from where i was performing, but i didn’t have to pay for it. sez she saw me, but i didn’t see her… which isn’t surprising, since i don’t know her and i saw literally thousands of people yesterday… although i did see a guy named jas linford, who went to RVTI in 2000, and is now a dealer for kelly mouthpieces, which are really cool, and because of the fact that i do musical instrument repair, i can also become a dealer and get them for half price…

folklife. i perform twice tomorrow, from 12:00 noon until 4:00 pm with la banda gozona and from 4:00 until 5:00 with the ballard sedentary sousa band. fortunately, both performances are at the mural amphitheater, so i don’t have a lot of moving around to do, but i’ve got a lot of loading in to do. i will leave around 8:00 am so that i can get there, find a relatively close place to park, which is probably going to be on the other side of the center grounds from where we will be performing, get my artist button, and make two runs to and from the car in order to get everything more or less in one place (hopefully) before i have to start performing.

we’ve got 4 hours scheduled with la banda gozona, but we’re not going to be playing for all that time. we’re sharing the stage with los flacos and about 60 dancers who will be taking up most of the stage. we’re only playing 16 tunes, but, being oaxacan, they’re all tunes that take around 10 to 20 minutes to perform in their entirety. then i get to finish the afternoon off with an hour or so of sousa marches. i’ve been playing a lot recently, so i’ll probably be okay, and there’s quite a bit of difference between the sousaphone embrochure and the trombone embrochure, but it’s still gonna be a lot of playing. it’ll all be over by 5:00, though, so even with the prospect of making 2 runs to the car and driving home, i should be able to relax by 7:00 or so.

also, i did some rearranging on a new piece, Troll March, for the fremont philharmonic, and started copying out parts. i got completely through the trumpet part and about halfway through the clarinet part, but it’s probably going to be at least monday or tuesday before i get the whole thing finished.

Cat grows wings

A Chinese woman claims her cat has grown wings.

Granny Feng’s tom cat has sprouted two hairy 4ins long wings, reports the Huashang News.

“At first, they were just two bumps, but they started to grow quickly, and after a month there were two wings,” she said.

Feng, of Xianyang city, Shaanxi province, says the wings, which contain bones, make her pet look like a ‘cat angel’.

Her explanation is that the cat sprouted the wings after being sexually harassed.

“A month ago, many female cats in heat came to harass him, and then the wings started to grow,” she said.

However, experts say the phenomenon is more likely down to a gene mutation, and say it shouldn’t prevent the cat living a normal life.

The Magnetic Brain Stimulator Will See You Now
22 May, 2007
By Marty Graham

SAN DIEGO — The next time you visit a psychiatrist, don’t be put off by the helmet-shaped device crawling with electrodes in the corner of the office. It’s there to help.

Transcranial magnetic stimulation, a technique for treating clinical depression, uses a device placed on a patient’s head that delivers a pulse to the gray matter. Psychiatrists at the American Psychiatric Association meeting here are unabashedly optimistic about its potential for treating tough cases. It’s in the final stages of FDA review, and could come to market as soon as the end of the year.

“It’s much less invasive — patients can go home or go back to work afterwards,” says Shirlene Sampson, an assistant professor at the Mayo Clinic College of Medicine. “And patients aren’t exposed to social risk with their insurance companies and employers.”

TMS works by creating an electromagnetic pulse that doesn’t disturb the skull or scalp, but can reach two to three centimeters into the brain to stimulate the prefrontal cortex and paralimbic blood flow, increasing the serotonin output and the dopamine and norepinephrine functions.

“We have to be sure to get really good contact with the scalp so we reach the most effective areas of the brain,” says Sampson. “In older patients where the brain has shrunk, we have to be very careful to get any results.”

TMS can be done in an office setting and doesn’t require anesthesia, which is needed for traditional ECT (“Electro-Convulsive Therapy” popularly known as “Shock Treatments”). Side effects include post-application headaches, muscle twitches and pain at the application site. The risk of seizure remains, but researchers worked very hard to avoid them, and they occurred very rarely.

Ten companies — including five based in Europe, two American companies and two in Korea — are now lined up to produce TMS headgear, which ranges in appearance from something like an ultrasound sensor mounted on a dental-drill arm to a cap resembling a beauty-parlor hair dryer.

Depression is increasingly recognized as a destructive, disabling, chronic illness with treatments that often fail patients. Studies yield conflicting results — patients can respond well to placebos and exercise, while drugs can fail some and succeed for others. And short-term results often don’t translate into long-term results as patients bolt from treatment because of side effects or lack of effect.

One of big problems in treating depression, where a bout is likely to lead to other bouts, is getting patients to stay on their therapy, studies show. And, while combinations of therapies initially seem to help the 30 percent and 40 percent of patients whose depression resists drug treatment, remission rates remain low and cures are elusive.

The downside is that it takes 20 to 30 sessions of 40 minutes each for at least six weeks to get a good result. But patients stick with TMS treatment better than with medication or electroshock, researchers say. It’s also being tested for treating migraines.

i just got done meeting with a woman named asma (ozma) who wants me to design and maintain a web site for her, which will mean a bit more money than has been happening in the past, but at this point i’m not sure how much. i’m supposed to call her on 4th june to make an appointment to take pictures of all the stuff in her shop, and then put together a web site where she can sell her stuff… except that she doesn’t currently have a computer at all, so i would be doing it all locally and then uploading it to whatever host service she decides to go with. r4l is the place where i intend to register her domain, and they’ve got a “5mb for free” hosting solution that will probably be the one i go with, unless she’s got a ton of pictures, which i don’t think she has. also she wants paypal on her web site, but since she doesn’t have a computer, that may be somewhat difficult. i suppose, as the web designer, i’ve got to come up with a solution for her, but all the solutions i can think of start with her buying a computer and getting email so that she can open a paypal account. i’m perfectly willing to be her web designer and web master, but i’m drawing the line at being the person responsible for printing out the orders she gets and giving them to her because she doesn’t have a computer, or being the person to relay all of the flack that’s stirred up when she doesn’t get around to filling somebody’s order as fast as they want her to… 8/

73 Percent Of Americans Unable To Believe This Shit
October 7, 1998

PRINCETON, NJ–According to the latest Gallup Poll, conducted Monday and Tuesday of this week, nearly three out of four Americans can no longer believe this shit.

In addition to the 73 percent of poll respondents who described this shit as “beyond belief,” 9 percent said they could “hardly” believe this shit, with another 5 percent “just barely” believing it. An additional 13 percent said they “couldn’t give a flying fuck about the whole goddamn thing.”

The poll also found that the National Shit-Credulity Index (NSCI) has hit an all-time low, with only 2 percent of Americans describing themselves as “fully confident of [their] capacity to believe this shit.”

“The American people have had to deal with this kind of shit for years,” Gallup Organization president Lee Sanderson said, “but now, for the first time, it appears that the vast majority of them just can’t fucking believe it anymore.”

“In all honesty, who can blame them?” Sanderson added. “Regardless of one’s political affiliation, socioeconomic status, religion or just about any other viewpoint, you’ve got to admit, the shit that’s been going on lately is way out of hand.”

In the wake of the poll, many activists are calling upon America’s leaders to get their shit in gear.

“The American people have had it up to here with this shitheap,” said James Schuerholz, president of the D.C.-based Heritage Foundation. “There is a public mandate for our leaders to cut this shit out, and it’s high time they finally did.”

Despite Americans’ incredulity over this shit, historians note that this sort of shit has been going on for years and is unlikely to end anytime soon.

“Contrary to popular belief, this type of shit is hardly anything new,” Harvard University American history professor Lawrence Coombs said. “The same shit was going down 50, 100 and 150 years ago. The only difference was, back then, you never read about that shit in the newspapers.”

Calling the American people’s enormous shit-belief capacity “one of the cornerstones of our democracy,” U.S. Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) stressed that it is the patriotic duty of all citizens to grant our leaders the benefit of the doubt with regard to their shit.

“If the American people are no longer willing to believe this shit, who will?” Kerry said. “Somebody’s got to take this shit at face value. Otherwise, why are we even doing all this shit in the first place? I am truly saddened by the lack of faith that the citizens of this country are willing to put in my shit, as well as that of my esteemed colleagues. We must repair our society’s fraying trust in the shit of our elected officials, or you would not believe the kind of hardcore, heavy-duty shit that will come down.”

“America,” conservative author and social critic Patricia Stouffer said, “is seriously losing its shit. But we’ve got to somehow hold our shit in place until all this passes. We’ve got to learn to believe in shit again. After this latest shitstorm, it may take years to accomplish, but we must somehow find the strength to put our trust back into the nation’s shit.”

Despite such impassioned calls for faith in the U.S. political system and all the shit that comes with it, if the Gallup Poll is any indication, the majority of Americans are no longer willing to put up with the shit.

“Fuck that shit,” said Evansville, IN, day-care provider Helen Reiderer. “I’m tired of hearing about it. Do they actually expect us to still believe that load of shit?”

“If you ask me, the shit is about to hit the fan,” said Reiderer’s husband Frank. “As far as I’m concerned, all that shit is just too much to be believed.”

Another disgruntled citizen, Wenatchee, WA, tractor salesman Tom Huard, summed up the sentiments of most Americans when, holding up the front page of the local newspaper to friend Benjamin Pritchard, he said, “Jesus, Ben, can you believe this?”

“Shit, no,” Pritchard replied.

The entire government has failed us on Iraq
For the president, and the majority leaders and candidates and rank-and-file Congressmen and Senators of either party—there is only blame for this shameful, and bi-partisan, betrayal
May 24, 2007
By Keith Olbermann

This is, in fact, a comment about… betrayal.

Few men or women elected in our history—whether executive or legislative, state or national—have been sent into office with a mandate more obvious, nor instructions more clear:

Get us out of Iraq.

Yet after six months of preparation and execution—half a year gathering the strands of public support; translating into action, the collective will of the nearly 70 percent of Americans who reject this War of Lies, the Democrats have managed only this:

• The Democratic leadership has surrendered to a president—if not the worst president, then easily the most selfish, in our history—who happily blackmails his own people, and uses his own military personnel as hostages to his asinine demand, that the Democrats “give the troops their money”;
• The Democratic leadership has agreed to finance the deaths of Americans in a war that has only reduced the security of Americans;
• The Democratic leadership has given Mr. Bush all that he wanted, with the only caveat being, not merely meaningless symbolism about benchmarks for the Iraqi government, but optional meaningless symbolism about benchmarks for the Iraqi government.
• The Democratic leadership has, in sum, claimed a compromise with the Administration, in which the only things truly compromised, are the trust of the voters, the ethics of the Democrats, and the lives of our brave, and doomed, friends, and family, in Iraq.

You, the men and women elected with the simplest of directions—Stop The War—have traded your strength, your bargaining position, and the uniform support of those who elected you… for a handful of magic beans.

You may trot out every political cliché from the soft-soap, inside-the-beltway dictionary of boilerplate sound bites, about how this is the “beginning of the end” of Mr. Bush’s “carte blanche” in Iraq, about how this is a “first step.”

Well, Senator Reid, the only end at its beginning… is our collective hope that you and your colleagues would do what is right, what is essential, what you were each elected and re-elected to do.

Because this “first step”… is a step right off a cliff.

And this President!

How shameful it would be to watch an adult… hold his breath, and threaten to continue to do so, until he turned blue.

But how horrifying it is… to watch a President hold his breath and threaten to continue to do so, until innocent and patriotic Americans in harm’s way, are bled white.

You lead this country, sir?

You claim to defend it?

And yet when faced with the prospect of someone calling you on your stubbornness—your stubbornness which has cost 3,431 Americans their lives and thousands more their limbs—you, Mr. Bush, imply that if the Democrats don’t give you the money and give it to you entirely on your terms, the troops in Iraq will be stranded, or forced to serve longer, or have to throw bullets at the enemy with their bare hands.

How transcendentally, how historically, pathetic.

Any other president from any other moment in the panorama of our history would have, at the outset of this tawdry game of political chicken, declared that no matter what the other political side did, he would insure personally—first, last and always—that the troops would not suffer.

A President, Mr. Bush, uses the carte blanche he has already, not to manipulate an overlap of arriving and departing Brigades into a ‘second surge,’ but to say in unequivocal terms that if it takes every last dime of the monies already allocated, if it takes reneging on government contracts with Halliburton, he will make sure the troops are safe—even if the only safety to be found, is in getting them the hell out of there.

Well, any true President would have done that, Sir.

You instead, used our troops as political pawns, then blamed the Democrats when you did so.

Not that these Democrats, who had this country’s support and sympathy up until 48 hours ago, have not since earned all the blame they can carry home.

“We seem to be very near the bleak choice between war and shame,” Winston Churchill wrote to Lord Moyne in the days after the British signed the Munich accords with Germany in 1938. “My feeling is that we shall choose shame, and then have war thrown in, a little later…”

That’s what this is for the Democrats, isn’t it?

Their “Neville Chamberlain moment” before the Second World War.

All that’s missing is the landing at the airport, with the blinkered leader waving a piece of paper which he naively thought would guarantee “peace in our time,” but which his opponent would ignore with deceit.

The Democrats have merely streamlined the process. Their piece of paper already says Mr. Bush can ignore it, with impugnity.

And where are the Democratic presidential hopefuls this evening? See they not, that to which the Senate and House leadership has blinded itself?

Judging these candidates based on how they voted on the original Iraq authorization, or waiting for apologies for those votes, is ancient history now.

The Democratic nomination is likely to be decided… tomorrow.

The talk of practical politics, the buying into of the President’s dishonest construction “fund-the-troops-or-they-will-be-in-jeopardy,” the promise of tougher action in September, is falling not on deaf ears, but rather falling on Americans who already told you what to do, and now perceive your ears as closed to practical politics.

Those who seek the Democratic nomination need to—for their own political futures and, with a thousand times more solemnity and importance, for the individual futures of our troops—denounce this betrayal, vote against it, and, if need be, unseat Majority Leader Reid and Speaker Pelosi if they continue down this path of guilty, fatal acquiescence to the tragically misguided will of a monomaniacal president.

For, ultimately, at this hour, the entire government has failed us.

• Mr. Reid, Mr. Hoyer, and the other Democrats… have failed us. They negotiated away that which they did not own, but had only been entrusted by us to protect: our collective will as the citizens of this country, that this brazen War of Lies be ended as rapidly and safely as possible.
• Mr. Bush and his government… have failed us. They have behaved venomously and without dignity—of course. That is all at which Mr. Bush is gifted. We are the ones providing any element of surprise or shock here.

With the exception of Senator Dodd and Senator Edwards, the Democratic presidential candidates have (so far at least) failed us.

They must now speak, and make plain how they view what has been given away to Mr. Bush, and what is yet to be given away tomorrow, and in the thousand tomorrows to come.

Because for the next fourteen months, the Democratic nominating process—indeed the whole of our political discourse until further notice—has, with the stroke of a cursed pen, become about one thing, and one thing alone.

The electorate figured this out, six months ago.
The President and the Republicans have not—doubtless will not.

The Democrats will figure it out, during the Memorial Day recess, when they go home and many of those who elected them will politely suggest they stay there—and permanently.

Because, on the subject of Iraq…

The people have been ahead of the media….

Ahead of the government…

Ahead of the politicians…

For the last year, or two years, or maybe three.

Our politics… is now about the answer to one briefly-worded question.

Mr. Bush has failed.

Mr. Warner has failed.

Mr. Reid has failed.

So.

Who among us will stop this war—this War of Lies? To he or she, fall the figurative keys to the nation.

To all the others—presidents and majority leaders and candidates and rank-and-file Congressmen and Senators of either party—there is only blame… for this shameful, and bi-partisan, betrayal.

The Visible Man: An FBI Target Puts His Whole Life Online
May 22, 2007
By Clive Thompson

Hasan Elahi whips out his Samsung Pocket PC phone and shows me how he’s keeping himself out of Guantanamo. He swivels the camera lens around and snaps a picture of the Manhattan Starbucks where we’re drinking coffee. Then he squints and pecks at the phone’s touchscreen. “OK! It’s uploading now,” says the cheery, 35-year-old artist and Rutgers professor, whose bleached-blond hair complements his fluorescent-green pants. “It’ll go public in a few seconds.” Sure enough, a moment later the shot appears on the front page of his Web site, TrackingTransience.net.

There are already tons of pictures there. Elahi will post about a hundred today — the rooms he sat in, the food he ate, the coffees he ordered. Poke around his site and you’ll find more than 20,000 images stretching back three years. Elahi has documented nearly every waking hour of his life during that time. He posts copies of every debit card transaction, so you can see what he bought, where, and when. A GPS device in his pocket reports his real-time physical location on a map.

Elahi’s site is the perfect alibi. Or an audacious art project. Or both. The Bangladeshi-born American says the US government mistakenly listed him on its terrorist watch list — and once you’re on, it’s hard to get off. To convince the Feds of his innocence, Elahi has made his life an open book. Whenever they want, officials can go to his site and see where he is and what he’s doing. Indeed, his server logs show hits from the Pentagon, the Secretary of Defense, and the Executive Office of the President, among others.

The globe-hopping prof says his overexposed life began in 2002, when he stepped off a flight from the Netherlands and was detained at the Detroit airport. He says FBI agents later told him they’d been tipped off that he was hoarding explosives in a Florida storage unit; subsequent lie detector tests convinced them he wasn’t their man. But with his frequent travel — Elahi logs more than 70,000 air miles a year exhibiting his art work and attending conferences — he figured it was only a matter of time before he got hauled in again. He might even be shipped off to Gitmo before anyone realized their mistake. The FBI agents had given him their phone number, so he decided to call before each trip; that way, they could alert the field offices. He hasn’t been detained since.

So it dawned on him: If being candid about his flights could clear his name, why not be open about everything? “I’ve discovered that the best way to protect your privacy is to give it away,” he says, grinning as he sips his venti Black Eye. Elahi relishes upending the received wisdom about surveillance. The government monitors your movements, but it gets things wrong. You can monitor yourself much more accurately. Plus, no ambitious agent is going to score a big intelligence triumph by snooping into your movements when there’s a Web page broadcasting the Big Mac you ate four minutes ago in Boise, Idaho. “It’s economics,” he says. “I flood the market.”

Elahi says his students get it immediately. They’ve grown up spilling their guts online — posting Flickr photo sets and confessing secrets on MySpace. He figures the day is coming when so many people shove so much personal data online that it will put Big Brother out of business.

For now, though, Big Brother is still on the case. At least according to Elahi’s server logs. “It’s really weird watching the government watch me,” he says. But it sure beats Guantanamo.

google.co.uk has 2,100,000 results for a search on saint fred and i am number 3… and number 2 is a guy that i know… 8)

Aussies go crazy for cat poo coffee
May 16, 2007

CANBERRA – Cafe-crazy Australians in the last decade have embraced coffee in all its forms, but they’ve saved the most expensive — and excremental — for last.

Kopi Luwak, made in neighboring Indonesia from coffee beans excreted by native civet cats, is reputedly the world’s rarest and most expensive coffee, painstakingly extracted by hand from the animals’ forest droppings.

When roasted, the resulting beans sell for around $1,000 a kilogram ($450 a pound) and brew into a earthy, syrupy, coffee acknowledged by connoisseurs as one of the world’s finest.

Despite the closeness of the coffee’s home on the islands of Sumatra, Java and Sulawesi, Australia’s first civet cat brew has only just gone on sale in Queensland state, selling for A$50 a cup at the Heritage Tea Rooms, west of Townsville.

“Everyone calls it cat poo coffee,” cafe owner Michelle Sharpe told the Australian Associated Press.

“People who willingly pay the $50 are uplifted by the thrill of the experience,” her husband Allan Sharpe said.

Civet cats, considered a delicacy in China, are linked to the SARS respiratory virus that emerged in the south of that country in 2002 and spread globally.

Kopi Luwak joins a booming coffee scene in Australia, which has seen consumption grow from 300 grams per person in 1939, to 2.4 kilograms a head, or 1.26 billion cups a year worth A$3 billion ($2.5 billion) in sales.

Around a dozen people a month try out the exotic brew, with reactions so far 99 per cent favorable.

“It’s as good as my private life is bad. This is the kind of coffee you renounce your religion and sell your child for,” one taster quoted by AAP said.

i have to ask, is it possible that this is just further evidence of a plot to take over the world by toxoplasma gondii?

Mom blames Satan for burning baby in microwave
May 20, 2007

GALVESTON — A woman blames the devil and not her husband for severely burning their infant daughter after the 2-month-old was put in a microwave, a Houston television station reported.

Eva Marie Mauldin said Satan compelled her 19-year-old husband, Joshua Royce Mauldin, to microwave their daughter May 10 because the devil disapproved of Joshua’s efforts to become a preacher.

“Satan saw my husband as a threat. Satan attacked him because he saw (Joshua) as a threat,” Eva Mauldin told Houston television station KHOU-TV.

A Galveston County grand jury indicted Joshua Mauldin last week on child injury charges after hearing evidence that he placed his daughter in a motel microwave for 10 to 20 seconds.

The infant, Ana Marie, remains hospitalized. She suffered burns on the left side of her face and to her left hand, police said.

Eva Marie Mauldin, the girl’s 20-year-old mother, told the television station that her husband is “not the monster people are making him out to be.”

“That was not my husband; my husband is a wonderful father,” she said. “Satan was working through his weaknesses.”

Eva Maudlin described those weaknesses as an undisclosed mental disability, and that her efforts to get help for him have failed.

Police said Joshua Mauldin told them he put Ana Marie in the microwave because he was under stress. The family had arrived in Galveston the day before.

Eva Maudlin, who met her husband in an Arkansas church, denied those claims by police.

“He would never do anything to hurt her. He loves her,” she said. “When she cries he is the one who comforts her. When she is sick, he is the one that takes her to the doctor.”

Joshua Mauldin, of Warren, Ark., came to Galveston with his wife and mother because he was called to be a preacher, his wife said. While Joshua Mauldin’s mother has returned to Arkansas, Eva Mauldin remains in Galveston.

She is hoping to be reunited with her daughter, but Child Protective Services is working to have her and Joshua Mauldin’s parental rights severed. A custody hearing for the infant is scheduled for later this week in a Galveston district court.

Joshua Mauldin faces a charge of injury to a child causing serious bodily harm, which carries a possible prison term of five to 99 years, as well as a fine of up to $10,000.

Eva Mauldin has set up a MySpace page, “Joshua Mauldin is not a Monster,” in hopes of defending her husband and making pleas for people to help her.

Heliocentrism is an Atheist Doctrine
May 18, 2007

What’s even worse than the debate raging in American schools about the teaching of the soulless doctrine of evolution, is the non-debate over an issue that rational Americans have foolishly conceded to the secular among us: the issue of Heliocentrism, or the idea that the Earth revolves around the Sun.

Now, it has to be granted that there may be some mathematical evidence going either way; mathematically speaking, Copernicus may be on ground nearly as firm as that of Tycho Brahe. Right-thinking people know the correct doctrine, however:

Heliocentrism is the view that the sun is at the center of the universe. It was proposed by some ancient Greeks,[1] and became the dominant view in the 1700s and 1800s. It was abandoned in the 20th century.

Since the advent of relativity theory in the early 1900s, the laws of physics have been written in covariant equations, meaning that they are equally valid in any frame. Heliocentric and geocentric theories are both used today, depending on which allows more convenient calculations

It seems clear that it may occasionally be convenient to assume that the calculations of Copernicus and Kepler were mathematically sound. However, for both moral and theological reasons, we should always bear in mind that the Earth does not move. If it moved, we would feel it moving. That’s called empiricism, the experience of the senses. Don’t take my word for it, or the evidence of your own senses, Copernicans. There’s also the Word of the Lord:

“He has fixed the earth firm, immovable.” (1 Chronicles 16:30)

“Thou hast fixed the earth immovable and firm …” (Psalm 93:1)

“Thou didst fix the earth on its foundation so that it never can be shaken.” (Psalm 104:5)

“…who made the earth and fashioned it, and himself fixed it fast…” (Isaiah 45:18)

“The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to his place where he arose.” (Ecclesiastes 1:5)

“Then spake Joshua to the LORD in the day when the LORD delivered up the Amorites before the children of Israel, and he said in the sight of Israel, Sun, stand thou still upon Gibeon; and thou, Moon, in the valley of Ajalon. And the sun stood still, and the moon stayed, until the people had avenged themselves upon their enemies. Is not this written in the book of Jasher? So the sun stood still in the midst of heaven, and hasted not to go down about a whole day.” (Joshua 10, 12-13)

Moreover, as Answers in Genesis points out,

…[S]omething well known to high-school physics students, but apparently not to bibliosceptics—that it’s valid to describe motion from any reference frame, although an inertial one usually makes the mathematics simpler. But there are many times when the Earth is a convenient reference frame; i.e. at some point we all use the geocentric model in one sense. For instance, a planetarium is a geocentric model. Calculation of rising, transiting, and setting of various celestial objects is calculated geocentrically. There are numerous other examples. Since modern astronomers often use an Earth-centred reference frame, it’s unfair and anti-scientific to criticise the Bible for doing the same.

The premier website for those wishing an absolute debunking of the Biblically unsound, empirically fraudulent, historically heretical doctrine of Heliocentrism is http://www.fixedearth.com/. The website contains numerous links to essays and analyses proving that the embrace of Copernicus is almost as foolish as the embrace of Darwinism. To quote from just one of these astounding essays:

Copernicanism, in short, is a concept that is protected in a bunker under a 50 foot thick ceiling of solid “scientific” concrete. It is meant to be impregnable. It is a concept that has become ensconced in men’s minds as the indestructible cornerstone of enlightened modern man’s knowledge. Virtually all people everywhere have been taught to believe–and do believe–that this concept is based on objective science and dispassionate secular reasoning, now long since freed from religious superstitions based on the Bible.

Indeed, it was this Copernican heliocentricity concept that gradually broke the back of Bible credibility as the source of Absolute Truth in Christendom. Once the Copernican Revolution had conquered the physical sciences of Astronomy and Physics and put down deep roots in Universities and lower schools everywhere, it was only a matter of time until the Biological sciences launched the Darwinian Revolution.

This embrace of Darwinism then quite predictably emboldened increasingly secular-minded mankind to further reject Biblical Absolutism and replace its teachings with yet more new “truths” in areas of learning having to do with economics and government. Thus was unsuccessful and floundering Marxism given new life. Marx openly tried to dedicate his own books to Darwin, exulting: “You have given me the basis for my system”. Thus, the “Social Science” disciplines were born and began to make their contributions to the destruction of Bible credibility…

Darwin, of course, only popularized evolutionism with his book in 1859, giving it a supposed mechanism thru natural selection and mutations, both since demonstrated to be utter nonsense. The actual roots of the evolutionary concept can be traced back to antiquity…as indeed can the roots of Copernican heliocentricism. Certainly the neo-heliocentrists, i.e., the early Copernicans such as Kepler were evolutionists. Galileo, like Kepler his friend, a neo-heliocentrist, was probably an evolutionist. Newton gave Copernicanism its biggest boost with his book in 1687, but I’ve seen no overt evidence that he was an evolutionist. (If you know of such evidence, I’d like to see it….)

Thanks, however, to Newton’s invented math and the excesses of his gravitational hypotheses (HERE), Copernicanism dug in its heels in the universities in the 1700’s, and by the last quarter of that century had produced a large crop of hard core heliocentrists, not a few of whom were advocating ape-man theories (amongst them, Darwin’s grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, Voltaire’s disciples in France, etc.). This was the age of “The Enlightenment” which produced Thomas Paine, the celebrated pamphleteer of the American Revolution, whom George Washington referred to as “that filthy little atheist”. Thomas Jefferson’s and Ben Franklin’s Deism was commonplace in Europe as well as amongst the rebellious American colonies. During the French Revolution of the 1790’s the Bible was actually outlawed.

These developments were sixty to a hundred years and more before Darwin, but the damage to Bible credibility done by the Copernican Revolution by that time was making an ever-widening open door for Evolutionism to take root. By 1830–even before Darwin (with his Degree in Theology, not Biology) went to the Galapagos Islands and began to formulate his mythology, Charles Lyell (with his degree in Law, not Geology) had advanced his idea of a “geologic column” with great ages attached to alleged descending layers of the earth. Though such a column has never, ever been confirmed, and though there are mountainous examples of the theoretically old layers being on top of the supposedly more recent ones, and though the Cambrian layer shows a sudden profusion of highly developed life forms with no antecedents, Darwin picked up on Lyell’s fantasy and it is still taught as a proof of an ancient earth and macro-evolutionism.

If that, alone, isn’t enough to convince you of the folly of embracing a soulless, atheistic pseudoscience like Heliocentrism, perhaps this will soften your stony head:

God, thru His Word, teaches a non-moving and immovable earth just as surely as he teaches a six-day Creation 6000 years ago and a universal Flood some 1600 years later. All attempts to twist and even boldly reverse geocentric Scriptures by claiming that God just used a “language of appearance” are extremely reckless for the Christian devoted to the inerrancy of Scripture. After all, the same argument has been employed with near devastating effect upon the Creationist Movement by Theistic Evolutionists, has it not?

Attacking vulnerable Copernicanism is a strategy that outflanks the entire secular science establishment (overrunning the Theistic Evolutionist’s position in the process!)

In addition to all that, being men and women of sound mind (II Tim. 1:7), Creationists should be eager to learn that:

1) No one–not Copernicus, not Kepler, not Galileo, not Newton, not Einstein–absolutely no one has proven the earth to be moving.

2) The earth moves only thru abstract, abstruse, and esoteric mathematics invented to make it move.

3) Over 200 truly scientific experiments using real mathematics have shown no earth movement, and these had the science establishment in a panic from the 1880’s until Einstein came to the rescue in 1905 with his “relativity” hypothesis.

4) Relativity is pure claptrap and there isn’t a person reading this who can’t know that fact.

5) Foucault’s Pendulum, the Coriolis Effect, and geostationary satellites do not prove a moving earth.

6) Anyone can see that the results of the Michelson-Morley experiments–especially the light fringe results–prove a stationary earth; and other facts about eclipses, satellite re-positionings, alleged blinding earth speeds, gravitational hooey, etc., add to the proof. Moreover, the Big Bang Baloney, the growing awareness of the effect of Dark Matter on galactic speeds, parallax factors (HERE) which shrink the cosmos, the evidence for speed-of-light retardation, the behavior of reflections and their capabilities for producing phenomena regarding size and depth, etc., all combine to corroborate the certitude of a greatly sanforized universe (one no more than one light day thick: Start HERE), a universe put in diurnal rotation around the spiritual and physical center of God’s Creation, just exactly as it appears to be day in and day out.

7) The Bible not only flatly states scores of times (HERE) and in several ways (HERE) that the earth does not move, it actually has a built-in geocentric assumption–sun rise, sun set–from beginning to end. (One scholar, a geocentrist and mathematician, is cataloguing some 2000 (!) of these.)

In the beginning, the Bible makes clear, the earth was the center of our “solar” system, with no sun for it to go around until the 4th day of creation (Gen.1:14-19; HERE). At the End we read of a New Earth (HERE) replacing in the same location this old one (Rev. 20:11; 21:1,2). This New Earth which occupies the same location in the cosmos as the old one which has “fled away” is the place where God the Father and Jesus will dwell with the redeemed forever (Rev. 21:3).

Given that unpreached but clear teaching, do you think that God the Father and Jesus the Son will eternally be somewhere out on the edge of Their NEW Universe in the boonies…or at the center?

If you ask me, that settles the question right there. I support the Bible, and I don’t want my children learning about Heliocentrism in school. I think this doctrine encourages atheism, Darwinism, and anti-Americanism. I don’t want my tax dollars going to finance this kind of false science. It’s complete rot, and I hope that those of us who come to realize this can ultimately prevail against its propogation amongst OUR children with the money from OUR salaries.

I can’t wait to hear from the moonbats and the Darwinists and the other rubes on this one, though. Go on, witch doctors. Preach to me how the planet hurtles through the ether, Scriptural and physical evidence to the contrary! Your false doctrines will be cast down on the day when America rediscovers its Christian roots. That is a promise.

and, once again, taking a 180° turn into bizarre-sex-land…

A woman robbed of her fertility
22 May 2007
By Jo Meek

Elaine Riddick is a petite woman in her early fifties with a warm smile.

Today she lives in a comfortable home on the outskirts of Atlanta, but this wasn’t how she spent her childhood.

She grew up in North Carolina with a violent father and an alcoholic mother.

She believes that the state used her chaotic childhood as a justification to sterilise her.

“When I was 13, I was raped. I had my beautiful son and when they cut me open, I had a caesarean, they sterilised me at the same time,” she said.

“I didn’t know anything about it until I was 19. I got married and tried to have a child. The doctor told me I had been butchered.”

Eugenics movement
It sounds like a story from the dark ages but this happened less than 40 years ago. And it happened in the US.

Whilst the feminist movement was gaining ground on both sides of the Atlantic, across poor America their ‘sisters’ were victims of sterilisation laws, which had their foundations in the eugenics movement.

This year marks the centenary of the first eugenics laws passed in the United States.

Policies were drawn up in over 30 states in the US to sterilise women, men and children who were considered to be physically, mentally or morally ‘defective’.

But in reality the majority of those who were sterilized were simply poor women.

Few have ever spoken about what happened because of embarrassment and shame.

Speaking out
But with her only son, Tony, by her side, Elaine Riddick has chosen to speak out about what happened to her.

“I think they saw it as a way to control me. They saw my parents were not available, so the state of North Carolina decided that they were going to sterilise me. I did nothing wrong.

“Now I’m healing a little bit I can talk about this. I can look you in the eye. I am not feeble minded. That’s the reason they gave for doing that to me.”

Between 1929 and 1974, across the state of North Carolina, more than 7600 men, women and children were sterilised.

Documents from the state’s eugenics board reveal how for nearly 50 years this unelected body authorised 90% of all sterilisation cases brought before it.

Social workers used gossip in their reports for the Eugenics Board.

Promiscuity
Elaine Riddick’s form refers to “community reports that she was ‘running around’ late at night” and her “promisicuity” and her “inability to control herself” constituted grounds for sterilisation.

By the late 1960s, ironically as the Civil Rights movement grew, North Carolina began to target its Black population.

More than 60% of those sterilized were black women and girls like Elaine Riddick.

Records show that in North Carolina out of the 7,000 sterilisations less than 500 took place with the clear consent of the patient. The vast majority were much more complicated.

State records, seen by Winston Salem Journal reporter John Railey, reveal cases where parents who were abusing their children would then agree to their sterilization.

“You have a sick cycle. The father was committing incest and was given the right of consent for her sterilisation.

“The state is victimising the children who have already been victimised by their parents.”

State records conservatively estimate that between 1943 and 1963, over 63,000 people were sterilized under the eugenics laws in America.

Apologies
Whilst five states, including North Carolina, have issued apologies for the sterilisations carried out under eugenics laws, the federal government has never acknowledged that any sterilisation abuses have ever taken place.

Paul Lombardo is professor of Law at Georgia State University and he has devoted himself to this issue for the past 27 years.

He believes that it is a shameful history, and one that needs to be openly recognised.

But at the moment that doesn’t seem likely.

“I hear from time to time from women who have been sterilised against their will, the difficulty is documentation,” he said.

“Even when there are records, when you ask them to come forward, being sterilised isn’t something that people want to broadcast, so they stay hidden.”

But until there is recognition that this happened, Elaine Riddick says today there is still no reason for other women to tell their stories.

“I can understand why they won’t come forward, because they don’t want their next door neighbour to know this happened. I felt same way. I have resentment – I will always have it for my Government.

“That’s just how I feel. Angry. You took something away from me and you can never give it back.”

Gay flamingos pick up chick
May 21, 2007

LONDON – A pair of gay flamingos have adopted an abandoned chick, becoming parents after being together for six years, a British conservation organisation said Monday.

Carlos and Fernando had been desperate to start a family, even chasing other flamingos from their nests to take over their eggs at the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust (WWT) in Slimbridge near Bristol.

But their egg-sitting prowess made them the top choice for taking an unhatched egg under their wings when one of the Greater Flamingo nests was abandoned.

The couple, together for six years, can feed chicks by producing milk in their throats.

“Fernando and Carlos are a same sex couple who have been known to steal other flamingos’ eggs by chasing them off their nest because they wanted to rear them themselves,” said WWT spokeswoman Jane Waghorn.

“They were rather good at sitting on eggs and hatching them so last week, when a nest was abandoned, it seemed like a good idea to make them surrogate parents.”

Gay flamingos are not uncommon, she added.

“If there aren’t enough females or they don’t hit it off with them, they will pair off with other males,” she said.

that settles it… if God created everything, and two same-sex flamingos are allowed to live together, then God must have created gay marriage. period.

somebody wrote to me within the last 30 minutes, asking for details about my sindarian font. instead of hitting “reply” i accidentally hit “delete” so i can’t respond. if you write to me again, i promise i won’t delete your message, and i’ll respond instead.

this has gotten to be so much of an issue with me that i have actually removed the “delete” button from the toolbar and replaced it with a “move message to trash” button, so i can catch it if i accidentally hit the wrong button in the future… 8/

National Security and Homeland Security Presidential Directive
May 9, 2007

NATIONAL SECURITY PRESIDENTIAL DIRECTIVE/NSPD 51

HOMELAND SECURITY PRESIDENTIAL DIRECTIVE/HSPD-20

Subject: National Continuity Policy

Purpose

(1) This directive establishes a comprehensive national policy on the continuity of Federal Government structures and operations and a single National Continuity Coordinator responsible for coordinating the development and implementation of Federal continuity policies. This policy establishes “National Essential Functions,” prescribes continuity requirements for all executive departments and agencies, and provides guidance for State, local, territorial, and tribal governments, and private sector organizations in order to ensure a comprehensive and integrated national continuity program that will enhance the credibility of our national security posture and enable a more rapid and effective response to and recovery from a national emergency.

Definitions

(2) In this directive:

(a) “Category” refers to the categories of executive departments and agencies listed in Annex A to this directive;

(b) “Catastrophic Emergency” means any incident, regardless of location, that results in extraordinary levels of mass casualties, damage, or disruption severely affecting the U.S. population, infrastructure, environment, economy, or government functions;

(c) “Continuity of Government,” or “COG,” means a coordinated effort within the Federal Government’s executive branch to ensure that National Essential Functions continue to be performed during a Catastrophic Emergency;

(d) “Continuity of Operations,” or “COOP,” means an effort within individual executive departments and agencies to ensure that Primary Mission-Essential Functions continue to be performed during a wide range of emergencies, including localized acts of nature, accidents, and technological or attack-related emergencies;

(e) “Enduring Constitutional Government,” or “ECG,” means a cooperative effort among the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of the Federal Government, coordinated by the President, as a matter of comity with respect to the legislative and judicial branches and with proper respect for the constitutional separation of powers among the branches, to preserve the constitutional framework under which the Nation is governed and the capability of all three branches of government to execute constitutional responsibilities and provide for orderly succession, appropriate transition of leadership, and interoperability and support of the National Essential Functions during a catastrophic emergency;

(f) “Executive Departments and Agencies” means the executive departments enumerated in 5 U.S.C. 101, independent establishments as defined by 5 U.S.C. 104(1), Government corporations as defined by 5 U.S.C. 103(1), and the United States Postal Service;

(g) “Government Functions” means the collective functions of the heads of executive departments and agencies as defined by statute, regulation, presidential direction, or other legal authority, and the functions of the legislative and judicial branches;

(h) “National Essential Functions,” or “NEFs,” means that subset of Government Functions that are necessary to lead and sustain the Nation during a catastrophic emergency and that, therefore, must be supported through COOP and COG capabilities; and

(i) “Primary Mission Essential Functions,” or “PMEFs,” means those Government Functions that must be performed in order to support or implement the performance of NEFs before, during, and in the aftermath of an emergency.

Policy

(3) It is the policy of the United States to maintain a comprehensive and effective continuity capability composed of Continuity of Operations and Continuity of Government programs in order to ensure the preservation of our form of government under the Constitution and the continuing performance of National Essential Functions under all conditions.

Implementation Actions

(4) Continuity requirements shall be incorporated into daily operations of all executive departments and agencies. As a result of the asymmetric threat environment, adequate warning of potential emergencies that could pose a significant risk to the homeland might not be available, and therefore all continuity planning shall be based on the assumption that no such warning will be received. Emphasis will be placed upon geographic dispersion of leadership, staff, and infrastructure in order to increase survivability and maintain uninterrupted Government Functions. Risk management principles shall be applied to ensure that appropriate operational readiness decisions are based on the probability of an attack or other incident and its consequences.

(5) The following NEFs are the foundation for all continuity programs and capabilities and represent the overarching responsibilities of the Federal Government to lead and sustain the Nation during a crisis, and therefore sustaining the following NEFs shall be the primary focus of

the Federal Government leadership during and in the aftermath of an emergency that adversely affects the performance of Government Functions:

(a) Ensuring the continued functioning of our form of government under the Constitution, including the functioning of the three separate branches of government;

(b) Providing leadership visible to the Nation and the world and maintaining the trust and confidence of the American people;

(c) Defending the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic, and preventing or interdicting attacks against the United States or its people, property, or interests;

(d) Maintaining and fostering effective relationships with foreign nations;

(e) Protecting against threats to the homeland and bringing to justice perpetrators of crimes or attacks against the United States or its people, property, or interests;

(f) Providing rapid and effective response to and recovery from the domestic consequences of an attack or other incident;

(g) Protecting and stabilizing the Nation’s economy and ensuring public confidence in its financial systems; and

(h) Providing for critical Federal Government services that address the national health, safety, and welfare needs of the United States.

(6) The President shall lead the activities of the Federal Government for ensuring constitutional government. In order to advise and assist the President in that function, the Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism (APHS/CT) is hereby designated as the National Continuity Coordinator. The National Continuity Coordinator, in coordination with the Assistant to the President for National

Security Affairs (APNSA), without exercising directive authority, shall coordinate the development and implementation of continuity policy for executive departments and agencies. The Continuity Policy Coordination Committee (CPCC), chaired by a Senior Director from the Homeland Security Council staff, designated by the National Continuity Coordinator, shall be the main day-to-day forum for such policy coordination.

(7) For continuity purposes, each executive department and agency is assigned to a category in accordance with the nature and characteristics of its national security roles and

responsibilities in support of the Federal Government’s ability to sustain the NEFs. The Secretary of Homeland Security shall serve as the President’s lead agent for coordinating overall

continuity operations and activities of executive departments and agencies, and in such role shall perform the responsibilities set forth for the Secretary in sections 10 and 16 of this directive.

(8) The National Continuity Coordinator, in consultation with the heads of appropriate executive departments and agencies, will lead the development of a National Continuity Implementation Plan (Plan), which shall include prioritized goals and objectives, a concept of operations, performance metrics by which to measure continuity readiness, procedures for continuity and incident management activities, and clear direction to executive department and agency continuity coordinators, as well as guidance to promote interoperability of Federal Government continuity programs and procedures with State, local, territorial, and tribal governments, and private sector owners and operators of critical infrastructure, as appropriate. The Plan shall be submitted to the President for approval not later than 90 days after the date of this directive.

(9) Recognizing that each branch of the Federal Government is responsible for its own continuity programs, an official designated by the Chief of Staff to the President shall ensure that the executive branch’s COOP and COG policies in support of ECG efforts are appropriately coordinated with those of

the legislative and judicial branches in order to ensure interoperability and allocate national assets efficiently to maintain a functioning Federal Government.

(10) Federal Government COOP, COG, and ECG plans and operations shall be appropriately integrated with the emergency plans and capabilities of State, local, territorial, and tribal governments, and private sector owners and operators of critical infrastructure, as appropriate, in order to promote interoperability and to prevent redundancies and conflicting lines of authority. The Secretary of Homeland Security shall coordinate the integration of Federal continuity plans and operations with State, local, territorial, and tribal governments, and private sector owners and operators of critical infrastructure, as appropriate, in order to provide for the delivery of essential services during an emergency.

(11) Continuity requirements for the Executive Office of the President (EOP) and executive departments and agencies shall include the following:

(a) The continuation of the performance of PMEFs during any emergency must be for a period up to 30 days or until normal operations can be resumed, and the capability to be fully operational at alternate sites as soon as possible after the occurrence of an emergency, but not later than 12 hours after COOP activation;

(b) Succession orders and pre-planned devolution of authorities that ensure the emergency delegation of authority must be planned and documented in advance in accordance with applicable law;

(c) Vital resources, facilities, and records must be safeguarded, and official access to them must be provided;

(d) Provision must be made for the acquisition of the resources necessary for continuity operations on an emergency basis;

(e) Provision must be made for the availability and redundancy of critical communications capabilities at alternate sites in order to support connectivity between

and among key government leadership, internal elements, other executive departments and agencies, critical partners, and the public;

(f) Provision must be made for reconstitution capabilities that allow for recovery from a catastrophic emergency and resumption of normal operations; and

(g) Provision must be made for the identification, training, and preparedness of personnel capable of relocating to alternate facilities to support the continuation of the performance of PMEFs.

(12) In order to provide a coordinated response to escalating threat levels or actual emergencies, the Continuity of Government Readiness Conditions (COGCON) system establishes executive branch continuity program readiness levels, focusing

on possible threats to the National Capital Region. The President will determine and issue the COGCON Level. Executive departments and agencies shall comply with the requirements and

assigned responsibilities under the COGCON program. During COOP activation, executive departments and agencies shall report their readiness status to the Secretary of Homeland Security or the Secretary’s designee.

(13) The Director of the Office of Management and Budget shall:

(a) Conduct an annual assessment of executive department and agency continuity funding requests and performance data that are submitted by executive departments and agencies as part of the annual budget request process, in order to monitor progress in the implementation of the Plan and the execution of continuity budgets;

(b) In coordination with the National Continuity Coordinator, issue annual continuity planning guidance for the development of continuity budget requests; and

(c) Ensure that heads of executive departments and agencies prioritize budget resources for continuity capabilities, consistent with this directive.

(14) The Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy shall:

(a) Define and issue minimum requirements for continuity communications for executive departments and agencies, in consultation with the APHS/CT, the APNSA, the Director of the Office of Management and Budget, and the Chief of Staff to the President;

(b) Establish requirements for, and monitor the development, implementation, and maintenance of, a comprehensive communications architecture to integrate continuity components, in consultation with the APHS/CT, the APNSA, the Director of the Office of Management and Budget, and the Chief of Staff to the President; and

(c) Review quarterly and annual assessments of continuity communications capabilities, as prepared pursuant to section 16(d) of this directive or otherwise, and report the results and recommended remedial actions to the National Continuity Coordinator.

(15) An official designated by the Chief of Staff to the President shall:

(a) Advise the President, the Chief of Staff to the President, the APHS/CT, and the APNSA on COGCON operational execution options; and

(b) Consult with the Secretary of Homeland Security in order to ensure synchronization and integration of continuity activities among the four categories of executive departments and agencies.

(16) The Secretary of Homeland Security shall:

(a) Coordinate the implementation, execution, and assessment of continuity operations and activities;

(b) Develop and promulgate Federal Continuity Directives in order to establish continuity planning requirements for executive departments and agencies;

(c) Conduct biennial assessments of individual department and agency continuity capabilities as prescribed by the Plan and report the results to the President through the APHS/CT;

(d) Conduct quarterly and annual assessments of continuity communications capabilities in consultation with an official designated by the Chief of Staff to the President;

(e) Develop, lead, and conduct a Federal continuity training and exercise program, which shall be incorporated into the National Exercise Program developed pursuant to Homeland Security Presidential Directive-8 of December 17, 2003 (“National Preparedness”), in consultation with an

official designated by the Chief of Staff to the President;

(f) Develop and promulgate continuity planning guidance to State, local, territorial, and tribal governments, and private sector critical infrastructure owners and operators;

(g) Make available continuity planning and exercise funding, in the form of grants as provided by law, to State, local, territorial, and tribal governments, and private sector critical infrastructure owners and operators; and

(h) As Executive Agent of the National Communications System, develop, implement, and maintain a comprehensive continuity communications architecture.

(17) The Director of National Intelligence, in coordination with the Attorney General and the Secretary of Homeland Security, shall produce a biennial assessment of the foreign and domestic threats to the Nation’s continuity of government.

(18) The Secretary of Defense, in coordination with the Secretary of Homeland Security, shall provide secure, integrated, Continuity of Government communications to the President, the Vice President, and, at a minimum, Category I executive departments and agencies.

(19) Heads of executive departments and agencies shall execute their respective department or agency COOP plans in response to a localized emergency and shall:

(a) Appoint a senior accountable official, at the Assistant Secretary level, as the Continuity Coordinator for the department or agency;

(b) Identify and submit to the National Continuity Coordinator the list of PMEFs for the department or agency and develop continuity plans in support of the NEFs and the continuation of essential functions under all conditions;

(c) Plan, program, and budget for continuity capabilities consistent with this directive;

(d) Plan, conduct, and support annual tests and training, in consultation with the Secretary of Homeland Security, in order to evaluate program readiness and ensure adequacy and viability of continuity plans and communications systems; and

(e) Support other continuity requirements, as assigned by category, in accordance with the nature and characteristics of its national security roles and responsibilities

General Provisions

(20) This directive shall be implemented in a manner that is consistent with, and facilitates effective implementation of, provisions of the Constitution concerning succession to the Presidency or the exercise of its powers, and the Presidential Succession Act of 1947 (3 U.S.C. 19), with consultation of the Vice President and, as appropriate, others involved. Heads of executive departments and agencies shall ensure that appropriate

support is available to the Vice President and others involved as necessary to be prepared at all times to implement those provisions.

(21) This directive:

(a) Shall be implemented consistent with applicable law and the authorities of agencies, or heads of agencies, vested by law, and subject to the availability of appropriations;

(b) Shall not be construed to impair or otherwise affect (i) the functions of the Director of the Office of Management and Budget relating to budget, administrative, and legislative proposals, or (ii) the authority of the Secretary of Defense over the Department of Defense, including the chain of command for military forces from the President, to the Secretary of Defense, to the commander of military forces, or military command and control procedures; and

(c) Is not intended to, and does not, create any rights or benefits, substantive or procedural, enforceable at law or in equity by a party against the United States, its

agencies, instrumentalities, or entities, its officers, employees, or agents, or any other person.

(22) Revocation. Presidential Decision Directive 67 of October 21, 1998 (“Enduring Constitutional Government and Continuity of Government Operations”), including all Annexes thereto, is hereby revoked.

(23) Annex A and the classified Continuity Annexes, attached hereto, are hereby incorporated into and made a part of this directive.

(24) Security. This directive and the information contained herein shall be protected from unauthorized disclosure, provided that, except for Annex A, the Annexes attached to this directive are classified and shall be accorded appropriate handling, consistent with applicable Executive Orders.

GEORGE W. BUSH

in short, if some sort of "catastrophe" strikes our country, george "catastrophe" bush will become dictator…

$120 – today
$1001.84 – TOTAL

nelson sings nilsson is now, for all intents and purposes, history. the two shows went very well indeed, but for this performance, that’s not much of a surprise. i have never worked with what is essentially a “pickup” band of more than 20 musicians who was more “together” as a group than this one. we sit down to “rehearse” and we play one song, and then we play it again and it’s exactly the same – the notes, the pitches, the inflections… EVERYTHING is exactly the same from one playing to the next. i’ve never played with another group of musicians who had that quality before. of course, there was a marimba last night, that we didn’t have the last time, and the trombone player that was there last time wasn’t there this time, but it went extremely well in spite of those things. the CD still isn’t released, but it’s done, and it’s just a matter of time before it gets released by someone.

if you’re in the seattle area and want something to do this evening, you’re invited to see Nelson Sings Nilsson at the Triple Door, two shows tonight: 7:00 pm and 10:00 pm. i’ll be the guy on stage with the tuba. i can’t comp you, but if you want to show up, i’ll be glad to see you.

City Police Spied Broadly Before G.O.P. Convention
March 25, 2007
By JIM DWYER

Correction Appended

For at least a year before the 2004 Republican National Convention, teams of undercover New York City police officers traveled to cities across the country, Canada and Europe to conduct covert observations of people who planned to protest at the convention, according to police records and interviews.

From Albuquerque to Montreal, San Francisco to Miami, undercover New York police officers attended meetings of political groups, posing as sympathizers or fellow activists, the records show.

They made friends, shared meals, swapped e-mail messages and then filed daily reports with the department’s Intelligence Division. Other investigators mined Internet sites and chat rooms.

From these operations, run by the department’s “R.N.C. Intelligence Squad,” the police identified a handful of groups and individuals who expressed interest in creating havoc during the convention, as well as some who used Web sites to urge or predict violence.

But potential troublemakers were hardly the only ones to end up in the files. In hundreds of reports stamped “N.Y.P.D. Secret,” the Intelligence Division chronicled the views and plans of people who had no apparent intention of breaking the law, the records show.

These included members of street theater companies, church groups and antiwar organizations, as well as environmentalists and people opposed to the death penalty, globalization and other government policies. Three New York City elected officials were cited in the reports.

In at least some cases, intelligence on what appeared to be lawful activity was shared with police departments in other cities. A police report on an organization of artists called Bands Against Bush noted that the group was planning concerts on Oct. 11, 2003, in New York, Washington, Seattle, San Francisco and Boston. Between musical sets, the report said, there would be political speeches and videos.

“Activists are showing a well-organized network made up of anti-Bush sentiment; the mixing of music and political rhetoric indicates sophisticated organizing skills with a specific agenda,” said the report, dated Oct. 9, 2003. “Police departments in above listed areas have been contacted regarding this event.”

Police records indicate that in addition to sharing information with other police departments, New York undercover officers were active themselves in at least 15 places outside New York — including California, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Massachusetts, Michigan, Montreal, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Oregon, Tennessee, Texas and Washington, D.C. — and in Europe.

The operation was mounted in 2003 after the Police Department, invoking the fresh horrors of the World Trade Center attack and the prospect of future terrorism, won greater authority from a federal judge to investigate political organizations for criminal activity.

To date, as the boundaries of the department’s expanded powers continue to be debated, police officials have provided only glimpses of its intelligence-gathering.

Now, the broad outlines of the pre-convention operations are emerging from records in federal lawsuits that were brought over mass arrests made during the convention, and in greater detail from still-secret reports reviewed by The New York Times. These include a sample of raw intelligence documents and of summary digests of observations from both the field and the department’s cyberintelligence unit.

Paul J. Browne, the chief spokesman for the Police Department, confirmed that the operation had been wide-ranging, and said it had been an essential part of the preparations for the huge crowds that came to the city during the convention.

“Detectives collected information both in-state and out-of-state to learn in advance what was coming our way,” Mr. Browne said. When the detectives went out of town, he said, the department usually alerted the local authorities by telephone or in person.

Under a United States Supreme Court ruling, undercover surveillance of political groups is generally legal, but the police in New York — like those in many other big cities — have operated under special limits as a result of class-action lawsuits filed over police monitoring of civil rights and antiwar groups during the 1960s. The limits in New York are known as the Handschu guidelines, after the lead plaintiff, Barbara Handschu.

“All our activities were legal and were subject in advance to Handschu review,” Mr. Browne said.

Before monitoring political activity, the police must have “some indication of unlawful activity on the part of the individual or organization to be investigated,” United States District Court Judge Charles S. Haight Jr. said in a ruling last month.

Christopher Dunn, the associate legal director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, which represents seven of the 1,806 people arrested during the convention, said the Police Department stepped beyond the law in its covert surveillance program.

“The police have no authority to spy on lawful political activity, and this wide-ranging N.Y.P.D. program was wrong and illegal,” Mr. Dunn said. “In the coming weeks, the city will be required to disclose to us many more details about its preconvention surveillance of groups and activists, and many will be shocked by the breadth of the Police Department’s political surveillance operation.”

The Police Department said those complaints were overblown.

On Wednesday, lawyers for the plaintiffs in the convention lawsuits are scheduled to begin depositions of David Cohen, the deputy police commissioner for intelligence. Mr. Cohen, a former senior official at the Central Intelligence Agency, was “central to the N.Y.P.D.’s efforts to collect intelligence information prior to the R.N.C.,” Gerald C. Smith, an assistant corporation counsel with the city Law Department, said in a federal court filing.

Balancing Safety and Surveillance

For nearly four decades, the city, civil liberties lawyers and the Police Department have fought in federal court over how to balance public safety, free speech and the penetrating but potentially disruptive force of police surveillance.

After the Sept. 11 attacks, Raymond W. Kelly, who became police commissioner in January 2002, “took the position that the N.Y.P.D. could no longer rely on the federal government alone, and that the department had to build an intelligence capacity worthy of the name,” Mr. Browne said.

Mr. Cohen contended that surveillance of domestic political activities was essential to fighting terrorism. “Given the range of activities that may be engaged in by the members of a sleeper cell in the long period of preparation for an act of terror, the entire resources of the N.Y.P.D. must be available to conduct investigations into political activity and intelligence-related issues,” Mr. Cohen wrote in an affidavit dated Sept. 12, 2002.

In February 2003, the Police Department, with Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s support, was given broad new authority by Judge Haight to conduct such monitoring. However, a senior police official must still determine that there is some indication of illegal activity before an inquiry is begun.

An investigation by the Intelligence Division led to the arrest — coincidentally, three days before the convention — of a man who spoke about bombing the Herald Square subway station. In another initiative, detectives were stationed in Europe and the Middle East to quickly funnel information back to New York.

When the city was designated in February 2003 as the site of the 2004 Republican National Convention, the department had security worries — in particular about the possibility of a truck bomb attack near Madison Square Garden, where events would be held — and logistical concerns about managing huge crowds, Mr. Browne said.

“We also prepared to contend with a relatively small group of self-described anarchists who vowed to prevent delegates from participating in the convention or otherwise disrupt the convention by various means, including vandalism,” Mr. Browne said. “Our goal was to safeguard delegates, demonstrators and the general public alike.”

In its preparations, the department applied the intelligence resources that had just been strengthened for fighting terrorism to an entirely different task: collecting information on people participating in political protests.

In the records reviewed by The Times, some of the police intelligence concerned people and groups bent on causing trouble, but the bulk of the reports covered the plans and views of people with no obvious intention of breaking the law.

By searching the Internet, investigators identified groups that were making plans for demonstrations. Files were created on their political causes, the criminal records, if any, of the people involved and any plans for civil disobedience or disruptive tactics.

From the field, undercover officers filed daily accounts of their observations on forms known as DD5s that called for descriptions of the gatherings, the leaders and participants, and the groups’ plans.

Inside the police Intelligence Division, daily reports from both the field and the Web were summarized in bullet format. These digests — marked “Secret” — were circulated weekly under the heading “Key Findings.”

Perceived Threats

On Jan. 6, 2004, the intelligence digest noted that an antigentrification group in Montreal claimed responsibility for hoax bombs that had been planted at construction sites of luxury condominiums, stating that the purpose was to draw attention to the homeless. The group was linked to a band of anarchist-communists whose leader had visited New York, according to the report.

Other digests noted a planned campaign of “electronic civil disobedience” to jam fax machines and hack into Web sites. Participants at a conference were said to have discussed getting inside delegates’ hotels by making hair salon appointments or dinner reservations. At the same conference, people were reported to have discussed disabling charter buses and trying to confuse delegates by switching subway directional signs, or by sealing off stations with crime-scene tape.

A Syracuse peace group intended to block intersections, a report stated. Other reports mentioned past demonstrations where various groups used nails and ball bearings as weapons and threw balloons filled with urine or other foul liquids.

The police also kept track of Richard Picariello, a man who had been convicted in 1978 of politically motivated bombings in Massachusetts, Mr. Browne said.

At the other end of the threat spectrum was Joshua Kinberg, a graduate student at Parsons School of Design and the subject of four pages of intelligence reports, including two pictures. For his master’s thesis project, Mr. Kinberg devised a “wireless bicycle” equipped with cellphone, laptop and spray tubes that could squirt messages received over the Internet onto the sidewalk or street.

The messages were printed in water-soluble chalk, a tactic meant to avoid a criminal mischief charge for using paint, an intelligence report noted. Mr. Kinberg’s bicycle was “capable of transferring activist-based messages on streets and sidewalks,” according to a report on July 22, 2004.

“This bicycle, having been built for the sole purpose of protesting during the R.N.C., is capable of spraying anti-R.N.C.-type messages on surrounding streets and sidewalks, also supplying the rider with a quick vehicle of escape,” the report said. Mr. Kinberg, then 25, was arrested during a television interview with Ron Reagan for MSNBC’s “Hardball” program during the convention. He was released a day later, but his equipment was held for more than a year.

Mr. Kinberg said Friday that after his arrest, detectives with the terrorism task force asked if he knew of any plans for violence. “I’m an artist,” he said. “I know other artists, who make T-shirts and signs.”

He added: “There’s no reason I should have been placed on any kind of surveillance status. It affected me, my ability to exercise free speech, and the ability of thousands of people who were sending in messages for the bike, to exercise their free speech.”

New Faces in Their Midst

A vast majority of several hundred reports reviewed by The Times, including field reports and the digests, described groups that gave no obvious sign of wrongdoing. The intelligence noted that one group, the “Man- and Woman-in-Black Bloc,” planned to protest outside a party at Sotheby’s for Tennessee’s Republican delegates with Johnny Cash’s career as its theme.

The satirical performance troupe Billionaires for Bush, which specializes in lampooning the Bush administration by dressing in tuxedos and flapper gowns, was described in an intelligence digest on Jan. 23, 2004.

“Billionaires for Bush is an activist group forged as a mockery of the current president and political policies,” the report said. “Preliminary intelligence indicates that this group is raising funds for expansion and support of anti-R.N.C. activist organizations.”

Marco Ceglie, who performs as Monet Oliver dePlace in Billionaires for Bush, said he had suspected that the group was under surveillance by federal agents — not necessarily police officers — during weekly meetings in a downtown loft and at events around the country in the summer of 2004.

“It was a running joke that some of the new faces were 25- to 32-year-old males asking, ‘First name, last name?’ ” Mr. Ceglie said. “Some people didn’t care; it bothered me and a couple of other leaders, but we didn’t want to make a big stink because we didn’t want to look paranoid. We applied to the F.B.I. under the Freedom of Information Act to see if there’s a file, but the answer came back that ‘we cannot confirm or deny.’ ”

The Billionaires try to avoid provoking arrests, Mr. Ceglie said.

Others — who openly planned civil disobedience, with the expectation of being arrested — said they assumed they were under surveillance, but had nothing to hide. “Some of the groups were very concerned about infiltration,” said Ed Hedemann of the War Resisters League, a pacifist organization founded in 1923. “We weren’t. We had open meetings.”

The war resisters publicly announced plans for a “die-in” at Madison Square Garden. They were arrested two minutes after they began a silent march from the World Trade Center site. The charges were dismissed.

The sponsors of an event planned for Jan. 15, 2004, in honor of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday were listed in one of the reports, which noted that it was a protest against “the R.N.C., the war in Iraq and the Bush administration.” It mentioned that three members of the City Council at the time, Charles Barron, Bill Perkins and Larry B. Seabrook, “have endorsed this event.”

Others supporting it, the report said, were the New York City AIDS Housing Network, the Arab Muslim American Foundation, Activists for the Liberation of Palestine, Queers for Peace and Justice and the 1199 Bread and Roses Cultural Project.

Many of the 1,806 people arrested during the convention were held for up to two days on minor offenses normally handled with a summons; the city Law Department said the preconvention intelligence justified detaining them all for fingerprinting.

Mr. Browne said that 18 months of preparation by the police had allowed hundreds of thousands of people to demonstrate while also ensuring that the Republican delegates were able to hold their convention with relatively few disruptions.

“We attributed the successful policing of the convention to a host of N.Y.P.D. activities leading up to the R.N.C., including 18 months of intensive planning,” he said. “It was a great success, and despite provocations, such as demonstrators throwing faux feces in the faces of police officers, the N.Y.P.D. showed professionalism and restraint.”

Correction: March 26, 2007:
A picture caption yesterday with the continuation of a front-page article about broad spying by the New York City police on people expected to protest in the city during the 2004 Republican National Convention referred incorrectly in some copies to the disposition of the property of one protester, Joshua Kinberg, who devised a bicycle equipped with cellphone, laptop and tubes that could spray the ground with messages in chalk. The spraying apparatus — not the bicycle — was held for more than a year before being returned; Mr. Kinberg says the authorities have still not returned his bicycle.

"Web site" baffles Internet terrorism trial judge
May 17, 2007
By Mark Trevelyan

LONDON (Reuters) – A British judge admitted on Wednesday he was struggling to cope with basic terms like “Web site” in the trial of three men accused of inciting terrorism via the Internet.

Judge Peter Openshaw broke into the questioning of a witness about a Web forum used by alleged Islamist radicals.

“The trouble is I don’t understand the language. I don’t really understand what a Web site is,” he told a London court during the trial of three men charged under anti-terrorism laws.

Prosecutor Mark Ellison briefly set aside his questioning to explain the terms “Web site” and “forum.” An exchange followed in which the 59-year-old judge acknowledged: “I haven’t quite grasped the concepts.”

Violent Islamist material posted on the Internet, including beheadings of Western hostages, is central to the case.

Concluding Wednesday’s session and looking ahead to testimony Thursday by a computer expert, the judge told Ellison: “Will you ask him to keep it simple, we’ve got to start from basics.”

Younes Tsouli, 23, Waseem Mughal, 24, and Tariq al-Daour, 21, deny a range of charges under Britain’s Terrorism Act, including inciting another person to commit an act of terrorism “wholly or partly” outside Britain.

Tsouli and Mughal also deny conspiracy to murder. Al-Daour has pleaded not guilty to conspiring with others to defraud banks, credit card and charge card companies.

Prosecutors have told the jury at Woolwich Crown Court, east London, that the defendants kept car-bomb-making manuals and videos of how to wire suicide vests as part of a campaign to promote global jihad, or holy war.

Vet Prosecuted for Protesting Military Recruitment in Library
A veteran and his wife started putting up 3×5 cards on the window of the room used by recruiters in a library. Then the police came.
May 17, 2007
By Matthew Rothschild

Tim Coli served in the first Gulf War and now suffers from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

On March 12, he and his wife, Yvette, went to the Stow-Munroe Falls Public Library in Ohio. At 37, she is a student at Kent State and needed to study for a biology test. Tim, 40, was reading some books.

Then they noticed two military recruiters trying to enlist someone in a nearby room, with a large glass window.

She decided to take action.

She took out some 3×5 cards and wrote messages to the man being recruited and then put them up on the window sill.

“Don’t fall for it! Military recruiters lie,” said one.

“It’s not honorable to fight for a lying President,” said another.

She says she cleared it all first.

“Before I put those cards up, I went to a volunteer and I asked her if it was OK if I put those cards up in the window, and she said she didn’t have a problem with that but talk to someone who works there,” Yvette says. “The next person said it was fine so long as there is no confrontation. And she said, ‘Between you and I, I wish they weren’t here, either.’ ”

The recruiters were none too happy with the cards.

One of them came out and asked Coil who put them up.

When she admitted she had, he asked for her name, which she didn’t give him.

He told her that she and her husband couldn’t put the cards up.

“My husband asked him if he was trying to keep us from using our freedom of speech,” Coil says.

He didn’t answer that, she says, but he did tell her again to stop.

He took the cards and went to find the library director.

In the meantime, Coil put some more card on the sill:

“Don’t do it.”

“My husband is a Gulf War Veteran. He can tell you the truth”

“To the military, you are cannon fodder.”

“Recruiters: You’re fighting for my freedom of speech, too!”

The library director, Doug Dotterer, told them that if they put up one more card, he was going to ask them to leave, Coil says. He told them they couldn’t display things that were disturbing other people in the library. She told him that the Army had its brochures out on a nearby table, and they were disturbing her, she says.

“My husband said that the library was a public place and we are allowed our freedom of speech,” Coil says. “The director said it was his library, and so we would have to follow his rules.”

When he left, they knocked on the window and urged the man being recruited not to join up.

Soon the police arrived.

They asked the Coils to leave the building.

“We said, ‘Gladly,’ ” Yvette recalls.

But on his way out, Tim called the director a name.

“One more word from you and I’ll arrest you,” the police officer told Tim.

Then Tim shouted, “Don’t let the military recruit people in the library.”

Whereupon the police arrested him and took him to the station and booked him for disorderly conduct. A little while later, Yvette came and picked him up.

The district attorney did not return phone calls for comment.

Library Director Dotterer would not talk except to say: “I contacted my board president, who is an attorney, and he indicated that because this is an ongoing case we’re not going to comment. What I would refer you to are the official police reports.”

The police report says Coil was arrested for “causing a disturbance within a library.”

At an April 30 pretrial meeting, Coil was asked if he wanted to make a plea and settle the whole thing.

“No, I’m not guilty,” he said, according to his wife.

She explains: “We’re Mennonite. To lie about that would be wrong. I don’t want him to go to jail. Neither does he. He doesn’t need that. But I believe that God’s going to take care of it. We’re OK with whatever happens. The point is if we don’t stand for these freedoms and we don’t allow ourselves to be put on the line for those things, there won’t be an option anymore.”

Attorney William Whitaker is representing the Coils.

“If a statute punishes this conduct, then that statute is unconstitutional since it sweeps protected speech within its orbit,” he says. “They were engaged in protected First Amendment speech. It’s legitimate to use the public library in the same way that the recruiters were using it.”

On May 10, Yvette Coil says that her lawyer was advised that the state would drop charges if they would pay $100 in court fees.

“Tim said he should not have to pay for being harassed,” says Yvette. “No one has the right to take your freedoms away.”

The case is scheduled for June 5.

Microsoft declares war on free software – are they just learning about it now, or what? this just seems to be the latest in a long string of events like this that microsnot has engaged in, over at least ten years i can think of, to bring linux in line with the microsnot business model… and from the way it’s starting out, i would guess that it’s going to be as successful as the last thing they tried.

Liberty University Student Affairs: Reprimands and Consequences – this will be my last word on jerry falwell, ever: i’m glad this wasn’t in force at my college, because i would have been expelled even before taking up residence. can they really get away with shit like this at a private university? i mean, doesn’t the bill of rights exist for liberty university students?

google has 172,000 results for a search on musical instrument repair woodwind and i’m number one… now why don’t i get more musical instrument repair customers?

The true Negro does not want integration… He realizes his potential is far better among his own race… It will destroy our race eventually…In one northern city, a pastor friend of mine tells me that a couple of opposite race live next door to his church as man and wife… It boils down to whether we are going to take God’s Word as final.

— Jerry Falwell in 1958

the world is now one fewer fat, bigoted, ignorant, backward, self-aggrandising, televangelistic whore, and i, for one, will not miss him in the slightest.

on the other hand, i mourn the loss of Yolanda King a lot more.

Daughter of Martin Luther King Jr. Dies
Yolanda King, Daughter and Eldest Child of Martin Luther King Jr., Dies at Age 51
May 16, 2007

Yolanda Denise King, daughter and eldest child of civil rights leader the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., has died, said Steve Klein, a spokesman for the King Center.

King died late Tuesday in Santa Monica, Calif., at age 51. Klein said the family did not know the cause of death but that relatives think it might have been a heart problem.

The actor, speaker and producer was the founder and head of Higher Ground Productions, billed as a “gateway for inner peace, unity and global transformation.” On her company’s Web site, King described her mission as encouraging personal growth and positive social change.

King was also an author and advocate for peace and nonviolence, and held memberships in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference which her father co-founded in 1957 and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Her death comes more than a year after the death of her mother, Coretta Scott King.

She appeared in numerous films and played Rosa Parks in the 1978 miniseries “King.” She also appeared in “Ghosts of Mississippi,” and founded a production company called Higher Ground Productions.

Born in 1955 in Montgomery, Ala., King was just an infant when her home was bombed during the turbulent civil rights era.

She was the most visible and outspoken among the Kings’ four children during activities honoring this year’s Martin Luther King Day in January, the first since Coretta Scott King’s death.

At her father’s former Atlanta church, Ebenezer Baptist, she performed a series of one-actor skits on King Day this year that told stories including a girl’s first ride on a desegregated bus and a college student’s recollection of the 1963 desegregation of Birmingham, Ala.

She also urged the audience at Ebenezer to be a force for peace and love, and to use the King holiday each year to ask tough questions about their own beliefs on prejudice.

“We must keep reaching across the table and, in the tradition of Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King, feed each other,” King said.

When asked then by The Associated Press how she was dealing with the loss of her mother, King responded: “I connected with her spirit so strongly. I am in direct contact with her spirit, and that has given me so much peace and so much strength.”

A flag at The King Center, which King’s mother founded in 1968 and where she was a board member, was lowered to half-staff on Wednesday.

Yolanda King is survived by her sister, the Rev. Bernice A. King; two brothers, Martin Luther King III and Dexter Scott King; and an extended family.

Arrangements were to be announced later, the family said in a statement.

so ezra graduated from college yesterday, and i was so busy with other things that i completely missed jerry falwell’s death. more on that later.

ezra graduated from college yesterday. that’s so unreal for me to realise, in so many ways… it doesn’t seem like it was that long ago that i was sitting, holding a tiny baby in my arms on garden street in bellingham. it doesn’t seem like that long ago that he was graduating from high school and i was in the midst of a legal battle with his mother, and i was working as a test lead at openwave… and that’s all before my injury and everything that came after that… so totally unreal. and yet i’m so proud of him, if for no other reason than he bucked the odds and graduated from college in spite of his mother and i, who both dropped out of college… among other things. there are pictures of the graduation ceremony and stuff, including a picture of the psycho hose-beast from hell, who said her first civil word to me since ezra was 14 years old.

she’d go nuts if she knew i had actually posted a picture of her on internet, which is the primary reason this picture is here

ezra graduates from college today. whee. a chance to see my kid doing something i never did myself, as well as a chance to run into both the psycho hose-beast from hell and my parents, at the same time, all in this uncomfortable, upper-crust, snooty environment from which it will be impossible to escape without some serious explaining to do later.

and, at the same time, i wouldn’t miss it for the world, and i’ll take my camera and embarrass my son while he’s on stage, because i’m so proud of him. 8)

a complete discography of Infected Mushroom — bittorrent FTW! 8)

and they wondered how dylan and klebold stashed so many weapons that nobody seemed to know anything about… 8/

Baby’s first FOID card
Firearm Owner’s Identification card issued to 10-month-old baby
May 13, 2007
By Howard Ludwig

My 10-month-old son has the cutest FOID card.

Howard David Ludwig — affectionately nicknamed Bubba — received his state-issued Firearm Owner’s Identification Card two weeks ago.

The wallet-size card arrived in the mail about a month after his dear ol’ dad correctly completed the online form and sent the $5 fee.

As a FOID cardholder, baby Bubba can own a firearm and ammunition in Illinois. He can also legally transport an unloaded weapon — though he can’t walk yet, so that’s not an issue.

The plastic card has a picture of a toothless, grinning Bubba in the upper right corner. It includes his name, address and date of birth.

The FOID card lists his height (2 feet, 3 inches), and his weight (20 pounds).

His signature is superimposed at the bottom of the card. Bubba can’t sign his name, so I simply placed a pen in his hand. He made the scribble.

Why does a 10-month-old need a FOID card?

Blame Grandpa.

‘How old is the boy?’

Within weeks after Bubba’s birth, my father called with news.

“I bought him a gun,” he said.

“What?” I asked.

Grandpa Ludwig, an avid trap shooter, explained he wanted an heirloom for his first grandson. He plans to engrave his name on the trigger guard.

When the proud grandpa walked into Mega Sports in Plainfield, the salesman asked why he was buying a gun. My dad explained it would be a gift for his grandson.

“How old is the boy?” the salesman asked.

“Two weeks,” the new grandpa said.

“Don’t you think you should wait until he’s a bit older?” asked the salesman.

“Nah, best to do it now,” the eager customer replied.

About an hour later, my dad walked out of the suburban gun shop with a receipt for a 12-gauge Beretta. He picked up the 686-model shotgun the next day.

The Wife wasn’t excited. Despite her Texas upbringing, she’s under the impression that cloth books and footed pajamas are somehow better baby gifts than a shotgun.

I proposed a compromise.

Grandpa could keep Bubba’s gun in his gun safe. On our son’s birthday, he and Grandpa could go to the trap club for the inaugural shoot.

The Wife relented.

Expecting rejection

But what if word of this arrangement got out? I don’t want my son to be the next Tank Johnson.

I needed to take the appropriate steps to make sure Bubba became a legal gun owner. So, I logged onto the Illinois State Police Web site and printed the FOID application.

I filled out one for me and another for Bubba. Applicants younger than 21 must complete an additional section at the bottom of the one-page form. The signature of a parent or legal guardian is required.

It takes 30 days to process the application. I anxiously greeted the mail carrier the next four weeks, curious if the state police would issue a FOID card to a 10-month-old.

When it finally arrived, I found my application was approved, but Bubba was rejected. I was expecting an official letter that went something like:

Attention Father of the Year,

We are not issuing a FOID card to an infant.

Love,

The Illinois State Police

Instead, I was rejected on a technicality. I forgot to check the box confirming Bubba’s U.S. citizenship.

Undeterred, I filled out the form again and sent in another $5.

This time, I failed to check a box indicating that I was Bubba’s father. So, I filled out another form and sent in another $5.

Maybe they figured I’d give up after two failed attempts. But as a stay-at-home dad, I am used to overcoming setbacks. This was nothing compared to diaper rash.

The third time proved to be the charm.

My parents happened to be at the house when I opened the mail that day. Like a kid on Christmas, I tore into the envelope addressed to my son.

“What is it?” Grandpa asked. “Is it a check?”

“Even better,” I said, handing my dad the newly cast card.

“Oh, my God,” he said.

“But he’s a baby!” my mom exclaimed.

Baby goes to the gun club

One week later, we took our father-and-son FOID cards to the Palos Sportsman’s Club in rural Frankfort.

Bubba fell asleep in the car. Grandpa and I decided to let him nap while we shot a couple rounds. I shot a paltry 50 percent the first round and got worse from there.

Those unfamiliar with trap shooting might remember a Nintendo game called Duck Hunt. Players could opt to shoot cartoon ducks or little white discs called clay pigeons in the popular 1980s video game.

Trap shooting is the live version of shooting clay pigeons.

Bubba woke early from his nap — likely jarred by the booming buckshot overhead and grown men yelling, “Pull!” I couldn’t help but notice my shell pouch could double as a diaper bag.

I showed one of my dad’s shooting buddies Bubba’s FOID card. “Don’t you need to pass a test or something to get this?” he said.

“No,” I replied, somewhat surprised he didn’t know the 1968 Firearm Owner’s Identification Act forward and backward.

Really, there’s no reason why Bubba should not have a FOID card.

The program is designed to keep guns away from convicted felons, those convicted of domestic battery or domestic violence and anyone subject to an active Order of Protection.

My 10-month-old son hasn’t broken any of these rules — yet.

But why would the state police issue a FOID card to anyone younger than 18?

I called the state police, who said they followed the law as it’s written.

“There is nothing in the FOID Act or any of the rules that says anything about age restrictions,” said Lt. Scott Compton, of the Illinois State Police.

The state doesn’t track FOID cards based on age. However, Compton admitted it’s a rare occasion when anyone younger than 18 would need a FOID card. Say a group of 15-year-old boys wants to go hunting rabbits unsupervised. If their parents approve the hunt, then the boys would need FOID cards, Compton said.

I’m not about to approve any unsupervised hunting or trap shooting for Bubba. Still, I’m glad he was able to get his FOID card.

It makes an adorable addition to his baby book.

Howard Ludwig is a former Daily Southtown business writer who traded his reporter’s notebook for a diaper bag, becoming a stay-at-home dad. He chronicles his experience in a weekly column in Wednesday’s Life section. Ludwig can be reached at [email protected]

the Vienna Vegetable Orchestra has released an album, called Automate, which i want. anybody want to buy it for me?

in the US we’re looking at the very real probability of paying $4.00 $5.00 a gallon for gasoline (apparently we’ve already hit $4.00 in some parts of the country) in the not-too-distant future. meanwhile the people from papua new guinea are driving around on coconut oil. if nothing else, it means that, when we’ve suceeded in killing ourselves off, in 10,000 years, the planet may be repopulated by descendants of those people, who had an awful lot more sense than we had… if we didn’t suceed in killing off their ancestors, by accident, as well… 8/

Papua New Guinea islanders drive their cars on coconut power
May 9, 2007

London – Residents of Bougainville in Papua New Guinea have found an indigenous solution to high-energy prices, the ubiquitous tropical fruit, coconut.

The islanders are developing mini-refineries to produce a coconut oil that can eventually replace diesel.

Residents say, coconut oil has not only made them less dependant on expensive fuel, which had to be imported onto the island, enquiries about the fuel have even come from overseas, including Iran and Europe.

Matthias Horn, a German migrant and an engineer, who is operating one the several coconut oil refineries on the island, said, the oil is not only cheap but also environment friendly.

“They sometimes refer to me as the Mad German because how can you do that to your car… filling it with some coconut juice that you normally fry your fish in,” he said.

“The coconut tree is a beautiful tree. Doesn’t it sound good if you really run your car on something which falls off a tree and that’s the good thing about it; you run your car and it smells nice and it’s environmentally friendly and that’s the main thing,” the BBC quoted him as saying.

these are two pieces that i wrote shortly after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. i agree with them more now than i would have thought possible when i originally wrote them.

I Am Ashamed of My Country!
I do not approve of the childish behaviour of my government and my countrymen
September 18, 2001
By Bruce Salamandir-Feyrecilde

Here’s a hypothetical situation: We have a nice, modern, suburban neighborhood where few of the neighbors know each other very well. From one of the houses in this neighborhood, a small child goes across the street and gives a neighbor-kid a black eye. In a civilized society such as the one we (supposedly) live in, the neighbor-kid’s father does not normally respond by going back across the street and beating up the perpetrator’s father. Neither does the neighbor-kid’s father declare war on the whole neighborhood.

Almost every single American I’ve heard talking about the recent terrorist attacks in New York and Washington DC have been incensed with hatred for the perpetrators of such an attack. There has been much talk of war, or, at the very least, military reprisals against the perpetrators – even though nobody is totally sure who the perpetrators are. There has been a lot of speculation and allegations made concerning who could have done it, but so far no American news source that I know of has come up with any solid proof. The principal suspect has been the well-known terrorist Osama bin Laden, who, along with his mojahedin, was originally financed and trained by the American CIA. Not surprisingly, bin Laden has publically denied any responsibility for the recent attacks.

For the sake of argument, let’s assume that it was Osama bin Laden. If the United States responds to this terrorist attack by killing Osama bin Laden, the only consequence will be that the hatred of his followers towards America will be enflamed even more than it already is, undoubtedly prompting more attacks. If bin Laden is tried in an American court, he will undoubtedly be found guilty, regardless of the evidence – one can’t have a fair trial in which the judge and jury are also the victim – and if bin Laden is imprisoned by the United States, that, too, will undoubtedly provoke more terrorist attacks from his followers who will then be demanding his release.

For most Americans, the only acceptable option has been to launch military strikes against Afghanistan, which would only succeed in causing more suffering for the hundreds of thousands of already suffering, completely innocent Afghani citizens who want to see Osama bin Laden and the Taliban driven from their country as much as the Americans do. Such attacks will have very little, if any effect at all on the followers of bin Laden and the Taliban.

Any military response from America would be exactly like the father of the kid who got the black eye going back across the street and beating up the perpetrator’s father. It would doubtless make the kid who got the black eye feel better, but it wouldn’t solve any problems – it wouldn’t create a situation where the kids didn’t give each other black eyes, and it would only generate more tension, hatred and mistrust amongst everybody involved.

And none of the American, warlike-rhetoric I’ve heard even comes close to addressing the fact that Osama bin Laden and his mojahedin were originally financed by America. Even if bin Laden was behind the attacks, anything he does comes back to being the fault of the American government who trained and financed him.

America’s freedoms aren’t threatened to the extent that we need to start talking about going to war to defend them. America has a pretty bad reputation in many parts of the world, and there are many people who would be rightly justified to hate America. Until these issues are dealt with, no amount of war will ever solve any problems. Thomas Jefferson said “Those who would give up a little freedom in exchange for peace and security deserve neither freedom nor security.” I can’t think of anywhere in the world I would prefer to live, but at this point, living in the United States scares me quite a bit.

All of these other arguments aside, America claims to be a “christian” country, claims that it’s laws are based on “biblical” truths. Sure, the bible says “an eye for an eye”, but Jesus himself supercedes that proscription (Matthew 5.38 – 40) by saying “You have heard that it is said, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth. But I say to you that you should not resist evil; but whoever strikes you on your right cheek, turn to him the other also. And if anyone wishes to sue you at the court and take away your shirt, let him have your robe also.” and (Matthew 5.43 – 45) “You have heard that it is said, Be kind to your friend, and hate your enemy. But I say to you, Love your enemies, bless anyone who curses you, do good to anyone who hates you, and pray for those who carry you away by force and persecute you, so that you may become sons of your Father who is in heaven, who causes his sun to shine upon the good and the bad, and who pours down his rain upon the just and the unjust.” This is very definitely not the kind of behaviour I have ever seen from my allegedly “christian” countrymen. Now, even more than normally, I would expect people who claim to follow Jesus to be behaving in a much less violent manner than most Americans seem to be now. I fail to see how any military action against Afghanistan, or against Osama bin Laden, or against whatever perpetrator or perpetrators of the recent terrorist attacks might even remotely be considered a “blessing”, and I sincerely doubt that such behaviour will do much to help Americans “become perfect, just as [our] Father in heaven is perfect.” (Matthew 5.48)

Without question, the terrorist attacks in New York, Washington DC and elsewhere were tragic, and thousands of innocent people died as a result of these attacks, nothing can change that. However answering terrorism with more terrorism isn’t the solution to the problem. Until Americans in general start taking more responsibility for their actions, and not acting like little children who aren’t getting exactly what they want, I will not support any action taken by the American government in regards to this situation.

War is bad – I would have hoped that there are enough veterans of the conflict in Vietnam, and even from World War II, still alive that would remember how bad war really is. I also think it’s ironic that, for the past few years the American public has been bombarded by the message that gang violence is out of control, and how we should work towards reducing the amount of gang violence that exists in our country, but when something happens like the recent terrorist attacks, America’s first response is to start talking about war. Violence never solved anybody’s problems, I truly don’t understand how Americans can think that violence will be any more effective now than it ever has been.

America, your behaviour is shameful! I am ashamed and embarrassed to be an American!

The Terrorists Have Already Won This War!
23-OCT-2001
By Bruce Salamandir-Feyrecilde

While a majority of Americans have been demanding “retribution” for the September 11th terrorist attacks, few Americans have stopped to consider how such retribution would reflect on our country. Obviously America already has a somewhat tarnished reputation (okay, I’m being nice here, honestly, I think America’s behaviour generally has sucked for the past century or so). If this were not the case, the terrorist attacks would never have happened in the first place. On the other hand, America has historically prided itself on its system of justice, and its personal freedoms – both of which are being totally ransacked and tossed out the window by the “retributatory” actions currently being taken.

How is America responding to the terrorist attacks? Is it responding by bringing the perpetrators to justice? No, America is responding to those who would terrorize it by terrorizing back. Instead of openly investigating the perpetrators, America is responding with cruise missiles. Instead of bringing Osama bin Laden before the world court, America is responding by sending terrorists into Afghanistan with the specific purpose of creating chaos and assasinating people. The “cowards”, some of whom were brave enough to stay in the airplane as it crashed into the World Trade Center are having “smart bombs” dropped on them by “heroes” who are far enough away that no retaliatory action taken could possibly have any effect on them. HOW “JUST” IS THAT???? Especially when our “smart bombs” have succeeded in wiping out, among other things, a hospital, residential neighborhoods, and a U.N. work crew who were clearing landmines?

How is America responding to the terrorist attacks? Is it examining the rationale behind the terrorist attacks and accepting all valid arguments? No, America is responding to those who disagree by discussing further restrictions on personal freedoms. Instead of listening to the reasons why those who hate America do so, America has essentially declared a “war on dissent”. By discussing the criminalization of “domestic terrorism”, and by drafting laws allowing “sneek and peek” warrants, and “forum shopping”, America has not only further trashed personal freedoms, but has taken a big step towards becoming a police state itself. It would be ironic if America, in the process of “defending democracy” became a police state, but, sadly, I get the very strong impression that that is exactly what is going to happen.

The terrorists themselves are likely very intelligent, although misguided people. They are clearly aware that terrorist actions are not going to be very successful at accomplishing their stated goals. However there are goals which they hope to accomplish through terrorism which they have not been so clear about, and they are accomplishing those goals with flying colours.

A lot of violent behaviour comes from a desire in the one perpetrating the violence to prove their superiority over their victim. The terrorists said they attacked the United States to try to change the political situation in Israel and Palestine, and to try to get U.S. troops out of Saudi Arabia, but that was only one of their goals. Another of their goals, one which has not been so publically aired, is to prove the superiority of their version of Islam, or the superiority of their political views over those of America. They attacked America, with the specific purpose of saying “Look how stupid and insignificant America is – instead of responding like civilized human beings, they’re going to start a war with us because of this.” And, ideologically, there is no possibility that terrorists would lose such a war, because, ideologically, the terrorists thought they were justified in their attack… ideologically, they think America is not justified in its response. No “smart bomb” America can drop has the capability to change their minds, and the more bombs America drops, the more valiantly heroic the terrorists become in their own minds. The only way America could win this war would be to respond not with military force, but with ideology – with thought, consideration and reason. Something of which America is apparently incapable.

Every news story about difficulties with airline travel because of beefed up security in American airports is a victory for the terrorists. Commercial airlines in America have had some of the most lax security measures in the whole world for many years. Israeli airports have much more stringent security measures in place, and they are taken as an inevitable fact of airline travel. Many commercial airlines outside the United States make a point of separating the pilots from the passenger cabin with a bullet-proof door that can be locked from inside the cockpit – thus making the possibility of a hijacker overpowering the pilots practically non-existent. But “America the free” has been deluded to believe that average people are going to act responsibly and not hijack airplanes. If average people were really that willing to take responsibility for their actions, we wouldn’t need approximately half of the criminal laws currently on the books. We keep those laws on the books because of people who we know aren’t going to act responsibly, so why do we not protect airplane pilots and their passengers from potential hijackers? Answer: because Americans are STUPID!! – Which is EXACTLY what the terrorists have been wanting to prove to everyone! Victory for the terrorists.

Every news story about anthrax is another victory for the terrorists. Americans are so terrified of anthrax these days that it seems like nothing is safe. Most of the news stories so far have been about “concerns” or hoaxes. Practically no-one has paid any attention to the fact that anthrax is not particularly effective as a weapon, or the fact that, if it is distributed through the mail, it can be neutralised with a common, everyday steam iron (heat and moisture kill anthrax spores). To date only FIVE people have died from anthrax!! How many people in America have died from malnourishment, or gang violence, or drug overdoses, or automobile accidents in the past month? How many people in America have died in prison violence due to overcrowding in the past month? How many innocent American citizens have died in military “accidents” in the past month? The Taliban claims it shot down a U.S. helicopter, although the U.S. military is denying any such event. Strangely enough, the U.S. military is acknowledging that a U.S. helicopter crashed in an “accident” and that the crew of 5 were killed, and the Taliban has been exhibiting the wreckage of what appears to be a helicopter, but Americans haven’t heard anything about that. Why? Answer: it is the American media’s job to keep Americans STUPID… and they’ve been doing an amazingly good job of it! – Which is EXACTLY what the terrorists have been wanting to prove to everyone! Victory for the terrorists.

Recently I have made the mistake of expressing negative opinions about America’s “war on terrorism” in public places on internet. The general response has been that my audiences have wished the terrorists would kill me. Honestly, at this point, I hope they do, because, even if they don’t, there’s a good chance that some “patriotic” American will do it, and I truly do not enjoy living in a world which is full of people who don’t know how to think! If idiots are going to decide what happens to the rest of us, I would rather be somewhere else anyway! As far as I can tell, as long as America continues on the path that it is currently following, things are only going to get worse. I don’t know how much you would enjoy living in a post-nuclear apocalypse, but my personal opinion is that I hope I don’t have to…

What Bush Doesn’t Understand About America
5/01/2007

Let us say, and why not, that President George W. Bush was more than just the delusional dry drunk with a bipolar narcissistic personality disorder that we’ve all come to know and hate. Let’s say that he was a completely bugfuck, eat-his-own-feces psychopath.

Now let us say, and, indeed, why not, that the President believed that his semen had magical properties. Not just any magical properties, but the ability to bring the dead back to life. However, in his psychopathic state, Bush knew that it wasn’t just a question of spreading his mystical jizz on a corpse like a moisturizer of the damned. No, no, Bush knew that he had to fuck a corpse in order for it to receive the benefit of his wondrous spunk.

So, and we’re still in “let us say” land here, George W. Bush began to fuck corpses, brought to him by his staff and Secret Service agents. Just random hobo corpses – homeless people dead on the streets of the nation’s capital. The cadavers would be collected, washed clean, of course, before being presented to a wizard-regalia-wearing George W. Bush. And the Leader of the Free World began to shove his hard cock into the bodies, male and female, ejaculating in their mouths, their asses, their pussies, their ears, fer chrissake. But, no, no corpse would reanimate. The dead would not rise.

A semi-coherent man might come to the conclusion that his semen was not the triumph of life over death that he had imagined it might be. In fact, the stacks of dead hobos, crusted with dried executive ejaculate, would be evidence enough. But, remember, in this “what if” scenario, the President of the United States is too far gone to believe that he might be wrong. No, as far as Bush was concerned, the fault was with the corpses, not with his splendiferous seed. Maybe they were laying wrong, legs too far akimbo or mouth held too tightly (pity the intern tasked with that duty). Maybe it was the wrong combination of multiple meat injections. No, no, the only real answer was to keep fucking corpses, knowing, just goddamn knowing, that at some point, one of those carcasses would suck in air (after, you know, Bush removed his dick from the mouth) and turn to the pantsless President to say, “Thank you, Mr. Bush, for fucking me back to life.”

Now what if the public, perfectly willing after 9/11 to give Bush the benefit of the doubt and let him try out his highly-touted testicle tea on a single body, now found the whole ordeal repulsive. And they wanted him to stop. Bush, though, would not stop, going through corpses so quickly that the FBI had to go out and start killing the homeless so that Bush could fuck some more.

Maybe pundits on TV and on the Internet would declare that Bush should be allowed to continue fucking corpses because what if he’s right? And what about the dead? Should they just be left to rot unfucked? The citizens of the country would say, “We don’t care about the dead. Bury them already and let nature take its course – let trees or flowers or weeds grow from their rotting remains. But let us stop the fucking of the corpses. George Bush doesn’t have magic sperm.”

When George Bush says of leaving Iraq, “Withdrawal would do nothing to prevent violence from spilling out across that country and plunging Iraq into chaos and anarchy,” when Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice says, “the withdrawal of our forces…would send the wrong message to the Iraqis, the wrong message to the neighborhood and the wrong message to Iraq’s enemies,” when Dick Cheney and every necrophilia-lovin’ pundit attempts to say how anarchy, death, and destruction will rain down on Iraq if we leave, what they’re not getting is that the American people don’t fucking care what happens to Iraq.

The citizens have moved beyond that. Bad shit happens to countries. The American public has accepted this, time and again, and we know that, no matter how many times we try, like trying to dam the ocean, the tide’s gonna do what it’s gonna do in Iraq.

google has 1,310,000 results for a search of elephant contact buttons, and i’m number one!!

it also has 1,110,000 results for a search of elephant hybrids, and i’m number three… 8)

Cop who made pot brownies will avoid charges
Mich. officer and wife admitted using drugs taken from suspects for baking
May 10, 2007

DEARBORN, Mich. – A police officer will avoid criminal charges despite admitting he took marijuana from criminal suspects and, with his wife, baked it into brownies.

The police department’s decision not to pursue a case against former Cpl. Edward Sanchez left a bad taste in the mouth of at least one city official, who vowed to investigate.

“If you’re a cop and you’re arresting people and you’re confiscating the marijuana and keeping it yourself, that’s bad. That’s real bad,” said City Councilman Doug Thomas.

Sanchez, who resigned last year from the department in this Detroit suburb, declined comment Wednesday to the Detroit Free Press. Police Cmdr. Jeff Geisinger did not return calls seeking comment.

The department’s investigation began with a 911 call from Sanchez’s home on April 21, 2006. On a 5-minute tape of the call, obtained by the Free Press, Sanchez told an emergency dispatcher he thought he and his wife were overdosing on marijuana.

“I think we’re dying,” he said. “We made brownies and I think we’re dead, I really do.”

Sanchez later told police investigators that his wife took the marijuana out of his police vehicle while he was sleeping. In a subsequent interview, he admitted he got the marijuana out of the car himself and put it in the brownie mix, police said.

His wife also was not charged.

special treatment for law enforcement officials, or a laissez-faire attitude? i guess we’ll never know…

Left-handed women may have a shorter life-span
Apr 30, 2007

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – A study suggests that women who are left-handed have a higher risk of dying, particularly from cancer and cerebrovascular disease – damage to an artery in the brain or an artery that supplies blood to the brain.

While it could be a chance finding and the evidence is far from conclusive, numerous reports have associated left-handedness with various disorders and, in general, a shorter life span, Dutch researchers note in their report in the journal Epidemiology.

“Left-handers are reported to be underrepresented in the older age groups, although such findings are still much debated,” write Dr. Made K. Ramadhani and colleagues from University Medical Center Utrecht. It is estimated that about 1 in 10 people are lefties.

Among 12,178 middle-aged Dutch women the researchers followed for nearly 13 years, 252 died.

When left-handed women were compared with the other women, and the data were adjusted for a number of potentially confounding factors, lefties had a 40 percent higher risk of dying from any cause, a 70 percent higher risk of dying from cancer, and a 30 percent higher risk of dying from diseases of the circulatory system.

Left-handed women also had a 2-fold increased risk of dying from breast cancer, close to a 5-fold increased risk of dying from colorectal cancer, and more than a 3-fold higher risk of cerebrovascular mortality.

The underlying mechanisms remain elusive, although genetics and environmental factors may be involved, Ramadhani and colleagues suggest. Much of the research into handedness and mortality has been fueled by the hypothesis that left-handedness is the result of an insult suffered during prenatal life, which ultimately leads to the early death.

The author of a commentary, Dr. Olga Basso, who is left-handed, is highly skeptical, in general, of research relating disease and death with handedness. “I am not alone in thinking that the literature on handedness suffers from a number of ills,” regardless of the putative illnesses seen in those who are left-handed, she notes.

“Having successfully dodged a number of disorders,” adds Basso, “I doubt that my left hand is prematurely pulling me toward my grave.”

Basso is with National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, Research Triangle Park, North Carolina.

here’s some news for ya’… left handers have a 100% chance of dying from any cause, regardless of whether they’re male, female, or other… right handers share the same statistic. 8/

that, and much more can be found at the Angry Toxicologist

Impeachment? It’s not just for Kucinich anymore
By Tim Grieve
May 9, 2007

Dennis Kucinich’s articles of impeachment for Dick Cheney are going exactly nowhere — he has found all of two cosponsors so far — but that’s not because the idea isn’t popular with the American people.

In a poll taken by Insider Advantage/Majority Opinion, 39 percent of Americans say they would favor the impeachment of both Cheney and his boss, George W. Bush. It’s not just those crazy, far-left, America-hating Democrats, either; 42 percent of the independents polled said they, too, would favor impeaching Cheney and Bush.

Matt Towery, who ran Newt Gingrich’s PAC before taking the helm at Insider Advantage/Majority Opinion, was so startled by the poll results that he sought some explanation from Bob Barr, the former Republican congressman who initiated an "inquiry of impeachment" against Bill Clinton in 1997. Barr’s take: “This indicates the surprising depth of dissatisfaction with Bush,” he tells Towery. “I’m not sure we ever really had hard polling numbers in favor of impeachment that were this high when we were in the midst of the process. Perhaps, but I don’t recall it.”

Actually, the numbers were pretty similar: Polls taken around the time of the House vote on Clinton’s impeachment showed that about 40 percent of the public supported it. The difference? The views of those 40 percent were taken seriously by members of Congress, who, for better or for worse, actually did something about them.

You Can Own an Integer Too — Get Yours Here

i finally got paid for the moisture festival. despite the fact that i put in far more actual work over a longer period of time than i did last year, i only got paid a relatively small amount more than i did last year, which makes me think that next year i’m going to go back to my position of last year, in spite of the fact that last year i was only in the band, while this year i was in the band, an actual performer, and i also made the programs, which took two months of hassling with the chaos on a regular basis and another 48 hours or so of actual work. now that i know what kind of chaos goes on behind the scenes, it will be easier to manipulate myself into a postion favourable to me without having to work so hard. hopefully… the other possibility is that i decide to boycott the moisture festival next year.

as a result of getting paid, however, i had some obligations, which included paying off my sousaphone, so now it is actually my sousaphone. now all i have to do is figure out how to fix all of the broken braces so that it will be held together with more than just zip ties.

i put in an incense order a week ago monday, 30th april. when i checked my bank account on thursday, they hadn’t withdrawn the money yet, so i called them to see what was going on. they said that one person had been sick, and another had quit, so they were running short handed and would ship my order out on friday. when i checked my bank account on saturday, they still hadn’t withdrawn the money, so i called them monday morning to see what was going on. they said that my order was sitting in front of them, and would go out that day. on tuesday (yesterday) i checked my bank account and they finally had withdrawn the money, but then they called me and said that a mistake had been made and that my order was going to out today for sure. if it did, indeed, go out yesterday, as they said, it still won’t get here until at least friday, and if not then, i will probably have to wait until next week.

previously i have not had any trouble from this supplier, except for the last order i made with them, which was stolen or something, because i never received it, although they said they had sent it, and now this.

i have had the same suppliers, more or less, pretty much ever since i started in business. i recently found another supplier which had pretty much identical stock to the main one i have had for 5 years, but has cheaper prices, so i have been slowly moving my old supplier aside and using the new one for most things… except that now this happens. it wouldn’t be so bad except that i have a customer waiting for stuff i have ordered, that would have been here last week if it wasn’t for this screw up.

okay, i’ve got a question that nobody else seems to know the answer to, so i’ll toss it out here and see what happens.

i’ve got an ISO9660 image of kubuntu which is 699.9 megabytes. in order to burn it to a CD, i would use a 700 mb writable disk, but it won’t let me, presumably because it’s too big.

i’ve also got a CD of kubuntu, which is 699.9 megabytes, but when i tell K3B to copy it, K3B crashes… toast on my mac doesn’t crash, but it also won’t let me copy the disk, because it’s too big.

how did canonical ltd. get kubuntu on the disk? how do i copy the disk so that i can give it to one of my clients?

$820.00 – today
$881.84 – TOTAL

google lists 1,100,000 results for a search on “html escape sequences” and i’m number two… 8)

… and i didn’t have to do anything! 8)

Loyalty Day, 2007
A Proclamation by the President of the United States of America
April 30, 2007

America was founded by patriots who risked their lives to bring freedom to our Nation. Today, our citizens are grateful for our Founding Fathers and confident in the principles that lead us forward. On Loyalty Day, we celebrate the blessings of freedom and remember our responsibility to continue our legacy of liberty.

Our Nation has never been united simply by blood, birth, or soil, but instead has always been united by the ideals that move us beyond our background and teach us what it means to be Americans. We believe deeply in freedom and self-government, values embodied in our cherished documents and defended by our troops over the course of generations. Our citizens hold the truths of our founding close to their hearts and demonstrate their loyalty in countless ways. We are inspired by the patriotic service of the men and women who wear our Nation’s uniform with honor and decency. The military spouses and families who stand by their loved ones represent the best of the American spirit, and we are profoundly grateful for their sacrifice. Our country is strengthened by the millions of volunteers who show deep compassion toward their neighbors in need. All citizens can express their loyalty to the United States by flying the flag, participating in our democracy, and learning more about our country’s grand story of courage and simple dream of dignity.

The Congress, by Public Law 85-529, as amended, has designated May 1 of each year as “Loyalty Day.” This Loyalty Day, and throughout the year, I ask all Americans to join me in reaffirming our allegiance to our Nation.

NOW, THEREFORE, I, GEORGE W. BUSH, President of the United States of America, do hereby proclaim May 1, 2007, as Loyalty Day. I call upon the people of the United States to participate in this national observance and to display the flag of the United States on Loyalty Day as a symbol of pride in our Nation.

IN WITNESS WHEREOF, I have hereunto set my hand this thirtieth day of April, in the year of our Lord two thousand seven, and of the Independence of the United States of America the two hundred and thirty-first.

GEORGE W. BUSH

Meine Ehre heißt Treue – My honour is loyalty (the motto of the SS).

i wonder how long it’s going to be before they start demanding loyalty oaths from ordinary citizens before they do things like buy gas, or groceries… 8/

thanks to

i have trouble believing that all this trouble and furor is being made over a 50¢ box of incense…

a guy ordered some incense from me a few days ago: 15 boxes of dragon’s blood. i turned around the order within 12 hours, and mailed it out. he had his 15 boxes of incense within 3 days. no big surprise.

then, about 5 days later, which is to say two days ago, i received email from him, claiming that he had been shorted one box of incense… one 50¢ box of incense.

when i order that particular variety of incense, i order it in 25-box packages, which makes it very easy for me to tell exactly how much incense i have sent out to people. i checked my remaining supply, and, sure enough, i had, actually, sent him 15 boxes of incense, so i wrote back and told him so. he responded to my email yesterday, at 7:30 pm (which is after the post office closes) and told me that he had only recieved 14 boxes.

at this point i figured, what the hell. it’s only a 50¢ box of incense, what do i care whether he received 14, 15 or 16 boxes of incense (i actually give similar boxes of incense as freebie samples to prospective clients all the time), so i packed up one 50¢ box of incense and sent it out to him this morning, on my way to the banda gozona performance at the bilingual orientation center. i planned on emailing him when i got home, and telling him that another 50¢ box of incense was on its way to him.

however… 8/

when i got home, at 2:30 pm, i found i had received a very snippy, angry note from him saying that this was not some scam to get an extra (50¢) box of incense from me, and that the fact that i had not responded to him (after my normal business hours, and when the post office was closed anyway) apparently meant that i am “unwilling to correct the mistake on your shipment” (one 50¢ box of incense), so he would “never do business with you company again. I also will no t recommend any one to do business with you either”…

if i recall correctly, you can’t please everyone, no matter how hard you try, but still… 8/

No Sex Is Very Bad For You
Study says abstinence leads to blindness, screaming, Jenna Bush. Who will save the children?
By Mark Morford
April 25, 2007

In an unusual turn of events, a comprehensive new study from a team of world-class prize-winning nicely disheveled calmly titillated researchers from Johns Hopkins University, working in conjunction with various slightly frumpy but no less adorable teams from Sweden, the United Kingdom, Brazil and roughly 57 other nations, many of which have names that are still barely pronounceable by our own president, has come to a decisive conclusion regarding sex education in America.

Their astonishing research shows that the Bush administration’s abstinence-only sex education programs are not only utterly useless and a complete waste of taxpayer money, but they actually invite all manner of disease and destruction and savage karmic pain upon those who attempt to adhere to them.

It’s true. Such programs, long touted by sexually denuded Republicans and nervous Christian righters and applauded by the Taliban and fundamentalists and Ann Coulter as some sort of psychosexual panacea, some sort of dour, clinical, sex-is-bad-for-you hammerblow to the sensual human soul all meant to act as some sort of humiliating deterrent to our fleshy, dangerous, sex-obsessed culture, these programs lead directly to severe anxiety, hair loss, acne, whininess, temporary blindness, adult bed-wetting, screaming, lousy taste in shoes, death, pararectal abscesses and even, in rare and bizarre cases, an overwhelming urge to date Jenna Bush.

“We are completely stunned at these far-reaching, nearly universal results which have emerged from every country in the world except Saudi Arabia, Oman and much of Utah,” said Dr. Claudio Ortega, totally cute lead researcher of the Johns Hopkins team that studied the behaviors of roughly 420 million normal, “genitally tingly” elementary school and teenage kids across all nations and demographics and hair colors and general inexplicable affection for Avril Lavigne.

“No wait, check that,” Ortega would’ve added, with a sly and knowing grin, if he had actually existed, which he does not. “We’re really not stunned at all. Actually, the results make a whole heaping truckload of very obvious and forehead-slapping sense.”

Ortega, surrounded by his research team who were all dressed almost exclusively in American Apparel silver lamé workout shorts, leather handcuffs and classic Iron Maiden T-shirts from Hot Topic, seemed nonplussed by the need for his own study. “I mean, come on. Say no to sex until you’re married? Abstinence is the only truly moral path? Where are we, 1756? What’s next, trepanning and lobotomies and hurling virgins into the volcano to appease the corn god? Are you people high?”

The overwhelming findings, recently released to the entire planet via multiple media formats including a simple one-page PDF document, universal text message, whispering God-like voice in your dreams and also by way of a two-disk six-hour DVD movie starring Rocco Siffredi, Jenna Jameson, Belladonna, numerous perky cheerleaders and an Italian villa featuring 13 sex swings and 47 bottles of dark rum and an enormous hot tub filled with warm, melted chocolate, is being widely touted as both a radical breakthrough and also as so heart-crushingly, Bush-slappingly obvious it makes you want to spank yourself with a tire iron, and not in a good way.

“Put it this way,” he sighed. “Not only will anti-sexual thoughts make you into some sort of shrill humorless neoconservative evangelical QVC addict with a thing for plastic lawn ornaments, Purity Balls, Coors and all things pleated, but we’ve found devastating evidence linking the widespread activity of not having good, respectful, dirty, open-mouthed sex to everything from acid reflux to infertility to global biochemical warfare to a chronic adoration of Adam Sandler,” Ortega said, soaping himself up in the tub with a bright red and purple sponge shaped like a giant vulva. “It’s really quite astonishing. Except for the part that it’s totally obvious.”

The study comes as a severe blow to the legion of grim, devoted abstinence educators and sour Republican government officials who, nevertheless, still refuse to acknowledge that the U.S. government has now wasted upward of 1 billion taxpayer dollars in the past 10 years on abstinence programs that have had, to put it simply, exactly zero effect on teen sex behavior. Nothing. Nada. Zilch. Unfortunately, this has not stopped the inept Bush administration from proposing $191 million for these unscientific, medically inaccurate programs for fiscal 2008, an increase of $28 million over 2007’s failed, useless levels.

“Here is the most astounding fact of all, the thing that makes you want to scream in the faces of these legislators and religious nutballs and pour a gallon of honey over them and then toss them onto a giant mound of gay fire ants,” Ortega would’ve added, between sips of margarita, had he been existent. And also very, very cool.

“Sex is just ridiculously good for you. Sex is good for the heart. It’s good for the blood. It’s good for the mood and it’s good for depression and it’s good for self-esteem and it’s good for making you feel more human and alive and present in your skin. Do it right and sex shoots huge gobs of endorphins and raw divine energy into your id and it’s good for raising your kundalini and inspiring awareness of the cosmos and it’s good for calmly and casually noting the interconnectedness of all things from all time in all places everywhere.”

Ortega then sighed heavily, his skin beginning to turn translucent, his bones fading away, his entire being beginning to soften and evaporate, much like the reality of this story, much like any hope-filled notions you may have that your government gives a damn about the sexual integrity of children and might actually reverse its degrading position and start treating youth with respect and love.

“Did you know sex actually improves your sense of smell? Helps the prostate? True. Also reduces stress. Improves sleep. Improves circulation. Relieves pain, menstrual cramps. Improves fertility. Helps you live longer. Look younger. Goes great with jeans. Goes perfectly with red wine, white wine, pink wine, sake, beer. Dress it up, dress it down. Take it out, or stay at home and rent a movie. It is the universal traveler. It is the Super Glue of the gods. It is the bond that connects all and to deny any of this to kids is abhorrent and insulting and you can rest assured that Jesus himself is just incredibly ashamed that these programs even exist.”

“Look me in the eye,” Ortega finally said, he and this whole tale disappearing into the sad media ether, to be quickly superseded by tales of death and war and blood. “Yes, this is a fantasy. I am a fantasy, OK? The sort of raw, real sex education human children deserve will never happen in your lifetime, not on any large scale, not with the whiny self-righteous Christian-righters screaming into their underwear and trembling at the sight of their own genitalia.”

“But here’s the thing: You need to know these facts. You need to keep this arrow of hot, deep sexual knowledge in your quiver, sharp and polished and ready to launch at a moment’s notice, OK? For when the time comes. For when the Great Transformation occurs. OK? Trust me.”

And just like that, Ortega vanished, leaving behind a small pool of fire and Astroglide and just a hint of eternal, grinning, inextinguishable hope.

The Hippies Were Right!
Green homes? Organic food? Nature is good? Time To Give The Ol’ Tie-Dyers Some Respect
by Mark Morford
May 2, 2007

Go ahead, name your movement. Name something good and positive and pro-environment and eco-friendly that’s happening right now in the newly “greening” America and don’t say more guns in Texas or fewer reproductive choices for women or endless vile unwinnable BushCo wars in the Middle East lasting until roughly 2075 because that would defeat the whole point of this perky little column and destroy its naive tone of happy rose-colored sardonic optimism. OK?

I’m talking about, say, energy-efficient light bulbs. I’m looking at organic foods going mainstream. I mean chemical-free cleaning products widely available at Target and I’m talking saving the whales and protecting the dolphins and I mean yoga studios flourishing in every small town, giant boxes of organic cereal at Costco and non-phthalates dildos at Good Vibes and the Toyota Prius becoming the nation’s oddest status symbol. You know, good things.

Look around: we have entire industries devoted to recycled paper, a new generation of cheap solar-power technology and an Oscar for “An Inconvenient Truth” and even the soulless corporate monsters over at famously heartless joints like Wal-Mart are now claiming that they really, really care about saving the environment because, well, “it’s the right thing to do” (read: It’s purely economic and all about their bottom line because if they don’t start caring they’ll soon be totally screwed on manufacturing and shipping costs at/from all their brutal Chinese sweatshops).

There is but one conclusion you can draw from the astonishing (albeit fitful, bittersweet) pro-environment sea change now happening in the culture and (reluctantly, nervously) in the halls of power in D.C., one thing we must all acknowledge in our wary, jaded, globally warmed universe: The hippies had it right all along. Oh yes they did.

You know it’s true. All this hot enthusiasm for healing the planet and eating whole foods and avoiding chemicals and working with nature and developing the self? Came from the hippies. Alternative health? Hippies. Green cotton? Hippies. Reclaimed wood? Recycling? Humane treatment of animals? Medical pot? Alternative energy? Natural childbirth? Non-GMO seeds? It came from the granola types (who, of course, absorbed much of it from ancient cultures), from the alternative worldviews, from the underground and the sidelines and from far off the goddamn grid and it’s about time the media, the politicians, the culture as a whole sent out a big, wet, hemp-covered apology.

Here’s a suggestion, from one of my more astute ex-hippie readers: Instead of issuing carbon credits so industrial polluters can clear their collective corporate conscience, maybe, to help offset all the savage damage they’ve done to the soul of the planet all these years, these commercial cretins should instead buy some karma credits from the former hippies themselves. You know, from those who’ve been working for the health of the planet, quite thanklessly, for the past 50 years and who have, as a result, built up quite a storehouse of good karma. You think?

Of course, you can easily argue that much of the “authentic” hippie ethos — the anti-corporate ideology, the sexual liberation, the anarchy, the push for civil rights, the experimentation — has been totally leeched out of all these new movements, that corporations have forcibly co-opted and diluted every single technology and humble pro-environment idea and Ben & Jerry’s ice cream cone and Odwalla smoothie to make them both palatable and profitable. But does this somehow make the organic oils in that body lotion any more harmful? Verily, it does not.

You might also just as easily claim that much of the nation’s reluctant turn toward environmental health has little to do with the hippies per se, that it’s taking the threat of global meltdown combined with the notion of really, really expensive ski tickets to slap the nation’s incredibly obese ass into gear and force consumers to begin to wake up to the savage gluttony and wastefulness of American culture as everyone starts wondering, oh my God, what’s going to happen to swimming pools and NASCAR and free shipping from Amazon? Of course, without the ’60s groundwork, without all the radical ideas and seeds of change planted nearly five decades ago, what we’d be turning to in our time of need would be a great deal more hopeless indeed.

But if you’re really bitter and shortsighted, you could say the entire hippie movement overall was just incredibly overrated, gets far too much cultural credit for far too little actual impact, was pretty much a giant excuse to slack off and enjoy dirty lazy responsibility-free sex romps and do a ton of drugs and avoid Vietnam and not bathe for a month and name your child Sunflower or Shiva Moon or Chakra Lennon Sapphire Bumblebee. This is what’s called the reactionary simpleton’s view. It blithely ignores history, perspective, the evolution of culture as a whole. You know, just like America.

But, you know, whatever. The proofs are easy enough to trace. The core values and environmental groundwork laid by the ’60s counterculture are still so intact and potent even the stiffest neocon Republican has to acknowledge their extant power. It’s all right there: Treehugger.com is the new ’60s underground hippy zine. Ecstasy is the new LSD. Visible tattoos are the new longhairs. And bands as diverse as Pearl Jam to Bright Eyes to NIN to the Dixie Chicks are writing savage anti-Bush, anti-war songs for a new, ultra-jaded generation.

And oh yes, speaking of good ol’ MDMA (Ecstasy), even drug culture is getting some new respect. Staid old Time mag just ran a rather snide little story about the new studies being conducted by Harvard and the National Institute of Mental Health into the astonishing psychospiritual benefits of goodly entheogens such as LSD, psilocybin and MDMA. Unfortunately, the piece basically backhands Timothy Leary and the entire “excessive,” “naive” drug culture of yore in favor of much more “sane” and “careful” scientific analysis happening now, as if the only valid methods for attaining knowledge and an understanding of spirit were through control groups and clinical, mysticism-free examination. Please.

Still, the fact that serious scientific research into entheogens is being conducted even in the face of the most anti-science, pro-pharmaceutical, ultra-conservative presidential regime in recent history is proof enough that all the hoary old hippie mantras about expanding the mind and touching God through drugs were onto something after all (yes, duh). Tim Leary is probably smiling wildly right now — though that might be due to all the mushrooms he’s been sharing with Kerouac and Einstein and Mary Magdalene. Mmm, heaven.

Of course, true hippie values mean you’re not really supposed to care about or attach to any of this, you don’t give a damn for the hollow ego stroke of being right all along, for slapping the culture upside the head and saying, See? Do you see? It was never about the long hair and the folk music and Woodstock and taking so much acid you see Jesus and Shiva and Buddha tongue kissing in a hammock on the Dog Star, nimrods.

It was, always and forever, about connectedness. It was about how we are all in this together. It was about resisting the status quo and fighting tyrannical corporate/political power and it was about opening your consciousness and seeing new possibilities of how we can all live with something resembling actual respect for the planet, for alternative cultures, for each other. You know, all that typical hippie crap no one believes in anymore. Right?

i had another weird dream. i don’t remember that much of it, but i remember that when i drew shapes in the air, the shapes turned into solid, heavy silver wire, which i was then able to catch. i started out just drawing lines, commenting to people that i could do it, and then progressed to more complicated shapes. the wire was soft enough that i could bend it fairly easily, and i remember winding some of it around my fingers.

La Banda Gozona is performing at the Bilingual Orientation Center, 411 Boston St, Queen Anne Hill at 11:30 am on friday, at El Centro de la Raza, 2524 16th Av S., Beacon Hill at 1:00 pm on saturday, and at a wedding in federal way from 8:00 pm until midnight on saturday the 12th.

which reminds me… playing with banda gozona is fun, especially playing sousaphone: all of the other “tuba” players (there are three of us, clayton, gilberto and myself) have tubas, and i’m the only one with an actual sousaphone, which, apparently, is cause for great jealousy among the other tuba players (even though my sousaphone is held together with zip ties and hope). also the music is pretty easy, for the most part, and kind of fun to play… especially “Norma de la Guadlajara” which is actually a tuba solo with band accompaniment.

but the rehearsals recently have been with a whole pile of dancers (a lot of the music we play is specifically to dance to, and there are complex dances with multiple different parts, so we have to play the music a very specific way), and most of the dancers – and a significant number of band members as well – either don’t speak english at all, or speak english “as a second language”, which means that, with varying degrees, they don’t understand what they’re saying when they’re speaking english… and it makes it very difficult to understand what they are saying when i don’t speak spanish, or oaxacan, or mayan or whatever it is that they speak. it’s even more confusing to me because a lot of the dancers are children, and, like most children, they make a lot of unnecessary noise all the time… particularly when we’re trying to figure out what to play next, or where to start. if the kids were making noise in english, it would be a lot easier for me to not pay attention to them, but because they’re making noise in another language, and half of the band is making noise in the same, other language, it’s practically impossible for me to understand what’s going on from one moment to the next. it’s so frustrating that there have been a few times recently where i have felt like walking out of the rehearsal because i don’t understand what’s going on and nobody will explain it to me… and then the band starts playing somewhere, in some piece of music that i don’t know.

i feel particularly sensitive to all of this noise when i’m trying to understand what’s going on, but it is not possible for me to get across the fact that i can’t understand what they’re saying when they can’t understand what i’m saying, even when i can say it. the fact that i can’t understand what they’re saying somehow makes my “difficulties with language” (aphasia) even worse, which makes me even more frustrated, and i feel like walking out, which wouldn’t be very polite, if nothing else.

also, sunday the 6th is no pants day, and friday the 11th is wesak. yippie…

Bush vetoes troop withdrawal bill
By ANNE FLAHERTY and JENNIFER LOVEN
1 May, 2007

WASHINGTON – President Bush vetoed legislation to pull U.S. troops out of Iraq Tuesday night in a historic showdown with Congress over whether the unpopular and costly war should end or escalate.

It was a day of high political drama, falling on the fourth anniversary of Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” speech declaring that major combat operations had ended in Iraq.

In only the second veto of his presidency, Bush rejected legislation pushed by Democratic leaders that would require the first U.S. combat troops to be withdrawn by Oct. 1 with a goal of a complete pullout six months later.

“This is a prescription for chaos and confusion and we must not impose it on our troops,” Bush said in a nationally broadcast statement from the White House. He said the bill would “mandate a rigid and artificial deadline” for troop pullouts, and “it makes no sense to tell the enemy when you plan to start withdrawing.”

Democrats accused Bush of ignoring Americans’ desire to stop the war, which has claimed the lives of more than 3,350 members of the military.

“The president wants a blank check,” said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., moments after Bush’s appearance. “The Congress is not going to give it to him.” She said lawmakers would work with him to find common ground but added that there was “great distance” between them on Iraq.

The legislation amounted to a rare rebuke of a wartime president and an assertion by Democrats that Congress must play a major role in Iraq and the extent of U.S. involvement.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said Bush has an obligation to explain his plan for responsibly ending the war.

“If the president thinks by vetoing this bill, he’ll stop us from working to change the direction of the war in Iraq, he is mistaken,” Reid said.

Lacking the votes to override the president, Democrats have already signaled they intend to approve a replacement bill stripped of the troop withdrawal timetable. Determined to challenge Bush’s policy, they are turning their attention to setting goals for the Iraqi government to meet as it struggles to establish a more secure, democratic society.

The White House and congressional Republicans have also called for so-called benchmarks, but only if they don’t mandate a troop withdrawal or some other major change in war policy.

Bush will meet with congressional leaders — Democrats and Republicans alike — on Wednesday to discuss new legislation.

He said Democrats had made a political statement by passing anti-war legislation. “They’ve sent their message, and now it’s time to put politics behind us and support our troops with the funds,” the president said.

He said the need to act was urgent because without a war-funding bill, the armed forces will have to consider cutting back on buying or repairing equipment.

“Our troops and their families deserve better, and their elected leaders can do better,” Bush said.

“Whatever our differences, surely we can agree that our troops are worthy of this funding and that we have a responsibility to get it to them without further delay,” the president said.

Bush signed the veto with a pen given to him by Robert Derga, the father of Marine Corps Reserve Cpl. Dustin Derga, who was killed in Iraq on May 8, 2005. The elder Derga spoke with Bush two weeks ago at a meeting the president had with military families at the White House.

Derga asked Bush to promise to use the pen in his veto. On Tuesday, Derga contacted the White House to remind Bush to use the pen, and so he did. The 24-year-old Dustin Derga served with Lima Company, 3rd Battalion 25th Marines from Columbus, Ohio. The five-year Marine reservist and fire team leader was killed by an armor-piercing round in Anbar province.

Minutes after Bush vetoed the bill, an anti-war demonstrator stood outside the White House with a bullhorn: “How many more must die? How many more must die?”

Earlier at the Capitol, Democrats held an unusual signing ceremony of the $124.2 billion bill before sending it to the White House.

“The president has put our troops in the middle of a civil war,” said Reid. “Reality on the ground proves what we all know: A change of course is needed.”

For his part, Bush flew to Florida to meet with military commanders and said the Democratic proposal would turn Iraq into a “cauldron of chaos.” With sleeves rolled up, Bush shook hands with troops at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, the headquarters of U.S. Central Command, which oversees military operations in the Middle East, including Iraq. Then Bush returned to the White House to announce his veto just before network news shows.

Democratic leaders refused to discuss their approach to Wednesday’s meeting with Bush. Past meetings have not led to any compromises, although members said this time they hoped Bush would signal a willingness to negotiate.

“I don’t want to get into a negotiation with myself,” Reid said when asked about conversations with Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky.

McConnell and other Republicans have said they would agree to provisions that lay out standards for the Iraqi government to meet in creating a more stable and democratic society.

“A number of Republicans think that some kind of benchmarks properly crafted would be helpful,” McConnell said. Bush and GOP allies have said they will oppose legislation that ties progress on such standards to a withdrawal of U.S. combat forces.

“House Republicans will oppose any bill that includes provisions that undermine our troops and their mission, whether it’s benchmarks for failure, arbitrary readiness standards or a timetable for American surrender,” said Minority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio.

Some Republicans say they would support tying goals for Iraqi self-defense and democracy to the more than $5 billion provided to Iraq in foreign aid. But such an idea hasn’t piqued the interest of Democrats.

When Bush announced a U.S. troop increase in January, he said Iraq’s government must crack down on both Shiites and Sunnis, equitably distribute oil wealth, refine its constitution and expand democratic participation. He attached no consequences if these benchmarks were not met.

Tuesday’s developments came exactly four years after Bush’s speech on the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln decorated with a huge “Mission Accomplished” banner. At the time, Bush’s approval rating was 63 percent, with the public’s disapproval at 34 percent.

Four years later, only 35 percent of the public approves of the job the president is doing, while 62 percent disapprove, according to an April 2-4 poll from AP-Ipsos.

Bush has used his veto power only once before, when he rejected a measure last summer to lift restrictions on federal money for embryonic stem cell research.

one of the things i do to discourage spammers is to run wpoison on my site as a script called members.pl (if you’re curious, you can click there, but any further clicks on any link will just generate more “gibberish” non-email addresses with no further explanation)… but i discovered today (thanks to my AWESOME web stats), that if you put “members.pl” into a google search, my site comes up number one on the list…

heh heh heh… }8D

er… um… i mean how unfortunate…

heh heh heh…

also, i’ve discovered that someone at psyreactor dot com has been hotlinking a graphic from my HTML tutorial. since psyreactor is a web forum which you have to log into in order to see the individual forums, i have been unable to tell exactly where at psyreactor dot com the hotlink is, but i know which graphic they’re stealing… so i changed the name of the graphic that they want to something else, and put this in it’s place:

i understand the concepts behind the $1 million experiment quite well, and i know it works. i’ve been using a similar affirmation for health and well-being for around 30 years. i also know that the more you believe it will work, the more likely it is to work, without any other explanation. basically, you spend 60 seconds a day focusing on – remembering – the affirmation: do this by reciting it, singing it, praying it, meditating on it, visualising it, or whatever works for you. it won’t happen all at once, but it will happen if you believe it will. check it out… 8)

this is getting to the point where it’s totally ridiculous, or intensely scary… or possibly both. in either case, it’s a very, very sad commentary on the society that we have become in the past few years, and it’s one of the reasons why i, personally, want to have as little to do with it as possible:

Culture of Fear: Poetry Professor Becomes Terror Suspect
A poetry professor in a small college in the Northeast decides to recycle old manuscripts and becomes an object of suspicion.
By Kazim Ali
April 24, 2007

On April 19, after a day of teaching classes at Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania, I went out to my car and grabbed a box of old poetry manuscripts from the front seat of my little white Beetle, carried it across the street and put it next to the trashcan outside Wright Hall. The poems were from poetry contests I had been judging and the box was heavy. I had previously left my recycling boxes there and they were always picked up and taken away by the trash department.

A young man from ROTC was watching me as I got into my car and drove away. I thought he was looking at my car, which has black flower decals and sometimes inspires strange looks. I later discovered that I, in my dark skin, am sometimes not even a person to the people who look at me. Instead, in spite of my peacefulness, my committed opposition to all aggression and war, I am a threat by my very existence, a threat just living in the world as a Muslim body.

Upon my departure, he called the local police department and told them a man of Middle Eastern descent driving a heavily decaled white Beetle with out of state plates and no campus parking sticker had just placed a box next to the trash can. My car has NY plates, but he got the rest of it wrong. I have two stickers on my car. One is my highly visible faculty parking sticker and the other, which I just don’t have the heart to take off these days, says, “Kerry/Edwards: For a Stronger America.”

Because of my recycling, the bomb squad came, then the state police. Because of my recycling, buildings were evacuated, classes were canceled, the campus was closed. No. Not because of my recycling. Because of my dark body. No. Not even that. Because of his fear. Because of the way he saw me. Because of the culture of fear, mistrust, hatred and suspicion that is carefully cultivated in the media, by the government, by people who claim to want to keep us “safe.”

These are the days of orange alerts, school lock-downs, and endless war. We are preparing for it, training for it, looking for it, and so, of course, in the most innocuous instances — a professor wanting to hurry home, hefting his box of discarded poetry — we find it.

That man in the parking lot didn’t even see me. He saw my darkness. He saw my Middle Eastern descent. This is ironic because though my grandfathers came from Egypt, I am Indian, a South Asian, and could never be mistaken for a Middle Eastern man by anyone who had ever met one.

One of my colleagues was in the gathering crowd, trying to figure out what had happened. She heard my description — a Middle Eastern man driving a white Beetle with out of state plates — and knew immediately they were talking about me and realized that the box must have been manuscripts I was discarding. She approached them and told them I was a professor on the faculty there. Immediately the campus police officer said, “What country is he from?”

“Ma’am, you are associated with the suspect. You need to step away and lower your voice,” he told her.

At some length, several of my faculty colleagues were able to get through to the police and get me on a cell phone where I explained to the university president and then to the state police that the box contained old poetry manuscripts that needed to be recycled. The police officer told me that in the current climate I needed to be more careful about how I behaved. “When I recycle?” I asked.

The university president appreciated my distress about the situation but denied that the call had anything to do with my race or ethnic background. The spokesperson of the university called it an “honest mistake,” not referring to the young man from ROTC giving in to his worst instincts and calling the police but referring to me who made the mistake of being dark-skinned and putting my recycling next to the trashcan.

The university’s bizarrely minimal statement lets everyone know that the “suspicious package” beside the trashcan ended up being, indeed, trash. It goes on to say, “We appreciate your cooperation during the incident and remind everyone that safety is a joint effort by all members of the campus community.”

What does that community mean to me, a person who has to walk by the ROTC offices every day on my way to my own office just down the hall — who was watched, noted and reported, all in a day’s work? Today, we gave in willingly and wholeheartedly to a culture of fear and blaming and profiling. It is deemed perfectly appropriate behavior to spy on one another and police one another and report on one another. Such behaviors exist most strongly in closed, undemocratic and fascist societies.

The university report does not mention the root cause of the alarm. That package became “suspicious” because of who was holding it, who put it down, who drove away. Me.

It was poetry, I kept insisting to the state policeman who was questioning me on the phone. It was poetry I was putting out to be recycled.

My body exists politically in a way I cannot prevent. For a moment today, without even knowing it, driving away from campus in my little Beetle, exhausted after a day of teaching, listening to Justin Timberlake on the radio, I ceased to be a person when a man I had never met looked straight through me and saw the violence in his own heart.

Bill Moyers on journalism and democracy
April 17, 2007

Throughout his career in print and broadcast journalism, Bill Moyers has blended a passionate interest in the workings of politics with a strong interest in religion. He is perhaps best known for the many interviews and reports he has produced and narrated for the Public Broadcasting System, including the “Faith and Reason” series in 2006. He has received over 30 Emmy awards for his documentary work and was given a Lifetime Achievement Award by the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences.

He is launching a new weekly series on PBS in April, and his documentary Buying the War, about the press and the buildup to the war in Iraq, airs on PBS on April 25. We spoke with him about the coverage of the war and about the health of journalism and democracy.

You were part of the Johnson administration during its escalation of the Vietnam War. What perspective does that experience give you on the current administration and the war in Iraq?

Both Lyndon Johnson and George W. Bush made the mistake of embracing a totalistic policy for a concrete reality that requires instead a more pragmatic response. You shouldn’t go to war for a Grand Theory on a hunch, yet both men plunged into complex local quarrels only to discover that they were treading on quicksand. And they learned too late that American exceptionalism doesn’t mean we can work our will anywhere we please. While freedom may be a universal yearning, democracy is not, alas, a universal solution—there are too many extenuating circumstances.

Both presidents rushed to judgment on premature and flawed intelligence — LBJ after the Gulf of Tonkin incident, Bush in conflating the terrorists attacks of 9/11 with the activities of Saddam Hussein. Each thought anything less than all-out victory would stigmatize his presidency. And in both wars, as the American people watched the casualties mount and the horrors unfold—Abu Ghraib had its precedents in Vietnam—they saw the abstractions invoked by each president to justify the conflict confounded by the coarseness of human nature laid bare by war.

Vietnam cost far more in lives — American and Vietnamese — than Iraq has so far. What came out of it was not democracy but capitalism with a communist face — something that was likely to happen anyway, as it did in China. Iraq, on the other hand, has destabilized world affairs more than the Vietnam War ever did. Long after I am gone my grandchildren will be living with the consequences of this unilateral and preemptive war in the Middle East.

If the Bush administration were to ask you for your advice, what would you say to them?

Well, I did give President Bush advice once: on a broadcast I urged him to make Al Gore head of homeland security—in other words, turn our response to the terrorist attacks into a bipartisan effort, make the fight against terroism an American cause, not a partisan battle cry.

What would I say now? Fire the ideologues and assign them to scrub the floors at Guantánamo for penitence. Stop confusing neocon pundits with Old Testament prophets. Read the Bible for humility’s sake, but for policy’s sake commit to memory the report of the Iraq Study Group. Don’t sacrifice any more soldiers to prove you’re in charge; get the soldiers out of the line of fire between Sunnis and Shi’ites. And remind your hirelings of Winston Churchill’s definition of democracy as the occasional necessity of deferring to the opinions of other people.

What kind of response did you get from your speech to cadets at West Point, in which you spoke about the limitations and liabilities of war making?

For 30 seconds after I finished there was just silence in that large auditorium, and I thought: “You really blew it this time. You not only lost them, you insulted them.” Then one by one, cluster by cluster, row by row, the cadets started standing up and applauding. I had to struggle to contain my emotions. I would like to tell you it was because they agreed with me. The truth is, I think, that they appreciated hearing a civilian talk openly about what they constantly wrestle with privately — the conflict of conscience required in obeying orders from leaders who have taken leave of reality. They listened like no audience I’ve had in a long time. And afterward they kept me up late in a lively give-and-take.

Earlier in the day I met for over two hours with a score of top cadets who were on their way to compete for Rhodes and Marshall scholarships and the like. They wanted to talk about the environment, science, philosophy, politics, history. The cadets are smart, disciplined and sophisticated people. One just hopes they get the civilian leadership they deserve.

One thing seems clear: In the buildup to the Iraq war and even in the first several years of that war, much of the news media did not ask tough questions of this administration. Why was that?

There are many reasons. The attacks of 9/11 brought a surge of solidarity that understandably engulfed journalists too. That event made asking critical questions difficult and unpopular. When cable networks and the major networks started reporting civilian casualties as a result of American actions in Afghanistan, for example, the patriot police came knocking. Later, if you challenged what the administration was saying about Iraq, they put you in their crosshairs again — charged you with being un-American, unpatriotic — for wanting evidence that Saddam really was behind 9/11, that he had ties to al-Qaeda, that he was actually building weapons of mass destruction.

Furthermore, a lot of journalists and editors are conditioned to believe that a thing is so because a president says it is so. Many young reporters thought it inconceivable that a government would lie or manipulate intelligence to go to war.

Stopping a government that’s determined to go to war is always hard. But it’s virtually impossible when large segments of the press mirror the official view of reality. When our channels of information become clogged with propaganda, the facts are trivialized; what officials say is the news, and no one else gets equal time.

The communications scholar Murray Edelman once wrote that “opinions about public policy do not spring immaculately or automatically into people’s minds; they are always placed there by the interpretations of those who can most consistently get their claims and manufactured cues publicized widely.” After 9/11 it proved easy for the administration and its apologists to manufacture a consensus motivated by fear.

There’s also a real go-along-to-get-along mentality inside the beltway. When I left Washington 40 years ago it took me a while to realize that what’s important is not how close you are to power but how close you are to the truth. The talk shows want to make “news” with the guest of the day whether or not the news has anything to do with reality. If you are a reporter in Washington, the official view of reality organizes your world.

One of my journalistic heroes is Charles J. Hanley of the Associated Press. He covered the weapons inspectors in Iraq for several months before the invasion, and his reporting should have caused everyone to see the administration’s claims for what they were — fiction. But Hanley’s own reporting was altered by editors who didn’t want to be caught out on a limb.

This is the fellow, by the way, who reported the torture of Iraqis in American prisons before anyone else. American newspapers ignored it because, as Hanley said, “it was not an officially sanctioned story that begins with a handout from an official source.” Think about that the next time you read or watch the news from Washington.

More generally, how do you assess the health of the news media? What concerns you and what gives you hope?

There’s some world-class journalism being done in our country by journalists committed to getting as close as possible to the verifiable truth. Unfortunately, a few huge corporations now dominate the media landscape. And the news business is at war with journalism. Virtually everything the average person sees or hears outside of her own personal communications is determined by the interests of private, unaccountable executives and investors whose primary goal is increasing profits and raising the company’s share price. One of the best newspaper groups, Knight Ridder — whose reporters were on to the truth about Iraq early on — was recently sold and broken up because a tiny handful of investors wanted more per share than they were getting.

Almost all the networks carried by most cable systems are owned by one of the major media conglomerates. Two-thirds of today’s newspaper markets are monopolies, and they’re dumbing down. As ownership gets more and more concentrated, fewer and fewer independent sources of information have survived in the marketplace. And those few significant alternatives that do survive, such as PBS and NPR, are under growing financial and political pressure to reduce critical news content.

Just the other day the major morning broadcast devoted long segments to analyzing why Britney Spears shaved her head, and the death of Anna Nicole Smith got more attention than the Americans or Iraqis killed in Baghdad that week. The next time you’re at a newsstand, look at the celebrities staring back at you. In-depth coverage on anything, let alone the bleak facts of power and powerlessness that shape the lives of ordinary people, is as scarce as sex, violence and voyeurism are pervasive.

At the same time we have seen the rise of an ideological partisan press that is contemptuous of reality, serves up right-wing propaganda as fact, and attempts to demonize anyone who says otherwise. Its embodiment is Rush Limbaugh. Millions heard him take journalists to task for their reporting on the torture at Abu Ghraib, which he attempted to dismiss as a little necessary sport for soldiers under stress. He said: “This is no different than what happens at the Skull and Bones initiation. . . . You ever heard of people [who] need to blow some steam off?”

So we can’t make the case today that the dominant institutions of the press are guardians of democracy. They actually work to keep reality from us, whether it’s the truth of money in politics, the social costs of “free trade,” growing inequality, the re-segregation of our public schools, or the devastating onward march of environmental deregulation. It’s as if we are living on a huge plantation in a story told by the boss man.

What encourages me is the Internet. Freedom begins the moment you realize someone else has been writing your story and it’s time you took the pen from his hand and started writing it yourself. The greatest challenge to the conglomeration of the media giants and the malevolent mentality of the partisan press is the innovation and expression made possible by the digital revolution. I’m also buoyed by the beginnings of a movement across the country of people who are fighting to keep mammoth corporations from controlling access to the Internet as they managed to control radio, then television, then cable. To find out more about this, go to Freepress.net or Savetheinternet.com.

What also gives me hope is that in a market society, sooner or later some entrepreneur is going to figure out how to make a fortune by offering people news they can trust. Millions of Americans care about our democracy, they want high-quality information because they know freedom dies of too many lies, and surely in this new age of innovation someone’s going to figure out that good journalism can be profitable.

Where do you get your news?

I keep stacks of magazines beside my bed to read at night—including the Christian Century.

It’s not a good day if I haven’t roamed half a dozen newspapers, a score of Web sites (journalistic, liberal, conservative, religious, secular — you name it, the Web has it), two or three newsletters, a quarterly journal or two, and summaries of news and opinion sent to me by my colleagues.

I check out a few bloggers — just because it pays to know how others see the world. It also helps to know who’s demonizing you today. Some bloggers are quite thoughtful, analytical, fair. Some are downright scurrilous — for example, the right-wing Moonie-connected blogger who recently lied about Barack Obama’s schooling.

Sometimes I think there are too many voices inside my head. Maybe I read too much. But they make sure I never think a matter settled. I’m with Mark Twain on this: “Loyalty to petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul.”

What do you think of the success of satirists like Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert?

There can be more truth in a flash of wit than in a full-throated pronouncement by a pundit. I once told Stewart that if Mark Twain were alive today, he would be on Comedy Central. Stewart looked at me as if he wouldn’t welcome the competition. As for Colbert: he’s one smart fellow, but he scares me, even when he’s funny, because you sometimes forget he’s only kidding. Being an old fogy, I worry about mixing journalism with entertainment. But I confess that it’s difficult not to write satire these days. Sometimes only satire makes sense. Enemies of the state, as satirists are, can be friends of the people.

But I wouldn’t dare try satire as a journalist; I’d have to target myself — and I’m not one for self-immolation.

You seem to have a very strong populist perspective. Where does that come from?

If I had been an embattled farmer exploited by the railroads and bankers back in the 19th century, I hope I would have shown up at that amazing convention in Omaha that adopted the platform beginning: “We meet in the midst of a nation brought to the verge of moral, political, and material ruin.” Those folks were aroused by Christian outrage over injustice. They made the prairie rumble. If I had lived a few years later, I would hope to have worked for McClure’s, the great magazine that probed the institutional corruption of the day and prompted progressive agitation.

The Great Depression was the tsunami of my experience, and my perspective was shaped by Main Street, not Wall Street. My parents were laid low by the Depression. When I was born my father was making $2 a day working on the highway, and he never brought home more than $100 a week in his working life. He didn’t even earn that much until he joined the union on his last job. Like Franklin Roosevelt, I came to think that government by organized money should be feared as much as government by organized mob. I’d rather not have either, thank you.

I am a democrat — notice the small d — who believes that the soul of democracy is representative government. It’s our best, although certainly imperfect, protection against predatory forces, whether unfettered markets, unscrupulous neighbors or fantastical ideologies—foreign or domestic. Our best chance at governing ourselves lies in obtaining the considered judgments of those we elect to weigh the competing interests and decide to the best of their ability what is right for the country. Anything that corrupts their judgment — whether rigged elections or bribery masked as campaign contributions—is the devil’s work.

Can you name a single issue that concerns you the most these days?

Inequality. Nearly all the wealth created in America over the past 25 years was captured by the top 20 percent of households. Meanwhile, working families find it harder and harder to make ends meet. Young people without privilege and wealth struggle to get a footing. Seniors enjoy less and less security for a lifetime’s labor. We are racially segregated in every meaningful sense except the letter of the law. And survivors of segregation and immigration toil for pennies on the dollar compared to those they serve.

None of this is the result of Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” creating the greatest good for the greatest number. It’s the result of invisible hands that write the checks to buy political protection for privilege. There’s been a campaign to organize the world economy for the benefit of corporations. Whatever its benefits, political and corporate efforts to deregulate the international economy and promote globalization have been the most powerful force of political, economic, social and cultural destabilization the world has known since World War II.

The Nobel laureate Robert Solow is not a man given to extreme political statements. He characterizes what has been happening in America as nothing less than elite plunder: “The redistribution of wealth in favor of the wealthy and of power in favor of the powerful.”

This wasn’t meant to be a country where the winner takes all. Read the Declaration of Independence, the preamble to the Constitution, the Gettysburg Address. We were going to be a society that maintained a healthy equilibrium in how power works—and for whom.

Although my parents were knocked down and almost out by the Depression and were poor all their lives, I went to good public schools. My brother made it to college on the GI bill. When I borrowed $450 to buy my first car, I drove to a public university on public highways and rested in public parks along the way. America was a shared project and I was just one of its beneficiaries. But a vast transformation has been occurring, documented in a series of recent studies. The American Political Science Association, for example, finds that “increasing inequalities threaten the American ideal of equal citizenship and that progress toward real democracy may have stalled . . . and even reversed.”

So here is the deepest crisis as I see it: We talk about problems, issues, policy solutions, but we don’t talk about what democracy means — what it bestows on us, the power it gives us — the astonishing opportunity to shape our destiny. I mean the revolutionary idea that democracy isn’t merely a means of government, it’s a means of dignifying people so that they have a chance to become fully human. Every day I find myself asking, Why is America forsaking its own revolution?

You once remarked that seminary was a detour in your life. Why did you go to seminary and what difference do you think it made for you?

I knew at age 15 that I wanted to be a journalist — then, a little later, a political journalist. That’s how I wound up spending the summer of 1954 on Lyndon Johnson’s staff in the Senate. I wanted to learn the game at the feet of the master.

But I came home feeling unsatisfied by that experience, and I interpreted my angst as a call to something more fulfilling—the ministry, actually. I thought of the pastorate or a professorship. I spent four years getting my master of divinity before finding myself back in politics and government and then back again in journalism.

For a while I thought I had made a mistake, that I would have been better off if I had spent those four years in law school or getting a Ph.D. But as the years unfolded I realized what a blessing seminary had been. I had a succession of remarkable teachers who believed that a true evangelical is always a seeker. T. B. Maston, one of the great souls in my life, taught Christian ethics and more than anyone else helped me to see into the southern enigma of having grown up well loved, well churched and well taught and yet still indifferent to the reality of other people’s lives. I learned about historical criticism, the beauty of the Greek language, and the witness of my Baptist ancestors to the power of conscience. That detour turned out to be quite a journey.

Later on, when I realized how almost every political and economic issue I dealt with in government and then as a journalist intersects with moral and ethical values, I was grateful for those years in seminary. They still inform my life.

So much is being written and said about the alliance between the religious right and the Republican Party. What role do you think religion should have in the public arena?

Whose religion? Christian? Muslim? Jew? Sikh? Buddhist? Catholic? Protestant? Shi’ite? Sunni? Orthodox? Conservative? Mormon? Amish? Wicca? For that matter, which Baptist? Bill Clinton or Pat Robertson? Newt Gingrich or Al Gore? And who is going to decide? The religion of one seems madness to another. Elaine Pagels said to me in an interview that she doesn’t know a single religion that affirms the other’s choice.⁽¹⁾

If religion is the voice of the deepest human experience—and I believe it is—humanity contains multitudes, each speaking in a different tongue. Naturally, believers will bring their faith into the public square, translating their unique personal experience into political convictions and moral arguments. But politics is about settling differences while religion is about maintaining them. Let’s realize what a treasure we have in a secular democracy that guarantees your freedom to believe as you choose and mine to vote as I wish.

Some people on the left think the Democratic Party needs to be more explicitly religious. What do you think about that counterstrategy?

If you have to talk about God to win elections, that doesn’t speak well of God or elections. We are desperate today for cool thinking and clear analysis. What kind of country is it that wants its politicians to play tricks with faith?

As you look back on your work, what gives you the most satisfaction?

The happiest years of my life were the time I helped to organize the Peace Corps and served as its deputy director. We really did believe that we were engaged in the moral equivalent of war.

My long career in journalism has been a continuing course in adult education, and I have been fortunate to share what I have learned with so many others. We journalists are beachcombers on the shores of other people’s experience and knowledge, but we don’t take what we gather and lock it in the attic. Like a pastor in the pulpit, we’re engaged in a moral transaction. When people give us an hour of their lives—something they never get back—we owe them something of value in return. Keeping our end of the bargain isn’t easy, but it’s deeply satisfying.

(1) — hinduism, or sanatanadharma is the only religion i know of that, at it’s fundamental core, affirms, in fact, encourages individual choice.

hey, check this out:

Shortwave Music

Euphoria!

This should probably be taped to your bathroom mirror where one could read it every day. You may not realize it, but it’s 100% true.

1. There are at least two people in this world that you would die for.

2. At least 15 people in this world love you in some way.

3. The only reason anyone would ever hate you is because they want to be just like you.

4. A smile from you can bring happiness to anyone, even if they don’t like you.

5. Every night, SOMEONE thinks about you before they go to sleep.

6. You mean the world to someone.

7. You are special and unique.

8. Someone that you don’t even know exists loves you.

9. When you make the biggest mistake ever, something good comes from it.

10. When you think the world has turned its back on you take another look.

11. Always remember the compliments you received. Forget about the rude remarks.

So:
If you are a loving friend, send this to everyone, including the one that sent it to you. If you get it back, then they really do love you.

And always remember….
When life hands you Lemons, ask for tequila and salt and call me over!

Good friends are like stars….
You don’t always see them,
But you know they are always there.

“Whenever God Closes One Door He Always Opens Another, Even Though Sometimes It’s Hell in the Hallway”

I would rather have one rose and a kind word from a friend while I’m here than a whole truck load when I’m gone!

Forward to all your friends, including me
And don’t tell me you’re too busy for this…

Don’t you know the phrase “stop and smell the flowers”? See how many “bouquets” you end up with!

Quantum physics says goodbye to reality
20 April 2007
By Jon Cartwright

Some physicists are uncomfortable with the idea that all individual quantum events are innately random. This is why many have proposed more complete theories, which suggest that events are at least partially governed by extra “hidden variables”. Now physicists from Austria claim to have performed an experiment that rules out a broad class of hidden-variables theories that focus on realism — giving the uneasy consequence that reality does not exist when we are not observing it (Nature 446 871).

Some 40 years ago the physicist John Bell predicted that many hidden-variables theories would be ruled out if a certain experimental inequality were violated – known as “Bell’s inequality”. In his thought experiment, a source fires entangled pairs of linearly-polarized photons in opposite directions towards two polarizers, which can be changed in orientation. Quantum mechanics says that there should be a high correlation between results at the polarizers because the photons instantaneously “decide” together which polarization to assume at the moment of measurement, even though they are separated in space. Hidden variables, however, says that such instantaneous decisions are not necessary, because the same strong correlation could be achieved if the photons were somehow informed of the orientation of the polarizers beforehand.

Bell’s trick, therefore, was to decide how to orient the polarizers only after the photons have left the source. If hidden variables did exist, they would be unable to know the orientation, and so the results would only be correlated half of the time. On the other hand, if quantum mechanics was right, the results would be much more correlated – in other words, Bell’s inequality would be violated.

Many realizations of the thought experiment have indeed verified the violation of Bell’s inequality. These have ruled out all hidden-variables theories based on joint assumptions of realism, meaning that reality exists when we are not observing it; and locality, meaning that separated events cannot influence one another instantaneously. But a violation of Bell’s inequality does not tell specifically which assumption – realism, locality or both – is discordant with quantum mechanics.

Markus Aspelmeyer, Anton Zeilinger and colleagues from the University of Vienna, however, have now shown that realism is more of a problem than locality in the quantum world. They devised an experiment that violates a different inequality proposed by physicist Anthony Leggett in 2003 that relies only on realism, and relaxes the reliance on locality. To do this, rather than taking measurements along just one plane of polarization, the Austrian team took measurements in additional, perpendicular planes to check for elliptical polarization.

They found that, just as in the realizations of Bell’s thought experiment, Leggett’s inequality is violated – thus stressing the quantum-mechanical assertion that reality does not exist when we’re not observing it. “Our study shows that ‘just’ giving up the concept of locality would not be enough to obtain a more complete description of quantum mechanics,” Aspelmeyer told Physics Web. “You would also have to give up certain intuitive features of realism.”

However, Alain Aspect, a physicist who performed the first Bell-type experiment in the 1980s, thinks the team’s philosophical conclusions are subjective. “There are other types of non-local models that are not addressed by either Leggett’s inequalities or the experiment,” he said. “But I rather share the view that such debates, and accompanying experiments such as those by [the Austrian team], allow us to look deeper into the mysteries of quantum mechanics.”

i got a postcard order from eva funderburgh, which i printed and delivered today. they’re postcards for an upcoming gallery show on 4 may, and my guess is that she wanted them right away, so i delivered them by hand. there was nobody home, so i left them in the mailbox. the mail had already been delivered (otherwise i wouldn’t have left them, as i know that “tampering with the mail is a federal offense”), and there were names that i recognised on the mail that was already there, but at the same time, it felt a little odd just leaving them outside the house with nobody there to receive them. that’s the reason why i put insurance and delivery confirmation on packages that i mail out, and, because i was delivering them by hand, those options were not available to me. she knows that i’m delivering them, so if she doesn’t get them, i’m sure she’ll let me know, but if she doesn’t get them, then i’m probably going to have to make another run into seattle, probably tonight, to retrieve them from wherever it is that i dropped them off, which, although it has the right address, is apparently not the place…

aarrggh! why did i do that?

next time someone from seattle orders something, i’ll only deliver it if they’re there to meet me in person, so this doesn’t happen again… 8/

15 Things Kurt Vonnegut Said Better Than Anyone Else Ever Has Or Will
by Scott Gordon, Josh Modell, Noel Murray, Sean O’Neal, Tasha Robinson, Kyle Ryan
April 23rd, 2007

1. “I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, ‘If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.'”

The actual advice here is technically a quote from Kurt Vonnegut’s “good uncle” Alex, but Vonnegut was nice enough to pass it on at speeches and in A Man Without A Country. Though he was sometimes derided as too gloomy and cynical, Vonnegut’s most resonant messages have always been hopeful in the face of almost-certain doom. And his best advice seems almost ridiculously simple: Give your own happiness a bit of brainspace.

2. “Peculiar travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God.”

In Cat’s Cradle, the narrator haplessly stumbles across the cynical, cultish figure Bokonon, who populates his religious writings with moronic, twee aphorisms. The great joke of Bokononism is that it forces meaning on what’s essentially chaos, and Bokonon himself admits that his writings are lies. If the protagonist’s trip to the island nation of San Lorenzo has any cosmic purpose, it’s to catalyze a massive tragedy, but the experience makes him a devout Bokononist. It’s a religion for people who believe religions are absurd, and an ideal one for Vonnegut-style humanists.

3. “Tiger got to hunt, bird got to fly; Man got to sit and wonder, ‘Why, why, why?’ Tiger got to sleep, bird got to land; Man got to tell himself he understand.”

Another koan of sorts from Cat’s Cradle and the Bokononist religion (which phrases many of its teachings as calypsos, as part of its absurdist bent), this piece of doggerel is simple and catchy, but it unpacks into a resonant, meaningful philosophy that reads as sympathetic to humanity, albeit from a removed, humoring, alien viewpoint. Man’s just another animal, it implies, with his own peculiar instincts, and his own way of shutting them down. This is horrifically cynical when considered closely: If people deciding they understand the world is just another instinct, then enlightenment is little more than a pit-stop between insoluble questions, a necessary but ultimately meaningless way of taking a sanity break. At the same time, there’s a kindness to Bokonon’s belief that this is all inevitable and just part of being a person. Life is frustrating and full of pitfalls and dead ends, but everybody’s gotta do it.

4. “There’s only one rule that I know of, babies — God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.”

This line from God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater comes as part of a baptismal speech the protagonist says he’s planning for his neighbors’ twins: “Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies — God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.” It’s an odd speech to make over a couple of infants, but it’s playful, sweet, yet keenly precise in its summation of everything a new addition to the planet should need to know. By narrowing down all his advice for the future down to a few simple words, Vonnegut emphasizes what’s most important in life. At the same time, he lets his frustration with all the people who obviously don’t get it leak through just a little.

5. “She was a fool, and so am I, and so is anyone who thinks he sees what God is doing.”

A couple of pages into Cat’s Cradle, protagonist Jonah/John recalls being hired to design and build a doghouse for a lady in Newport, R.I., who “claimed to understand God and His Ways of Working perfectly.” With such knowledge, “she could not understand why anyone should be puzzled about what had been or about what was going to be.” When Jonah shows her the doghouse’s blueprint, she says she can’t read it. He suggests taking it to her minister to pass along to God, who, when he finds a minute, will explain it “in a way that even you can understand.” She fires him. Jonah recalls her with a bemused fondness, ending the anecdote with this Bokonon quote. It’s a typical Vonnegut zinger that perfectly summarizes the inherent flaw of religious fundamentalism: No one really knows God’s ways.

6. “Many people need desperately to receive this message: ‘I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people do not care about them. You are not alone.'”

In this response to his own question — “Why bother?” — in Timequake, his last novel, Vonnegut doesn’t give a tired response about the urge to create; instead, he offers a pointed answer about how writing (and reading) make a lonesome world a little less so. The idea of connectedness—familial and otherwise—ran through much of his work, and it’s nice to see that toward the end of his career, he hadn’t lost the feeling that words can have an intimate, powerful impact.

7. “There are plenty of good reasons for fighting, but no good reason ever to hate without reservation, to imagine that God Almighty Himself hates with you, too.”

Though this quote comes from the World War II-centered Mother Night (published in 1961), its wisdom and ugly truth still ring. Vonnegut (who often said “The only difference between Bush and Hitler is that Hitler was elected”) was righteously skeptical about war, having famously survived the only one worth fighting in his lifetime. And it’s never been more true: Left or right, Christian or Muslim, those convinced they’re doing violence in service of a higher power and against an irretrievably inhuman enemy are the most dangerous creatures of all.

8. “Since Alice had never received any religious instruction, and since she had led a blameless life, she never thought of her awful luck as being anything but accidents in a very busy place. Good for her.”

Vonnegut’s excellent-but-underrated Slapstick (he himself graded it a “D”) was inspired by his sister Alice, who died of cancer just days after her husband was killed in an accident. Vonnegut’s assessment of Alice’s character—both in this introduction and in her fictional stand-in, Eliza Mellon Swain—is glowing and remarkable, and in this quote from the book’s introduction, he manages to swipe at a favorite enemy (organized religion) and quietly, humbly embrace someone he clearly still missed a lot.

9. “That is my principal objection to life, I think: It’s too easy, when alive, to make perfectly horrible mistakes.”

The narrator delivering this line at the end of the first chapter of Deadeye Dick is alluding both to his father’s befriending of Hitler and his own accidental murder of his neighbor, but like so many of these quotes, it resonates well beyond its context. The underlying philosophy of Vonnegut’s work was always that existence is capricious and senseless, a difficult sentiment that he captured time and again with a bemused shake of the head. Indeed, the idea that life is just a series of small decisions that culminate into some sort of “destiny” is maddening, because you could easily ruin it all simply by making the wrong one. Ordering the fish, stepping onto a balcony, booking the wrong flight, getting married—a single misstep, and you’re done for. At least when you’re dead, you don’t have to make any more damn choices. Wherever Vonnegut is, he’s no doubt grateful for that.

10. “Literature should not disappear up its own asshole, so to speak.”

Vonnegut touchstones like life on Tralfamadore and the absurd Bokononist religion don’t help people escape the world so much as see it with clearer reason, which probably had a lot to do with Vonnegut’s education as a chemist and anthropologist. So it’s unsurprising that in a “self-interview” for The Paris Review, collected in his non-fiction anthology Palm Sunday, he said the literary world should really be looking for talent among scientists and doctors. Even when taking part in such a stultifying, masturbatory exercise for a prestigious journal, Vonnegut was perfectly readable, because he never forgot where his true audience was.

11. “All persons, living and dead, are purely coincidental.”

In Vonnegut’s final novel, 1997’s Timequake, he interacts freely with Kilgore Trout and other fictional characters after the end of a “timequake,” which forces humanity to re-enact an entire decade. (Trout winds up too worn out to exercise free will again.) Vonnegut writes his own fitting epigram for this fatalistic book: “All persons, living and dead, are purely coincidental,” which sounds more funny than grim. Vonnegut surrounds his characters—especially Trout—with meaninglessness and hopelessness, and gives them little reason for existing in the first place, but within that, they find liberty and courage.

12. “Why don’t you take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut? Why don’t you take a flying fuck at the mooooooooooooon?” (my favourite)

Even when Vonnegut dared to propose a utopian scheme, it was a happily dysfunctional one. In Slapstick, Wilbur Swain wins the presidency with a scheme to eliminate loneliness by issuing people complicated middle names (he becomes Wilbur Daffodil-11 Swain) which make them part of new extended families. He advises people to tell new relatives they hate, or members of other families asking for help: “Why don’t you take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut? Why don’t you take a flying fuck at the mooooooooooooon?” Of course, this fails to prevent plagues, the breakdown of his government, and civil wars later in the story.

13. “So it goes.”

Unlike many of these quotes, the repeated refrain from Vonnegut’s classic Slaughterhouse-Five isn’t notable for its unique wording so much as for how much emotion—and dismissal of emotion—it packs into three simple, world-weary words that simultaneously accept and dismiss everything. There’s a reason this quote graced practically every elegy written for Vonnegut over the past two weeks (yes, including ours): It neatly encompasses a whole way of life. More crudely put: “Shit happens, and it’s awful, but it’s also okay. We deal with it because we have to.”

14. “I have been a soreheaded occupant of a file drawer labeled ‘science fiction’ ever since, and I would like out, particularly since so many serious critics regularly mistake the drawer for a urinal.”

Vonnegut was as trenchant when talking about his life as when talking about life in general, and this quote from an essay in Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons is particularly apt; as he explains it, he wrote Player Piano while working for General Electric, “completely surrounded by machines and ideas for machines,” which led him to put some ideas about machines on paper. Then it was published, “and I learned from the reviewers that I was a science-fiction writer.” The entire essay is wry, hilarious, and biting, but this line stands out in particular as typifying the kind of snappishness that made Vonnegut’s works so memorable.

15. “We must be careful about what we pretend to be.”

In Mother Night, apolitical expatriate American playwright Howard W. Campbell, Jr. refashions himself as a Nazi propagandist in order to pass coded messages on to the U.S. generals and preserve his marriage to a German woman—their “nation of two,” as he calls it. But in serving multiple masters, Campbell ends up ruining his life and becoming an unwitting inspiration to bigots. In his 1966 introduction to the paperback edition, Vonnegut underlines Mother Night‘s moral: “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” That lesson springs to mind every time a comedian whose shtick relies on hoaxes and audience-baiting — or a political pundit who traffics in shock and hyperbole—gets hauled in front of the court of public opinion for pushing the act too far. Why can’t people just say what they mean? It’s a question Don Imus and Michael Richards — and maybe someday Ann Coulter — must ask themselves on their many sleepless nights.

Fascist America, in 10 easy steps
From Hitler to Pinochet and beyond, history shows there are certain steps that any would-be dictator must take to destroy constitutional freedoms. And, argues Naomi Wolf, George Bush and his administration seem to be taking them all
April 24, 2007
By Naomi Wolf

Last autumn, there was a military coup in Thailand. The leaders of the coup took a number of steps, rather systematically, as if they had a shopping list. In a sense, they did. Within a matter of days, democracy had been closed down: the coup leaders declared martial law, sent armed soldiers into residential areas, took over radio and TV stations, issued restrictions on the press, tightened some limits on travel, and took certain activists into custody.

They were not figuring these things out as they went along. If you look at history, you can see that there is essentially a blueprint for turning an open society into a dictatorship. That blueprint has been used again and again in more and less bloody, more and less terrifying ways. But it is always effective. It is very difficult and arduous to create and sustain a democracy – but history shows that closing one down is much simpler. You simply have to be willing to take the 10 steps.

As difficult as this is to contemplate, it is clear, if you are willing to look, that each of these 10 steps has already been initiated today in the United States by the Bush administration.

Because Americans like me were born in freedom, we have a hard time even considering that it is possible for us to become as unfree – domestically – as many other nations. Because we no longer learn much about our rights or our system of government – the task of being aware of the constitution has been outsourced from citizens’ ownership to being the domain of professionals such as lawyers and professors – we scarcely recognise the checks and balances that the founders put in place, even as they are being systematically dismantled. Because we don’t learn much about European history, the setting up of a department of “homeland” security – remember who else was keen on the word “homeland” – didn’t raise the alarm bells it might have.

It is my argument that, beneath our very noses, George Bush and his administration are using time-tested tactics to close down an open society. It is time for us to be willing to think the unthinkable – as the author and political journalist Joe Conason, has put it, that it can happen here. And that we are further along than we realise.

Conason eloquently warned of the danger of American authoritarianism. I am arguing that we need also to look at the lessons of European and other kinds of fascism to understand the potential seriousness of the events we see unfolding in the US.

1. Invoke a terrifying internal and external enemy
After we were hit on September 11 2001, we were in a state of national shock. Less than six weeks later, on October 26 2001, the USA Patriot Act was passed by a Congress that had little chance to debate it; many said that they scarcely had time to read it. We were told we were now on a “war footing”; we were in a “global war” against a “global caliphate” intending to “wipe out civilisation”. There have been other times of crisis in which the US accepted limits on civil liberties, such as during the civil war, when Lincoln declared martial law, and the second world war, when thousands of Japanese-American citizens were interned. But this situation, as Bruce Fein of the American Freedom Agenda notes, is unprecedented: all our other wars had an endpoint, so the pendulum was able to swing back toward freedom; this war is defined as open-ended in time and without national boundaries in space – the globe itself is the battlefield. “This time,” Fein says, “there will be no defined end.”

Creating a terrifying threat – hydra-like, secretive, evil – is an old trick. It can, like Hitler’s invocation of a communist threat to the nation’s security, be based on actual events (one Wisconsin academic has faced calls for his dismissal because he noted, among other things, that the alleged communist arson, the Reichstag fire of February 1933, was swiftly followed in Nazi Germany by passage of the Enabling Act, which replaced constitutional law with an open-ended state of emergency). Or the terrifying threat can be based, like the National Socialist evocation of the “global conspiracy of world Jewry”, on myth.

It is not that global Islamist terrorism is not a severe danger; of course it is. I am arguing rather that the language used to convey the nature of the threat is different in a country such as Spain – which has also suffered violent terrorist attacks – than it is in America. Spanish citizens know that they face a grave security threat; what we as American citizens believe is that we are potentially threatened with the end of civilisation as we know it. Of course, this makes us more willing to accept restrictions on our freedoms.

2. Create a gulag
Once you have got everyone scared, the next step is to create a prison system outside the rule of law (as Bush put it, he wanted the American detention centre at Guantánamo Bay to be situated in legal “outer space”) – where torture takes place.

At first, the people who are sent there are seen by citizens as outsiders: troublemakers, spies, “enemies of the people” or “criminals”. Initially, citizens tend to support the secret prison system; it makes them feel safer and they do not identify with the prisoners. But soon enough, civil society leaders – opposition members, labour activists, clergy and journalists – are arrested and sent there as well.

This process took place in fascist shifts or anti-democracy crackdowns ranging from Italy and Germany in the 1920s and 1930s to the Latin American coups of the 1970s and beyond. It is standard practice for closing down an open society or crushing a pro-democracy uprising.

With its jails in Iraq and Afghanistan, and, of course, Guantánamo in Cuba, where detainees are abused, and kept indefinitely without trial and without access to the due process of the law, America certainly has its gulag now. Bush and his allies in Congress recently announced they would issue no information about the secret CIA “black site” prisons throughout the world, which are used to incarcerate people who have been seized off the street.

Gulags in history tend to metastasise, becoming ever larger and more secretive, ever more deadly and formalised. We know from first-hand accounts, photographs, videos and government documents that people, innocent and guilty, have been tortured in the US-run prisons we are aware of and those we can’t investigate adequately.

But Americans still assume this system and detainee abuses involve only scary brown people with whom they don’t generally identify. It was brave of the conservative pundit William Safire to quote the anti-Nazi pastor Martin Niemöller, who had been seized as a political prisoner: “First they came for the Jews.” Most Americans don’t understand yet that the destruction of the rule of law at Guantánamo set a dangerous precedent for them, too.

By the way, the establishment of military tribunals that deny prisoners due process tends to come early on in a fascist shift. Mussolini and Stalin set up such tribunals. On April 24 1934, the Nazis, too, set up the People’s Court, which also bypassed the judicial system: prisoners were held indefinitely, often in isolation, and tortured, without being charged with offences, and were subjected to show trials. Eventually, the Special Courts became a parallel system that put pressure on the regular courts to abandon the rule of law in favour of Nazi ideology when making decisions.

3. Develop a thug caste
When leaders who seek what I call a “fascist shift” want to close down an open society, they send paramilitary groups of scary young men out to terrorise citizens. The Blackshirts roamed the Italian countryside beating up communists; the Brownshirts staged violent rallies throughout Germany. This paramilitary force is especially important in a democracy: you need citizens to fear thug violence and so you need thugs who are free from prosecution.

The years following 9/11 have proved a bonanza for America’s security contractors, with the Bush administration outsourcing areas of work that traditionally fell to the US military. In the process, contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars have been issued for security work by mercenaries at home and abroad. In Iraq, some of these contract operatives have been accused of involvement in torturing prisoners, harassing journalists and firing on Iraqi civilians. Under Order 17, issued to regulate contractors in Iraq by the one-time US administrator in Baghdad, Paul Bremer, these contractors are immune from prosecution

Yes, but that is in Iraq, you could argue; however, after Hurricane Katrina, the Department of Homeland Security hired and deployed hundreds of armed private security guards in New Orleans. The investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill interviewed one unnamed guard who reported having fired on unarmed civilians in the city. It was a natural disaster that underlay that episode – but the administration’s endless war on terror means ongoing scope for what are in effect privately contracted armies to take on crisis and emergency management at home in US cities.

Thugs in America? Groups of angry young Republican men, dressed in identical shirts and trousers, menaced poll workers counting the votes in Florida in 2000. If you are reading history, you can imagine that there can be a need for “public order” on the next election day. Say there are protests, or a threat, on the day of an election; history would not rule out the presence of a private security firm at a polling station “to restore public order”.

4. Set up an internal surveillance system
In Mussolini’s Italy, in Nazi Germany, in communist East Germany, in communist China – in every closed society – secret police spy on ordinary people and encourage neighbours to spy on neighbours. The Stasi needed to keep only a minority of East Germans under surveillance to convince a majority that they themselves were being watched.

In 2005 and 2006, when James Risen and Eric Lichtblau wrote in the New York Times about a secret state programme to wiretap citizens’ phones, read their emails and follow international financial transactions, it became clear to ordinary Americans that they, too, could be under state scrutiny.

In closed societies, this surveillance is cast as being about “national security”; the true function is to keep citizens docile and inhibit their activism and dissent.

5. Harass citizens’ groups
The fifth thing you do is related to step four – you infiltrate and harass citizens’ groups. It can be trivial: a church in Pasadena, whose minister preached that Jesus was in favour of peace, found itself being investigated by the Internal Revenue Service, while churches that got Republicans out to vote, which is equally illegal under US tax law, have been left alone.

Other harassment is more serious: the American Civil Liberties Union reports that thousands of ordinary American anti-war, environmental and other groups have been infiltrated by agents: a secret Pentagon database includes more than four dozen peaceful anti-war meetings, rallies or marches by American citizens in its category of 1,500 “suspicious incidents”. The equally secret Counterintelligence Field Activity (Cifa) agency of the Department of Defense has been gathering information about domestic organisations engaged in peaceful political activities: Cifa is supposed to track “potential terrorist threats” as it watches ordinary US citizen activists. A little-noticed new law has redefined activism such as animal rights protests as “terrorism”. So the definition of “terrorist” slowly expands to include the opposition.

6. Engage in arbitrary detention and release
This scares people. It is a kind of cat-and-mouse game. Nicholas D Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, the investigative reporters who wrote China Wakes: the Struggle for the Soul of a Rising Power, describe pro-democracy activists in China, such as Wei Jingsheng, being arrested and released many times. In a closing or closed society there is a “list” of dissidents and opposition leaders: you are targeted in this way once you are on the list, and it is hard to get off the list.

In 2004, America’s Transportation Security Administration confirmed that it had a list of passengers who were targeted for security searches or worse if they tried to fly. People who have found themselves on the list? Two middle-aged women peace activists in San Francisco; liberal Senator Edward Kennedy; a member of Venezuela’s government – after Venezuela’s president had criticised Bush; and thousands of ordinary US citizens.

Professor Walter F Murphy is emeritus of Princeton University; he is one of the foremost constitutional scholars in the nation and author of the classic Constitutional Democracy. Murphy is also a decorated former marine, and he is not even especially politically liberal. But on March 1 this year, he was denied a boarding pass at Newark, “because I was on the Terrorist Watch list”.

“Have you been in any peace marches? We ban a lot of people from flying because of that,” asked the airline employee.

“I explained,” said Murphy, “that I had not so marched but had, in September 2006, given a lecture at Princeton, televised and put on the web, highly critical of George Bush for his many violations of the constitution.”

“That’ll do it,” the man said.

Anti-war marcher? Potential terrorist. Support the constitution? Potential terrorist. History shows that the categories of “enemy of the people” tend to expand ever deeper into civil life.

James Yee, a US citizen, was the Muslim chaplain at Guantánamo who was accused of mishandling classified documents. He was harassed by the US military before the charges against him were dropped. Yee has been detained and released several times. He is still of interest.

Brandon Mayfield, a US citizen and lawyer in Oregon, was mistakenly identified as a possible terrorist. His house was secretly broken into and his computer seized. Though he is innocent of the accusation against him, he is still on the list.

It is a standard practice of fascist societies that once you are on the list, you can’t get off.

7. Target key individuals
Threaten civil servants, artists and academics with job loss if they don’t toe the line. Mussolini went after the rectors of state universities who did not conform to the fascist line; so did Joseph Goebbels, who purged academics who were not pro-Nazi; so did Chile’s Augusto Pinochet; so does the Chinese communist Politburo in punishing pro-democracy students and professors.

Academe is a tinderbox of activism, so those seeking a fascist shift punish academics and students with professional loss if they do not “coordinate”, in Goebbels’ term, ideologically. Since civil servants are the sector of society most vulnerable to being fired by a given regime, they are also a group that fascists typically “coordinate” early on: the Reich Law for the Re-establishment of a Professional Civil Service was passed on April 7 1933.

Bush supporters in state legislatures in several states put pressure on regents at state universities to penalise or fire academics who have been critical of the administration. As for civil servants, the Bush administration has derailed the career of one military lawyer who spoke up for fair trials for detainees, while an administration official publicly intimidated the law firms that represent detainees pro bono by threatening to call for their major corporate clients to boycott them.

Elsewhere, a CIA contract worker who said in a closed blog that “waterboarding is torture” was stripped of the security clearance she needed in order to do her job.

Most recently, the administration purged eight US attorneys for what looks like insufficient political loyalty. When Goebbels purged the civil service in April 1933, attorneys were “coordinated” too, a step that eased the way of the increasingly brutal laws to follow.

8. Control the press
Italy in the 1920s, Germany in the 30s, East Germany in the 50s, Czechoslovakia in the 60s, the Latin American dictatorships in the 70s, China in the 80s and 90s – all dictatorships and would-be dictators target newspapers and journalists. They threaten and harass them in more open societies that they are seeking to close, and they arrest them and worse in societies that have been closed already.

The Committee to Protect Journalists says arrests of US journalists are at an all-time high: Josh Wolf (no relation), a blogger in San Francisco, has been put in jail for a year for refusing to turn over video of an anti-war demonstration; Homeland Security brought a criminal complaint against reporter Greg Palast, claiming he threatened “critical infrastructure” when he and a TV producer were filming victims of Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana. Palast had written a bestseller critical of the Bush administration.

Other reporters and writers have been punished in other ways. Joseph C Wilson accused Bush, in a New York Times op-ed, of leading the country to war on the basis of a false charge that Saddam Hussein had acquired yellowcake uranium in Niger. His wife, Valerie Plame, was outed as a CIA spy – a form of retaliation that ended her career.

Prosecution and job loss are nothing, though, compared with how the US is treating journalists seeking to cover the conflict in Iraq in an unbiased way. The Committee to Protect Journalists has documented multiple accounts of the US military in Iraq firing upon or threatening to fire upon unembedded (meaning independent) reporters and camera operators from organisations ranging from al-Jazeera to the BBC. While westerners may question the accounts by al-Jazeera, they should pay attention to the accounts of reporters such as the BBC’s Kate Adie. In some cases reporters have been wounded or killed, including ITN’s Terry Lloyd in 2003. Both CBS and the Associated Press in Iraq had staff members seized by the US military and taken to violent prisons; the news organisations were unable to see the evidence against their staffers.

Over time in closing societies, real news is supplanted by fake news and false documents. Pinochet showed Chilean citizens falsified documents to back up his claim that terrorists had been about to attack the nation. The yellowcake charge, too, was based on forged papers.

You won’t have a shutdown of news in modern America – it is not possible. But you can have, as Frank Rich and Sidney Blumenthal have pointed out, a steady stream of lies polluting the news well. What you already have is a White House directing a stream of false information that is so relentless that it is increasingly hard to sort out truth from untruth. In a fascist system, it’s not the lies that count but the muddying. When citizens can’t tell real news from fake, they give up their demands for accountability bit by bit.

9. Dissent equals treason
Cast dissent as “treason” and criticism as “espionage’. Every closing society does this, just as it elaborates laws that increasingly criminalise certain kinds of speech and expand the definition of “spy” and “traitor”. When Bill Keller, the publisher of the New York Times, ran the Lichtblau/Risen stories, Bush called the Times’ leaking of classified information “disgraceful”, while Republicans in Congress called for Keller to be charged with treason, and rightwing commentators and news outlets kept up the “treason” drumbeat. Some commentators, as Conason noted, reminded readers smugly that one penalty for violating the Espionage Act is execution.

Conason is right to note how serious a threat that attack represented. It is also important to recall that the 1938 Moscow show trial accused the editor of Izvestia, Nikolai Bukharin, of treason; Bukharin was, in fact, executed. And it is important to remind Americans that when the 1917 Espionage Act was last widely invoked, during the infamous 1919 Palmer Raids, leftist activists were arrested without warrants in sweeping roundups, kept in jail for up to five months, and “beaten, starved, suffocated, tortured and threatened with death”, according to the historian Myra MacPherson. After that, dissent was muted in America for a decade.

In Stalin’s Soviet Union, dissidents were “enemies of the people”. National Socialists called those who supported Weimar democracy “November traitors”.

And here is where the circle closes: most Americans do not realise that since September of last year – when Congress wrongly, foolishly, passed the Military Commissions Act of 2006 – the president has the power to call any US citizen an “enemy combatant”. He has the power to define what “enemy combatant” means. The president can also delegate to anyone he chooses in the executive branch the right to define “enemy combatant” any way he or she wants and then seize Americans accordingly.

Even if you or I are American citizens, even if we turn out to be completely innocent of what he has accused us of doing, he has the power to have us seized as we are changing planes at Newark tomorrow, or have us taken with a knock on the door; ship you or me to a navy brig; and keep you or me in isolation, possibly for months, while awaiting trial. (Prolonged isolation, as psychiatrists know, triggers psychosis in otherwise mentally healthy prisoners. That is why Stalin’s gulag had an isolation cell, like Guantánamo’s, in every satellite prison. Camp 6, the newest, most brutal facility at Guantánamo, is all isolation cells.)

We US citizens will get a trial eventually – for now. But legal rights activists at the Center for Constitutional Rights say that the Bush administration is trying increasingly aggressively to find ways to get around giving even US citizens fair trials. “Enemy combatant” is a status offence – it is not even something you have to have done. “We have absolutely moved over into a preventive detention model – you look like you could do something bad, you might do something bad, so we’re going to hold you,” says a spokeswoman of the CCR.

Most Americans surely do not get this yet. No wonder: it is hard to believe, even though it is true. In every closing society, at a certain point there are some high-profile arrests – usually of opposition leaders, clergy and journalists. Then everything goes quiet. After those arrests, there are still newspapers, courts, TV and radio, and the facades of a civil society. There just isn’t real dissent. There just isn’t freedom. If you look at history, just before those arrests is where we are now.

10. Suspend the rule of law
The John Warner Defense Authorization Act of 2007 gave the president new powers over the national guard. This means that in a national emergency – which the president now has enhanced powers to declare – he can send Michigan’s militia to enforce a state of emergency that he has declared in Oregon, over the objections of the state’s governor and its citizens.

Even as Americans were focused on Britney Spears’s meltdown and the question of who fathered Anna Nicole’s baby, the New York Times editorialised about this shift: “A disturbing recent phenomenon in Washington is that laws that strike to the heart of American democracy have been passed in the dead of night … Beyond actual insurrection, the president may now use military troops as a domestic police force in response to a natural disaster, a disease outbreak, terrorist attack or any ‘other condition’.”

Critics see this as a clear violation of the Posse Comitatus Act – which was meant to restrain the federal government from using the military for domestic law enforcement. The Democratic senator Patrick Leahy says the bill encourages a president to declare federal martial law. It also violates the very reason the founders set up our system of government as they did: having seen citizens bullied by a monarch’s soldiers, the founders were terrified of exactly this kind of concentration of militias’ power over American people in the hands of an oppressive executive or faction.

Of course, the United States is not vulnerable to the violent, total closing-down of the system that followed Mussolini’s march on Rome or Hitler’s roundup of political prisoners. Our democratic habits are too resilient, and our military and judiciary too independent, for any kind of scenario like that.

Rather, as other critics are noting, our experiment in democracy could be closed down by a process of erosion.

It is a mistake to think that early in a fascist shift you see the profile of barbed wire against the sky. In the early days, things look normal on the surface; peasants were celebrating harvest festivals in Calabria in 1922; people were shopping and going to the movies in Berlin in 1931. Early on, as WH Auden put it, the horror is always elsewhere – while someone is being tortured, children are skating, ships are sailing: “dogs go on with their doggy life … How everything turns away/ Quite leisurely from the disaster.”

As Americans turn away quite leisurely, keeping tuned to internet shopping and American Idol, the foundations of democracy are being fatally corroded. Something has changed profoundly that weakens us unprecedentedly: our democratic traditions, independent judiciary and free press do their work today in a context in which we are “at war” in a “long war” – a war without end, on a battlefield described as the globe, in a context that gives the president – without US citizens realising it yet – the power over US citizens of freedom or long solitary incarceration, on his say-so alone.

That means a hollowness has been expanding under the foundation of all these still- free-looking institutions – and this foundation can give way under certain kinds of pressure. To prevent such an outcome, we have to think about the “what ifs”.

What if, in a year and a half, there is another attack – say, God forbid, a dirty bomb? The executive can declare a state of emergency. History shows that any leader, of any party, will be tempted to maintain emergency powers after the crisis has passed. With the gutting of traditional checks and balances, we are no less endangered by a President Hillary than by a President Giuliani – because any executive will be tempted to enforce his or her will through edict rather than the arduous, uncertain process of democratic negotiation and compromise.

What if the publisher of a major US newspaper were charged with treason or espionage, as a rightwing effort seemed to threaten Keller with last year? What if he or she got 10 years in jail? What would the newspapers look like the next day? Judging from history, they would not cease publishing; but they would suddenly be very polite.

Right now, only a handful of patriots are trying to hold back the tide of tyranny for the rest of us – staff at the Center for Constitutional Rights, who faced death threats for representing the detainees yet persisted all the way to the Supreme Court; activists at the American Civil Liberties Union; and prominent conservatives trying to roll back the corrosive new laws, under the banner of a new group called the American Freedom Agenda. This small, disparate collection of people needs everybody’s help, including that of Europeans and others internationally who are willing to put pressure on the administration because they can see what a US unrestrained by real democracy at home can mean for the rest of the world.

We need to look at history and face the “what ifs”. For if we keep going down this road, the “end of America” could come for each of us in a different way, at a different moment; each of us might have a different moment when we feel forced to look back and think: that is how it was before – and this is the way it is now.

“The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands … is the definition of tyranny,” wrote James Madison. We still have the choice to stop going down this road; we can stand our ground and fight for our nation, and take up the banner the founders asked us to carry.

note to :

1) go to google
2) type in “where to find tie dye objects“
3) observe that number three in the list is Hybrid Elephant

now, how do we get more people with money to find out about it… 8)

common phrases that people use to hit my web pages include: html escape characters, html escape sequence, html escape codes, html escape sequences, html relative address, html escape character, shirts(!), html escape apostrophe, relative address html, computer graphic, html &sp, auroshikha agarbathies, hybrid elephant, sarathi perfumery works, html character escape, spiritual images, define chandan, elephant jewelry, html escape code, btu hp conversion, absolute address, conversion gwh, mwh conversion, graphic services, siva lingams, escape html characters, html &sp;, ardhanariswara, html tab escape, elephant graphic, conversion nm to lbft, convert btu to mw, html escape values, measurement conversion, hybrid elephants, html escape tab, html escape symbols, conversion mwh, narmada lingam, &sp html, convert twh to kwh, html relative addresses, vira ganapati, conversion horsepower btu, elvish writing, &sp; html, mo chada(?), html character escape codes, mwh to mw conversion, cucumber graphics, html escaped tab, define mogra, html tutorial escape, html escape, define benzoin, hindu sacred stones, relative addressing html, rune, web, html entities paren, html absolute address, html character escapes, hangul.syllables 8859, html relative location, escape sequence in html, armada shiva lingams india, html escaped apostrophe, green champa, buttons, why use html escape sequences, saint fred, ‐ html, special characters escape sequences, lord siva, narmada river shiva linga, mwh conversions, absolute address html, hybrid stickers, html relative addressing, convert metric force kgf/cm, &brkbar html, define makko, unicode escape sequences chart, gram to oz to grain converson, dhoop, kali ma, define masala, hindu imagery, auroshikha, elephant hybrid, define dhoop, html apostrophe escape, elvish letters, kerala-grass, siva lingam, html escape character ö ä, auroshikha agarbathies incense, sindarian, conversion mw to btu, nippon kodo incense…

which may give you a clue about which page has the most traffic, if you haven’t already figured it out…

grr!

my keyboard isn’t working – that is my piano keyboard, not my typing keyboard. i hooked it up just like i did the last time i had it set up, but nothing happened. usually there’s a little icon that appears in the systray that indicates i’ve got USB hardware plugged in, and everything just works… but now, no little icon in the systray, and no sound, even when i trigger the oscillator manually… wait a second… well, i figured out that if i turn up the volume (D’OH!) i get sound when i trigger the oscilator manually, but i still don’t get any MIDI control…

stupid windoesn’t… 8P

yesterday this icon showed up on my cell phone, and i can’t figure out what it means. it’s an icon that looks like a speaker with sound waves coming out of it, and it’s not the voice-mail indicator, nor the indicator for any kind of messaging system the phone has, and it’s not the earpiece volume indicator, nor the indicator for anything you have control over the volume of that the phone has… and there’s no way to set the phone so that it has text-messages rather than icon-messages for alerts – like the icons that mysteriously appear and then won’t go away, like this phone has… and the quick reference guide that came with the phone doesn’t have a picture of the phone with all the icons lit and an explanation of what they mean, like every other cell phone that i have owned, which means i’m likely going to go down to the mall, where there’s a verizon wireless store to get them to tell me what it means. 8/

yesterday i got an incense order, and friday i got a postcard order back from the printer. also, yesterday i finally found the CD mailer that i was looking for, so that i can mail the CD i got from to darol, who first turned me on to xir music, so i’ll probably go to the mall after i go to the post office. i hate having to go to the verizon store for just about any reason, because 1) i used to work for the company that makes the software that goes inside the phones they sell people, so in spite of the fact that i don’t know what all the little icons mean, i know more about what goes on inside the phones than they do, which means that 2) i can tell right away when they don’t know how the software works and lie to me instead of saying that they don’t know, which is every time i go to the verizon store. i don’t like being lied to, and i’d prefer that if they are going to lie to somebody, that they do it with someone other than me, especially when they are going to lie to me and then charge me to use their products.

we had a fremont phil rehearsal last night: the first time we’ve gotten together since the MF ended. we discussed the issue that goes along side the fact that fred wants to “license” his music to us, which is that if we’re not going to play any of fred’s music, we’ve got to start coming up with more music to replace it. we’ve currently got a good deal of music which isn’t fred’s (which is a good thing, since we’re scheduled to play at “Shower To The People”, seanjohn and josh’s late night cabaret thing, on friday), but we need more. to that end, i’ve decided that i really need to set up my keyboard so that i can do things like start arranging The Holy Modal Rounders’ “Euphoria” – which we want to play at OCF this year – and fixing the parts for my own pieces… and, potentially, creating new ones. we’ve got to have something to replace “Pyros On Parade” (which those of you who have actually seen the Fremont Phil will probably know as “The Siren Song”).

i got a “supplement” at costco the last time i was there, which says that it compares to “focus factor”, whose spam i have noticed on TV for the past couple of years. it has at least 10 lines of 6-point type of ingredients, and provides at least 100% RDA of nutrients like vitamins A, B1, B2, B6, B12, C, D and E. it is claims that it is “nutrition for your brain” and it “supports concentration and memory”.

well, i need that…

i need that… my memory has become even more sieve-like in the past few years, which is not to say that it was a great retainer of recent information before my injury… not to mention my… er… um… uh…

8/

aphasia, that’s it… aphasia…

8/

but, at the same time, it also says “these statements have not been evaluated by the FDA”, which makes me think that i don’t really know whether this will do anything at all or not, despite my general suspicion of government agencies.

Waco, Oklahoma City, Columbine and Virginia Tech
by Anthony Gregory
April 19, 2007

This week in April marks the fourteenth anniversary of the Waco massacre, the eighth anniversary of Columbine, and, in years to come, the anniversary of the largest mass shooting in American history – the massacre at Virginia Tech.

It is also the twelfth anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing, which itself was carried out precisely two years after the Waco standoff ended in a deadly conflagration.

All civilized human beings see such horrific acts of mass killing as unspeakably tragic. In the midst of any such explosion of seemingly senseless violence, it is common to hear questions as to how and why such a thing happened, so we can formulate possible answers as to how such atrocities might not happen again, or at least happen much less frequently than they do.

Starting with the most recent of these horrors, and moving backwards in time, it is worth reflecting on the most commonly heard explanations for such violence.

Already, some conservatives are looking for some connection between the Korean student who committed mass murder on 4/16 and Islamist terrorists. Since 9/11, we have heard many acts of gang violence and individual criminality blamed on Islam itself. Ultimately, this is all to shore up more support for the state’s foreign and domestic war on terror.

The center-left media, however, are making the predictable inferences: The problem is easy access to weapons. It’s exceedingly easy to purchase handguns in the state of Virginia. What is ignored is that it’s illegalto bring such weapons on to the campus of Virginia Tech, and certainly illegal to use them for murder. Another law wouldn’t have disrupted the plans of a madman determined to kill.

As for madness, we are also hearing reports that Seung Cho had written disturbing stories and had a history of psychiatric treatment. Perhaps if the university community and local police had been more vigilant, his unsettling proclivity for violent fantasy would have been caught before it culminated in real-life slaughter.

Of course, thousands of American youth write graphically appalling stories and many more behave like loners and outcasts. The implication here is that a certain form of suspicious behavior needs to be caught early and somehow managed by schools and the government. People should take notice of who is in their communities, but when it’s politicized and taken to the extreme, this is the basis for criminalizing thought and censoring ideas, for the preemptive law enforcement we see in the dystopian film, Minority Report.

Just as thousands of students probably exhibit peculiar behavior, thousands probably wore trench coats in the late 1990s and millions saw The Matrix.But back in 1999, after the Columbine massacre transpired, the two killers had been in the “Trench Coat Mafia” and the conclusion was that somehow loners wearing such clothing and keeping to themselves, inspired by the violent action in the film The Matrix, should be watched closely. In that case, the perpetrators had broken plenty of gun laws, but weak gun laws were also blamed. Just as with Virginia Tech, odd behavior and inanimate objects were seen as the problem.

Rewind back to Oklahoma City in 1995 and it was rightwing, anti-government opinions that were blamed. It made little sense to attack the availability of such pedestrian items as rental trucks and fertilizer. So the focus was on ideas. Even rightwing talk radio had contributed to this terrorist attack, we were told. What was not so emphasized was the fact that McVeigh had been trained by the US military and had been a Gulf War veteran. He was said to have seen his victims as collateral damage in an act of war against the US government, largely for what it had done, exactly two years before, at Waco.

Going back to 1993, the Waco massacre would seem to have altogether different lessons. This couldn’t have been attributed to anti-social, anti-establishment, anti-government attitudes and conduct – could it? After all, it was the US government that was responsible for this tragedy. It had smashed the side of the Branch Davidian home, filled the inside with flammable and poisonous CS gas, and projected incendiary devices at the building. The fire that took the lives of about 80 civilians was the end of a 51-day standoff that the US government had initiated as a public relations booster for the ATF.

Yet, in response to Waco, the establishment line was simply that the Davidians, and especially their leader David Koresh, were crazed, dangerous and hostile. The rationales in this case were always dubious and shifting: determined to wage their staged raid, the feds had first claimed the Davidians had a methamphetamine lab, partly to bureaucratically justify assistance from the military, and then claimed they had illegal weapons. It was claimed that Koresh was totally irrational and beyond negotiation. He was at points compared to Adolf Hitler and other such dictatorial loons. The feds also claimed he was holding his followers hostage, yet when people tried to leave the building during the standoff, the FBI would throw flash-bang grenades toward the home, frightening them back into it.

Even Waco was blamed not on overbearing government, but on antisocial, extremist, anti-government thinking and behavior. The Davidians had been living at peace with their neighbors, but they were different enough, weird enough, to warrant state aggression.

And here we see the true commonality in all these massacres: They were all acts of mass aggression and inhumanity and they all existed in the context of a highly politicized world where state aggression is wrongly defended but private aggression is rightfully condemned.

The deaths at Waco were a direct result of federal violence against the Branch Davidians. Oklahoma City was Waco’s terroristic antithesis, conducted by men trained in the techniques and moral principles of government warfare. Columbine and Virginia Tech both happened at government facilities, where the soft, hidden coercion of gun control and government protection failed to protect anyone and only left victims defenseless. Both Columbine and Virginia Tech also each occurred against a backdrop of a foreign war of aggression – Clinton’s war with Serbia, in the case of Columbine, and Bush’s war in Iraq, in the case of Virginia Tech. Both Clinton’s and Bush’s wars consumed about as many lives per day as each of these school massacres did in a single instance, yet we are automatically supposed to regard one type of violence as completely different from the other type.

But what underlies all these acts of mass violence is murderous aggression against the individual, the initiation of force against the peaceful. All such violence should be condemned and none of it excused. But the reason we instead hear complaints of out-of-season coats on teenagers or violent video games, easy access to handguns or gruesome stories, bizarre religions or conservative radio is because all such idiosyncratic scapegoats detract from the evil of aggression itself and thus serve the purposes of more government control.

The state is the embodiment of organized aggression. It is, after all, the legal institution that monopolizes the right to commit theft (taxation), kidnapping (mandatory attendance laws), slavery (conscription), and mass murder (war). It imprisons millions, loots trillions and slaughters civilians as a matter of course. Its powers cannot be expanded and directed to foster peace, since, to the extent it is empowered, it is at war with the principles of civilization and the rule of law – the principles that the rest of us must abide for us to be considered acting legally and peacefully among other humans.

Ultimately, the state attributes massacres to drugged or insufficiently drugged quirky extremists, gun accessibility and anti-American, anti-mainstream thinking because understanding the true universal evils – aggression, and the ideologies that allow for aggression, of which statism is the most common variety – would reveal that the state itself is the very fulfillment of atrocity. Indeed, statism is ubiquitous in our culture, and it is very mainstream. It is why governments get away with dropping bombs on children.

By deemphasizing the nature and evil of aggression itself and instead focusing on the quirks and antisocial habits of terrorists and criminals, the establishment line on all these tragedies and mass crimes effectively covers up that the greatest problem in all human affairs is interpersonal aggression, whatever the source. This serves the violent democratic state, which can always claim to stand for moderation, mainstream ideology and social normality.

But it is the democratic state in America that slaughtered American Indians at Wounded Knee and religious outsiders at Waco. It is that state that nuked Nagasaki and set Cambodia ablaze. It is that organization of moderation and the American way of life that was starving Iraqi children with a hunger blockade as the Oklahoma City bombing unfolded, dropping cluster bombs on Yugoslavia during the Columbine tragedy, and maintaining violent occupations abroad as Virginia Tech fell victim to the largest school shooting in America.

Is it wrong to point this out? Why should it be? The US government and its kept media spin every human tragedy as a reason to give more power to the state – even though, in nearly every such tragedy, the government either totally failed to make matters better or succeeded catastrophically in making matters much worse. Why shouldn’t we show, at every opportunity, that giving more power to the state only makes such tragedies more likely?

The state is not the direction to look for solutions to instances of mass aggression, for the state itself is aggression. Its aggressive nature only encourages more aggression throughout society, as it warps the public morality and gives example after example demonstrating that might makes right, at least from the mainstream political perspective. Its intimidation and extortion are clear every April when Americans have to turn in their tax forms, knowing they can be jailed if they made an honest mistake or even if the IRS simply bungles something. And the naked aggression of the state and its institutional disadvantage at protecting people should also be clear every April, as we reflect on the massacres the government has conducted, the ones it enabled, and the ones it failed to prevent.

i need a favour: i need someone to hit Hybrid Elephant, right-click on any image, choose “View Image” (or whatever it says like that) and tell me what happens.

if you wanna be really adventurous (and have the free time and web space), you can right-click, select “copy image location” (or whatever it says) and post the resulting URI in the appropriate image tag on a web page somewhere (in other words, hotlink an image from Hybrid Elephant), and respond to this with a link so that i can go and see what it does.

nothing bad will happen, i promise. 8) one disadvantage to having a fixed IP address is that it doesn’t work for me, regardless of which computer i’m using, and i don’t have ready access to any IP addresses other than my own…

Reid: U.S. can’t win the war in Iraq
April 19, 2007
By ANNE FLAHERTY

WASHINGTON – Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said Thursday the war in Iraq is “lost,” triggering an angry backlash by Republicans who said the top Democrat had turned his back on the troops.

The bleak assessment was the sharpest yet from Reid, who has vowed to send President Bush legislation calling for combat to end next year. Reid said he told Bush on Wednesday that he thought the war could not be won through military force and only through political, economic and diplomatic means.

“I believe myself that the secretary of state, secretary of defense and — you have to make your own decisions as to what the president knows — (know) this war is lost and the surge is not accomplishing anything as indicated by the extreme violence in Iraq yesterday,” said Reid, D-Nev.

Republicans pounced on the comment as evidence, they said, that Democrats do not support the troops.

“I can’t begin to imagine how our troops in the field, who are risking their lives every day, are going to react when they get back to base and hear that the Democrat leader of the United States Senate has declared the war is lost,” said Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky.

The exchange came as the House headed toward a vote Thursday on whether to demand that troops leave Iraq next year. Last month, the House passed legislation that funded the war in Iraq but ordered combat missions to end by September 2008. The Senate passed similar, less-sweeping legislation that would set a nonbinding goal of bringing combat troops home by March 31, 2008.

Bush said he would veto either measure and warned that troops are being harmed by Congress’ failure to deliver the funds quickly.

The Pentagon says it has enough money to pay for the Iraq war through June. The Army is taking “prudent measures” aimed at ensuring that delays in the bill financing the war do not harm troop readiness, according to instructions sent to Army commanders and budget officials April 14.

While $70 billion that Congress provided in September for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan has mostly run out, the Army has told department officials to slow the purchase of nonessential repair parts and other supplies, restrict the use of government charge cards, and limit travel.

The Army also will delay contracts for facilities repair and environmental restoration, according to instructions from Army Comptroller Nelson Ford. He said the accounting moves are similar to those enacted last year when the Republican-led Congress did not deliver a war funding bill to Bush until mid-June.

More stringent steps would be taken in May, such as a hiring freeze and firing temporary employees, but exceptions are made for any war-related activities or anything that “would result immediately in the degradation of readiness standards” for troops in Iraq or those slated for deployment.

White House spokeswoman Dana Perino called the Democrat’s stance “disturbing” and all but dared Reid to cut off funding for the war.

“If this is his true feeling, then it makes one wonder if he has the courage of his convictions and therefore will decide to defund the war,” she said.

Reid has left that possibility open. The majority leader supports separate legislation that would cut off funding for combat missions after March 2008. The proposal would allow money spent on such efforts as counterterrorism efforts and training Iraqi security forces.

Reid and other Democrats were initially reluctant to discuss such draconian measures to end the war, but no longer.

“I’m not sure much is impossible legislatively,” Reid said Thursday. “The American people have indicated . . . that they are fed up with what’s going on.”

Al-Qaida chief appointed minister of war
By MAAMOUN YOUSSEF
April 19, 2007

CAIRO, Egypt – A Sunni insurgent coalition posted Web videos on Thursday naming the head of al-Qaida in Iraq as “minister of war” and showing the execution of 20 men it said were members of the Iraqi military and security forces.

The announcement unveiling an “Islamic Cabinet” for Iraq appeared to have multiple aims. One was to present the Islamic State of Iraq coalition as a “legitimate” alternative to the U.S.-backed, Shiite-led administration of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki — and to demonstrate that it was growing in power despite the U.S. military push against insurgents.

It also likely sought to establish the coalition’s dominance among insurgents after an embarrassing public dispute with other Iraqi Sunni militants.

The Islamic State of Iraq is a coalition of eight insurgent groups, the most powerful of them al-Qaida in Iraq. It was first announced in October, claiming to hold territory in the Sunni-dominated areas of western and central Iraq.

In the Cabinet announcement video, a man identified as a spokesman for the group appeared, with his face obscured, speaking from behind a desk with a flat-screen computer.

“It is the duty at our present stage to form this Cabinet, the first Islamic Cabinet, which has faith in God,” said the spokesman, wearing robes and a red headdress.

He denounced Iraq’s rulers for the past decades — including Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party and the present government — saying they “spread corruption and ruined the country and its people, until God helped the mujahideen (holy warriors) bring torture upon them.”

“Now the Islamic State emerges as a state for Islam and the mujahideen,” he said.

He then listed a 10-member “Cabinet,” including Abu Hamza al-Muhajer as “war minister.” Al-Muhajer is the name announced as the successor of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaida in Iraq who was killed in the summer of 2006. The U.S. military and Iraqi government have identified him by another pseudonym, Abu Ayyub al-Masri.

The names listed by the spokesman were all pseudonyms and their real names were not known — though the pseudonyms included the names of some major Sunni Arab tribes.

The Islamic state is led by Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, who holds the title of “emir (prince) of the faithful.”

Sheik Abu Abdul-Rahman al-Falahi was named as the emir’s “first minister,” the spokesman said. Other positions included ministers of information, “prisoners and martyrs,” agriculture and health.

The video came on the heels of a rare public dispute between the coalition and other insurgent groups.

In past week, another Sunni insurgent group, the Islamic Army in Iraq, has issued statements accusing al-Qaida of killing its members and trying to force others to join its ranks. Al-Baghdadi tried to patch up the dispute by issuing a Web audiotape this week calling for unity and promising to punish any of his group’s members who kill other insurgents.

Al-Qaida in Iraq is blamed for some of the deadliest suicide bombings against Shiite civilians, as well as numerous attacks on U.S. troops and Iraqi soldiers and police. The U.S. military has blamed it for a devastating bombing Wednesday in Baghdad’s Sadriyah market.

The message came after hours after another video from the group showing a masked gunmen walking down a row of men, blindfolded and bound, shooting each in the back of the head.

The video purported to show 20 Iraqi police and soldiers that the Islamic State in Iraq claimed six days earlier to have kidnapped northwest of Baghdad. It had threatened to kill them after 48 hours unless the government freed female prisoners and handed over police accused of rapes in the northern town of Tal Afar.

The Iraqi government has denied that 20 police and soldiers were kidnapped. Interior Ministry spokesman Brig. Gen. Abdul-Karim Khalaf said Thursday that the men in the video could not be identified and said the insurgents may have dressed up civilians to kill them.

“We checked with our commands then and all the troops were accounted for,” Khalaf told The Associated Press. “They are immoral criminals. They have used all criminal methods and we don’t rule out that they executed civilians who they dressed in military uniforms.”

it’s 4/20… you know what that means… 8)

Back to 18?
A new chorus of critics says it’s time to lower the drinking age.
By Radley Balko
April 12, 2007

It’s been 20 years that America has had a minimum federal drinking age. The policy began to gain momentum in the early 1980s, when the increasingly influential Mothers Against Drunk Driving added the federal minimum drinking age to its legislative agenda. By 1984, it had won over a majority of the Congress.

President Reagan initially opposed the law on federalism grounds but eventually was persuaded by his transportation secretary at the time, now-Sen. Elizabeth Dole.

Over the next three years every state had to choose between adopting the standard or forgoing federal highway funding; most complied. A few held out until the deadline, including Vermont, which fought the law all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court (and lost).

Twenty years later, the drawbacks of the legislation are the same as they were when it was passed.

The first is that the age set by the legislation is basically arbitrary. The U.S. has the highest drinking age in the world (a title it shares with Indonesia, Mongolia, Palau). The vast majority of the rest of the world sets the minimum age at 17 or 16 or has no minimum age at all.

Supporters of the federal minimum argue that the human brain continues developing until at least the age of 21.

Alcohol expert Dr. David Hanson of the State University of New York at Potsdam argues such assertions reek of junk science. They’re extrapolated from a study on lab mice, he explains, as well as from a small sample of actual humans already dependent on alcohol or drugs. Neither is enough to make broad proclamations about the entire population.

If the research on brain development is true, the U.S. seems to be the only country to have caught on to it.

Oddly enough, high school students in much of the rest of the developed world — where lower drinking ages and laxer enforcement reign — do considerably better than U.S. students on standardized tests.

The second drawback of the federal drinking age is that it set the stage for tying federal mandates to highway funds, enabling Congress to meddle in all sorts of state and local affairs it has no business attempting to regulate — so long as it can make a tortured argument about highway safety.

Efforts to set national speed limits, seat belt laws, motorcycle helmet laws and set a national blood-alcohol standard for DWI cases have rested on the premise that the federal government can blackmail the states with threats to cut off funding.

The final drawback is pretty straightforward: It makes little sense that America considers an 18-year-old mature enough to marry, to sign a contract, to vote and to fight and die for his country, but not mature enough to decide whether or not to have a beer.

So for all of those drawbacks, has the law worked? Supporters seem to think so. Their primary argument is the dramatic drop in the number of alcohol-related traffic fatalities since the minimum age first passed Congress in 1984. They also cite relative drops in the percentage of underage drinkers before and after the law went into effect.

But a new chorus is emerging to challenge the conventional wisdom. The most vocal of these critics is John McCardell Jr., the former president of Middlebury College in Vermont. McCardell’s experience in higher education revealed to him that the federal age simply wasn’t working.

It may have negligibly reduced total underage consumption, but those who did consume were much more likely to do so behind closed doors and to drink to excess in the short time they had access to alcohol. McCardell recently started the organization Choose Responsibility, which advocates moving the drinking age back to 18.

McCardell explains that the drop in highway fatalities often cited by supporters of the 21 minimum age actually began in the late 1970s, well before the federal drinking age set in.

What’s more, McCardell recently explained in an online chat for the “Chronicle of Higher Education,” the drop is better explained by safer and better built cars, increased seat belt use and increasing awareness of the dangers of drunken driving than in a federal standard.

The age at highest risk for an alcohol-related auto fatality is 21, followed by 22 and 23, an indication that delaying first exposure to alcohol until young adults are away from home may not be the best way to introduce them to drink.

McCardell isn’t alone. Kenyon College President S. Georgia Nugent has expressed frustration with the law, particularly in 2005 after the alcohol-related death of a Kenyon student. And former Time magazine editor and higher ed reporter Barrett Seaman echoed McCardell’s concerns in 2005.

The period since the 21 minimum drinking age took effect has been “marked by a shift from beer to hard liquor,” Seaman wrote in Time, “consumed not in large social settings, since that was now illegal, but furtively and dangerously in students’ residences. In my reporting at colleges around the country, I did not meet any presidents or deans who felt the 21-year age minimum helps their efforts to curb the abuse of alcohol on their campuses.”

The federal drinking age has become somewhat sacrosanct among public health activists, who’ve consistently relied on the accident data to quell debate over the law’s merits.

They’ve moved on to other battles, such as scolding parents for giving their own kids a taste of alcohol before the age of 21 or attacking the alcohol industry for advertising during sporting events or in magazines aimed at adults that are sometimes read by people under the age of 21.

But after 20 years, perhaps it’s time to take a second look—a sound, sober (pardon the pun), science-based look—at the law’s costs and benefits, as well as the sound philosophical objections to it.

McCardell provides a welcome voice in a debate too often dominated by hysterics. But beyond McCardell, Congress should really consider abandoning the federal minimum altogether, or at least the federal funding blackmail that gives it teeth.

State and local governments are far better at passing laws that reflect the values, morals and habits of their communities.

but in britain…

Call to raise drinking age to 21
Britain should consider making the legal drinking age 21 as it has “lost the plot” when it comes to regulating alcohol, policy pundits claim.
15 April 2007

The UK has one of the worst problems in Europe with a fifth of children aged 11 to 15 drinking at least once a week.

Public Policy Research (PPR), the journal of the IPPR think-tank, says it is time to practise “tough love”, such as reviewing the minimum drinking age.

The government said there were already tough measures in place.

Binge culture
But columnist Jasper Gerard argues in PPR: “When it comes to booze, society seems to have lost its senses.”

He says current regulations are failing to tackle the growing trend of underage and binge drinking.

By raising the age threshold, he claims: “It is at least possible that those in their early and mid teens will not see drink as something they will soon be allowed to do so therefore they might as well start doing it surreptitiously now.”

Alternatively, he proposes getting 18-year-olds to carry smart cards which record how much they have drunk each night and making it an offence to serve more alcohol to anyone under-21 who had already consumed more than three units.

Crackdown
He conceded that no measure would stamp out youthful drinking entirely, but said it was time for a crackdown.

Alcohol Concern agreed that further action was needed, but did not think raising the legal drinking age would help, pointing out that other countries which have already done this, including the US, still have a problem with youth drinking.

But a spokesman added: “There is a sense that the regulatory landscape is lopsided.

“Licensing reform, resistance to a debate on taxation, the cancellation of the Alcohol Misuse Enforcement Campaigns which raised the profile of underage drinking issues – all happening at a time when alcohol-related harm is rising – seem to suggest the government is more concerned about making sure the drinks industry operates with as little interference as possible than with seriously grasping the nettle.”

However, David Poley, chief executive of the Portman Group, said the drinks industry was already subject to “very strict and effective” regulations.

He said: “What we really need to do is change the drinking culture through education rather than making drinking a social taboo by raising the legal drinking age.”

A government spokesman said: “The majority of people drink sensibly and responsibly and the government has no plans to raise the minimum drinking age.

“Instead, we are using a combination of effective education and tough enforcement to change the behaviour of the minority that don’t.”

He said there had been campaigns to cut sales to underage drinkers and restrictions on TV advertising of alcohol, as well as education programmes in schools about the dangers of drinking.

‘Talking’ CCTV scolds offenders
“Talking” CCTV cameras that tell off people dropping litter or committing anti-social behaviour are to be extended to 20 areas across England.
4 April 2007

They are already used in Middlesbrough where people seen misbehaving can be told to stop via a loudspeaker, controlled by control centre staff.

About £500,000 will be spent adding speaker facilities to existing cameras.

Shadow home affairs minister James Brokenshire said the government should be “very careful” over the cameras.

Home Secretary John Reid told BBC News there would be some people, “in the minority who will be more concerned about what they claim are civil liberties intrusions”.

“But the vast majority of people find that their life is more upset by people who make their life a misery in the inner cities because they can’t go out and feel safe and secure in a healthy, clean environment because of a minority of people,” he added.

The talking cameras did not constitute “secret surveillance”, he said.

“It’s very public, it’s interactive.”

Competitions would also be held at schools in many of the areas for children to become the voice of the cameras, Mr Reid said.

Downing Street’s “respect tsar”, Louise Casey, said the cameras “nipped problems in the bud” and reduced bureaucracy.

“It gets across the message, ‘please don’t litter our streets because someone else will have to pay to pick up that litter again’,” she told BBC News.

“Half a billion pounds a year is spent picking up litter.”

‘Scarecrow policing’
Mr Brokenshire told the BBC he had a number of concerns about the use of the talking cameras.

“Whether this is moving down a track of almost ‘scarecrow’ policing rather than real policing – actually insuring that we have more bobbies on the beat – I think that’s what we really want to see, albeit that an initiative like this may be an effective tool in certain circumstances.

“We need to be very careful about applying this more generally.”

The talking cameras will be installed in Southwark, Barking and Dagenham, in London, Reading, Harlow, Norwich, Ipswich, Plymouth, Gloucester, Derby, Northampton, Mansfield, Nottingham, Coventry, Sandwell, Wirral, Blackpool, Salford, South Tyneside and Darlington.

In Middlesbrough, staff in a control centre monitor pictures from 12 talking cameras and can communicate directly with people on the street.

Local councillor Barry Coppinger says the scheme has prevented fights and criminal damage and cut litter levels.

“Generally, I think it has raised awareness that the town centre is a safe place to visit and also that we are keeping an eye open to make sure it is safe,” he said.

But opponent and campaigner Steve Hills said: “Apart from being absurd, I think it’s rather sad that we should have faceless cameras barking at us on orders from who? Who sets these cameras up?”

There are an estimated 4.2 million CCTV cameras in Britain.

A recent study by the government’s privacy watchdog, the Information Commissioner, warned that Britain was becoming a “surveillance society”.

George Orwell, Big Brother is watching your house
31 March, 2007

The Big Brother nightmare of George Orwell’s 1984 has become a reality – in the shadow of the author’s former London home.

It may have taken a little longer than he predicted, but Orwell’s vision of a society where cameras and computers spy on every person’s movements is now here.

According to the latest studies, Britain has a staggering 4.2million CCTV cameras – one for every 14 people in the country – and 20 per cent of cameras globally. It has been calculated that each person is caught on camera an average of 300 times daily.

Use of spy cameras in modern-day Britain is now a chilling mirror image of Orwell’s fictional world, created in the post-war Forties in a fourth-floor flat overlooking Canonbury Square in Islington, North London.

On the wall outside his former residence – flat number 27B – where Orwell lived until his death in 1950, an historical plaque commemorates the anti-authoritarian author. And within 200 yards of the flat, there are 32 CCTV cameras, scanning every move.

Orwell’s view of the tree-filled gardens outside the flat is under 24-hour surveillance from two cameras perched on traffic lights.

The flat’s rear windows are constantly viewed from two more security cameras outside a conference centre in Canonbury Place.

In a lane, just off the square, close to Orwell’s favourite pub, the Compton Arms, a camera at the rear of a car dealership records every person entering or leaving the pub.

Within a 200-yard radius of the flat, there are another 28 CCTV cameras, together with hundreds of private, remote-controlled security cameras used to scrutinise visitors to homes, shops and offices.

The message is reminiscent of a 1949 poster to mark the launch of Orwell’s 1984: ‘Big Brother is Watching You’.

In the Shriji grocery store in Canonbury Place, three cameras focus on every person in the shop. Owner Minesh Amin explained: ‘They are for our security and safety. Without them, people would steal from the shop. Although this is a nice area, there are always bad people who cause trouble by stealing.’

Three doors away, in the dry-cleaning shop run by Malik Zafar, are another two CCTV cameras.

‘I need to know who is coming into my shop,’ explained Mr Zafar, who spent £400 on his security system.

This week, the Royal Academy of Engineering (RAE) produced a report highlighting the astonishing numbers of CCTV cameras in the country and warned how such ‘Big Brother tactics’ could eventually put lives at risk.

The RAE report warned any security system was ‘vulnerable to abuse, including bribery of staff and computer hackers gaining access to it’. One of the report’s authors, Professor Nigel Gilbert, claimed the numbers of CCTV cameras now being used is so vast that further installations should be stopped until the need for them is proven.

One fear is a nationwide standard for CCTV cameras which would make it possible for all information gathered by individual cameras to be shared – and accessed by anyone with the means to do so.

The RAE report follows a warning by the Government’s Information Commissioner Richard Thomas that excessive use of CCTV and other information-gathering was ‘creating a climate of suspicion’.

me: hello?

alex: hi this is alex, i’m calling from (some mortgage company)

me: could you tell me how you got this number?

alex: i got it from our marketing department… do you have a fixed rate mortgage?

me: i can’t answer your question in the interests of this investigation. is this your full time job?

alex: is this my full time job?

me: or do you just work part time?

alex: full time, do you have a fixed rate mortgage?

me: i can’t provide you with this information because i need unprejudiced answers. do you also live in washington?

alex: no, i live in san diego, california. do you have a fixed rate mortgage?

me: an answer to this question might jeopardise the partiality of this investigation and it would prove unreliable. how long have you been in the telemarketing business?

alex: telemarketing? but i’m not trying to sell you anything…

me: you are in the business of cold-calling people and asking personal questions, how long have you been in that business?

alex: but i’m not trying to sell you anything…

me: i’m sorry, but the information you ask for is unfortunately not available to you. how long have you been in the telemarketing business?

alex: oh, er, um, five years… more than five years…

me: and do you like your job?

alex: do i like my job?

me: is it a pleasant job?

alex: (says something to somebody on his end of the phone) do i like my job?

me: yes, that’s what i said…

alex: <CLICK!>

i’ve always wanted a spam-caller to hang up on me in frustration!

chalk up another one to the counterscript!!

okay, that’s it… i’m going to paint more on my art car… big surprise, huh?

i’ve discovered that putting my web site address on my car will help in a couple of big ways: first, it will give a place where people who see it “in motion” to go and find out more information about it, rather than just wondering, and second, it will prompt people to look at the rest of my web site as well.

i made this decision when i was at the bank this afternoon. i was in the drive-up, and this lady in the car next to me started asking questions about my car, and the artwork on it, and who did it… and when i said i had done it myself, she wanted to know if i could make signs in arabic for her business, and then she asked if i know anything about web sites… when i gave her my card, she said “oh, you do everything”… so, if nothing else, i got a potential customer.

i left my car at the “public, you-don’t-have-to-pay-for-a-parking space” near the baseball stadium on the west side of the tracks, and wandered for an hour or so before showing up at westlake mall, which is where the “walk” was going to take place. it turned out that the woman who was monitoring the cameras had a rehearsal this evening, so instead of being a 5 hour walk, it was only 3 hours… they positively hurried compared to the pace they would have taken if it had been 5 hours. i took a whole bunch of pictures – which are linked behind this picture, which is one of my favourites:

this picture was taken as i was leaving. i think i broke ezra’s concentration, but they had been walking for around 2 hours at that point, so i think it was justified.

also, i saw my father, who was taking pictures. i took several pictures of him without him noticing who i was… then i came up behind him and said his name, he turned, and recognised me immediately. i’m not really too surprised, considering that i haven’t even spoken with him in over 2 years, but at the same time, i took 5 pictures of him, and i was fairly obvious about it, but he didn’t realise it was me until the last one, where i actually said his name before clicking the shutter.

i also found a whole bunch of interesting stickers, grafitti, another glove, a wig… ?

i also made an empirical discovery while driving home that was significant enough to me that i had to take a picture of it, despite the fact that i was driving on the freeway at the time. while i was driving, i drove into a squall, and right at the north edge of it, there was a rainbow that was so bright that i could actually see “the end” of the rainbow, except that it was a circle. unfortunately i couldn’t get a picture of the entire circle, because it was at street level, at the edge of my car… which was hurtling south on I-5 at the speed of traffic at the time, so give me a break. but my discovery that “the end” of the rainbow doesn’t exist solves a mystery that i have wondered about my whole life.

ezra just called. apparently he is participating in a 5-hour walk between 5th and pine, and 4th and pine, in downtown seattle today. they’re going to take 5 hours – from 4:00 pm to 9:00 pm – to walk 1 block, without interacting with anybody.

this is definitely my kid.

i’m going to take pictures. should be interesting.

microsoft, among others, sees the invention and popularization of the general-purpose computer as a historical mistake.

ALL of the things you can currently do with computers (write text, do mathematical computations, edit graphics, edit sound, manipulate financial records, statistically analyze data) are things that the general public should not have access to for free. period. all these things should be rented to consumers, with ultimate control of the data involved residing in the renting corporations, not the individual users.

if windows vista’s control mechanisms become established, linux will become, by default, useless, and shortly thereafter, illegal. after all, of what use is a computer that can’t communicate with any public or corporate data (i.e. if ALL commercial content is protected, including commercial websites)? and if this is the case, any attempt by non-“trusted” computers to access this data will be definition be illegal cracking.

which is why this article is particularly scary…

Researchers Explore Scrapping Internet
By ANICK JESDANUN
April 13, 2007

NEW YORK (AP) – Although it has already taken nearly four decades to get this far in building the Internet, some university researchers with the federal government’s blessing want to scrap all that and start over.

The idea may seem unthinkable, even absurd, but many believe a “clean slate” approach is the only way to truly address security, mobility and other challenges that have cropped up since UCLA professor Leonard Kleinrock helped supervise the first exchange of meaningless test data between two machines on Sept. 2, 1969.

The Internet “works well in many situations but was designed for completely different assumptions,” said Dipankar Raychaudhuri, a Rutgers University professor overseeing three clean-slate projects. “It’s sort of a miracle that it continues to work well today.”

No longer constrained by slow connections and computer processors and high costs for storage, researchers say the time has come to rethink the Internet’s underlying architecture, a move that could mean replacing networking equipment and rewriting software on computers to better channel future traffic over the existing pipes.

Even Vinton Cerf, one of the Internet’s founding fathers as co- developer of the key communications techniques, said the exercise was “generally healthy” because the current technology “does not satisfy all needs.”

One challenge in any reconstruction, though, will be balancing the interests of various constituencies. The first time around, researchers were able to toil away in their labs quietly. Industry is playing a bigger role this time, and law enforcement is bound to make its needs for wiretapping known.

There’s no evidence they are meddling yet, but once any research looks promising, “a number of people (will) want to be in the drawing room,” said Jonathan Zittrain, a law professor affiliated with Oxford and Harvard universities. “They’ll be wearing coats and ties and spilling out of the venue.”

The National Science Foundation wants to build an experimental research network known as the Global Environment for Network Innovations, or GENI, and is funding several projects at universities and elsewhere through Future Internet Network Design, or FIND.

Rutgers, Stanford, Princeton, Carnegie Mellon and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are among the universities pursuing individual projects. Other government agencies, including the Defense Department, have also been exploring the concept.

The European Union has also backed research on such initiatives, through a program known as Future Internet Research and Experimentation, or FIRE. Government officials and researchers met last month in Zurich to discuss early findings and goals.

A new network could run parallel with the current Internet and eventually replace it, or perhaps aspects of the research could go into a major overhaul of the existing architecture.

These clean-slate efforts are still in their early stages, though, and aren’t expected to bear fruit for another 10 or 15 years—assuming Congress comes through with funding.

Guru Parulkar, who will become executive director of Stanford’s initiative after heading NSF’s clean-slate programs, estimated that GENI alone could cost $350 million, while government, university and industry spending on the individual projects could collectively reach $300 million. Spending so far has been in the tens of millions of dollars.

And it could take billions of dollars to replace all the software and hardware deep in the legacy systems.

Clean-slate advocates say the cozy world of researchers in the 1970s and 1980s doesn’t necessarily mesh with the realities and needs of the commercial Internet.

“The network is now mission critical for too many people, when in the (early days) it was just experimental,” Zittrain said.

The Internet’s early architects built the system on the principle of trust. Researchers largely knew one another, so they kept the shared network open and flexible—qualities that proved key to its rapid growth.

But spammers and hackers arrived as the network expanded and could roam freely because the Internet doesn’t have built-in mechanisms for knowing with certainty who sent what.

The network’s designers also assumed that computers are in fixed locations and always connected. That’s no longer the case with the proliferation of laptops, personal digital assistants and other mobile devices, all hopping from one wireless access point to another, losing their signals here and there.

Engineers tacked on improvements to support mobility and improved security, but researchers say all that adds complexity, reduces performance and, in the case of security, amounts at most to bandages in a high-stakes game of cat and mouse.

Workarounds for mobile devices “can work quite well if a small fraction of the traffic is of that type,” but could overwhelm computer processors and create security holes when 90 percent or more of the traffic is mobile, said Nick McKeown, co-director of Stanford’s clean- slate program.

The Internet will continue to face new challenges as applications require guaranteed transmissions—not the “best effort” approach that works better for e-mail and other tasks with less time sensitivity.

Think of a doctor using teleconferencing to perform a surgery remotely, or a customer of an Internet-based phone service needing to make an emergency call. In such cases, even small delays in relaying data can be deadly.

And one day, sensors of all sorts will likely be Internet capable.

Rather than create workarounds each time, clean-slate researchers want to redesign the system to easily accommodate any future technologies, said Larry Peterson, chairman of computer science at Princeton and head of the planning group for the NSF’s GENI.

Even if the original designers had the benefit of hindsight, they might not have been able to incorporate these features from the get- go. Computers, for instance, were much slower then, possibly too weak for the computations needed for robust authentication.

“We made decisions based on a very different technical landscape,” said Bruce Davie, a fellow with network-equipment maker Cisco Systems Inc., which stands to gain from selling new products and incorporating research findings into its existing line.

“Now, we have the ability to do all sorts of things at very high speeds,” he said. “Why don’t we start thinking about how we take advantage of those things and not be constrained by the current legacy we have?”

Of course, a key question is how to make any transition—and researchers are largely punting for now.

“Let’s try to define where we think we should end up, what we think the Internet should look like in 15 years’ time, and only then would we decide the path,” McKeown said. “We acknowledge it’s going to be really hard but I think it will be a mistake to be deterred by that.”

Kleinrock, the Internet pioneer at UCLA, questioned the need for a transition at all, but said such efforts are useful for their out-of- the-box thinking.

“A thing called GENI will almost surely not become the Internet, but pieces of it might fold into the Internet as it advances,” he said.

Think evolution, not revolution.

Princeton already runs a smaller experimental network called PlanetLab, while Carnegie Mellon has a clean-slate project called 100 x 100.

These days, Carnegie Mellon professor Hui Zhang said he no longer feels like “the outcast of the community” as a champion of clean-slate designs.

Construction on GENI could start by 2010 and take about five years to complete. Once operational, it should have a decade-long lifespan.

FIND, meanwhile, funded about two dozen projects last year and is evaluating a second round of grants for research that could ultimately be tested on GENI.

These go beyond projects like Internet2 and National LambdaRail, both of which focus on next-generation needs for speed.

Any redesign may incorporate mechanisms, known as virtualization, for multiple networks to operate over the same pipes, making further transitions much easier. Also possible are new structures for data packets and a replacement of Cerf’s TCP/IP communications protocols.

“Almost every assumption going into the current design of the Internet is open to reconsideration and challenge,” said Parulkar, the NSF official heading to Stanford. “Researchers may come up with wild ideas and very innovative ideas that may not have a lot to do with the current Internet.”

Board requires pharmacies to fill all orders
April 12, 2007

TUMWATER — After years of debate, the state has made it official: Patients must get prescriptions filled even if pharmacists are opposed to the drugs for religious or moral reasons.

The Washington State Board of Pharmacy voted unanimously Thursday to adopt a policy that applies to all kinds of medications, although it clearly was aimed at Plan B, a birth control measure that critics say is tantamount to abortion. Most health experts refute that claim.

Druggists with personal objections to a drug still could have a limited escape by getting a co-worker to fill an order. But that would apply only if the patient is able to get the prescription in the same pharmacy visit.

Essentially, the regulations require pharmacies either to dispense legally prescribed drugs or make sure customers could get the medication elsewhere in a timely fashion.

The issue has been debated since 2004, when the state board began receiving complaints that pharmacists were refusing to fill some prescriptions for moral, religious or ethical reasons — primarily prescriptions for Plan B, sometimes known as the morning-after pill. It can lower the risk of pregnancy by up to 89 percent if taken within 72 hours of unprotected sex.

The rule-making process began in January 2006 and resulted in more than a year of workshops, drafts, amended drafts and public hearings.

Last year, the state Pharmacy Board declared that pharmacists might be able to deny prescriptions for personal reasons.

That was the pharmacy association’s preferred route, but the policy angered Gov. Chris Gregoire, women’s groups and some state lawmakers.

The rule adopted Thursday is a compromise worked out last year by Gregoire, women’s advocates and the Washington State Pharmacy Association.

Pharmacy board member Rosemarie Duffy said Thursday the new rule is about more than the Plan B drug. It’s about antibiotics that have to be taken within four hours or supplies for diabetics.

But it was the morning-after pill that caused opponents to refer to proponents as “baby killers” and proponents to point out that when a person’s doctor fills out a prescription, that prescription should be filled in a timely manner.

According to its manufacturer, Plan B works like a regular birth control pill. It prevents pregnancy mainly by stopping the release of an egg from the ovary, and may also prevent the fertilization of an egg. It may also work by preventing the egg from attaching to the uterus.

Because Plan B is used to prevent an unplanned pregnancy, it will not affect an existing pregnancy. It is different from the abortion pill RU-486.

The new rule is likely to go into effect by mid-June.

What happens if a pharmacist or pharmacy refuses a prescription? Board member Gary Harris said once the board receives a complaint, the pharmacist or pharmacy will come before the board for disciplinary action. Each individual case will be reviewed by a board member, who could recommend a fine or probation, for example.

That recommendation would then be reviewed by a panel before action is taken.

Twilight Zone
Pass through the portal to the alternate reality of the War Party’s propagandists.
by Gregory Cochran
April 9, 2007

I think almost everybody has wondered what would have happened if they had made a different choice in life, taken a different path. If you didn’t think of it by yourself, seeing “It’s a Wonderful Life” a few hundred times has probably driven the point home by now.

Many authors have applied this idea to big turning points, writing about alternative histories in which Hitler won World War II (Fatherland) or the South won the Civil War (Bring the Jubilee). The notion may not be pure fantasy: the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics suggests that these Worlds-of-If may really exist, although forever unreachable.

Or maybe not so unreachable. A very odd pattern of statements by prominent supporters and members of the Bush administration suggests that we may have some truly unusual visitors—literally out-of-this-world.

You see, the president and his associates keep referring to historical events that never happened, at least not as they did in the fields we know. And they keep referring to the same historical events. Over and over, the secretary of state and the (now former) secretary of defense have referred to guerrilla warfare in Germany after the Nazi surrender. But there just wasn’t any. You can’t find it in the history books or in the memories of people who were there at the time. My uncle was in Bavaria in the summer of 1945: no trouble. Secretary Rumsfeld repeatedly talked about the similarities between today’s Iraq and America after the Revolutionary War, but again, I’m pretty sure that there aren’t any. I don’t believe we found tortured corpses in the streets of Philadelphia every morning back in 1784. And why does President Bush keep saying that Saddam refused to admit those UN arms inspectors back in 2002 and early 2003? Why did Condoleezza Rice, in 2000, say that Iran was probably backing the Taliban, when in fact the two had almost gone to war in 1998?

Now some might say that these statements were just talking points—that is, lies—but I sure wouldn’t want to accuse anyone of lying. More to the point, there have been many a historical statements that are just strange and don’t seem to advance any particular political agenda. For example, when President Bush said that the Japanese lost two carriers sunk and one damaged at the Battle of Midway (instead of losing all four, which is what actually happened), who gained? When POTUS said that Sweden has no army (it does), what political argument was advanced?

We’re talking about the rulers of the most powerful nation on earth. It can’t be that they’re just pig-ignorant—of their own history, yet. There has to be a deeper, more subtle explanation.

We can learn more by examining these statements in detail, including those of the administration’s close supporters. They too keep diverging from the history we know. Recently, Rep. Don Young of Alaska quoted Lincoln as saying, “Congressmen who willfully take actions during wartime that damage morale and undermine the military are saboteurs, and should be arrested, exiled or hanged.” Lincoln never said that, of course. Cliff May, at National Review, said “President Roosevelt waited until after World War II to put in place a commission to investigate what mistakes led to Pearl Harbor.” Pretty fly for a dead guy: FDR passed on just before Germany surrendered, well before the Japanese quit. And anyhow, the first of many Pearl Harbor investigations—the Roberts Commission—started only 11 days after the sneak attack.

More and more, I get the feeling that Bush and his friends come from one of the Worlds-of-If—a sad place, even worse than the one we actually live in, a world in which their odd statements are true.

When tired or stressed, they refer to the history that they lived and learned in school. But their briefing books recount an alternate history in which Iraq in 2002 was not a poor and backward country but the coming threat, as our Germany was in 1938. A history in which America, after the Revolution, was a flaming cesspool like Iraq today, a world in which Lincoln executed unruly legislators. One in which World War II dragged on long after the indecisive Battle of Midway. One in which our occupation of Germany was plagued by guerrilla warfare. One in which we’ve been fighting World War IV with Iran and Syria for 25 years, as Jim Woolsey has repeatedly said. One in which a hostile Islamic Caliphate has bothered to go through the formality of coming into existence.

Close study of such statements might eventually give a rough sketch of that other world’s history. This would be of immense value, for it would allow us to learn much about the inner workings of the historical process, just as the discovery of a different kind of life on Mars would be an epochal event in biology. The fact that a history that diverged from ours at least 200 years ago, judging from the differences in the Revolution, still bears some resemblance to ours—still had a battle of Midway, just not the same battle—suggests that unknown overarching forces constrain the course of events. But the story is never the same in detail.

The casual mention of World War IV strongly implies that these interlopers also had a World War III. They must have suffered greatly—maybe bombed out, likely short on resources such as oil. I would guess that those disasters irretrievably darkened their political perspective, just as our World War I left an entire generation embittered and disaffected. Certainly some kind of civilizational blight is needed to explain Vice President Cheney’s “Dark Lord” shtick.

Somehow they came here, so there must be a gate or portal. Judging from the spatial clustering of identifiable visitors, it’s somewhere in Washington, probably very close to the AEI building. Possibly inside. It may be an accident of nature, or it might be a scientific wonder used for judicial exile, just as bad Kryptonians were sent to the Phantom Zone. You have to wonder about that when you consider the kind of guys they’re sending.

If two-way transfer is possible, there could be vast business opportunities. There are reasons to suspect that science and engineering took a very different path over there: their limited understanding of nuclear weapons—they seem to think that nukes are roughly as easy to build as bottle rockets—suggests that nuclear fission may never have been developed on their timeline. But even if they’re behind us in some areas, they’re likely to be ahead in others. I’d guess that they know far more about torture than we do. Practice makes perfect.

Even if they’ve never split the atom, they have much to offer. The very existence of such a portal is the most significant new scientific result in a century, far more important than any result expected from the most advanced accelerator. The sheer physical presence of Condoleezza Rice on this plane suggests, indeed demands, new physics that may lead to the long-desired marriage of quantum mechanics and general relativity. It’s either this or string theory.

Of course this means that we need to corral some or all of these visitors for study and experimentation. Such experiments would, I suppose, interfere with their civil liberties, if they had any, but they’re obviously not citizens of these United States. Technically they’re illegal aliens. Gitmo’s a-waitin’.

And perhaps we can do more. Obviously this other world is in a sorry state and could stand some saving. They’re our closer-than-brothers—our other selves living in a world gone bad, a world in which the toast always falls butter-side down, a world where Mr. Potter owns the Building and Loan. Undoubtedly an irrepressible desire for freedom burns in every heart there. As soon as possible, we should begin preparing for their liberation.

It will be a cakewalk.

[email protected], which is the administrative authority for blogspot, is apparently refusing to accept reports from spamcop concerning spammers who set up their spamvertisements at blogspot dot com.

which is one of the reasons why i don’t subscribe to blogs on blogspot – the other reason is because for some reason, blogspot won’t let me comment, even anonymously. i think it has to do with the fact that my policy is to reject any cookies from them, but i’m not sure.

i took my car to get it emission tested. it passed. in fact, according to the guy at the emissions testing place, it monitors the emissions automatically, so they don’t actually have to do anything – for which i paid them $15 – although it did have an error that wasn’t related to emissions, which is P1195. anybody know what a P1195 error on a ’96 mazda protegé means?

then i went to Re-PC to get another $5 CD-RW drive, because the external one that i have connected to my mac died yesterday and instead of buying a new external drive i decided that it would be a lot easier to replace the drive part in the external drive i’ve already got. it was. it was a matter of breaking the “WARRANTY VOID IF THIS SEAL IS BROKEN” seal, taking out 6 screws, replacing the drive with one that i got for $5, and putting everything back together again. it works. all i had to do was spend $5 and take a little time. why isn’t everything having to do with a computer this easy to fix?

after that, i went to the utilikilts store for my free kilt. it turns out that we were comped “up to a workmen’s”, which, for me, meant $225.10. based on the kilt i was wearing when i went in, the guy said that he would give me a 24.5″ hem, and they’ll ship it to me when it has been hemmed – they make all their kilts with a 26″ hem, and then charge you extra for a shorter hem, $25 for 2½" of cloth… but what am i complaining about? i don’t have to pay for it!

Kurt Vonnegut, Writer of Classics of the American Counterculture, Dies at 84
By DINITIA SMITH
April 11, 2007

i wanted to just post that, since it is so appropriate, but then i thought better of it and i’ll go ahead and post the rest of the article, and the picture as well.

Kurt Vonnegut, whose dark comic talent and urgent moral vision in novels like “Slaughterhouse-Five,” “Cat’s Cradle” and “God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater” caught the temper of his times and the imagination of a generation, died Wednesday night in Manhattan. He was 84 and had homes in Manhattan and in Sagaponack on Long Island.

His death was reported by Morgan Entrekin, a longtime family friend, who said Mr. Vonnegut suffered brain injuries as a result of a fall several weeks ago.

Mr. Vonnegut wrote plays, essays and short fiction. But it was his novels that became classics of the American counterculture, making him a literary idol, particularly to students in the 1960s and ’70s. Dog-eared paperback copies of his books could be found in the back pockets of blue jeans and in dorm rooms on campuses throughout the United States.

Like Mark Twain, Mr. Vonnegut used humor to tackle the basic questions of human existence: Why are we in this world? Is there a presiding figure to make sense of all this, a god who in the end, despite making people suffer, wishes them well?

He also shared with Twain a profound pessimism. “Mark Twain,” Mr. Vonnegut wrote in his 1991 book, “Fates Worse Than Death: An Autobiographical Collage,” “finally stopped laughing at his own agony and that of those around him. He denounced life on this planet as a crock. He died.”

Not all Mr. Vonnegut’s themes were metaphysical. With a blend of vernacular writing, science fiction, jokes and philosophy, he also wrote about the banalities of consumer culture, for example, or the destruction of the environment.

His novels — 14 in all — were alternate universes, filled with topsy-turvy images and populated by races of his own creation, like the Tralfamadorians and the Mercurian Harmoniums. He invented phenomena like chrono-synclastic infundibula (places in the universe where all truths fit neatly together) as well as religions, like the Church of God the Utterly Indifferent and Bokononism (based on the books of a black British Episcopalian from Tobago “filled with bittersweet lies,” a narrator says).

The defining moment of Mr. Vonnegut’s life was the firebombing of Dresden, Germany, by Allied forces in 1945, an event he witnessed firsthand as a young prisoner of war. Thousands of civilians were killed in the raids, many of them burned to death or asphyxiated. “The firebombing of Dresden,” Mr. Vonnegut wrote, “was a work of art.” It was, he added, “a tower of smoke and flame to commemorate the rage and heartbreak of so many who had had their lives warped or ruined by the indescribable greed and vanity and cruelty of Germany.”

His experience in Dresden was the basis of “Slaughterhouse-Five,” which was published in 1969 against the backdrop of war in Vietnam, racial unrest and cultural and social upheaval. The novel, wrote the critic Jerome Klinkowitz, “so perfectly caught America’s transformative mood that its story and structure became best-selling metaphors for the new age.”

To Mr. Vonnegut, the only possible redemption for the madness and apparent meaninglessness of existence was human kindness. The title character in his 1965 novel, “God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater,” summed up his philosophy:

“Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies — ‘God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.’ ”

Mr. Vonnegut eschewed traditional structure and punctuation. His books were a mixture of fiction and autobiography, prone to one-sentence paragraphs, exclamation points and italics. Graham Greene called him “one of the most able of living American writers.” Some critics said he had invented a new literary type, infusing the science-fiction form with humor and moral relevance and elevating it to serious literature.

He was also accused of repeating himself, of recycling themes and characters. Some readers found his work incoherent. His harshest critics called him no more than a comic book philosopher, a purveyor of empty aphorisms.

With his curly hair askew, deep pouches under his eyes and rumpled clothes, he often looked like an out-of-work philosophy professor, typically chain smoking, his conversation punctuated with coughs and wheezes. But he also maintained a certain celebrity, as a regular on panels and at literary parties in Manhattan and on the East End of Long Island, where he lived near his friend and fellow war veteran Joseph Heller, another darkly comic literary hero of the age.

Mr. Vonnegut was born in Indianapolis in 1922, a fourth-generation German-American and the youngest of three children. His father, Kurt Sr., was an architect. His mother, Edith, came from a wealthy brewery family. Mr. Vonnegut’s brother, Bernard, who died in 1997, was a physicist and an expert on thunderstorms.

During the Depression, the elder Vonnegut went for long stretches without work, and Mrs. Vonnegut suffered from episodes of mental illness. “When my mother went off her rocker late at night, the hatred and contempt she sprayed on my father, as gentle and innocent a man as ever lived, was without limit and pure, untainted by ideas or information,” Mr. Vonnegut wrote. She committed suicide, an act that haunted her son for the rest of his life.

He had, he said, a lifelong difficulty with women. He remembered an aunt once telling him, “ ‘All Vonnegut men are scared to death of women.’ ”

“My theory is that all women have hydrofluoric acid bottled up inside,” he wrote.

Mr. Vonnegut went east to attend Cornell University, but he enlisted in the Army before he could get a degree. The Army initially sent him to the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie-Mellon) in Pittsburgh and the University of Tennessee to study mechanical engineering.

In 1944 he was shipped to Europe with the 106th Infantry Division and shortly saw combat in the Battle of the Bulge. With his unit nearly destroyed, he wandered behind enemy lines for several days until he was captured and sent to a prisoner of war camp near Dresden, the architectural jewel of Germany.

Assigned by his captors to make vitamin supplements, he was working with other prisoners in an underground meat locker when British and American war planes started carpet bombing the city, creating a firestorm above him. The work detail saved his life.

Afterward, he and his fellow prisoners were assigned to remove the dead.

“The corpses, most of them in ordinary cellars, were so numerous and represented such a health hazard that they were cremated on huge funeral pyres, or by flamethrowers whose nozzles were thrust into the cellars, without being counted or identified,” he wrote in “Fates Worse Than Death.” When the war ended, Mr. Vonnegut returned to the United States and married his high school sweetheart, Jane Marie Cox. They settled in Chicago in 1945. The couple had three children: Mark, Edith and Nanette. In 1958, Mr. Vonnegut’s sister, Alice, and her husband died within a day of each other, she of cancer and he in a train crash. The Vonneguts adopted their children, Tiger, Jim and Steven.

In Chicago, Mr. Vonnegut worked as a police reporter for the Chicago City News Bureau. He also studied for a master’s degree in anthropology at the University of Chicago, writing a thesis on “The Fluctuations Between Good and Evil in Simple Tales.” It was rejected unanimously by the faculty. (The university finally awarded him a degree almost a quarter of a century later, allowing him to use his novel “Cat’s Cradle” as his thesis.)

In 1947, he moved to Schenectady, N.Y., and took a job in public relations for the General Electric Company. Three years later he sold his first short story, “Report on the Barnhouse Effect,” to Collier’s magazine and decided to move his family to Cape Cod, Mass., where he wrote fiction for magazines like Argosy and The Saturday Evening Post. To bolster his income, he taught emotionally disturbed children, worked at an advertising agency and at one point started an auto dealership.

His first novel was “Player Piano,” published in 1952. A satire on corporate life — the meetings, the pep talks, the cultivation of bosses — it also carries echoes of Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World.” It concerns an engineer, Paul Proteus, who is employed by the Ilium Works, a company similar to General Electric. Proteus becomes the leader of a band of revolutionaries who destroy machines that they think are taking over the world.

“Player Piano” was followed in 1959 by “The Sirens of Titan,” a science fiction novel featuring the Church of God of the Utterly Indifferent. In 1961 he published “Mother Night,” involving an American writer awaiting trial in Israel on charges of war crimes in Nazi Germany. Like Mr. Vonnegut’s other early novels, they were published as paperback originals. And like “Slaughterhouse-Five,” in 1972, and a number of other Vonnegut novels, “Mother Night” was adapted for film, in 1996, starring Nick Nolte.

In 1963, Mr. Vonnegut published “Cat’s Cradle.” Though it initially sold only about 500 copies, it is widely read today in high school English classes. The novel, which takes its title from an Eskimo game in which children try to snare the sun with string, is an autobiographical work about a family named Hoenikker. The narrator, an adherent of the religion Bokononism, is writing a book about the bombing of Hiroshima and comes to witness the destruction of the world by something called Ice-Nine, which, on contact, causes all water to freeze at room temperature.

Mr. Vonnegut shed the label of science fiction writer with “Slaughterhouse-Five.” It tells the story of Billy Pilgrim, an infantry scout (as Mr. Vonnegut was), who discovers the horror of war. “You know — we’ve had to imagine the war here, and we have imagined that it was being fought by aging men like ourselves,” an English colonel says in the book. “We had forgotten that wars were fought by babies. When I saw those freshly shaved faces, it was a shock. My God, my God — I said to myself, ‘It’s the Children’s Crusade.’ ”

As Mr. Vonnegut was, Billy is captured and assigned to manufacture vitamin supplements in an underground meat locker, where the prisoners take refuge from Allied bombing.

In “Slaughterhouse-Five,” Mr. Vonnegut introduced the recurring character of Kilgore Trout, his fictional alter ego. The novel also featured a signature Vonnegut phrase.

“Robert Kennedy, whose summer home is eight miles from the home I live in all year round,” Mr. Vonnegut wrote at the end of the book, “was shot two nights ago. He died last night. So it goes.

“Martin Luther King was shot a month ago. He died, too. So it goes. And every day my Government gives me a count of corpses created by military science in Vietnam. So it goes.”

One of many Zen-like words and phrases that run through Mr. Vonnegut’s books, “so it goes” became a catchphrase for opponents of the Vietnam war.

“Slaughterhouse-Five” reached No.1 on best-seller lists, making Mr. Vonnegut a cult hero. Some schools and libraries have banned it because of its sexual content, rough language and scenes of violence.

After the book was published, Mr. Vonnegut went into severe depression and vowed never to write another novel. Suicide was always a temptation, he wrote. In 1984, he tried to take his life with sleeping pills and alcohol.

“The child of a suicide will naturally think of death, the big one, as a logical solution to any problem,” he wrote. His son Mark also suffered a breakdown, in the 1970s, from which he recovered, writing about it in a book, “Eden Express: A Memoir of Insanity.”

Forsaking novels, Mr. Vonnegut decided to become a playwright. His first effort, “Happy Birthday, Wanda June,” opened Off Broadway in 1970 to mixed reviews. Around this time he separated from his wife, Jane, and moved to New York. (She remarried and died in 1986.)

In 1979 Mr. Vonnegut married the photographer Jill Krementz. They have a daughter, Lily. They survive him, as do all his other children.

Mr. Vonnegut returned to novels with “Breakfast of Champions, or Goodbye Blue Monday” (1973), calling it a “tale of a meeting of two lonesome, skinny, fairly old white men on a planet which was dying fast.” This time his alter ego is Philboyd Sludge, who is writing a book about Dwayne Hoover, a wealthy auto dealer. Hoover has a breakdown after reading a novel written by Kilgore Trout, who reappears in this book, and begins to believe that everyone around him is a robot.

In 1997, Mr. Vonnegut published “Timequake,” a tale of the millennium in which a wrinkle in space-time compels the world to relive the 1990s. The book, based on an earlier failed novel of his, was, in his own words, “a stew” of plot summaries and autobiographical writings. Once again, Kilgore Trout is a character. “If I’d wasted my time creating characters,” Mr. Vonnegut said in defense of his “recycling,” “I would never have gotten around to calling attention to things that really matter.”

Though it was a bestseller, it also met with mixed reviews. “Having a novelist’s free hand to write what you will does not mean you are entitled to a free ride,” R. Z. Sheppard wrote in Time. But the novelist Valerie Sayers, in The New York Times Book Review, wrote: “The real pleasure lies in Vonnegut’s transforming his continuing interest in the highly suspicious relationship between fact and fiction into the neatest trick yet played on a publishing world consumed with the furor over novel versus memoir.”

Mr. Vonnegut said in the prologue to “Timequake” that it would be his last novel. And so it was.

His last book, in 2005, was a collection of biographical essays, “A Man Without a Country.” It, too, was a best seller.

In concludes with a poem written by Mr. Vonnegut called “Requiem,” which has these closing lines:

When the last living thing

has died on account of us,

how poetical it would be

if Earth could say,

in a voice floating up

perhaps

from the floor

of the Grand Canyon,

“It is done.”

People did not like it here.

the moisture festival ended more than a week ago, and i am still recovering… and it’s not just my ankle, i’ve been sleeping a lot, even though i’ve been doing relatively normal stuff. i’ve had two rehearsals, of the banda gozona last week, and one of the ballard sedentary sousa band last night. the BSSB is rehearsing in the sanctuary of the crown lutheran church these days – a step up from the “tree frog room” at small faces – which is slightly bizarre, but the accoustics are excellent. we haven’t had a fremont philharmonic rehearsal since the moisture festival ended, but we’d better get on the ball, because we’ve got a late night cabaret with shackjack on the 28th. we’ve heard from fred, for the first time since the cirque show that we had to put off last year because he decided to bail on us at the last minute. fred has decided that he wants to “license” his music to fremonstor for $700 a year, which he’s not going to get. personally, i think we should out-and-out buy a few characteristic pieces, like meteor ballade, pyros on parade, widow’s lament, and so forth, for an agreed upon price, and then just not play anything else of fred’s. we’ve got plenty of other music and between kiki, stuart and i we should be able to come up with enough new music to keep us going, besides learning standard covers, which we were unable to do when fred was in charge of the band.

i’ve planned on going in for my kilt-fitting on friday. i haven’t decided, but i am torn between black and something else. my tendency is to think black, but i may get inspired before it actually happens. if nothing else, i’ll consider it payment for having to perform on buckets (not to mention wearing a diaper) after having sprained my ankle.

a long time ago, i pestered a friend of mine into loaning me 4 albums by gentle giant, whereupon i spent almost the whole day playing gentle giant, and recording the albums to cassette, a task which i enjoyed quite a bit, but the friend got annoyed with and eventually left because he “couldn’t take any more gentle giant”.

i am in the process of downloading bit torrents of, and listening to those four gentle giant albums, getting stoned, and feeling nostalgic…

EDIT: i just found a more reliable bit torrent that contains 15 gentle giant albums and a whole bunch of other stuff… bit torrent rocks, and mininova FTW!

Pearls Before Breakfast
Can one of the nation’s great musicians cut through the fog of a D.C. rush hour? Let’s find out.
By Gene Weingarten
April 8, 2007

HE EMERGED FROM THE METRO AT THE L’ENFANT PLAZA STATION AND POSITIONED HIMSELF AGAINST A WALL BESIDE A TRASH BASKET. By most measures, he was nondescript: a youngish white man in jeans, a long-sleeved T-shirt and a Washington Nationals baseball cap. From a small case, he removed a violin. Placing the open case at his feet, he shrewdly threw in a few dollars and pocket change as seed money, swiveled it to face pedestrian traffic, and began to play.

It was 7:51 a.m. on Friday, January 12, the middle of the morning rush hour. In the next 43 minutes, as the violinist performed six classical pieces, 1,097 people passed by. Almost all of them were on the way to work, which meant, for almost all of them, a government job. L’Enfant Plaza is at the nucleus of federal Washington, and these were mostly mid-level bureaucrats with those indeterminate, oddly fungible titles: policy analyst, project manager, budget officer, specialist, facilitator, consultant.

Each passerby had a quick choice to make, one familiar to commuters in any urban area where the occasional street performer is part of the cityscape: Do you stop and listen? Do you hurry past with a blend of guilt and irritation, aware of your cupidity but annoyed by the unbidden demand on your time and your wallet? Do you throw in a buck, just to be polite? Does your decision change if he’s really bad? What if he’s really good? Do you have time for beauty? Shouldn’t you? What’s the moral mathematics of the moment?

On that Friday in January, those private questions would be answered in an unusually public way. No one knew it, but the fiddler standing against a bare wall outside the Metro in an indoor arcade at the top of the escalators was one of the finest classical musicians in the world, playing some of the most elegant music ever written on one of the most valuable violins ever made. His performance was arranged by The Washington Post as an experiment in context, perception and priorities — as well as an unblinking assessment of public taste: In a banal setting at an inconvenient time, would beauty transcend?

The musician did not play popular tunes whose familiarity alone might have drawn interest. That was not the test. These were masterpieces that have endured for centuries on their brilliance alone, soaring music befitting the grandeur of cathedrals and concert halls.

The acoustics proved surprisingly kind. Though the arcade is of utilitarian design, a buffer between the Metro escalator and the outdoors, it somehow caught the sound and bounced it back round and resonant. The violin is an instrument that is said to be much like the human voice, and in this musician’s masterly hands, it sobbed and laughed and sang — ecstatic, sorrowful, importuning, adoring, flirtatious, castigating, playful, romancing, merry, triumphal, sumptuous.

So, what do you think happened?

HANG ON, WE’LL GET YOU SOME EXPERT HELP.

Leonard Slatkin, music director of the National Symphony Orchestra, was asked the same question. What did he think would occur, hypothetically, if one of the world’s great violinists had performed incognito before a traveling rush-hour audience of 1,000-odd people?

“Let’s assume,” Slatkin said, “that he is not recognized and just taken for granted as a street musician . . . Still, I don’t think that if he’s really good, he’s going to go unnoticed. He’d get a larger audience in Europe . . . but, okay, out of 1,000 people, my guess is there might be 35 or 40 who will recognize the quality for what it is. Maybe 75 to 100 will stop and spend some time listening.”

So, a crowd would gather?

“Oh, yes.”

And how much will he make?

“About $150.”

Thanks, Maestro. As it happens, this is not hypothetical. It really happened.

“How’d I do?”

We’ll tell you in a minute.

“Well, who was the musician?”

Joshua Bell.

“NO!!!”

A onetime child prodigy, at 39 Joshua Bell has arrived as an internationally acclaimed virtuoso. Three days before he appeared at the Metro station, Bell had filled the house at Boston’s stately Symphony Hall, where merely pretty good seats went for $100. Two weeks later, at the Music Center at Strathmore, in North Bethesda, he would play to a standing-room-only audience so respectful of his artistry that they stifled their coughs until the silence between movements. But on that Friday in January, Joshua Bell was just another mendicant, competing for the attention of busy people on their way to work.

Bell was first pitched this idea shortly before Christmas, over coffee at a sandwich shop on Capitol Hill. A New Yorker, he was in town to perform at the Library of Congress and to visit the library’s vaults to examine an unusual treasure: an 18th-century violin that once belonged to the great Austrian-born virtuoso and composer Fritz Kreisler. The curators invited Bell to play it; good sound, still.

“Here’s what I’m thinking,” Bell confided, as he sipped his coffee. “I’m thinking that I could do a tour where I’d play Kreisler’s music . . .”

He smiled.

“. . . on Kreisler’s violin.”

It was a snazzy, sequined idea — part inspiration and part gimmick — and it was typical of Bell, who has unapologetically embraced showmanship even as his concert career has become more and more august. He’s soloed with the finest orchestras here and abroad, but he’s also appeared on “Sesame Street,” done late-night talk TV and performed in feature films. That was Bell playing the soundtrack on the 1998 movie “The Red Violin.” (He body-doubled, too, playing to a naked Greta Scacchi.) As composer John Corigliano accepted the Oscar for Best Original Dramatic Score, he credited Bell, who, he said, “plays like a god.”

When Bell was asked if he’d be willing to don street clothes and perform at rush hour, he said:

“Uh, a stunt?”

Well, yes. A stunt. Would he think it . . . unseemly?

Bell drained his cup.

“Sounds like fun,” he said.

Bell’s a heartthrob. Tall and handsome, he’s got a Donny Osmond-like dose of the cutes, and, onstage, cute elides into hott. When he performs, he is usually the only man under the lights who is not in white tie and tails — he walks out to a standing O, looking like Zorro, in black pants and an untucked black dress shirt, shirttail dangling. That cute Beatles-style mop top is also a strategic asset: Because his technique is full of body — athletic and passionate — he’s almost dancing with the instrument, and his hair flies.

He’s single and straight, a fact not lost on some of his fans. In Boston, as he performed Max Bruch’s dour Violin Concerto in G Minor, the very few young women in the audience nearly disappeared in the deep sea of silver heads. But seemingly every single one of them — a distillate of the young and pretty — coalesced at the stage door after the performance, seeking an autograph. It’s like that always, with Bell.

Bell’s been accepting over-the-top accolades since puberty: Interview magazine once said his playing “does nothing less than tell human beings why they bother to live.” He’s learned to field these things graciously, with a bashful duck of the head and a modified “pshaw.”

For this incognito performance, Bell had only one condition for participating. The event had been described to him as a test of whether, in an incongruous context, ordinary people would recognize genius. His condition: “I’m not comfortable if you call this genius.” “Genius” is an overused word, he said: It can be applied to some of the composers whose work he plays, but not to him. His skills are largely interpretive, he said, and to imply otherwise would be unseemly and inaccurate.

It was an interesting request, and under the circumstances, one that will be honored. The word will not again appear in this article.

It would be breaking no rules, however, to note that the term in question, particularly as applied in the field of music, refers to a congenital brilliance — an elite, innate, preternatural ability that manifests itself early, and often in dramatic fashion.

One biographically intriguing fact about Bell is that he got his first music lessons when he was a 4-year-old in Bloomington, Ind. His parents, both psychologists, decided formal training might be a good idea after they saw that their son had strung rubber bands across his dresser drawers and was replicating classical tunes by ear, moving drawers in and out to vary the pitch.

TO GET TO THE METRO FROM HIS HOTEL, a distance of three blocks, Bell took a taxi. He’s neither lame nor lazy: He did it for his violin.

Bell always performs on the same instrument, and he ruled out using another for this gig. Called the Gibson ex Huberman, it was handcrafted in 1713 by Antonio Stradivari during the Italian master’s “golden period,” toward the end of his career, when he had access to the finest spruce, maple and willow, and when his technique had been refined to perfection.

“Our knowledge of acoustics is still incomplete,” Bell said, “but he, he just . . . knew.”

Bell doesn’t mention Stradivari by name. Just “he.” When the violinist shows his Strad to people, he holds the instrument gingerly by its neck, resting it on a knee. “He made this to perfect thickness at all parts,” Bell says, pivoting it. “If you shaved off a millimeter of wood at any point, it would totally imbalance the sound.” No violins sound as wonderful as Strads from the 1710s, still.

The front of Bell’s violin is in nearly perfect condition, with a deep, rich grain and luster. The back is a mess, its dark reddish finish bleeding away into a flatter, lighter shade and finally, in one section, to bare wood.

“This has never been refinished,” Bell said. “That’s his original varnish. People attribute aspects of the sound to the varnish. Each maker had his own secret formula.” Stradivari is thought to have made his from an ingeniously balanced cocktail of honey, egg whites and gum arabic from sub-Saharan trees.

Like the instrument in “The Red Violin,” this one has a past filled with mystery and malice. Twice, it was stolen from its illustrious prior owner, the Polish virtuoso Bronislaw Huberman. The first time, in 1919, it disappeared from Huberman’s hotel room in Vienna but was quickly returned. The second time, nearly 20 years later, it was pinched from his dressing room in Carnegie Hall. He never got it back. It was not until 1985 that the thief — a minor New York violinist — made a deathbed confession to his wife, and produced the instrument.

Bell bought it a few years ago. He had to sell his own Strad and borrow much of the rest. The price tag was reported to be about $3.5 million.

All of which is a long explanation for why, in the early morning chill of a day in January, Josh Bell took a three-block cab ride to the Orange Line, and rode one stop to L’Enfant.

AS METRO STATIONS GO, L’ENFANT PLAZA IS MORE PLEBEIAN THAN MOST. Even before you arrive, it gets no respect. Metro conductors never seem to get it right: “Leh-fahn.” “Layfont.” “El’phant.”

At the top of the escalators are a shoeshine stand and a busy kiosk that sells newspapers, lottery tickets and a wallfull of magazines with titles such as Mammazons and Girls of Barely Legal. The skin mags move, but it’s that lottery ticket dispenser that stays the busiest, with customers queuing up for Daily 6 lotto and Powerball and the ultimate suckers’ bait, those pamphlets that sell random number combinations purporting to be “hot.” They sell briskly. There’s also a quick-check machine to slide in your lotto ticket, post-drawing, to see if you’ve won. Beneath it is a forlorn pile of crumpled slips.

On Friday, January 12, the people waiting in the lottery line looking for a long shot would get a lucky break — a free, close-up ticket to a concert by one of the world’s most famous musicians — but only if they were of a mind to take note.

Bell decided to begin with “Chaconne” from Johann Sebastian Bach’s Partita No. 2 in D Minor. Bell calls it “not just one of the greatest pieces of music ever written, but one of the greatest achievements of any man in history. It’s a spiritually powerful piece, emotionally powerful, structurally perfect. Plus, it was written for a solo violin, so I won’t be cheating with some half-assed version.”

Bell didn’t say it, but Bach’s “Chaconne” is also considered one of the most difficult violin pieces to master. Many try; few succeed. It’s exhaustingly long — 14 minutes — and consists entirely of a single, succinct musical progression repeated in dozens of variations to create a dauntingly complex architecture of sound. Composed around 1720, on the eve of the European Enlightenment, it is said to be a celebration of the breadth of human possibility.

If Bell’s encomium to “Chaconne” seems overly effusive, consider this from the 19th-century composer Johannes Brahms, in a letter to Clara Schumann: “On one stave, for a small instrument, the man writes a whole world of the deepest thoughts and most powerful feelings. If I imagined that I could have created, even conceived the piece, I am quite certain that the excess of excitement and earth-shattering experience would have driven me out of my mind.”

So, that’s the piece Bell started with.

He’d clearly meant it when he promised not to cheap out this performance: He played with acrobatic enthusiasm, his body leaning into the music and arching on tiptoes at the high notes. The sound was nearly symphonic, carrying to all parts of the homely arcade as the pedestrian traffic filed past.

Three minutes went by before something happened. Sixty-three people had already passed when, finally, there was a breakthrough of sorts. A middle-age man altered his gait for a split second, turning his head to notice that there seemed to be some guy playing music. Yes, the man kept walking, but it was something.

A half-minute later, Bell got his first donation. A woman threw in a buck and scooted off. It was not until six minutes into the performance that someone actually stood against a wall, and listened.

Things never got much better. In the three-quarters of an hour that Joshua Bell played, seven people stopped what they were doing to hang around and take in the performance, at least for a minute. Twenty-seven gave money, most of them on the run — for a total of $32 and change. That leaves the 1,070 people who hurried by, oblivious, many only three feet away, few even turning to look.

No, Mr. Slatkin, there was never a crowd, not even for a second.

It was all videotaped by a hidden camera. You can play the recording once or 15 times, and it never gets any easier to watch. Try speeding it up, and it becomes one of those herky-jerky World War I-era silent newsreels. The people scurry by in comical little hops and starts, cups of coffee in their hands, cellphones at their ears, ID tags slapping at their bellies, a grim danse macabre to indifference, inertia and the dingy, gray rush of modernity.

Even at this accelerated pace, though, the fiddler’s movements remain fluid and graceful; he seems so apart from his audience — unseen, unheard, otherworldly — that you find yourself thinking that he’s not really there. A ghost.

Only then do you see it: He is the one who is real. They are the ghosts.

IF A GREAT MUSICIAN PLAYS GREAT MUSIC BUT NO ONE HEARS . . . WAS HE REALLY ANY GOOD?

It’s an old epistemological debate, older, actually, than the koan about the tree in the forest. Plato weighed in on it, and philosophers for two millennia afterward: What is beauty? Is it a measurable fact (Gottfried Leibniz), or merely an opinion (David Hume), or is it a little of each, colored by the immediate state of mind of the observer (Immanuel Kant)?

We’ll go with Kant, because he’s obviously right, and because he brings us pretty directly to Joshua Bell, sitting there in a hotel restaurant, picking at his breakfast, wryly trying to figure out what the hell had just happened back there at the Metro.

“At the beginning,” Bell says, “I was just concentrating on playing the music. I wasn’t really watching what was happening around me . . .”

Playing the violin looks all-consuming, mentally and physically, but Bell says that for him the mechanics of it are partly second nature, cemented by practice and muscle memory: It’s like a juggler, he says, who can keep those balls in play while interacting with a crowd. What he’s mostly thinking about as he plays, Bell says, is capturing emotion as a narrative: “When you play a violin piece, you are a storyteller, and you’re telling a story.”

With “Chaconne,” the opening is filled with a building sense of awe. That kept him busy for a while. Eventually, though, he began to steal a sidelong glance.

“It was a strange feeling, that people were actually, ah . . .”

The word doesn’t come easily.

“. . . ignoring me.”

Bell is laughing. It’s at himself.

“At a music hall, I’ll get upset if someone coughs or if someone’s cellphone goes off. But here, my expectations quickly diminished. I started to appreciate any acknowledgment, even a slight glance up. I was oddly grateful when someone threw in a dollar instead of change.” This is from a man whose talents can command $1,000 a minute.

Before he began, Bell hadn’t known what to expect. What he does know is that, for some reason, he was nervous.

“It wasn’t exactly stage fright, but there were butterflies,” he says. “I was stressing a little.”

Bell has played, literally, before crowned heads of Europe. Why the anxiety at the Washington Metro?

“When you play for ticket-holders,” Bell explains, “you are already validated. I have no sense that I need to be accepted. I’m already accepted. Here, there was this thought: What if they don’t like me? What if they resent my presence . . .”

He was, in short, art without a frame. Which, it turns out, may have a lot to do with what happened — or, more precisely, what didn’t happen — on January 12.

MARK LEITHAUSER HAS HELD IN HIS HANDS MORE GREAT WORKS OF ART THAN ANY KING OR POPE OR MEDICI EVER DID. A senior curator at the National Gallery, he oversees the framing of the paintings. Leithauser thinks he has some idea of what happened at that Metro station.

“Let’s say I took one of our more abstract masterpieces, say an Ellsworth Kelly, and removed it from its frame, marched it down the 52 steps that people walk up to get to the National Gallery, past the giant columns, and brought it into a restaurant. It’s a $5 million painting. And it’s one of those restaurants where there are pieces of original art for sale, by some industrious kids from the Corcoran School, and I hang that Kelly on the wall with a price tag of $150. No one is going to notice it. An art curator might look up and say: ‘Hey, that looks a little like an Ellsworth Kelly. Please pass the salt.'”

Leithauser’s point is that we shouldn’t be too ready to label the Metro passersby unsophisticated boobs. Context matters.

Kant said the same thing. He took beauty seriously: In his Critique of Aesthetic Judgment, Kant argued that one’s ability to appreciate beauty is related to one’s ability to make moral judgments. But there was a caveat. Paul Guyer of the University of Pennsylvania, one of America’s most prominent Kantian scholars, says the 18th-century German philosopher felt that to properly appreciate beauty, the viewing conditions must be optimal.

“Optimal,” Guyer said, “doesn’t mean heading to work, focusing on your report to the boss, maybe your shoes don’t fit right.”

So, if Kant had been at the Metro watching as Joshua Bell play to a thousand unimpressed passersby?

“He would have inferred about them,” Guyer said, “absolutely nothing.”

And that’s that.

Except it isn’t. To really understand what happened, you have to rewind that video and play it back from the beginning, from the moment Bell’s bow first touched the strings.

White guy, khakis, leather jacket, briefcase. Early 30s. John David Mortensen is on the final leg of his daily bus-to-Metro commute from Reston. He’s heading up the escalator. It’s a long ride — 1 minute and 15 seconds if you don’t walk. So, like most everyone who passes Bell this day, Mortensen gets a good earful of music before he has his first look at the musician. Like most of them, he notes that it sounds pretty good. But like very few of them, when he gets to the top, he doesn’t race past as though Bell were some nuisance to be avoided. Mortensen is that first person to stop, that guy at the six-minute mark.

It’s not that he has nothing else to do. He’s a project manager for an international program at the Department of Energy; on this day, Mortensen has to participate in a monthly budget exercise, not the most exciting part of his job: “You review the past month’s expenditures,” he says, “forecast spending for the next month, if you have X dollars, where will it go, that sort of thing.”

On the video, you can see Mortensen get off the escalator and look around. He locates the violinist, stops, walks away but then is drawn back. He checks the time on his cellphone — he’s three minutes early for work — then settles against a wall to listen.

Mortensen doesn’t know classical music at all; classic rock is as close as he comes. But there’s something about what he’s hearing that he really likes.

As it happens, he’s arrived at the moment that Bell slides into the second section of “Chaconne.” (“It’s the point,” Bell says, “where it moves from a darker, minor key into a major key. There’s a religious, exalted feeling to it.”) The violinist’s bow begins to dance; the music becomes upbeat, playful, theatrical, big.

Mortensen doesn’t know about major or minor keys: “Whatever it was,” he says, “it made me feel at peace.”

So, for the first time in his life, Mortensen lingers to listen to a street musician. He stays his allotted three minutes as 94 more people pass briskly by. When he leaves to help plan contingency budgets for the Department of Energy, there’s another first. For the first time in his life, not quite knowing what had just happened but sensing it was special, John David Mortensen gives a street musician money.

THERE ARE SIX MOMENTS IN THE VIDEO THAT BELL FINDS PARTICULARLY PAINFUL TO RELIVE: “The awkward times,” he calls them. It’s what happens right after each piece ends: nothing. The music stops. The same people who hadn’t noticed him playing don’t notice that he has finished. No applause, no acknowledgment. So Bell just saws out a small, nervous chord — the embarrassed musician’s equivalent of, “Er, okay, moving right along . . .” — and begins the next piece.

After “Chaconne,” it is Franz Schubert’s “Ave Maria,” which surprised some music critics when it debuted in 1825: Schubert seldom showed religious feeling in his compositions, yet “Ave Maria” is a breathtaking work of adoration of the Virgin Mary. What was with the sudden piety? Schubert dryly answered: “I think this is due to the fact that I never forced devotion in myself and never compose hymns or prayers of that kind unless it overcomes me unawares; but then it is usually the right and true devotion.” This musical prayer became among the most familiar and enduring religious pieces in history.

A couple of minutes into it, something revealing happens. A woman and her preschooler emerge from the escalator. The woman is walking briskly and, therefore, so is the child. She’s got his hand.

“I had a time crunch,” recalls Sheron Parker, an IT director for a federal agency. “I had an 8:30 training class, and first I had to rush Evvie off to his teacher, then rush back to work, then to the training facility in the basement.”

Evvie is her son, Evan. Evan is 3.

You can see Evan clearly on the video. He’s the cute black kid in the parka who keeps twisting around to look at Joshua Bell, as he is being propelled toward the door.

“There was a musician,” Parker says, “and my son was intrigued. He wanted to pull over and listen, but I was rushed for time.”

So Parker does what she has to do. She deftly moves her body between Evan’s and Bell’s, cutting off her son’s line of sight. As they exit the arcade, Evan can still be seen craning to look. When Parker is told what she walked out on, she laughs.

“Evan is very smart!”

The poet Billy Collins once laughingly observed that all babies are born with a knowledge of poetry, because the lub-dub of the mother’s heart is in iambic meter. Then, Collins said, life slowly starts to choke the poetry out of us. It may be true with music, too.

There was no ethnic or demographic pattern to distinguish the people who stayed to watch Bell, or the ones who gave money, from that vast majority who hurried on past, unheeding. Whites, blacks and Asians, young and old, men and women, were represented in all three groups. But the behavior of one demographic remained absolutely consistent. Every single time a child walked past, he or she tried to stop and watch. And every single time, a parent scooted the kid away.

IF THERE WAS ONE PERSON ON THAT DAY WHO WAS TOO BUSY TO PAY ATTENTION TO THE VIOLINIST, it was George Tindley. Tindley wasn’t hurrying to get to work. He was at work.

The glass doors through which most people exit the L’Enfant station lead into an indoor shopping mall, from which there are exits to the street and elevators to office buildings. The first store in the mall is an Au Bon Pain, the croissant and coffee shop where Tindley, in his 40s, works in a white uniform busing the tables, restocking the salt and pepper packets, taking out the garbage. Tindley labors under the watchful eye of his bosses, and he’s supposed to be hopping, and he was.

But every minute or so, as though drawn by something not entirely within his control, Tindley would walk to the very edge of the Au Bon Pain property, keeping his toes inside the line, still on the job. Then he’d lean forward, as far out into the hallway as he could, watching the fiddler on the other side of the glass doors. The foot traffic was steady, so the doors were usually open. The sound came through pretty well.

“You could tell in one second that this guy was good, that he was clearly a professional,” Tindley says. He plays the guitar, loves the sound of strings, and has no respect for a certain kind of musician.

“Most people, they play music; they don’t feel it,” Tindley says. “Well, that man was feeling it. That man was moving. Moving into the sound.”

A hundred feet away, across the arcade, was the lottery line, sometimes five or six people long. They had a much better view of Bell than Tindley did, if they had just turned around. But no one did. Not in the entire 43 minutes. They just shuffled forward toward that machine spitting out numbers. Eyes on the prize.

J.T. Tillman was in that line. A computer specialist for the Department of Housing and Urban Development, he remembers every single number he played that day — 10 of them, $2 apiece, for a total of $20. He doesn’t recall what the violinist was playing, though. He says it sounded like generic classical music, the kind the ship’s band was playing in “Titanic,” before the iceberg.

“I didn’t think nothing of it,” Tillman says, “just a guy trying to make a couple of bucks.” Tillman would have given him one or two, he said, but he spent all his cash on lotto.

When he is told that he stiffed one of the best musicians in the world, he laughs.

“Is he ever going to play around here again?”

“Yeah, but you’re going to have to pay a lot to hear him.”

“Damn.”

Tillman didn’t win the lottery, either.

BELL ENDS “AVE MARIA” TO ANOTHER THUNDEROUS SILENCE, plays Manuel Ponce’s sentimental “Estrellita,” then a piece by Jules Massenet, and then begins a Bach gavotte, a joyful, frolicsome, lyrical dance. It’s got an Old World delicacy to it; you can imagine it entertaining bewigged dancers at a Versailles ball, or — in a lute, fiddle and fife version — the boot-kicking peasants of a Pieter Bruegel painting.

Watching the video weeks later, Bell finds himself mystified by one thing only. He understands why he’s not drawing a crowd, in the rush of a morning workday. But: “I’m surprised at the number of people who don’t pay attention at all, as if I’m invisible. Because, you know what? I’m makin’ a lot of noise!”

He is. You don’t need to know music at all to appreciate the simple fact that there’s a guy there, playing a violin that’s throwing out a whole bucket of sound; at times, Bell’s bowing is so intricate that you seem to be hearing two instruments playing in harmony. So those head-forward, quick-stepping passersby are a remarkable phenomenon.

Bell wonders whether their inattention may be deliberate: If you don’t take visible note of the musician, you don’t have to feel guilty about not forking over money; you’re not complicit in a rip-off.

It may be true, but no one gave that explanation. People just said they were busy, had other things on their mind. Some who were on cellphones spoke louder as they passed Bell, to compete with that infernal racket.

And then there was Calvin Myint. Myint works for the General Services Administration. He got to the top of the escalator, turned right and headed out a door to the street. A few hours later, he had no memory that there had been a musician anywhere in sight.

“Where was he, in relation to me?”

“About four feet away.”

“Oh.”

There’s nothing wrong with Myint’s hearing. He had buds in his ear. He was listening to his iPod.

For many of us, the explosion in technology has perversely limited, not expanded, our exposure to new experiences. Increasingly, we get our news from sources that think as we already do. And with iPods, we hear what we already know; we program our own playlists.

The song that Calvin Myint was listening to was “Just Like Heaven,” by the British rock band The Cure. It’s a terrific song, actually. The meaning is a little opaque, and the Web is filled with earnest efforts to deconstruct it. Many are far-fetched, but some are right on point: It’s about a tragic emotional disconnect. A man has found the woman of his dreams but can’t express the depth of his feeling for her until she’s gone. It’s about failing to see the beauty of what’s plainly in front of your eyes.

“YES, I SAW THE VIOLINIST,” Jackie Hessian says, “but nothing about him struck me as much of anything.”

You couldn’t tell that by watching her. Hessian was one of those people who gave Bell a long, hard look before walking on. It turns out that she wasn’t noticing the music at all.

“I really didn’t hear that much,” she said. “I was just trying to figure out what he was doing there, how does this work for him, can he make much money, would it be better to start with some money in the case, or for it to be empty, so people feel sorry for you? I was analyzing it financially.”

What do you do, Jackie?

“I’m a lawyer in labor relations with the United States Postal Service. I just negotiated a national contract.”

THE BEST SEATS IN THE HOUSE WERE UPHOLSTERED. In the balcony, more or less. On that day, for $5, you’d get a lot more than just a nice shine on your shoes.

Only one person occupied one of those seats when Bell played. Terence Holmes is a consultant for the Department of Transportation, and he liked the music just fine, but it was really about a shoeshine: “My father told me never to wear a suit with your shoes not cleaned and shined.”

Holmes wears suits often, so he is up in that perch a lot, and he’s got a good relationship with the shoeshine lady. Holmes is a good tipper and a good talker, which is a skill that came in handy that day. The shoeshine lady was upset about something, and the music got her more upset. She complained, Holmes said, that the music was too loud, and he tried to calm her down.

Edna Souza is from Brazil. She’s been shining shoes at L’Enfant Plaza for six years, and she’s had her fill of street musicians there; when they play, she can’t hear her customers, and that’s bad for business. So she fights.

Souza points to the dividing line between the Metro property, at the top of the escalator, and the arcade, which is under control of the management company that runs the mall. Sometimes, Souza says, a musician will stand on the Metro side, sometimes on the mall side. Either way, she’s got him. On her speed dial, she has phone numbers for both the mall cops and the Metro cops. The musicians seldom last long.

What about Joshua Bell?

He was too loud, too, Souza says. Then she looks down at her rag, sniffs. She hates to say anything positive about these damned musicians, but: “He was pretty good, that guy. It was the first time I didn’t call the police.”

Souza was surprised to learn he was a famous musician, but not that people rushed blindly by him. That, she said, was predictable. “If something like this happened in Brazil, everyone would stand around to see. Not here.”

Souza nods sourly toward a spot near the top of the escalator: “Couple of years ago, a homeless guy died right there. He just lay down there and died. The police came, an ambulance came, and no one even stopped to see or slowed down to look.

“People walk up the escalator, they look straight ahead. Mind your own business, eyes forward. Everyone is stressed. Do you know what I mean?”

What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.
— from Leisure by W.H. Davies

Let’s say Kant is right. Let’s accept that we can’t look at what happened on January 12 and make any judgment whatever about people’s sophistication or their ability to appreciate beauty. But what about their ability to appreciate life?

We’re busy. Americans have been busy, as a people, since at least 1831, when a young French sociologist named Alexis de Tocqueville visited the States and found himself impressed, bemused and slightly dismayed at the degree to which people were driven, to the exclusion of everything else, by hard work and the accumulation of wealth.

Not much has changed. Pop in a DVD of “Koyaanisqatsi,” the wordless, darkly brilliant, avant-garde 1982 film about the frenetic speed of modern life. Backed by the minimalist music of Philip Glass, director Godfrey Reggio takes film clips of Americans going about their daily business, but speeds them up until they resemble assembly-line machines, robots marching lockstep to nowhere. Now look at the video from L’Enfant Plaza, in fast-forward. The Philip Glass soundtrack fits it perfectly.

“Koyaanisqatsi” is a Hopi word. It means “life out of balance.”

In his 2003 book, Timeless Beauty: In the Arts and Everyday Life, British author John Lane writes about the loss of the appreciation for beauty in the modern world. The experiment at L’Enfant Plaza may be symptomatic of that, he said — not because people didn’t have the capacity to understand beauty, but because it was irrelevant to them.

“This is about having the wrong priorities,” Lane said.

If we can’t take the time out of our lives to stay a moment and listen to one of the best musicians on Earth play some of the best music ever written; if the surge of modern life so overpowers us that we are deaf and blind to something like that — then what else are we missing?

That’s what the Welsh poet W.H. Davies meant in 1911 when he published those two lines that begin this section. They made him famous. The thought was simple, even primitive, but somehow no one had put it quite that way before.

Of course, Davies had an advantage — an advantage of perception. He wasn’t a tradesman or a laborer or a bureaucrat or a consultant or a policy analyst or a labor lawyer or a program manager. He was a hobo.

THE CULTURAL HERO OF THE DAY ARRIVED AT L’ENFANT PLAZA PRETTY LATE, in the unprepossessing figure of one John Picarello, a smallish man with a baldish head.

Picarello hit the top of the escalator just after Bell began his final piece, a reprise of “Chaconne.” In the video, you see Picarello stop dead in his tracks, locate the source of the music, and then retreat to the other end of the arcade. He takes up a position past the shoeshine stand, across from that lottery line, and he will not budge for the next nine minutes.

Like all the passersby interviewed for this article, Picarello was stopped by a reporter after he left the building, and was asked for his phone number. Like everyone, he was told only that this was to be an article about commuting. When he was called later in the day, like everyone else, he was first asked if anything unusual had happened to him on his trip into work. Of the more than 40 people contacted, Picarello was the only one who immediately mentioned the violinist.

“There was a musician playing at the top of the escalator at L’Enfant Plaza.”

Haven’t you seen musicians there before?

“Not like this one.”

What do you mean?

“This was a superb violinist. I’ve never heard anyone of that caliber. He was technically proficient, with very good phrasing. He had a good fiddle, too, with a big, lush sound. I walked a distance away, to hear him. I didn’t want to be intrusive on his space.”

Really?

“Really. It was that kind of experience. It was a treat, just a brilliant, incredible way to start the day.”

Picarello knows classical music. He is a fan of Joshua Bell but didn’t recognize him; he hadn’t seen a recent photo, and besides, for most of the time Picarello was pretty far away. But he knew this was not a run-of-the-mill guy out there, performing. On the video, you can see Picarello look around him now and then, almost bewildered.

“Yeah, other people just were not getting it. It just wasn’t registering. That was baffling to me.”

When Picarello was growing up in New York, he studied violin seriously, intending to be a concert musician. But he gave it up at 18, when he decided he’d never be good enough to make it pay. Life does that to you sometimes. Sometimes, you have to do the prudent thing. So he went into another line of work. He’s a supervisor at the U.S. Postal Service. Doesn’t play the violin much, anymore.

When he left, Picarello says, “I humbly threw in $5.” It was humble: You can actually see that on the video. Picarello walks up, barely looking at Bell, and tosses in the money. Then, as if embarrassed, he quickly walks away from the man he once wanted to be.

Does he have regrets about how things worked out?

The postal supervisor considers this.

“No. If you love something but choose not to do it professionally, it’s not a waste. Because, you know, you still have it. You have it forever.”

BELL THINKS HE DID HIS BEST WORK OF THE DAY IN THOSE FINAL FEW MINUTES, in the second “Chaconne.” And that also was the first time more than one person at a time was listening. As Picarello stood in the back, Janice Olu arrived and took up a position a few feet away from Bell. Olu, a public trust officer with HUD, also played the violin as a kid. She didn’t know the name of the piece she was hearing, but she knew the man playing it has a gift.

Olu was on a coffee break and stayed as long as she dared. As she turned to go, she whispered to the stranger next to her, “I really don’t want to leave.” The stranger standing next to her happened to be working for The Washington Post.

In preparing for this event, editors at The Post Magazine discussed how to deal with likely outcomes. The most widely held assumption was that there could well be a problem with crowd control: In a demographic as sophisticated as Washington, the thinking went, several people would surely recognize Bell. Nervous “what-if” scenarios abounded. As people gathered, what if others stopped just to see what the attraction was? Word would spread through the crowd. Cameras would flash. More people flock to the scene; rush-hour pedestrian traffic backs up; tempers flare; the National Guard is called; tear gas, rubber bullets, etc.

As it happens, exactly one person recognized Bell, and she didn’t arrive until near the very end. For Stacy Furukawa, a demographer at the Commerce Department, there was no doubt. She doesn’t know much about classical music, but she had been in the audience three weeks earlier, at Bell’s free concert at the Library of Congress. And here he was, the international virtuoso, sawing away, begging for money. She had no idea what the heck was going on, but whatever it was, she wasn’t about to miss it.

Furukawa positioned herself 10 feet away from Bell, front row, center. She had a huge grin on her face. The grin, and Furukawa, remained planted in that spot until the end.

“It was the most astonishing thing I’ve ever seen in Washington,” Furukawa says. “Joshua Bell was standing there playing at rush hour, and people were not stopping, and not even looking, and some were flipping quarters at him! Quarters! I wouldn’t do that to anybody. I was thinking, Omigosh, what kind of a city do I live in that this could happen?”

When it was over, Furukawa introduced herself to Bell, and tossed in a twenty. Not counting that — it was tainted by recognition — the final haul for his 43 minutes of playing was $32.17. Yes, some people gave pennies.

“Actually,” Bell said with a laugh, “that’s not so bad, considering. That’s 40 bucks an hour. I could make an okay living doing this, and I wouldn’t have to pay an agent.”

These days, at L’Enfant Plaza, lotto ticket sales remain brisk. Musicians still show up from time to time, and they still tick off Edna Souza. Joshua Bell’s latest album, “The Voice of the Violin,” has received the usual critical acclaim. (“Delicate urgency.” “Masterful intimacy.” “Unfailingly exquisite.” “A musical summit.” “. . . will make your heart thump and weep at the same time.”)

Bell headed off on a concert tour of European capitals. But he is back in the States this week. He has to be. On Tuesday, he will be accepting the Avery Fisher prize, recognizing the Flop of L’Enfant Plaza as the best classical musician in America.

thanks to my awesome web stats, i know that at least 7 people have logged into Hybrid Elephant during the past week as a direct result of my posting a link in my blog, and that post appearing in various peoples’ friends pages. this is to let those 7 of you know, and anybody else who is interested, that i am investigating how to give you a code that will give you 10% off your order if you hit my web site from a livejournal link. stay tuned for further details.

i had a very nice conversation with the other day, and i wanted to write down some things related to that, so as to help me solidify them in my brain:

religion is like an infinitely multifaceted jewel. you hold the jewel in front of you, and light reflects off of certain facets and dazzles your eye. at the same time, there are facets on the opposite side of the jewel that you can’t even see. but that doesn’t mean that the facets that dazzle your eye are any more important, or that the facets that you can’t see are any less important.

in fact, if one facet or the other ceased to exist, the whole jewel would vanish.

i put an announcement to the effect on the page which gets the most traffic of any page on my web site. no, i’m not going to tell you which page it is, if you want to know, figure it out for yourself. it’s not the index page, and it’s probably not one of the pages that you might think – it certainly was a surprise to me. it’s now got the following text on it, at the bottom of the page: “Congratulations, you have chosen the page of this web site that has the most traffic. Aren’t you proud? Your partipation makes this page great!”. it got 8 new hits since noon… 8)

Holy Hypocrite!: TV Preacher Pat Robertson Worries About Religious Takeover Of U.S. Government
By Rob Boston
March 20th 2007

TV preacher Pat Robertson is worried about a Muslim takeover of the United States.

Such a thing would seem remote, at best. While hard numbers are difficult to come by, most demographers say there are about 3 million Muslims in America. In a country of 300 million, they haven’t made a huge dent.

But last year, the first Muslim was elected to Congress, and Muslims have been elected to a few state and local offices as well. Recently, a Muslim group announced plans to register more Muslims to vote and encourage civic activity. All of this has Robertson worried.

“Well, ladies and gentlemen, there you’ve got it,” Robertson said on his “700 Club” today. “It’s interesting, isn’t it? You know, the Protestant churches, there’s no doctrine of faith that I know in any Protestant denomination that calls for the takeover of the government and making other people second-class citizens. I don’t know of one denomination, Protestant or Catholic, that has that agenda. But yet, Islam has just that agenda, that they want to take over the government and that everybody else is a second-class citizen. That is the primary doctrine of Islam.”

Having Pat Robertson lecture you on the dangers of a religious takeover of government is simply too much. The man’s hypocrisy is staggering. Taking over the government, implementing a “moral” agenda according to his interpretation of the Bible and relegating millions to second-class citizenship has been Robertson’s goal from day one.

In a 1997 speech to the Christian Coalition, Robertson outlined a secret plan to secure control of Congress by conservative Republicans and put a “born-again” president in the White House in 2000. He made it clear he would then insist that they toe the line.

“We just tell these guys, ‘Look, we put you in power in 1994, and we want you to deliver,’” Robertson told the crowd. “‘We’re tired of temporizing. Don’t give us all this stuff about you’ve got a different agenda. This is what you’re going to do this year. And we’re going to hold your feet to the fire while you do it.’”

What was that agenda? Robertson outlined it: No more legal abortion, a rollback of gay rights and passage of a constitutional amendment to put coercive forms of prayer in public schools, foster tax funding of Christian projects and merge fundamentalist Christianity and government in other ways.

Hmmm. That sounds like a takeover of government! It’s important to remember that Robertson was not aware he was being recorded at the time and thus spoke with extreme frankness. (Americans United later released a tape of the closed-door session, and news media outlets across the country reported the information.) He put his goals right out there before a friendly crowd. It sure sounded like a theocratic platform to many.

Of course we don’t want a merger of mosque and state in America. But we don’t want a merger of Robertson’s brand of Christianity and state either. We need to protect religious liberty for all but with the understanding that the power of government will back no particular sectarian view. The best way to do that is to maintain a high and firm wall of separation between church and state.

During today’s rant, Robertson even found a way to take a shot at Americans United. Speaking of conservative Christians, he carped, “We’ve been harassed by People For the American Way, we have been harassed by Americans United for Separation of Church and State, we have been harassed by the federal court system.”

Please. Pat, take a look at the studios of your multi-million dollar televangelism empire (all tax free!). Ponder the political influence you have. (U.S. Sen. John McCain was on the show today.) Consider your daily TV audience. (It’s just under 1 million.) No one is harassing you.

And, Pat, if you really are worried about a possible takeover of the American government by a religious group, there is a way to prevent that. It’s called the First Amendment. Why don’t you try supporting it for a change?

A fundamental wrong in letting some marry
By Lisa Pryor
March 31, 2007

The views I am about to express are not very fashionable. They are certainly not politically correct. But I believe what I am about to say must be expressed to protect the institution of marriage.

Too often in the media, currency is given to the theory that everyone should be allowed to marry regardless of gender, outlook and whether the two people are creating a suitable family environment in which to bring up children.

Well, it is time to ask some hard questions about this attitude. The only way we will save marriage is to reclaim the institution for the mainstream. Marriage is for normal people who want to raise children in a healthy and secure environment. This is why we should ban religious fundamentalists from marrying.

Fundamentalists of all religions engage in unnatural practices. The unconventional views they hold inevitably lead to their children being teased in the playground and, no matter what studies may show, there is surely a greater risk they will grow up to be fundamentalist themselves if they are exposed to dangerous ideas from a tender age.

No matter what fundamentalist propaganda may claim, fundamentalism is not sanctioned by nature. There is not a single species in the animal kingdom which stresses the infallibility of the Bible or adheres to the teachings of the Koran. Even in the higher orders of primate, no species has conclusively shown faith in the virgin birth or the second coming. Animals tend to be atheist, pagan or animist, which shows that these views are surely instinctive, normal, natural and right.

Maybe you think it is OK for humans to differ from animals. Maybe you think consenting adults should be able to do what they like regardless of whether the average person agrees with their views.

Such a liberal approach is a slippery slope. When we allow fundamentalists to marry it says that fundamentalism is OK. It encourages these people to foist the fundamentalist agenda on the rest of the community. Before long they will be trying to “convert” people to their “religions”. Should we risk this? Fundamentalists are a small minority of the population, so only a small number of people would be inconvenienced by a ban. It would not even be discriminatory as fundamentalists would still have the right to marry – so long as they renounced their religion.

Let’s not forget that we are not just talking about consenting adults. When you allow fundamentalists to marry it encourages them to have children. Sure, they might still have kids even if they cannot marry in the eyes of the law, but why legitimise it? Children are the true victims of fundamentalist marriages. Children don’t get a say when they are born into a household practising a fundamentalist lifestyle. Tiny children should not be subjected to cultural experiments and social engineering. Imagine how confused and guilty children would feel when they were indoctrinated with the bizarre idea that they were born with the stain of original sin and were in fact so inherently bad that a man had to bleed to death to make it all OK.

Imagine also the teasing that children who have grown up in these “families” would be subjected to in the playground when other kids find out about their unusual views and practices. What are normal parents supposed to do when their children arrive home asking uncomfortable questions because they have been exposed to these groups at an age when they are too young to understand?

Before you know it, fundamentalist parents will be insisting preschool children read storybooks about the fundamentalist lifestyle in order to better understand it. There will be colouring books directed at four-year-olds showing Jesus turning water into wine and walking on water, as if it were gospel.

What hope does a child indoctrinated with this sort of propaganda have of growing up to be normal? Can you really tell me they will not be more likely to grow up fundamentalist themselves?

Before you accuse me of hate speech, I should point out that I bear no grudge against fundamentalists personally. “Love the fundamentalist, hate the fundamentalism” is my policy.

I suppose one chink in this argument is that banning a minority from marrying is utterly unfair, inhumane and intolerant. Kind of like the ban on gay marriage.

and, if we didn’t already have enough to say that intelligent design is a bunch of crap…

Primordial Soup’s On: Scientists Repeat Evolution’s Most Famous Experiment
Their results could change the way we imagine life arose on early Earth
By Douglas Fox
March 28, 2007

A Frankensteinesque contraption of glass bulbs and crackling electrodes has produced yet another revelation about the origin of life.

The results suggest that Earth’s early atmosphere could have produced chemicals necessary for life—contradicting the view that life’s building blocks had to come from comets and meteors. “Maybe we’re over-optimistic, but I think this is a paradigm shift,” says chemist Jeffrey Bada, whose team performed the experiment at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, Calif.

Bada was revisiting the famous experiment first done by his mentor, chemist Stanley Miller, at the University of Chicago in 1953. Miller, along with his colleague Harold Urey, used a sparking device to mimic a lightning storm on early Earth. Their experiment produced a brown broth rich in amino acids, the building blocks of proteins. The disclosure made the pages of national magazines and showed that theories about the origin of life could actually be tested in the laboratory.

But the Miller-Urey results were later questioned: It turns out that the gases he used (a reactive mixture of methane and ammonia) did not exist in large amounts on early Earth. Scientists now believe the primeval atmosphere contained an inert mix of carbon dioxide and nitrogen—a change that made a world of difference.

When Miller repeated the experiment using the correct combo in 1983, the brown broth failed to materialize. Instead, the mix created a colorless brew, containing few amino acids. It seemed to refute a long-cherished icon of evolution—and creationists quickly seized on it as supposed evidence of evolution’s wobbly foundations.

But Bada’s repeat of the experiment—armed with a new insight—seems likely to turn the tables once again.

Bada discovered that the reactions were producing chemicals called nitrites, which destroy amino acids as quickly as they form. They were also turning the water acidic—which prevents amino acids from forming. Yet primitive Earth would have contained iron and carbonate minerals that neutralized nitrites and acids. So Bada added chemicals to the experiment to duplicate these functions. When he reran it, he still got the same watery liquid as Miller did in 1983, but this time it was chock-full of amino acids. Bada presented his results this week at the American Chemical Society annual meeting in Chicago.

“It’s important work,” says Christopher McKay, a planetary scientist at NASA Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif. “This is a move toward more realism in terms of what the conditions were on early Earth.”

Most researchers believe that the origin of life depended heavily on chemicals delivered to Earth by comets and meteorites. But if the new work holds up, it could tilt that equation, says Christopher Chyba, an astrobiologist at Princeton University. “That would be a terrific result for understanding the origin of life,” he says, “and for understanding the prospects for life elsewhere.”

But James Ferris, a prebiotic chemist at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y., doubts that atmospheric electricity could have been the only source of organic molecules. “You get a fair amount of amino acids,” he says. “What you don’t get are things like building blocks of nucleic acids.” Meteors, comets or primordial ponds of hydrogen cyanide would still need to provide those molecules.

Bada’s experiment could also have implications for life on Mars, because the Red Planet may have been swaddled in nitrogen and carbon dioxide early in its life. Bada intends to test this extrapolation by doing experiments with lower-pressure mixes of those gases.

Chyba is cautious: “We don’t know,” he says, “whether Mars really ever had that atmosphere.” That’s because Mars today has carbon dioxide, but hardly any nitrogen—which is also needed for making amino acids. Some scientists suspect that nitrogen gas existed on Mars, but was blasted away by asteroid impacts billions of years ago.

and then, a 180° turn into bizarre sex land, just for good measure…

Authorities: Fifth-graders posted lookout, had sex in class
April 4, 2007

NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana (AP) — Five fifth-grade students face criminal charges after authorities said four of them had sex in front of other students in an unsupervised classroom and kept a classmate posted as a lookout for teachers.

The students were arrested Tuesday at the Spearsville school in rural north Louisiana, authorities said. Two 11-year-old girls, a 12-year-old boy and a 13-year old boy were charged with obscenity, a felony. An 11-year-old boy, the alleged lookout, was charged with being an accessory.

“After 44 years of doing this work, nothing shocks me anymore,” said Union Parish Sheriff Bob Buckley. “But this comes pretty close.”

Authorities said the incident happened March 27 at the school, which houses students from kindergarten through 12th grade. A high school teacher normally watches the fifth-grade class at the time, but went to an assembly for older students and the class was inadvertently left unattended, Buckley said.

The class, which had around 10 other students, was alone for about 15 minutes, he said.

“When no teacher showed up, the four began to have sex in the classroom with the other elementary students in the classroom with them,” he said.

It took a day for authorities to find out about the incident. A student who had been in the class told a high school student about it the next day, Buckley said. The student told a teacher, and school officials notified the sheriff’s office. Detectives began questioning students Thursday.

School officials did not return calls seeking comment.

The students, who were not identified because of their age, were released to their parents after their arrests, Buckley said. They will next be arraigned in juvenile court.

A message seeking comment from the district attorney was not immediately returned.

Buckley said it was unclear what penalties the children could face.

immediately after i posted that last one, my cell phone rang, and caller ID identified it as “UNAVAILABLE”, which usually means that it’s a spam-call of some kind. so i dug out my counterscript, answered… and it was a sales call from someone who wanted to sell me investments! so i turned the tables on her. boy that felt good! 8)

ever since i first learned of it, i have suspected that i might have Asperger’s Syndrome. i have also come to realise that it is very unlikely that i will ever get a valid diagnosis as having AS because the syndrome wasn’t identified until i was already more-or-less an adult (is 20 an adult? i thought it was when i was 20, but now i’m not so sure). but thanks to , i was pointed to this article about the first u.s. online autism survey, which lead me to the Interactive Autism Network, where i discovered this article about very late diagnosis of asperger syndrome, which has a link to the web site that has all of the screening questionaires… i’m seeing ned today. we’ll see what happens next.

Call that humiliation?
No hoods. No electric shocks. No beatings. These Iranians clearly are a very uncivilised bunch
March 31, 2007
By Terry Jones

I share the outrage expressed in the British press over the treatment of our naval personnel accused by Iran of illegally entering their waters. It is a disgrace. We would never dream of treating captives like this – allowing them to smoke cigarettes, for example, even though it has been proven that smoking kills. And as for compelling poor servicewoman Faye Turney to wear a black headscarf, and then allowing the picture to be posted around the world – have the Iranians no concept of civilised behaviour? For God’s sake, what’s wrong with putting a bag over her head? That’s what we do with the Muslims we capture: we put bags over their heads, so it’s hard to breathe. Then it’s perfectly acceptable to take photographs of them and circulate them to the press because the captives can’t be recognised and humiliated in the way these unfortunate British service people are.

It is also unacceptable that these British captives should be made to talk on television and say things that they may regret later. If the Iranians put duct tape over their mouths, like we do to our captives, they wouldn’t be able to talk at all. Of course they’d probably find it even harder to breathe – especially with a bag over their head – but at least they wouldn’t be humiliated.

And what’s all this about allowing the captives to write letters home saying they are all right? It’s time the Iranians fell into line with the rest of the civilised world: they should allow their captives the privacy of solitary confinement. That’s one of the many privileges the US grants to its captives in Guantánamo Bay.

The true mark of a civilised country is that it doesn’t rush into charging people whom it has arbitrarily arrested in places it’s just invaded. The inmates of Guantánamo, for example, have been enjoying all the privacy they want for almost five years, and the first inmate has only just been charged. What a contrast to the disgraceful Iranian rush to parade their captives before the cameras!

What’s more, it is clear that the Iranians are not giving their British prisoners any decent physical exercise. The US military make sure that their Iraqi captives enjoy PT. This takes the form of exciting “stress positions”, which the captives are expected to hold for hours on end so as to improve their stomach and calf muscles. A common exercise is where they are made to stand on the balls of their feet and then squat so that their thighs are parallel to the ground. This creates intense pain and, finally, muscle failure. It’s all good healthy fun and has the bonus that the captives will confess to anything to get out of it.

And this brings me to my final point. It is clear from her TV appearance that servicewoman Turney has been put under pressure. The newspapers have persuaded behavioural psychologists to examine the footage and they all conclude that she is “unhappy and stressed”.

What is so appalling is the underhand way in which the Iranians have got her “unhappy and stressed”. She shows no signs of electrocution or burn marks and there are no signs of beating on her face. This is unacceptable. If captives are to be put under duress, such as by forcing them into compromising sexual positions, or having electric shocks to their genitals, they should be photographed, as they were in Abu Ghraib. The photographs should then be circulated around the civilised world so that everyone can see exactly what has been going on.

As Stephen Glover pointed out in the Daily Mail, perhaps it would not be right to bomb Iran in retaliation for the humiliation of our servicemen, but clearly the Iranian people must be made to suffer – whether by beefing up sanctions, as the Mail suggests, or simply by getting President Bush to hurry up and invade, as he intends to anyway, and bring democracy and western values to the country, as he has in Iraq.

I, Hard Gay, fixed a child’s tastes… with natto. 8P

Storm in US over chocolate Jesus
A New York gallery has angered a US Catholic group with its decision to exhibit a milk chocolate sculpture of Jesus Christ.
30 March 2007

Chocolate Jesus!

The six-foot (1.8m) sculpture, entitled “My Sweet Lord”, depicts Jesus Christ naked on the cross.

Catholic League head Bill Donohue called it “one of the worst assaults on Christian sensibilities ever”.

The sculpture, by artist Cosimo Cavallaro, will be displayed from Monday at Manhattan’s Lab Gallery.

The Catholic League, which describes itself as the nation’s largest Catholic civil rights organisation, also criticised the timing of the exhibition.

“The fact that they chose Holy Week shows this is calculated, and the timing is deliberate,” Mr Donohue said.

He called for a boycott of the gallery and the hotel which houses it.

‘Overwhelming response’
The gallery’s creative director, Matt Semler, said the gallery was considering its options in the wake of angry e-mails and telephone calls.

“We’re obviously surprised by the overwhelming response and offence people have taken,” he said. “We are certainly in the process of trying to figure out what we’re going to do next.”

Mr Semler said the timing of the exhibition was coincidental.

Mr Cavallaro, the Canadian-born artist, is known for using food ingredients in his art, on one occasion painting a hotel room in mozzarella cheese.

He used 200 pounds (90 kg) of chocolate to make the sculpture which, unusually, depicts Jesus without a loincloth.

A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection makes me very glad indeed that i gave up on windoesn’t 7 years ago. apparently DRM and “content protection” is costing the entire PC community, giving the ability to view HD-DVDs, blue-ray disks, and a variety of other multimedia, but leaving everyone (not just windoesn’t users) with issues that include system performance, system stability, technical support overhead, and hardware and software cost. as a friend of mine says, “it looks like if you have any interest in multimedia, windows vista offers you the power of a radio shack Trash-80″…

Mind-Control Microbe
parasitic infection can give you schizophrenia, make you have a car crash, or determine the sex of your child.
03.01.2007
by Kathy A. Svitil

Five years ago, Oxford University zoologists showed that the parasite Toxoplasma gondii alters the brain chemistry of rats so that they are more likely to seek out cats. Infection thus makes a rat more likely to be killed and the parasite more likely to end up in a cat—the only host in which it can complete the reproductive step of its life cycle. The parasite also lives in the brain cells of thousands of species, including about 60 million supposedly symptom-free Americans. Studies over the past few years have suggested that toxoplasmosis infections in humans, too, may cause behavioral changes—from subtle shifts to outright schizophrenia. Two studies this year add even weirder twists.

U.S. Geological Survey biologist Kevin Lafferty has linked high rates of toxoplasmosis infection in 39 countries with elevated incidences of neuroticism, suggesting the mind-altering organism may be affecting the cultures of nations.

Stranger still, parasitologist Jaroslav Flegr of Charles University in Prague thinks T. gondii could also be skewing our sex ratios. When he looked at the clinical records of more than 1,800 babies born from 1996 to 2004, he noted a distinct trend: The normal sex ratio is 104 boys born for every 100 girls, but in women with high levels of antibodies against the parasite, the ratio was 260 boys for every 100 girls. Exactly how the parasite might be tipping the odds in favor of males isn’t understood, but Flegr points out that it is known to suppress the immune system of its hosts, and because the maternal immune system sometimes attacks male fetuses in very early pregnancy, the parasite’s ability to inhibit the immune response might protect future boys as well as itself.

"Our present study was rejected by eight journals, usually without any formal review," says Flegr, who had the same problem publishing an earlier one showing that infection more than doubles the odds of a person having a traffic accident. "People don’t like the possibility that their behavior and life are manipulated by a parasite," he says.

If altering our culture and causing car crashes weren’t bad enough, toxoplasma may actually wheedle their genes into our genomes.

There are plenty of other theories about what affects the reproductive sex ratio. Some of them are actually true.

the moisture festival is over for another year. unofficially, the marathon time to beat is now 5½ hours, but i don’t know what it is officially, because i left fairly quickly last night. moe had to sleep… 8)

the official time, thanks the phone call mentioned below, was 5 hours 17 minutes, and the pool was won by misha from nanda.

BBWP opened the show last night, which was very cool. even more cool was that i was introduced to moz wright, a fire eater and sword swallower(!) who is also a reiki practitioner, and he did his “magic-woogie-thing” on my ankle – sat me in a chair and walked around me making swishing noises, motioning with his hands, and “muscle testing” himself – before BBWP went on, and now my ankle is well on it’s way to being all better. it’s still slightly sore, but the bruising has completely disappeared, and it has gone from being swollen the size of a small pumpkin to being slightly larger than a lime, and it feels a lot stronger and more stable than i would have suspected. i’m not discounting the ibuprophen, ice and elevation that happened yesterday, but even still, it’s not what i expected, seeing that i just sprained it two days ago.

i just got a phone call from john c., who found my popgun at the palladium.

damn.

at first, he said that he would take parts of it, and stuart would take parts of it, and they’d get it back to me eventually, but then he relented and said he’s going to give it to stuart who is (hopefully) going to return it to me at the bacon bunny roast at chris’ place on saturday. i say “hopefully” because most of the cirque people in general put up with my popgun with thinly veiled distaste that borders on revulsion… even though (or, possibly, because of which) it’s one of my favourite musical instruments of all time. stuart puts up with it somewhat better than most other folks – in fact, it could be that he wants one himself, but two orchestral-quality popguns in one band would be interesting. thinking about the sanity of other people, however, it is a bit excessive. the first time i popped it was at the cirque show up at magnuson park a few years ago, which is an old helicopter landing pad with a huge hangar at one end. it was an incredible sound, and i distinctly remember hearing simon (matches), who was across the parking lot, saying, with admiration, “that’s a clown noise!”… but since then he has been one of the most irritable people when he even sees me with the popgun… 8)

yesterday was the busiest day i’ve had in a long time. i left the house at 1:00 and was performing (SW3D for the last time) at 2:30. then i went to pioneer square to perform with BBWP for the utilikilts party, at 8:00, and on the way i sprained my ankle. i performed with BBWP anyway, buckets and all, despite the fact that my ankle was swollen to the size of a small pumpkin – “the show must go on” and all of that crap – and then i went back to the palladium for the late night show, from which i didn’t arrive home until 3:00 am, when i – finally – put an elastic bandage on it. when i woke up at 8:00 this morning, my ankle had turned 8 different shades of purple and green. i took the “anti-inflammatory” dose of ibuprophen, elevated my ankle and went back to sleep. i just woke up again, it’s almost noon, and i’ve got one more performance with the moisture festival, which is – of course – the “marathon”… of course, BBWP is performing again, as well as the fact that i’ve got almost 5 hours of performing with the band, where i can’t elevate my ankle anyway.

and on top of that, i don’t have any pot. i ran out about a week ago, and haven’t been able to get a fresh supply, because i’ve been so busy. today is gonna be wonderful… 8/

now i’m going to ice my ankle, take more ibuprophen, and sleep more.

but, you know, i wouldn’t have it any other way…

thanks to :
Moondog’s Corner

a long time ago, some friends of mine and i decided that we were going to secede from the united states and form our own country, Normidia, which would be 500 yards surrounding wherever we were. inside Normidia, all US laws would be null and void, and, instead, the laws of the Principality of Normidia would be obeyed. this meant, among other, significantly less important things, that we could smoke pot with impunity, regardless of where we were, as cannabis was not illegal, but was actually the official currency of Normidia – as in the Illuminatus trilogy, we traded in hempscript.

as the years went by, we developed the country even further. we had a flag, a coat of arms, an official state religion, a constitution, and even a bill of rights. as princes of Normidia, we were able to recruit a number of citizens of Normidia, but as the country was defined as existing within a 500 yard radius from wherever we were at the moment, we were unable to do much more than that. then one of us died, and another one was lost to the ravages of alcohol (the last time i heard about where he lived, he was staying at the shetler for homeless drunks in a small town near the canadian border), and the only one left was me… and i’m considering reviving Normidia, especially after reading this:

Executive Branch Secedes from the Union
by Devilstower
March 24, 2007

When Tony Snow made the rounds of talk shows this week, some might have been surprised at his message.

Snow to CNN: “There’s another principle, which is Congress doesn’t have the legislative — I mean oversight authority over the White House.”

Snow to NBC: “Congress doesn’t have any legitimate oversight and responsibilities to the White House.”

Snow to NBC: “First, the White House is under no compulsion to do anything. The legislative branch doesn’t have oversight.”

Snow to ABC: “The executive branch is under no compulsion to testify to Congress, because Congress in fact doesn’t have oversight ability.”

Just in case you missed it the first time, Snow repeated himself to make sure the public gets the message: the White House has declared itself, a law unto itself, beholden to no other authority. This goes quite a bit beyond the already massive expansions of “executive privilege” previously claimed by this administration.

Congress has the enumerated authority under the constitution to pass laws, to raise a military, to declare war, and to impeach and remove members of the executive branch. Does the word “oversight” appear? It doesn’t, but it’s so clearly implied in the powers designated to Congress that there’s been really little doubt of this power since 1787. The Supreme Court has agreed with Congress’ role in overseeing the White House on any number of occasions. After all, how can Congress have impeachment authority over the executive if any investigation can be stonewalled by an uncooperative administration? The judicial equivalent would be making a defendant the judge at his own trial.

Under the Snow interpretation, the executive could get away with anything. Anything at all. Absolutely anything. Like Tony, I wanted to repeat so you would be sure I meant what I said. A lack of congressional oversight would not just place the White House above the law, but completely beyond it.

Though it may have passed as just another incidence of Snow being trotted forth to distribute the day’s right wing talking points, what was said on Friday should not go without notice. This is the single more amazing declaration in an administration that has already produced more extraordinary claims than the fountain at Lourdes.

For the last forty years, there has been only a single Republican administration. That may seem an odd idea. After all, at least a couple of Republicans have been elected over that period — and a couple more have found their way to the White House through other means. No matter the name on the Oval Office door, the philosophy promoted by the White House has remained. This the Imperial Presidency of Richard M. Nixon, now brought to inglorious summer by the (adopted) son of Crawford. It was under Nixon that the philosophy of a supreme executive was gestated. It was under Nixon that the men who populate the current administration were taught their love for tyranny over justice. From Watergate, to Iran-Contra, to Iraq, Nixon’s heirs have worked to chisel away the rule of law. With Snow’s blunt declaration of independence, any remaining illusion that the executive branch continues to act as part of the government is removed. If this interpretation holds, if the congress can not exert authority over the executive, then we are a democracy in name only.

In a high school history book, the fall of the Roman Republic is usually dated to the point were Julius Caesar, in defiance of Senate “micromanagement,” ordered his legions across the Rubicon to end effective representative oversight. However, at the time, the Romans didn’t see it that way. They continued to call themselves a republic for years. Decades. Long after Caesar, they kept up the hollow pretense of a senate, marching in each day to pass laws that the executive of their day did not follow, and direct armies that moved only at the emperor’s command.

The Bush administration is waist deep in the Rubicon. The only question now is whether we will drive them back to the bank, or admit that we are only play-acting at democracy.

Operation Bite: April 6 sneak attack by US forces against Iran planned, Russian military sources warn
By Webster G. Tarpley
26 March, 2007

WASHINGTON DC, — The long awaited US military attack on Iran is now on track for the first week of April, specifically for 4 am on April 6, the Good Friday opening of Easter weekend, writes the well-known Russian journalist Andrei Uglanov in the Moscow weekly “Argumenty Nedeli.” Uglanov cites Russian military experts close to the Russian General Staff for his account.

The attack is slated to last for 12 hours, according to Uglanov, from 4 am until 4 pm local time. Friday is the sabbath in Iran. In the course of the attack, code named Operation Bite, about 20 targets are marked for bombing; the list includes uranium enrichment facilities, research centers, and laboratories.

The first reactor at the Bushehr nuclear plant, where Russian engineers are working, is supposed to be spared from destruction. The US attack plan reportedly calls for the Iranian air defense system to be degraded, for numerous Iranian warships to be sunk in the Persian Gulf, and for the most important headquarters of the Iranian armed forces to be wiped out.

The attacks will be mounted from a number of bases, including the island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean. Diego Garcia is currently home to B-52 bombers equipped with standoff missiles. Also participating in the air strikes will be US naval aviation from aircraft carriers in the Persian Gulf, as well as from those of the Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean. Additional cruise missiles will be fired from submarines in the Indian Ocean and off the coast of the Arabian peninsula. The goal is allegedly to set back Iran’s nuclear program by several years, writes Uglanov, whose article was reissued by RIA-Novosti in various languages, but apparently not English, several days ago. The story is the top item on numerous Italian and German blogs, but so far appears to have been ignored by US websites.

Observers comment that this dispatch represents a high-level orchestrated leak from the Kremlin, in effect a war warning, which draws on the formidable resources of the Russian intelligence services, and which deserves to be taken with the utmost seriousness by pro-peace forces around the world.

Asked by RIA-Novosti to comment on the Uglanov report, retired Colonel General Leonid Ivashov confirmed its essential features in a March 21 interview: “I have no doubt that there will be an operation, or more precisely a violent action against Iran.” Ivashov, who has reportedly served at various times as an informal advisor to Russian President Vladimir Putin, is currently the vice president of the Moscow Academy for Geopolitical Sciences.

Ivashov attributed decisive importance to the decision of the Democratic leadership of the US House of Representatives to remove language from the just-passed Iraq supplemental military appropriations bill that would have demanded that Bush come to Congress before launching an attack on Iran. Ivashov pointed out that the language was eliminated under pressure from AIPAC, the lobbing group representing the Israeli extreme right, and from Israeli Foreign Minister Tsipi Livni.

“We have drawn the unmistakable conclusion that this operation will take place,” said Ivashov. In his opinion, the US planning does not include a land operation: “ Most probably there will be no ground attack, but rather massive air attacks with the goal of annihilating Iran’s capacity for military resistance, the centers of administration, the key economic assets, and quite possibly the Iranian political leadership, or at least part of it,” he continued.

Ivashov noted that it was not to be excluded that the Pentagon would use smaller tactical nuclear weapons against targets of the Iranian nuclear industry. These attacks could paralyze everyday life, create panic in the population, and generally produce an atmosphere of chaos and uncertainty all over Iran, Ivashov told RIA-Novosti. “This will unleash a struggle for power inside Iran, and then there will be a peace delegation sent in to install a pro-American government in Teheran,” Ivashov continued. One of the US goals was, in his estimation, to burnish the image of the current Republican administration, which would now be able to boast that they had wiped out the Iranian nuclear program.

Among the other outcomes, General Ivashov pointed to a partition of Iran along the same lines as Iraq, and a subsequent carving up of the Near and Middle East into smaller regions. “This concept worked well for them in the Balkans and will now be applied to the greater Middle East,” he commented.

“Moscow must exert Russia’s influence by demanding an emergency session of the United Nations Security Council to deal with the current preparations for an illegal use of force against Iran and the destruction of the basis of the United Nations Charter,” said General Ivashov. “In this context Russia could cooperate with China, France and the non-permanent members of the Security Council. We need this kind of preventive action to ward off the use of force,” he concluded.

ITT fined $100 million for illegal exports
Manufacturer admits to exporting night vision materials to China, Singapore and Britain without U.S. authorization.
March 27 2007

WASHINGTON (CNN) — The leading manufacturer of night vision gear for the Defense Department has admitted sending classified materials overseas and will pay a $100 million penalty, according to federal prosecutors, who say the actions of ITT Corp. have jeopardized the security of U.S. soldiers.

ITT, based in Roanoke, Va., exported classified or sensitive technical data to China, Singapore and Britain without having obtained authorization from the United States, prosecutors said.

The conviction is the first involving a major defense contractor violating the Arms Export Control Act, prosecutors said.

Saying that American soldiers are “the principal victims of ITT’s crimes,” U.S. Attorney John Brownlee said he has structured the $100 million penalty so that half of the money is spent by ITT to develop a next-generation night vision system and “ensure that our soldiers have the best night vision equipment in the world.”

Safety gizmos that aren’t worth the cost
ITT must invest the $50 million over five years to accelerate development of night vision technology, and the government will maintain rights to all technology that is developed under the agreement.

The arrangement will also allow the government to share any technology developed by ITT under the agreement with ITT’s competitors, Brownlee said.

Prosecutors said the probe began Aug. 1, 2001, when Defense Department investigators discovered that ITT night vision employees sent a classified military document to Britain.

The company engaged in a “regular pattern of export violations and misrepresentation” to the U.S. government from 1980 to 2005, prosecutors said.

In some cases, information was transferred because the manufacture of laser gear could be done cheaper overseas.

ITT “went to significant lengths to set up an end run” around State Department licensing systems, prosecutors said, including enlisting a front company to export the systems.

The company also fought the government’s investigation, Brownlee said, and attempted “to essentially run out the clock on the statute of limitations.” He said the company’s posture changed in 2005 with the hiring of a new CEO, Steven Loranger, who hired new outside corporate attorneys and instructed the company to cooperate with the investigation.

101 Dumbest Moments in Business
ITT Corp., whose competitors include Lockheed Martin (up $0.08 to $98.50, Charts) and United Technologies (down $0.34 to $66.07, Charts), has agreed to plead guilty to a count of violating the Arms Export Control Act by illegally sending classified and/or export-controlled information relating to night vision materials to foreign countries. It also will plead guilty to a count of knowingly or willfully omitting material facts from required reports with intent to obstruct a State Department investigation.

As part of the $100 million penalty, ITT will pay a $2 million criminal fine and a $50 million deferred prosecution penalty – to be invested in night vision technology – and will forfeit $28 million to the U.S. government as the proceeds of its illegal actions. ITT will also pay a $20 million penalty to the State Department.

i had come into possession of a humongous recreational-vehicle-type-thing, which was being stored at my parents’ house… in fact, there’s a possibility that i was staying at my parents’ house as well, but i don’t remember.

anyway, i was at the service station up the street from my parents’ house, having some minor repairs done to the enormous behemoth (a “juggernaut”?), which was taking a much longer time to complete than they at the service station had originally told me, so i decided that i would make the repairs myself – changing the oil, replacing a hose, and something else relatively minor – but the guys at the service station were not into letting a “big” job like that go without a fight, so two of the service station guys actually got on the “bus” as i was driving it out of the parking lot, and refused to get off until i went back to the service station. they were actually acting as though they owned the bus, and i was “taking” it without their permission. i was driving through the neighbourhood near my parents’ house – i knew that if i went directly to my parents’ house that they would know where to find it, and just come back at night to “repossess” it – and somehow i convinced the two guys to vacate the bus relatively far away from where i was going to end up, but that is where the dream took a really weird turn.

somehow, after “dropping off” the guys from the service station, i found myself in a part of town with which i was completely unfamiliar, although it was a place i knew i had been before. and, somehow, the bus sort of faded out the more unfamiliar/familiar the streets became, until i was in front of this large residential house which was in between the road and the beach(?) near the end of the road through a very rich neighbourhood of extremely large residential houses, which i recognised as a sufi(?) spiritual centre/school. i went in without knocking, as though it was my own house (because i knew i would be welcome?), and was immediately greeted by a tall, middle-eastern man with a long greyish-black beard and a plaid button down shirt (majid? it would make the whole dream even weirder if it was, but who knows…) who welcomed me as though they had been expecting me. there were a large number of people in the house, doing various tasks the details of which were out of my view, and there were a fair number of small children (it was a school as well as a spiritual centre). they said that they were muslim, but i got the impression that they were not “normal” muslims, in very much the same way that sufis say they’re muslims, but are, in fact, quite different, in many significant ways from “normal” muslims. eventually i began to see signs that disturbed me, like a hook on a wall that held many whips, and a whole “classroom” of children being taught the right way to do “penance” which involved the teacher (who was a guy i recognised, although at this point, i don’t remeber who he was) whipping himself, while the children watched. it was at this point that i decided to leave, but there was something unspoken that gave me the impression that it was impossible to leave. nevertheless, i somehow escaped from the house, and was climbing over rocks on the beach, heading for the very-rich-looking house in the very-rich-looking neighbourhood when i realised that i had somehow found myself in bellingham, on the south side – which, i figured, would be a good way to hide the bus (remember?) from the people who wanted to take it from me.

but then i couldn’t find the bus, and i couldn’t find my way back to where i had last seen the bus (in bellevue) because i was in bellingham. and the tall middle-eastern guy (who might have been majid) was there, saying something i don’t know, because i was deliberately not hearing what he was saying… and somehow it transformed into the neighbourhood around lake sammammish, near my parents’ house, which frustrated me so much that i woke up.

i distinctly remember, at least twice, trying, and succeeding to a certain extent, to go back to sleep and pick up the dream where i left off, but i always seemed to pick up on the dream in the middle, where there were signs that disturbed me in the house, and i couldn’t change the dream, which disturbed me even more.

An elderly man came to Reb Israel and told him that he was on the verge of dying, he wanted Israel to recite his confession with him. The old man was yellow as wax. He supported himself on two canes. Those who had brought him had half-carried him inside. He was followed by his daughters and daughters-in-law, who lamented as if it were his funeral. Reb Abraham Gershon’s wife, the rebbetzin, feared lest the old man die in her house. But the Baal Shem said to the old man: “How do you know that you are about to die? Did you make an agreement with the Angel of Death? Were you called up to judgment, and did you watch as you were erased from the Book of Life? How old are you, may the evil eye spare you?”

“Eighty.”

“You call that old? At your age, Methuselah was still a boy. They first began offering him matches.”

“Rabbi, what shall I do?”

“Have a glass of vodka, and let us drink to life.”

Laughter broke out among the assembled. Those who had been crying just a moment before now laughed through tearful eyes. The old man himself smiled. The Baal Shem pored two glasses of aquavit, one for the old man and one for himself, and to everyone’s amazement, the old men drank his down. He even chewed along on a cookie.

from Reaches of Heaven by Isaac Bashevis Singer
about Rabbi Israel ben Eliezer, called Baal Shem Tov

i said that the fremont phil should play the burlesque nights months ago. i distinctly remember when the phil was discussing what nights we wanted to play, and saying that we should definitely play the burlesque nights when we first discussed it, in the latter part of last year. i also distinctly remember saying, in my artist’s “application” for the moisture festival, which was submitted in november of last year, that i did more than just play tuba, and if the fremont phil, for some reason, was not needed to play the burlesque nights, that i was very interested in playing them anyway, and if they had to “hire” a band, that i wanted to be part of it. on the 8th of march, this year, i received an email asking if anyone was interested in playing the burlesque nights, and i responded that i was. i even put them on my schedule. then, 3 days ago, i received another email saying that we “were not needed” for the burlesque nights.

i had already got a comp for moe for the late night show last night, because i thought i was playing, so i went anyway, and bought a ticket. i was surprised to discover that out of the musicians that i could see, i knew 3 of them… four if you count RB, who didn’t actually play, but was there as a “producer of the show”: 2 (or 3) zebra kings, and one person who has been sitting in with the fremont phil. i know that they’re also playing tonight, when the phil has “their own night” at the palladium at exactly the same time – which will mean that the phil will have to forgo doing one of their most characteristic pieces of music because we don’t have a trombone player. not only that, but they played 1 piece that the phil actually rehearsed as recently as monday, this week, for a vocalist that rehearsed it with us, and as far as i’ve been able to tell, is not going to be performed again, and they played another piece that has a tuba solo at the beginning, which wasn’t there last night, because there was no tuba player.

i’m PISSED OFF!!

i wanted to play the burlesque nights, and i didn’t, because there was no communication… same as there has been no communication throughout the process of creating the program, and, i get the impression that it’s been the same situation as last year and the year before that… and, possibly, the year before that, and the year before that as well.

and i’m not the only one that’s pissed off about it as well, but i still don’t know what is to be done about it, which pisses me off even more. i don’t care if they are paying me, they can’t pay me enough to make up for the anger that i feel that the producers of this show are as unconscious as they are. i don’t understand how this can be the longest running show of it’s kind in the world with this kind of lack of communication going on from the very beginning.

i was pointed this direction by a post in the community. it doesn’t exactly tell my story, but the story it does tell is appalling enough that i would probably have posted it under the "i am a terrorist" tag. but what it does tell matches my outcome to a T. i haven’t really considered whether or not i really have PTSD before now, just taking other peoples’ word for it. but particularly with this (admittedly “non-medical”) description of someone who does have PTSD – “his emotions are all over the place. He’ll get so angry at things, and it’s not toward anybody. It’s toward himself. He blames himself for everything.” He has a hard time sleeping and doesn’t spend as much time as he used to with the kids. “They get rowdy when they play, and he just has to be alone. It’s almost like his nerves can’t handle it… He kind of… zones out, almost like he’s in a daze.” – it really hits home how much i’ve been deluding myself. so here it is anyway, under the PTSD tag as well:

How Specialist Town Lost His Benefits
March 22, 2007
By Joshua Kors

Jon Town has spent the last few years fighting two battles, one against his body, the other against the US Army. Both began in October 2004 in Ramadi, Iraq. He was standing in the doorway of his battalion’s headquarters when a 107-millimeter rocket struck two feet above his head. The impact punched a piano-sized hole in the concrete facade, sparked a huge fireball and tossed the 25-year-old Army specialist to the floor, where he lay blacked out among the rubble.

“The next thing I remember is waking up on the ground.” Men from his unit had gathered around his body and were screaming his name. “They started shaking me. But I was numb all over,” he says. “And it’s weird because… because for a few minutes you feel like you’re not really there. I could see them, but I couldn’t hear them. I couldn’t hear anything. I started shaking because I thought I was dead.”

Eventually the rocket shrapnel was removed from Town’s neck and his ears stopped leaking blood. But his hearing never really recovered, and in many ways, neither has his life. A soldier honored twelve times during his seven years in uniform, Town has spent the last three struggling with deafness, memory failure and depression. By September 2006 he and the Army agreed he was no longer combat-ready.

But instead of sending Town to a medical board and discharging him because of his injuries, doctors at Fort Carson, Colorado, did something strange: They claimed Town’s wounds were actually caused by a “personality disorder.” Town was then booted from the Army and told that under a personality disorder discharge, he would never receive disability or medical benefits.

Town is not alone. A six-month investigation has uncovered multiple cases in which soldiers wounded in Iraq are suspiciously diagnosed as having a personality disorder, then prevented from collecting benefits. The conditions of their discharge have infuriated many in the military community, including the injured soldiers and their families, veterans’ rights groups, even military officials required to process these dismissals.

They say the military is purposely misdiagnosing soldiers like Town and that it’s doing so for one reason: to cheat them out of a lifetime of disability and medical benefits, thereby saving billions in expenses.

The Fine Print
In the Army’s separations manual it’s called Regulation 635-200, Chapter 5-13: “Separation Because of Personality Disorder.” It’s an alluring choice for a cash-strapped military because enacting it is quick and cheap. The Department of Veterans Affairs doesn’t have to provide medical care to soldiers dismissed with personality disorder. That’s because under Chapter 5-13, personality disorder is a pre-existing condition. The VA is only required to treat wounds sustained during service.

Soldiers discharged under 5-13 can’t collect disability pay either. To receive those benefits, a soldier must be evaluated by a medical board, which must confirm that he is wounded and that his wounds stem from combat. The process takes several months, in contrast with a 5-13 discharge, which can be wrapped up in a few days.

If a soldier dismissed under 5-13 hasn’t served out his contract, he has to give back a slice of his re-enlistment bonus as well. That amount is often larger than the soldier’s final paycheck. As a result, on the day of their discharge, many injured vets learn that they owe the Army several thousand dollars.

One military official says doctors at his base are doing more than withholding this information from wounded soldiers; they’re actually telling them the opposite: that if they go along with a 5-13, they’ll get to keep their bonus and receive disability and medical benefits. The official, who demanded anonymity, handles discharge papers at a prominent Army facility. He says the soldiers he works with know they don’t have a personality disorder. “But the doctors are telling them, this will get you out quicker, and the VA will take care of you. To stay out of Iraq, a soldier will take that in a heartbeat. What they don’t realize is, those things are lies. The soldiers, they don’t read the fine print,” he says. “They don’t know to ask for a med board. They’re taking the word of the doctors. Then they sit down with me and find out what a 5-13 really means–they’re shocked.”

Russell Terry, founder of the Iraq War Veterans Organization (IWVO), says he’s watched this scenario play itself out many times. For more than a year, his veterans’ rights group has been receiving calls from distraught soldiers discharged under Chapter 5-13. Most, he says, say their military doctors pushed the personality disorder diagnosis, strained to prove that their problems existed before their service in Iraq and refused to acknowledge evidence of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), traumatic brain injury and physical traumas, which would allow them to collect disability and medical benefits.

“These soldiers are coming home from Iraq with all kinds of problems,” Terry says. “They go to the VA for treatment, and they’re turned away. They’re told, ‘No, you have a pre-existing condition, something from childhood.'” That leap in logic boils Terry’s blood. “Everybody receives a psychological screening when they join the military. What I want to know is, if all these soldiers really did have a severe pre-existing condition, how did they get into the military in the first place?”

Terry says that trying to reverse a 5-13 discharge is a frustrating process. A soldier has to claw through a thicket of paperwork, appeals panels and backstage political dealing, and even with the guidance of an experienced advocate, few are successful. “The 5-13,” he says, “it’s like a scarlet letter you can’t get taken off.”

In the last six years the Army has diagnosed and discharged more than 5,600 soldiers because of personality disorder, according to the Defense Department. And the numbers keep rising: 805 cases in 2001, 980 cases in 2003, 1,086 from January to November 2006. “It’s getting worse and worse every day,” says the official who handles discharge papers. “At my office the numbers started out normal. Now it’s up to three or four soldiers each day. It’s like, suddenly everybody has a personality disorder.”

The reason is simple, he says. “They’re saving a buck. And they’re saving the VA money too. It’s all about money.”

Exactly how much money is difficult to calculate. Defense Department records show that across the entire armed forces, more than 22,500 soldiers have been dismissed due to personality disorder in the last six years. How much those soldiers would have collected in disability pay would have been determined by a medical board, which evaluates just how disabled a veteran is. A completely disabled soldier receives about $44,000 a year. In a recent study on the cost of veterans’ benefits for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, Harvard professor Linda Bilmes estimates an average disability payout of $8,890 per year and a future life expectancy of forty years for soldiers returning from service.

Using those figures, by discharging soldiers under Chapter 5-13, the military could be saving upwards of $8 billion in disability pay. Add to that savings the cost of medical care over the soldiers’ lifetimes. Bilmes estimates that each year the VA spends an average of $5,000 in medical care per veteran. Applying those numbers, by discharging 22,500 soldiers because of personality disorder, the military saves $4.5 billion in medical care over their lifetimes.

Town says Fort Carson psychologist Mark Wexler assured him that he would receive disability benefits, VA medical care and that he’d get to keep his bonus–good news he discussed with Christian Fields and Brandon Murray, two soldiers in his unit at Fort Carson. “We talked about it many times,” Murray says. “Jon said the doctor there promised him benefits, and he was happy about it. Who wouldn’t be?” Town shared that excitement with his wife, Kristy, shortly after his appointment with Wexler. “He said that Wexler had explained to him that he’d get to keep his benefits,” Kristy says, “that the doctor had looked into it, and it was all coming with the chapter he was getting.”

In fact, Town would not get disability pay or receive long-term VA medical care. And he would have to give back the bulk of his $15,000 bonus. Returning that money meant Town would leave Fort Carson less than empty-handed: He now owed the Army more than $3,000. “We had this on our heads the whole way, driving home to Ohio,” says Town. Wexler made him promises, he says, about what would happen if he went along with the diagnosis. “The final day, we find out, none of it was true. It was a total shock. I felt like I’d been betrayed by the Army.”

Wexler denies discussing benefits with Town. In a statement, the psychologist writes, “I have never discussed benefits with my patients as that is not my area of expertise. The only thing I said to Spc. Town was that the Chapter 5-13 is an honorable discharge…. I assure you, after over 15 years in my position, both as active duty and now civilian, I don’t presume to know all the details about benefits and therefore do not discuss them with my patients.”

Wexler’s boss, Col. Steven Knorr, chief of the Department of Behavioral Health at Evans Army Hospital, declined to speak about Town’s case. When asked if doctors at Fort Carson were assuring patients set for a 5-13 discharge that they’ll receive disability benefits and keep their bonuses, Knorr said, “I don’t believe they’re doing that.”

Not the Man He Used to Be
Interviews with soldiers diagnosed with personality disorder suggest that the military is using the psychological condition as a catch-all diagnosis, encompassing symptoms as diverse as deafness, headaches and schizophrenic delusions. That flies in the face of the Army’s own regulations.

According to those regulations, to be classified a personality disorder, a soldier’s symptoms had to exist before he joined the military. And they have to match the “personality disorder” described in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the national standard for psychiatric diagnosis. Town’s case provides a clear window into how these personality disorder diagnoses are being used because even a cursory examination of his case casts grave doubt as to whether he fits either criterion.

Town’s wife, for one, laughs in disbelief at the idea that her husband was suffering from hearing loss before he headed to Iraq. But since returning, she says, he can’t watch TV unless the volume is full-blast, can’t use the phone unless its volume is set to high. Medical papers from Fort Carson list Town as having no health problems before serving in Iraq; after, a Fort Carson audiologist documents “functional (non-organic) hearing loss.” Town says his right ear, his “good” ear, has lost 50 percent of its hearing; his left is still essentially useless.

He is more disturbed by how his memory has eroded. Since the rocket blast, he has struggled to retain new information. “Like, I’ll be driving places, and then I totally forget where I’m going,” he says. “Numbers, names, dates–unless I knew them before, I pretty much don’t remember.” When Town returned to his desk job at Fort Carson, he found himself straining to recall the Army’s regulations. “People were like, ‘What are you, dumb?’ And I’m like, ‘No, I’m probably smarter than you. I just can’t remember stuff,'” he says, his melancholy suddenly replaced by anger. “They don’t understand–I got hit by a rocket.”

Those bursts of rage mark the biggest change, says Kristy Town. She says the man she married four years ago was “a real goofball. He’d do funny voices and faces–a great Jim Carrey imitation. When the kids would get a boo-boo, he’d fall on the ground and pretend he got a boo-boo too.” Now, she says, “his emotions are all over the place. He’ll get so angry at things, and it’s not toward anybody. It’s toward himself. He blames himself for everything.” He has a hard time sleeping and doesn’t spend as much time as he used to with the kids. “They get rowdy when they play, and he just has to be alone. It’s almost like his nerves can’t handle it.”

Kristy begins to cry, pauses, before forcing herself to continue. She’s been watching him when he’s alone, she says. “He kind of… zones out, almost like he’s in a daze.”

In May 2006 Town tried to electrocute himself, dropping his wife’s hair dryer into the bathtub. The dryer short-circuited before it could electrify the water. Fort Carson officials put Town in an off-post hospital that specializes in suicidal depression. Town had been promoted to corporal after returning from Iraq; he was stripped of that rank and reduced back to specialist. “When he came back, I tried to be the same,” Kristy says. “He just can’t. He’s definitely not the man he used to be.”

Town says his dreams have changed too. They keep taking him back to Ramadi, to the death of a good friend who’d been too near an explosion, taken too much shrapnel to the face. In his dreams Town returns there night after night to soak up the blood.

He stops his description for a rare moment of levity. “Sleep didn’t use to be like that,” he says. “I used to sleep just fine.”

How the Army determined then that Town’s behavioral problems existed before his military service is unclear. Wexler, the Fort Carson psychologist who made the diagnosis, didn’t interview any of Town’s family or friends. It’s unclear whether he even questioned Town’s fellow soldiers in 2-17 Field Artillery, men like Fields, Murray and Michael Forbus, who could have testified to his stability and award-winning performance before the October 2004 rocket attack. As Forbus puts it, before the attack Town was “one of the best in our unit”; after, “the son of a gun was deaf in one ear. He seemed lost and disoriented. It just took the life out of him.”

Town finds his diagnosis especially strange because the Diagnostic Manual appears to preclude cases like his. It says that a pattern of erratic behavior cannot be labeled a “personality disorder” if it’s from a head injury. The specialist asserts that his hearing loss, headaches and anger all began with the rocket attack that knocked him unconscious.

Wexler did not reply to repeated requests seeking comment on Town’s diagnosis. But Col. Knorr of Fort Carson’s Evans hospital says he’s confident his doctors are properly diagnosing personality disorder. The colonel says there is a simple explanation as to why in so many cases the lifelong condition of personality disorder isn’t apparent until after serving in Iraq. Traumatic experiences, Knorr says, can trigger a condition that has lain dormant for years. “They may have done fine in high school and before, but it comes out during the stress of service.”

“I’ve never heard of that occurring,” says Keith Armstrong, a clinical professor with the Department of Psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco. Armstrong has been counseling traumatized veterans for more than twenty years at the San Francisco VA; most recently he is the co-author of Courage After Fire: Coping Strategies for Troops Returning From Iraq and Afghanistan and Their Families. “Personality disorder is a diagnosis I’m very cautious about,” he says. “My question would be, has PTSD been ruled out? It seems to me that if it walks like a duck, looks like a duck, let’s see if it’s a duck before other factors are implicated.”

Knorr admits that in most cases, before making a diagnosis, his doctors only interview the soldier. But he adds that interviewing family members, untrained to recognize signs of personality disorder, would be of limited value. “The soldier’s perception and their parents’ perception is that they were fine. But maybe they didn’t or weren’t able to see that wasn’t the case.”

Armstrong takes a very different approach. He says family is a “crucial part” of the diagnosis and treatment of soldiers returning from war. The professor sees parents and wives as so important, he encourages his soldiers to invite their families into the counseling sessions. “They bring in particular information that can be helpful,” he says. “By not taking advantage of their knowledge and support, I think we’re doing soldiers a disservice.”

Knorr would not discuss the specifics of Town’s case. He did note, however, that his department treats thousands of soldiers each year and says within that population, there are bound to be a small fraction of misdiagnosed cases and dissatisfied soldiers. He adds that the soldiers he’s seen diagnosed and discharged with personality disorder are “usually quite pleased.”

The Army holds soldiers’ medical records and contact information strictly confidential. But The Nation was able to locate a half-dozen soldiers from bases across the country who were diagnosed with personality disorder. All of them rejected that diagnosis. Most said military doctors tried to force the diagnosis upon them and turned a blind eye to symptoms of PTSD and physical injury.

One such veteran, Richard Dykstra, went to the hospital at Fort Stewart, Georgia, complaining of flashbacks, anger and stomach pains. The doctor there diagnosed personality disorder. Dykstra thinks the symptoms actually stem from PTSD and a bilateral hernia he suffered in Iraq. “When I told her my symptoms, she said, ‘Oh, it looks like you’ve been reading up on PTSD.’ Then she basically said I was making it all up,” he says.

In her report on Dykstra, Col. Ana Parodi, head of Behavioral Health at Fort Stewart’s Winn Army Hospital, writes that the soldier gives a clear description of PTSD symptoms but lays them out with such detail, it’s “as if he had memorized the criteria.” She concludes that Dykstra has personality disorder, not PTSD, though her report also notes that Dykstra has had “no previous psychiatric history” and that she confirmed the validity of his symptoms with the soldier’s wife.

Parodi is currently on leave and could not be reached for comment. Speaking for Fort Stewart, Public Affairs Officer Lieut. Col. Randy Martin says that the Army’s diagnosis procedures “have been developed over time, and they are accepted as being fair.” Martin said he could not address Dykstra’s case specifically because his files have been moved to a storage facility in St. Louis.

William Wooldridge had a similar fight with the Army. The specialist was hauling missiles and tank ammunition outside Baghdad when, he says, a man standing at the side of the road grabbed hold of a young girl and pushed her in front of his truck. “The little girl,” Wooldridge says, his voice suddenly quiet, “she looked like one of my daughters.”

When he returned to Fort Polk, Louisiana, Wooldridge told his doctor that he was now hearing voices and seeing visions, hallucinations of a mangled girl who would ask him why he had killed her. His doctor told him he had personality disorder. “When I heard that, I flew off the handle because I said, ‘Hey, that ain’t me. Before I went over there, I was a happy-go-lucky kind of guy.'” Wooldridge says his psychologist, Capt. Patrick Brady of Baynes-Jones Army Community Hospital, saw him for thirty minutes before making his diagnosis. Soon after, Wooldridge was discharged from Fort Polk under Chapter 5-13.

He began to fight that discharge immediately, without success. Then in March 2005, eighteen months after Wooldridge’s dismissal, his psychiatrist at the Memphis VA filed papers rejecting Brady’s diagnosis and asserting that Wooldridge suffered from PTSD so severe, it made him “totally disabled.” Weeks later the Army Discharge Review Board voided Wooldridge’s 5-13 dismissal, but the eighteen months he’d spent lingering without benefits had already taken its toll.

“They put me out on the street to rot, and if I had left things like they were, there would have been no way I could have survived. I would have had to take myself out or had someone do it for me,” he says. The way they use personality disorder to diagnose and discharge, he says, “it’s like a mental rape. That’s the only way I can describe it.”

Captain Brady has since left Fort Polk and is now on staff at Fort Wainwright, Alaska; recently he deployed to Iraq and was unavailable for comment. In a statement, Maj. Byron Strother, chief of the Department of Behavioral Health at Baynes-Jones hospital, writes that allegations that soldiers at Fort Polk are being misdiagnosed “are not true.” Strother says diagnoses at his hospital are made “only after careful consideration of all relevant clinical observation, direct examination [and] appropriate testing.”

If there are dissatisfied soldiers, says Knorr, the Fort Carson official, “I’ll bet not a single one of them has been diagnosed with conditions that are clear-cut and makes them medically unfit, like schizophrenia.”

Linda Mosier disputes that. When her son Chris left for Iraq in 2004, he was a “normal kid,” she says, who’d call her long-­distance and joke about the strange food and expensive taxis overseas. When he returned home for Christmas 2005, “he wouldn’t sit down for a meal with us. He just kept walking around. I took him to the department store for slacks, and he was inside rushing around saying, ‘Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go.’ He wouldn’t sleep, and the one time he did, he woke up screaming.”

Mosier told his mother of a breaking point in Iraq: a roadside bomb that blew up the truck in front of his. “He said his buddies were screaming. They were on fire,” she says, her voice trailing off. “He was there at the end to pick up the hands and arms.” After that Mosier started having delusions. Dr. Wexler of Fort Carson diagnosed personality disorder. Soon after, Mosier was discharged under Chapter 5-13.

Mosier returned home, still plagued by visions. In October he put a note on the front door of their Des Moines, Iowa, home saying the Iraqis were after him and he had to protect the family, then shot himself.

Mosier’s mother is furious that doctors at Fort Carson treated her son for such a brief period of time and that Wexler, citing confidentiality, refused to tell her anything about that treatment or give her family any direction on how to help Chris upon his return home. She does not believe her son had a personality disorder. “They take a normal kid, he comes back messed up, then nobody was there for him when he came back,” Linda says. “They discharged him so they didn’t have to treat him.”

Wexler did not reply to a written request seeking comment on Mosier’s case.

Thrown to the Wolves
Today Jon Town is home, in small-town Findlay, Ohio, with no job, no prospects and plenty of time to reflect on how he got there. Diagnosing him with personality disorder may have saved the Army thousands of dollars, he says, but what did Wexler have to gain?

Quite a lot, says Steve Robinson, director of veterans affairs at Veterans for America, a Washington, DC-based soldiers’ rights group. Since the Iraq War began, he says, doctors have been facing an overflow of wounded soldiers and a shortage of rooms, supplies and time to treat them. By calling PTSD a personality disorder, they usher one soldier out quickly, freeing up space for the three or four who are waiting.

Terry, the veterans’ advocate from IWVO, notes that unlike doctors in the private sector, Army doctors who give questionable diagnoses face no danger of malpractice suits due to Feres v. U.S., a 1950 Supreme Court ruling that bars soldiers from suing for negligence. To maintain that protection, Terry says, most doctors will diagnose personality disorder when prodded to do so by military officials.

That’s precisely how the system works, says one military official familiar with the discharge process. The official, who requested anonymity, is a lawyer with Trial Defense Services (TDS), a unit of the Army that guides soldiers through their 5-13 discharge. “Commanders want to get these guys out the door and get it done fast. Even if the next soldier isn’t as good, at least he’s good to go. He’s deployable. So they’re telling the docs what diagnosis to give to get what discharge.”

The lawyer says he knows this is happening because commanders have told him that they’re doing it. “Some have come to me and talked about doing this. They’re saying, ‘Give me a specific diagnosis. It’ll support a certain chapter.'”

Colonel Martin of Fort Stewart said the prospect of commanders pressuring doctors to diagnose personality disorder is “highly unlikely.” “Doctors are making these determinations themselves,” Martin says. In a statement, Col. William Statz, commander at Fort Polk’s Baynes-Jones hospital, says, “Any allegations that clinical decisions are influenced by either political considerations or command pressures, at any level, are untrue.”

But a second TDS lawyer, who also demanded anonymity, says he’s watched the same process play out at his base. “What I’ve noticed is right before a unit deploys, we see a spike in 5-13s, as if the commanders are trying to clean house, get rid of the soldiers they don’t really need,” he says. “The chain of command just wants to eliminate them and get a new body in there fast to plug up the holes.” If anyone shows even moderate signs of psychological distress, he says, “they’re kicking them to the curb instead of treating them.”

Both lawyers say that once a commander steps in and pushes for a 5-13, the diagnosis and discharge are carved in stone fairly fast. After that happens, one lawyer says he points soldiers toward the Army Board for Correction of Military Records, where a 5-13 label could be overturned, and failing that, advises them to seek redress from their representative in Congress. Town did that, contacting Republican Representative Michael Oxley of Ohio, with little success. Oxley, who has since retired, did not return calls seeking comment.

Few cases are challenged successfully or overturned later, say the TDS lawyers. The system, says one, is essentially broken. “Right now, the Army is eating its own. What I want to see is these soldiers getting the right diagnosis, so they can get the right help, not be thrown to the wolves right away. That is what they’re doing.”

Still, Town tries to remain undaunted. He got his story to Robinson of Veterans for America, who brought papers on his case to an October meeting with several top Washington officials, including Deputy Surgeon General Gale Pollock, Assistant Surgeon General Bernard DeKoning and Republican Senator Kit Bond of Missouri. There Robinson laid out the larger 5-13 problem and submitted a briefing specifically on Town.

“We got a very positive response,” Robinson says. “After we presented, they were almost appalled, like we are every day. They said, ‘We didn’t know this was happening.'” Robinson says the deputy surgeon general promised to look into Town’s case and the others presented to her. Senator Bond, whose son has served in Iraq, floated the idea of a Congressional hearing if the 5-13 issue isn’t resolved. The senator did not return calls seeking comment.

In the meantime, Town is doing his best to keep his head in check. He says his nightmares have been waning in recent weeks, but most of his problems persist. He’s thinking of going to a veterans support group in Toledo, forty-five miles north of Findlay. There will be guys there who have been through this, he says, vets who understand.

Town hesitates, his voice suddenly much softer. “I have my good days and my bad days,” he says. “It all depends on whether I wake up in Findlay or Iraq.”

The Hostile New Age Takeover of Yoga
There’s nothing worse than narcissism posing as humility.
March 21, 2007
By Ron Rosenbaum

Don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against yoga—or Eastern disciplines in general. In fact, I’ve done tai chi exercises for many years.

No, it’s the commodification and rhetorical dumbing-down of yoga culture that gets to me. The way something that once was—and still can be—pure and purifying has been larded with mystical schlock. Once a counterweight to our sweaty striving for ego gratification, yoga has become an unctuous adjunct to it.

There is the exploitative and ever-proliferating “yoga media.” The advent of yoga fashion (the yoga mat, the yoga-mat carrier, and yoga-class ensembles). And worst of all, the yoga rhetoric, that soothing syrupy “yoga-speak” that we all know and loathe.

It all adds up to what a friend recently called the “hostile New Age takeover of yoga.” “New Age” culture being those scented-candle shrines to self-worship, the love-oneself lit of The Secret, the “applied kinesiology“-type medical and metaphysical quackery used to support a vast array of alternative-this or alternative-that magical-thinking workshops and spa weekends. At its best, it’s harmless mental self-massage. At its worst, it’s the kind of thinking that blames cancer victims for their disease because they didn’t “manifest” enough positive vibes.

One “manifestation” of this takeover is the shameless enlistment of yoga and elevated Eastern yogic philosophy for shamelessly material Western goals. Rather than an alternative, it’s become an enabler. “Power yoga”! Yoga for success! Yoga for regime change! (Kidding.)

And then there’s what you might call “Yoga for Supermarket Checkout Line Goals.” Or as the cover story of Rodale’s downmarket magazine YogaLife put it, yoga to: “BURN FAT FASTER!” (Subsidiary stories bannered on the YogaLife cover: “4 WAYS TO LOSE 5 POUNDS”; “ZEN SECRETS TO: HEALTHY RELATIONSHIPS … INSTANT CALM.”)

Gotta love “Zen Secrets to Instant Calm,” right? It goes right along with other cover lines like “Double Your Flexibility Today!” and “Heal Winter Skin Now!”

Clearly what the ancient inventors of yogic wisdom had in mind: Now! Instant! Today! Very Eastern, calm, and meditative right?

But even more insidious than the easily satirizable but at least down-to-earth and honest magazines like YogaLife—or ethereally serious ones like Yoga + Joyful Living (which coaches readers in “The Breath of Self-Understanding”)—are the mainstream yoga publications such as Yoga Journal, one of the most popular, prosperous, and respectable yoga magazines.

In fact, my impetus for this examination of yoga media came from a sharp-witted woman I know who practices yoga but frankly concedes that—for her, anyway—it’s less about Inner Peace than Outer Hotness. She called my attention to what she called an amazingly clueless—and ultimately cruel (to the writer)—decision by the editors of Yoga Journal to print a first-person story that was ostensibly about the yogic wisdom on forgiveness in relationships.

The story, which appeared in the December 2006 issue, was titled “Forgive Yourself.” It’s by this woman who tells us about an “intense” friendship she once had with a guy nearly 20 years ago, when they were 16. She says it was “never romantic,” and it clearly wasn’t—on his part.

Somehow she picked a fight with him—remember, this was 20 years ago. She defaced some “artwork” he’d done on the back of her jean jacket and danced with some other boys in an attempt to make him jealous.

She claims he gave her a “stricken” look.

Then, 20 years later, she starts to hound the guy. She claims she just happened to be going through some boxes and found a journal of his. She claims the journal convinced her that what she needed to do was apologize and ask his forgiveness. So she Google-stalks him, or, as she puts it: “With the help of an Internet search engine, I tracked him down and sent an e-mail. I told him I was sorry and that I hoped we could talk.”

She “got no response but figured the e-mail address was out of date.” Right.

Anyway she doesn’t let that stop her. “After more digging”—by what methods we’re not told—”I found a phone number and left a message on his machine.”

Her message: “Wow, what a trip to hear your voice! … I missed you!”

He didn’t call back.

But no response doesn’t really mean no, to her. So, “a month later, in desperation, I sent him a short letter,” in which she tells him, “You deserved better. I betrayed your love and friendship and I’m sorry. I made life worse for you and I regret it.”

Doesn’t regret it enough to stop pestering him now though. And notice how at first she’d disclaimed there was anything romantic, but now she’s all “I betrayed your love.” And then there’s the poem: “I hope you can forgive me,” she concludes the note, adding: “I included a poem I’d written for him some years earlier.”

Restraining order time!

Instead he makes the mistake of responding. “About a month later an envelope arrived,” she writes, “addressed in that familiar handwriting. I opened it with trembling hands and found a short note wrapped around my letter and poem.”

“What part of no don’t you understand?” his note said. “I never want to hear from you again.” Cruel, true, but maybe “cruel to be kind.”

“What part of no” does she not understand? Just about every single part of no there is.

What does this have to do with yoga wisdom and its Western use? One might think yoga would counsel acceptance of his feelings. Instead, she takes it as an invitation for further intense inward gazing. Her interpretation: He’s afraid of being hurt again. He just doesn’t understand her: He thought “I clearly hadn’t changed if I was expecting him to give me something (forgiveness) along with everything I’d taken from him.” (Don’t worry, it took me several readings to figure this out too.)

“I sat down and started to cry. I felt as if I’d been punched in the gut. What could I do now? How would I ever be able to move on?”

So, using her deep yogic intuition again she decides there is one way of “moving on”: She can write a several-thousand-word article for Yoga Journal about him and her and how we all can learn something from this about “forgiveness.”

“Moving on”? Somehow one wonders if she sent the article to him, perhaps with another poem. And an invitation to “journal” their way to a mutual understanding. Or maybe meet to discuss “closure”?

But look, it’s not really her fault; we’ve all been there. As my sharp-witted friend, who is herself an editor, points out, it is here one has to question the deep yogic wisdom of the editors of Yoga Journal who don’t seem to be able to—or want to—see what is going on and instead encourage the writer’s “journey”—her quest, her stalking—of “self-discovery.”

Thus, we get the classic Western women’s magazine “relationship story” translated into Eastern yoga-speak. Indeed they give it prominent placement in the issue and subject their readers to the endless New Age clichés of pablum-dispensing yoga-wisdom “experts” who further encourage the hapless writer not to move on but to dwell endlessly, excruciatingly, on the microanalysis of the situation.

Instead of counseling her just to leave the poor guy alone, they direct her to dwell on her need to forgive herself: Some “research associate” at Stanford tells her “when people can’t forgive, their stress levels increase which can contribute to cardiovascular problems.”

The poor young woman! All she wants is help, and now she’s told she’s going to have a heart attack.

Another yogic savant, a “clinical psychologist with Elemental Yoga in Boston” even disses the poor guy and further encourages the writer’s obsession, clearly getting the whole thing wrong: “He’s the one that can’t let go,” the “yoga therapist” opines. Right. I guess he wrote that poem to himself.

More yogic “experts” are brought in to prescribe even more “work” on herself. Instead of advising her to leave the whole thing behind, and perhaps perform some act of compassion for someone who needs real help (the admirable Eastern tradition), the yoga experts advise her to enmesh herself in a tediously obsessive spiral of self-examination, which the magazine compounds by prescribing a five-step forgiveness ritual for achieving—you guessed it!—”closure.”

The interminable ritual, which is the work of the purportedly steeped-in-yogic-wisdom editors, not the unfortunate writer, begins with “a ritual bath” complete with “scents” and “candles.”

Then there’s the inevitable “journal” in which you must write down all your “thoughts, feelings and memories.” … “What you learned … what you’ll change … anything that comes into your head.” It’s a full-time job!

But that’s not all there is to the endless forgiveness ritual (which, remember, is not about forgiving him but forgiving herself because he won’t forgive her), there’s the semi-demi witchcraft aspect: “Write down the patterns you seek to change in yourself; then burn what you’ve written.” (They neglect to add, “Use this as reminder to change the batteries in your smoke detector.”)

But it’s not over, the endless ritual. You must next and last, “Send yourself flowers when you’ve completed letting go.”

No premature floral deliveries, mind you. Only when you’ve “completed” letting go, which sending yourself flowers certainly signals. OK maybe one more poem, but that’s it! This is the kind of misguided narcissism (it’s always all about you; metaphorically, it’s all sending flowers to yourself) that gives yoga, an ancient, honorable tradition, a bad name. This is what is meant by the “hostile New Age takeover of yoga.” All this hectoring about the right way to feel. Yoga and other Eastern disciplines are supposed to work from the inside out and not depend on product placement candles, scented bath oils, and “yoga therapists.”

And it’s still not over! If the ritual bath and flower-sending don’t do the trick, there’s a “four-step practice rooted in Tibetan Buddhist philosophy that can take us through the process of making amends.” You could spend a lifetime “moving on” from some imagined 20-year-old incident. Then move on to the next incredibly elaborate “Moving On” ceremony. You never get to move in, or move out.

The final step in the great journey of self-understanding the Yoga Journal editors have force-marched her on is realizing it’s all about her “relationship with herself.” Whitney Houston yoga: I found the greatest love of all—Me! It’s the return of New Age Me-generation narcissism. And there’s nothing worse than narcissism posing as humility.

Hey, if Buddhism and other Eastern traditions are about compassion, why not skip the scented bath, skip making amends with the self, skip realization of “the opportunity to embrace aparigraha or non-grasping.” Instead, go down to the local soup kitchen or homeless shelter and help some people who don’t have the resources to send flowers to themselves, people who actually need help. Rather than continuing the endless processes of anointing yourself with overly scented candlelit self-love.

After all this self-indulgence, it’s almost refreshing to turn to a yoga magazine that offers stuff like, “BURN FAT FASTER!”

Anti-rape device to hit market – and rapists
March 20 2007
By Sivuyile Mangxamba

A controversial South African invention, a female condom-like anti-rape device, is almost ready to hit the market after months of waiting for patent verification.

The device, known as Rapex, has stirred controversy around the world but its inventor, Sonnet Ehlers, is preparing the final pre-production phase after seven years of waiting.

The controversy has raged over whether the device, which has fish-like teeth that attach to the head and shaft of the penis, is a medieval device built on a hatred of men or whether it is an easy-to-use invention that could free millions of South African women from fear of rape.

In the latest crime statistics, South Africa recorded a staggering 54 926 rape cases, giving it one of the worst sexual assault records in the world.

“This product can enter the market anytime now.

“The process of checking if there are any patent infringements will be up on April 10,” said Ehlers from her Kleinmond home.

Since publicly announcing her invention one-and-half years ago, Ehlers has shot to international fame, stirring a worldwide debate about the merits of her anti-rape device.

She has been on talk radio shows in England and Australia and even South American journalists have descended on Kleinmond to interview her.

“I am not a male hater, but why must the woman always be the one degraded by rape?” said Ehlers.

Even Rape Crisis Cape Town argues that Rapex is not a solution to the social problem of rape.

They have argued that such a device increases women’s vulnerability to violence.

But for Ehlers this device, which is inserted in the vagina, could give women vital seconds to escape the rapist while he was busy dealing with his pain.

“The surprise factor will give women a chance to escape,” says Ehlers, explaining that the rapist would be in great pain as the 25 teeth attach themselves to the shaft of the penis.

The rapist also has to contend with the fact that only a doctor can remove the fish-like teeth.

“I want this guy to be identified. I want a way that will prove that penetration took place,” said Ehlers.

With production scheduled for next month, Ehlers said the product will be mass-produced in China to keep costs down.

i’m still a little annoyed that they’ve disabled telnet access to my server, but as long as they’re willing to execute shell commands for me (like chmod members.pl +x for example) when i call them, everything will be cool. the new server has a whole bunch of new stats that the old server didn’t have, and a bunch of new interfaces for things like .htaccess, robots.txt and spamassassin that make me very happy. i still haven’t figured out how to password-protect something (8/), and i’ve had to get rid of my logo on the error pages, but i think that may be just a “relative-versus-absolute” addressing problem (it was. the error pages have graphics again). all in all, the new server is very cool, and $50 a year cheaper than the old server.

oh, and since the change from the old server, when they straightened out all of my miscellaneous email address issues, i haven’t gotten more than 5 spams in a day, and there have been two days (including today) where i didn’t get any spam at all. 8)

pistachio nuts are highly flammable when stored in large quantities, and are prone to self heating and spontaneous combustion.

for that matter, pistachios are actually drupes, not nuts.

Will a New Study Force Changes in Drug Law?
A two-year study from a British commission is recommending a reality-based approach to drug law, rooted in science and focused on reducing harm. Americans should take note.
March 15, 2007
By Bruce Mirken

On March 8, a high-powered British commission recommended tossing that country’s law on illegal drugs onto the scrap heap and starting over again. Given that the U.S. Controlled Substances Act parallels the British Misuse of Drugs Act in important ways, the suggestion deserves attention in America as well.

Indeed, it would be a fine start if Americans could simply begin the sort of rational, thoughtful debate on drug policy that the British seem to be having. If we could manage such a thing, we might start changing illogical and unscientific laws that now lead to more U.S. arrests for marijuana possession than for all violent crimes combined.

The RSA Commission on Illegal Drugs, Communities and Public Policy, was convened by the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, a respected think tank with a 250-year history. After two years of research, this panel of experts and laypeople came to a number of conclusions so sensible and so obvious that it’s astonishing how consistently our elected leaders have avoided confronting them. In particular:

• The notion of a drug-free society is “almost certainly a chimera. … People have always used substances to change the way they see the world and how they feel, and there is every reason to think they always will.” Therefore, “[t]he main aim of public policy should be to reduce the amount of harms that drugs cause.” A policy based on total prohibition “is bound to fail.”
• The concept of “drugs” should include tobacco and alcohol. “Indeed, in their different ways, alcohol and tobacco cause far more harm than illegal drugs.” These substances should be brought into a unified regulatory framework “capable of treating substances according to the harm they cause.”
• The heart of this new regulatory framework must be an index of substance-related harms. “The index should be based on the best available evidence and should be able to be modified in light of new evidence.”
• We need a new way of evaluating the efficacy of drug policies. “In our view, the success of drugs policy should be measured not in terms of the amounts of drugs seized or in the number of dealers imprisoned, but in terms of the amount of harms reduced.”

As an example of the sort of harms index they envision, the RSA Commission points to an index developed by a pair of British scientists, David Nutt and Colin Blakemore, and published in a House of Commons report last year.

Based on scientific evaluations of physical harms (e.g., acute and chronic toxicity), likelihood of dependence, and social harms (including damage done to others, health care costs, etc.), Nutt and Blakemore ranked 20 different classes of drugs, both legal and illegal. Not surprisingly, heroin was at the top of the harm scale, followed by cocaine and barbiturates. Alcohol and tobacco were rated as significantly more harmful than marijuana and several other illegal substances.

While not specifically endorsing the Nutt/Blakemore index, the RSA Commission clearly considered these rankings a good example of what they have in mind, using them as a starting point for illustrations of how such an index might translate into law. Marijuana, they wrote, “should continue to be controlled. But its position on the harms index suggests that the form this control takes might have to correspond far more closely with the way in which alcohol and tobacco are regulated.”

Both the United States and Britain now have drug laws that rank drugs into a series of classifications. The problem — well, at least one problem — is that these classifications have little connection to what the science actually tells us about the dangers (or lack thereof) of different substances. Britain’s version, the commission noted, “is driven more by ‘moral panic’ than a practical desire to reduce harm. … It sends people to prison who should not be there. It forces people into treatment who do not need it (while, in effect, denying treatment to people who do need it).”

And Britain’s law is, on at least one key point, far more rational than the U.S. Controlled Substances Act. The British classify marijuana in the lowest of three classes of illicit drugs — still illegal, but treated as less dangerous than cocaine, heroin or methamphetamine. Simple possession, without aggravating circumstances, is generally a “nonarrestable” offense.

Our CSA ranks marijuana in Schedule I, the worst class of drugs — considered not only to be at high risk of abuse but also to be unsafe for use even under medical supervision — along with heroin and LSD. Amazingly, cocaine and meth are in Schedule II — considered acceptable for use under medical supervision. That such a ranking is insane should not need to be stated.

There are plenty of specifics in the RSA report about which reasonable people can disagree. But the important thing is not what they say about any specific drug — and indeed, the report is careful not to advocate specific legal changes for particular drugs. What’s important is that it suggests a framework that’s far more rational than what now exists in the United States, Britain and most other countries: A reality-based approach rooted in sound science, focusing on how to reduce harm.

Even more encouraging is the generally level-headed reaction thus far. Some commentators are arguing with parts of the report and disagreeing with some suggestions, but even critics seem to be acknowledging that the RSA has raised important issues that need serious discussion.

As a commentary in the March 9 edition of the London paper the Mirror put it, “Hasn’t the time now come to hold a public debate on whether our current drug prohibition is working any better than the alcohol prohibition of Al Capone’s day? Aren’t we now adult enough to discuss whether a legally regulated drug trade would work better than our gangster-run market? We think we are.”

Sadly, it’s hard to imagine such a rational discussion taking place on the national stage in the United States. Meanwhile, in the time it took you to read this, 12 Americans were arrested on marijuana charges.

Shooting Pain
The future of heat-beaming weapons.
Feb. 17, 2007
By William Saletan

If you’re worried about terrorism, upset about the war in Iraq, and depressed by global chaos, violence, and death, cheer up. We’ve just invented a weapon that fires a beam of searing pain.

Three weeks ago, the U.S. armed forces tested it on volunteers at an Air Force base in Georgia. You can watch the video on a military Web site. Three colonels get zapped, along with an Associated Press reporter. The beam is invisible, but its effects are vivid. Two dozen airmen scatter. The AP guy shrieks and bolts out of the target zone. He says it felt like heat all over his body, as though his jacket were on fire.

The feeling is an illusion. No one is harmed. The beam’s energy waves penetrate just one-sixty-fourth of an inch into your body, heating your skin like microwaves. They inflame your nerve endings without actually burning you. This could be the future of warfare: less bloodshed, more pain.

Military technology has always sought greater precision from longer range. In the Gulf War, Kosovo, and Afghanistan, we exploited the increasing accuracy of laser-guided bombs. In the post-9/11 terrorist hunt and the occupation of Iraq, we’ve sent hundreds of remotely piloted aerial drones to spy and kill. But the lives protected by drones are ours. The pain beam is more ambitious: It can spare civilians and even the enemy. Precision isn’t just the ability to kill. Sometimes, it’s ability to disperse and deter without killing.

That kind of precision is becoming more important. Twelve years ago, the Department of Defense observed that our armed forces were increasingly being used for peacekeeping, humanitarian aid, and protection of civil society. More of our enemies were blending in with, or disguising themselves as, civilians. Through the media, more eyeballs, hearts, and minds could see the infrastructure we destroyed. The DOD proposed the development of weapons “to incapacitate personnel or materiel, while minimizing fatalities, permanent injury to personnel, and undesired damage to property and the environment.”

Like lethal weapons, nonlethal weapons have evolved from short- to long-range. Batons and pepper spray required hand-to-hand combat. Water cannons, rubber bullets, beanbag rounds, and sting ball grenades have extended our reach, but not far enough to keep soldiers clear of rocks or small-arms fire. Some of our weapons are insufficiently discriminate. Tear gas torments a whole crowd, not just the miscreants using it for cover.

Projectiles are also unpredictable. At long range, particularly in crosswinds, rubber bullets can hit the wrong people, or the right people in the wrong places. At close range, they can kill. Look at the absurdly named "FN303 less lethal launcher." It’s supposed to fire "non-lethal projectiles at established non-lethal ranges." But when you’re launching things, less lethal is the best you can do.

That’s where the pain beam comes in. Unlike projectiles, beams are "directed energy." They travel in a straight line over long distances, ignoring gravity and wind. They cause no more damage at 10 feet than at 1,000. Unlike gas, they’re discriminate. Raytheon, the pain beam’s manufacturer, points out that the weapon "allows precise targeting of specific individuals" and that the pain "ceases immediately" when the beam is diverted or the target flees.

The shift from hardware to software, from matter to energy, can do more than control the unpredictability of weapons. It can control the unpredictability of the people who fire them. Early nonlethal devices, such as rubber bullets and Mace, often caused injuries due to abuse by hotheads. When the pain beam was initially being developed, somebody accidentally fired it on a high setting, inflicting a second-degree burn. The designers responded by programming limits on the beam’s power and duration.

Years of work have gone into making the beam safe. It’s been tested thousands of times on 600 volunteers. It’s been reviewed and revised by a human-effects review board, a human-effects advisory panel, and military surgeons general. It’s been tested for effects on skin cancer, fertility, jewelry, and drunks. The results have been published in peer-reviewed journals. Never has an organization licensed to kill jumped through so many hoops to make sure nobody gets injured.

The nonlethal weapons program is a pacifist’s dream. Its “vehicle lightweight arresting devices” are built to stop cars with minimal damage, allowing minor injuries only if you’re “not wearing a seatbelt.” Its “acoustic hailing devices” are engineered to deliver sound waves “below Occupational Safety and Health Administration hearing limits for prolonged exposure.” Its founding directive pledges to avoid environmental damage. Even the less lethal launcher projectiles are “non-toxic.”

But the ability to inflict pain without injury doesn’t just make injury less necessary. It makes pain more essential to military operations—and easier to inflict. To achieve the desired “repel effect,” I have to make you suffer. Knowing that your agony will be brief and leave no physical damage makes the weapon easier to fire. It’s almost as though, like the imagined flames on the AP reporter’s jacket, your pain isn’t real.

That’s the metaphysical gap nonlethal energy weapons exploit. The rain of pain falls mainly in the brain. The long-range acoustic device, for instance, “can target narrow sound beams at excruciating decibel levels, but below the threshold of hearing damage,” according to a military account of a presentation by its project manager. Four months ago, Congress passed and President Bush signed legislation to prosecute torture, defined as intentional infliction of “serious physical or mental pain or suffering.” But that rule applies only in captivity. On the street, pain administration won’t be a crime. It’ll be a policy.

Two weeks from now, military leaders will convene in London to discuss the pain beam and the next generation of directed-energy weapons, including microwaves and lasers. Law enforcement agencies are interested. Raytheon is already advertising the technology for commercial applications. We’re even developing a “personnel halting and stimulation response” system—yes, a PHaSR—to stun targets instead of killing them. But don’t worry, nobody will get hurt. Sort of.

it’s raining really hard.

i went to the post office to mail a package, and on my way, i saw two dogs who have been apparently tethered to a post near a fire hydrant down the street from our house. they have no shelter, no food or water, and the owners are not home. these are dogs that i frequently have to chase out of our yard, because they have been running loose, but i called animal control anyway, because they’re tethered outside with no shelter, and it’s raining really hard. i realise this is not a good way to make friends with the neighbours, but they shouldn’t leave their dogs tethered with no shelter in this kind of weather, and somebody has to say something. of all the people with dogs in our neighbourhood, i would say that we have the largest quantity, and our dogs are treated the best out of all of them, so i don’t even feel guilty about it.

ned cancelled again. he said he was home with a sick kid, which is exactly the same excuse he gave me last time, which was less than a month ago. i would say i’m sorry his kid gets sick so much, but ned has been using the same excuse for long enough that i’m beginning to wonder.

at the same time, it’s probably just as well that he cancelled, because i’m really exhausted, and i’ve got to do an update on the seattle agility center‘s web site and go to a fremont phil rehearsal, and if i had to work seeing ned into the scenario, i probably wouldn’t have the time to do one or the other of those things. sometimes living out in the sticks has its disadvantages… 8/

the first week of the moisture festival came to a close last night. big bois with poise opened last night’s 7:30 show to great acclaim and applause from the audience. we premiered a “new” act, which was more or less the same as the old act, only with new costumes (diapers, bibs, and baby-bottle poi), and a new “twist” at the end, having to do with babies and “moisture”… heh heh heh… 8)

i’ve been averaging around 100 spam messages a day for at least three months. it’s been getting really annoying.

yesterday they completed my move to a different server for Hybrid Elephant, which included straightening out some things that caused me to receive a lot of spam, and cleaned up a bunch of other things relating to my personal account(s) that caused me to get way too much spam.

normally i wake up and have between 30 and 70 spams that i have to process.

today, i woke up and there were two spams in my inbox.

something was wrong… but whatever it was, it appears to be fixed now. massive sigh of relief!

tonight is the opening performance of The Moisture Festival, which will very likely mean that i won’t be posting with the regularity that i usually do until it’s over in three weeks.

for those of you in the seattle area, i encourage you to come see us in action. in spite of all the turmoil and tension surrounding the program, the schedule, etc., etc., (etc., etc… 8/ ), it comes with a guarantee that it is the best show west of the mississippi, as well as being the longest running comedie/varieté showcase IN THE WORLD!

and if you write to me – przxqgl at livejournal dot com – there is a possibility that i can comp you, so don’t let lack of money keep you from a rollicking good time. 8)

the process of moving my server is complete, and other technical issues with my personal account(s) have been taken care off, so that now i will probably receive a lot less spam than i did previously. i’ve been averaging around 100 spam messages a day for the past 3 months. yesterday i only received half of that, and today, so far, i have received no spam messages at all. if nothing else, i like that a lot…

although they’ve disabled telnet on their servers “for security reasons”, which means that i will not be able to symlink deep parts of my site to shallow URIs. i’m not totally sure i understand their “security reasons” (partially because they haven’t told me what they are), but as long as they’re willing to come up with another way to create symbolic links, i won’t complain too much.

today is ? day in the rest of the world. it won’t be ? day in the united states until 22 july. let’s hear it for decimal fractions! woo hoo.

on sunday i met with a “project manager” (otherwise known as ian, a guy who i have known for around 30 years) to discuss how to make my business do more of what it’s supposed to do, which is bring in money to support me. he gave me a whole bunch of ideas – significantly, he is the first person to actually say that i do, in fact, need a workshop (and it turns out that he knows a guy who might be able to get a shipping container in which to put said workshop). one of the other things that he suggested was to expand my disk quota on drizzle, so that we would have a place to put documents related to my business that are meaningful to both of us. so i contacted drizzle, and they are changing my DNS, at this very moment, so that i (well, hybridelephant.com) will be located on a different server, so that instead of having 40mb maximum (which is what i have now), it will have 500mb maximum, which should be more than enough. added perquisites to this are that hybridelephant.com will also have a real SQL database for my shopping cart, 60 pop email addresses – real email addresses, not aliases – and it will cost around $50 a year less than it did before the move.

to add to all of this, i got $200 from drunk puppet night, which i was not expecting, and i did business cards for MIVC (one of the places where moe works) which is going to bring in another $200, along with the $280 that is coming in from the MF program and whatever they deign to pay me for actually being a musician in the MF should put me over $500 in the bank, which will be the first time i have ever had that much money in the bank since i first started the business.

maybe this “project manager” thing is going to actually work out… it seems to be doing so so far…

Terrorists Proving Harder to Profile
European Officials Say Traits of Suspected Islamic Extremists Are Constantly Shifting
By Craig Whitlock
March 12, 2007

ZUTPHEN, Netherlands — On the surface, the young Dutch Moroccan mother looked like an immigrant success story: She studied business in college, hung out at the pub with her friends and was known for her fashionable taste in clothes.

So residents of this 900-year-old river town were thrown for a loop last year when Bouchra El-Hor, now 24, appeared in a British courtroom wearing handcuffs under an all-encompassing black veil. Prosecutors said she had covered up plans for a terrorist attack and wrote a letter offering to sacrifice herself and her infant son as martyrs.

“We were flabbergasted to learn that she had become a fanatic,” said Renee Haantjes, a college instructor who recalled her as “a normal Dutch girl.”

People in Zutphen may have been surprised, but terrorism suspects from atypical backgrounds are becoming increasingly common in Western Europe. With new plots surfacing every month, police across Europe are arresting significant numbers of women, teenagers, white-skinned suspects and people baptized as Christians — groups that in the past were considered among the least likely to embrace Islamic radicalism.

The demographics of those being arrested are so diverse that many European counterterrorism officials and analysts say they have given up trying to predict what sorts of people are most likely to become terrorists. Age, sex, ethnicity, education and economic status have become more and more irrelevant.

“It’s very difficult to make a profile of terrorists,” Tjibbe Joustra, the Dutch national coordinator for counterterrorism, said in an interview. “To have a profile that you can recognize, so that you can predict, ‘This guy is going to be radical, perhaps he will cross the line into terrorism’ — that, I think, is impossible.”

European authorities said the trait patterns of those arrested on terrorism charges are constantly shifting. In the Netherlands, officials said they are seeing an increase in the number of young teenagers and people of Turkish descent, two groups that used to be low on their radar. Among the key players in the Hofstad group, a cell of Islamic radicals that targeted Dutch politicians and cultural figures, was Jason Walters, the teenage son of a U.S. soldier.

In neighboring Belgium, people are still perplexed over what drove Muriel Degauque, 38, a blond, white Catholic, to convert to Islam and travel to Iraq to blow herself up in November 2005. Nizar Trabelsi, convicted two years earlier of plotting to bomb a NATO base in Belgium, had been a European soccer star before going to Afghanistan to attend al-Qaeda training camps.

In Britain, three of the suspects arrested in last summer’s alleged transatlantic airline hijacking plot were religious converts who grew up in north London’s affluent suburbs. One was the well-to-do English son of a Conservative Party activist; he worked in a bar and loved the movie “Team America.”

A recently completed Dutch study of 242 Islamic radicals convicted or accused of planning terrorist attacks in Europe from 2001 to 2006 found that most were men of Arab descent who had been born and raised in Europe and came from lower or middle-class backgrounds. They ranged in age from 16 to 59 at the time of their arrests; the average was 27. About one in four had a criminal record.

The author of the study, Edwin Bakker, a researcher at the Clingendael Institute in The Hague, tried to examine almost 20 variables concerning the suspects’ social and economic backgrounds. In general, he determined that no reliable profile existed — their traits were merely an accurate reflection of the overall Muslim immigrant population in Europe. “There is no standard jihadi terrorist in Europe,” the study concluded.

In an interview, Bakker said that many local police agencies have been slow to abandon profiling, but that most European intelligence agencies have concluded it is an unreliable tool for spotting potential terrorists. “How can you single them out? You can’t,” he said. “For the secret services, it doesn’t give them a clue. We should focus more on suspicious behavior and not profiling.”

Bakker and other analysts said more attention should be devoted to understanding the personal experiences that motivate people to become radicals. For example, Dutch researchers said they suspect one reason why more young women are becoming involved in radical networks in the Netherlands is that they come under the influence of “Moroccan lover boys.” Authorities use the phrase to describe charismatic Romeos who manipulate emotionally needy women into committing criminal acts. “These are really down-to-earth things that we should not underestimate,” Bakker said.

Indeed, there are clear signs that al-Qaeda cells and affiliates are intentionally recruiting supporters from nontraditional backgrounds as a way to avoid detection, according to European intelligence officials and analysts.

In London, eight male al-Qaeda suspects are currently on trial for an alleged plot to blow up unspecified targets in Britain with bombs made of ammonium nitrate, a common ingredient in fertilizers. According to testimony at the trial, which began in March 2006, the defendants persuaded a Canadian woman, whom they had met on the Internet, to wire money on their behalf because she was less likely to attract suspicion.

Zenab Armend Pisheh, a student at Carleton College in Northfield, Minn., said a member of the cell asked her to wire more than $5,000 so the defendants could go to Pakistan in 2003 to attend an al-Qaeda training camp. “He said it had to be a woman because sisters don’t get caught — brothers get caught if they send money,” Pisheh said in a statement to British investigators.

According to trial testimony last fall, Pisheh met one of the defendants, Anthony Garcia, of east London, in an Internet chat room and quickly fell in love; they became engaged without ever meeting face to face. He introduced her to other accused conspirators, including the man who asked her to wire the cash.

Garcia is of Algerian descent, but testified in September that he legally changed his name from Rahman Adam to further his ambitions as a fashion model and because the Latin-sounding name “had a better ring to it.” British investigators, however, believe he was trying to conceal his Muslim and Arab background from police.

John Horgan, a senior research fellow at the Center for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, said terrorist groups are constantly trying to catch law enforcement officials off guard.

“One guiding principle for terrorist groups is to always maintain the psychological edge and the upper hand by doing things that are surprising to the enemy,” he said. “So you’ll see the use of a child, the use of a woman.”

Among those arrested last August in London in the alleged transatlantic hijacking plot, for example, was Cossor Ali, a 24-year-old mother married to another suspect in the case. British investigators suspect that she or her husband planned to smuggle liquid explosives onto a flight in their infant daughter’s bottle.

In the Dutch study of terrorism suspects in Europe, only five of the 242 suspects examined were women. But Dutch counterterrorism officials said they have seen a significant rise in the number of female suspects in the past two years.

“It seems that it will be simply a matter of time before these women also become actively involved in violence,” the Dutch General Intelligence and Security Service, known as AIVD, reported a year ago in a unclassified analysis of terrorism trends in the country.

In May 2006, two months after the intelligence analysis was released, British police stopped Hor, the young Dutch Moroccan mother from Zutphen, and her husband at Luton airport outside London. Although it is unclear what prompted the stop, investigators said they found suspicious files on the husband’s laptop computer, including instructions for building a homemade rocket launcher and explosives.

In a search of the couple’s home, police said, they found radical literature, including a document titled “A Training Schedule for Committing Jihad.” They also discovered a letter written by Hor in which she offered herself and their 6-month-old son as martyrs for an unspecified cause.

Hor was later arrested and charged with failing to disclose information to prevent a terrorist attack. Her husband, Yassin Nassari, 27, was charged with possessing documents for terrorism. They are scheduled to go on trial May 23 in London.

Both had been living in Britain, but they frequently traveled back and forth to the Netherlands, authorities said. Dutch police assisted in the investigation, conducting a search of Nassari’s parents’ home in Eindhoven. Prosecutors have disclosed few other details.

Bart Nooitgedagt, a lawyer in Amsterdam who represents Hor, declined to answer questions about the case but said his client was innocent. “I’m pretty convinced she will be cleared of all the accusations that are being made,” he said. “I cannot believe, and will not believe, that this will lead to a conviction.”

In Zutphen, a town of 46,000 people alongside the Ijssel River, former neighbors and friends said they are still struggling to understand how Hor transformed so quickly from a fashion-conscious college student with a secular outlook on life into a burqa-wearing fundamentalist. “She was a modern young girl,” Allal Kaddouri, a friend and owner of a pizzeria in the center of town, told the Apeldoornse Courant newspaper.

Zutphen has had a sizable immigrant population since the early 1970s, when Turks and North Africans began arriving to fill low-wage jobs in the booming Dutch economy. About one-sixth of the town is of Turkish or Arab descent.

Adriaan van Oosten, an alderman responsible for immigration issues, said there have been no overt signs of Islamic radicalism. He said civic and religious leaders met after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the United States to ensure that there were no problems festering under the surface. “We certainly haven’t had any tensions,” he said.

People who knew Hor speculated that she changed after she married her husband, whom she apparently met in London while on a study-abroad program. Jeroen Ongering, a professor at a nearby community college who taught Hor, said she was a good student but abruptly dropped out in the summer of 2003 without explanation.

“For us, we had no signal at all that there was anything wrong or amiss,” Ongering said in an interview. “She was a Moroccan girl, but she was very Westernized. She knew she was a very beautiful woman. It’s hard for us to understand.”

Your Christian President dot com — even the “christians” are getting upset about shrub… but still, nobody is actually doing anything about him. come on people, your terrorist president needs you!

in spite of my previous hesitance and trepidation, closing night of drunk puppet night went off with only minor hitches that we could easily deal with. for example, the lighting effects (disco ball, follow spots, etc.) blew the breaker on the power strip that they were (all 8/ ) plugged into, which was located on the ceiling and only accessible with a ladder, which wasn’t able to be set up when there were (occupied) chairs in the way, so i had to get by with plain old house lights for the opening, intermission and closing… and i didn’t get a drink ticket, so i had to pay for my own drinks. on the positive side, we got beau in the board, so you could actually understand his “any attempt to make sense of the next 10 minutes would be a profound waste of your time”, “does this incarnation make me look fat” and “normal is just an average of a lot of bizarre behaviour, brought to you by the magic of mathematical averaging”. i got a present from jeppa, aka “Queen Schmooquan”: her “Goatgirl: plum” CD (which is music, i think… i haven’t listened to it yet). she said that she’s got another present for me, as well, but she said that she would give it to me the next time she sees me (whever that is going to be), and she’s not telling me what it is. she was actually able to sneak a piece of music by frank zappa into her show (it was an orchestral interlude from “200 Motels”), without josh noticing, otherwise he probably would have made her change it. i sold all of my buttons. admittedly i only made half as many this year as i did last year, but i also got at least one request for a button that came after they had already sold out. also josh paid me, which is the first time that he’s thought to do that since i got the job, four years ago.

and when i got home, i had 10 albums worth of music by The Residents .ape files downloaded and burned onto CDs. i’m downloading 15 more at this very moment, and i will probably download more later. bit torrent FTW!

i’m going to meet with ian this afternoon to discuss ways to market Hybrid Elephant more effectively. should be interesting. his current business venture brought in $3M last year, and they just sold a bunch of their domains to MTV. i figure if i can get .001% of that, it would be a good thing for my business.

my good friend, dan, husband of moe’s friend and compatriot, trudy, died suddenly last week, of a heart attack. his funeral was today.

it was a catholic funeral, but i get the impression that it was catholic more for his family than it was because he wanted it that way, because i didn’t know him as anything like obviously catholic. afterwards they showed a video commemorating him. trudy was in tears, and it looked like she had been that way for at least a week.

why wasn’t it me?

and even worse, if it had been me, it probably wouldn’t have affected dan’s life anyway…

i am going to have to be able to “forget” about this for long enough to do lights and sound for the closing night of drunk puppet night, and then go to a closing night party. at this point, i don’t know whether it’s going to happen or not.

an almost complete discography of The Residents in .ape format – close to 16gb of music for the discriminating lover of animals The Residents.

download it in several passes… it’s worth it!

free music from the government including several albums of music by john philip sousa.

from …

Drug testing kids a bad idea, doctors say
March 5, 2007

CHICAGO – Subjecting children to drug testing is usually a bad idea for a host of reasons, including often inaccurate results and loss of the child’s trust, a leading pediatricians’ group said on Monday.

Increasingly, schools are embarking on drug testing, particularly of student-athletes, following a 2002 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that declared the practice legal.

Parents may also be tempted by newly available home drug screening kits in an effort to catch the problem early.

But the American Academy of Pediatrics, updating its decade-old policy statement on the issue, said screening for illicit drugs is a complicated process prone to errors and cheating, and has not been shown to curtail youngsters’ drug use.

Drug testing also creates a counterproductive climate of “resentment, distrust and suspicion” between children and their parents or school administrators, a committee of experts wrote in the March issue of the group’s journal, Pediatrics.

False-positive results can arise from eating poppy seeds or ingesting certain cold medications, and test results may need to be confirmed with expensive further testing, it said.

Many students are also likely to be aware of Web sites that offer methods of defeating drug testing.

In addition, several illegal drugs are undetectable in urine more than 72 hours after use, and standard tests do not detect often abused substances such as alcohol, Ecstasy and inhalants. Some youngsters may respond to testing by avoiding drugs such as marijuana and instead abuse less-detectable, but more dangerous, drugs, the statement said.

“A key issue at the heart of the drug-testing dilemma is the lack of developmentally appropriate adolescent substance abuse and mental health treatment” in many communities, it said, noting existing programs designed for adults may be unsuitable for children.

The report suggested parents suspicious that a child is abusing drugs or alcohol consult the child’s primary care doctor rather than rely on school-based drug screening or home kits to check their concerns.

Marijuana, the wonder drug
By Lester Grinspoon
March 1, 2007

CAMBRIDGE, Massachusetts: A new study in the journal Neurology is being hailed as unassailable proof that marijuana is a valuable medicine. It is a sad commentary on the state of modern medicine that we still need “proof” of something that medicine has known for 5,000 years.

The study, from the University of California at San Francisco, found that smoked marijuana was effective at relieving the extreme pain of a debilitating condition known as peripheral neuropathy.

It was a study of HIV patients, but a similar type of pain caused by damage to nerves afflicts people with many other illnesses including diabetes and multiple sclerosis.

Neuropathic pain is notoriously resistant to treatment with conventional pain drugs. Even powerful and addictive narcotics like morphine and OxyContin often provide little relief. This study leaves no doubt that marijuana can safely ease this type of pain.

As all marijuana research in the United States must be, the new study was conducted with government-supplied marijuana of notoriously poor quality. So it probably underestimated the potential benefit.

This is all good news, but it should not be news at all. In the 40-odd years I have been studying the medicinal uses of marijuana, I have learned that the recorded history of this medicine goes back to ancient times.

In the 19th century it became a well-established Western medicine whose versatility and safety were unquestioned. From 1840 to 1900, American and European medical journals published over 100 papers on the therapeutic uses of marijuana, also known as cannabis.

Our knowledge has advanced greatly over the years. Scientists have identified over 60 unique constituents in marijuana, called cannabinoids, and we have learned much about how they work. We have also learned that our own bodies produce similar chemicals, called endocannabinoids.

The mountain of accumulated anecdotal evidence that pointed the way to the present and other clinical studies also strongly suggests there are a number of other devastating disorders and symptoms for which marijuana has been used for centuries.

They deserve the same careful, methodologically sound research.

While few such studies have so far been completed, all have lent weight to what medicine already knew but had largely forgotten or ignored: Marijuana is effective at relieving nausea and vomiting, spasticity, appetite loss, certain types of pain and other debilitating symptoms. And it is extraordinarily safe — safer than most medicines prescribed every day.

If marijuana were a new discovery rather than a well-known substance carrying cultural and political baggage, it would be hailed as a wonder drug.

The pharmaceutical industry is scrambling to isolate cannabinoids and synthesize analogs and to package them in non-smokable forms. In time, companies will almost certainly come up with products and delivery systems that are more useful and less expensive than herbal marijuana.

However, the analogs they have produced so far are more expensive than herbal marijuana, and none has shown any improvement over the plant nature gave us to take orally or to smoke.

We live in an antismoking environment. But as a method of delivering certain medicinal compounds, smoking marijuana has some real advantages: The effect is almost instantaneous, allowing the patient to fine-tune his or her dose to get the needed relief without intoxication.

Smoked marijuana has never been demonstrated to have serious pulmonary consequences, but in any case the technology to inhale these cannabinoids without smoking marijuana already exists as vaporizers that allow for smoke-free inhalation.

Hopefully the UCSF study will add to the pressure on the U.S. government to rethink its irrational ban on the medicinal use of marijuana — and its destructive attacks on patients and caregivers in states that have chosen to allow such use.

Rather than admit they have been mistaken all these years, federal officials can cite “important new data” and start revamping outdated and destructive policies.

Such legislation would bring much-needed relief to millions suffering from cancer, AIDS, multiple sclerosis, arthritis and other debilitating illnesses.

i feel slightly better about the whole moisture festival program thing because now it appears that i will actually be paid for the job, even though they’re going to have to toss half of my artwork before printing actually starts… which it hasn’t yet, but they’re on their own at this point… and they readily admit that none if it is my fault, although they don’t offer any assurances that it won’t happen exactly the same way next year – which makes me think that i probably won’t be doing the program next year, regardless of how much they pay me.

it now appears that RB has convinced sandy to do the typesetting for the “real” schedule. she says that she has “identical” fonts, which i doubt – and even if she does, i know for a fact that she doesn’t know how to use them, because she told me so a month and a half ago. but at the same time, apparently the schedule that was delivered to me by RB – two days after the deadline – is dramatically out of date(?!), so even if it was printed, it would be totally wrong. despite the fact that ron lacks several clues when it comes to figuring out the schedule, and dealing with artists, it’s probably just as well that somebody is creating a more up to date one.

i finally convinced my antique scanner to quit crashing my antique mac, so i posted the colour cover, for whatever that’s worth…

the first box of colour covers arrived today. they are a thing of beauty, and i can’t wait to see the complete program…

but i just got a call from RB, who is one of the producers of the show. he’s concerned that the schedule in program isn’t right. yes, the schedule is not right: he neglected to send me the most up-to-date schedule until it was too late, and now he’s paying for it. so, instead, he, himself, wants to typeset the right information, combine them with a screened background and “replace” entire pages of the program during the printing process, so that the schedule will be right. he says “we’re doing this for the artists, and they’re going to want an accurate schedule”, but i think that just about any artist would understand that, after a certain point, changes cannot be made, and i am not going to have time to make the changes myself… which means that someone else (RB?) will be attempting (and, knowing RB and crew, probably failing miserably, but doing it anyway because that’s what RB wants) to match my typography and the line screen on the halftones… which means that the program won’t look as good, even with the colour covers.

he says he appreciates the work i put into it, and that “he’s never produced a shoddy performance”, but i doubt he’s got the typefaces, never mind the time or expertise to combine them with the artwork the way i did. if he appreciates my work so much, why doesn’t he leave it alone, rather than fucking with it? he says “we’re doing this for the artists”, but what about my artwork? doesn’t that matter? if so, why did i even bother in the first place? 8\

i’m starting to agree with chris… the MF is a MF… 8/

a loooooooooooong time ago – i was living in gordy’s house, before i moved up to state street, so… probably 1987 or thereabouts – i had this dream of owning a school bus that was also a dwelling and/or a workshop come one step closer to being a reality than it had been before (or since), when i actually began the process of buying a converted school bus from a woman named mauldiwarp moongate-climber… i say “began the process of buying” because she began the process by sending me the (unsigned) title to the vehicle and then disappearing to lapland (literally) where she was unavailable to do things like actually sign the bill of sale on the opposite side of the title. meanwhile i found out that the engine and transmission, which had originally been a 1959 international diesel school bus engine and the corresponding 5-speed manual transmission, had been “replaced” with a 1972 ford pinto engine and the 3-speed automatic transmission that went along with it, which, of course, made it impossible to move the massive international school bus more than 5 miles without overheating, blowing gaskets and generally leaving me in a much, much worse place than i was before i began the process of buying it. the upshot was that, after i found a series of “technically illegal” places to park the bus, i moved it into the vacant lot next door to gordy’s house, where it stayed until mauldiwarp got back from lapland, at which point she seemingly-successfully sold it to another mangy hippie-type, because i never saw it again.

problem is, the school bus left my life, but the dream of owning a converted school bus got stronger. with the advent of internet, the probability that i was going to run into this site increased dramatically…

this could be dangerous… 8)

i got another order for business cards, another incense order, and a potential for postcards a few weeks down the road. i don’t like doing print brokering as well as i like selling incense, but i make more per job brokering printing than i do selling incense. and that’s not to say that i dislike brokering printing, especially when all i have to do is email the artwork to the printer, but i still like selling incense better.

the second week of drunk puppet night performances are history. while the second week was somewhat more drunk than the first week (inclusion of “The Enablàrs” and Holly Chernobyl pushed it over the edge), it was still rather tame compared to two or three years ago, but we had a full house, so i can’t complain too much. i also sold 17 buttons… they sell so much better when someone actually mentions that they’re for sale (which they haven’t done the past three nights in a row. 8/ )

sandy has apparently found a local printer that will do the inside pages, plus folding, collating and stapling the whole job (plus the colour cover, which should arrive tuesday or wednesday) for $1,400, which is a lot more like what we can afford, so at this point, i can say with relative confidence that we will have finished programs by the time the show opens.

More in U.S. plunge deeper into poverty
The ranks of the severely poor are soaring, study finds.
March 1, 2007
By Tony Pugh

The percentage of poor Americans who are living in severe poverty has reached a 32-year high, millions of working Americans are falling closer to the poverty line and the gulf between the nation’s “haves” and “have-nots” continues to widen.

A McClatchy Newspapers analysis of 2005 census figures, the latest available, found that nearly 16 million Americans are living in deep or severe poverty. A family of four with two children and an annual income of less than $9,903 — half the federal poverty line — was considered severely poor in 2005. So were individuals who made less than $5,080 a year.

The McClatchy analysis found that the number of severely poor Americans grew by 26 percent from 2000 to 2005. That’s 56 percent faster than the overall poverty population grew in the same period.

The plight of the severely poor is a distressing sidebar to an unusual economic expansion. Worker productivity has increased dramatically since the brief recession of 2001, but wages and job growth have lagged behind, and the share of national income going to corporate profits has dwarfed the amount going to wages and salaries.

That helps explain why the median household income of working-age families, adjusted for inflation, has fallen for five straight years.

These and other factors have helped push 43 percent of the nation’s 37 million poor people into deep poverty — the highest rate since at least 1975.

Since 2000, the share of poor Americans in deep poverty has grown “more than any other segment of the population,” according to a recent study in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.

“That was the exact opposite of what we anticipated when we began,” said Dr. Steven Woolf of Virginia Commonwealth University, who co-authored the study. “We’re not seeing as much moderate poverty as a proportion of the population. What we’re seeing is a dramatic growth of severe poverty.”

McClatchy’s review suggests that the rise in the number of severely poor residents isn’t confined to large urban counties but extends to suburban and rural areas.

For Sacramento County, the census estimates that between 60,000 and 76,000 people — roughly 5 percent of the total population — live in deep poverty. County-level data are subject to significant margins of error because of the smaller populations and the smaller geographic areas they cover.

California has an estimated 1.9 million severely poor residents. But the state’s 8 percent growth in the number of severely poor from 2000 to 2005 was one of the nation’s slowest. Only eight states had smaller growth during that time.

The growth nationally, which leveled off in 2005, in part reflects how hard it is for low-skilled workers to earn their way out of poverty in a job market that favors skilled and educated workers. It also suggests that social programs aren’t as effective as they once were at catching those who fall into economic despair.

Female-headed families with children account for a large share of the severely poor. About one in three severely poor people are under age 17, and nearly two out of three are female.

According to census data, nearly two of three people in severe poverty are white (10.3 million) and 6.9 million are non-Hispanic whites. Severely poor blacks (4.3 million) are more than three times as likely as non-Hispanic whites to be in deep poverty, while extremely poor Hispanics of any race (3.7 million) are more than twice as likely.

The problem of severe poverty is most pronounced in towns near the Mexican border and in some areas of the South, where 6.5 million severely poor residents are struggling to find work as manufacturing jobs in the textile, apparel and furniture-making industries disappear. The Midwestern Rust Belt and areas of the Northeast also have been hard hit as economic restructuring and foreign competition have forced numerous plant closings.

At the same time, low-skilled immigrants with impoverished family members are increasingly drawn to the South and Midwest to work in the meatpacking, food-processing and agriculture industries.

“What appears to be taking place is that, over the long term, you have a significant permanent underclass that is not being impacted by anti-poverty policies,” said Michael Tanner, the director of Health and Welfare Studies at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank.

Over the past two decades, America has had the highest or near-highest poverty rates for children, individual adults and families among 31 developed countries, according to the Luxembourg Income Study, a 23-year project that compares poverty and income data from 31 industrial nations.

“It’s shameful,” said Timothy Smeeding, the former director of the study and the current head of the Center for Policy Research at Syracuse University. “We’ve been the worst performer every year since we’ve been doing this study.”

42% – Christians First, Americans Second

Among non-Muslim nations, the United States is the outlier in terms of religious self-identification; about four in ten U.S. adults see themselves as Christians first rather than as Americans first, while an additional 7% say they self-identify as both equally according to the 2006 Pew Global Attitudes survey. In this regard, the views of Americans closely parallel those of French Muslims, 46% of whom think of themselves first in terms of their religion rather than their nationality. By contrast, only a third of German Christians (33%), and fewer than a quarter of British, French and Spanish Christians self-identify primarily with their religion.

the printer that i originally wanted to do the inside (black & white) pages – troy – can’t do it on schedule because the job is too large – 60,000 impressions, 30,000 finished pieces – and we need it in 2 weeks. the printer that did the colour cover (at a very reasonable price, $700) can do it, but wants $4500, and they will only print it on 100# gloss book with an aqueous coating – read “very shiny, durable, high quality printing” – which is way fancier and heavier-duty than we need, and far outside our budget. kinkos can do it on time, and stay inside our budget, plus do the stuff that we thought we were going to have to do outselves (fold, collate, staple), but it’s kinkos… yeeech!

and there was much rejoicing…

but the schedule is already wrong… in fact they sent me two updates since it has been finished… but that’s why they say “schedule is subject to change without notice”.

and the printing hasn’t actually been done yet… or approved yet… or estimated on yet… but i’m confident that i can come up with an estimate that will be more than reasonable, and at this point, if they don’t approve it, they’re screwed… but once that is realised, there’s a good chance that we will have completed programs in time for opening night!

a very good friend of moe’s and mine unexpectedly died yesterday. apparently, his wife, moe’s friend trudy, woke up yesterday morning and found him dead in the kitchen. it was very traumatic for everyone, including me, surprisingly enough, despite the fact that i didn’t know him that well. he was relatively young, healthy and strong, literally had everything a man could want, and yet he’s dead.

i spent all day yesterday in a fog, wondering why him and not me. in spite of the fact that i was terrifically tired, and slept through the night, i woke up in the same fog this morning.

how to build a Looty, which is a device that allows its user to gaze into their own eyeballs. the fact that it’s inventor, jim woodring, says that it is a “bad invention” is enough to make me wonder about it.

The American Cornhole Association – somewhere between ROTFLMAO and ZOMG!

Jesus: Tales from the Crypt
February 23, 2007
by Tim McGirk

Brace yourself. James Cameron, the man who brought you ‘The Titanic’ is back with another blockbuster. This time, the ship he’s sinking is Christianity.

In a new documentary, Producer Cameron and his director, Simcha Jacobovici, make the starting claim that Jesus wasn’t resurrected –the cornerstone of Christian faith– and that his burial cave was discovered near Jerusalem. And, get this, Jesus sired a son with Mary Magdelene.

No, it’s not a re-make of “The Da Vinci Codes’. It’s supposed to be true.

Let’s go back 27 years, when Israeli construction workers were gouging out the foundations for a new building in the industrial park in the Talpiyot, a Jerusalem suburb. of Jerusalem. The earth gave way, revealing a 2,000 year old cave with 10 stone caskets. Archologists were summoned, and the stone caskets carted away for examination. It took 20 years for experts to decipher the names on the ten tombs. They were: Jesua, son of Joseph, Mary, Mary, Mathew, Jofa and Judah, son of Jesua.
Israel’s prominent archeologist Professor Amos Kloner didn’t associate the crypt with the New Testament Jesus. His father, after all, was a humble carpenter who couldn’t afford a luxury crypt for his family. And all were common Jewish names.

There was also this little inconvenience that a few miles away, in the old city of Jerusalem, Christians for centuries had been worshipping the empty tomb of Christ at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. Christ’s resurrection, after all, is the main foundation of the faith, proof that a boy born to a carpenter’s wife in a manger is the Son of God.

But film-makers Cameron and Jacobovici claim to have amassed evidence through DNA tests, archeological evidence and Biblical studies, that the 10 coffins belong to Jesus and his family.

Ever the showman, (Why does this remind me of the impresario in another movie,”King Kong”, whose hubris blinds him to the dangers of an angry and very large ape?) Cameron is holding a New York press conference on Monday at which he will reveal three coffins, supposedly those of Jesus of Nazareth, his mother Mary and Mary Magdalene. News about the film, which will be shown soon on Discovery Channel, Britain’s Channel 4, Canada’s Vision, and Israel’s Channel 8, has been a hot blog topic in the Middle East (check out a personal favorite: Israelity Bites) Here in the Holy Land, Biblical Archeology is a dangerous profession. This 90-minute documentary is bound to outrage Christians and stir up a titanic debate between believers and skeptics. Stay tuned.

The myth of Muslim support for terror
The common enemy is violence and terrorism, not Muslims any more than Christians or Jews.
February 23, 2007
By Kenneth Ballen

WASHINGTON – Those who think that Muslim countries and pro-terrorist attitudes go hand-in-hand might be shocked by new polling research: Americans are more approving of terrorist attacks against civilians than any major Muslim country except for Nigeria.

The survey, conducted in December 2006 by the University of Maryland’s prestigious Program on International Public Attitudes, shows that only 46 percent of Americans think that “bombing and other attacks intentionally aimed at civilians” are “never justified,” while 24 percent believe these attacks are “often or sometimes justified.”

Contrast those numbers with 2006 polling results from the world’s most-populous Muslim countries – Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Nigeria. Terror Free Tomorrow, the organization I lead, found that 74 percent of respondents in Indonesia agreed that terrorist attacks are “never justified”; in Pakistan, that figure was 86 percent; in Bangladesh, 81 percent.

Do these findings mean that Americans are closet terrorist sympathizers?

Hardly. Yet, far too often, Americans and other Westerners seem willing to draw that conclusion about Muslims. Public opinion surveys in the United States and Europe show that nearly half of Westerners associate Islam with violence and Muslims with terrorists. Given the many radicals who commit violence in the name of Islam around the world, that’s an understandable polling result.

But these stereotypes, affirmed by simplistic media coverage and many radicals themselves, are not supported by the facts – and they are detrimental to the war on terror. When the West wrongly attributes radical views to all of the world’s 1.5 billion Muslims, it perpetuates a myth that has the very real effect of marginalizing critical allies in the war on terror.

Indeed, the far-too-frequent stereotyping of Muslims serves only to reinforce the radical appeal of the small minority of Muslims who peddle hatred of the West and others as authentic religious practice.

Terror Free Tomorrow’s 20-plus surveys of Muslim countries in the past two years reveal another surprise: Even among the minority who indicated support for terrorist attacks and Osama bin Laden, most overwhelmingly approved of specific American actions in their own countries. For example, 71 percent of bin Laden supporters in Indonesia and 79 percent in Pakistan said they thought more favorably of the United States as a result of American humanitarian assistance in their countries – not exactly the profile of hard-core terrorist sympathizers. For most people, their professed support of terrorism/bin Laden can be more accurately characterized as a kind of “protest vote” against current US foreign policies, not as a deeply held religious conviction or even an inherently anti- American or anti-Western view.

In truth, the common enemy is violence and terrorism, not Muslims any more than Christians or Jews. Whether recruits to violent causes join gangs in Los Angeles or terrorist cells in Lahore, the enemy is the violence they exalt.

Our surveys show that not only do Muslims reject terrorism as much if not more than Americans, but even those who are sympathetic to radical ideology can be won over by positive American actions that promote goodwill and offer real hope.

America’s goal, in partnership with Muslim public opinion, should be to defeat terrorists by isolating them from their own societies. The most effective policies to achieve that goal are the ones that build on our common humanity. And we can start by recognizing that Muslims throughout the world want peace as much as Americans do.

and yet…

Poll shows U.S. views on Muslim-Americans
Nearly half of those surveyed say some rights should be restricted
Dec. 17, 2004

ITHACA, N.Y. – Nearly half of all Americans believe the U.S. government should restrict the civil liberties of Muslim-Americans, according to a nationwide poll.

The survey conducted by Cornell University also found that Republicans and people who described themselves as highly religious were more apt to support curtailing Muslims’ civil liberties than Democrats or people who are less religious.

Disturbing news
Researchers also found that respondents who paid more attention to television news were more likely to fear terrorist attacks and support limiting the rights of Muslim-Americans.

“It’s sad news. It’s disturbing news. But it’s not unpredictable,” said Mahdi Bray, executive director of the Muslim American Society. “The nation is at war, even if it’s not a traditional war. We just have to remain vigilant and continue to interface.”

The survey found 44 percent favored at least some restrictions on the civil liberties of Muslim Americans. Forty-eight percent said liberties should not be restricted in any way.

The survey showed that 27 percent of respondents supported requiring all Muslim-Americans to register where they lived with the federal government. Twenty-two percent favored racial profiling to identify potential terrorist threats. And 29 percent thought undercover agents should infiltrate Muslim civic and volunteer organizations to keep tabs on their activities and fund-raising.

Cornell student researchers questioned 715 people in the nationwide telephone poll conducted this fall. The margin of error was 3.6 percentage points.

37 percent believe terrorist attack likely
James Shanahan, an associate professor of communications who helped organize the survey, said the results indicate “the need for continued dialogue about issues of civil liberties” in a time of war.

While researchers said they were not surprised by the overall level of support for curtailing civil liberties, they were startled by the correlation with religion and exposure to television news.

“We need to explore why these two very important channels of discourse may nurture fear rather than understanding,” Shanahan said.

According to the survey, 37 percent believe a terrorist attack in the United States is still likely within the next 12 months. In a similar poll conducted by Cornell in November 2002, that number stood at 90 percent.

again, i worked on the moisture festival program all day, but i’m getting somewhere today. i completed the artwork for the cover, which is going to the printer tomorrow. also i had to totally reorganise the layout for the black and white pages: i originally estimated that it was going to be 16 pages, but they’ve got 16 pages of advertising, so i had to make it 24 pages, which means carefully taking apart the 16-page layout and pasting it into the 24-page layout, and then tweaking things until everything fits. now that i’ve actually got a working dummy, i’ve been able to finallise the layout for each page, and discover where i need to make filler. they’ve still got 20 ads to place, but they’re allegedly in my inbox (i haven’t checked mail all day, because i was too busy doing other things), so if everything goes well, there will be a finished program by tomorrow evening, or tuesday at the latest. then it’s just a matter of printing, which i’m making arrangements for, and, if everything goes well, i’ll hand off the artwork to troy, the printer, on wednesday or thereabouts. then there’s the matter of folding, collating and stapling, but that doesn’t happen until the printing is finished, and, to be honest, at that point it’s SEP.

woo…

yesterday, i worked most of the day on the program for the Moisture Festival. in spite of the fact that sandy and i agreed a month and a half ago that yesterday would be the last day we would accept materials from advertisers, there were only 6 out of 27 ads in the program. i got an email this morning that said that most of the program ads would be in no later than tuesday, but some of the advertisers hadn’t even been contacted yet.

we’ve got a little more than 3 weeks until the moisture festival starts, and we agreed a month and a half ago that we would have all of the ads by yesterday. plus the person responsible for putting the program together (me) has drunk puppet night performances, fremont philharmonic rehearsals, moisture festival rehearsals, ballard sedentary sousa band rehearsals and banda gozona rehearsals, which have started in the past month and a half.

a month and a half ago, i was eager to do the program, because it would give me something to do, but nobody seemed to be interested in kicking some ass and getting ads to me. now, when i’ve got more than i can handle already, they’re saying “what about the program?” because of the fact that this is very likely the last year i will be involved with the moisture festival (we’re moving to some as-yet-to-be-determined location at the end of the year), i don’t want peoples’ last impression of me to be “he didn’t get the programs for the moisture festival finished in time”, i’m doing them despite the fact that i don’t really have either the time or the energy to do them.

and even if the artwork gets completed next week (as currently hoped-for), there still hasn’t been any sign of money for printing, which i have to have before any printing gets done – currently around $1,000 for 5,000 programs, or $1,500 for 10,000 programs – and i’m not going to be able to do any programs without this money… and that’s not to mention the time to fold, collate and staple 5,000 to 10,000 programs…

meanwhile, drunk puppet night started last night. i’m REALLY glad the fremont phil is only playing the first weekend, because running back and forth from the bandstand to the lighting booth several hundred times during the evening, along with playing and running lights (both of which are surprisingly athletic activites), really takes it out of me, especially when i’ve been dealing with moisture festival program stuff all day.

despite the fact that i was running all night, drunk puppet night went surprisingly well. it’s at least in part because the owners of the venue acutely missed DPN6 last year, and when DPN7 was announced at the rebar this year, many people came to it because of it’s previous reputation.

in spite of that, however, this has got to be one of the tamest drunk puppet nights i have ever seen. there were a few reasonably risqué acts (“Queen Schmooquan” and “Stunt Dick” immediately spring to mind), along with the standard alien abduction/nazi experimentation and people either doing, or having done to them, some horrible nasties, but nothing like the show i was involved in for DPN3, which involved a young boy being eaten alive by a larger-than-life squirrel, or the johnny jetpack propulsion labs production, which was a pair of cattle copulating while falling into a container of liquid nitrogen. there is one show by a guy who has written for south park and spongebob squarepants, “The Passion Of The Hair Plugs” which is excellent, however, and worth the $15 cover charge all on it’s own.

so anyway… back to work on the program. <yawn>

BE AFRAID
By CAPT Doug Traversa
2/19/07

Just when I think nothing will surprise me, Afghanistan throws me a curve ball. Let me set the stage. Maj Apple, Wali, Hamid (our interpreters) and I were sitting in our office having a Deep Discussion about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Somehow the topic of gays serving in the military came up, and Maj Apple and I both think they will be able to openly serve in the military very soon. (I mention this to set the stage, not to start a debate. Personally, it wouldn’t bother me. If they want to come over and fight for their country, it’s fine with me. Welcome.)

Once this topic came up, Wali asked why people were allowed to be openly gay in our country. We explained that in a free society, people are allowed to do pretty much what they please, as long as they are not hurting others, etc.

“But it is so revolting. A man would shame himself to do this.”

“Wali,” I asked, “What would happen to a man in Afghanistan if he openly declared he was gay?”

“That would never happen,” replied Wali, acting as though that was as likely as the Pope converting to Islam.

“I know. But let’s just pretend. For instance, let’s say a famous TV personality decided he wanted to try to change things here, so he announced on TV that he was gay.”

Wali interrupted. “But that would never happen.”

“Maybe it would. Just tell me what you think would happen.”

“His family would kill him immediately,” he said without batting an eye. Remember, Wali represents moderate, westernized, Islam in Afghanistan.

“Why would you kill someone just for being gay?” I pressed.

“Because my religion says so.” Again, as matter-of-fact as though he was explaining why a rock falls to the ground if you pick it up and then let go.

“Let’s suppose he escaped from his family. What would the government do? Would they arrest him?”

“Yes.”

“And would they then kill him?”

“Yes. This is an Islamic Republic. Our religion says to.”

“And if someone wanted to leave Islam and join another religion, they would be executed for that too, right?”

“Yes.”

The sad thing is, we could have been talking about football scores or the weather. He was not remotely embarrassed or hesitant in any of this. Hamid, however, was very quiet the whole time. I wonder what was going through his head.

“Well, if you believe all this, why would you want to move to America? We allow people to switch religions if they wish, or believe in nothing at all.”

“Do you have people from different religions marry each other?” he asked.

“Yes, all the time,” replied Maj Apple.

“What do they teach the children?”

“Usually they teach them both religions, and let them decide for themselves,” said Maj Apple.

Wali seemed a bit surprised by this. Steam was starting to come out his ears.

“America is not like Afghanistan,” I continued. “Our government does not tell us what to believe. We are free to believe whatever we wish. That is our greatness. We can say whatever we wish, as long as we aren’t threatening to kill someone or violently overthrow the government. We can get on TV and say we think the government is awful, and no one will arrest us.”

Maj Apple gave a brief explanation of how our country was founded by people who wished to worship in their own way. Once this was done, I asked again, “Do you think you could be happy in America? Muslims can leave the faith there, and no one will kill them.”

“That’s okay, as long as I can worship my way, I don’t mind what others do.”

So there you have it, the incongruity of a man who thinks it is perfectly normal to execute gays and apostates in this country, but doesn’t think it’s a big deal if he’s living in the US. No matter what your views on homosexuality, I doubt any readers of The Sandbox want to execute gays (well, maybe some Taliban reading this trying to gather intel). Same thing with people who leave your particular faith. Would you kill them? (Hopefully that’s a rhetorical question). Yet I live with seemingly normal, pleasant, hard-working people who would think nothing of doing this. This is not an isolated incident either. Other Americans have heard the same thing from their interpreters.

Now take this mindset, set temperature to high, and nuke for ten minutes, and you have some idea of the hatred and violence in the hearts of the men we are fighting against. Do you think diplomacy is going to work?

Do you think you can reason with them?

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Lafayette judge steps down: Frieling won’t enforce new marijuana law
By Eric Schmidt
February 13, 2007

An associate municipal court judge in Lafayette resigned Monday in protest of stiffer penalties for marijuana possession in the city.

Leonard Frieling, a Boulder criminal-defense lawyer, said he is resigning out of principle after more than eight years as a backup to Lafayette Municipal Judge Roger Buchholz.

“I cannot in good conscience sit on the bench while being unwilling to enforce the municipal ordinances,” Frieling said in a resignation letter to city officials. “Specifically, since you have seen fit to increase the penalty for cannabis possession from a $100 fine (which matches the state penalty) to a $1,000 fine and a year in jail, I find that I am morally and ethically unable to sit as a judge for the city.”

The Lafayette City Council last week passed a first reading of an ordinance increasing the possible penalty for possession of cannabis or drug paraphernalia, which now carries a maximum $100 fine. The change is pending final approval next week.

Frieling said he was willing to enforce the old ordinance despite a personal belief that the war on marijuana is “ridiculous.” He said it makes no sense for cannabis to be illegal for adults who are allowed to drink alcohol, and the proposed penalty in Lafayette would set a bad precedent.

“The state of Colorado has somewhat decriminalized small amounts for personal possession by making it a petty offense with maximum $100 fine,” he said. “I think that it is inappropriate for a municipality that a crime is so much more serious within their city limits than it is statewide.”

Lafayette Mayor Chris Berry said Monday night that he had not seen Frieling’s letter and could not comment on its contents.

Berry said the new pot penalties were among several changes supported by the city’s law enforcement. The idea was to increase the maximum penalty to give judges more discretion when sentencing marijuana offenders under different circumstances, he said.

“My interpretation was that it would be up to the judge,” Berry said. “A sitting judge could still make (the fine) $100.”

Mayor Pro Tem David Strungis — who cast the sole vote against the ordinance — said the police chief and sitting judge showed “no evidence that we have a pandemic of marijuana-possession arrests in Lafayette.”

“My feeling was that punishments have to be within reason, and the punishment has to fit the crime,” Strungis said. “To put someone in jail for a year for less than an ounce of marijuana — I couldn’t justify that.”

Tiny duckling has rare mutation: 4 legs
February 18, 2007

LONDON – Webbed feet run in Stumpy’s family, but he’s the first to have four of them.

A rare mutation has left the eight-day-old duckling with two nearly full-sized legs behind the two he runs on. Nicky Janaway, a duck farmer in New Forest, Hampshire, 95 miles southwest of London, showed the duckling to reporters Saturday.

“It was absolutely bizarre. I was thinking ‘he’s got too many legs’ and I kept counting ‘one, two, three, four,'” Janaway said.

Stumpy would probably not survive in the wild, but Janaway, who runs the Warrawee Duck Farm in New Forest, says he is doing well.

“He’s eating and surviving so far, and he is running about with those extra legs acting like stabilizers,” Janaway said.

The mutation is rare, but cases have been recorded across the world. One duckling named Jake was born in Queensland, Australia, in 2002 with four legs but died soon after.

Monkey Wrench Puppet Lab presents Drunk Puppet Nite #7!

At Re-Bar 1114 Howell Street at Boren, Seattle

Friday & Saturday. February 23 & 24; March 2 & 3; 9 & 10

Show at 8:00 SHARP; Door open at 7:00 21 and over only w/ID

Tickets $15 at the door; NO reservations!

For info call Monkey Wrench Puppet Lab (206) 528-7799
http://www.monkeywrenchpuppetlab.org

Ladies and gentlemen, it’s the 7th Drunk Puppet Nite! And the talented freaks at Monkey Wrench Puppet Lab are inviting our favorite puppeteers to expose themselves in public!

Monkey Wrench Puppet Lab is once again hosting the outrageous mix of puke, politics, porn, poetry and puppets that we call Drunk Puppet Nite! This is an evening of puppetry from beyond the pale; a chancefor Seattle’s best, and most notorious, puppeteers to expose their ids in public. We dare to enter the nether realms of puppetry. Drunk Puppet Nite is subversive; it’s ugly, it’s ridiculous, it’s sublime, it’s controversial, it’s lovely, it’s righteously political, it’s literary.

This year, by popular demand, we are moving back to the Re-Bar at the base of Capitol Hill. No one knows what to expect from Drunk Puppet Nite. Over these three weekends, our puppeteers have no boundaries. Performers include Queen Shmooquan; Johnny Jetpack; members of Circus Contraption, Cry of the Rooster, Islewilde, Naked Puppets, Tears of Joy, and all of your Monkey Wrench favorites! Musical guests include Miles & Karina and The Fremont Philharmonic! No two evenings are the same.

Monkey Wrench is a cluster of Seattle area puppeteers who are working to expand the public’s definition of puppetry by bringing their blend of the surprising, the bizarre and the artistically excellent to audiences around the Puget Sound. Monkey Wrench is the group responsible for Frankenocchio, The Mermaid who Broke my F*cking Heart, Halfpenny Opera and the upcoming Dracula.

For more information call Monkey Wrench at (206) 528-7799 or email producer Josh Okrent at [email protected]

the four CDs worth of Holy Modal Rounders mp3s that i was waiting for yesterday didn’t come through for some, unknown reason (which is very sad indeed), but the other stuff did.

except some of them were mp3s and some of them were FLAC files, and the only player i have that understands FLAC is on windoesn’t – only this time it’s the only thing that does for a change. is there a way to convert FLAC to mp3, or something that is compatible with my ipod? i realise that FLAC is infinitely preferable (yes, i have ears), but as far as i can tell, i can’t put FLACs in my ipod, and i really would like to take this music with me, rather than having to carry around my windows box for one album…

i stayed awake last night for mahasivaratri. in between bouts of internet activity (i downloaded about 15 CDs worth of music, and there’s four more that are currently downloading with an ETA of about an hour), and another art project that i got started (think multiple, big stencils), i actually spent some time meditating as well, which is the first time i’ve been able to meditate for more than 10 minutes or so since my injury. oddly enough, i don’t feel tired, but my body feels tired: i’m as mentally alert as i am at lunch time pretty much daily, but i’m having extreme difficulty typing, for example, because both my hands are so tired that they’re hitting the wrong letters about 90% of the time. my mind is sort of fuzzy and it takes me longer to form a sentance than it would normally. my vision, especially close up, is extremely blurred…

i can’t decide whether i want to give my body a rest, or whether i want to go for a bike ride… it’s such a gorgeous day… 8)

by the way, it’s Mahasivaratri tonight. happy mahasivaratri everyone. 8)

Research Supports Medicinal Marijuana
AIDS Patients in Controlled Study Had Significant Pain Relief
By Rick Weiss
February 13, 2007

AIDS patients suffering from debilitating nerve pain got as much or more relief by smoking marijuana as they would typically get from prescription drugs — and with fewer side effects — according to a study conducted under rigorously controlled conditions with government-grown pot.

In a five-day study performed in a specially ventilated hospital ward where patients smoked three marijuana cigarettes a day, more than half the participants tallied significant reductions in pain.

By contrast, less than one-quarter of those who smoked “placebo” pot, which had its primary psychoactive ingredients removed, reported benefits, as measured by subjective pain reports and standardized neurological tests.

The White House belittled the study as “a smoke screen,” short on proof of efficacy and flawed because it did not consider the health impacts of inhaling smoke.

But other doctors and advocates of marijuana policy reform said the findings, in today’s issue of the journal Neurology, offer powerful evidence that the Drug Enforcement Administration’s classification of cannabis as having “no currently accepted medical use” is outdated.

“This should be a wake-up call for Congress to hold hearings to investigate the therapeutic use of cannabis and to encourage more research,” said Barbara T. Roberts, a former interim associate deputy director in the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, now with Americans for Safe Access, which promotes access to marijuana for therapies and research.

Countless anecdotal reports have suggested that smoking marijuana can help relieve the pain, nausea and muscular spasticity that often accompany cancer, AIDS, multiple sclerosis and other ailments. But few well-controlled studies have been conducted.

The new study enrolled 50 AIDS patients with severe foot pain caused by their disease or by the medicines they take.

The team first measured baseline pain, both subjectively (patients ranked their pain on a scale of 1 to 100) and with two standardized tests, one involving a small hot iron held to the skin and another involving hot chili pepper cream.

Then, for five days, patients lit up at 8 a.m., 2 p.m. and 8 p.m. using a calibrated puff method that calls for inhaling for five seconds, holding one’s breath for 10, then waiting 45 seconds before the next.

The cigarettes were kept frozen and locked in a safe, then thawed and humidified one day before use. Cigarette butts and other debris were collected, weighed and returned to the safe to ensure no diversion for recreational purposes.

Grown on the government’s official pot farm in Mississippi, the drug was about one-quarter the potency of quality street marijuana. The inactive version was chemically cleansed of cannabinoids, the drug’s main active ingredients.

“It smelled like and looked like” normal marijuana, said study leader Donald I. Abrams, a physician at San Francisco General Hospital, where the smoking ward was located. Like the patients, Abrams was not told who had the active pot until the study was over.

Thirteen of 25 patients who smoked the regular marijuana achieved pain reduction of at least 30 percent, compared with six of 25 who smoked placebo pot. The average pain reduction for the real cannabis was 34 percent, compared with17 percent for the placebo.

Opioids and other pills can reduce nerve pain by 20 to 30 percent but can cause drowsiness and confusion, Abrams said. And many patients complain that a prescription version of pot’s main ingredient in pill form does not work for them.

That was true for Diana Dodson, 50, who received an AIDS diagnosis in 1997 after a blood transfusion.

“I have so many layers of pain I can hardly walk,” said Dodson, who was in the new study. Prescription drugs made her feel worse. “But inhaled cannabis works,” she said.

Patients in the study — all of whom had smoked pot previously — reported no notable side effects, though the researchers acknowledged that people unfamiliar with the drug may not fare as well.

Igor Grant, director of the University of California Center for Medicinal Cannabis Research, which funded the research, said the study was probably the best-designed U.S. test of marijuana’s medical potential in decades. He called the results “highly believable.”

But David Murray, chief scientist at the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, called the findings “not particularly persuasive.” The study was relatively small, he said, and it is likely that those who received the real pot were aware of that, introducing a bias of expected efficacy.

“We’re very much supportive of any effort to ameliorate the suffering of AIDS patients,” Murray said. But even if ingredients in marijuana prove useful, he added, they ought to be synthesized in a pill to make dosing more accurate and to minimize lung damage.

Separately, ending a six-year effort, a Massachusetts group learned yesterday that it had won a legal victory against the DEA in its battle for federal permission to grow its own cannabis for federally approved studies, instead of relying on government pot.

In an 87-page opinion, administrative law judge Mary Ellen Bittner ruled that it “would be in the public interest” to allow a University of Massachusetts researcher to cultivate marijuana under contract to the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), which sponsors medical research on marijuana and other drugs.

The DEA is not obligated to follow the advice of its law judges, but the detailed decision should make it difficult for the agency to balk, said MAPS President Rick Doblin.

Anti-evolution memo stirs controversy
By Jeremy Redmon
February 15, 2007

The Anti-Defamation League is calling on state Rep. Ben Bridges to apologize for a memo distributed under his name that says the teaching of evolution should be banned in public schools because it is a religious deception stemming from an ancient Jewish sect.

Bridges (R-Cleveland) denies having anything to do with the memo. But one of his constituents said he wrote the memo with Bridges’ approval before it was recently distributed to lawmakers in several states, including Texas, California, New York, Illinois, Pennsylvania and Ohio.

“Indisputable evidence — long hidden but now available to everyone — demonstrates conclusively that so-called ‘secular evolution science’ is the Big-Bang 15-billion-year alternate ‘creation scenario’ of the Pharisee Religion,” the memo says. “This scenario is derived concept-for-concept from Rabbinic writings in the mystic ‘holy book’ Kabbala dating back at least two millennia.”

The memo calls on lawmakers to introduce legislation that would end the teaching of evolution in public schools because it is “a deception that is causing incalculable harm to every student and every truth-loving citizen.”

It also directs readers to a Web site www.fixedearth.com, which includes model legislation that calls the Kabbala “a mystic, anti-Christ ‘holy book’ of the Pharisee Sect of Judaism.” The Web site also declares “the earth is not rotating … nor is it going around the sun.”

The Anti-Defamation League says the assertions in the memo border on anti-Semitism.

“Your memo conjures up repugnant images of Judaism used for thousands of years to smear the Jewish people as cult-like and manipulative,” Bill Nigut, the ADL’s Southeast regional director, wrote in an e-mail to Bridges Thursday. “I am shocked and appalled that you would send this anti-Semitic material to colleagues and friends, and call upon you to repudiate and apologize for distributing this highly offensive memo.”

Bridges denied writing or authorizing the memo.

“I did not put it out nor did I know it was going out,” Bridges said. “I’m not defending it or taking up for it.”

The memo directs supporters to call Marshall Hall, president of the Fair Education Foundation Inc., a Cornelia, Ga.-based organization that seeks to show evolution is a myth. Hall said he showed Bridges the text of the memo and got his permission to distribute it.

“I gave him a copy of it months ago,” said Hall, a retired high school teacher. “I had already written this up as an idea to present to him so he could see what it was and what we were thinking.”

Hall said his wife Bonnie has served as Bridges’ campaign manager since 1996.

Bridges acknowledged that he talked to Hall about filing legislation this year that would end the teaching of evolution in Georgia’s public schools. Bridges said the views in the memo belong to Hall, though Bridges said he doesn’t necessarily disagree with them.

“I agree with it more than I would the Big Bang Theory or the Darwin Theory,” Bridges said. “I am convinced that rather than risk teaching a lie why teach anything?”

Bridges sponsored unsuccessful legislation in 2005 that would have required Georgia’s teachers to introduce scientific evidence challenging evolution.

Asked about the ADL’s call for an apology, Bridges said: “I regret that these people have been offended, but I didn’t offend them because I didn’t put the memo out.”

A Texas lawmaker says he is now “willing to apologize” for giving fellow legislators the memo Tuesday, The Dallas Morning News reported today.

“The stuff that causes conflicts between religious beliefs, you know, I’d never be a party to that,” Texas House Appropriations Chairman Warren Chisum told the Morning News Wednesday. “I’m willing to apologize if I’ve offended anyone.”

The newspaper reported Chisum made his comments after he learned the Anti-Defamation League was demanding an apology in a letter to his office.

The National Center for Science Education, an Oakland, Calif.-based organization that defends the teaching of evolution in public schools, said the assertion that evolution is linked to an ancient Jewish sect is “bizarre.”

“Evolution is recognized as a central unifying principle of the biological sciences by the scientific community and the education community,” said Glenn Branch, the center’s deputy director.

The non-moving Earth & anti-evolution web page of The Fair Education Foundation, Inc. – O_o

these people make the NATURE’S HARMONIC SIMULTANEOUS 4-DAY TIME CUBE guy look positively normal…

(by the way, if you hadn’t noticed, both of the web sites above were posted by people who are stark raving lunatics)

but people still believe this crap and think you’re EVIL if you disagree with ’em!! – and they’ve apparently got a guy at the federal level who is responsible for making OUR LAWS who agrees with ’em!!

and people wonder why i’m not sure i wouldn’t be happier dead… 8/

and then, to top it all off…

Christian pediatrician denies child service because parents are tattooed
By Brynn Galindo
2/14/07

BAKERSFIELD – A family is turned away by a local pediatrician, they say because of the way they look.

The doctor said he is just following his beliefs, creating a Christian atmosphere for his patients.

Tasha Childress said it’s discrimination.

She said Dr. Gary Merrill wouldn’t treat her daughter for an ear infection because Tasha, the mother, has tattoos.

The writing is on the wall—literally: “This is a private office. Appearance and behavior standards apply.”

For Dr. Gary Merrill of Christian Medical Services, that means no tattoos, body piercings, and a host of other requirements—all standards Merrill has set based upon his Christian faith.

“She had to go that entire night with her ear infection with no medicine because he has his policy,” Tasha Childress said.

Merrill won’t speak on camera, but said based on his values and beliefs, he has standards that he expects in his office.

He does that, he said, to ensure the patients he does accept have a more comfortable atmosphere.

According to the American Medical Association and other doctors, he reserves that right.

“In the same sense that any other business person has the opportunity to decline service, be it a restaurant if they’re not dressed properly, be it any other type of business,” said Dr. Ronald Morton, Kern County Medical Society.

Morton said certain ethics apply if a person’s life is in danger, but besides that, there is no requirement to serve anyone they don’t approve of.

“I felt totally discriminated against, like I wasn’t good enough to talk to,” Tasha Childress said, “like he didn’t have to give me any reason for not wanting to see my daughter because I have tattoos and piercings.”

17 News found other patients who had a different experience with Merrill.

“I have tattoos, actually, and no, nothing’s ever been said about it,” Brandi Stanley said, Merrill’s patient.

Childress’ insurance company, Health Net of California, who referred her to Merrill, said in a statement: “We provide our customers with a wide breadth of doctors that meet certain medical quality standards … If a customer doesn’t feel comfortable with a particular physician, it is our responsibility to provide that customer with access to another doctor who does meet their needs.”

But that’s not enough for Childress who wants the policy changed immediately and an apology from the doctor for making her feel like an outsider.

“Really, it didn’t matter what he didn’t want to see us for. It isn’t right,” she said.

Merrill said he will continue to enforce the rules he has in place, which even include no chewing gum in his office.

He said if they don’t like his beliefs, they can find another doctor.

through some unknown coincidence, i was invited to check out a college that claire petersky was going to be attending, along with bruce borntraeger. it was more-or-less what i remember a typical college was like, with various buildings and dormitories. there was something bruce, claire and i were involved with that took place in one of the dormitories, but i don’t remember that part. there was one place, next to the dormitory, where there was a building and a parking lot and a huge earth berm with a road on the other side of it, and a gap so that the parking lot could be accessed from the road, and at the end of the berm, just before the gap, there was a concrete sign embedded in the berm, with faded writing that appeared to be german, and i realised that this had been an old WWI-era fort before it was a college. there was a large sailboat on a trailer in the parking lot, and i went up to it and started climbing on it as though i knew what i was doing. i found a derby hat that had somehow been forced down on the mast, so that it was ripped through the crown and resting on the deck. somehow i got it off, and, in spite of the fact that it was twisted out of shape and totally useless as a hat, i put it on my head anyway, and said that it didn’t matter to me that it wasn’t a hat any longer.

Civil Libertarian You scored 86% Personal Liberty and 48% Economic Liberty!

A civil libertarian believes in little to no government intervention on personal matters and moderate government intervention on economic matters. As the name implies, a Civil Libertarian’s main concern is with civil liberties – personal matters. They tend to be strongly opposed to war, police powers, victimless crimes, and foreign intervention. Civil Libertarians may tend to believe in a social safety net, but to a lesser extent then most leftists. Strong Civil Libertarians are somewhat inclined towards supporting capitalism as an economic system, while others believe in a “mixed” system between different aspects of capitalism and socialism. A civil libertarian strongly believes in protecting personal liberty. They strongly support self-ownership and privacy.

Partial List of IP Blocks Used by US “Terrorist Surveillance Program”

The following partial list of IP blocks are routinely used by the US government entities (supported by private contractors) to gain access to, to monitor, and in some cases, to destroy IT networks. Such activity is related to the US “Terrorist Surveillance Program.” Most of the registrants of the blocks listed below are not aware of these activities. Concerned network admins should examine traffic logs closely. A correlation of traffic from several of these IP blocks likely indicates that a network is under surveillance or has had access attempted by the US intelligence community and affiliated entities.

Another thing to note about the program is that access attempts are usually done through Microsoft service ports 1025-1030. Microsoft OS’s allow remote access via these specific ports.

83.27.0.0 – 83.27.255.255
170.86.0.0 – 170.86.255.255
62.212.234.128 – 62.212.234.255
81.57.102.0 – 81.57.103.255
201.5.0.0 – 201.5.255.255
213.151.160.0 – 213.151.191.255
70.83.15.0 – 70.83.15.255
166.128.0.0 – 166.255.255.255
60.64.0.0 – 60.159.255.255
142.191.0.0 – 142.191.255.255
83.65.121.32 – 83.65.121.39
12.108.2.0 – 12.108.3.255
65.128.0.0 – 65.159.255.255
24.158.208.0 – 24.158.223.255
86.97.64.0 – 86.97.95.255
201.239.128.0 – 201.239.255.255
68.36.0.0 – 68.36.255.255
70.44.0.0 – 70.44.255.255
64.231.200.0 – 64.231.203.255
189.128.0.0 – 189.255.255.255
216.155.192.0 – 216.155.207.255
121.6.0.0 – 121.7.255.255
71.96.0.0 – 71.127.255.255
190.213.196.0 – 190.213.196.255
80.72.230.0 – 80.72.230.255
58.29.0.0 – 58.29.255.255
121.128.0.0 – 121.191.255.255
88.191.3.0 – 88.191.248.255
58.72.0.0 – 58.79.255.255
70.16.0.0 – 70.23.255.255
200.57.192.0 – 200.57.255.255
201.5.0.0 – 201.5.255.255
124.168.0.0 – 124.168.255.255
211.200.0.0 – 211.205.255.255
78.252.0.0 – 78.252.255.255
59.0.0.0 – 59.31.255.255
72.64.0.0 – 72.95.255.255
211.200.0.0 – 211.205.255.255
145.53.0.0 – 145.53.255.255
71.200.0.0 – 71.200.127.255
60.206.0.0 – 60.207.255.255
194.178.125.48 – 194.178.125.55
98.226.0.0 – 98.226.255.255
201.88.0.0 – 201.88.255.255
205.209.128.0 – 205.209.191.255
51.0.0.0 – 51.255.255.255
70.64.0.0 – 70.79.255.255
70.112.0.0 – 70.127.255.255
202.84.96.0 – 202.84.127.255
70.32.0.0 – 70.32.31.255
207.218.192.0 – 207.218.255.255
69.31.88.0 – 69.31.89.255
198.74.0.0 – 198.74.255.255
221.0.0.0 – 221.3.127.255
72.144.0.0 – 72.159.255.255
220.96.0.0 – 220.99.255.255
82.88.0.0 – 82.91.255.255
216.128.73.0 – 216.128.73.255

I’ve converted your list to CIDR notation, it’s much more useful this way:

83.27.0.0/16
170.86.0.0/16
62.212.234.128/25
81.57.102.0/23
201.5.0.0/16
213.151.160.0/19
70.83.15.0/24
166.128.0.0/9
60.64.0.0/10
60.128.0.0/11
142.191.0.0/16
83.65.121.32/29
12.108.2.0/23
65.128.0.0/11
24.158.208.0/20
86.97.64.0/19
201.239.128.0/17
68.36.0.0/16
70.44.0.0/16
64.231.200.0/22
189.128.0.0/9
216.155.192.0/20
121.6.0.0/15
71.96.0.0/11
190.213.196.0/24
80.72.230.0/24
58.29.0.0/16
121.128.0.0/10
88.191.3.0/24
88.191.4.0/22
88.191.8.0/21
88.191.16.0/20
88.191.32.0/18
88.191.64.0/17
88.191.128.0/18
88.191.192.0/19
88.191.224.0/20
88.191.240.0/21
88.191.248.0/24
58.72.0.0/13
70.16.0.0/13
200.57.192.0/18
201.5.0.0/16
124.168.0.0/16
211.200.0.0/14
211.204.0.0/15
78.252.0.0/16
59.0.0.0/11
72.64.0.0/11
211.200.0.0/14
211.204.0.0/15
145.53.0.0/16
71.200.0.0/17
60.206.0.0/15
194.178.125.48/29
98.226.0.0/16
201.88.0.0/16
205.209.128.0/18
51.0.0.0/8
70.64.0.0/12
70.112.0.0/12
202.84.96.0/19
70.32.0.0/19
207.218.192.0/18
69.31.88.0/23
198.74.0.0/16
221.0.0.0/15
221.2.0.0/16
221.3.0.0/17
72.144.0.0/12
220.96.0.0/14
82.88.0.0/14
216.128.73.0/24

Ex-Agent Ties Firing to CIA Pressure on WMD
By Chitra Ragavan
February 09, 2007

A federal judge has ruled that a CIA agent identified only as “Doe,” allegedly fired after he gathered prewar intelligence showing that Iraq was not developing weapons of mass destruction, can proceed with his lawsuit against the CIA. The judge has ordered both parties to submit discovery requests–evidence they want for their case–to be completed by March 15, according to the CIA agent’s lawyer and a spokesman for the Justice Department, which is defending the CIA in court.

U.S. District Judge Gladys Kessler issued her ruling after what Doe’s attorney, Roy Krieger, described as an extraordinary, secret status conference by telephone this afternoon that lasted nearly a half an hour. So concerned was the CIA about the agent’s identity becoming public that the Justice Department prevailed upon the judge to issue a highly restrictive order regarding press contacts by the agent and Krieger. The order barred them from “requesting, allowing, encouraging, or directing” any members of the media from appearing at Krieger’s office or even within a two-block vicinity of the building where he works or of any other location of the status conference, until two hours after the conference was completed.

Krieger and his client were also barred from notifying the media ahead of time about the status conference or its location. The judge sealed her order until 2 p.m. today.

“They are worried about his photograph being taken or his likeness being sketched,” Krieger told U.S. News, “because if his appearance became public, we are told we will lose one of our most valued assets because [the asset has] been publicly associated with him.”

At the hearing, Krieger said, Justice Department attorney Marcia Tiersky told Kessler the department wanted to file a motion for summary judgment, leading to dismissal of the case, before discovery commenced. In response to Kessler’s request for a basis for summary judgment, according to Krieger and the Justice Department, Tiersky said that the department would produce affidavits in support of the move. But the judge, indicating that she viewed this as a delaying tactic, said she would allow the discovery process to begin.

This is the second setback for the government in this case. In January, Kessler decided on technical grounds that the CIA employee’s lawsuit could not be dismissed. However, the judge did not rule on the agent’s central claim that he was fired because he refused to alter intelligence that contradicted the Bush administration’s central rationale for the war in Iraq. In that earlier ruling, Kessler said that the covert agent could plausibly argue that his firing was based on allegedly false information placed in his personnel file. Krieger said that his client had gathered intelligence from several countries in the Middle East, including Iraq.

The intelligence was picked up as the United States began its push for invading Iraq in 2003. As has been widely reported, the Bush administration has since failed to find any weapons of mass destruction. The CIA agent has alleged in his suit that supervisors told him they would notify President Bush that he had found contradictory information but that they failed to follow through on their promise.

boytaur dot net?? – somwhere between ZOMG and ROTFLMAO…

the big bois with poise took Miss Indigo Blue‘s “tassel twirling” class this evening. it was a little weird, being one of only 4 men in a class full of women who were learning how to apply pasties, and various other things that involved taking off our shirts… but nobody seemed too hung up about it, and now i have my very own set of pasties with tassels, and i can even twirl them in a variety of ways. aren’t you impressed?

i got a new cell phone the other day. i didn’t really need a new cell phone, but the ringer in phone i had was being “intermittent” – sometimes it would ring and sometimes it wouldn’t – which meant that i was constantly missing important calls to let me know about schedule changes and suchlike, and i figured it would be easier to just get a new phone instead of battling with verizon to get the old one fixed, especially since the old one is two years old anyway.

the ringtones are midi files. there are a ton of “get it now” web sites that say that they have “500,000 FREE” ringtones, or something like that, but you have to subscribe (pay) to get the “free” ringtones, and they don’t have any frank zappa ringtones, even if you do subscribe.

however, there are another ton of frank zappa midi sites, that have totally free midi files, that you can download without having to subscribe to anything…

so now my cell phone rings with “Take Your Clothes Off When You Dance”, except for when it’s moe calling, when it rings with “Dirty Love”.

it is still giving me trouble changing “wallpapers” so that i don’t have the obnoxious verizon advertising though, it turns out that the picture i was sending was “the wrong size”, and instead of telling me that it was the wrong size, it was saying “invalid file” when i tried to set it as wallpaper, even though i was able to see it when i downloaded the message, which is a bug, and the “screensaver” won’t turn off (which is very definitely a bug).

also, the “head man” at the verizon store in the mall didn’t know some stuff about the email software that the phone uses, but instead of saying that he didn’t know, he said the technology was different, which i know for a fact (because of the fact that i used to work for openwave, the company that makes the email server software that is used by verizon) is not true… but i didn’t feel like arguing with him, so i left him feeling smug that he didn’t actually have to replace my phone.

bastard!

so i drove Ganesha The Car down to target to transfer some photos from a smart-disk (for which i do not have a reader) to a CD, so that moe can give back the camera that the smart-disk is from, and when i came out of target, there were a couple of “business” cards on my windshield advertising jeezis.

i really wonder what whoever left them on my windshield was thinking? i drive a car that is covered with sanskrit, that has a license plate that says GANESHA, and a bumper sticker that says JESUS IS A GATEWAY DRUG… do they think a couple of business cards, left by what i have to assume is an anonymous “christian”, are suddenly going to change my mind?

and one of the cards says “If we meet and you forget me, you have lost nothing. If you meet Jesus and forget him, you have lost everything!” with a bumper sticker that says JESUS IS A GATEWAY DRUG, how do they think that i could possibly have forgotten Jesus? if it were not for Jesus, i would not be where i am now. i was a christian, and a christian minister, long before i ever even thought about hinduism – admittedly, it is primarily because i didn’t know about hinduism, but still, that’s one of the many meanings of my JESUS IS A GATEWAY DRUG sticker.

not only that, but i wonder if they would have given me the cards if they met me in person, rather than the anonymity of leaving them on my windshield? to be honest, i’m not sure i would have accepted them if i had been offered them in person, but at the same time, if my experience with “christians” is anything to go by, they probably would have been scared to approach me if they had seen me in person, if for no other reason than they would think that their “christianity” would be offensive to me or something… and, to be honest, i would be offended if someone who didn’t know me, who assumed that i don’t know Jesus, offered these cards to me. it’s very clear to me why the cards don’t have any personally identifying information that i could use to get in contact with them personally.

Each soul is potentially divine. The goal is to manifest that divinity within by controlling nature: external and internal. Do this either by work, or worship, or psychic control, or philosophy — by one, or more, or all of these — and be free. This is the whole of religion. Doctrines, or dogmas, or rituals, or books, or temples, or forms are but secondary details.

— Swami Vivekananda

sheesh… 8/

according to the latest news from ezra, katharyn is out of the state loony bin again, but i got a call from darol a few days ago asking if i knew how to get in touch with either ezra or katharyn. apparently he’s experienced a “break in” of sorts: someone went into the madhouse kitchen – which is never locked – and “stole” a bunch of kitchenware, including darol’s favourite cast-iron frying pan, which he’s had for the last 30 years, and he thinks katharyn might have taken stuff that she thought was hers… problem is, all of her stuff was cleared out, boxed up and put in storage (at darol’s expense) two years ago, and he’d like to get paid back for the storage. i doubt katharyn has the money to pay darol back, and even if she does, the probability that she will doesn’t seem particularly likely.

if her routine holds, she’ll get into a snit and, when she can’t find anyone in the community who will step forward and bad-mouth darol in public, thus justifying her negative feelings towards him, she will probably file a lawsuit against him… which will probably be a lot more difficult now that she doesn’t have an attorney (she alienated all three of the ones that she had during my 12-year battle with her over custody of ezra, and very likely has not paid them anything)… but i somehow see her not letting that stand in her way, which probably means that she’ll be representing herself… which, if it were anybody else, i’d like to see just for the pure entertainment value, but as it’s the psycho-hose-beast-from-hell, i think i’ll stay away for fear that i’ll set her off and she’ll go after me again…

why didn’t anyone listen to me 15 years ago, when i was saying that the woman was psychotic, but they still wouldn’t let me have custody of my son? and how do i get paid back for all of the costs of paying for my son’s schooling because she was holding him back in order to be eligible for Aid for Families with Dependent Children welfare handouts, child support that i paid to his mother in spite of the fact that he was in my care, the cost of a last-minute transcontinental flight from boston, and legal fees that i was forced to pay for 15 years during the time i was saying this?

yup, i was right… it was interesting… 8)

Iranian hackers possess Windows Vista

Tehran, Feb 5, Taliya News – Cracked version of Windows Vista is already available at Iranian software markets.

Less than two months after presentation of last edited version of Microsoft Company’s latest operating system, Windows Vista and despite all anti-crack locks installed by that system’s designers, Iranian hackers managed to beat Microsoft’s anti-copying tricks and present the “fully cracked” version of this new Windows software to their Iranian clients!

The copied version of Vista is presently presented by an Iranian software company and provides the possibility for its owner to have a private “Serial Number” and thus, to “legalize!” his cracked Windows copy. The retail sale price of the Iranian cracked version of Windows Vista is 80,000 Rials (around US $8) while this good’s original version is sold around $650 at world markets!

This version of Windows is the first in its kind that enables the users to register his Windows “fully legally!!” at Microsoft website and take full advantage of that company’s after sale services, thus sacking over $640 of illegal benefit!

We have still received no news on Microsoft officials’ reaction to the cracking of their final version of Windows Vista.

we are writing you about your claim for social security disability benefits. based on a review of your health problems you do not qualify for benefits on this claim. this is because you are not disabled under our rules.

we have determined that your condition is not severe enough to keep you from working.

we realise that your condition prevents you from doing your past work, but it does not prevent you from doing jobs that are less demanding.

if your condition gets worse and keeps you from working, write, call or visit any social security office about filing another appliciation.

—

8/

Thoughts on Music
By Steve Jobs
February 6, 2007

With the stunning global success of Apple’s iPod music player and iTunes online music store, some have called for Apple to “open” the digital rights management (DRM) system that Apple uses to protect its music against theft, so that music purchased from iTunes can be played on digital devices purchased from other companies, and protected music purchased from other online music stores can play on iPods. Let’s examine the current situation and how we got here, then look at three possible alternatives for the future.

To begin, it is useful to remember that all iPods play music that is free of any DRM and encoded in “open” licensable formats such as MP3 and AAC. iPod users can and do acquire their music from many sources, including CDs they own. Music on CDs can be easily imported into the freely-downloadable iTunes jukebox software which runs on both Macs and Windows PCs, and is automatically encoded into the open AAC or MP3 formats without any DRM. This music can be played on iPods or any other music players that play these open formats.

The rub comes from the music Apple sells on its online iTunes Store. Since Apple does not own or control any music itself, it must license the rights to distribute music from others, primarily the “big four” music companies: Universal, Sony BMG, Warner and EMI. These four companies control the distribution of over 70% of the world’s music. When Apple approached these companies to license their music to distribute legally over the Internet, they were extremely cautious and required Apple to protect their music from being illegally copied. The solution was to create a DRM system, which envelopes each song purchased from the iTunes store in special and secret software so that it cannot be played on unauthorized devices.

Apple was able to negotiate landmark usage rights at the time, which include allowing users to play their DRM protected music on up to 5 computers and on an unlimited number of iPods. Obtaining such rights from the music companies was unprecedented at the time, and even today is unmatched by most other digital music services. However, a key provision of our agreements with the music companies is that if our DRM system is compromised and their music becomes playable on unauthorized devices, we have only a small number of weeks to fix the problem or they can withdraw their entire music catalog from our iTunes store.

To prevent illegal copies, DRM systems must allow only authorized devices to play the protected music. If a copy of a DRM protected song is posted on the Internet, it should not be able to play on a downloader’s computer or portable music device. To achieve this, a DRM system employs secrets. There is no theory of protecting content other than keeping secrets. In other words, even if one uses the most sophisticated cryptographic locks to protect the actual music, one must still “hide” the keys which unlock the music on the user’s computer or portable music player. No one has ever implemented a DRM system that does not depend on such secrets for its operation.

The problem, of course, is that there are many smart people in the world, some with a lot of time on their hands, who love to discover such secrets and publish a way for everyone to get free (and stolen) music. They are often successful in doing just that, so any company trying to protect content using a DRM must frequently update it with new and harder to discover secrets. It is a cat-and-mouse game. Apple’s DRM system is called FairPlay. While we have had a few breaches in FairPlay, we have been able to successfully repair them through updating the iTunes store software, the iTunes jukebox software and software in the iPods themselves. So far we have met our commitments to the music companies to protect their music, and we have given users the most liberal usage rights available in the industry for legally downloaded music.

With this background, let’s now explore three different alternatives for the future.

The first alternative is to continue on the current course, with each manufacturer competing freely with their own “top to bottom” proprietary systems for selling, playing and protecting music. It is a very competitive market, with major global companies making large investments to develop new music players and online music stores. Apple, Microsoft and Sony all compete with proprietary systems. Music purchased from Microsoft’s Zune store will only play on Zune players; music purchased from Sony’s Connect store will only play on Sony’s players; and music purchased from Apple’s iTunes store will only play on iPods. This is the current state of affairs in the industry, and customers are being well served with a continuing stream of innovative products and a wide variety of choices.

Some have argued that once a consumer purchases a body of music from one of the proprietary music stores, they are forever locked into only using music players from that one company. Or, if they buy a specific player, they are locked into buying music only from that company’s music store. Is this true? Let’s look at the data for iPods and the iTunes store – they are the industry’s most popular products and we have accurate data for them. Through the end of 2006, customers purchased a total of 90 million iPods and 2 billion songs from the iTunes store. On average, that’s 22 songs purchased from the iTunes store for each iPod ever sold.

Today’s most popular iPod holds 1000 songs, and research tells us that the average iPod is nearly full. This means that only 22 out of 1000 songs, or under 3% of the music on the average iPod, is purchased from the iTunes store and protected with a DRM. The remaining 97% of the music is unprotected and playable on any player that can play the open formats. It’s hard to believe that just 3% of the music on the average iPod is enough to lock users into buying only iPods in the future. And since 97% of the music on the average iPod was not purchased from the iTunes store, iPod users are clearly not locked into the iTunes store to acquire their music.

The second alternative is for Apple to license its FairPlay DRM technology to current and future competitors with the goal of achieving interoperability between different company’s players and music stores. On the surface, this seems like a good idea since it might offer customers increased choice now and in the future. And Apple might benefit by charging a small licensing fee for its FairPlay DRM. However, when we look a bit deeper, problems begin to emerge. The most serious problem is that licensing a DRM involves disclosing some of its secrets to many people in many companies, and history tells us that inevitably these secrets will leak. The Internet has made such leaks far more damaging, since a single leak can be spread worldwide in less than a minute. Such leaks can rapidly result in software programs available as free downloads on the Internet which will disable the DRM protection so that formerly protected songs can be played on unauthorized players.

An equally serious problem is how to quickly repair the damage caused by such a leak. A successful repair will likely involve enhancing the music store software, the music jukebox software, and the software in the players with new secrets, then transferring this updated software into the tens (or hundreds) of millions of Macs, Windows PCs and players already in use. This must all be done quickly and in a very coordinated way. Such an undertaking is very difficult when just one company controls all of the pieces. It is near impossible if multiple companies control separate pieces of the puzzle, and all of them must quickly act in concert to repair the damage from a leak.

Apple has concluded that if it licenses FairPlay to others, it can no longer guarantee to protect the music it licenses from the big four music companies. Perhaps this same conclusion contributed to Microsoft’s recent decision to switch their emphasis from an “open” model of licensing their DRM to others to a “closed” model of offering a proprietary music store, proprietary jukebox software and proprietary players.

The third alternative is to abolish DRMs entirely. Imagine a world where every online store sells DRM-free music encoded in open licensable formats. In such a world, any player can play music purchased from any store, and any store can sell music which is playable on all players. This is clearly the best alternative for consumers, and Apple would embrace it in a heartbeat. If the big four music companies would license Apple their music without the requirement that it be protected with a DRM, we would switch to selling only DRM-free music on our iTunes store. Every iPod ever made will play this DRM-free music.

Why would the big four music companies agree to let Apple and others distribute their music without using DRM systems to protect it? The simplest answer is because DRMs haven’t worked, and may never work, to halt music piracy. Though the big four music companies require that all their music sold online be protected with DRMs, these same music companies continue to sell billions of CDs a year which contain completely unprotected music. That’s right! No DRM system was ever developed for the CD, so all the music distributed on CDs can be easily uploaded to the Internet, then (illegally) downloaded and played on any computer or player.

In 2006, under 2 billion DRM-protected songs were sold worldwide by online stores, while over 20 billion songs were sold completely DRM-free and unprotected on CDs by the music companies themselves. The music companies sell the vast majority of their music DRM-free, and show no signs of changing this behavior, since the overwhelming majority of their revenues depend on selling CDs which must play in CD players that support no DRM system.

So if the music companies are selling over 90 percent of their music DRM-free, what benefits do they get from selling the remaining small percentage of their music encumbered with a DRM system? There appear to be none. If anything, the technical expertise and overhead required to create, operate and update a DRM system has limited the number of participants selling DRM protected music. If such requirements were removed, the music industry might experience an influx of new companies willing to invest in innovative new stores and players. This can only be seen as a positive by the music companies.

Much of the concern over DRM systems has arisen in European countries. Perhaps those unhappy with the current situation should redirect their energies towards persuading the music companies to sell their music DRM-free. For Europeans, two and a half of the big four music companies are located right in their backyard. The largest, Universal, is 100% owned by Vivendi, a French company. EMI is a British company, and Sony BMG is 50% owned by Bertelsmann, a German company. Convincing them to license their music to Apple and others DRM-free will create a truly interoperable music marketplace. Apple will embrace this wholeheartedly.

Caution: Marijuana may not be lesser evil
By Rita Rubin
February 6, 2007

Tyreol Gardner first smoked marijuana when he was 13.

“The main reason I tried it was curiosity,” Gardner recalls. “I wanted to see what it felt like.”

He liked what it felt like, and by age 15, he was smoking pot every week. He supported his habit with the money his parents gave him for getting straight A’s on his report card. They didn’t have a clue.

“By 16, when I got my license, it turned into a fairly everyday thing,” says Gardner, now 24. “I believe it is very addictive, especially for people with addictive personalities.”

Millions of baby boomers might disagree. After all, they smoked marijuana — the country’s most popular illicit drug — in their youth and quit with little effort.

But studies have shown that when regular pot smokers quit, they do experience withdrawal symptoms, a characteristic used to predict addictiveness. Most users of more addictive drugs, such as cocaine or heroin, started with marijuana, scientists say, and the earlier they started, the greater their risk of becoming addicted.

Many studies have documented a link between smoking marijuana and the later use of “harder” drugs such as heroin and cocaine, but that doesn’t necessarily mean marijuana causes addiction to harder drugs.

“Is marijuana a gateway drug? That question has been debated since the time I was in college in the 1960s and is still being debated today,” says Harvard University psychiatrist Harrison Pope, director of the Biological Psychiatry Laboratory at Boston’s McLean Hospital. “There’s just no way scientifically to end that argument one way or the other.”

That’s because it’s impossible to separate marijuana from the environment in which it is smoked, short of randomly assigning people to either smoke pot or abstain — a trial that would be grossly unethical to conduct.

“I would bet you that people who start smoking marijuana earlier are more likely to get into using other drugs,” Pope says. Perhaps people who are predisposed to using a variety of drugs start smoking marijuana earlier than others do, he says.

Besides alcohol, often the first drug adolescents abuse, marijuana may simply be the most accessible and least scary choice for a novice susceptible to drug addiction, says Virginia Tech psychologist Bob Stephens.

No matter which side you take in the debate over whether marijuana is a “gateway” to other illicit drugs, you can’t argue with “indisputable data” showing that smoking pot affects neuropsychological functioning, such as hand-eye coordination, reaction time and memory, says H. Westley Clark, director of the Center for Substance Abuse Treatment at the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.

Adolescents have the greatest rates of marijuana use, and they also have the greatest amount to lose by using marijuana, scientists say.

“Adolescence is about risk-taking, experimentation,” says Yasmin Hurd, professor of psychiatry, pharmacology and biological chemistry at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York who last summer published a rat study that found early exposure to THC, the psychoactive ingredient in marijuana, led to a greater sensitivity to heroin in adulthood.

“All of the studies clearly show the earlier someone starts taking marijuana, the greater their vulnerability to addiction disorders and psychiatric disorders. I’m so shocked still that so many parents are not considering enough the dangers of early drug use.”

Use is more common
Marijuana use by adolescents in the USA declined slightly from 2005 to 2006, but it’s still more common than it was 15 years ago, according to “Monitoring the Future,” an ongoing study by the University of Michigan that tracks people from the eighth grade through young adulthood. It’s paid for by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, or NIDA, part of the National Institutes of Health.

In 2006, 11.7% of eighth-graders said they had used marijuana during the past year, compared with 6.2% of eighth-graders in 1991. Among 12th-graders, 31.5% said they had used marijuana in the previous year; in 1991, 23.9% said they had.

“You are at school, and your main job as an adolescent is to learn and memorize,” NIDA director Nora Volkow says. But if you keep becoming intoxicated by smoking marijuana, she says, you’ll fall further and further behind in your studies. “How are you going to catch up?”

In a study comparing heavy marijuana users with people who’d had minimal exposure to the drug, Pope found that the former had lower verbal IQ scores than the latter. In a 2003 paper, he and his co-authors postulated three potential reasons: innate differences between the groups in cognitive ability that predated first marijuana use, an actual toxic effect of marijuana on the developing brain or poorer learning of conventional cognitive skills by young marijuana users who skipped school.

Wasted years
By the time Gardner was a junior, he started skipping high school regularly to smoke pot. “I would always find somebody who wasn’t at school that day and get high with them,” he says. Gardner says he missed 50 days in the first semester of his senior year. His parents discovered his stash of marijuana and sent him to a psychiatrist. His grades plummeted; his college plans evaporated.

When he was 16 or 17, Gardner says, he was charged at least twice with possession of marijuana and underage possession of alcohol. The court sent him to a three-month outpatient treatment program. He attended weekly sessions and underwent urine checks.

But it didn’t stick. He celebrated the end of the program by getting high on pot and alcohol. By 18, “I was pretty heavy into cocaine,” Gardner says. Crystal meth and intravenous heroin followed.

“I was always looking for the ultimate high. It was like a constant search, and I never found it. … By the end, it was a living hell for me.”

Finally, Gardner says, his parents persuaded him to enter an inpatient treatment program in Winchester, Va. They spoke from experience. When he was 8, Gardner says, his father stopped using drugs while in prison for possession. “My mom got clean while he was in prison.”

Gardner says he has been off drugs and alcohol for 14 months. He works in a Winchester factory that makes patio decking. He graduated high school because a teacher took pity on him and let him try to make up the work he had missed. More than six years after graduating, Gardner hopes to go to college to study psychology.

Research shows marijuana users are significantly less satisfied with the quality of their lives than non-users, a revelation “as telling as any very fancy story of molecules,” Volkow says.

Yet, she says, “I think there is a general sense that marijuana is a relatively benign drug and does not produce addiction.” Although over the past decade, “research clearly has provided unequivocal evidence that … some people can become addicted to marijuana.”

Stephens has conducted seven large treatment studies of marijuana dependence, or addiction. “There’s never any shortage of people who meet this definition,” says Stephens, who edited the 2006 book Cannabis Dependence.

Pot as predecessor
Pope has studied heavy marijuana users, whom he defines as having smoked pot at least 5,000 times, or once a day for nearly 14 years. On average, his subjects, ages 30 to 55, reported having smoked marijuana 20,000 times.

Pope required the volunteers to abstain from smoking pot for 28 days and used urine samples for confirmation.

“We had them rate various symptoms on a day-by-day basis,” he says. “We were able to show there is a clear withdrawal syndrome.”

His research found the most common symptom of marijuana withdrawal was irritability, followed by trouble sleeping and loss of appetite. Symptoms began to subside after a week and disappeared by the end of two weeks.

“We’ve had some people in our study who reported quite a lot of craving. They were quite miserable not being allowed to smoke marijuana,” Pope says, although “certainly, one does not see craving even remotely to the degree you would … with heroin or alcohol or cocaine.”

Marijuana today is more potent and therefore more toxic than marijuana grown in the 1970s, Volkow says. Back then, she says, plants typically contained only 2% THC. Today, she says, marijuana plants typically contain 15% THC.

Even if today’s marijuana is more potent, Stephens says, he’s not convinced that makes a difference.

“The evidence of its increased potency is overrated,” he says. Samples of marijuana grown in the 1970s might have appeared to be less potent than they actually were because they weren’t fresh when tested. And, Stephens speculates, marijuana users might just smoke more of less-potent pot, and vice versa.

A family problem
Rachel Kinsey says drug addiction runs in her mother’s family, although not in her immediate family. Kinsey, 24, started drinking alcohol at 14 and smoking marijuana at 15 — “definitely a predecessor for everything else I used.” She began using Ecstasy and cocaine at 17, then heroin at 18.

“I did graduate high school, and I went off to college, but I withdrew after a month,” says Kinsey, of Richmond, Va. She used the diagnosis of mononucleosis she’d received the week before college as an excuse.

“I don’t think I was ready for the responsibility, and I wanted to continue to use while I was in college. I was at the point where I just didn’t care about college. I was already using heroin.”

She moved in with her boyfriend and his father, both of whom used heroin. At 19, she got pregnant. She moved back in with her mother, substituted methadone for heroin and gave the baby up for adoption. Practically as soon as she delivered, she was back to using heroin.

About five months after her son was born in May 2003, Kinsey entered inpatient addiction treatment. During the 30-day program, she became involved with a man who went back to using cocaine after ending treatment. Kinsey says she didn’t want to go back to using cocaine or heroin, “but for some reason I thought it was OK to drink and go back to smoking weed.”

When she turned 21 in fall 2003, “it was off to the races. For some reason, I felt (turning 21) gave me the right to drink if I wanted to.”

From January to August 2004, Kinsey says, she was charged three times with driving under the influence of alcohol and marijuana.

‘Not worth the risk’
With the help of another stay at a treatment center, Kinsey hasn’t used drugs or alcohol since Aug. 25, 2004, the day after her last DUI arrest. She’s halfway toward graduating from nursing school and works as a nurse tech in a hospital. For the first time, she has signed a lease on an apartment and pays rent.

She can’t drive until September 2008 and then only to work, to school and to 12-step meetings.

If she had to do it all over again, she says, she never would have started smoking marijuana.

“You never know where it’s going to lead you,” she says. “You don’t know that you’re not going to become an addict, so it’s not worth the risk.”

New Study Reveals Marijuana Is Addictive And Users Who Quit Experience Withdrawal
By Richelle Putnam
February 6, 2007

Blacksburg, VA (AHN) – Recent studies have concluded that when users quit smoking pot, they do experience withdrawal systems. In addition, those who abuse harder drugs, such as heroin and cocaine, admitted to using marijuana first. Risk of addiction relates to how early in life the user starts.

Marijuana, a mixture of flowers, stems, seeds, and leaves from the hemp plant, Cannabis sativa, can be smoked as a cigarette or in a pipe. THC (delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol) is its main active chemical.

Bob Stephens, a Virginia Tech psychologist and editor of the book “Cannabis Dependence,” conducted treatment studies of marijuana addiction, and was quoted in a USA Today article as saying, “There’s never any shortage of people who meet this definition.”

A study called “Monitoring the Future,” performed by the University of Michigan, revealed that adolescent use of marijuana in the U.S. decreased from 2005 to 2006. However, in the past 15 years, marijuana use has become more common. This is according to the same “Monitoring the Future” study, which followed a group of eighth graders into adulthood. USA Today stated that a survey among eighth-graders revealed an increase from 6.2% in 1991 to 11.7% in 2006 regarding marijuana use. 31.5% of the surveyed 12th graders admitted to marijuana use in the past year compared to 23.9% in 1991.

Harrison Pope, director of the Biological Psychiatry Laboratory at Boston’s McLean Hospital, who studied heavy marijuana users for fourteen years, found that those who smoked pot once a day scored lower on their verbal IQ testing.

Research on chronic marijuana smokers and alcoholics performed in 2006 by psychiatry professor, Ronald Kadden, who has run the Health Center’s Alcohol and Drug Abuse Treatment Center for over ten years, showed that marijuana was more addictive that originally thought.

However, past studies claimed that marijuana is still the lesser evil of the very much legal drug, alcohol. In a 1999 Summit Daily article, the U. S. Department of Transportation 1990-91 study revealed that the adverse effect on drivers is “relatively small” to the adverse effects of those under the influence of alcohol and some prescribed drugs.

A 2004 study performed by Alyssa J. Myers and Marion O. Petty of the Department of Psychology at Missouri Western State University, researched the connection of alcohol use to marijuana use. The study revealed that, “the more alcohol someone drinks, the more likely they will be to want to smoke marijuana. We also found that 100% of the people who reported marijuana use were also drinkers. The first drug used by the majority of people who smoke marijuana was alcohol, 67%.”

The report also stated that marijuana, a “gateway” drug, is considered worse than alcohol, because it supposedly prods users to try harder drugs. However, the study stresses the use of marijuana typically comes after alcohol and tobacco use and most people don’t realize that alcohol is the “gateway” drug to the “gateway” marijuana drug.

Atlanta police officer to face murder indictment
Fulton DA seeks charges in shooting of elderly woman in her home
By BILL TORPY
February 7, 2007

Fulton County District Attorney Paul Howard will seek felony murder charges against at least one of the Atlanta police officers involved in a botched drug raid that resulted in the shooting death of an elderly woman, the officer’s attorney said.

Defense attorney Rand Csehy, who is representing Gregg Junnier, said he had received an e-mail from Howard’s office Wednesday saying the prosecutor would go before a grand jury on Feb. 26 to seek charges against his client.

It was unclear Wednesday evening whether charges were being sought against other police officers. Eight Atlanta officers were put on administrative leave after the shooting. The November incident prompted a multi-jurisdictional investigation that included state and federal authorities.

Csehy responded angrily to the threat of an indictment against his client. “It’s an overbroad indictment,” he said.

He also complained that Howard’s office acted prematurely and had struck out on its own without consulting with the FBI, which is still investigating the circumstances that led to the shooting. “Paul Howard is no longer part of a joint investigation,” he said.

Howard would not comment Wednesday. Patrick Crosby, a spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office, said Howard had not informed his office about any plans to seek indictments.

Csehy conceded that his client may have made mistakes, but he insisted that he didn’t commit a crime.

“There was no malfeasance here, it was sloppy police work,” Csehy said. “It was cutting corners.”

Lyn Vaughn, a spokeswoman for Howard, said the district attorney would not comment on the prospect of seeking any indictments. However, the district attorney expressed outrage over the shooting in a Feb. 6 letter to Markel Hutchins, spokesman for the family of victim Kathryn Johnston.

“The death of Mrs. Johnston constitutes one of the greatest tragedies ever to occur in Fulton County,” Howard wrote. “I will not rest until every person responsible for her death is held accountable. …

“When homicides occur in Fulton County, whether committed by a civilian or a law enforcement official, it is the obligation of the district attorney’s office to take the appropriate legal actions. … The public will not tolerate separate treatment for police officers.”

On Nov. 21, narcotics officers went to Johnston’s home in southwest Atlanta to execute a “no knock” search warrant. Johnston was killed and the three officers were injured in an ensuing shootout.

No-knock warrants are frequently issued so police can get inside before suspects can destroy or dispose of drugs. When the officers kicked in the door, the elderly woman apparently fired five shots from her own revolver.

Her friends and family members contended Johnston, who kept the gun for her protection, was a feeble and frightened woman who rarely ventured outside after dark. And they say that she was never involved in any drug activity. Her family says she was 92, while authorities say she was 88.

Junnier later told federal investigators that officers had lied to a magistrate judge about sending a confidential informant to Johnston’s house to purchase drugs in order to get the warrant.

Atlanta police Sgt. Scott Kreher — who, as president of the International Brotherhood of Police Officers, has defended the officers’ actions — called the reports that prosecutors would seek an indictment against the officer “sad.”

“I think any time a law enforcement officer is accused of a crime, we all sit back and wonder what went wrong and look within ourselves in what we do day to day,” Kreher said. “And hopefully, if it’s presented to a grand jury and there isn’t enough evidence, they will send back a no bill.”

Atlanta City Councilman Ivory Lee Young Jr., a vocal opponent of the use of no-knock warrants, said it’s too early to comment on Howard’s push for murder indictments. “That would be as irresponsible as knocking down a door with allegations of drugs, without proof of drugs.”

A Change in the Weather
Progressive Dennis Kucinich takes over a new House subcommittee, signaling changes in national drug policy
By DEAN KUIPERS
February 01, 2007

Photo by Steve Appleford The drug hawk’s worst nightmare: Kucinich’s hearings will raise a ruckus

The Democratic sweep in the 2006 mid-term elections has done more than finally install a woman as speaker of the House. It has also put one of the most vocal critics of the ill-starred “War on Drugs” in a position to affect federal drug policy. On January 18, Ohio Congressman and presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich, one of the most progressive Democratic voices in the House, was appointed as chair of the new House Government Reform and Oversight subcommittee on domestic policy, causing drug reform organizations coast-to-coast to rejoice in hopes that a moment for significant change may have finally come.

This subcommittee replaces the now-defunct Criminal Justice, Drug Policy, and Human Resources subcommittee, which was headed up by staunch drug warrior, Rep. Mark Souder (R-IN). Kucinich will assume many of his oversight duties, including policy oversight of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy and appointed Drug Czar John Walters. One commentator on Stopthedrugwar.org crowed that “the responsibility of overseeing the ONDCP has effectively been transferred from Congress’s most reckless drug warrior to its most outspoken drug policy reformer” [his emphasis].

“He is certainly the polar opposite of his predecessor, Mark Souder,” says Allen St. Pierre, spokesman for the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, or NORML. “Since the time the [ONDCP] was created in 1988, there have always been friendly people in that subcommittee and the ONDCP has always been able to get what they want under the guise of protecting children and saving America from drugs. But Kucinich doesn’t believe any of that. Any of it!”

For instance, St. Pierre notes, Kucinich is a supporter of industrial hemp, the non-psychoactive product of the cannabis sativa plant. He is also a supporter of medical marijuana and of the federal rescheduling of marijuana, where it is currently illegal as a Schedule I drug, classified as having “no medical value.” This classification clashes with states such as California, which have legalized medical use of marijuana, and leads directly to the current rash of raids on medical marijuana dispensaries by the federal Drug Enforcement Agency. Kucinich is expected, St. Pierre says, to be a sponsor of a new bill to be introduced in March that would decriminalize pot.

Washington insiders, however, are not holding their breath for great upheaval in federal drug policy overall. Sources close to the appointment, who asked not to be named, say that Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other members of the Democratic leadership have effectively embargoed major crime or drug policy legislation for the next two years, to avoid looking soft on crime in the 2008 election.

Kucinich, however, is promising a couple years of entertaining and edifying hearings.

“We’re going to open up the discussion to new hearings,” says Kucinich, interviewed Sunday in Culver City, where he presented his bill for Universal Health Care, which is co-sponsored by Rep. John Conyers (D-MI). “We want to explore the federal government’s policies and the Department of Justice’s policies on medical marijuana, for example. We need to also look at the drug laws that have brought about mandatory minimum sentences that have put people in jail for long periods of time. I think it’s an appropriate time to look at the proliferation of drugs in America, and how that fits in with our health care crisis, and how that fits in with law enforcement.”

The ONDCP did not reply to several requests for comment. That office, however, which is a function of the executive branch, has been deeply involved in pushing heavy sentences for nonviolent drug offenders and resisting medical marijuana, buying big-money ad campaigns attacking marijuana in states trying to legalize at the state level. Controlling that ad money could be a key to reform. When asked if his subcommittee has any budget oversight or other muscle, Kucinich shook his head and added, “No, this committee does not have control of the budgets, but it does have control of the policy, and it can ask questions and get documents that others couldn’t get.”

That can make a difference, says Ethan Nadelmann, executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, one of the nation’s biggest drug policy reform organizations. His group plans to push for incremental slices of legislation that can move a progressive agenda while not upsetting Democratic unity, adding that Kucinich can “hold hearings on some of the subjects that haven’t been addressed in, you know, decades. Like a hearing on America having the highest incarceration rate in the world. Or maybe a hearing on why the DEA has jurisdiction over medical issues.

“One can obviously empathize with the democratic leadership’s desire to be cautious when it comes to supporting drug policy reforms and other sentencing reforms,” he adds. “But when you have a growing number of Republicans supporting sentencing reform, this might be a good time for the Democrats to show a little leadership.”

In fact, several activists point out, the new Congress may be the most sympathetic to drug-law reform that America has ever seen. Progressives like Senator Richard Durbin and Reps. Pelosi, George Miller, Conyers, Barney Frank, Henry Waxman, Kucinich, and Bobby Scott have all turned up in leadership positions.

“If we had to pick out our 40 best friends in Congress, they’d be disproportionately in leadership positions,” says Nadelmann. He includes Sen. Patrick Leahy on that list, but cautions: “Mind you, seven years ago, Leahy said that sentencing reform was one of the top priorities, but now it’s not even a top-10 priority. Part of that’s because there’s so much other stuff to deal with.”

Still, action on several fronts is expected. Sentencing reform should get some attention, with an aim of reducing the number of non-violent drug offenders currently getting long prison sentences, which has given the U.S. the highest per-capita incarceration rate in the world. One such change would be to make sentences involving crack cocaine equal to those given for powdered cocaine, as community activists have long contended these simply punish the black and poor who are more likely to use the drug in the form of crack. Hearings might also bring new media scrutiny to decades-long marijuana rescheduling motions and several Data Quality Act petitions, which force bodies like the Food and Drug Administration to make decisions based on science rather than ideology, and which have been roundly ignored by the Bush administration.

St. Pierre points out another potential point of influence: High Intensity Drug Trafficking Areas, or HIDTAs. Congress funnels millions of dollars to local law enforcement for use in these areas, and activists have long argued they are wrongly prioritized.

“That’s a very obscure acronym, but when it comes down to the billions of dollars that get channeled out to local governments and their law enforcement, HIDTA is the battleground. That’s where Dennis can come in and say, ‘Mr. Walters, we the Congress, and, clearly, your own constituents want methamphetamines as the number one priority, not marijuana, and certainly not in the states that have medical marijuana laws.’ A couple of weeks ago, Walters was out in Fresno giving awards away for busting buyers’ clubs. Dennis can clip those wings. It all depends on how he’s going to want to pull the trigger.”

Military: No Gitmo guard abuse evident
By MICHAEL MELIA
February 7, 2007

An Army officer who investigated possible abuse at Guantanamo Bay after some guards purportedly bragged about beating detainees found no evidence they mistreated the prisoners — although he did not interview any of the alleged victims, the U.S. military said Wednesday.

Col. Richard Bassett, the chief investigator, recommended no disciplinary action against the Navy guards named by Marine Sgt. Heather Cerveny, who had said that during a conversation in September they described beating detainees as common practice.

In an affidavit filed to the Pentagon’s inspector general, Cerveny — a member of a detainee’s legal defense team — said a group of more than five men who identified themselves as guards had recounted hitting prisoners. The conversation allegedly took place at a bar inside the base.

“The evidence did not support any of the allegations of mistreatment or harassment,” the Miami-based Southern Command, which oversees Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in southeastern Cuba, said in a statement.

Investigators conducted 20 interviews with “suspects and witnesses,” the Southern Command said. Bassett did not interview any detainees, said Jose Ruiz, a Miami-based command spokesman.

“He talked to all the parties he felt he needed to get information about the allegations that were made,” Ruiz said by telephone from Miami.

Bassett’s findings were approved by Adm. James Stavridis, the head of the Southern Command.

The investigation began on Oct. 13 and was expanded ten days later to include a similar allegation from a civilian employee who recounted a conversation between a female guard and a male interrogator, according to the statement. Following Bassett’s recommendations, Stavridis said a “letter of counseling” should be sent to the female guard who allegedly initiated a “fictitious account” of detainee abuse.

Bassett also accused Cerveny of filing a false statement during a brief meeting with her at the Marine base at Camp Pendleton, Calif., her boss, Marine Lt. Col. Colby Vokey, said last week.

Vokey, who had filed the complaint about possible detainee abuse to the inspector general’s office that included Cerveny’s affidavit, could not immediately be reached for comment Wednesday.

Making an Example of Lt. Ehren Watada
An eloquent voice of “GI resistance” rattles the war machine
By Norman Solomon
February 7th, 2007

The people running the Iraq war are eager to make an example of Ehren Watada. They’ve convened a kangaroo court-martial. But the man on trial is setting a profound example of conscience – helping to undermine the war that the Pentagon’s top officials are so eager to protect.

“The judge in the case against the first U.S. officer court-martialed for refusing to ship out for Iraq barred several experts in international and constitutional law from testifying Monday about the legality of the war,” the Associated Press reported.

While the judge was hopping through the military’s hoops at Fort Lewis in Washington state, an outpouring of support for Watada at the gates reflected just how broad and deep the opposition to this war has become.

The AP dispatch merely stated that “outside the base, a small group that included actor Sean Penn demonstrated in support of Watada.” But several hundred people maintained an antiwar presence Monday at the gates, where a vigil and rally – led by Iraq war veterans and parents of those sent to kill and be killed in this horrific war – mirrored what is happening in communities across the United States.

Many of the most compelling voices against the Iraq war come from the men and women who were ordered into a conflagration that should never have begun. Opinions may be debatable, but experiences are irrefutable. And the devastating slaughter that the U.S. war effort continues to inflict on Iraqi people has a counterpoint in the suffering of Americans who are left with unspeakable grief.

In direct resistance to the depravity of the Bush administration as it escalates this war, Lieutenant Watada is taking a clear and uplifting position. Citing international law and the U.S. Constitution, he points out that the Iraq war is “manifestly illegal.” And he adds: “As the order to take part in an illegal act is ultimately unlawful as well, I must as an officer of honor and integrity refuse that order. It is my duty not to follow unlawful orders and not to participate in things I find morally reprehensible.”

Watada says: “My participation would make me party to war crimes.”

Outside the fence at Fort Lewis – while the grim farce of Watada’s court-martial proceeded with virtually all substance ruled out of order – the criminality of the war and the pain it has brought were heavy in the air.

Darrell Anderson was a U.S. soldier in Iraq. He received a Purple Heart. Later, he refused orders to return for a second tour of duty. Now, he gives firsthand accounts of the routine killing of Iraqi civilians. He speaks as an eyewitness and a participant in a war that is one long war crime. And he makes a convincing case that “the GI resistance” is emerging and pivotal: “You can’t call yourself antiwar if you’re not supporting the resistance.”

At Fort Lewis, outside the gates, I met Carlos Arredondo. He’s traveling the country in a long black hearse-like station wagon, with big photos and letters from his son Alexander plastered on the sides of the vehicle. At age 20, more than two years ago, Alexander died in Iraq. Now, a conversation with Carlos Arredondo is likely to leave you in tears, feeling his grief and his rage against this war.

“When the Marines came to inform Arredondo of his son’s death and stayed after he asked them to leave, he set their van on fire, burning over a quarter of his body in the process,” the Boston Globe has reported. Carlos and his wife Melida Arredondo are now members of Military Families Speak Out.

Among the speakers at a nearby event the night before Watada’s court-martial began was Helga Aguayo, whose husband Agustin Aguayo is a U.S. Army medic now charged with desertion. After deployment to Iraq in 2004, he applied for recognition as a conscientious objector, without success. During a year in the war zone, he refused to put ammunition in his weapon. Today, he is looking at the prospect of up to seven years in prison.

Many others in uniform are struggling to extricate themselves from the war machine. Information about some of them is available at: www.couragetoresist.org.

Soldiers have to choose from options forced upon them by the commander in chief and Congress. Those who resist this war deserve our gratitude and our support. And our willingness to resist as well.

Ehren Watada faces four years in prison. Half of that potential sentence has to do with the fact that he made public statements against the war. The war-makers want such honest courage to stop. But it is growing every day.

Haggard now "completely heterosexual"
February 6, 2007

DENVER – One of four ministers who oversaw three weeks of intensive counseling for the Rev. Ted Haggard said the disgraced minister emerged convinced that he is “completely heterosexual.”

Haggard also said his sexual contact with men was limited to the former male prostitute who came forward with sexual allegations, the Rev. Tim Ralph of Larkspur told The Denver Post for a story in Tuesday’s edition.

“He is completely heterosexual,” Ralph said. “That is something he discovered. It was the acting-out situations where things took place. It wasn’t a constant thing.”

Ralph said the board spoke with people close to Haggard while investigating his claim that his only extramarital sexual contact happened with Mike Jones. The board found no evidence to the contrary.

“If we’re going to be proved wrong, somebody else is going to come forward, and that usually happens really quickly,” he said. “We’re into this thing over 90 days and it hasn’t happened.”

Haggard resigned as president of the National Association of Evangelicals last year after allegations of sexual misconduct surfaced. He was also forced out from the 14,000 New Life Church that he founded years ago in his basement after Jones alleged Haggard paid him for sex and sometimes used methamphetamine when they were together. Haggard, who is married, has publicly admitted to “sexual immorality.”

Haggard said in an e-mail Sunday, his first communication in three months to church members, that he and his wife, Gayle, plan to pursue master’s degrees in psychology. The e-mail said the family hasn’t decided where to move but that they were considering Missouri and Iowa.

Another oversight board member, the Rev. Mike Ware of Westminster, said the group recommended the move out of town and the Haggards agreed.

“This is a good place for Ted,” Ware said. “It’s hard to heal in Colorado Springs right now. It’s like an open wound. He needs to get somewhere he can get the wound healed.”

It was also the oversight board that strongly urged Haggard to go into secular work.

… in case he suffers a “relapse” at some point in the future… 8/

Newsom to seek help for alcohol abuse – MAYOR’S ADMISSION: In wake of scandal, he says that he has stopped drinking
February 6, 2007
By Cecilia M. Vega and Heather Knight

Just days after disclosing his affair with a staff member married to one of his top political aides, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom admitted Monday he has a drinking problem and said he would seek treatment for alcohol abuse.

During a regularly scheduled weekly meeting with department leaders in City Hall, Newsom said he has stopped drinking and that he is seeking professional help for his dependency.

In a statement issued by his press office after the meeting, the mayor said he has no plans to step down from his job while he undergoes treatment.

“Upon reflection with friends and family this weekend, I have come to the conclusion that I will be a better person without alcohol in my life,” he said in the three-paragraph statement. “I take full responsibility for my personal mistakes, and my problems with alcohol are not an excuse for my personal lapses in judgment.”

The announcement comes at a time when Newsom’s 3-year-old administration is in crisis. Last week the 39-year-old mayor admitted to having an affair 1 1/2 years ago with his appointments secretary, Ruby Rippey-Tourk, whose husband is Alex Tourk, who at the time was the mayor’s deputy chief of staff and moved on to manage Newsom’s re-election campaign. Tourk resigned from the campaign last week after confronting the mayor about the affair.

Rumors about Newsom’s drinking have long swirled around his administration. They reached a head in December after the mayor appeared to have been drinking when he arrived at San Francisco General Hospital to pay his respects for a police officer who had been killed in the line of duty.

One city department leader who attended the Monday afternoon meeting said Newsom appeared pained.

“From my read, the man is actually in physical pain,” said the official said, who like most city employees contacted for this story spoke on the condition of anonymity because they still have to work with Newsom.

At the end of the 1 1/2-hour meeting, Newsom spent more than 10 minutes apologizing for his recent transgressions — including the affair and his betrayal of Tourk — to the more than 50 people convened in a City Hall conference room.

“He said he was solely responsible for causing not only pain to his family and the two people involved that he considers very good friends, but that he knew he had caused pain to a lot of other people, including everybody in the room,” the city official said.

In his statement, Newsom said he would seek treatment from Mimi Silbert, head of San Francisco’s famous Delancey Street Foundation.

“It was very heartfelt,” said another attendee, who asked not to be named because he was not cleared to discuss the matter publicly. “It was also clear that he wasn’t taking a leave from the office.”

Newsom reportedly spent the weekend with family and friends discussing the situation, though insiders said disclosing his alcohol problem probably was a necessary step in his efforts to salvage his political future in the Democratic Party.

Still, the mayor’s disclosure was a shock to department heads and reportedly to some in his closest political circle.

After he apologized, a small smattering of applause erupted in the room, some in attendance said.

Many of those on hand Monday were hired by Newsom or are his close allies. A number of people contacted by The Chronicle either refused to speak about what he said during the meeting or did not return calls seeking comment.

Another department head who was present for the meeting said Newsom appeared to be “getting some clarity” and that he “was pretty courageous.”

Alcohol has been a big part of Newsom’s economic well being. Before taking office in 2004, he built a multimillion-dollar group of wine, restaurant, bar and resort businesses.

He formed PlumpJack Associates in the early 1990s, in part funded by longtime Newsom family friend, oil tycoon Gordon Getty.

It began with a wine shop on Fillmore Street in 1992, and other successful ventures followed, including the PlumpJack Cafe, also on Fillmore Street, the PlumpJack winery in Napa and an online wine outlet.

Newsom also owned a stake in two popular Cow Hollow night spots, Balboa Cafe and the MatrixFillmore bar, a popular club that serves designer cocktails and featured a plasma screen video system and tables shaped as the letters S, E and X.

Reports about the mayor’s after-hours drinking have in recent months become increasingly public and increasingly embarrassing for his administration.

In addition to reports that he had been drinking at a holiday party before visiting the hospital for the police officer, he also was spotted in a restaurant window in North Beach in December, slurping pasta and kissing his girlfriend and appearing to be intoxicated.

In the wake of Newsom’s announcement about seeking treatment for alcohol, those close to him wondered just how much of a problem he really has.

“I honestly had no idea if he did or he didn’t,” said his chief political strategist Eric Jaye. “I don’t know anything about addiction at that level. I know he showed up every morning at work and worked through the day and always was focused, always ready to go.”

Others, however, say Newsom’s affinity for wine was particularly a problem after hours, when he went out socially or attended evening events.

After Newsom admitted to his affair, his spokesman Peter Ragone was hounded by the media with questions about the mayor’s drinking. Ragone said Newsom’s drinking was in no way related to the affair.

In his statement Monday, Newsom said he accepts full responsibility for his personal mistakes and that his problems with alcohol are not an excuse for his errors.

Earlier in the day, Newsom made a round of public appearances, including a visit to the Queen Mary 2 docked at the city’s waterfront. He refused to answer questions from the media about the affair.

After his announcement to department heads, Newsom attended the regular monthly meeting of SF Stat, a program he created to track a variety of city statistics.

As the public meeting progressed, a few members of the media entered, prompting the mayor to shake his head and look down. A Chronicle photographer took pictures of Newsom, who soon exploded.

“Should I just pose for you so you can get your shot?” Newsom asked the photographer, interrupting the meeting. Turning to a Chronicle reporter, he said, “What do you want? What’s the headline in tomorrow’s paper?”

He then lectured the two about the importance of the meeting. “At a point, this becomes almost farcical,” he said. “I know why you’re here — I know what you’re writing about.”

Though the disclosure of Newsom’s affair has not provoked a huge public outcry, it remains to be seen what the new revelations about his problem with alcohol will have on either his chances for higher office or his re-election campaign. He is up for re-election in November.

“I don’t think it bothers him one way or the other if there are political consequences,” Jaye said of the drinking announcement. “He leaves that up to the judgment of the people of San Francisco.”

While Jaye referred to Newsom’s treatment for alcohol dependency as counseling, Silbert disagreed with the characterization.

“I don’t know if I would use the word ‘counseling,’ but I will be helping the mayor,” she said.

Silbert said Newsom had contacted her Saturday about getting help.

“No one comes to me or Delancey Street for any kind of help unless they are deadly serious,” Silbert said. “We are no lightweight or B.S. program.”

pictures from portland are uploaded. please note that there are no pictures from DPN, but i’ll do my best to remedy that in seattle.

one thing i forgot to say about my trip to portland: i drove Ganesha the Car, and i was honked at and followed for a mile or so through downtown portland by a car which had an oregon license plate that said KALI MA, which makes me wonder, among other things, about the possibility of getting a license plate for wherever we move to that says GANESHA, like the current one does… and also, generally, about how many people have license plates that have hindu gods on them…

hi sally… i’m watching you! 8)

DEFENSE OF MARRIAGE INITIATIVE ACCEPTED BY SECRETARY OF STATE
January 26, 2007

Seattle, WA – The Washington Defense of Marriage Alliance (WA-DOMA) announced on Thursday that their proposed initiative to make procreation a requirement for legal marriage has been accepted by the Secretary of State and assigned the serial number 957. The initiative has been in the planning stages since the Washington Supreme Court ruled last July that the state’s Defense of Marriage Act was constitutional.

“For many years, social conservatives have claimed that marriage exists solely for the purpose of procreation,” said WA-DOMA organizer Gregory Gadow in a printed statement. “The Washington Supreme Court echoed that claim in their lead ruling on Andersen v. King County. The time has come for these conservatives to be dosed with their own medicine. If same-sex couples should be barred from marriage because they can not have children together, it follows that all couples who can not or will not have children together should equally be barred from marriage. And this is what the Defense of Marriage Initiative will do.”

Mr. Gadow also stated, “Our agenda is to shine a very bright light on the injustice and prejudice that underlie the Andersen decision by giving that decision the full force of law.

If passed by Washington voters, I-957 would:

• add the phrase, “who are capable of having children with one another” to the legal definition of marriage;
• require that couples married in Washington file proof of procreation within three years of the date of marriage or have their marriage automatically annulled;
• require that couples married out of state file proof of procreation within three years of the date of marriage or have their marriage classed as “unrecognized;”
• establish a process for filing proof of procreation; and
• make it a criminal act for people in an unrecognized marriage to receive marriage benefits.

This initiative is the first of three that WA-DOMA has planned for upcoming years. The other two would prohibit divorce or separation when a married couple has children together, and make having a child together the equivalent of marriage.

The text of I-957 and further information about the Washington Defense of Marriage Alliance can be found at the group’s website: www.WA-DOMA.org.

aaarrrrrRRRRRRGGHH!!!

i live in washington state. 25 years ago, i had a child with a woman who i never married, and who is now psychotic and in the state mental institution… i subsequently had a vasectomy, and have been legally married to another woman for 10 years, and we don’t plan on having any children. if this law passes, it means that my current marriage will be annulled, and my previous relationship with the psychotic “hose-beast-from-hell” will automatically become a “marriage” for all legal purposes… and if the DOMA gets their way, we would then be made criminals for getting “divorced” after having our son, 25 years after the fact!!! also, i might be guilty of polygamy, because, while “married” to the psychotic hose-beast-from-hell, i carried on an “illegal relationship” with my wife!!! where’s the “justice” in that???

much as i love washington state, it’s time to move elsewhere. the people here are just too stupid for me any more!

Game Over: Thirty-Six Sure-Fire Signs That Your Empire Is Crumbling
February 2, 2007
by David Michael Green

So. You’ve built yourself an empire, eh?

Well, bully for you!

What’s next, you ask? Well, now you’ve got to do what everybody does when they have an empire, of course. You’ve got to worry about it falling apart, mate!

But how to tell for sure? Let me see if I can be helpful. Here are some rules of thumb to keep in mind, thirty-six sure-fire indicators that your empire is falling apart:

You know your empire’s crumbling when the folks who are gearing up their empire to replace yours start blowing up satellites in space. And then they don’t bother to return your phone calls when you ring up to ask why.

You know your empire’s crumbling when those same folks are cutting deals left, right and center across Asia, Latin America and Africa, while you, your lousy terms, and your arrogant attitude are no longer welcome.

You know your empire’s crumbling when you’re spending your grandchildren’s money like a drunken sailor, and letting your soon-to-be rivals finance your little splurge (i.e., letting them own your country).

You know your empire’s crumbling when it’s considered an achievement to pretend that you’ve halved the rate at which you’re adding to the massive mountain of debt you’ve already accumulated.

You know your empire’s crumbling when you weaken your currency until it looks as anemic as a Paris runway model, and you’re still setting record trade deficits. (Hint: Because you’re not making anything anymore.)

You know your empire’s crumbling when “the little brown ones” (thank you George H.W. Bush – certainly not me – for that lovely expression) in country after country of “your backyard” blow you off and proudly elect anti-imperialist leftist governments.

You know your empire’s crumbling when you can’t topple those governments and replace them with nice puppet regimes – like in the good old days – even if you wanted to. And you badly want to.

You know your empire’s crumbling when one of their leaders comes to the United Nations and makes fun of your emperor, calling him the devil, and joking about smelling sulphur where he just stood. And though a few folks cringe, everybody laughs.

You know your empire’s crumbling when just about your entire military land force is tied up in a worse-than-useless war launched on the basis of complete fabrications, that every day is actually making you less – not more – secure from external threat.

You know your empire’s crumbling when almost half the soldiers in that war are high-paid mercenaries, and you don’t dare institute a draft.

You know your empire’s crumbling when you send soldiers into war with two weeks training and a lack of armor, and then you keep them there for three, four and five rotations.

You know your empire’s crumbling when a member of the Axis of Evil can test missiles and explode nuclear warheads, and all you can do about it is mumble some pathetic warnings about how they better not do that again or there will be consequences.

You know your empire’s crumbling when you even think that there is an Axis of Evil.

You know your empire’s crumbling when a rag-tag military hodge-podge of irregulars has you pinned down in an endless fight you can’t win, but also can’t lose.

You know your empire’s crumbling when you’re too dumb to even ban Humvees as a first step toward ending your dependency on a foreign-owned crucial resource.

You know your empire’s crumbling when you trade your prior moral leadership on human rights issues for global disgust at your torture, ‘extraordinary rendition’ (a.k.a. kidnaping for torture) and the dismantling of nine centuries worth of civil liberties progress.

You know your empire’s crumbling when you blow off international law that you once helped create, and undermine the institutions of international governance that you once helped build.

You know your empire’s crumbling when opinion polls confirm that every month you’re more and more despised throughout the world.

You know your empire’s crumbling when you can’t even pull off the hanging of a tin-pot murderous former dictator without turning him into a hero.

You know your empire’s crumbling when you’re the richest country in the world, but nearly 50 million of your people don’t have basic health care coverage.

You know your empire’s crumbling when the World Health Organization ranks your healthcare system 37th ‘best’ in the world, just above Slovenia, and just below Costa Rica. (And far below Colombia, Cyprus, Saudi Arabia and Morocco.)

You know your empire’s crumbling when instead of making it easier for citizens to obtain a higher education, you’re making it harder and more expensive.

You know your empire’s crumbling when your government gives tax breaks to industries as a reward for exporting your jobs elsewhere.

You know your empire’s crumbling when the so-called ‘opposition’ party can’t even turn that obscenity into a viable campaign theme and use it to clobber the worst emperor in your history.

You know your empire’s crumbling when your middle class has been stagnant for three decades, while the wealth of the hyper-rich continues to climb through the roof.

You know your empire’s crumbling when your reaction to that is to exacerbate the problem by enacting tax policies that massively increase further still the gap between the rich and the rest.

You know your empire’s crumbling when the predatory class has taken over your government and is stripping the country of everything not bolted down to the floor. And then it sells the floor itself, as well, to your rivals.

You know your empire’s crumbling when you’re spending tens of billions of dollars you don’t own on new nuclear warheads and space weapons that don’t work, to be used against an enemy you don’t have.

You know your empire’s crumbling when one of your cities drowns and your government does next to nothing before, during and after.

You know your empire’s crumbling when a massive environmental nightmare is looming around the corner, and your emperor not only ignores it, but claims it isn’t real while taking steps to exacerbate it.

You know your empire’s crumbling when your emperor is warned by a CIA briefer of an imminent terrorist attack of vast proportions, and responds by remaining on vacation and dismissing the briefer with the words: “All right. You’ve covered your ass, now.”

You know your empire’s crumbling when the same emperor drops everything to fly across the country from his vacation home in order to sign a bill intervening on the wrong side of a personal medical drama involving a single family.

You know your empire’s crumbling when gays and immigrants are used as diversionary issues to keep people from thinking about the pillaging of their country and their wallets actually taking place. And it works.

You know your empire’s crumbling when people are getting more religious and less scientific, not the other way around.

You know your empire’s crumbling when your political leaders start to be chosen by dynastic rules of succession.

And you especially know your empire’s crumbling when the most idiotic child of one of the least accomplished leaders in its history is not only crowned as the next emperor, but is even revered for a time by most of the public as a great one.

Rome? Britain? Spain?

At this rate we’ll be lucky to end up like Belgium.

Cleric seeks end to sectarian violence
February 3, 2007
By BUSHRA JUHI

BAGHDAD, Iraq – Iraq’s top Shiite cleric called Saturday for Muslim unity and an end to sectarian conflict, his first public statement in months on the worsening security crisis.

In statement issued by his office, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani noted that differences between Sunnis and Shiites have existed for centuries but should not be the cause for bloodshed.

“Everyone realizes the desperate need for unity and for renouncing divisions, avoiding sectarian fanaticism and avoiding arousing sectarian disputes,” the statement said.

The Iranian-born cleric called on all Muslims to work to overcome sectarian differences and calm the passions, which serve only “those who want to dominate the Islamic country and control its resources to achieve their aims.”

Al-Sistani, who is in his late 70s, has emerged as one of the most influential figures in Iraq since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003 because of his stature within the majority Shiite community.

But his calls for calm following the bombing of a Shiite shrine in Samarra last February proved ineffective in preventing a surge in Shiite-Sunni bloodletting. Since then he has largely refrained from public statements as the wave of sectarian killings has swept the country.

His last public statement was issued Oct. 20, in which he lauded efforts of Sunni and Shiite clerics to stop sectarian violence.

In the latest statement, al-Sistani accused some unspecified individuals and groups of working to widen the schism among Muslims and foment sectarian differences.

Al-Sistani was apparently referring to Abdullah bin Jabrain, a key member of Saudi Arabia’s clerical establishment, who last month joined a chorus of other senior figures from the hardline Wahhabi school of Sunni Islam that considers Shiites as infidels.

Bin Jabrain described Shiites as “the most vicious enemy of Muslims.”

“Regrettably, it has been noticed that some individuals and some groups are working totally contrary to (reconciliation) by strengthening the divisions and deepening the sectarian disputes among Muslims,” The statement said.

“They have increased their efforts in recent days after the escalation of the political conflicts aimed at gaining more authorities in the region.”

He said those groups had sought to tarnish “a specific sect and reduce the rights of its followers and making others afraid of it.”

DHS memo reveals agency personnel are treated like "Human capital"
Jan 31st, 2007
By Bill Conroy

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has brought us the bungled handling of Hurricane Katrina, the Star Trek-like terrorism alert scale that seems to move in sync with political calculations, and the House of Death mass murder, to name but a few of its many shortcomings.

Given that track record, if anyone still has some doubt that DHS is a federal agency in disarray, the following memo provided to Narco News should settle the question.

From: [DHS] Broadcast
Sent: Tuesday, January 30, 2007

Subject: MESSAGE FROM [DHS] DEPUTY SECRETARY
[Michael] JACKSON: DHS FHC SURVEY RESULTS
Importance: High
January 30, 2007
MEMORANDUM FOR ALL DHS EMPLOYEES

FROM:           MICHAEL P. JACKSON
SUBJECT:     Federal Human Capital Survey Results

The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) surveyed federal employees last summer about various measures of job satisfaction and agency performance, and the results will be released today.  Over 10,400 DHS employees responded and, candidly, what you said shows that DHS is not where any of us wants to be.

 The survey results will be posted on the OPM website (www.opm.gov) and our own DHS intranet, and I encourage you to review them in detail. In brief, of 36 peer federal agencies surveyed, DHS ranks as follows:

• 36th on the job satisfaction index
• 35th on the leadership and knowledge management index
• 36th on the results-oriented performance culture index
• 33rd on the talent management index

These results deliver a clear and jolting message from managers and line employees alike.  On whole, it is not significantly changed since OPM’s 2004 employee survey.  Secretary Chertoff and I discussed these results with concern.

Initial details indicate that we get low marks in basic supervision, management and leadership. Some examples are:

• Promotion and pay increase based on merit
• Dealing with poor performance
• Rewarding creativity and innovation
• Leadership generating high levels of motivation in the workforce
• Recognition for doing a good job
• Lack of satisfaction with various component policies and procedures
• Lack of information about what is going on with the organization

I am writing to assure you that, starting at the top, the leadership team across DHS is committed to address the underlying reasons for DHS employee dissatisfaction and suggestions for improvement.

Standing up this new and vital Department is clearly not a walk in the park, but our employees bring a passion for this mission, great professionalism and outstanding performance every single day.  DHS employees have shouldered the weight of long hours, complex integration assignments, multiple reorganizations, and no small amount of criticism.  In some cases you’ve had to wait too long for tools you need to succeed.

These are not excuses to rationalize where we stand, rather an acknowledgement on my part of how much our team is doing.  And there are good news items in the survey for DHS.  As chief operating officer of DHS, I commit to improve results.  We will need your help.

Several months ago, the Secretary asked the Homeland Security Advisory Council to study and suggest a strategy for creating a stronger common culture. This month, drawing on the experience of top executives in the private sector, the Council has delivered a set of recommendations for promoting a culture of excellence in DHS.

In the days ahead, our Under Secretary for Management, Paul Schneider, will join the Secretary and me in evaluating carefully the details of the OPM survey and the HSAC report.  Our first steps will be to analyze thoroughly the survey data, including specific attention to those government organizations that are recognized for their high performance in these areas, and determine the specific steps to improvement. This process will include the leadership team in each operating component and every headquarters unit to discuss details of the survey with our workforce. We will do so with a sense of urgency and seriousness.

Strengthening core management is one of the Secretary’s highest priorities and the key elements are effective communications and proper recognition of our workforce. You deserve nothing less. We will build on some good work that has already been done to chart a path forward on these issues. We will then go where you point us, to improve job satisfaction for the DHS team.

Along the way, I will continue to ask for your help and guidance.  Thanks in advance for that assistance, and thanks for what you are doing each day for DHS.

One note of “guidance” from this observer would be for DHS to come clean about its agents’ alleged complicity in the House of Death mass murder in Juarez, Mexico. A good start would be to release the Joint Assessment Team review that DHS’ U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) prepared (in cooperation with the DEA) about the tragedy.

To date, DHS and DEA have refused to release the results of that internal JAT investigation — with the DEA going as far as to claim it is seeking the have portions of the report classified due to national security concerns.

You can’t promote a “culture of excellence” when you fail address a culture of cover-up and corruption.

i’m back…

friday, i drove to portland and met , which was cool. she doesn’t do as well without some previous planning, and we didn’t make any kind of arrangements beforehand. i’m not much of a socialiser myself unless i have some kind of screen (like internet), or if i’ve known you for a while, so we both sat in her living room and discussed this and that. i’ve not met many people i know on the net IRL, and one of them was moe, who is a special case, but meeting was interesting. i’m meeting for lunch on thursday… should be interesting…

i got to the someday lounge at around 5:00, and nobody was there, so i began what would eventually become a two-day extended random wander around PDX. i took a lot of pictures, but they weren’t of the actual performances because they didn’t want me to use a flash and my digital camera isn’t good enough to take decent photos in low light situations without it.

i got back to the someday lounge at 6:00, just as they were just opening. the only people there at that point were one of the owners (i think his name is nick, but there were so many people i didn’t know that i’m not sure), lance the tech guy for TOJT (the sponsors of drunk puppet night in portland), and queen schmooquan, who was rehearsing her wonderfully twisted, bizarre, but very topical piece that featured george w. bush doing obscene things with a massive dildo (complete with two maracas) and a piece of shit.

the meat play was well received but josh and i had some problems reading the script because of low light. it always amazes me that i have to wait for people to get done laughing before i read my next line… to me, it’s just reading a script that i’ve read hundreds of times before, and it always takes me by surprise that other people haven’t read it at all.

i stayed at lance’s house, like i did last year. his wife, kris, is learning HTML because she has become the default webmaster for TOJT, but she’s having only limited success getting HTML to do what she wants – primarily because she should be learning CSS as well, and she was unaware of that. another thing of which she was unaware is validation. i’ve known a lot of people who do web design, but i can count on the fingers of one hand the web designers i have met who understand and take advantage of HTML validation. admittedly, it’s difficult to understand at first, but still… ??? needless to say, i gave her my card and told her to write me with questions as they arise.

saturday, i got up and went to find music millenium, where i purchased the latest CD by The Residents, called Tweedles. then i decided i would see how far i could drive before i got lost, and i discovered that it’s practically impossible to get lost in portland… basically, you have to go “off the grid” before the streets start making no sense, and that’s a long way in just about any direction. i started heading out of town and it wasn’t more than 20 minutes or so later that i was totally in an area that i recognised and knew which direction to go to get back to where i started. so i took the scenic route to get back to where i started, left my car and started wandering on foot. i wandered downriver from the morrison bridge to the steel bridge on the eastbank and crossed on the steel bridge exactly at the same time that a portland fireboat was crossing underneath, so i got to watch the lower level of the bridge (for freight trains) go up for it while the upper level of the bridge continued to carry car and rail (MAX) traffic without interruption (very cool!).

portland is a much friendlier city than seattle. i say that primarily because of two reasons: the people, regardless of who they are, more frequently make eye contact, and say hello or nod or something, and they’re a lot more tolerant of pedestrians when they’re driving. i’m not sure, but i think the latter may be partially a legal thing. i did notice pedestrians getting away with stuff on a regular basis that they would either be getting a ticket, or an ambulance ride for doing if they were in seattle. it doesn’t really have to do with friendliness, but portland also has an impressive array of large sculpture in public places, rather than having one or two big “sculpture gardens” and a whole bunch of smaller sculptures “hidden” in places where you probably won’t see it unless you’re looking for it, like seattle does. i get the impression that it may actually be possible to make a living as an artist/musician in portland, and there are not many ways to do that in seattle.

the saturday performances were outrageous, and only five of thirteen acts(!) were repeats from friday, the piece by queen schmooquan, a piece called “light year” by dan luce, which is about becoming disconnected from this “alien” world, “edward puss”, a modern take on the old story of œdipus that was absolutely hillarious, “el sol de verrano”, a quietly disturbing piece about two kids at the beach who go swimming, but only one comes back, which is based on a spanish folksong, and the meat play.

it turns out i may actually get paid for drunk puppet night again this year. the someday lounge was charging a $15 cover (which is one reason i don’t go out that much, as i consider paying $15 to go to a “bar” outrageous, even if it is something like drunk puppet night), and lana, who was the sponsor’s host this year, actually got personal information, including my SS# and said that it was because i would be getting paid… but i’ll believe it when i see it. she was saying that if it were up to her, there would be a drunk puppet night once a month, and i get the impression that she’s at least partially in a position to make things like that happen. also, somebody whose name i (unfortunately) don’t remember, shot video of the meat play and she’s going to send me a VHS of it, so i can see what it looks like from the audience’s perspective for a change. 8)

and when i got home i had a marble sivalingam and 6 CDs from india waiting for me, i got email saying that my 1″ expansion taper has been shipped, and my sweetie should be home soon, so i’m happy

i’m leaving for portland. be back on sunday. while i’m in portland, you can contact me at the Someday Lounge, 125 NW 5th, or call me on my cell… if you’ve got the number. 8)

bye.