Saturday, May 11, 2002
Former Jehovah's Witnesses claiming abuse "disfellowshipped" for "sowing discord". I used to go to the beach in Belmar, many yee-ahz ago. Never sowed discord though. Not in the open anyway. Secret sower, I was.
OK OK
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Sphinx, kouros and lion sculptures uncovered in Greece. (That's another kouros in the photo, no pics yet. I wanna see the sphinx.)
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Wealth gap threatens stability in China.
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A Japanese faith healer was sentenced to death for beating six people to death with a drumstick during a 1995 exorcism ritual. I think we lost the "healing" thing somewhere along the way here.
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Bahrain bans Al Jazeera because it's "pro-Zionist" and anti-American. (?) And anti-Bahrain. It's getting really confusing, even on the surface.
Or maybe because it's the surface.
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Half of Argentines below poverty line.
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Who, exactly, is going to read the Ozzy books? Repeat, books, plural. In
case you haven't heard, the Osbournes signed a two-book deal with Simon &
Schuster, reportedly in the neighborhood of $3 million. Hey, we love the
fried old bat-chomping fart and all his wacky brood, but somehow it seems
unlikely that those millions of viewers avidly following the domestic misadventures
of these heavy metal Cleavers are going to run out and buy their books. Doesn't
it? from the Epitonic newsletter.
heh.
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Heather Wokusch on the War for on Terror.
Meanwhile, US Vice President Dick Cheney warns that the US is considering
military action against "40-50" countries and Bush adviser Richard Perle
explains, "This is total war. We are fighting a variety of enemies. There
are lots of them out there . . . If we let our vision of the world go
forth, and we embrace it entirely, and we don't try to piece together clever
diplomacy but just wage a total war, our children will sing great songs about
us years from now."
But which version of the world should go forth is the burning question. Is
neverending "total war" really the goal? Is the authoritative, xenophobic
leadership demanded by war desirable? Each day we are trained to be fearful
and to see weaponry as the solution. That makes the War on Terror seem like
a war on the hearts and minds of common citizens. And for those unlucky souls
in Cheney's "40-50" countries, or the thousands who have already been slaughtered
as collateral damage, the War on Terror is looking more like terrorism everyday.
[my emphasis]
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Good stuff on Counterpunch today (May 10). (A more permanent link here to George Sunderland's piece on Congressional obeisance to Israel.)
No criticism of President Bush is warranted, apparently, except where Israel
is involved. In that case, one is seemingly permitted to travel to foreign
countries at taxpayer expense for the purpose of publicly undercutting one's
own government's foreign policy. What gives this circumstance added savor
is the recollection that Jesse Jackson's erstwhile forays into hostage negotiation
in Lebanon and the Balkans met with grumbling from Republicans that Jackson
ought to be prosecuted for violating the Logan Act. Again, apparently the
Israel exception applies.
A further example of Vichyite subservience is provided by John McCain, adored
pet of newspaper editorial boards and in relentless competition with Joseph
Lieberman as Conscience of the Senate pro tempore. Addressing the closing
plenary session of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee at the Jefferson
Memorial on April 23, McCain plighted his troth with Sharon's Israel in a
manner that would have been denounced as fellow-travelership or useful idiocy
had it been Henry Wallace praising the Soviet Union.
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Congress is getting impatient with the obstructionism of the Justice Dept. and the CIA re the 9/11 investigation.
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Friday, May 10, 2002
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A new Greg Palast interview on Guerrilla News Network.
Look at Venezuela. You are not getting that story. What they are doing is
they are already preparing you with propaganda war. They're telling you Hugo
Chavez is a dictator. Think about this a minute: George Bush is elected through
stolen votes in Florida. Surely, he didn't win the popular vote by even...close.
So an unelected president, we are supposed to praise him. And you have Hugo
Chavez who was elected with something like 70% of the vote, and he's the
dictator. There is this drum beat to set up the approval of a coup d'etat.
Why do they want to get this guy? He did two things: he's passed two laws,
only two. But the two laws are unused land in Venezuela, which there is plenty,
goes to the landless. Radical enough. The other thing was he doubled the
royalties that are payment to be paid from the international oil companies.
Venezuela was the number exporter of oil, even greater than Saudi Arabia.
So we cut way back on purchases on Venezuela to tr[y] and squeeze him. That
wasn't good enough.
Watch, they are going to try and assassinate this guy. I was going down to
interview him. And a member of his staff said do you really want to be in
a room with him this week because we think they are going to try and get
him.
Look for the assassination of Hugo Chavez, or a move to have him removed.
You won't see this on the British Petroleum documentary about globalization.
This is globalization led by bullets.
Here's an older interview on Bush's côup d'état.
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It makes sense with Berlusconi in charge and corruption
endemic -- and the high media profiles of Le Pen, Haider and Fortuyn -- that
Italians are reassessing and re-imagining Mussolini.
Over the last decade, since corruption scandals brought down Italy's center-left
establishment and opened the way for right-wing parties to vie for power,
a more complex view of fascism, emphasizing its benefits as well as its flaws,
has gained ground.
Volumes by Renzo De Felice and other Italian historians have emphasized that
Mussolini was beloved during most of his heyday for modernizing the country,
defending family values, suppressing the Mafia and making the trains run
on time. That popularity broke down only with the devastation of the war,
they point out.
The election of a center-right government under media magnate Silvio Berlusconi
last May has further eroded the anti-fascist taboos.
But it has also kept Mussolini's emboldened but tiny band of loyalists out on the fringe.
Gianfranco Fini, whose National Alliance is the reformed heir to the Fascist
Party, has embraced the political mainstream to become Berlusconi's deputy
prime minister. Seeking respectability as Italy's delegate to a European
Union panel, Fini in January retracted his 1994 characterization of Mussolini
as the century's greatest statesman.
Many Italians welcome all these changes as evidence that fascist political
power is irretrievable and that a more balanced look at its historical and
cultural imprint is now possible.
"Paradoxically, as fascism recedes over the historical horizon, it is becoming
more of a folkloric phenomenon," said Franco Pavoncello, a political science
professor at Rome's John Cabot University. "Before, it was unacceptable,
hidden. Now you see people trying to establish a connection with the past."
To others, however, the fascination with Mussolini borders on a rehabilitation
that would be impossible in Germany for Adolf Hitler, his Nazi protege and
wartime ally.
"Even the heat cannot suppress the shiver provoked by the open respect given
to Italy's biggest war criminal," James Walston, a British-born political
scientist who is active in Italian politics, remarked after visiting Mussolini's
tomb last summer. "The reason for this revival, this acceptability, is that
younger people do not know what fascism was really like."
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#1: Microsoft Works Oxymorons: the Big List.
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Thursday, May 09, 2002
A short summary (.pdf) of the PATRIOT Act.
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"You have to get beyond the sort of dysfunctional aspect" Republicans laud Satan for becoming father, quitting drugs
. Just get married and have a baby and you'll be redeemed, however Godless
and Fallen you may have been. Oh, and mumble when you say something bad,
OK?
Let me just state for the record that, while I wish him no ill, Ozzy Osbourne
is one of the dullest people on the planet, and he and his family's popularity
with people in general borders on the astonishing. Of course DQ has always
been aces in my book -- an indeed rich and fascinating personality -- so
I strain, I reach.
Alas.
This Republican fascination with Ozzy reminds me of John Major's trumpeting
of rave culture as evidence of Britain's cultural renaissance. Now I'm into
electronic music more than most Americans, but I can only take heart that
lizardboy is on the ropes like his UK predecessor to be hitching his star
to Iron Man. IRON MAN
Has he lost his mind?
Can he see or is he blind?
Can he walk at all,
Or if he moves will he fall?
Is he alive or dead?
Has he thoughts within his head?
We'll just pass him there
Why should we even care?
He was turned to steel
In the great magnetic field
Where he traveled time
For the future of mankind
Nobody wants him
He just stares at the world
Planning his vengeance
That he will soon unfold
Now the time is here
For Iron Man to spread fear
Vengeance from the grave
Kills the people he once saved
Nobody wants him
They just turn their heads
Nobody helps him
Now he has his revenge
Heavy boots of lead
Fills his victims full of dread
Running as fast as they can
Iron Man lives again!
[thanks to ivory.org for the lyrics] Wait. . .never mind.
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Another ice sheet breakoff. [Drudge]
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"Fracture criticality" Dams and mines can trigger earthquakes.
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Lucas John Helder's mailbox letter
from the fiery Newsmax ("The same media establishment that is quick to label
right-wing extremists refuses to call admitted pipe bomber Luke John Helder
a left-wing extremist, despite his radical environmental and socialistic rantings.") site and the NYTimes background. And a longer explication of his um philosophy. [Emphasis mine]
Nobody had a clue, right?
I wish I could have talked to him. It's clearly the frustration and pain
underneath the desperate "philosophy" that drove him nuts.
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Terrorist attacks in Dagestan, Israel, Pakistan and the US.
The pipe bomber was in a band called Apathy and "seemed really obsessed about
New Age religion and death and the fact that death really doesn't mean an
end to existence."
. . . what?
Yup, it was that Old Time New Age Religion that did him in, Jedediah. Seen it before. Very sad.
Perhaps there's a wee bit more to this, eh?
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An environmental group is suing for warning labels for American chocolate products because of high cadmium and lead levels. I'll have to check out the group and see whether this is legit.
Lead poisoning can impair intellectual development in children and cause
progressive kidney disease in adults. Cadmium can cause kidney failure and
inflammation in the lungs. The institute previously sued successfully over
lead levels in children's vitamins.
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Rudy Rudy Rudy This whole Rudi (which is it anyway?) Bakhtiar thing is out of hand.
I posted a snide comment to a rather rude link 2 weeks a month ago, and people are scouring my site for hot pics and info.
Please go away, there's nothing for you here.
The original item is down on the left. You have to use Google's cache to
find the post apparently, the pages I saved for the Archive aren't complete.
*sigh*
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Wednesday, May 08, 2002
An article in the NY Post on the Edison Schools --"the
country's largest 'for profit' public schools management company" -- raises questions about the dubious "HMO approach" to public education.
. . .however well or poorly managed school systems may turn out to be city-wide,
there's usually not a whole lot of waste taking place down at the level of
the individual schools. As a result, there isn't a lot of profit for an outfit
like Edison to rake off in the first place.
In the latest three months for which data are available, Edison took in $133.3
million in management revenues, and shoveled nearly $113.5 million of it
right back out again just to run the schools themselves. That's a 14 percent
gross margin, which is pretty unimpressive for a business, and as soon as
you throw in Edison's own administrative overhead, the entire operation drops
into the red.
And that's not all, because a review of the company's latest annual report
to shareholders reveals that in 2001 some 19 of the schools managed by Edison
were supported by charitable giving from philanthropic organizations in cooperation
with Edison itself. [U]
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Progressive Review's Undernews yesterday explored the demographic time bomb facing Israel, where Palestinians will attain majority in 5 to 11 years.
For Israel this means a tough choice between demography and democracy: either
there is proper democracy (in which case the Palestinians will dominate)
or Israel will be forced into apartheid-like rule.
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Media smear campaign against Rep. Cynthia McKinney (for call for a complete
9/11 investigation) fizzles in face of "mysterious" public support.
. . . Interestingly, no one has challenged the accuracy of a single word
McKinney said. What has been said, in a variety of ways, is that her call
for a complete investigation is an indication that McKinney is either "crazy"
or "treacherous."
In the original Washington Post article, Bush spokesman Scott McLellan was
quoted as saying "The American people know the facts, and they dismiss such
ludicrous, baseless views." Carlyle Group spokesman Chris Ullman posed the
question "Did she say these things while standing on a grassy knoll in Roswell,
New Mexico?"
That same day, April 12, "Representative Awful" was posted on National Review
Online by Jonah Goldberg, son of Lucianne Goldberg -- literary agent, Linda
Tripp crony, and former Nixon dirty trickster. National Review was founded
by William F. Buckley, whose family fortune was made in the oil business.
Goldberg dismissed McKinney's suggestion for an investigation, saying "I
am not aware of any evidence that Ms. McKinney has murdered several children
or that she personally profited from sleeping with the entire defensive squad
of the Atlanta Falcons." He then goes on to say that the congresswoman is
suffering "paranoid, America-hating, crypto-Marxist conspiratorial delusions."
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Hospitals and medical groups have conspired for years to limit competition
for young doctors, forcing them to accept low wages and long workweeks in
the first years of their careers, according to a class action suit filed
Tuesday in Washington.
Currently, the National Resident Matching Program, one of the defendants,
puts residents and hospitals together based on lists submitted by both sides.
All parties agree in advance to accept the match without negotiations on
wages or hours.
As a result, the plaintiffs are suing on antitrust grounds. They say fifty
years ago, the medical establishment decided that free competition in recruiting
and compensating resident physicians was "undesirable" because the number
of positions to be filled outpaced the number of candidates and could drive
up salaries.
"Creating the matching program enabled employers to obtain resident physicians
without such a bidding war, thereby artificially fixing, depressing, standardizing
and stabilizing compensation ... below competitive levels," the plaintiffs
charge.
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NZ PM Helen Clark signed paintings she didn't paint for charity auctions, because of "time pressures."
Uh. . . what?
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Tuesday, May 07, 2002
Like Le Pen in France, Fortuyn spoke what many think in Holland but no one admits to
: people are afraid of losing their culture, their jobs and their identity
because of immigration policies. Immigrants are more threatening to these
more culturally monolithic & brittle societies than to the US and Canada.
Dutch citizens of all political stripes now express their admiration for
Fortuyn because he brought up subjects that most politicians won't address.
Ultimately, whether rich countries help poorer countries become places people
don't want to leave -- instead of using them as cheap labor pools, resource
wells to be sucked dry and pawns in international politics -- is what will
change things. Otherwise, especially in rocky economic times, tensions will
be bound to boil over as more refugees press the borders.
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In other EU news, they figure they can tax software downloads across national borders.
Oh yeahhhh. . .
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Placebos match or better the effects of anti-depressants like Paxil and Prozac.
After thousands of studies, hundreds of millions of prescriptions and tens
of billions of dollars in sales, two things are certain about pills that
treat depression: Anti-depressants like Prozac, Paxil and Zoloft work. And
so do sugar pills.
A new analysis has found that in the majority of trials conducted by drug
companies in recent decades, sugar pills have done as well as - or better
than - anti-depressants. Companies have had to conduct numerous trials to
get two that show a positive result for the drug they are testing, the Food
and Drug Administration's minimum for approval.
What's more, the sugar pills, or placebos, cause profound changes in the
same areas of the brain affected by the medicines, according to research
published last week. One researcher has ruefully concluded that a higher
percentage of depressed patients gets better on placebos today than 20 years
ago. Who's the witch doctor now? And how has Big Pharma hoodwinked doctors and the public into thinking otherwise?
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EU Commission proposes EU police force to patrol EU borders against drug trafficking, immigration and terrorism.
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I think it's time to revise my music section. I was
going to wait til I switched to my new design/host, but I'm bored.
Here's a site that's up my street tastewise: almost cool.
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miss veen looks like an interesting blog for lit and art folks, but you need to read Portuguese (which I don't).
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Canadian notables petition for a reversal of media conglomeration. [MF]
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Guns & warm fuzzy toolbars.
NRA Online Premium Internet Access. [via Moon Farmer]
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Aging nuclear reactors are falling apart.
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Seventh Reich mouthpiece "No Spin" O'Reilly pays stations to carry his radio show. $300,000 to WOR in NY alone. Maybe Mr Drudge is "shocked," but can't say I am.
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Monday, May 06, 2002
I heard about the series of microbiologist deaths and discounted it as a distractive dead end. But maybe not.
Eleven microbiologists mysteriously dead over the span of just five months.
Some of them world leaders in developing weapons-grade biological plagues.
Others the best in figuring out how to stop millions from dying because of
biological weapons. Still others, experts in the theory of bioterrorism.
[...]
"Statistically, what are the chances?" wondered a prominent North American
microbiologist reached last night at an international meeting of infectious-disease
specialists in Chicago.
Janet Shoemaker, director of public and scientific affairs of the American
Society for Microbiology in Washington, D.C., pointed out yesterday that
there are about 20,000 academic researchers in microbiology in the U.S. Still,
not all of these are of the elevated calibre of those recently deceased.
She had a chilling, final thought. When microbiologists die in a lab, there's
a way of taking note of the deaths and adding them up. When they die in freakish
accidents outside the lab, nobody keeps track. [U]
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I get my ink carts from a site I list at the left, and
pay about 25% of the cost of a new Epson black and color set at Wal Mart.
There are many other sites that sell non-OEM carts and there are the refillers
too. Here's an article
on how the printer companies try to fight back and maintain their ridiculously
high prices -- which is why printer prices can be so low, apparently.
One method employed by the printer giants is a so-called "killer" computer
chip installed on ink cartridges that makes it tough for the cartridges to
be refilled. Some chips warn refill users that the cartridge is "invalid."
Sometimes they even disable the printer.
Another means of protecting refills is a "prebate" agreement that Lexmark
uses to sell discounted refills. In return, the buyer promises to return
the cartridge to Lexmark for remanufacturing -- and not to sell it to anyone
else.
[...]
a Lexmark Z22 color inkjet printer was selling on OfficeMax.com recently
for $49.98 while its replacement ink cartridges cost $32.97 for black and
$37.87 for color. Meanwhile, remanufactured cartridges for the Lexmark Z22
were selling on InkSell.com for $19.95. [U]
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This
is just so much bullshit. Like Cuba has something to gain by staging a bioattack
against the US. If any of the 80% of Americans the polls say approve of Bush
wants to explain this to me, please comment.
2 comments
Shelley Jackson's The Melancholy of Anatomy sounds interesting.
It's a borderline surrealist work of fiction, where stories such as "Blood"
deal with the city of London's underground menstrual flow, "Sperm" dance
in a cabaret, and a hovering, larger-than-human "Foetus" becomes the town's
new pastor. She discusses the history of the "Dildo" in detail, and a very
tangible "Cancer" grows to fill a room.
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The proposed home for the new media arts organization Eyebeam in Manhattan's Chelsea area is um striking. There are larger pics at the first link. [sm]
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If you're not tall enough, there's always the rack...
Because there are height requirements for jobs, schools and even relationships
in China, young Chinese are using the risky Ilizarov procedure to become
taller.
Zhang Xiaoli's porcelain skin, rosy cheeks and cover-girl features once
made her the constant center of attention. Then she grew up to become her
father's daughter, just 153 centimeters tall.
"I lost my advantage," Zhang, a 24-year-old law school graduate, said from
a Beijing hospital bed. "It was terrible having a younger sister who was
taller than me."
So last September, Zhang decided to take over where nature left off. She
checked herself into a hospital here and a doctor cut her shinbones in two,
applied a medieval-looking brace to her legs and taught her how to turn its
screws so that metal pins would pull her bones apart nearly a millimeter
a day, or around four-hundredths of an inch. Today, Zhang is 9 centimeters
taller than she was six months ago, though she cannot yet walk.
[...]
"I'm confident the operation will pay for itself many times over," she said.
"I'll have a better job, a better boyfriend and eventually a better husband.
It's a long-term investment." [link] The Ilizarov precedure was originally developed to treat dwarfsim and deformed limbs.
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John Malkovich wants "to shoot" British critics of US policy Robert Fisk (journalist) and George Galloway (Labour MP), while stock "wizard" Warren Buffett says a terrorist nuclear attack in th US is "a virtual certainty."
To me Buffett & Malkovich are the ones being irresponsible.
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Sunday, May 05, 2002
Dissent within the shrub club shrinks Ridge's mandate.
Maybe that's just as well. And since there's really not much that can be
done to stop terrorism directly -- as many people suspect -- the feuding
among the shrub club, and between them and Congress, just underscores American
politicians' irrelevance in general on foreign affairs. At least until they
start looking outside our borders and seeing what the rest of the world sees.
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The Democracy Bubble in Israel -- never very stable to begin with -- is losing air fast.
The latest, and most unlikely, target is the septuagenarian Yaffa Yarkoni,
Israel's "singer of the wars". A national heroine, the khaki-clad chanteuse
whose patriotic songs once carried Israel forces into battle caused shock
and anger when she recently castigated Israel's army, comparing its conduct
in Jenin with the Nazis. "When I saw the Palestinians with their hands tied
behind their backs, I said, 'It is like what they did to us in the Holocaust,'"
she told Army Radio. "We are a people who have been through the Holocaust.
How are we capable of doing these things?"
It was as if Vera Lynn had appeared on the BBC and denounced the conduct
of British troops in Northern Ireland. Reprisals swiftly followed. A ceremony
where she was to receive a lifetime award was cancelled. Israeli youth organi-
sations declared they would boycott her songs. She was denounced by ministers,
and told by one town ? Kfar Yona ? that she would no longer be welcome to
perform at its Memorial Day event.
Israel has long taken pride in its freedom of expression. It cites this,
correctly, as an example in which Israeli society is vastly superior to the
repressive Arab nations, and especially to the Palestinians, where critics
of Yasser Arafat have been jailed and beaten up in the past. But the hardening
mood has expanded the scope of the Israeli armed forces to restrict and distort
information without creating a domestic outcry. [via Antiwar]
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A parched Taiwan buys water from China.
For an island that's basically a military garrison, no less. Maybe resource
bartering is a trend for the future? The Mid East especially will have more
problems with water soon -- this is part of what's behind the tensions there,
I'm sure.
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Rambling, by turns insightful and spookily fatalistic, redaction of comments by Seymour Hersh at a journos' club in Chicago on The War On Terror etc.
"We didn't win the war in Afghanistan; I don't care what George Bush says.
I don't care that George Bush doesn't know much, but the people around him
should know more who don't seem to know more. That bothers me. We didn't
win the war in Afghanistan. Right now, we're not being told very much. We're
sort of pacified, because we're all scared, too, and we don't know what's
going to happen, and we don't like what happened to us.
"We have men, our Delta Force, who are seeing combat every day. They're engaged
every day. They're going into Pakistan. They've been engaged for two or three
months, in heavy combat, hand-to-hand sometimes.
"We've had many more casualties than they've told you about. We've had no
discussion of the casualties among our special forces, where we have as many
as 1,800 people operating there. And the Brits have people there, the Australians
have people there, the Canadians have people there, the New Zealanders have
teams there. All of them have suffered casualties that you don't know about.
[...]
"I really think it's circa 1967 again, in a funny way. We were fighting a
terrible war in Vietnam and everybody knew there was something wrong, and
you couldn't see anybody coming out leading. [og] There's something kind of strange about these comments, since Hersh's work in The New Yorker on The Current Situation is so highly respected. He seems a little woolly-headed, though I can't explain exactly why right now.
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This article on conservative influence in the media is more about the new "liberal" (please) Crossfire
, but it mentions that in Italy, where Berlusconi controls the media to a
great extent, 3 popular entertainers (actor Roberto Benigni, comedian Daniele
Luttazzi and commentator Michele Santoro) are being charged with seditious
behavior for simply criticizing the government.
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