Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others,
are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so.
Douglas Adams

Insecurity Goes Upscale -- Newsweek

It has been the most egalitarian of all the 11 recessions since World War II. In various ways, it has touched every social class through job loss, pay cuts, depressed home values, shrunken stock portfolios, eroded retirement savings, grown children returning home—and anxiety about all of the above. The Great Recession (as it is widely called) has changed America psychologically, politically, economically, and socially. Just how will be examined and debated for years. Here comes a booming cottage industry of scholars, pollsters, and pundits.

A new study from the Pew Research Center, based on an opinion survey in May of nearly 3,000 Americans and an exhaustive evaluation of economic data, provides a preview. Not surprisingly, it confirms that Americans have become more frugal; 71 percent say they’re buying less expensive brands, 57 percent say they’ve trimmed or eliminated vacations. Life plans have changed; 11 percent say they’ve postponed marriage or children, while 9 percent have moved in with parents.

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What Would Reagan Really Do? -- Newsweek

Grown men don't tend to worship other grown men -- unless, of course, they happen to be professional Republicans, in which case no bow is too deep, and no praise too fawning, for the 40th president of the United States: Saint Ronald Reagan.

His name is invoked by candidates for offices high and low, from aspiring state assemblyman Anthony Riley of Hesperia, Calif., who constantly referred to himself as a "Reagan Republican" before losing in the 59th district last month, to Danny Tarkanian of Nevada, who framed his failed 2010 primary run for the U.S. Senate as Reagan’s "last campaign" and frequently repeated what has to be one of the most tired lines in politics: "We're going to win this one for the Gipper."

For conservatives, Reagan is more than a president. He is a god of sorts: wise, just, omniscient, infallible. Being Republican has long meant being like Reagan -- or at least saying you're like Reagan. The writer Dinesh D'Souza neatly captured the conservative CW when he suggested that the right "simply need[s] to ask in every situation that arises: what would Reagan have done?" Period. Problem solved.

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Definitely an interesting read.

DIA Dreams: Aviation director Kim Day plans to take DIA where no airport has gone before -- Westword

Before the late-night jokes about the baggage system, before the opening-day snowstorm and the seven-hour breakdown of the train system on Black Sunday, and long before the 9/11 attacks changed the way people fly, Denver International Airport was already full of surprises — not all of them pleasant.

Curt Fentress remembers going out to the site when it was Colorado's largest and most astounding construction zone. Piles of dirt were heaped everywhere. Ziggurats of dirt, more than a hundred million cubic yards of the stuff. Enough, one flack calculated, to bury 32 city blocks a quarter-mile deep.

"There were thousands of people working there," Fentress recalls. "It was dangerous going around, because the roads changed every day. There were different paths because of the grading process, and you really had to watch out. They had EMT groups standing by, waiting to pick up anybody who might get injured. It was already getting to be a city in itself."

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Why Ad Blocking is devastating to the sites you love -- Ars Technica

There is an oft-stated misconception that if a user never clicks on ads, then blocking them won't hurt a site financially. This is wrong. Most sites, at least sites the size of ours, are paid on a per view basis. If you have an ad blocker running, and you load 10 pages on the site, you consume resources from us (bandwidth being only one of them), but provide us with no revenue. Because we are a technology site, we have a very large base of ad blockers. Imagine running a restaurant where 40% of the people who came and ate didn't pay. In a way, that's what ad blocking is doing to us. Just like a restaurant, we have to pay to staff, we have to pay for resources, and we have to pay when people consume those resources. The difference, of course, is that our visitors don't pay us directly but indirectly by viewing advertising. (Although a few thousand of you are subscribers, and we thank you all very, very much!)

My argument is simple: blocking ads can be devastating to the sites you love. I am not making an argument that blocking ads is a form of stealing, or is immoral, or unethical, or makes someone the son of the devil. It can result in people losing their jobs, it can result in less content on any given site, and it definitely can affect the quality of content. It can also put sites into a real advertising death spin. As ad revenues go down, many sites are lured into running advertising of a truly questionable nature. We've all seen it happen. I am very proud of the fact that we routinely talk to you guys in our feedback forum about the quality of our ads. I have proven over 12 years that we will fight on the behalf of readers whenever we can. Does that mean that there are the occasional intrusive ads, expanding this way and that? Yes, sometimes we have to accept those ads. But any of you reading this site for any significant period of time know that these are few and far between. We turn down offers every month for advertising like that out of respect for you guys. We simply ask that you return the favor and not block ads.

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Inspired by Saturday afternoon movies, the two boys storm the local bank – sort of. - Robert C. Jones/CSM

James Carlyle and I were downtown, letting our tricycles graze outside the door of the First National Bank. James’s was light blue, a full two hands higher than my red one. I, however, wore a real buffalo-fur cowboy vest - bulletproof. In addition, I had on my genuine Mexican sombrero, which, if I turned the brim down all the way around, made a very workable tent. One of us - I think it was James, but it might have been me - said, "Let’s rob the bank!"

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Boxed In - Slate

Recently, my father-in-law broke his leg when his golfing buddy ran him over with their golf cart. Don't shed too many tears. These things happen as one ages: Eyes dim, hearing fades, reactions slow, and eventually someone runs someone else over. If you have any tears, save them for the sad scene I witnessed when I visited him during his convalescence.

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How I learned to stop worrying and live with the bomb - Salon

Neither terrorists nor rogue states like North Korea are likely to use nuclear weapons. Here's why

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America's War on the Overweight - Newsweek

Anti-fat rhetoric is getting nastier than ever. Why our overweight nation hates overweight people.

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The Rural Brain Drain - The Chronicle

What is going on in small-town America? The nation's mythology of small towns comes to us straight from the The Music Man's set designers. Many Americans think about flyover country or Red America only during the culture war's skirmishes or campaign season. Most of the time, the rural crisis takes a back seat to more visible big-city troubles. So while there is a veritable academic industry devoted to chronicling urban decline, small towns' struggles are off the grid.

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The Angry Evolutionist - Newsweek

More Americans believe in angels than in evolution -- and Richard Dawkins isn't going to take it anymore.

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Top 10 Unanswered Questions in Geeky Movies - Wired

Even the best movies ever made leave unanswered questions in their wake. Some refer to these as "plot holes," but why not give the filmmakers the benefit of the doubt? Maybe they had a perfectly reasonable explanation in mind, and simply ... forgot to include it in the movie.

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* Be sure to read the comment section. There are some great observations.

The New Sputnik - Thomas L. Freidman / NYT

China is embarking on a new, parallel path of clean power deployment and innovation. It is the Sputnik of our day. Unfortunately, we’re still not racing.

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Sandra Day O'Connor Sworn In -- Bill of Rights Proposed 

The Four Horsemen send their regrets - Salon

A list of failed predictions of the end of the world, including a few current theories that probably won't pan out

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Build a Better Bulb for a $10 Million Prize - NYT

The ubiquitous but highly inefficient 60-watt light bulb badly needs a makeover. And it could be worth millions in government prize money -- and more in government contracts -- to the first company that figures out how to do it.

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Autumn Equinox & Hobbit Day 

Tomgram: Michael Klare, Energy Xtremism -- TomDispatch.com

Talk about roller-coaster rides: the price of a barrel of crude oil, which was still under $20 the week after September 11, 2001, made it to $147 in July 2008, just before the global economic meltdown, only to hit a low of $32.40 early this year. And yet, in recent months, hardly noticed, it's crept back above $70 -- and this with "recovery" barely on the horizon and global industrial demand still muted at best. And that's the good news.

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Bicycles, books and beer -- High Country News

How a man with no plan built a community around literature and social activism.

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America, the beautiful (America, the ugly) -- Salon

You could do a lot worse with the next 220 days of your life than to begin each one by reading an entry from the freshly published "A New Literary History of America" -- the way generations past used to study a Bible verse daily. You could do a lot worse, but I'm not sure you could do much better; this magnificent volume is a vast, inquisitive, richly surprising and consistently enlightening wallow in our national history and culture.

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What a fat tax really means for America -- Slate Magazine

Not long after the attack on Pearl Harbor, in the winter of 1942, physiologist A.J. Carlson made a radical suggestion: If the nation's largest citizens were charged a fee -- say, $20 for each pound of overweight -- we might feed the war effort overseas while working to subdue an "injurious luxury" at home.

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Smoking bans cut heart attacks by a third: study -- Reuters

Smoking bans in public places can reduce the number of heart attacks by as much as 36 percent, offering fresh proof that the restrictions work, U.S. researchers said on Monday.

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Tiny technologies could produce big energy solutions -- CNN

Forgot to charge your cell phone last night? Imagine that you could power it by walking. Weirder still, you might be able to just spray a new battery on.

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Leave The Guns At Home - E.J. Dionne Jr. - Washington Post

Try a thought experiment: What would conservatives have said if a group of loud, scruffy leftists had brought guns to the public events of Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush?

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What it means to wear a gun in public - Salon
Bringing a weapon to a rally isn't about exercising your own rights -- it's about threatening other people's rights

Those of us living in the Rocky Mountains are steeped in America's famous gun culture -- and we therefore know well the binary debates surrounding the Second Amendment. Firearm enthusiasts -- the vast majority of whom use weapons responsibly -- believe the Constitution protects their right to bear arms. Gun control advocates counter that the Constitution doesn't give anyone the inalienable right to wield automatic weapons that can kill scores of people in seconds.

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Who wants to be a billionaire? - Heather Havrilesky, Salon
Smug rich people condescend to hapless entrepreneurs on Mark Burnett's new reality show, "Shark Tank"

Money makes the world go 'round. Maybe that's why we resent money so much. It controls our fates. It kicks us when we're down. It makes us feel helpless, especially when we're depressed and need a two-hour back massage, a custard-filled doughnut and a brand-new Lexus LX 570 to bring us happiness and fulfillment.

That's why we Americans worship self-made billionaires. These are people who took revenge on money, bent it to their will, and now they disrespect it right to its face on a daily basis by wasting huge amounts of it on things they don't really need.

No matter how much we pay lip service to the common good, we all secretly want to be like these billionaires and make money our own personal sniveling handservant. But until we come up with some brilliant product or book or scheme that we can promote on Facebook and tweet about and become instant trillionaires like everyone else who truly understands social networking tools, we'll continue to be oppressed by that merciless dominatrix, the mighty dollar.

It's so no-fair! Day after day, we sally forth to do money's bidding and win her favor! Night after night we wonder if she'll ever let us live in peace! And still, we can't help daydreaming of being free to roam the world unafraid of credit cards and retirement goals, free to eat huge plates of overpriced food and have our idle bodies massaged by a team of highly trained minions, free to gloat and brag and swagger through this godforsaken world like only a disgustingly wealthy human can!

read on ... (it's worth it)

© Cam Cardow - Ottawa Citizen - 05.26.2006

The quote above was written in 1914 and is the fourth stanza of "For The Fallen" by Laurence Binyon.

With proud thanksgiving, a mother for her children,
England mourns for her dead across the sea.
Flesh of her flesh they were, spirit of her spirit,
Fallen in the cause of the free.

Solemn the drums thrill; Death august and royal
Sings sorrow up into immortal spheres,
There is music in the midst of desolation
And a glory that shines upon our tears.

They went with songs to the battle, they were young,
Straight of limb, true of eye, steady and aglow.
They were staunch to the end against odds uncounted;
They fell with their faces to the foe.

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years contemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.

They mingle not with their laughing comrades again;
They sit no more at familiar tables of home;
They have no lot in our labour of the day-time;
They sleep beyond England's foam.

But where our desires are and our hopes profound,
Felt as a well-spring that is hidden from sight,
To the innermost heart of their own land they are known
As the stars are known to the Night;

As the stars that shall be bright when we are dust,
Moving in marches upon the heavenly plain;
As the stars that are starry in the time of our darkness,
To the end, to the end, they remain.

~~~~~~

From KnowledgeNews:

Today, America's Memorial Day tends to be more beach-and-barbecue than reflection-and-remembrance. But Memorial Day still exists to commemorate the sacrifice of the more than 1.1 million American service members who have died in battle - and to remember why they gave up their lives.

No one has ever done that better than Abraham Lincoln in his Gettysburg Address. Even before Americans began decorating Civil War graves to give Memorial Day its start, Lincoln's short speech pointed the way to the greatest memorial of all.

On November 19, 1863, President Lincoln visited Gettysburg to help dedicate a new national cemetery. The president was not the event's main speaker. That honor belonged to Edward Everett, a Massachusetts statesman and perhaps the best-known orator of the time. As was customary, Everett delivered a lengthy oration, speaking for two hours straight. Lincoln spoke for just two minutes

The day after the ceremony, Edward Everett wrote to Lincoln, "I wish that I could flatter myself that I had come as near to the central idea of the occasion in two hours as you did in two minutes." Today, the central idea of the occasion remains the same. As Lincoln points out, we honor the sacrifice of soldiers for freedom and self-government best by carrying forward the work of democracy. We dedicate memorials by dedicating ourselves.

- Steve Sampson

The Gettysburg Address:

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting-place for those who here gave their lives that this nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow, this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us, the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us--that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion - that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

- Abraham Lincoln

The evolutionary argument for Dr. Seuss -- Slate
Why do we often care more about imaginary characters than real people? A new book suggests that fiction is crucial to our survival as a species.

Why do human beings spend so much time telling each other invented stories, untruths that everybody involved knows to be untrue? People in all societies do this, and do it a lot, from grandmothers spinning fairy tales at the hearthside to TV show runners marshaling roomfuls of overpaid Harvard grads to concoct the weekly adventures of crime fighters and castaways. The obvious answer to this question -- because it's fun -- is enough for many of us. But given the persuasive power of a good story, its ability to seduce us away from the facts of a situation or to make us care more about a fictional world like Middle-earth than we do about a real place like, oh, say, Turkmenistan, means that some ambitious thinkers will always be trying to figure out how and why stories work.

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NASA Cheers Rejuvenated Hubble -- Washington Post
Shuttle Astronauts Prepare to Return From a Wildly Successful Servicing Trip

Just a few days ago the Hubble had a single major scientific instrument, a 16-year-old camera. It also had an aiming device that freelanced a little bit of science in its spare time. Everything else was kaput. The most advanced camera had been dead for two years, and the spectrograph dead for nearly five.

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Wire Power -- Newsweek
How to send electricity across the continent, virtually for free

Remember the Woodstock of Physics? Probably not. Back in the spring of 1987, though, headlines were trumpeting it as the most exciting scientific meeting in history. Three thousand physicists crammed into a ballroom at the New York Hilton to talk about superconductivity-the transmission of electricity with literally zero resistance. The technology was suddenly within reach of being economical. So it appeared, anyway, and that could mean anything from superfast computers to tiny, powerful electric motors to power lines that could carry current with no loss of energy.

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Successful Hubble Repair Mission Widens Policy Rift at NASA - Washington Post

NASA's triumphant mission to repair the Hubble Space Telescope this week has cracked open a policy rift within the space agency, with a top NASA scientist saying that the United States is on the way to losing the capability of doing what it has just done so dramatically.

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2012: Tsunami of Stupidity -- Slate
Why the latest apocalyptic cult is a silly scam.

The growing harmonic convergence of apocalyptic stupidity that goes under the rubric 2012 or "the Mayan Calendar Prophecy" has not yet reached Y2K proportions. And while it's broken out of the New Agey cult status where it's been fermenting for some years, there are still many in the chattering classes who haven't heard about it. "The end of the world in 2012?" my friend Stanley said. "You mean I have to wait that long?"

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Are Hackers Working for the Mob? -- PCWorld/Computerworld UK

Hackers stole more data last year than in the previous four years, according to new research.

In its 2009 Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR), Verizon investigated 90 data breach cases that exposed a 285 million records, which is equivalent to nine records per second. This figure is far greater than the 230 million records recorded as breached in the five years combined from 2004 to 2008.

The study looked only at breaches involving attacks that resulted in compromised records being used in a crime. Verizon Business found that organised crime was behind 90 percent of all breaches which involved compromised records.

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What would Jack Sparrow think of the Pirate Bay? -- Chris Matyszczyk

I've spent much time this week thinking about Jack Sparrow, pirate of the Caribbean.

Channeling his inner Keith Richards, Sparrow is a good pirate. Ugly, drunk, but good.

The Swedish pirates from the Bay are supposed to be good pirates too. You know, the ones who, according to a local court, channel Richards, Mick Jagger, and a whole host of other musical acts in a not quite legal fashion.

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Wanted: Computer Hackers ... To Help Government -- AP

Federal authorities aren't looking to prosecute them, but to pay them to secure the nation's networks.

General Dynamics Information Technology put out an ad last month on behalf of the Homeland Security Department seeking someone who could ``think like the bad guy.'' Applicants, it said, must understand hackers' tools and tactics and be able to analyze Internet traffic and identify vulnerabilities in the federal systems.

In the Pentagon's budget request submitted last week, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said the Pentagon will increase the number of cyberexperts it can train each year from 80 to 250 by 2011.

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Down With Denim -- Daniel Akst -- WSJ

If there is a silver lining to a financial crisis that threatens to leave the entire country dressed only in a barrel, it is this: At least we won't be wearing denim.

Never has a single fabric done so little for so many. Denim is hot, uncomfortable and uniquely unsuited to people who spend most of their waking hours punching keys instead of cows. It looks bad on almost everyone who isn't thin, yet has somehow made itself the unofficial uniform of the fattest people in the world.

It's time denim was called on the carpet, for its crimes are legion. Denim, for instance, is an essential co-conspirator in the modern trend toward undifferentiated dressing, in which we all strive to look equally shabby no matter what the occasion. Despite its air of innocence, no fabric has ever been so insidiously effective at undermining national discipline.

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Restorative Slumber -- Daily Om

As we focus on the many obligations we gladly undertake in order to create the lives we want, sleep is often the first activity that we sacrifice. We’re compelled by both external and internal pressures to be productive during many of our waking hours. While this can lead to great feats of accomplishment, it also disrupts the body’s natural cycles and leaves us craving rest. Napping represents a pleasurable remedy to this widespread sleep deprivation. Though judged by many as a pastime of little children or the lazy, the need for a nap is a trait that all mammals share and an acceptable part of the day in many countries. It is also a free and effortless way to improve our health and lift our spirits. A nap is relaxing and can improve our mood, vision, reflexes, and memory.

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The Gundersons get us ready for Basil, the robot of our dreams -- Westword

When people ask Jim and Louise Gunderson if they have kids, they reply, "No, we have robots." But right now, Louise feels like any other harried mother carrying a kilo of toys and bottles and diapers wherever she goes. Today is the first big day out for her little one, and she's brought along everything Basil the robot may need. That includes a laptop in case they have to mess with his code, an impressively large wrench and a couple of screwdrivers if they have to tinker with his hardware, an extension cord for when he gets hungry, and super glue - lots and lots of super glue.

... Or maybe it's because Basil, despite the current setback, already has the ability to identify, reason about and then interact with items he may find in a bar - a feat that his creators believe is the hardest problem of all. To figure out how to make Basil do this, the couple pondered some of the most advanced robots around, like unmanned military airplanes and the Mars rovers. These machines handle complex tasks with ease because they rely on a human - someone watching video feeds and identifying for the robot what objects are relevant to its mission and how to handle unexpected developments and so on. The Gundersons were very familiar with this sort of tele-operated robot, having strapped a video camera to a remote-control car and remotely chased cats around their back yard for kicks. But what, exactly, did they, the humans, bring to this person-robot relationship?

Their contribution, the Gundersons decided, was helping the robot simplify and understand all the miscellaneous data with which it's bombarded at any given moment.

"It occurred to us that the key thing that we are doing is taking the little dots on the video screens and turning them into 'chair legs' and 'doorways' and 'cats' and then coming up with a plan about them," says Jim.

It's as if people are living in simplified virtual realities, where they filter out the vast majority of information around them — light gradients and subtle odors and ambient sounds — and just focus on basic abstract concepts. The Gundersons found a quote from twentieth-century philosopher C.I. Lewis that put it well: "We do not see patches of color, but trees and houses; we hear, not indescribable sound, but voices and violins."

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Pie (in the name of love) -- Salon

It's time someone stood up for the ugly stepchild of desserts. It's time someone stood up for pie.

... After a lifetime of pie-induced pleasure, I feel it's time somebody stood up for my perfect dessert. For too long, pie has played the ugly stepchild to that flamboyant diva of desserts, cake. Sure, plastered with enough frosting and chocolate-ganache implants, cake cuts a fine appearance at a party. But do you ever hear anyone talk about what's on cake’s inside? Cake’s dazzling superficiality and popularity has allowed us to ignore its tasteless core. All the while, pie has been standing in the corner waiting patiently for us to notice -- a little homey looking, sure, but with a personality like you wouldn’t believe. Pie is moist where cake is too often arid; it's complex where cake is too often banal. Pie offers me lasting contentment, whereas all cake can tender is a cloying sugar rush. In a subtle, supple flake of pie crust there is more of heaven than in all the world's slabs of cake combined.

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Insanely Great: What if Steve Jobs ran one of the Big Three auto companies? -- Robert X. Cringely

Looking for improved business models for the personal computer business, Apple CEO Steve Jobs often used to cite automobile makers, though never American car companies. The examples were invariably German. Whether it was the design aesthetic of his Mercedes sedan or Porsche's success at selling high-margin cars as entertainment devices, Jobs could always point to farfegnugen as a way to sell a good car for a great price. So since he thinks about these things anyway, and because the U.S. automobile industry is on the skids and begging for help this week, I find myself wondering what would happen if Steve Jobs were put in charge of any of the Big Three car companies?

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Obama's Human Rights Opportunity -- Jimmy Carter

The advancement of human rights around the world was a cornerstone of foreign policy and U.S. leadership for decades, until the attacks on our country on Sept. 11, 2001.

Since then, while Americans continue to espouse freedom and democracy, our government's abusive practices have undermined struggles for freedom in many parts of the world. As the gross abuses at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay were revealed, the United States lost its mantle as a champion of human rights, eliminating our national ability to speak credibly on the subject, let alone restrain or gain concessions from oppressors. Tragically, a global backlash against democracy and rights activists, who are now the targets of abuse, has followed.

The advancement of human rights and democracy is necessary for global stability and can be achieved only through the local, often heroic, efforts of individuals who speak out against injustice and oppression -- endeavors the United States should lead, not impede. If the early warnings of human rights activists had been heeded and tough diplomacy and timely intervention mobilized, the horrific, and in some cases ongoing, violence in Bosnia, Rwanda, Sudan's Darfur region and the Democratic Republic of the Congo might have been averted.

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America's Most Dangerous Librarians: Meet the radical bookworms who fought the Patriot Act -- and won. -- Mother Jones

They looked like they had walked off a film set, the two men standing at the door of the Library Connection in Windsor, Connecticut, as they flashed fbi badges and asked to speak to the boss. Director George Christian courteously shepherded them into the office. By the hum of the Xerox machine, one agent explained to Christian that the bureau was demanding "any and all subscriber information, billing information and access logs of any person or entity" that had used computers between 4 p.m. and 4:45 p.m. on February 15, 2005, in any of the 27 libraries whose computer systems were managed by the Library Connection, a nonprofit co-op of library databases. He handed Christian a document called a national security letter (nsl); it said the information was being sought "to protect against international terrorism."

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An open apology to boomers everywhere -- Heather Havrilesky -- Salon
Your earnest, self-important prattle has gotten on Gen X nerves for decades. But now we finally get it.

Nov. 7, 2008 | Dear boomers: We're sorry for rolling our eyes at you all these years. We apologize for scoffing at your earnestness, your lack of self-deprecation, your tendency to take yourselves a little too seriously. We can go ahead and admit now that we grew tired of hearing about the '60s and the peace movement, as if you had to live through those times to understand anything at all. It's true, we didn't completely partake of your idealism and your notions about community. Frankly, it looked gray and saggy in your hands, these many decades later. Chanting "What do we want? Peace! When do we want it? Now!" at that rally against the Iraq War made us feel self-conscious in spite of ourselves. We felt like cliches. We wondered why someone couldn't come up with a newer, catchier, pro-peace slogan over the course of 40 years of protests. We knew we shouldn't care that some of you were wearing socks with sandals and smelled like you'd been on the bus with Wavy Gravy for the last three decades, but we cared anyway. We couldn't help it. It's just who we are.

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Finally, a Thin President -- Colson Whitehead -- NY Times

Over the coming days and weeks, there will be many "I never thought I'd see the day" pieces, but none of them will be more overflowing with "I never thought I'd see the day"-ness than this one. I'm black, you see, and I haven't gained a pound since college. I skip breakfast most days, have maybe half a sandwich for lunch, and sometimes I forget to eat dinner. Just slips my mind. Yesterday morning, I woke up to a new world. America had elected a Skinny Black Guy president.

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Log off. Shutdown. Reboot - ZDNet

Log off. Shutdown. Reboot Jason Perlow: Has your job, your enabling technology and the events of the day turned you into an anxious, depressed, sleep-deprived irritable head case? Enough already! Take a break from technology.

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Privacy 2.0: No Privacy at All -- John C. Dvorak

Google's limiting the length of time it keeps records on people? Big deal. Why the public puts up with any tracking whatsoever is a mystery to me.

... this information would be quite useful in a police state or to merely curb dissent. The potential for abuse alone should have the public up in arms.

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The voters are angry -- and don't know why - Salon

What happens when the messy thing called democracy collides with the financial markets in full panic.

... The morning after the 778-point market mayhem, three TV ads were released with public fanfare, two by the candidates themselves and the third by the Republican National Committee blasting Obama. It was stunning how unresponsive all three commercials were to the real-world details of the worst financial crisis since brokers drank their martinis in speak-easies. Both campaigns seem determined to cling to their familiar arguments (Obama is too liberal and McCain is an out-of-touch Bush III) in the face of the dramatically reshaped realities on Wall Street.

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He used his fame to give away his fortune. - Dahlia Lithwick

The Hole in the Wall Gang Camp opened in Connecticut in 1988 to provide a summer camping experience -- fishing, tie-dye, ghost stories, s'mores -- for seriously ill children. By 1989, when I started working there as a counselor, virtually everyone on staff would tell some version of the same story: Paul Newman, who had founded the camp when it became clear his little salad-dressing lark was accidentally going to earn him millions, stops by for one of his not-infrequent visits. He plops down at a table in the dining hall next to some kid with leukemia, or HIV, or sickle cell anemia, and starts to eat lunch. One version of the story has the kid look from the picture of Newman on the Newman's Own lemonade carton to Newman himself, then back to the carton and back to Newman again before asking, "Are you lost?" Another version: The kid looks steadily at him and demands, "Are you really Paul Human?"

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Paul Newman Taught Me How to Clean Fish - Karen Ocamb

It's strange how someone's death can trigger the oddest of memories. When I heard that Paul Newman died, I suddenly flashed to the moment he walked into the house where I was babysitting and said, "Come on, kid - let's clean these fish."

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Ad Astra Mr. Newman - Jayne Lyn Stahl

On a day when many will have much to say about a man who few understood, or took the time to understand -- it is in this country where we celebrate celebrity, and divest celebrities of their humanity -- that humanity is, after all, the only thing that matters.

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Over-driven: why our cars guzzle gas, what to do about it - Ars Technica - Jonathan M. Gitlin

From more drilling in the Gulf of Mexico to tapping the strategic oil reserve, politicians and pundits spar daily over the best solution to America's ongoing fuel crisis. But no matter which side of the fence they're on, almost everyone can agree on one thing: Americans are going to have to get used to paying more for their gas than they have in years past; possibly much more. The specter of permanently higher gas prices has already driven consumers and automakers to take a long, hard look at the fuel economy ratings on the vehicles that Americans own and produce, and what they've found has sparked an aggressive search for ways to squeeze more miles out of each gallon. In this brief article, I'll take a look at why the current American auto fleet is so inefficient, and at what's being done to improve it.

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Nice Guys Finish Last: Why do we expect presidential candidates to be kind? - Slate

Perhaps it's just a coincidence, but in the past few days I feel I've been overwhelmed by a tsunami of commentary, all of which purports to prove the fundamental nastiness of Barack Obama or, alternatively, the deep unlikability of John McCain. You thought our presidential candidates were nice guys, regular guys, guys who you'd like to sit down and have a beer with? Guess what, lots of people are now telling me: They aren't!

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Nation's Spies: Climate Change Could Spark War - Wired

Environmental groups have been warning for years that global climate change could make already-tense parts of the world even worse, and even spark whole new conflicts. Now, the nation's spies are saying pretty much the same thing.

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We are becoming a nation of narrow thinkers, thanks to the Internet, newspapers, and schools.
by John C. Dvorak

These days everyone is so enthusiastic about the evolution of the Web, with its free content, interesting blogs, citizen journalism, and the rest of it. Not me. The big problem, as I see it, is the decline in general perspective, which is due to the decline in the popularity of newspapers and magazines.

By perspective, I mean generalized or common knowledge. When you pick up The New York Times and look at the front page, you get a general perspective on world events. As you page through the newspaper, you see all sorts of interesting articles that you might not have read if you were merely surfing the Net for news.

Over time, this sort of happenstance approach to information gives a reader perspective on things. You have a sense as to what the economy is doing. You know if some international disaster has occurred. You are more tuned in.

This is going away.

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Our New Energy Crisis - Mother Jones

Almost four years ago, when oil was trading at around $40 a barrel, Paul Roberts wrote a story for Mother Jones on a bleak scenario gaining currency among energy insiders, but not yet in the mainstream consciousness: peak oil, basically the notion that the world's petroleum resources are nearing exhaustion. If the theory held true, Roberts warned, oil prices could soon leap to "perhaps as high as $100 per barrel - a disaster if we don't have a cost-effective alternative fuel or technology in place."

Welcome to the disaster: $100-a-barrel oil is in the rearview mirror, and no cost-effective (or even cost-prohibitive) alternative has emerged. The most dire consequences of this failing - hurricanes, drought, extinction - are occurring far more rapidly than even Slideshow Al could have predicted four years ago. And then there's the war.

It's easy enough to blame Dick Cheney, Big Oil, Detroit - all of whom have done their part in obstructing progress. But their chicanery distracts us from the far greater problem, one that, unfortunately, comes down to Organic Chemistry 101. Every technological advance of the last 150 years has been powered by a unique, extremely energy-dense, but finite - and, as it turns out, planet-killing - source of fuel. Switching away from fossil energy requires an economic and social transformation at least as great as the Industrial Revolution. And we have to build this new economy on the fumes of the old, hoping that we don't run out of gas, or ice caps, before we get there. As Roberts points out in this special issue on energy, if we sit on our hands or let the process be hijacked by vested interests, "there may not be enough crude left in the ground to fuel a second try."

Read on ...

I never saw a wild thing
sorry for itself.
A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough
without ever having felt sorry for itself.

D. H. Lawrence

Ignoring the Supreme Court - Washington Post
The Bush administration punts on greenhouse emissions

The Bush administration never had any intention of doing what the Supreme Court commanded it to do a year ago today: regulate greenhouse gas emissions. We infer this because, even though President Bush ordered his agencies last May to work together to meet the court's directive, and even though the Environmental Protection Agency delivered to the White House last December its finding that those pollutants endanger public welfare, a prerequisite for regulation, EPA Administrator Stephen L. Johnson announced last week a plan to seek public input starting in the spring on how best to limit the emissions. Translation: punt to the next administration. This giant step backward is the starkest example yet of the chasm between the words and deeds of Mr. Bush on climate change.

Read on ...

FCC living in the dark ages; a threat to net neutrality aims - Ars Technica

The Government and Accountability Office (GAO) has concluded that the Federal Communications Commission does nothing with about four out of every five consumer complaints that it puts into a database and investigates. Even worse, the GAO could not discern from its survey of the FCC's complaint process why the FCC takes no enforcement action with 83 percent of the complaints it looked into from 2003 through 2006. "Without key management tools, FCC may have difficulty assuring Congress and other stakeholders that it is meeting its enforcement mission," the GAO report warns. That's putting it mildly. If the FCC does set up some serious net neutrality guidelines for ISPs like Comcast, how can P2P application users and other consumers know that the agency will take their comments seriously?

The invasion of America: Creeping intrusions against our privacy rights are an assault on the Constitution.
By Andrew P. Napolitano

When President Nixon was in his pre-Watergate heyday, he ordered the FBI and the CIA to electronically monitor the private behavior of his domestic political adversaries. Shortly after Nixon resigned, investigators discovered hundreds of reports of break-ins and secret electronic surveillance. None of it was authorized by warrants, and thus all of it was illegal. But it had been conducted pursuant to the president's orders. Nixon's defense was, "When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal."

He made that infamous statement in a TV interview years after he left office, but the attitude espoused was obviously one he embraced while in the White House. He, like his present-day successor, rejected the truism that the 4th Amendment of the Constitution, which prohibits the government from conducting electronic surveillance of anyone without a search warrant issued by a judge based on probable cause of a crime, restrains the president.

In response to the abuses during the Nixon administration, Congress enacted the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, in 1978. The law provides that no electronic surveillance may occur by anyone in the government at any time under any circumstances for any reason other than in accordance with law, and no such surveillance may occur within the U.S. of an American other than in accordance with the 4th Amendment.

Read on ...

Andrew P. Napolitano, a New Jersey Superior Court judge from 1987 to 1995, is the senior judicial analyst at the Fox News Channel. His latest book is "A Nation of Sheep."

Let's do away with the legislative fiction of the terrorist alarm clock. - Slate

The cliche holds that we are always fighting the last war. I disagree. For the last seven years, congressional Democrats have been fighting the next one: the war perennially set to erupt if they don't deliver whatever the president asks of them immediately. Time and again, they've been rendered so terrified by White House threats about imminent terrorist attacks that they have caved on issues ranging from detainee rights to secret surveillance to torture. And every time they've caved, it's under the threat that if they withhold from the president extra powers (ones that he's often already seized in secret), terrorists will mass against us instantaneously, and they will be blamed.

A political speech the West needs to hear - High Country News

"One of our most urgent projects is to develop a national energy policy. The United States is the only major industrial country without a comprehensive, long-range energy policy. Our program will emphasize conservation ... solar energy and other renewable energy sources. ... We must face the fact that the energy shortage is permanent. There is no way we can solve it quickly. But if we all cooperate and make modest sacrifices ... we can find ways to adjust." - Imagine those words spoken by the next president shortly after taking office on Jan. 20, 2009, continuing a theme originally established on the campaign trail.

In What City Did You Honeymoon? And other monstrously stupid bank security questions. - Slate

Verizon wants to know my favorite ice cream flavor, Google's got designs on my library card number, and Wachovia needs my favorite all-time entertainer. Yahoo! is asking where I met my spouse, and Bank of America wants the details of the honeymoon. Like those squiggly pictures of letters and numbers, weird personal questions have become ubiquitous totems of online security. If you tell the bank your favorite grade-school teacher or cartoon character, the thinking goes, it'll be easy to confirm your identify when you misplace your account number. This thinking is dumb.

Dear Rich People ... All you wealthy Americans, stop complaining and save the economy!
By Daniel Gross

To: The Filthy Rich
CC: The Stinking Rich; the Pretty-Darned Rich
From: America

Look, you've had a pretty good deal these past few years. We gave you everything you wanted. Massive reductions in the top income-tax rates? Happy to oblige. Cuts on dividends and capital gains taxes, which overwhelmingly benefit you? No problem. Going after the estate tax—excuse me, the death tax? You got it. We've even agreed to overlook the fact that you private-equity and hedge-fund managers pay only a 15 percent tax rate.

Because we like you, we've pretended not to notice your gauche taste and rude manners. (You know you're benefiting from the greatest concentration of wealth since the 1920s, right? The share of national income taken down by the wealthiest 1 percent rose from 14.6 percent in 2003 to 17.4 percent in 2005, according to Emmanuel Saez of the University of California-Berkeley.) We have sat patiently on JetBlue and Southwest as your private jets clog runways. We continue to bust our butts, defend the borders, and uphold the rule of law in order to protect your fortunes and property.

Read on ...

A Berlitz guide to Washington English - The Atlantic

Just as modern French-speakers who travel to Quebec often find the dialect of French Canadians to be archaic and quaint, English-speakers who visit Washington, D.C., are frequently bemused by the language spoken there. Though the Potomac dialect shares the alphabet and grammar of English, it has a vocabulary all its own.:

The $100 Barrel of Oil vs. the Global War on Terror
The Bush Legacy (Take Two)
By Tom Engelhardt

Consider the debate among four Democratic presidential candidates on ABC News last Saturday night. In the previous week, the price of a barrel of oil briefly touched $100, unemployment hit 5%, the stock market had the worst three-day start since the Great Depression, and the word "recession" was in the headlines and in the air. So when ABC debate moderator Charlie Gibson announced that the first fifteen-minute segment would be taken up with "what is generally agreed to be... the greatest threat to the United States today," what did you expect?

As it happened, he was referring to "nuclear terrorism," specifically "a nuclear attack on an American city" by al-Qaeda (as well as how the future president would "retaliate"). In other words, Gibson launched his version of a national debate by focusing on a fictional, futuristic scenario, at this point farfetched, in which a Pakistani loose nuke would fall into the hands of al-Qaeda, be transported to the United States, perhaps picked up by well-trained al-Qaedan minions off the docks of Newark, and set off in the Big Apple. In this, though he was surely channeling Rudy Giuliani, he managed to catch the essence of what may be George W. Bush's major legacy to this country.

The Planet as a GWOT Free-Fire Zone

On September 11, 2001, in his first post-attack address to the nation, George W. Bush was already using the phrase, "the war on terror." On September 13th, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz announced that the administration was planning to do a lot more than just take out those who had attacked the United States. It was going to go about "removing the sanctuaries, removing the support systems, ending states who sponsor terrorism." We were, Bush told Americans that day, in a state of "war"; in fact, we were already in "the first war of the twenty-first century."

That same day, R.W. Apple, Jr. of the New York Times reported that senior officials had "cast aside diplomatic niceties" and that "the Bush administration today gave the nations of the world a stark choice: stand with us against terrorism... or face the certain prospect of death and destruction." Stand with us against terrorism (or else) -- that would be the measure by which everything was assessed in the years to come. That very day, Secretary of State Colin Powell suggested that the U.S. would "rip [the bin Laden] network up" and "when we're through with that network, we will continue with a global assault on terrorism."

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A sled, a cow, the future - Mountain Gazette

Few people may believe that at age 57, I recently T-boned, so to speak, a pregnant, 1,000-pound cow while riding my Flexible Flyer sled down the steepest county road in western Montana. To rural sledders, this is plausible, but perhaps not to adults of my generation. The mean age for the 55,000 sledders injured badly enough last winter to need an ER visit is 9.9, a dismal statistic that reveals a paucity of Baby Boomers still willing to have fun hurtling down mountains with a minimum of control. Sledding down icy back roads is a pure and noble calling that offers countless opportunities for high-speed rides on metal-runners that are only somewhat steerable. Obstacles to doing so abound, from so-called common sense, to cows, like the one I collided with.

Foolproof Online Dating Tips for Desperate Guys - Wired

There are a lot of guys out there on the internet who desperately want to find a woman to share their life with, and who don't want to have to go outside to do it. If you're one of them, you may find yourself wondering why the women you meet in chat rooms, discussion groups and online games have so far failed to love you.

California Sues EPA; Says State Law Greener, Cleaner Than Feds - Wired

California today sued the federal Environmental Protection Agency today for preventing the state from reducing greenhouse gas emissions in its cars.

Big Brother gets bigger, says global privacy study - C|Net

According to a new international privacy report, governments around the world are increasingly invading the privacy of citizens with surveillance, identification systems, and archiving of private data.

US Near Bottom of Global Privacy Index - AP/Wired

Individual privacy is under threat around the world as governments continue introducing surveillance and information-gathering measures, according to an international rights group.

Journey to the Dark Side: The Bush Legacy (Take One) - TomDispatch

If you don't mind thinking about the Bush legacy a year early, there are worse places to begin than with the case of Erla Osk Arnardottir Lilliendahl. Admittedly, she isn't an ideal "tempest-tost" candidate for Emma Lazarus' famous lines engraved on a bronze plaque inside the Statue of Liberty. After all, she flew to New York City with her girlfriends, first class, from her native Iceland, to partake of "the Christmas spirit." She was drinking white wine en route and, as she put it, "look[ing] forward to go shopping, eat good food, and enjoy life." On an earlier vacation trip, back in 1995, she had overstayed her visa by three weeks, a modest enough infraction, and had even returned the following year without incident.

This time - with the President's Global War on Terror in full swing - she was pulled aside at passport control at JFK Airport, questioned about those extra three weeks 12 years ago, and soon found herself, as she put it, "handcuffed and chained, denied the chance to sleep... without food and drink and... confined to a place without anyone knowing my whereabouts, imprisoned." It was "the greatest humiliation to which I have ever been subjected."

By her account, she was photographed, fingerprinted, asked rude questions - "by men anxious to demonstrate their power. Small kings with megalomania" - confined to a tiny room for hours, then chained, marched through the airport, and driven to a jail in New Jersey where, for another nine hours, she found herself "in a small, dirty cell." On being prepared for the return trip to JFK and deportation, approximately 24 hours after first debarking, she was, despite her pleas, despite her tears, again handcuffed and put in leg chains, all, as she put it, "because I had taken a longer vacation than allowed under the law."

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50 Ways to Improve Your Life in 2008 - U.S. News and World Report

Flame Wars: Why We Can't Resist Hot Blogger-on-Blogger Action - LinuxInsider

You can't help but think that Thomas Jefferson himself would be pleased to know that out there in the awesome equalizing social force that is the Internet, people armed with the power of free-flowing ideas are busy pummeling the crap out of each other. More than that, they're doing it in public, with an often-participatory audience. Blog fights are verbal steel-cage smackdowns with a revolving door.

Ten Best Technologies and Trends of 2007 - Extremetech.com

Ten Worst Technologies and Trends of 2007 - Extremetech.com

Five desktop Linux highlights of 2007 - DesktopLinux.com

2007: The Miserable Year in Review - John C. Dvorak

The Top 10 New Organisms of 2007 - Wired

THREAT LEVEL's Year in Review - 2007 - Wired

The Year in Oversight:The yeas and nays of Congress' efforts to gavel the Bush administration into order in 2007 - MotherJones

100 things we didn't know last year - BBC

Interesting comment from CompUSA - Very Grumpy Rabbit

I don't know if you've heard or not, but CompUSA is going out of business. ...

... I asked one of the employees off the record if he could comment at all on the impact of Vista sales on the end of CompUSA's business, expecting no comment. Afterall, most such retail chains don't want local employees speaking out for the company.

That... isn't what I got. With a glaring look he responded I'd be better off asking about the returns. Returns? Well, the employee asked me to follow him to the back, and he pulled out a cardboard box opening it up to reveal it was packed full of copies of Vista.

Returns.

Fabric of America is Fraying
By David Wann

By certain measurements, the U.S. economy has been quite successful in the last several decades, but the fundamental question remains: Successfully what?

We may lead the world in categories like gross domestic product, average house size, and ownership of color TVs, but we also "lead" the industrial nations in debt per capita, the child poverty rate, overall poverty rate, ratio of people in prison, rate of traffic fatalities, murder rate, carbon dioxide emissions per capita, and the per capita consumption of energy and water.

These are hardly distinctions we can be proud of. Clearly, we're not taking care of what really matters.

On the upside, increased awareness of where we stand can guide a reordering of national and local priorities, resulting in a healthier and more satisfying American lifestyle ...

The New Entitlement
By George F. Will

She who would be president excoriates, as Democratic presidential candidates must, the current president and almost all his works. But she and he largely agree regarding the subprime mortgage problem. Granted, she greeted his response to it with the cri de coeur without which Democrats would be speechless: "More!" She upped his ante by proposing a moratorium, for 90 days, on foreclosures. But the crux of her proposal is the crux of his -- a selective five-year freeze on the rates of subprime adjustable-rate mortgages ...

A Gates-Style Thaw
By Jim Hoagland

"We are going to do something terrible to you," one Kremlin insider frequently told Americans in the 1980s as the Soviet Union was crumbling before the unbelieving eyes of U.S. intelligence. "We are going to deprive you of an enemy."

He turned out to be more prophetic than he realized. Today -- to my slack-jawed astonishment -- a senior U.S. official is pursuing a similar approach toward a newly hostile Kremlin by making subtle overtures on ballistic missile defense and other contentious security issues and then wooing world opinion.

Big deal. Diplomats get paid to do that, right? But this is the astonishing part. The official is Defense Secretary Robert Gates. The same Robert Gates who under Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush helped shape hard-line intelligence judgments -- which he later admitted were behind the curve -- and cultivated an image as a leading CIA hawk in the Washington political aviary.

No hope now - San Francisco Chronicle Editorial

President Bush announced his HOPE NOW program to ease the nation's mortgage crisis last Thursday. The plan is neither "hope" nor "now," nor will it ease the nation's mortgage crisis.

It's baffling why an administration that believes in the free market as much as this one does would attempt to intrude on an inevitable economic correction. There are two possibilities, both of them desperate: 1) 2008 is coming up, and both parties need to look like they're doing something for Americans who are losing their homes, and 2) The administration is panicked about what might happen should those who invested in mortgage debt start calling off their deals with the banks that sold them.

Desperation rarely leads to good policy. (To be fair, the Democratic counters to the Bush plan are equally irresponsible.) Regarding the two scenarios, the problems of the second are dealt with at length in the article on the front page of this section. As for the first, the main problem is that while politicians may gain a few points for "helping" struggling home buyers stay in houses they can't afford, their bailout policies aren't helping either home buyers - past, current, or future - or the economy.

Read On ...

~

The Spies Strike Back - Jim Hoagland
Washington Post

The Fourth of July came on Dec. 3 this year for the U.S. intelligence community.

The nation's espionage agencies delivered their own declaration of independence from the war aims and rhetoric of President Bush and Vice President Cheney in a National Intelligence Estimate that was ostensibly about Iran's nuclear program.

But the CIA, DIA and 14 other agencies grouped under the director of national intelligence also delivered a riveting if implicit X-ray of the changing nature of leadership in Washington, where the White House's once-commanding authority over government has been smashed but not replaced by any other power center.

The Bush-Cheney obsession with restoring presidential authority has provoked new challenges to powers the White House can legitimately claim. It is as if this administration has developed its own political version of Jimmy Carter's aborted project for a neutron bomb, which was intended to destroy people while sparing buildings. Bush consistently manages to destroy or damage goals he proclaims and friends who support him, while foes escapes harm.

Read on ...

~

The United States of debt - Christine Tatum
The Denver Post

As the nation's comptroller general, David M. Walker is essentially licensed to be one of the world's most boring people.

But then he opens his mouth, and it becomes clear that the country's top auditor is ready to bust some chops and to say things a whole lot of people don't want to hear.

The federal budget is crumbling, he says. The nation continues to borrow at an alarming rate and to saddle today's toddlers with exorbitant debt they may not ever be able to repay. The country can't afford the Medicare and Social Security benefits it has promised.

And politicians seemingly refuse to level with Americans about how much financial trouble the country faces if it sticks with the status quo much longer.

Read On ...

Cult Watch 2007: Who's Drinking the Kool-Aid?
Mike Elgan

As we wind down another year in technology, it's a good time to check in on the cults and see how they’re doing.

For companies who inspire them, user cults are nice because they motivate customers to overlook strategic blunders, exaggerate product successes and -- most importantly -- walk the earth “virally” marketing products without pay.

Cult members themselves get an enhanced feeling of self-worth through group association. "I'm better than you! I have an iPhone!" Consumers can become one of the "chosen people" for $399, plus a two-year contract.

Let's have a look at the major tech cults, and see how they're doing.

Read on ...

Going Green? Easy Doesn't Do It
By Michael Maniates - Washington Post

Thanksgiving nicely focuses our attention on things of lasting importance: family, friends, community, a rich harvest. None of these blessings come without cost or sacrifice. Today, then, we might consider what we must give of ourselves to preserve such abundance in the face of increasing climatic instability.

One needn't ponder this question in a vacuum. Several best-sellers offer advice about what we must ask of ourselves and one another. Their titles suggest that we needn't break much of a sweat: "It's Easy Being Green," "The Lazy Environmentalist," or even "The Green Book: The Everyday Guide to Saving the Planet One Simple Step at a Time."

Although each offers familiar advice ("reuse scrap paper before recycling" or "take shorter showers"), it's what's left unsaid by these books that's intriguing. Three assertions permeate the pages: (1) We should look for easy, cost-effective things to do in our private lives as consumers, since that's where we have the most power and control; these are the best things to do because (2) if we all do them the cumulative effect of these individual choices will be a safe planet; which is fortunate indeed because (3) we, by nature, aren't terribly interested in doing anything that isn't private, individualistic, cost-effective and, above all, easy.

This glorification of easy isn't limited to the newest environmental self-help books. The Web sites of the big U.S. environmental groups, the Environmental Protection Agency and even the American Association for the Advancement of Science offer markedly similar lists of actions that tell us we can change the world through our consumer choices, choices that are economic, simple, even stylish. Al Gore himself isn't immune. His recent Live Earth concert featured a who's-who lineup of celebrities who said that if we all do our little bit to recycle and conserve -- the simple things, mind you, because that's all we'll need (translation: that's all they think we'll go for) -- we can together rescue the world for our children and grandchildren.

Read on ...

Meanwhile, on the campaign trail ...

David Horsey - 21 November 2007

Beautiful Snow by J.W. Watson

Oh, the snow, the beautiful snow,
Filling the sky and the earth below,
Over the housetops, over the street,
Over the heads of people you meet.
Dancing, flirting, skimming along,

Beautiful snow! It can do no wrong;
lying to kiss a fair lady’s cheek,
Clinging to lips in frolicksome freak;
Beautiful snow from heaven above,
Pure as an angel, gentle as love!

Oh, the snow, the beautiful snow,
How the flakes gather and laugh as they go
Whirling about in maddening fun:
Chasing, laughing, hurrying by,

It lights on the face and it sparkles the eye;
And the dogs with a bark and a bound
Snap at the crystals as they eddy around;
The town is alive, and its heart is aglow,
To welcome the coming of beautiful snow!

Read the complete poem and more info here.

I originally hear this poem quoted by Chris Stevens on Northern Exposure.

The Coup at Home
Frank Rich - November 11, 2007

As Gen. Pervez Musharraf arrested judges, lawyers and human-rights activists in Pakistan last week, our Senate was busy demonstrating its own civic mettle. Chuck Schumer and Dianne Feinstein, liberal Democrats from America's two most highly populated blue states, gave the thumbs up to Michael B. Mukasey, ensuring his confirmation as attorney general.

So what if America's chief law enforcement official won't say that waterboarding is illegal? A state of emergency is a state of emergency. You're either willing to sacrifice principles to head off the next ticking bomb, or you're with the terrorists. Constitutional corners were cut in Washington in impressive synchronicity with General Musharraf's crackdown in Islamabad.

In the days since, the coup in Pakistan has been almost universally condemned as the climactic death knell for Bush foreign policy, the epitome of White House hypocrisy and incompetence. But that's not exactly news. It's been apparent for years that America was suicidal to go to war in Iraq, a country with no tie to 9/11 and no weapons of mass destruction, while showering billions of dollars on Pakistan, where terrorists and nuclear weapons proliferate under the protection of a con man who serves as a host to Osama bin Laden.

General Musharraf has always played our president for a fool and still does, with the vague promise of an election that he tossed the White House on Thursday. As if for sport, he has repeatedly mocked both Mr. Bush's "freedom agenda" and his post-9/11 doctrine that any country harboring terrorists will be "regarded by the United States as a hostile regime."

Read on ...

~

Curveball, Swing and A Miss
George F. Will - November 11, 2007

In late 2002, two strong-willed CIA officers, identified only as Beth and Margaret, were at daggers drawn. They had diametrically opposing views about the veracity of an Iraqi defector's reports concerning Saddam Hussein's biological weapons programs, especially the notorious but never-seen mobile weapons labs.

"Look," said Beth defiantly, "we can validate a lot of what this guy says." Margaret, angry and incredulous: "Where did you validate it?" Beth: "On the Internet." Margaret: "Exactly, it's on the Internet. That's where he got it, too!"

Margaret was right in that episode, recounted in the new book "Curveball" by Bob Drogin of the Los Angeles Times. Curveball was the code name of the Iraqi defector in Germany on whose reports the Bush administration relied heavily in its argument that Hussein's weapons of mass destruction justified a preventive war.

In 1999, Curveball defected to Germany, which has a significant portion of the Iraqi diaspora. Seeking the good life -- a prestigious job, a Mercedes -- he jumped to the head of the line of asylum-seekers and got the attention of Germany's intelligence agency with the word "Biowaffen," or germ weapons. He claimed to have been deeply involved in Hussein's sophisticated and deadly science, particularly those notorious mobile labs. Notorious and, we now know, nonexistent.

Read on ...

~

Off Target in the War on Cancer
Devra Davis - November 4, 2007

We've been fighting the war on cancer for almost four decades now, since President Richard M. Nixon officially launched it in 1971. It's time to admit that our efforts have often targeted the wrong enemies and used the wrong weapons.

Throughout the industrial world, the war on cancer remains focused on commercially fueled efforts to develop drugs and technologies that can find and treat the disease -- to the tune of more than $100 billion a year in the United States alone. Meanwhile, the struggle basically ignores most of the things known to cause cancer, such as tobacco, radiation, sunlight, benzene, asbestos, solvents, and some drugs and hormones. Even now, modern cancer-causing agents such as gasoline exhaust, pesticides and other air pollutants are simply deemed the inevitable price of progress.

They're not. Scientists understand that most cancer is not born but made. Although identical twins start life with amazingly similar genetic material, as adults they do not develop the same cancers. As with most of us, where they live and work and the habits that they develop do more to determine their health than their genes do. Americans in their 20s today carry around in their bodies levels of some chemicals that can impair their ability to produce healthy children -- and increase the chances that those children will develop cancer.

Read on ...

The Last Ride - High Country News

I don't even remember my first ride. When I was a young teenager, growing up in southern Oregon, my dad and I used to hitchhike back to our car after we’d boated down the Klamath, or the Rogue, or the Umpqua. Hitchhiking wasn’t a very large part of my life until I graduated from college, and became an idealist.

I decided to try to go places, go long distances. I liked the environmental aspect of hitchhiking, that it used less gas, and I liked that it was cheap. It also felt like a grand adventure, like a cool thing to do.

So I took a lot of trips. I went from Arizona to Montana to Colorado and back to Arizona, and I went from Colorado to Oregon and back to Colorado. I hitchhiked around Germany, France, Luxembourg and Holland.

I've probably gotten four or five hundred rides in the last 20 years. I think I did get better at hitchhiking as the years went by. But I also kept thinking I was finding the trick of it, and all of a sudden I would be standing on the highway for six hours with nobody picking me up, thinking I wasn't so smart after all.

Read on ...

I Was Wrong: Microsoft Won - open dot dot dot

I could feel it in my bones: the great victory of the EU over MS is a sham. Here's why.

Ex-steely Neelie - to be renamed wheeler-dealer Neelie - said as follows:

I told Microsoft that it should give legal security to programmers who help to develop open source software and confine its patent disputes to commercial software distributors and end users. Microsoft will now pledge to do so.

And naively, I thought that meant what it said. Silly me. Reference to the rather low-profile EU FAQ clarifies:

Can open source software developers implement patented interoperability information?

Open source software developers use various “open source” licences to distribute their software. Some of these licences are incompatible with the patent licence offered by Microsoft. It is up to the commercial open source distributors to ensure that their software products do not infringe upon Microsoft’s patents. If they consider that one or more of Microsoft’s patents would apply to their software product, they can either design around these patents, challenge their validity or take a patent licence from Microsoft.

Read on ...

What's at Stake in the Surveillance Debate in Congress - Wired Commentary

Over the next few weeks and months, civil libertarians and consumer advocates will wage a battle against the telecommunications companies and the Bush administration to preserve some semblance of privacy rights in Americans' communications.

Congress will be considering several versions of bills that will, one way or another, expand government access to phone calls and e-mails. These legislative proposals are complex and in flux, but there are two main issues at the center of the debate that citizens can focus on. One is whether eavesdropping on millions of Americans simultaneously is acceptable. The second is whether communications companies should get a free pass for breaking the law by allowing illegal warrantless surveillance of all Americans' communications.

In the 1960s and '70s, several Supreme Court cases held that citizens can reasonably expect that the government will not eavesdrop on their personal communications without first demonstrating to a court the need for this privacy invasion. Congress passed the Wiretap Act of 1968 to regulate eavesdropping for law enforcement purposes, and added the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) of 1978 to establish procedures for the president to follow when conducting surveillance for national-security purposes. FISA established a "secret court" -- the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, or FISC -- to review applications for national-security warrants. These could be obtained merely by showing that the target was an agent of a foreign power.

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The Kingdom of the Lotus - Patrick Symmes
A not-always-mythic journey to Shambhala, over sky-high mountains and across vicious deserts, requiring boldness of heart, purity of vision, the recitation of 99 million mantras, and $45 worth of Snickers bars, party balloons, Diamox, and dehydrated soup.

I'm not telling you where it is. But in order to reach Shambhala, you need a mixture of merit and dumb luck, and at first the dumb part seemed to be working. When I wrestled my luggage, packed with clothes for three climates and obscure tracts from four religions, onto the night train out of New Delhi, there was something auspicious in my bunk assignment.

It was a sleeping carriage, the start of a run east. Tomorrow I would cross the border to Nepal on foot. Then on to Kathmandu. Then Lhasa. Then over Tibet and onward, sometimes west and always north, to places unknown. Tonight the train was jostling, hot, full of brilliant Indian colors and smells, the famous synesthesia of the subcontinent, too much of everything. The cabin had four bunks. The pair on the right were occupied by a Brahmin couple, having their feet kissed in farewell by their adult children. And on the bunk below mine, what had to be perfect luck: a Buddhist monk, his elegant robes dark mustard, his disposition affable.

One is enjoined to seek, on the road to the hidden kingdom, the blessing and advice of wise monks, and around midnight, after rubbing menthol all over himself, this learned man listened to my plan. I was setting out on the ancient pilgrimage route to Shambhala, I told him, to seek the king and paradise here on earth. I was afraid, I said. Did he have any advice? No. Any teaching? No. Any blessing? No. Shambhala was "lama nonsense," he said. A Thai, he didn't believe in the stories, carefully curated over the centuries by Tibetan Buddhists, that Shambhala was a real place, a city that could be found. Shambhala, the monk told me, was a destination for an inner journey. I should meditate more, he suggested, and travel less.

"Don't go," he said, and went to sleep.

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Gone: Mass Extinction and the Hazards of Earth's Vanishing Biodiversity - Julia Whitty MotherJones

It is a fact widely accepted by biologists but little known by the population at large. By the end of the century, half of all species on Earth may be extinct due to global warming and other causes. Who will survive the world's dwindling biodiversity, and why?

We awake in our tents in the moonlight to what sounds like a dance troupe in wooden clogs practicing on rock under stunted juniper trees. It's a half-dozen Carmen mountain white-tailed deer, scraping at the ground with bootlike hooves, bending gracile necks to chew on wet soil and lick it dry. They're harvesting the minerals and moisture from our urine soaked into the parched earth of the high desert, the herd toiling through the night and into the morning in a pursuit tenacious enough to enlighten us to the wastefulness of our own bodies. Clearly, the three of us have squandered most of what we drank hiking to 7,400 feet on the south rim of Texas' Chisos Mountains. From the deer's point of view, our arrival here is the next best thing to rain.

Come morning, we pack camp and loiter on the precipice, staring across wracked ranges and sunburnt country to the Rio Grande thousands of feet below, and to the even higher country of Mexico's Sierra Madre. Here, in Big Bend National Park, one of America's truly wild places, there's barely a sign of human impact, and not a sound of it—not planes, cars, or human voices. The silence is so thick that our ears feel congested, and we jump when the quiet is pierced by the whistle of a peregrine falcon on its glide path through thin air.

We spend a couple of hours here with binoculars, map, and compass, scanning 100-mile visibility, scrutinizing the area below the rim and trying to find a trail we might travel another day. Although we don't know it, we're peering down into the place where a lost hiker is desperately trying to find the same trail and a freshwater spring midway along it. At this point he has been without water for three days. We don't see him stumbling through cholla and nopales cactus and writing farewell notes to loved ones—though he is likely staring up at the mirage of us silhouetted against the sky.

Ironically, this corner of the Chihuahuan Desert is lush at the moment, watered by rains two months ago that are still working their way through soils and roots and cells, so that many plants are blooming and an explosion of butterflies jams the breezes. The cacti are swollen with hoarded water. The Chisos oaks are dropping so many acorns that park rangers have closed trails where black bears are fattening on them. Countless millions of walking-stick insects are coupled in such dense mating congregations in the canopies of mesquites that entire trees appear to be walking through the sky. Everything is haloed in the golds, yellows, and greens of desert grasses, some taller than us, all bowed under heavy seed heads destined to feed and water kangaroo rats.

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Colleges shouldn't have to police illegal downloading - Rocky Mountain News Editorial

Congress is in the process of renewing the Higher Education Act of 1965, the federal law that established a major role for Washington in providing aid to low- and middle-income college students.

As with most legislation that has large sums of taxpayer funding attached, lawmakers are finding the temptation to lard it up with regulations impossible to resist.

Beltway-based micromanagement of colleges and universities is rarely wise, but it's really offensive when the hammer of federal law is wielded at the behest of a narrow interest group.

In this case, the powerful interest is the entertainment industry, which wants to sic U.S. Department of Education officials on schools where students use campus Internet networks to illegally download music and video files.

It's odd that Congress would entangle the Education Department in an otherwise unrelated law-enforcement issue; that's usually the bailiwick of the Justice Department.

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Edgar Allen Poe dies on this date in 1849, four days after being found in a Baltimore gutter.

(He) was an American poet, short story writer, editor, literary critic, and one of the leaders of the American Romantic Movement. Best known for his tales of mystery and of the macabre, Poe was one of the early American practitioners of the short story and a progenitor of detective fiction and crime fiction. He is also credited with contributing to the emergent science fiction genre.

- Wikipedia

The Raven

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore --
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door --
"'Tis some visiter," I muttered, "tapping at my chamber door --
           Only this and nothing more."

Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December;
And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor.
Eagerly I wished the morrow; -- vainly I had sought to borrow
From my books surcease of sorrow -- sorrow for the lost Lenore --
For the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore --
           Nameless here for evermore.

And the silken, sad, uncertain rustling of each purple curtain
Thrilled me -- filled me with fantastic terrors never felt before;
So that now, to still the beating of my heart, I stood repeating,
"'Tis some visiter entreating entrance at my chamber door --
Some late visiter entreating entrance at my chamber door; --
           This it is and nothing more."

Presently my soul grew stronger; hesitating then no longer,
"Sir," said I, "or Madam, truly your forgiveness I implore;
But the fact is I was napping, and so gently you came rapping,
And so faintly you came tapping, tapping at my chamber door,
That I scarce was sure I heard you " -- here I opened wide the door; ----
           Darkness there and nothing more.

Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there wondering, fearing,
Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before;
But the silence was unbroken, and the stillness gave no token,
And the only word there spoken was the whispered word, "Lenore?"
This I whispered, and an echo murmured back the word, "Lenore!" --
           Merely this and nothing more.

Back into the chamber turning, all my soul within me burning,
Soon again I heard a tapping somewhat louder than before.
"Surely," said I, "surely that is something at my window lattice;
Let me see, then, what thereat is, and this mystery explore --
Let my heart be still a moment and this mystery explore;--
           'Tis the wind and nothing more!"

Open here I flung the shutter, when, with many a flirt and flutter,
In there stepped a stately Raven of the saintly days of yore;
Not the least obeisance made he; not a minute stopped or stayed he;
But, with mien of lord or lady, perched above my chamber door --
Perched upon a bust of Pallas just above my chamber door --
           Perched, and sat, and nothing more.

Then this ebony bird beguiling my sad fancy into smiling,
By the grave and stern decorum of the countenance it wore,
"Though thy crest be shorn and shaven, thou," I said, "art sure no craven,
Ghastly grim and ancient Raven wandering from the Nightly shore --
Tell me what thy lordly name is on the Night's Plutonian shore!"
           Quoth the Raven "Nevermore."

Much I marvelled this ungainly fowl to hear discourse so plainly,
Though its answer little meaning -- little relevancy bore;
For we cannot help agreeing that no living human being
Ever yet was blessed with seeing bird above his chamber door --
Bird or beast upon the sculptured bust above his chamber door,
           With such name as "Nevermore."

But the Raven, sitting lonely on the placid bust, spoke only
That one word, as if his soul in that one word he did outpour.
Nothing further then he uttered -- not a feather then he fluttered --
Till I scarcely more than muttered "Other friends have flown before --
On the morrow he will leave me, as my hopes have flown before."
           Then the bird said "Nevermore."

Startled at the stillness broken by reply so aptly spoken,
"Doubtless," said I, "what it utters is its only stock and store
Caught from some unhappy master whom unmerciful Disaster
Followed fast and followed faster till his songs one burden bore --
Till the dirges of his Hope that melancholy burden bore
           Of 'Never -- nevermore'."

But the Raven still beguiling my sad fancy into smiling,
Straight I wheeled a cushioned seat in front of bird, and bust and door;
Then, upon the velvet sinking, I betook myself to linking
Fancy unto fancy, thinking what this ominous bird of yore --
What this grim, ungainly, ghastly, gaunt and ominous bird of yore
           Meant in croaking "Nevermore."

This I sat engaged in guessing, but no syllable expressing
To the fowl whose fiery eyes now burned into my bosom's core;
This and more I sat divining, with my head at ease reclining
On the cushion's velvet lining that the lamp-light gloated o'er,
But whose velvet violet lining with the lamp-light gloating o'er,
            She shall press, ah, nevermore!

Then, methought, the air grew denser, perfumed from an unseen censer
Swung by Seraphim whose foot-falls tinkled on the tufted floor.
"Wretch," I cried, "thy God hath lent thee -- by these angels he hath sent thee
Respite -- respite and nepenthe, from thy memories of Lenore;
Quaff, oh quaff this kind nepenthe and forget this lost Lenore!"
           Quoth the Raven "Nevermore."

"Prophet!" said I, "thing of evil! -- prophet still, if bird or devil! --
Whether Tempter sent, or whether tempest tossed thee here ashore,
Desolate yet all undaunted, on this desert land enchanted --
On this home by Horror haunted -- tell me truly, I implore --
Is there -- is there balm in Gilead? -- tell me -- tell me, I implore!"
           Quoth the Raven "Nevermore."

"Prophet!" said I, "thing of evil -- prophet still, if bird or devil!
By that Heaven that bends above us -- by that God we both adore --
Tell this soul with sorrow laden if, within the distant Aidenn,
It shall clasp a sainted maiden whom the angels name Lenore --
Clasp a rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore."
           Quoth the Raven "Nevermore."

"Be that word our sign in parting, bird or fiend!" I shrieked, upstarting --
"Get thee back into the tempest and the Night's Plutonian shore!
Leave no black plume as a token of that lie thy soul hath spoken!
Leave my loneliness unbroken! -- quit the bust above my door!
Take thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off my door!"
           Quoth the Raven "Nevermore."

And the Raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting
On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door;
And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon's that is dreaming,
And the lamp-light o'er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor;
And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor
           Shall be lifted -- nevermore!

Practical Values: Hard to Break - MotherJones

As the scary studies about plastic's health effects pile up, should we kick the habit?

My moment of plastic panic came a few months ago. As a science writer, I've spent the past several years following the steady stream of research into the disturbing effects of the chemicals that leach into our bodies from everyday plastic objects. I'd managed to stay pretty calm about these unsettling discoveries, but then I went to yet another presentation where renowned scientists described new, peer-reviewed findings on how plastic's ingredients may cause reproductive abnormalities and obesity. Afterward, I huddled with the other journalists present, brimming with uneasy questions: Does this mean we should ditch our refillable plastic water bottles? Is it safe for our kids to chew on plastic toys? Should we try to go completely plastic free?

It's one thing to use cloth shopping bags in the name of ecofriendliness or to forswear plastic cutlery in the pursuit of style; it's another to eschew plastics because they might be a health risk. But are you about to give up your computer or cell phone? What about your bike helmet or your child's car seat? Your contact lenses? Your toothbrush? Probably not.

Then what to do about the alarming fact that plastic's chemical constituents are percolating throughout our bodies, apparently interfering with our metabolism, our sex organs, and our children's neurological and reproductive development? The Centers for Disease Control has found two compounds—phthalates, used in polyvinyl chloride (pvc) plastic, and bisphenol A, a building block of polycarbonate plastics—in the urine of a majority of Americans tested. Both chemicals are short-lived once they enter the environment, but they're being scrutinized for their potential to mimic and disrupt our hormones—even before we're born.

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Sabotaging Google - John C. Dvorak

A reader, Courtney Cox (no relation to the actress), recently pointed out to me that the top results of recent complex Google searches turned out to be inane Chinese sites that were not even parking sites, just an assortment of keywords that somehow got indexed and brought to the top of the results list. After seeing a few of these sites, I have to wonder what's going on. Is it sabotage?

Let's start by showing you a typical site: http://vmk.wtoxd.cn/xmijotb.html (there's some annoying Active X here. So visit at your own risk). This site was the top result listed when the search term "reset mp3 player m240d" was entered. And here are the full search results, in which nine of the top ten results are these weird Chinese sites.

Courtney sent me numerous examples of this phenomenon, and it's obvious that the more specific and detailed the search request, the more likely Google is to list these Chinese sites. The issue has apparently been reported to Google, but if the basic algorithms allow this sort of result, even banning the specific sites will not stop this sort of abuse.

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The Road from Media Ethics to Information Anarchy - John C. Dvorak

The definition of "media" has undergone some major changes over the past few years. Many of the changes—and confusion—can be attributed to the immediate nature of information, thanks to new media and the arrival of bloggers and vloggers.

Is a blogger a journalist? The answer is evolving to "Yes, if he/she wants to be." The fact is that in this country, anyone can be a journalist, as there is largely a protected right to a free press. And a free press does not mean that you have to be owned by the Times-Mirror, or anyone else for that matter.

Newsletter writers are journalists just as much as New York Times reporters are (albeit without the NYT structure and all of its ethical and other rules). The subject of ethics always enters the "journalist" debate because it gets attention. What we consider ethical journalistic behavior, for the most part, is dictated by the corporate policies designed for specific news organizations. The big news organizations usually preach that their ethical standards are the best and that everyone should use them. This is a form of marketing and nothing more. Unfortunately, it's a trick that tends to confuse the small fries who often no longer define themselves as "true" media.

Old media ethics bugaboo. Much of what is deemed ethical by The New York Times is simply impractical for a low-budget online publication. Here's the example I often use to prove this point: A small-time publication is given the opportunity to cover an event in a faraway place, and the sponsoring corporation offers to pay for the trip. The Times would insist on picking up the tab itself. But the small-timer may not have the budget to do so. If it doesn't accept the sponsor's offer, it doesn't get the story, and the Times does. How is that fair to the readers? In fact, if the small-time publication adopts the same ethical code as the Times, it loses out. It's as if the small-timer was tricked into submission.

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DRM, Vista and Your Rights - polishlinux.org

In the US, France and a few other countries it is already forbidden to play legally purchased music or videos using GNU/Linux media players . Sounds like sci-fi? Unfortunately not. And it won’t end up on multimedia only. Welcome to the the new era of DRM!

In this article I would like to explain the problem of Digital Rights (or restrictions) Management, especially in the version promoted by Microsoft with the new Windows Vista release. Not everyone is familiar with the dangers of the new “standard” for the whole computer industry. Yes, the whole industry — because it goes way beyond the software produced by the giant from Redmond and its affiliates.

A similar (but a bit more specialized) term to DRM is Trusted Computing. The term is intentionally misleading. It does not try to improve the security of the user, but rather wants to ensure that the user can be “trusted”. Obviously it’s not about the trust, it’s about the money. The companies that deliver content (specially multimedia, but it’s not restricted to media only) to the client want to be able to control the way it is used. For example, they want the content to be displayed on approved media only, banning all the “illegal” applications (illegal does not mean that it violates the law, but rather the agreement between the client and the company that sells the media). More on Trusted Computing can be found (as always) in Wikipedia.

Read on ...

It's from January, but still a good read if you are unfamiliar with what DRM really is.

Just Don't Call Them Communes - U.S. News and World Report

It's the luxury edition of the American exurb: hilltop scenery, new-money mansions, horses galloping behind split-rail fences. About 25 miles west of Washington, D.C., Loudoun County boasts a median household income of $98,483, twice the national rate. It's the kind of place beloved by D.C. power brokers, whose sprawling estates serve as monuments to the American dream. These days, however, Loudoun County is also at the forefront of a very different if no less American vision: the commune.

The idea that like-minded individuals should forge a community is on something of a comeback tour. An online directory of "intentional communities" has more than doubled in the past two years to 1,295 in North America, and 20 new listings are added each month.

Past imperfect. But forget the term commune. Try "ecovillage," where residents live in Earth-friendly homes on communal land, or "cohousing," where a common house serves as a gathering place. Driven by a green ethos and discontent with impersonal suburbs, residents frequently dine together, share possessions, and baby-sit one another's children. But shared income is a thing of the past, and private homes are essential. Still, the old stereotypes of socialism, drugs, and rebellion dog these communities. "We've fought this for years," says Joani Blank, a cohousing advocate who lives in a divvied-up former market in Oakland, Calif. "Our ideology is about neighborhoods more than anything else."

Poverty and disillusionment drove many older communes to extinction, but the idea was reincarnated, particularly in Europe, in the post-Cold War era. By 1995, Danish activists Hildur and Ross Jackson had created the Global Ecovillage Network to promote sustainable living around the world. Even some of the most archetypal communes, such as the 1960s socialist experiment, the Farm in Tennessee, have reshaped themselves. In New York, the 175-acre EcoVillage at Ithaca boasts two 30-home neighborhoods, office space, and working farms.

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Iraq by the Numbers - TomDispatch.com

Sometimes, numbers can strip human beings of just about everything that makes us what we are. Numbers can silence pain, erase love, obliterate emotion, and blur individuality. But sometimes numbers can also tell a necessary story in ways nothing else can.

This January, President Bush announced his "surge" plan for Iraq, which he called his "new way forward." It was, when you think about it, all about numbers. Since then, 28,500 new American troops have surged into that country, mostly in and around Baghdad; and, according to the Washington Post, there has also been a hidden surge of private armed contractors -- hired guns, if you will -- who free up troops by taking over many mundane military positions from guarding convoys to guarding envoys. In the meantime, other telltale numbers in Iraq have surged as well.

Now, Americans are theoretically waiting for the commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, General David Petraeus, to "report" to Congress in September on the "progress" of the President's surge strategy. But there really is no reason to wait for September. An interim report -- "Iraq by the numbers" -- can be prepared now (as it could have been prepared last month, or last year). The trajectory of horror in Iraq has long been clear; the fact that the U.S. military is a motor driving the Iraqi cataclysm has been no less clear for years now. So here is my own early version of the "September Report."

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Can 'green chic' save the planet? - CSMonitor

Ecofriendly buying choices alone can't sustain America's lifestyle, experts warn – unless 'looking green' becomes 'voting green.'

Green, it seems, has gone mainstream. Magazines like Elle, Fortune, and Vanity Fair have published "green issues" in the past year, and the Academy Awards were carbon neutral. The Vatican recently announced plans to offset its 2007 emissions, while Costa Rica pledged to arrive at "net zero" by 2021.

Green has also gone trendy. Last week, Whole Foods Market released a limited edition, $15 cotton bag with "I'm not a plastic bag" emblazoned on its side. When the bag went on sale at outlets in Taiwan, a stampede followed. In Hong Kong, throngs shut down a shopping mall. In New York City last week, lines formed at dawn. Later that day, bags were offered on Craigslist for between $200 and $500. "These bags are walking billboards," says Isabel Spearman, a spokeswoman for the bag's designer, Anya Hindmarch. "You do have to make something trendy, and it becomes a habit. That's the whole point."

Savvy marketers have clearly tapped into something. But the green craze has many asking how, if at all, it addresses what many characterize as an impending climate catastrophe.

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The Digital Imprimatur - How big brother and big media can put the Internet genie back in the bottle.
November 4th, 2003

Over the last two years I have become deeply and increasingly pessimistic about the future of liberty and freedom of speech, particularly in regard to the Internet. This is a complete reversal of the almost unbounded optimism I felt during the 1994-1999 period when public access to the Internet burgeoned and innovative new forms of communication appeared in rapid succession. In that epoch I was firmly convinced that universal access to the Internet would provide a countervailing force against the centralisation and concentration in government and the mass media which act to constrain freedom of expression and unrestricted access to information. Further, the Internet, properly used, could actually roll back government and corporate encroachment on individual freedom by allowing information to flow past the barriers erected by totalitarian or authoritarian governments and around the gatekeepers of the mainstream media.

So convinced was I of the potential of the Internet as a means of global unregulated person-to-person communication that I spent the better part of three years developing Speak Freely for Unix and Windows, a free (public domain) Internet telephone with military-grade encryption. Why did I do it? Because I believed that a world in which anybody with Internet access could talk to anybody else so equipped in total privacy and at a fraction of the cost of a telephone call would be a better place to live than a world without such communication.

Computers and the Internet, like all technologies, are a double-edged sword: whether they improve or degrade the human condition depends on who controls them and how they're used. A large majority of computer-related science fiction from the 1950's through the dawn of the personal computer in the 1970's focused on the potential for centralised computer-administered societies to manifest forms of tyranny worse than any in human history, and the risk that computers and centralised databases, adopted with the best of intentions, might inadvertently lead to the emergence of just such a dystopia.

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Living With a Computer by James Fallow - The Atlantic Monthly, July 1982

The author talks about his Sol-20 that he purchased in 1979, his trials and tribulations with it and then gives advice about buying a computer in the early 80's. It is interesting read as he talks about the make up of the industry in pre Microsoft days. It is amazing to read the specs he suggests and the capacities of the time.

... for a total of about $4,000, Optek gave me the machinery I have used happily to this day.

The microcomputer industry these days is like the auto business in 1910, with a thousand little hustlers trying to claim a piece of the action.

although any serious computer should have at least 48 and preferably 64K of random access memory

You don't need to remove the hard disks because each one stores a prodigious amount of data, from two or three on up to several dozen megabytes.

I gave in and bought a daisy wheel (printer), the Anderson-Jacobson 830 model, which cost about $1,400.

... the Displaywriter with a good printer was quoted at $11,350 by my local IBM dealer.

The best-known small computer is probably the Apple. Because there are so many Apples in circulation, and because the company has pushed software so aggressively, you can get a wider variety of programs and accessories for an Apple than for any other system. (How things change!)

One of the most interesting new computers, both as a piece of machinery and as a specimen of capitalism in action, is the Osborne I.

Lets see, it is day 7 of the Tour de France and I am finally watching a bit of the racing this morning on VS. The tour has hit the beginning of the Alps, ahh, the mountain stages. I really haven't followed the tour this past week, so I have some to burn some midnight oil to catch up and find out what is happening.

It has been fun listening to Phil and Paul again.

~

Tour thrives before thin heartland crowds - IHT

The weather was balmy, the course beautiful, the race exciting, but the crowds in Burgundy were generally small for the fifth stage of the Tour de France.

That does not mean, however, that the Tour is not alive and well in the heart of the country.

One explanation for the sparse turnout in three days so far in France is that the Tour has been traversing regions that do not attract vacationers, the usual bulk of spectators. A test of that theory will come in the Alps, starting on Saturday, and in the south next week.

For now, however, as it passed through villages so remote that cellphones went blessedly dead, the Tour showed on Thursday that, despite all the doping scandals and suspicions surrounding bicycle racing, it retains its traditional grip on such places as Lormes, population 1,300, most of whom turned out to celebrate the race's visit.

Read on ...

~

Casey Gibson takes the best photos!

~ Life, Liberty and the Pursute on Happiness ~

Schoolhouse Rock! - 'There are going to be fireworks' on YouTube

~ Quotes ~

Patriotism is supporting your country all the time and your government when it deserves it - Mark Twain

... how little do my countrymen know what precious blessings they are in possession of, and which no other people on earth enjoy! - Thomas Jefferson

We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. When the loyal opposition dies, I think the soul of America dies with it. - Edward R. Murrow

"My country, right or wrong" is a thing no patriot would ever think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying "My mother, drunk or sober." - G. K. Chesterton

The notion that a radical is one who hates his country is naive and usually idiotic. He is, more likely, one who likes his country more than the rest of us, and is thus more disturbed than the rest of us when he sees it debauched. He is not a bad citizen turning to crime; he is a good citizen driven to despair. - H. L. Mencken

Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country. - John F. Kennedy

The government is merely a servant - merely a temporary servant; it cannot be its prerogative to determine what is right and what is wrong, and decide who is a patriot and who isn't. Its function is to obey orders, not originate them. - Mark Twain

To announce that there must be no criticism of the president, or that we are to stand by the president, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public. - Theodore Roosevelt

Restriction of free thought and free speech is the most dangerous of all subversions. It is the one un-American act that could most easily defeat us. - William O. Douglas

~ Almost Nation Anthem ~

O beautiful for spacious skies,
For amber waves of grain,
For purple mountain majesties
Above the fruited plain!
America! America!
God shed His grace on thee
And crown thy good with brotherhood
From sea to shining sea!

O beautiful for pilgrim feet,
Whose stern, impassion'd stress
A thoroughfare for freedom beat
Across the wilderness!
America! America!
God mend thine ev'ry flaw,
Confirm thy soul in self-control,
Thy liberty in law!

O beautiful for heroes proved
In liberating strife,
Who more than self their country loved,
And mercy more than life!
America! America!
May God thy gold refine,
Till all success be nobleness,
And ev'ry gain divine!

O beautiful for patriot dream
That sees beyond the years
Thine alabaster cities gleam,
Undimm'd by human tears!
America! America!
God shed His grace on thee
And crown thy good with brotherhood
From sea to shining sea!

- Katharine Lee Bates

~ The Written Word ~

Unfree Speech - By Robert J. Samuelson - The Washington Post

The Fourth of July is an apt moment to reflect on one of the great underreported stories of our time: the rise of speech regulation. Glance at the First Amendment, but do not think it still applies. Large bodies of political speech are now governed by laws, agency regulations, court decisions and lawyerly interpretations. Speech has become unfree.

This does not mean that we don't have vigorous debate or that most points of view aren't represented. But in and around elections, what can be said, by whom and under what circumstances, is now a tangled web of legal qualifications -- all justified as campaign finance "reform."

Read on ...

~ Editorial Cartoons ~

Cagle Cartoons collection for Independence Day

Dead Weight by Eric Hansen - Outside Magazine - When our man dons a tumpline and dhoko for a five-day trek in the Himalayas, he discovers two things: Nepali porters may be the toughest workers in the universe, and there's simply no way he can measure up

So far, I have been carrying a bamboo basket and tumpline for roughly three-quarters of a mile in Nepal and already the locals' responses are falling into a tidy pattern.

My three fellow porters and I approach a stone hamlet at the back of our string of clients, eight Chinese yuppies from Shanghai, and instantly one of the country's ubiquitous semi-feral children spots me—the freakishly huge queri sweating, grunting, and wincing under the weight of 13 pounds of his own clothes.

"Look! Here comes White Eyes carrying a dhoko!" he yells, and skips ahead to tell everyone the circus has arrived.

... A dhoko-naamlo isn't fun. It's an ancient tradition from a simpler, more Hobbesian time. The dhoko, a cone-shaped basket with a flat bottom, is woven out of bamboo slats to be roughly as tall as your torso. The naamlo, or tumpline, is a section of rope with a three-inch-wide head strap, generally cut from a flour or rice sack. Wrap the naamlo around the back side of the dhoko; position it just in front of the crown of your head; insert anvil collection.

Read on ...

PC Mags Five Ideas That Will Reinvent Modern Computing

• IMAX At Home
• The Midair Mouse
• The Perfect Machine
• Extreme Peer-to-Peer
• The Man-Made Brain

Read on ...

 
Mike Luckovich - 06.23.2007

Shut Up About the iPhone, Already! - Wake me up when this pathetic week of iPhone launch hype is over. - John C. Dvorak

Forbes.com has a special section report on Twenty-First Century Cities

• Two Billion Slum Dwellers - Cities are the future of the world, and slums are the future of the city.
• Snitchtown - In the brave new world of ubiquitous security cameras, universal surveillance is seen as the solution to all urban ills.
• In Defense Of Sprawl - Think the inexorable spread of cities is a bad thing? Think again.
• Megacities Of The Future - The demographic future belongs to cities like Mumbai, Shanghai and Dhaka.
• Ghost Cities of 2100 - Even as the world's urban population explodes, these eight cities face potential extinction

This Digitally Mundane Life - John Dvorak, PC Magazine

I wonder if anyone will ever do a study of how technology has actually harmed the quality of life of the average person who has fully adopted the digital lifestyle. This isn't to say that the word processor and the information Web site haven't benefited us all in lots of ways. I'm talking about the fact that, with the computer in particular, you have to take the good with the bad - and it is starting to look mostly bad.

And by bad, I mean time-wasting. Seriously time-wasting. Do we really need to send e-mail correspondence to the same person sometimes three or four times in one day just to say that you agree with something? And of course to even find this correspondence we have to wade though an inbox full of e-mail junk.

... Want to waste even more time? Become a blogger. The mechanism is easy and it's cheap - free, in fact. While you are blogging you can check other blogs and create a network of the banal. This is a great use of your time, no? "Today I ate a cheese sandwich. No wait, it wasn't like the cheese sandwich that other blogger ate 10 years ago. Really, it wasn't."

Hey, wait a minute, he's talking about me.

Banal? I ain't no stickin banal!

Oh, well maybe, my byline is "just another persons waste of time" afterall, isn't it.

By the way, my cheese sandwiches are toasted!

The Road Less Taken
Robert Frost

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that, the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I --
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Pete Jordan (aka Dishwasher Pete - myspace | wikipedia) has a new book out and there is a review on MotherJones with a short interview.

From Open Source Law publications:

Brenden Scotts reply to the May 14th, Fortune article Microsoft takes on the free world

Software Patents: Microsoft jumps the shark (pdf)

Via consumeraffairs.com

The news that Dell will begin making the fast-growing Ubuntu flavor of Linux available on some of its machines should be welcomed by consumers everywhere.

It not only makes a tiny dent in Microsoft's armor but also is one of the few times consumers can actually get something for nothing. Best of all, the something for nothing is, in this reviewer's humble opinion, a lot better than the high-priced spreads.

Though its name may sound odd initially, there's nothing odd about the way Ubuntu works. It is fast, lean and responsive, like a sleek jungle cat prowling through the South Africa outback.

Read on

From Christian Science Monitor - What's happening to the bees?

Beekeeper James Doan first began finding empty hives last fall. Entire bee colonies seemed to have up and vanished, leaving their honey behind. Noting the unusually wet fall in Hamlin, N.Y., he blamed the weather. Unable to forage in the rain, the bees probably starved, he reasoned.

But when deserted hives began appearing daily, "we knew it was something different," he says. Now, at the beginning of the 2007 pollination season, more than half of his 4,300 hives are gone. "I'm just about ready to give up," says Mr. Doan from his honeybee wintering site in Ft. Meade, Fla. "I'm not sure I can survive."

The cause of the die-offs has yet to be determined. Its effect on the food supply may be significant. Longer-term, it may also force a rethinking of some agricultural practices including our heavy reliance on human-managed bees for pollination.

Scientists call it "colony collapse disorder" (CCD). First reported in Florida last fall, the problem has since spread to 24 states. Commercial beekeepers are reporting losses of between 50 and 90 percent, an unprecedented amount even for an industry accustomed to die-offs.

Many worry that what's shaping up to be a honeybee catastrophe will disrupt the food supply. While staple crops like wheat and corn are pollinated by wind, some 90 cultivated flowering crops – from almonds and apples to cranberries and watermelons – rely heavily on honeybees trucked in for pollinization. Honeybees pollinate every third bite of food ingested by Americans, says a Cornell study. Bees help generate some $14 billion in produce.

Read on

Papa was a Rolling Stone's illegal substance - D. Allan Kerr - Sea Coast Online

At a time when we find ourselves lost in a blizzard of bad news from a maddening war, shady political dealings and cover-ups, preening presidential contenders we wouldn't even buy a used car from, and the usual laundry list of murders and atrocities, leave it to a Rolling Stone to put it all into perspective.

Read on ...

Why let a little thing like a pedestrian slow you down?

The Final Word by Craig Wilson - USA Today

From MotherJones - How the poor get dinged at every turn:

Bush's tax cuts (extended until 2010) save those earning between $20,000 and $30,000 an average of $10 a year, while those earning $1 million are saved $42,700.

In 2002, Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) compared those who point out statistics such as the one above to Adolf Hitler.

Wondering where this info is true, read Paul Krugmans NYT editorial available on Truthout.

Which brings me to the last line of Krugman's editorial - "You see, some folks must be under the impression that as long as something is repeated often enough, it will become true. That was how George W. Bush got to the top." - guess that is why Bush thinks Iraq was a good idea, in his mind "When the legend becomes fact, print the legend."

For years, conservationists have warned about over fishing of large sharks in the northwestern Atlantic, as the demand for meat and fins, coupled with slow growth and reproduction rates of many species, has caused sharp declines in populations of hammerheads, duskies and other sharks.

Researchers are now reporting repercussions beyond the declining shark populations. Depletion of large sharks, they write in Friday's issue of the journal Science, has led to the destruction of the bay scallop fishery along parts of the Eastern seaboard.

The study, by Ransom A. Myers of Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and colleagues, is among the few to document the cascading effects that the loss of a top predator can have on a marine ecosystem. In the absence of large sharks, the researchers say, the smaller sharks, skates and rays that they feed upon have thrived. In turn, the study shows that as one of these middle links in the food chain, the cownose ray, has become more abundant, it has wiped out scallop beds in North Carolina.

Read on ...

Fears of a YouTube Swiftboat

To get a sense of the confusion the mega-viral Vote Different anti-Hillary Clinton video is sowing in professional political circles, just ask Clay Johnson, a veteran of Howard Dean's presidential campaign and a certifiable big thinker on online electioneering.

I know that the (Barack) Obama folks are saying that they didn't make it ... but people will still believe that it's from them," said Johnson about the YouTube clip in an interview Wednesday afternoon, when the identity of the ad's creator was still a mystery. "The real trouble ... is that as people get more sophisticated in producing these videos, you're going to see a very large blur in what's official and what's not."

As if to illustrate the point, within hours of Johnson speaking with Wired News, the creator of Vote Different revealed himself on the Huffington Post as one of Johnson's employees. Phillip de Vellis had been working at Blue State Digital, a political technology consulting firm that provides Obama's presidential campaign with software development and web hosting services, where Johnson is a founding partner.

Read on

From the free features section of Wall Street Journal comes:

Linux Starts to Find Home on Desktops
More Businesses Adopt Cost-Saving Software For Some Workers' PCs

The Linux operating system, having made inroads into corporations' backroom server computers, is showing hints of inching into a much broader market: employees' personal computers.

The much-hyped notion that Linux would be viable software to run desktop and notebook PCs seemed dead on arrival a few years ago. But the idea is showing some new vital signs.

Chief information officers have experienced the cost savings that Linux has brought to their server computers, which do narrow and repetitive tasks such as data storage and serving up Web sites. Now some CIOs are taking new interest in installing Linux on workers' PCs as well, for certain narrow applications.

Auto maker PSA Peugeot Citroen last month said it will start using Linux on 20,000 of its workers' PCs. Novell Inc., which sells a version of Linux and is supplying it to Peugeot, says it has recently signed up several large U.S. financial institutions that are installing Linux on some employee PCs. Sales of Linux PCs are showing a "really nice uptick" at Novell, says Ronald Hovsepian, chief executive of Novell.

Read on ...

Justice for Dafur

Angelina Jolie, a goodwill ambassador for the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, is now writing about Africa, not just doing goodwill work.

With Ballmers recent FUD about patent threats against Linux (and if anyone knows about stealing intellectual property, it would be MS!) I found Open Source, the Internet and the Decline of Microsoft on drdreg.com an interesting read.

~ update ~

Check out Show Us The Code - an open letter to Steven Ballmer

~ update ~

doofus - I won't be holding my breath waiting on Dell to start selling Linux machines. I think it was just a bunch of hot air.

Here is a wonderful article for those thing of moving to Linux/Ubuntu or moving someelse to it. It is worth the read

http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=58862 

To me it is a bit humorous - I always considered myself somewhat of a "Windows Power User". I guess I wasn't - I did modify the registry by hand, was able to install drivers not just form cd's, ect... - I guess I could really be a geek. Ahhhhhhh!!!!!

Why Craigslist chooses not to rake in the big bucks:

Craigslist President and Chief Executive Jim Buckmaster isn't nuts. He just sounds that way, particularly to anyone who thinks that the point of running a business is, you know, to make money.

And that was enough to make his appearance last week at the UBS Global Media & Communications Conference feel like a dizzying trip through Lewis Carroll's looking glass.

Speaking in an unflappable, near-monotone, Buckmaster calmly discussed with UBS analyst Ben Schachter a business model which, by any rational standard, is completely insane. And yet it's also been shockingly successful, at least in terms of traffic. Craigslist has revolutionized the classified advertising market with its free listings for everything from real estate to jobs to personals. Newspaper companies, in particular, have been hit hard.

Read more on Forbes.com

This article on High Country News talks about how "the Park Service finds itself watcheddogged by former staffers who no longer fear the consequences of protest."

Old but Faithful by Stephen J Lyons - How a feisty group of government retirees faced down the Bush administration and changed the future of America’s national parks

(Subscription required ... but it is worth it!)

Myth No. 1: War is good - By Edward W. Wood Jr.

 The problem with America in its struggle with terrorism is one we never talk of: our dedication - some would say addiction - to the myths of World War II.

From our colonial wars, our revolution, our wars with Native Americans, our Civil War, our wars of expansion in 1846 and 1898 and our victory in World War I, we inherited war as a path to national identity. Our stunning triumph in World War II gave war its mythical and glorious aspect in our minds.

In spite of the stalemate in the Korean War, the brutal failure of the war in Vietnam and now the quagmire in Iraq - which even its advocates admit is not going well - the myths of that war more than 60 years ago continue to possess us and determine the way we relate to the rest of the world.

Severely wounded at age 19 in that war, I have watched those myths slowly soften its harsh horror. Out of our stunning victory in 1945 we have come to believe in the following myths

Read on

Check out this "poster" of quotes, actions and info on the Bush administration on Jim Hightowers HightowerLowdown.

The New York Times reported this June that Bush was running another spy program. This one was snooping through international banking records, including millions of bank transactions done by innocent Americans. George reacted angrily to the exposure, branding the Times report “disgraceful” and declaring that revelation of his spy program “does great harm to theUnited States.” The White House and its right-wing acolytes promptly launched a “Hate-the-Times” political campaign.

Name the guy who was the first to reveal that such a bank-spying program was in the works: George W. Bush! At a September 2001 press conference, he announced that he’d just signed an executive order to monitor all international bank transactions.

This is a good essay in High Country News about cell phones and their place in the outdoors.

Leave only footprints, and turn the darn phone off

With the Military Commissions Act waiting for Presdident Bush to sign, a few people have spoken up.

Senator Barack Obama - Remarks on the Military Commission Legislation

Global Politician - Scrapping the Geneva Conventions

The Washington Times - Habeas Corpus Sellout

Keith Olbermann - Why does habeas corpus hate America

The Village Voice - Congress Bows To Bush

Keith Olbermann is certainly on a role talking about the Bush Administration:

09.18: Bush Owes Us an Apology - Watch it / Read it

09.25: A Textbook Definition of Cowardice - Watch it / Read it

10.06: A Special Comment About Lying - Watch it / Read it

You might not agree with him, but he is putting what he feels into words and speaking them. Not many other people are out there doing that these days.

As for me, he is putting what I feel into words and I thank him for that.

Here is a nice tongue in cheek editorial by Dale McFeatters of Scripps Howard News Service.

A truly historic monument in the making

Every generation builds its great monuments, hoping that they will stand testament to history.

The Egyptians had the pyramids; the Romans, their coliseums and great aqueducts; the Europeans, their soaring cathedrals; and in our own country such generational monuments as Mount Rushmore, Hoover Dam, the Golden Gate Bridge, the interstate highway system.

And now, thanks to Congress, our generation is getting its own monument - the Great U.S.-Mexico Border Fence. And a fine fence it will be, one we can be proud of - a double-layered fence 15 feet high of metal plates and wire mesh with lights, cameras, sensors and microphones to detect the telltale rustle of Latin Americans determined to mow our grass.

The fence will cost $1.2 billion, meaning we can proudly take foreign visitors there, point to our creation baking in the desert heat and say: "See that fence there? It cost $1.2 billion. Bet you don't have anything like it back in Norway."

The fence will cover 700 miles of our 2,000-mile border with Mexico, which is a little like buying a 7-foot ladder to paint a 20-foot ceiling, but I think we can agree we don't want to hear that kind of negative talk.

Years from now, our descendants will marvel at our handiwork and say: "Now that was a fence-building generation. They lost New Orleans, but those old-timers knew how to build a fence, yes sir."

Maybe, as is said of the Great Wall of China, the fence will be visible from outer space, at dusk the setting sun picking out in sharp relief the shadow of barbed wire on the desert floor.

With all due regard to Teddy Roosevelt, this is George W. Bush's Panama Canal.

If a fence is to be our monument, it is perhaps worth comparing with the great barriers of history.

That Great Wall stretches 4,163 miles across China. We can beat that. Our border with Canada is 5,500 miles. The Great Wall was built to keep out the wild tribes of the steppes out of China proper. But it wasn't even a speed bump for the Mongols; the Manchus bribed their way through and the Japanese overran it in two days.

So maybe that's not the best example.

There was Hadrian's Wall, 74 miles across the north of England intended to keep the savage tribes of Scotland out of Roman Britain. It didn't work. The Romans left. And the Scots and the Scots-Irish wound up over here, where, if you believe James Webb's "Born Fighting," they started some of our wars just so they could fight in them and gleefully joined in the rest.

OK, so that one didn't work out real well.

Here's one for you - the Maginot Line, 400 miles of forts, tunnels and pillboxes between France and Germany and Belgium intended to discourage a German invasion and repulse the Germans if they were so foolish as to try. The French left a gap for the Ardennes Forest, thought to be impenetrable, so the Germans attacked there and France fell 33 days later.

Let's keep moving on here.

How about the Iron Curtain? Barbed wire, minefields, watchtowers, dogs and border troops, stretching, as Churchill put it, from Stettin on the Baltic and Trieste on the Adriatic. And how about its little brother, the Berlin Wall, 76 miles of concrete slabs and barbed wire surrounding West Berlin?

The Iron Curtain was designed to ensure that the Soviet Union and communism lasted forever, or at least to the moment of their ultimate triumph, and the Berlin Wall was intended to keep pernicious agents of capitalism and imperialism from defiling East German socialism.

Listen, this isn't quite working out the way I thought it would. But when it's finished, the Great Border Fence will be a monument we can all be proud of. Really.

How things have changed in the past 91 years - (Cost is today's dollars)

Floating Belly Up: it's stink or swim at Isamoralda - Westword

This has to one of the most creatively written restaurant reviews that just rips apart the establishment

On the blog The Tattered Coat, Matt has a post about how the Bush administration force the timing of the recent London arrests. His analysis of reports by NBC amonst others is a must read.

This goes way beyond what we understood previously — that the Bush Administration knew about the arrests ahead of time, and timed a PR offensive against the Democrats around it.

It turns out that it was the other way around: the Bush Administration orchestrated the timing of the arrests to coordinate them with the PR offensive, which attacked Democrats after Ned Lamont’s victory in the Connecticut primary.

For the GOP, the short-term political importance of getting the Lamont victory, and the developing sense that America had fully turned against the Iraq War, off the news was reason enough to disrupt an active terror investigation. The disruption hurt the legal case against the terrorists — it will be much harder to convict them without passports or airline tickets. The GOP was so insistent on the timing that they threatened to “render” the lead suspect if the British did not comply with their wishes.

The Republicans, in other words, once again played politics with national security, and hurt anti-terrorism efforts as they did so.

They cannot be trusted to protect us from the threat of terrorism because — to paraphrase The Downing Street Memo — they fix terror investigations around smear campaigns.

Read More

Op- Ed from L.A Times:
The CIA-Contra-Crack Connection, 10 Years Later: Reporter Gary Webb was the victim of his own hyperbole, but he never got credit for what he got right.

Ten years ago today, one of the most controversial news articles of the 1990s quietly appeared on the front page of the San Jose Mercury News. Titled "Dark Alliance," the headline ran beneath the provocative image of a man smoking crack — superimposed on the official seal of the CIA.

The three-part series by reporter Gary Webb linked the CIA and Nicaragua's Contras to the crack cocaine epidemic that ripped through South Los Angeles in the 1980s.

This is the paragraph that caught me the most (it is my emphasis on chosen sentences)

Most of the nation's elite newspapers at first ignored the story. A public uproar, especially among urban African Americans, forced them to respond. What followed was one of the most bizarre, unseemly and ultimately tragic scandals in the annals of American journalism, one in which top news organizations closed ranks to debunk claims Webb never made, ridicule assertions that turned out to be true and ignore corroborating evidence when it came to light. The whole shameful cycle was repeated when Webb committed suicide in December 2004.Unlike the media pariahs who came after "Dark Alliance" — most notably fabulists Stephen Glass of the New Republic and Jayson Blair of the New York Times — Webb didn't invent facts. Contrary to the wholly discredited reporting on Iraq's nonexistent weapons of mass destruction by New York Times reporter Judith Miller, Webb was the only victim of his mistakes. Nobody else died because of his work, and no one, either at the CIA or the Mercury News, is known to have lost so much as a paycheck. The editors involved with the story, including Managing Editor David Yarnold, survived the scandal to receive generous promotions.

Read More

An expert panel convened by the BBC concludes that climate change is "real and severe", but maybe not "catastrophic".

~ Update ~

Here are a couple of related articles on Newsweek:

The President: Shades of Green - George W. Bush thinks of himself as a conservationist, but activists call his policies destructive to the environment.
Going Green - With windmills, low-energy homes, new forms of recycling and fuel-efficient cars, Americans are taking conservation into their own hands.

Here are a couple artilces on the net neutrality issue:

Molly says: The Net needs new laws - "Molly Wood from Buzz Out Loud has finally set aside her misgivings about overregulation of the Internet. She now believes that we must have legislation to protect the open and equal nature of the Net, or the Net must be regulated as a utility, just like the highways and the water pipes--and we must have one or the other right away. Otherwise, she says, the telcos and the cable companies pushing for a tiered Internet will cheerfully turn it into a lopsided disaster filled with perfectly accessible content created by those very same telcos and cable companies."

Dvorak Online: Net Neutrality Has a Spokesperson - "What exactly is Net neutrality? Dvorak explains that there needs to be legislation to make Internet providers, such as SBC and Comcast, neutral in how they provide service. Senator Ted Stevens (R—Alaska) appears to be the front man for the telecom companies regarding Net neutrality. But is he the right man for the job?"

Breaking Away - Early on, Floyd Landis Learned the Last Shall Be First. Then Came the Tour de France. - Washington Post

Hincapie relished time in yellow - VeloNews

Big George in Yellow. An interesting thread on the BBC message board about George. There are some rather opinionated people posting there

The UCI responce to Dick Pound and Jean-Francois Lamour comments from this weekend.

Media Matters for America has an ongoing series on the defining issue of our time - the media.

The defining issue of our time is not the Iraq war. It is not the "global war on terror." It is not our inability (or unwillingness) to ensure that all Americans have access to affordable health care. Nor is it immigration, outsourcing, or growing income inequity. It is not education, it is not global warming, and it is not Social Security.

The defining issue of our time is the media.

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 |

I have found it to be an interesing read so far and recommend it.

NSA Train Wreck - An effort to get NSA surveillance under control is morphing into a license to spy.

The Internet's Future - Congress should stay out of cyberspace.

© Cam Cardow - Ottawa Citizen - 05.26.2006

The quote above was written in 1914 and is the fourth stanza of "For The Fallen" by Laurence Binyon.

With proud thanksgiving, a mother for her children,
England mourns for her dead across the sea.
Flesh of her flesh they were, spirit of her spirit,
Fallen in the cause of the free.

Solemn the drums thrill; Death august and royal
Sings sorrow up into immortal spheres,
There is music in the midst of desolation
And a glory that shines upon our tears.

They went with songs to the battle, they were young,
Straight of limb, true of eye, steady and aglow.
They were staunch to the end against odds uncounted;
They fell with their faces to the foe.

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years contemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.

They mingle not with their laughing comrades again;
They sit no more at familiar tables of home;
They have no lot in our labour of the day-time;
They sleep beyond England's foam.

But where our desires are and our hopes profound,
Felt as a well-spring that is hidden from sight,
To the innermost heart of their own land they are known
As the stars are known to the Night;

As the stars that shall be bright when we are dust,
Moving in marches upon the heavenly plain;
As the stars that are starry in the time of our darkness,
To the end, to the end, they remain.

~~~~~~

From KnowledgeNews:

Today, America's Memorial Day tends to be more beach-and-barbecue than reflection-and-remembrance. But Memorial Day still exists to commemorate the sacrifice of the more than 1.1 million American service members who have died in battle - and to remember why they gave up their lives.

No one has ever done that better than Abraham Lincoln in his Gettysburg Address. Even before Americans began decorating Civil War graves to give Memorial Day its start, Lincoln's short speech pointed the way to the greatest memorial of all.

On November 19, 1863, President Lincoln visited Gettysburg to help dedicate a new national cemetery. The president was not the event's main speaker. That honor belonged to Edward Everett, a Massachusetts statesman and perhaps the best-known orator of the time. As was customary, Everett delivered a lengthy oration, speaking for two hours straight. Lincoln spoke for just two minutes

The day after the ceremony, Edward Everett wrote to Lincoln, "I wish that I could flatter myself that I had come as near to the central idea of the occasion in two hours as you did in two minutes." Today, the central idea of the occasion remains the same. As Lincoln points out, we honor the sacrifice of soldiers for freedom and self-government best by carrying forward the work of democracy. We dedicate memorials by dedicating ourselves.

- Steve Sampson

The Gettysburg Address:

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting-place for those who here gave their lives that this nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow, this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us, the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us--that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion - that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

- Abraham Lincoln

Supporters of wholesale government surveillance are fond of saying that only the guilty should be worried about spying. Let's put that spurious argument out to pasture once and for all
Wired Commentary by Bruce Schneier.

Commentary on Mother Jones: Consider yourself an honorary graduate of the Internet University of hard knocks, mixed metaphors, and strange analogies

OK, it is really the text of the 2006 commencement address for the Department of English at the University of California at Berkeley by Rebecca Solnit, but it is well worth the time to read.

~ Update ~

This address has been added to the library of LarsonsWorld. Read it here.

"Why Should Anyone Worry About Whose Communications Bush and Cheney Are Intercepting, If It Helps To Find Terrorists?", by John W. Dean, gives us a few reasons why we should worry.

On top of this, yesterday Attorney General Gonzales said he would not rule out warrantless eaves dropping between Americans that occur within the Unites States. Think about that for a minute. If this current administration has its way, we will slowly but surely move farther and farther away from a democracy. Towards what I do not know, but I don't feel it can be good.

Just in case you hadn't noticed, we're in a Bushworld too absurd for words. But that hasn't stopped this administration from yakking its collective head off.
Commentary by Tom Engelhardt

Read On

They were loyal conservatives, and Bush appointees. They fought a quiet battle to rein in the president's power in the war on terror. And they paid a price for it. A NEWSWEEK investigation.

This is a must read. http://msnbc.msn.com/id/11079547/site/newsweek/

These Justice Department lawyers, backed by their intrepid boss Comey, had stood up to the hard-liners, centered in the office of the vice president, who wanted to give the president virtually unlimited powers in the war on terror. Demanding that the White House stop using what they saw as farfetched rationales for riding rough-shod over the law and the Constitution, Goldsmith and the others fought to bring government spying and interrogation methods within the law. They did so at their peril; ostracized, some were denied promotions, while others left for more comfortable climes in private law firms and academia. Some went so far as to line up private lawyers in 2004, anticipating that the president's eavesdropping program would draw scrutiny from Congress, if not prosecutors. These government attorneys did not always succeed, but their efforts went a long way toward vindicating the principle of a nation of laws and not men.

The rebels were not whistle-blowers in the traditional sense. They did not want—indeed avoided—publicity. (Goldsmith confirmed public facts about himself but otherwise declined to comment. Comey also declined to comment.) They were not downtrodden career civil servants. Rather, they were conservative political appointees who had been friends and close colleagues of some of the true believers they were fighting against. They did not see the struggle in terms of black and white but in shades of gray—as painfully close calls with unavoidable pitfalls. They worried deeply about whether their principles might put Americans at home and abroad at risk. Their story has been obscured behind legalisms and the veil of secrecy over the White House. But it is a quietly dramatic profile in courage. (For its part the White House denies any internal strife. "The proposition of internal division in our fight against terrorism isn't based in fact," says Lea Anne McBride, a spokeswoman for Vice President Dick Cheney. "This administration is united in its commitment to protect Americans, defeat terrorism and grow democracy.")

This is from a recent email sent to my by a concerned friend.

I am writing you on a matter of utmost urgency. At this moment Sen. John McCain is in negotiations with ranking members of the Armed Service Committee who want to re-work the McCain Amendment to ban TORTURE and water it down so the United State Government can continue to torture, murder and otherwise mistreat human persons with impunity.

The McCain Amendment bans cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of human persons. As a matter of policy the US Government has sanctioned and endorsed with zeal the use of torture violating every treaty we are a signatory to.

It is a national disgrace and to add egregious insult to injury the Administration and GOP leadership are now trying to undo what our elected representatives voted to make law in a bi-partisan 90-9 vote to ban torture which was a stern rebuke to the Administration and its policies.

It is imperative to the future of our Nation, the World, our military and civilian personnel overseas, our children and grandchildren to confront this grave injustice. You can do something right now!

I would encourage first to read the press release below which summerizes this Amendment, and its provisions, and then make an informed decision. If you would take a few minutes today to pick up the phone and call the ranking members of the Armed Services Committed and forcefully voice your support of the McCain Amendment banning torture you would be taking a stand for humanity.

Carl Levin the ranking Democrat is under great pressure and so is John McCain. Call their office and express your support for their courage and leadership. The people doing the bidding for the Administration are:
Sen. John Warner R-VA
Rep. Duncan Hunter R-CA

I am not sure where Rep. Ike Skelton D-MO is on the issue and his office could not tell me. I am getting the sense he may be for water down the McCain Amendment.

If you would take time to call these representatives and your congressional representatives in your district it would be a great service to our Nation and Humanity.

The press release:

STATEMENT OF SENATOR JOHN MCCAIN STATEMENT ON DETAINEE AMENDMENTS ON (1) THE ARMY FIELD MANUAL AND (2) CRUEL, INHUMANE, DEGRADING TREATMENT Amendment To The Defense Authorization Bill For Immediate Release Friday, Nov 04, 2005   The following is a statement delivered by Senator John McCain: "Mr. President, I rise to offer an amendment that would (1) establish the Army Field Manual as the uniform standard for the interrogation of Department of Defense detainees and (2) prohibit cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment of persons in the detention of the U.S. government. Mr. President, this amendment is identical to the one added by a 90-9 vote to the Defense Department Appropriations bill. Because of the extraordinary support for this legislation and its importance to our men and women in uniform, it is imperative that these provisions remain on the appropriations measure, which is now in conference. While I am now offering this amendment to the authorization bill in order to preserve all legislative options, I expect no one to argue that these critical provisions should thus be struck from the appropriations bill. They should not be removed from the appropriations bill; they should stay on that “must-pass” measure to ensure their earliest enactment into law. On that bill, the provisions won the votes of 46 Republican senators and 44 Democrats. In addition, I understand, a clear majority in the House supports these provisions, wants to see them remain intact, and wishes to have them remain on the appropriations measure. I commend Congressman Murtha for his leadership and efforts to date to offer a motion to instruct conferees to keep this amendment intact without modification. I would hope that no one seeks procedural maneuvers to thwart overwhelming majorities in both chambers. Let me be clear, Mr. President, a bicameral, bipartisan majority in support of this amendment will prevail. Even if the will of the majority is thwarted this month, if it is thwarted next month, it will not be denied indefinitely. If necessary, and I sincerely hope it is not, I and the co-sponsors of this amendment will seek to add it to every piece of important legislation voted on in the Senate until the will of a substantial bipartisan majority in both houses of Congress prevails. Let no one doubt our determination. Mr. President, to fight terrorism we need intelligence. That much is obvious. What should also be obvious is that the intelligence we collect must be reliable and acquired humanely, under clear standards understood by all our fighting men and women. To do differently not only offends our values as Americans, but undermines our war effort, because abuse of prisoners harms – not helps – us in the war on terror. First, subjecting prisoners to abuse leads to bad intelligence, because under torture a detainee will tell his interrogator anything to make the pain stop. Second, mistreatment of our prisoners endangers U.S. troops who might be captured by the enemy – if not in this war, then in the next. And third, prisoner abuses exact on us a terrible toll in the war of ideas, because inevitably these abuses become public. When they do, the cruel actions of a few darken the reputation of our country in the eyes of millions. American values should win against all others in any war of ideas, and we can’t let prisoner abuse tarnish our image. And yet reports of detainee abuse continue to emerge, in large part because of confusion in the field as to what is permitted and what is not. This amendment would go a long way toward clearing up the confusion. Army Field Manual The first part of this amendment would establish the Army Field Manual as the uniform standard for the interrogation of Department of Defense detainees. The Army Field Manual and its various editions have served America well, through wars against both regular and irregular foes. It embodies the values Americans have embraced for generations, while preserving the ability of our interrogators to extract critical intelligence from ruthless foes. Never has this been more important than today, in the midst of the war on terror. This amendment would establish the Army Field Manual as the standard for interrogation of all detainees held in DOD custody. The Manual has been developed by the Executive Branch for its own uses, and a new edition, written to take into account the needs of the war on terror and with a new classified annex, is due to be issued soon. My amendment would not set the Field Manual in stone – it could be changed at any time. The advantage of setting a standard for interrogation based on the Field Manual is to cut down on the significant level of confusion that still exists with respect to which interrogation techniques are allowed. Confusion about the rules results in abuses in the field. We need a clear, simple, and consistent standard, and we have it in the Army Field Manual on Interrogation. That’s not just my opinion, but that of many more distinguished military minds than mine, including General Colin Powell, General Joseph Hoar, General John Shalikashvili, RADM John Hutson, and RADM Don Guter. These and other distinguished officers believe that the abuses at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and elsewhere took place in part because our soldiers received ambiguous instructions, which in some cases authorized treatment that went beyond what the Field Manual allows, and that, had the Manual been followed across the board, we could have avoided the prisoner abuse scandal. Mr. President, wouldn’t any of us do whatever we could to have prevented that? By enacting this amendment, our service members can follow the Manual consistently from now on. Our troops deserve no less. Cruel, Inhumane, Degrading Treatment The second part of this amendment is a prohibition against cruel, inhumane, and degrading treatment. If that doesn’t sound new, that’s because it’s not – the prohibition has been a longstanding principle in both law and policy in the United States. To mention just a few examples, this prohibition is contained in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights; the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, to which the U.S. is a signatory; and the binding Convention Against Torture, negotiated by the Reagan administration and ratified by the Senate. Nevertheless, the administration has held that the prohibition does not legally apply to foreigners held overseas. They can, apparently, be treated inhumanely. This means that America is the only country in the world that asserts a legal right to engage in cruel and inhumane treatment. What this also means is that confusion about the rules becomes rampant again. With this simple amendment, we can restore clarity on a simple and fundamental question: Does America treat people inhumanely? My answer is no, and from all I’ve seen, America’s answer has always been no. I’d note for my colleagues’ consideration that the State of Israel, no stranger to terrorist attacks, has declared cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment illegal. In 1999 the Israeli Supreme Court issued a unanimous decision to this effect that contained words we may wish to reflect on today. “A democratic, freedom-loving society,” the court wrote, “does not accept that investigators use any means for the purpose of uncovering the truth. The rules pertaining to investigations are important to a democratic state. They reflect its character.” Mr. President, let there be no question about America’s character. In deciding these rules, each member of this body has a vital role. Under Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution, the Congress has the responsibility for making “rules concerning captures on land and water.” Not the executive branch, not the courts, but Congress. Our brave men and women in the field need clarity. America needs to show the world that the terrible photos and stories of prison abuse are a thing of the past. Let’s step up to this responsibility and speak clearly on this critical issue. We should do it not because we wish to coddle terrorists. We should do it not because we view them as anything but evil and terrible. We should do it, Mr. President, because we are Americans, and because we hold ourselves to humane standards of treatment of people no matter how evil or terrible they may be. America stands for a moral mission, one of freedom and democracy and human rights at home and abroad. We are better than these terrorists, and we will we win. I have said it before but it bears repeating: The enemy we fight has no respect for human life or human rights. They don’t deserve our sympathy. But this isn’t about who they are. This is about who we are. These are the values that distinguish us from our enemies, and we can never, never allow our enemies to take those values away."

A good friend of mine recently had an article published in the Rocky Mountain News Speakout that is well worth the read whether you are here in Denver or somewhere else.

Well, the mayor's office and City Council have decided enough is enough and it's time to get rid of the crafty street hustlers who panhandle and pose such a serious threat to the health, safety and well-being of the citizenry. This of course will be just the first step toward pushing the least of these off the streets and just in time for Christmas, too.

Perhaps the city can get a Homeland Security grant to purchase an armored personnel carrier with a water cannon and then they can simply wash these vagrants right off the street. The Denver newspapers would probably like to see the streets cleaned up just in time to open their shiny new office building at Broadway and Colfax Avenue. The Downtown Denver Partnership/Business Improvement District certainly can't wait to get the ball rolling so they can push for enforcement and get these bums out of sight as soon as possible. After all, they bought and paid for the new ordinances.

You would think that panhandling is the most pressing issue the city is facing today. Not the 67 percent high school dropout rate among our adolescents, teen pregnancy, the 67 percent drop in arrests for sexual assaults, child obesity patterns, the 35 percent drop in overall arrests for crime or the city's budget shortfall.

Read On

From Jim Hightower:

The White House has gone from slippery to silly.

First came the stunning news that George W has ordered his own staff to undergo mandatory refresher courses in ethics. Ethics! Good grief. The Bush White House is to ethics what a New Orleans levee is to flood control: Porous to say the least. Exactly who is George W trying to convince of exactly what with this silly stunt?

Read On

Keith Olbermann blogs: "If merely a reasonable case can be made that any of these juxtapositions of events are more than just coincidences, it underscores the need for questions to be asked in this country - questions about what is prudence, and what is fear-mongering; questions about which is the threat of death by terror, and which is the terror of threat."

A countdown of the last 13 "political downturn for the administration, followed by a “terror event” - a change in alert status, an arrest, a warning"

The Nexus of Politics and Terror

Here are links for a video of his broadcast with 10 of the events.

"To Autumn"

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run;
To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o'erbrimm'd their clammy cells.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep,
Drowsed with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cider-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,--
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

John Keats
September 1819

Check out this dispatch about the Presidents speech from Jackson Square on TomDispatch:

"Don't say they can't. They can -- and they did. Despite every calumny, it turns out that the Bush administration can put together an effective, well-coordinated rescue team and get crucial supplies to militarily occupied, devastated New Orleans on demand, in time, and just where they are most needed. Last Thursday, in a spectacular rescue operation, the administration team delivered just such supplies without a hitch to one of the city's neediest visitors, who had been trapped in hell-hole surroundings for almost three weeks by Hurricane Katrina. I'm speaking, of course, of George W. Bush."

There is some good insight into what New Orleans looks like on Brian Williams blog including this post from the same night:

"The motorcade route through the district was partially lit no more than 30 minutes before POTUS drove through. And yet last night, no more than an hour after the President departed, the lights went out."

To bad the rest of the citizens of New Orleans don't rate as high as Bush for services like electricity.

Dave Krieger: Avalanche is playing a game of ice charades

The NHL might be ready to resume, but reality is still on vacation over at the Pepsi Center.

... If the Moore situation is no factor, why was May unwilling to speak his name? In a 10-minute interview session with the wretches, his first since signing with the Avs this summer, May referred to Moore only once, as "the individual."

******

May's quote after the game in which Moore made an unpenalized hit on the Canucks' Markus Naslund:

"There's definitely a bounty on his head. Clean hit or not, that's our best player and you respond. It's going to be fun when we get him."

Early Warning by William M. Arkin

Michael Brown Was Set Up: It's All in the Numbers

It's so easy to blame Michael Brown, but he got his marching orders from someone else. Weapons of mass destruction, not waves of mass destruction, are the president's priorities. Want to get on the White House Varsity team? Get with the program.

The same obsession that led the Bush administration to see weapons of mass destruction and terrorism in every tea leaf and go to war in Iraq now guides the entire federal government disaster response effort.

How do I prove the point? I've got the goods.

But this is America. In sorrow, in rage, but mainly in incredulity, as the images of the suffering in New Orleans and its region began to rip at the eyes and the minds of the entire country, Americans were heard to say, in one way or another: But this is America. The mass pain that was inflicted by Katrina was not only tragic, it was incoherent. For Americanism is significantly the faith that such evils do not happen here. It is the doctrine of insulation. That is why many people wish to come here: They believe that here they may escape the malevolences of history and nature, that here they will be in some unprecedented way safe, and strangers to tragedy. Americans are always so shocked when they turn out not to be exceptions to the universe. Their president also: "The people we're talking about are not refugees," President Bush insisted. But they are plainly refugees, and these refugees will be a feature of American life in many states for many months and even years to come. When was the last time that the noun "refugee" was modified by the adjective "American"? So the Americanist innocence, too, was drowned in Katrina's waters. Our invulnerability is not perfect. The storm beat us.

But this is America. The words were not a protest only against the flood. They were a protest also against the aftermath of the flood, which was not a natural catastrophe but a human one. Americanism is also the conviction that the wretchedness of large numbers of Americans is unacceptable, an offense to the American idea, a spur to American action. We take care of our own, and our efficiency is a measure of our decency. But when our efficiency fails us, we must conclude that our decency failed us, too. "No insignificant person was ever born," Bush unforgettably declared in his first inaugural address. How significant, exactly, were the persons who waited for days for relief and rescue from the Superdome and the Convention Center and the other makeshift purgatories, while the rest of the country watched their dehumanization on television? We did not take care of our own, not swiftly, not fiercely, not as if nothing in the world was more important to us. The natural fury that caused this misery should have been met with a human fury to alleviate it. It was not.

More, the American belief in American decency is, to a large extent, a belief in American government. For all the suspicion of power upon which this country was founded, the view of government as a force for ill has never really prevailed in America, because it would have defeated the American hunger for justice. American history over the last hundred years is a stirring tale of government in the proud and largely effective service of compassion. Consider also the ironic history of the Bush administration, the many times that human need, real and imagined, at home and abroad, has required it to betray its philosophy of small and limited government. Sometimes "we" cannot take care of our own; only our government can. In times of emergency, the power of the federal government may be a beautiful thing. When Bush finally flew to the devastation, he said: "In America, we do not abandon our fellow citizens in our hour of need. And the federal government will do its part." Its part? But this is America. Sometimes the federal government's part is the whole, or most of it. This should have been so in the early hours, when the local and state authorities showed their fecklessness. Instead, micro-incompetence was succeeded by macro-incompetence.

And by our own, we mean all of our own. Disasters often reveal how we live. One of the most chilling things in New Orleans last week was the extent to which all of us were not represented in the crisis. The some of us who suffered were overwhelmingly poor and black. If you did not see race and class, you were blind. Barbara Bush saw race and class, and expressed race and class, when she visited the Houston Astrodome: "And so many of the people in the arenas here, you know, were underprivileged anyway. So this is working very well for them." But the people living in the refugee camp on the Astroturf are not underprivileged, they are destitute. The good news is that most Americans did not respond like the overprivileged former first lady. Near and far, they saw race and class and they rushed to help--thereby shaming their government, which is one of the duties of civil society. Now American government will no doubt demonstrate its capacity for good, but it is not American government, with its briefings and its drop-bys, that will have preserved American solidarity. There were no heroes in office, but there will have been heroes. Perhaps this really is America.

© 09.08.2005 - The Editors of The New Republic

To many religious Americans, faith has a legitimate role in shaping the laws of the nation. But many of the Americans who claim to have no religion disagree. They hold that this public sphere should rightly be a secular space, not favoring or even representing the views of any religious orientation. Can America learn to balance church and state?

U.S. News & World Report

Why do those who stand to gain the least from virtually every policy of George W. Bush, support him the most?

Here are a couple articles passed on to me by an un-named source. (He has conspiracy issues such as the "White Vans Everywhere".)

The first one is by Brent Scowcroft. It was written prior to the current war in Iraq and deals with the false reasons the Bush Administration used to go to war. Mr. Scowcroft, national security adviser under President Gerald Ford and George H.W. Bush, is founder and president of the Forum for International Policy. After voicing his views in a published article he was ostracized by the administration and others in Washington.

Don't Attack Saddam: It would undermine our antiterror efforts.

The second article is by Thomas D. Schauf and is about the Federal Reserve Bank. Mr. Schauf, worked up this report, to clear up questions he had received about the Federal Reserve Bank (FED). The resulting, shocking and revealing conclusions make for a very interesting read.

The Federal Reserve is Privately Owned

This Memorial Day is not a good one for the country that was once the world's most brilliant beacon of freedom and justice.

State Department officials know better than anyone that the image of the United States has deteriorated around the world. The U.S. is now widely viewed as a brutal, bullying nation that countenances torture and operates hideous prison camps at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and in other parts of the world - camps where inmates have been horribly abused, gruesomely humiliated and even killed.

Bob Herbert - The New York Times

Bill Frist has gone nuts. The rich, aristocratic, Harvard-educated, Presbyterian, country-club senator who was chosen by Republicans to be majority leader to portray a more "moderate" image for their party - has become a raging Christian extremist, pushing the entire nutty agenda of the ultra-right-wing televangelists.

Jim Hightower

Meet Walt Whitman
(1819-1892)

• Occupation - poet, nurse, federal worker, printer, publisher, journalist, teacher, carpenter, "kosmos"
• Philosophy - "The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem"

On May 15, 1855, Walt Whitman registered the first edition of Leaves of Grass with the U.S. District Court in New York. A few weeks later, he published the book of poems himself--and changed American literature forever. To mark the 150th anniversary of Whitman's essential work, let's get to know the old "rough" himself.

Before Walt Whitman, American literature consisted largely of political treatises, moral allegories, and poetry derivative of English verse. Ben Franklin and the rest weren't bad, but they were busy building a nation. By the time Whitman made the scene, the literati were clamoring for the creation of a distinctly American literature.

Man of Vision and Revision

Enter Walt Whitman and his "barbaric yawp." Born into a working-class family in Brooklyn, Whitman was largely self-educated, drawing his curriculum from the libraries, museums, and theaters of up-and-coming New York. After several years in the newspaper business and a five-year stint as a teacher, he began to focus his energies on creative writing.

In 1848, Whitman left New York to travel to New Orleans for a new newspaper gig. His trip down the mighty Mississippi broadened his understanding of the land and people, and he returned to New York with a sense that America possessed unique power and potential. Whitman then set about creating a literary form to celebrate his novel nation.

The poetic medium seemed sufficiently grand, but the rhythmic and structural constraints of traditional verse just wouldn't do. So, to write his love letters to America, Whitman positioned himself as a kind of cosmic moderator--and threw out the rules of poetry in favor of free verse.

Those Lovely Leaves

After honing his new style for several years, Whitman sponsored his own coming-out party in 1855, putting up the money to publish a collection of 12 poems titled Leaves of Grass. At first, the volume didn't excite much enthusiasm in critics or regular readers, but it did serve to solidify Whitman's status as a writer and stated his artistic purpose:

I CELEBRATE myself, And what I assume you shall assume, For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

Anointing himself as the nation's spokespoet ("Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos"), Whitman continued, forging linguistic connections between facets of America as diverse as city and country, master and slave, prostitute and priest.

As Whitman's years increased, so did Leaves of Grass. Eight editions of the title eventually appeared. He revised the work copiously, rearranging, adding, and removing poems with each new release. In reality, the various editions of Leaves of Grass are different books, each reflecting Whitman's evolving view of American society and the poet's role in it.

Beltway Bard

Just as Whitman settled into his vocation, the Civil War broke out, endangering both the country he loved and his literary venture. During the war's early days, he wrote little and began visiting military hospitals around New York, offering comfort to patients. When his brother George was injured during fighting in Virginia, Walt took his nursing on the road, first to Fredericksburg, Virginia, then to Washington, D.C.

George rejoined the fray, but Walt stayed in Washington. He had become attached to hospital work and spent the remainder of the war conversing with the wounded and dying, writing letters to their families, and bringing them small gifts.

Of course, Whitman still had to pay the bills. So he did what any Washingtonian worth his salt does--he networked furiously until he landed a government job. His first position, in the Indian Affairs Bureau, was short-lived. His boss thought Leaves of Grass, with its frank treatment of human sexuality, was morally suspect. In 1865, Whitman began clerking in the Office of the Attorney General, where he remained until 1873.

Required Reading

The end of the Civil War marked the beginning of a difficult period in Whitman's life. He was traumatized by Lincoln's assassination in 1865 and composed two celebrated elegies mourning the president: "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd" and "O Captain! My Captain!"

Despite suffering a stroke in 1873, Whitman continued to tinker with Leaves of Grass until his death in 1892. By then, he was recognized as a writer of some stature in American literary circles. Yet the Great American Poet's greatest accolades came from Europe, where he was appreciated for his unabashed celebration of democracy, liberty, and America's cultural diversity.

Whitman's work has now made its way into countless classrooms, anthologies, movies, and songs. It has also influenced entire generations of American writers. Not bad for "one of the roughs."

Laura Kane - The Knowledge News
May 13, 2005

Big Brother isn't here yet, is an interesting read about wire tapping here and abroad. Some of the interesting numbers from the article:

• There where 3,464 wiretaps approved for all state and federal investigations, which works out to 1 for every 100,000 U.S. residents.
• Italy is the highest with 174 wiretaps per 100,000 people
• Wiretaps in federal investigations cost an average of $75,500.
• ...cases involving wiretap evidence generated 4,506 arrests but only 634 convictions, a success rate of about 14%. (in the U.S. Compared to 89% conviction rate overall.

Place Your Bets is an interesting editorial by John Tierney on the NYTs:

... Still, stocks could yield much lower returns in the future, as critics of private accounts have pointed out in advertisements comparing the market to a slot machine and extolling the "guarantee" of Social Security.

But there's also another kind of risk to consider, one that Chilean workers kept mentioning to me. The best part of their private accounts, they said, was that they'd put "la plata donde mis ojos la vean" - the money where my eyes can see it. They knew they might lose some of it in the stock market, but they preferred that to watching it all disappear into politicians' hands.

... My Social Security, far from being a guarantee, comes with a political risk that will become clear around 2017, when I'll be 64. That's when the Social Security Administration expects to start paying out more than it collects in taxes.

In theory, there is a trust fund to cover this shortfall. When Congress sharply raised Social Security taxes in the 1980's, the idea was to generate surpluses during the baby boomers' working years that would finance our retirement. Instead, Congress spent our money, leaving the Social Security trust fund with a file cabinet full of i.o.u.'s in the form of Treasury bills.

Read it.

Well, well. George W is getting a poltical comeuppance – and it's coming from a place he least expected: conservatives.

At issue is his enthusiam for the liberty-busting USA Patriot Act, a little shop of autocratic horrors that the Bushites rammed through congress under cover of the 9/11 terrorist attack. Several of its most intrusive, anti-democratic provisions expire this year, and Bush has made their renewal a top priority. These provisions include "sneak-and-peak" secret searches by the FBI of people's homes and computers, the secret raiding of libraries and medical offices to grab people's records, and a definition of "terrorist" that is so broad that it includes citizens who simply protest government policy.

Fortunately for America, there are some real conservatives who balk at such a dangerous extension of autocratic police power, even if it's imposed by Bushite Republicans masquerading as conservatives. Libertarian-minded Republicans – such as Bob Barr, Paul Weyerich, and Grover Norquist – have now joined such liberal adovcates for liberty as the ACLU in an oddfellow coalition to battle the Bushites. Called Patriots to Restore Checks and Balances, the coalition is rallying grassroots opposition to the renewal of the most offensive parts of the perversely-named Patriot Act.

The grassroots need little rallying, however, for they're already on the move. Montana, for example, is in the forefront of a "red state rebellion" against Bush's intrusive police powers. Montana lawmakers have overwhelmingly approved a strong resolution criticizing Bush's Patriot Act, uniting Republican legislators with Democrats. "Civil liberties are a bipartisan issue in Montana," said a Republican state representative from Trout Creek, who led the house effort to pass the resolution by a vote of 88 to 12.

Whether you're Republican, Democrat, or whatever, you can't take liberty for granted. To fight the Bushite's grab for more police power, call the coalition: 1-800-583-9122.

Jim Hightower

Broadcasters and the Public Interest: Gambling with Our Democracy

A study of local news during the last election by the Norman Lear Center clearly shows that the "if it bleeds, it leads" mentality continues to drive news decisions. And that means that when citizens across the country went to the ballot box last year, they were essentially forced to shrug their shoulders and roll the dice.

As trustees of a public resource, broadcasters have a statutory obligation to air programming that is in the public interest. But too many in the broadcast industry continue to resist even minor efforts to strengthen the public interest standard - to the detriment of the public, and our democracy itself.

Campaign Legal Center

When was the last time someone asked you how to put files on a CD or where the nearest post office was, even as they sat right in front of an Internet-connected PC? Two minutes ago? Sense a problem here? Columnist John C. Dvorak does and wonders when people will realize that they can answer most of life's basic questions by using their PCs. Dvorak believes this is part of a larger and much more disturbing trend.

Dvorak: The Dumbing Down of America

The president's commission on intelligence delivered half a report. Like the general played by Jack Nicholson in "A Few Good Men," the commission acted as if America can't handle the truth. The commissioners would have us believe that those who provided the false intelligence were solely to blame, and the senior political leaders who ordered and presented the claims to the public were passive victims. Conservative pundits have quickly declared, "case closed," and urge us to focus on rearranging the deck chairs on the intelligence ship. But buried deep inside the report is evidence that contradicts the commission's own conclusions and raises serious questions about their recommendations. Most damning is the tale of two CIA analysts who were removed from their positions for "causing waves" when they questioned the reliability of the defector known as "Curveball."

Proliferation News and Resources

How savvy marketing is contributing to the nation's obesity epidemic

Overeating and its lethal companion underexercising are the recognized culprits in this country's rise in obesity rates. Today, two thirds of American adults are obese or overweight. A national team of researchers reported in last week's New England Journal of Medicine that obesity already reduces the current life expectancy in the United States by four to nine months.

What's worse, they project that the rise in obesity rates among children and teens could knock off as many as five years from today's average of 77 years as overweight people in that generation grow up and die prematurely. Diseases associated with obesity, such as diabetes, heart disease, kidney disease, and some cancers, are likely to strike at younger ages. It would be the first time in 200 years that children would be statistically likely to live shorter lives than their grandparents.

U.S. News and World Report

In 1970, The Clean Air Act was supported by liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans, including President Richard M. Nixon and Sen. Barry Goldwater (R-Ariz.). When the act was amended under George H.W. Bush in 1990, a bipartisan Congress not only supported the changes but paid close attention, decreeing precise emission allowances and timetables.

The bipartisan consensus has since crumbled, and the legislative process has ground to a halt. In an unpublished paper, Richard Lazarus of Georgetown University points out that increasing partisanship has meant that although dozens of environmental laws passed in the 1970s and 1980s, there have been no amendments to the Clean Air Act since 1990, or to the Clean Water Act since 1987. Congress has not reauthorized the tax that funds toxic waste cleanup, and it has made no significant reforms to laws on mining, grazing or endangered species protection on federal lands since 1992. These days only riders attached to appropriations bills can pass, or oddities such as the new budget resolution that may legalize drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

In part, the shift reflects a change among congressional Republicans, whose leaders found that environmental laws won them no friends (Nixon himself said so, according to Mr. Lazarus, on one of his famous tapes) and whose key committee chairmanships now go more often to anti-environmentalist Westerners than to the environmentalist Northeasterners who held them in the past. The issue is so unpopular generally among Republican politicians that a career civil servant now runs the Environmental Protection Agency.

By rigidly opposing compromise, some environmentalists haven't helped matters. But the president sets the tone. And by refusing to push higher environmental standards in any area, whether climate change, forest policy, ocean policy or automobile emissions, the Bush administration has eliminated goodwill. Earlier this month, yet another air pollution law, the Clear Skies Act, stalled in the Senate, following a tied committee vote. The changes proposed, to set up a cap-and-trade scheme for three pollutants, will now be written by regulators, whose interpretations are more easily challenged in court.

Many believe the Clear Skies Act could have passed if it had been intended to win bipartisan support from the start. Instead, Republicans made changes at the last minute, trying to win over a single Democrat; Democrats, wary of an administration with no environmentalist credibility, refused to go along, as did Sens. Lincoln D. Chafee (R-R.I.), and James M. Jeffords (I-Vt.). No one thinks the shift from legislation to regulation is good for the environment or for business. If the president cares about these issues, as he sometimes claims to do, he should look harder at the leading role he has played in the impasse, and propose ways to get out of it.

A Washington Post Editorial - Monday, March 21, 2005

The Washington Post has been running an occasional series of editorials on the Social Security issue now brewing in Washington D.C. They are interesting reading.

The Risks in Personal Accounts - Sunday, February 20, 2005

Mr. Bush's Personal Accounts - Friday, February 11, 2005

No Social Security 'Crisis' - Tuesday, February 1, 2005

Social Security - Monday, January 17, 2005

The Cost of Reform - Monday, December 6, 2004

The holiday creates so much pressure that it's a common time for relationships to end.

They're the Valentine's Day gifts no one asks for: a note slipped under the door that reads "I'm taking my freedom back." Or 25 votive candles with the comment, "The flame has died." Sometimes it's just the ring of a phone and the terse message, "We're through."

Those on the receiving end of such presents might want to break Cupid's arrows, since Valentine's Day breakups are becoming more common. As many as half of dating couples split up on Cupid's big day, estimates Jodi Smith, etiquette expert and president of Mannersmith Consulting.

The main reason Valentine's Day breakups are so frequent, culture watchers agree, is that the much-hyped holiday creates so much pressure and so many expectations. The ubiquitous ads for long-stemmed roses, heart-shaped boxes of chocolates, and flowery cards prompt many to think of all the reasons they don't want to remain half of a couple.

He loves you not: Valentine's hype can force tough decisions By Elizabeth Lund, The Christian Science Monitor

PS: Thirty-eight percent of men have considered breaking up with a woman rather than deal with the "get her something really good" holiday, according to It's Just Lunch, a dating service.

I found this opinion about those LiveStrong bracelets on Web@Devil. This young lady has some very good points that are worth thinking about.

Imposter Bracelets Lack Benevolence
by Lucia Bill - Arizona State University Press
01/31/2005

When Ugg boots and little Louis Vuitton purses are shoved into the back of dorm closets and replaced with spring's frilly short skirts and low cut tops, one fashion statement will remain: the yellow LIVESTRONG bracelets.

Worn by everyone from college students and professors to Hollywood stars and presidential candidates, the yellow, silicon band has been everywhere since its launch in May.

The trend began when Nike and the Lance Armstrong Foundation created the $1 bracelets to raise money for cancer research and awareness. The Foundation, named after cancer survivor and six-time Tour de France winner Lance Armstrong hoped to sell five million. To date, they have sold 31 million and counting.

And like any trend with the possibility of profit, the LIVESTRONG bracelet has created many impostors.

A few worthy causes followed the bracelet craze, including the $1 black "Rock the Arts" bracelet available at Hot Topic, which gives profits to music programs in schools. Or the pending ASU tsunami relief bracelets coming to the bookstore.

But would we be so eager to buy a bracelet if it cost $5? $10? How about $20? The "bracelet causes" such as cancer research and saving Darfur are in dire need of funding, and buying a one-dollar bracelet is great...for a start.

Wearing a bracelet might make you sleep better at night -- thinking that you have already made your contribution, but no disease has been conquered and no peace treaty signed because of the rubber bands on our wrists.

Still, the craze continues as more and more retailers take the trend and instead of keeping the bracelet a sign of support for serious causes, turn them into simple moneymaking schemes.

Local gas stations offer racks of bracelets with such phrases as "Hope" and "Stability."

Foot Locker has created a set of four colored bracelets selling for $3.99 a set. They're called "baller bands."

Then there is the Spencer's Gifts version of the bracelet, available for $1.99, with deep and powerful messages such as "Drama Queen" and "Worship Me."

Some companies even began customizing the bracelets, with popular demands being "Live Wrong" and "Drink Strong."

People who wear those should get their asses kicked.

But if those don't seem a little over the top to you, consider the Conservative Values Bracelet, available on the Internet. It depicts a cross, a "traditional" family, a fetus, a flag and a gun.

Wearing that should get you an ass-kicking too.

What started as a reminder of struggle and triumph has become a reminder of our pride in psychological dysfunction and close-minded political views. Retailers across the country are even making exact replicas of the LIVESTRONG bracelet, with no profits going toward charity.

It's hard to think of how low profit-driven corporations are willing to sink to exploit a pure and dignified cause.

But the corporations aren't the only ones to blame. It is the responsibility of consumers to know what they are buying and what statement they are making by wearing the bands.

Although it seems like a hassle to do research on something that costs a dollar, think of what a difference that money could make when placed in the hands of a research lab as opposed to a CEO's bank account.

Wearing a bracelet that contributes to a serious cause not only gives money to a charity, but also serves as a daily reminder that we ought to be strong in the face of our own personal adversities and to be grateful for what we have.

The refusal to buy a bracelet whose maker is questionable or that carries no message other than an announcement of your personal issues or political prejudices is an affirmation of your ability to say no to greed and yes to generosity.

And that's always in style.

Lucia Bill is a political science and journalism sophomore. - the original article

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By the way, yes I do wear one and have been since last June or so.

LiveStrong - WearYellow

Diet for a Dead Planet: How the Food Industry is Killing Us - By Christopher D. Cook. New Press. $24.95

After reading this review don't you just want to go out, read the book and then go shopping.

Boy, I do!

Can't wait till the "natural" foods just become another offering in the "corporate cornucopia."

I found this commentary rather insightful and interesting. I hope you find it likewise.

The sum of American fears - By Joel Agee.

I told a friend I'd be writing an essay about fear. He cautioned me: "Don't say that our fears are groundless." He had heard me express the widespread opinion that in allowing ourselves to be governed by fear, we may be forfeiting our freedom

Of course our fears aren't groundless. Who would deny the threat of nuclear and biological war on our shores? And militant factions within three major religions seem intent on fulfilling prophecy of a final war between good and evil, certain that they and not their enemies are the children of light. What greater danger can be imagined?

But just for that reason it seems to me necessary to live without fear - to the extent that we're able. This doesn't mean we shouldn't protect ourselves from real dangers. It means we must be vigilant against the counsels of fear.

What impressed me most forcefully in the pictures from Abu Ghraib was how fear was employed as an instrument of torture. Humiliation, too - but those photographs were meant to terrify, because they could be used to shame the victims in their communities.

Why has the discussion of these outrages very nearly vanished from public discourse? Does our silence bespeak a tacit consent to their continuation? If so, what would be our motive? I believe it is fear - fear of an elusive, treacherous enemy, but also fear of seeing the depths to which we may go for the sake of an equally elusive security.

I spent my formative years behind the Iron Curtain. It is commonplace to say the people there were deprived of their freedom. This is true, but it's a truth that was not evident to many of those people. If you live in a stooped position long enough you can mistake it for an upright stance.

Read the rest of this commentary here: http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/1221/p09s01-coop.html

I believe that what you sing to the clouds,
will rain upon you when your sun has gone away,
and I believe that what you dream to the moon,
will manifest before you rest another day.

So stay strong, and sleep long, and when you need to
let the morning take you out on to today,
and when you find you're at the end of the road,
just lift your head up, spread your wings and fly away!

When your lost and alone, that's when a rainbow comes.
When your lost and alone, that's when a rainbow comes for you.

- Michael Franti and Spearhead

Check out this site. Quite a few interesting essays to read.

The Mathematics of Responsibility
by Ran Prieur
February 7, 2002

It's frustrating to be stuck in a world where I actually have to point this out, but what we call "responsibility" is not distributed by breaking up "full responsibility" and dividing it into parts. If you add up everyone's responsibility for something, it doesn't equal 100% -- it equals a billion percent if it has to, because any number of entities can be fully responsible for the same thing. Another way to say it is that our responsibilities can and do overlap. Another way to say it is that nobody's responsibility for anything excuses anybody else.

For example, Hitler is fully responsible for every particular murder in the Holocaust. But so is the actual person who did the murder, and every person in the chain of command, and the fanatically repressive Prussian culture, and maybe the victim, if there was a chance to see the murder coming and fight or flee.

I just pushed a hot button, but it's hot only because of our idea of "blame," which is a lie. I don't "blame" anyone for anything, because I understand that blame is stuck responsibility -- falsely packing it all in one place to block it from being traced where you don't want it traced.

For example, if a woman gets drunk and passes out at a frat party, and she gets raped, and I excuse the rapist by saying the woman should have known better, then I am stupidly blaming the victim. But if I hold the rapist fully responsible, and also hold the society that trained the rapist fully responsible, and also notice that the victim took a huge risk and had the power to choose otherwise, then I'm not blaming anyone -- I'm being honest and paying attention.

This gets even trickier when someone is punished for doing something good. The Raise The Fist website was recently shut down in a violent police raid. Some people (who are being ripped off if they're not on the authorities' payroll) made slippery suggestions that the author of the site should have known the police would come after him, and therefore that he was somehow at fault.

"He should have known! Jesus should have known he'd be crucified! Gandhi should have known he'd get people beaten and killed. Nelson Mandela and Lech Walesa and Vaclav Havel should have known their activities would get them locked up. Idiots! When people threaten violence you should do whatever they say, or you deserve what you get!"

Read the rest of this essay.

This is the Fight of Our Lives

by Bill Moyers
Keynote speech
Inequality Matters Forum
New York University
June 3, 2004

There's no question about it: The corporate conservatives and their allies in the political and religious right are achieving a vast transformation of American life that only they understand because they are its advocates, its architects, and its beneficiaries. In creating the greatest economic inequality in the advanced world, they have saddled our nation, our states, and our cities and counties with structural deficits that will last until our children's children are ready for retirement, and they are systematically stripping government of all its functions except rewarding the rich and waging war.

And they are proud of what they have done to our economy and our society. If instead of practicing journalism I was writing for Saturday Night Live, I couldn't have made up the things that this crew have been saying. The president's chief economic adviser says shipping technical and professional jobs overseas is good for the economy. The president's Council of Economic Advisers report that hamburger chefs in fast food restaurants can be considered manufacturing workers. The president's Federal Reserve Chairman says that the tax cuts may force cutbacks in social security - but hey, we should make the tax cuts permanent anyway. The president's Labor Secretary says it doesn't matter if job growth has stalled because "the stock market is the ultimate arbiter."

You just can't make this stuff up. You have to hear it to believe it. This may be the first class war in history where the victims will die laughing.

But what they are doing to middle class and working Americans -- and to the workings of American democracy -- is no laughing matter. Go online and read the transcripts of Enron traders in the energy crisis four years ago, discussing how they were manipulating the California power market in telephone calls in which they gloat about ripping off "those poor grandmothers." Read how they talk about political contributions to politicians like "Kenny Boy" Lay's best friend George W. Bush. Go on line and read how Citigroup has been fined $70 Million for abuses in loans to low-income, high risk borrowers - the largest penalty ever imposed by the Federal Reserve. A few clicks later, you can find the story of how a subsidiary of the corporate computer giant NEC has been fined over $20 million after pleading guilty to corruption in a federal plan to bring Internet access to poor schools and libraries. And this, the story says, is just one piece of a nationwide scheme to rip off the government and the poor.

Let's face the reality: If ripping off the public trust; if distributing tax breaks to the wealthy at the expense of the poor; if driving the country into deficits deliberately to starve social benefits; if requiring states to balance their budgets on the backs of the poor; if squeezing the wages of workers until the labor force resembles a nation of serfs -- if this isn't class war, what is?

It's un-American. It's unpatriotic. And it's wrong.

Please read the whole speech: http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0616-09.htm

Welcome to the Year of the Voter - by Peter Grier

Highest turnout since 1968 produced two-hour lines - and talk of a new era of engagement.

If nothing else, the election of 2004 may be remembered as The Year of the Lines.

Fired by partisan passion, a greater percentage of US voters appeared to have cast ballots than at any time since 1968 - and if you were a resident of a swing state, sometimes all those people seemed to be waiting in front of you.

Waits were an hour, or two, or five. Volunteers passed out cookies, line-mates made friends, children turned crowded precinct rooms into impromptu playgrounds.

Some people waited in lines at airports, so they could fly home to wait in line to vote. Some brought no work, or nothing to read, and grabbed discarded newspapers eagerly, and were disappointed when they found the crossword puzzle already done.

http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/1104/p03s01-ussc.html

Vote, No Matter What - NYT Editorial - 11/02/2004

Urging Americans to vote on Election Day should be a motherhood-and-apple-pie editorial topic. But nothing is simple in the post-2000 political world. We all know the difference between a swing state and one that's long been consigned to the column of sure things. If you happen to be living in Ohio or Florida, nobody has to explain why it is important for you to go to the polls today. But citizenship is more complicated in places like New York and California, or Utah and Georgia, where electoral votes were all but conceded by last spring.

Still, every vote counts. Including the ones that already feel counted.

On the presidential level, the popular vote really does matter, despite the Electoral College. Those of us in the deep-dyed blue or red states vote to register our bit of the national will, to help confer a mandate on our chosen candidate or withhold one should the other side triumph. We vote because the very act of turning out shows that we believe that this election is critically important, and we don't want to give even the slightest impression that it doesn't matter to us who wins.

We vote because the rest of the world has become disillusioned enough about the American political process. If people can ride donkeys over mountains in Afghanistan to choose among the decidedly imperfect candidates they were offered last month in their first democratic election, we can stand in line and force election officials to make sure our vote is recorded. And if people can find the location of their voting place in Kandahar, we can call up the board of elections or go on the Web to make sure we're heading for the right site here.

And once we find the right polling place, we're going to vote to make sure that our election officials are doing their job properly and to reassure the shocking numbers of our fellow Americans, especially first-time voters or minorities, who believe they will be prevented from casting a ballot or that it will not be counted. Here in New York, for instance, we have seen plenty of evidence that it is only the wide margins in most races that have been saving the state's creaky voting system from a meltdown that would make Florida look like Athens in the age of Pericles. If we start complaining now, perhaps we can fix things before it's too late.

We're going to vote because in many places there are other matters - ballot propositions, state legislative races, Congressional contests - that deserve our attention.

And even if all of those contests seem like foregone conclusions as well, we can vote to send a message. An incumbent state legislator who is used to getting 70 percent of the vote every year will feel a thrill of terror if this season's opponent comes within 10 percent, and may well be inspired to try to improve the political status quo that's causing dissatisfaction.

Most of all, we're going to vote because this is our country, our election, our national future. It's not possible to make up enough rules or roadblocks to discourage us.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/02/opinion/02tue1.html

As the sun sets on this final day before this years election commences, here are some of the stories that have caught my eye.

Campaign Premortem Postmortem - By Dante Chinni

So you want to know who's going to win, right? That makes sense, and it's only fair. You deserve something for sitting through Zell Miller's GOP convention speech and Bob Graham's monologue at the Democratic show.

Well, everyone in this town would love to tell you - it would allow them to start kissing up to the right people sooner. But the truth is, no one knows who's going to win. The 2004 campaign is different, full of complicated issues, and playing out before a divided, charged-up electorate.

http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/1102/p08s02-codc.html

One Book, Two Book, Red Book, Blue Book - by Leonard Riggio

If you follow the sales of books closely enough, you are bound to come across a beguiling revelation or two. Here's one: the humor category is dominated by liberals and left-leaning authors. In fact, 95 percent of the sales in the political humor section comes from the left. Whether this means that conservative writers have no sense of humor, or that publishing houses fail to recognize it, is worthy of study - or even loud protest from the right.

Indeed, the right seems convinced that booksellers and publishers are trying to influence the election by publishing and prominently displaying books that attack President Bush. In stores across America, angry citizens can be found poring over book displays and tallying up the number of titles according to their political persuasion. If they don'