grumpy Fr. Mendel w/pitchfork

San Francisco early on

ballistic knight

Teddy Roosevelt and John Muir in their element

drugs and toilet articles and time

Dick Cheney's heaven looks just like this

the beginning of the 60's in the middle of the 60's

what is obscene here is her poverty

her poverty

Ishi I think

impounded

many small machine tools are repaired by women

By the time a girl is 16 years old, she will have spent more time watching television than going to school (Basow) Television is, by far, the most influential force in the lives of children today.

_____________

According to the NOW report:

87% of all sound bites from "experts" are from men. ~ 92% of those men are white.

90% of children's educational programs have male leading roles.

Television programming emphasizes male characters� strength and skill; for women, it focuses on attractiveness and desirability.

virtual desktop for windows

At worst, sentimental; at best, like a New Yorker cartoon wrapped round a knife.

Mr Read showed how, stage by stage, OK was spread throughout North America and the world to the moon, and then took on its new form AOK, first used by space people and frowned on by purists. This being an exercise in the academic world, there remain some doubters. Some believe that the Boston newspaper's reference to OK may not be the earliest. Some are attracted to the claim that it is of American-Indian origin. There is an Indian word, okeh, used as an affirmative reply to a question. Mr Read treated such doubting calmly. �Nothing is absolute,� he once wrote, �nothing is forever.�

Police arrested a Gulf War veteran and his teenage Jamaican sidekick in the Washington sniper case, ending a media frenzy that included a request by CNN to interview actors from the CBS series "Crime Scene Investigation." Lengthy footage was broadcast of a tree stump being dug up and hauled away. Experts and profilers who had spent untold hours on television speculating about the killer were forced to admit that their prophecies had been worthless. "My predictions were not that close," one expert said. "But the average American was hungry for information. And when there isn't real news, people make up their own. People wanted a story of who this guy was. What we did, by providing it, comforted them."

Harper's Weekly

War! Hunh! Good God Y'all!

Natives Harvesting Beans

Madera 1906

The earthquake does not have to do however according to expert opinion anything with the heavy outbreak of the Aetna, which began on Sunday. "the central Apenninen is its own geological area, which stands, said with the Aetna not in direct reciprocal effect" the Seismologe Peter Bormann of the geo research center potsdam. Earthquakes of the strength five would occur in central Italy all three to five years. "the whole Apenninen is an earthquake region."

The main Iraqi Shia opposition group, which is based in Iran, did not believe that to be the case on this occasion.
But it pointed out that the fires would not have been possible had the Baghdad government not dried out much of the marshes of south east Iraq by huge drainage schemes in recent years.
The marshes were a globally important wetland, sustaining a huge volume of wildlife, especially birds, as well as a unique way of life for the marsh dwelling people.
The United Nations environment programme has said that about 90% of the marshes have been destroyed, describing it as an environmental catastrophe and a major loss to all humanity.
______________
Wilfred Thesiger The Marsh Arabs

Artists under itself: Mutual inspirations

Washington - the franzoesin, 56, had participated in Indiana in the wedding of her nephew and was on the return flight to France, when she was examined of the testers. According to witness data the scanner of the official beeped again and again with control, to it "at the beginning of cooperative" woman became too multicolored and it down from annoying the sweater, blouse and despite violent Gegenwehr of the tester also the BH finally put. Despite striptease was not found anything, but the excitement led to a zehnminuetigen locking of the airport.
When the responsible judge in Evansville informed it about the possible maximum penalty, the woman broke down. The judge appointed himself thereby to the new anti-terror law, which was passed after 11 September 2001 and with "criminal offences" at airports up to three years detention plans

Extrapolating this data to the entire world suggests that from 22 percent to 47 percent of all of the Earth's plant species are in danger of becoming extinct, Jorgensen said. The range of the estimate varies because botanists are uncertain how many plant species there are.
Estimates range from 310,000 to 422,000, Jorgensen said.
Of all the plant species, most live in the tropical belt and "in many tropical countries, our knowledge of the plant species is very sketchy," he said.
The demand for new farm land to feed a growing population in tropical countries is the biggest cause of global plant species extinction, he said.
"The natural forest is being cut down and burned and the land converted into pastures and fields for crops," said Jorgensen.
A gradual global warming may aggravate the species loss, he said, because wide open, cultivated areas prevent the natural migration of plants in response to climate change.

http://lcweb2.loc.gov/pnp/cph/3c10000/3c10000/3c10200/3c10294r.jpg

The 19-year-old has earned 37 merit badges, been a quartermaster and three-time senior patrol leader, and now he's an assistant Scoutmaster and a field leader in training as part of the Search and Rescue Program. In his senior year in high school, he racked up more than 1,000 hours of community service.

He doesn't believe in smoking or taking illegal drugs. His mom offered to take him out for a drink when he turns 21. But he doesn't believe in drinking alcohol.
And he doesn't believe in God � not since the ninth grade. And even before then he was unsure.

"You need to have a recognition of a supreme being," said Farmer. "We as the Boy Scouts do not define what that is, but you need to have a recognition."

Paul Wellstone was the only progressive in the U.S. Senate. Mother Jones magazine once described him as, "The first 1960s radical elected to the U.S. senate." He was also the last. Since defeating incumbent Republican Rudy Boschowitz 12 years ago in a grassroots upset, Wellstone emerged as the strongest, most persistent, most articulate and most vocal Senate opponent of the Bush administration.
Various White House figures made numerous recent campaign stops in Minnesota to stump for the ailing campaign of Wellstone's Republican opponent, Norm Coleman. Despite being outspent and outgunned, however, polls show that Wellstone's popularity surged after he voted to oppose the Senate resolution authorizing George Bush to wage war in Iraq. He was pulling ahead of Coleman and moving toward a victory that would both be an embarrassment to the Bush administration and to Democratic Quislings such as Hillary Clinton who voted to support "the president."

Then he died.

Wellstone now joins the ranks of other American politicians who died in small plane crashes. Another recent victim was Missouri's former Democratic governor, Mel Carnahan, who lost his life in 2000, three weeks before Election Day, during his Senatorial race against John Ashcroft. Carnahan went on to become the first dead man to win a Senatorial race, humiliating and defeating the unpopular Ashcroft posthumously. Ashcroft, despite his unpopularity, went on to be appointed Attorney General by George W. Bush. Investigators determined that Carnahan's plane went down due to "poor visibility."

Cronkite, who began anchoring the CBS Evening News in 1962, said the country is at a very critical point in its history. The only other decade that compares, he said, is the 1960s, which saw the beginning of the Vietnam War, the civil rights movement come to the forefront and the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy and civil rights leaders Martin Luther King Jr. and Medgar Evers.
�That was a tough 10 years,� he said. �But this period, with the threat of war with Iraq on tap, economic difficulties and terrorism are something we must be terribly concerned about.�
Cronkite said he fears Americans are learning less and less about what their government is doing, and worse, they do not seem to care.
He cited recent presidential elections that have seen less than half of registered voters go to the polls. The result has been leaders who are chosen by about a quarter of the electorate.
�That means we don�t have a democracy,� he said. �We�ve got an oligarchy here, not a democracy. Our democracy is in some danger if we don�t concentrate on educating the populace.�
Educating Americans should rest with the media, he said. But more often than not, nightly newscasts and the networks� magazine-style shows focus more on entertainment than hard news. Cronkite said this approach is the result of directives from the companies that own the networks to make things more �interesting.�
He said the ability to get the news, especially during times of war, also is becoming more difficult.
Since the Vietnam War, Cronkite said, the media has not been allowed to take its cameras, pencils and notepads into the field with the soldiers to give an accurate account of what is happening.

There was only one giant golden spruce in the world, and, until a man named Grant Hadwin took a chainsaw to it, in 1997, it had stood for more than three hundred years in a steadily shrinking patch of old-growth forest in Port Clements, on the banks of the Yakoun River, in the Queen Charlotte Islands. his rented kayak was punctured en route, and he lived off the land for twelve days before he was rescued by the Coast Guard. Later that summer, Hadwin was stopped at the United States border with three thousand hypodermic needles in the trunk of his car. He talked his way through Customs and proceeded to Washington, D.C., where he distributed the needles on the street along with condoms, presenting himself as an advocate of needle exchange and safe sex. In July, with two thousand needles remaining, he caught a plane to Moscow; from there, he continued eastward, donating needles to children's hospitals as he went. He was arrested by the police in Irkutsk, Siberia, but apparently finessed the interview and parted on good terms....

When Hadwin came back to Kamloops, a town of eighty thousand in south-central British Columbia, where his wife and children lived, people who knew him were alarmed by what they saw. The guerrilla-theatre dress he wore on his travels (running shorts, boots with spurs, and a baseball cap festooned with needles and condoms) raised questions about his mental state. After an altercation with a truck driver, he was sent to a forensic hospital for psychiatric evaluation. Hadwin was interviewed extensively by several doctors...

http://lcweb2.loc.gov/pnp/cph/3c10000/3c10000/3c10200/3c10278r.jpg

Research by the Defence Intelligence Agency into the possibility of genetically engineering a new strain of antibiotic-resistant anthrax...
� A programme to produce dried and weaponised anthrax spores, officially for testing US bio-defences, but far more spores were allegedly produced than necessary for such purposes and it is unclear whether they have been destroyed or simply stored....
In each case, the US argued the research work was being done for defensive purposes, but their legality under the BWC is questionable, the scientists argue.


{There's a army base north of here a ways. abandoned mostly or so it appears, or appeared anyway. within the last couple months signs have appeared at either end of the strip of 101 that you pass by the base on. the signs say "DO NOT PICK UP HITCHIKERS NEXT 13 MILES" it's funny cause the signs are in non-standard colors. non-standard for around here anyway. I was thinking today when I drive by maybe it's from back east that color, kind of a dirty orange. the army base still has boarded up windows and stuff, though across the highway is a brand new sort of Xfiley beige warehouse, with humvees and stuff. it's too far away to see very clear. it was a big base at one time there's like churches with plywooded windows and lots of barracks and other army-type buildings, all looking pretty well abandoned.
the only live human I've mentioned this to said she knew the area and there was a prison nearby and a state mental hospital. which on paper is true. but the fact is the mental hospital though housing the criminally deranged and dangerous is further down the highway, a good 20-30 miles and very close to a town and there's no signs of the type we're speaking of anywhere near it. the prison is miles away and though a road goes right along within spitting distance of it there are no signs of warning there. so.
we have a mental hospital whose inmates are deemd too dangerous to society to be anything but locked up, and a state prison, and neither of them have any warning signs on the major thoroughfares they sit near. and we have an abandoned(sorta) army base and at least three signs each direction warning the unwary. do not. pick up. hitchikers. from whence might those hikers be hitching one wonders. and from what?}

First, it establishes a secure computing space, which means that as a computer starts up, the software will verify that the hardware components such as hard drives can't be read by unauthenticated programs under any known circumstances. Palladium will also check the computer�s central processing unit�s serial number before kicking into operation; both Intel and AMD have already said they're willing to include such identification. Before any program is run, Palladium will make sure it's authenticated via a digital certificate. Stored data will be encrypted and will only be decrypted by authenticated programs.

The drug's localised effect may explain why it increases wakefulness without triggering the "wired" feeling of stimulants such as coffee and amphetamines. Surprisingly, tests also found that when the drug wore off, there was no noticeable need for an extended sleep to recover.

Critics of more widespread use of Provigil fear that the drug might give people a false sense that they can cheat their need for sleep, while in reality they may be accumulating a sleep debt that will ultimately harm them.

designed to provide a rapidly deployable, extended-range surveillance capability for a variety of operations and missions, including: fire control, force protection, tactical security, support to counterdrug and border patrol operations, signal/communications relays, detection and assessment of barriers (i.e., mine fields, tank traps), remote assessment of suspected contaminated areas (i.e., chemical, biological, and nuclear), and even resupply of small quantities of critical items

In real life Paul Wellstone was fighting against heavy odds in the cynical, decadent capital of Absurdistan. As John Nichols wrote in the Nation: "Paul Wellstone is a hunted man. Minnesota's senior senator is not just another Democrat on White House political czar Karl Rove's target list, in an election year when the Senate balance of power could be decided by the voters of a single state. Rather, getting rid of Wellstone is a passion for Rove, Dick Cheney, George W. Bush and the special-interest lobbies that fund the most sophisticated political operation ever assembled by a presidential administration. 'There are people in the White House who wake up in the morning thinking about how they will defeat Paul Wellstone,' a senior Republican aide confides. 'This one is political and personal for them.'"

{Sam Smith's Progressive Oct. 28/02-shortlife link}

End of waiting: she models her 7" heels made by LSB {!}

was dumbfounded. Well over 100,000 Americans were barred from anywhere close to the White House, the home of their nation�s ostensible president, to exercise their Constitutionally guaranteed rights to freedom of speech and freedom of assembly, yet these British tourists could walk right up to the fence. That didn�t make sense to me. It still doesn�t.

And so, while George Bush continues, without much success, to attempt to strong arm other nations into going along with his intention to make war on Iraq, Americans by the hundreds of thousands from Washington to San Francisco are saying no. Bush isn�t paying any attention to them. Even worse, the news media that can speak the truth because of the same Constitutional guarantees that demonstrators attempted to exercise, chose to say little, if anything at all.

What is going on here?
Regis T. Sabol is contributing editor to Intervention Magazine

We are advisers to the President of a very powerful country, and we are prominent in a group of so-called hawks urging him to wage war on Iraq. Like every other member of the group, we evaded the war in Vietnam. Some people see an ethical problem in this; they refer to us as chicken hawks. But we figure that if we had gone to Vietnam we could have been killed, and then who would be here to urge the President to wage war on Iraq?

D.C., R.P., P.W.,Washington, D.C


Calvin Trillin @The New Yorker

f Al Qaeda is serious about recent threats to strike at U.S. Economic interests, we could end up waging war on two�or even three�fronts, from the Middle East and Asia all the way to Latin America. That's because, in our government's view, U.S. interests start and end with oil.

Already, we have spent billions upon billions of dollars, and sacrificed no small number of lives, protecting supplies of crude in remote corners of the world. Though we lean heavily on stable sources like Canada, our biggest supplier, we're also dependent on several volatile nations. Saudi Arabia tops that list, followed by Venezuela and Mexico. West Africa is a growing exporter, with Nigeria now our No. 5 provider. Despite continued sanctions, Iraq remains our sixth-biggest supplier.

_____________
One figure, from the Sydney Morning Herald, tallies U.S. expenditures on troops and advisers in Central Asia at $200 billion. The real aim is to secure the region for more pipelines. American companies are involved in an enormous venture with the Chinese to build a pipeline more than 3000 miles long, stretching from the Caspian Sea to Shanghai; a second consortium would open a pipe from the Caspian to a Turkish port. The U.S. also has an interest in Russian oil rigs and pipelines. The war in Chechnya has left the Russians facing a constant specter of terrorists blowing up any network. Thus U.S. Special Forces stand by protectively in the former Soviet republics, while the meter runs.

Bush's supporters have tried to shift the blame for this unsettling development to President Clinton, by claiming that a 1994 agreement to stop North Korea�s nuclear program was too weak. But the evidence now is that North Korea cast aside that agreement this year and sped up its quest for nuclear weapons in direct reaction to Bush�s threats and rhetoric.

The collision course with North Korea was set early in the Bush administration. In 2001, shortly after taking office, Bush cut off talks with North Korea and snubbed South Korea�s President Kim Dae-Jung over his d�tente strategy. Kim Dae-Jung, a Nobel Peace Prize winner, found himself humiliated during a state visit to Washington.

After the Sept. 11 terror attacks on New York and Washington, Bush began counting North Korea as part of his �axis of evil,� along with Iraq and Iran. Apparently, Bush's reasoning for putting North Korea into the "axis" was to avoid fingering only Islamic countries. So his speechwriters added North Korea as a kind of politically-correct multiculturalism in reverse.

ancient lift-off launchpad

Billy, is that you?

old raver dude

Dream Requiem

"He was just smooth," says Estria. "Like, someone would do an E, and do it kind of loopy. It just sits there. Dream would make it flow." Once, he says, Francisco painted a piece entirely in yellow that was so vibrant it attracted bees.

Dream Lives

Dream

Dream

Dream

Dream

Vidal's highly controversial 7000 word polemic titled 'The Enemy Within' - published in the print edition of The Observer today - argues that what he calls a 'Bush junta' used the terrorist attacks as a pretext to enact a pre-existing agenda to invade Afghanistan and crack down on civil liberties at home.

Vidal writes: 'We still don't know by whom we were struck that infamous Tuesday, or for what true purpose. But it is fairly plain to many civil libertarians that 9/11 put paid not only to much of our fragile Bill of Rights but also to our once-envied system of government which had taken a mortal blow the previous year when the Supreme Court did a little dance in 5/4 time and replaced a popularly elected President with the oil and gas Bush-Cheney junta.'

Vidal argues that the real motive for the Afghanistan war was to control the gateway to Eurasia and Central Asia's energy riches. He quotes extensively from a 1997 analysis of the region by Zgibniew Brzezinski, formerly national security adviser to President Carter, in support of this theory. But, Vidal argues, US administrations, both Democrat and Republican, were aware that the American public would resist any war in Afghanistan without a truly massive and widely perceived external threat.
_______
These procedures, says Vidal, determine that fighter planes should automatically be sent aloft as soon as a plane has deviated from its flight plan. Presidential authority is not required until a plane is to be shot down. But, on 11 September, no decision to start launching planes was taken until 9.40am, eighty minutes after air controllers first knew that Flight 11 had been hijacked and fifty minutes after the first plane had struck the North Tower.
By law, the fighters should have been up at around 8.15. If they had, all the hijacked planes might have been diverted and shot down.'
______
Vidal, 77, and internationally renowned for his award-winning novels and plays, has long been a ferocious, and often isolated, critic of the Bush administration at home and abroad. He now lives in Italy. In Vidal's most recent book, The Last Empire, he argued that 'Americans have no idea of the extent of their government's mischief ... the number of military strikes we have made unprovoked, against other countries, since 1947 is more than 250.'

muerto seco

ursus in arborus

even then

Ladies Rest Room Death Valley

plague rat

and motherhood

and the rat catcher {what's up with that can?}

TWO rat catchers, bigger can

burley at work

The City Council of Santa Monica and San Francisco voters had no authority to approve identical laws in 1999 banning a bank from charging an ATM fee to a customer who was not a member of the bank, said the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

Federal banking regulations allow banks to charge fees for ATM usage.

Ian Dawson's plastic art @James Cohan

China 1995
Shanghai 1998
The Literary Mind Carves Dragons

Although recalling the past may make you happy, it may sometimes also make you lonely, and there is no point in clinging in spirit to lonely bygone days. However, my trouble is that I cannot forget completely, and these stories have resulted from what I have been unable to erase from my memory.

-- Lu Xun (1881-1936), from Call to Arms


CHINA Fifty years inside the People's Republic, Asia Society, Richard Yee


A word has abolished another word

a book has issued orders

to burn another book

a morning established by the violence of language

has changed the morning

of people's coughing

-- Bei Dao (b. 1949)
from "The Morning's Story"

Keeping a weblog of your reading on the Web forces you to commit to some opinion on each link, and publishing that opinion forces you to take full responsibility for it.

The widespread campaign to dismiss webloggers as narcissists is a clearcut demonstration of how the self-knowledge taboo is currently being enforced. Capitalism (in the broadest sense) has no use for original, authentic, self-discovering individuals, because they naturally opt out of the conformist consumer culture. So the profiteers of that culture actively propagandise against self-knowledge, encouraging instead self-distrust and self-hate. ("Ewwww, if you don't fit in with us, you're not hip!")

Because weblogging takes place in an infinite 'namespace'-- ie, nobody is squeezed out even if you take up gigabytes of space-- there's comparatively little territorial harrassment, as compared to traditional publication on paper... and proportionally greater opportunity for experimental risk-taking. (The harrassment you'll get will be limited to email, and will take them a lot more effort to send than it takes you to ignore it!)


{barger is the original template for this, for me. I read about robotwisdom in the ragmulch version of the New Yorker, back in '99. and followed through to blogger, eventually, some months later.
everything changes, everything evolves, and at the exponential rate of change of online things like blogging it isn't possible now for any living person to speak with any accuracy whatsoever concerning the nature of, nor the effectiveness of, what these journals are, and are doing. Dan Gillmor, floating wreckage, Barger's robotwisdom, Tom Tomorrow, Through The Looking Glass, Sam Smith's Progressive, which is essentially a blog, and many others I haven't seen yet, these are beacons, light in a time of darkness. the coast is rocky, the storm is worsening. it's true there are thousands of narcissistic and useless blogs, some of them from people who were involved in Internet evolution from the get, and there are many hundreds of vicious ranting blogs, but all that's necessary to subvert that is not reading them, not linking to them. to pretend that that's all there is, is like falling back on the patchouli oil/bell bottom cliched images editorial writers clung to when the 'hippy' phenomenon became too large, and too scary, to ignore. there was so much more happening then, some of it vital to the continuation of the human spirit, noble and liberating, and sincerely, deeply, compassionate.
key word that.}

{and I'll say again here, there's no adherence to any protocols, and certainly no attempt to plagiarize, I'm way too vain to plagiarize anybody, it's about the links, if you want to know who wrote the text, hit the link, my stuff is between the brackets {...thus...} or even {...so...}

So claims that we've entered a second Gilded Age aren't exaggerated. In
America's middle-class era, the mansion-building, yacht-owning classes had
pretty much disappeared. According to Piketty and Saez, in 1970 the top 0.01
percent of taxpayers had 0.7 percent of total income -- that is, they earned
''only'' 70 times as much as the average, not enough to buy or maintain a
mega-residence. But in 1998 the top 0.01 percent received more than 3 percent
of all income. That meant that the 13,000 richest families in America had
almost as much income as the 20 million poorest households; those 13,000
families had incomes 300 times that of average families.

And let me repeat: this transformation has happened very quickly, and it is
still going on. You might think that 1987, the year Tom Wolfe published his
novel ''The Bonfire of the Vanities'' and Oliver Stone released his movie
''Wall Street,'' marked the high tide of America's new money culture. But in
1987 the top 0.01 percent earned only about 40 percent of what they do today,
and top executives less than a fifth as much. The America of ''Wall Street''
and ''The Bonfire of the Vanities'' was positively egalitarian compared with
the country we live in today.

_______
Canadians can expect to live about
two years longer than Americans. In fact, life expectancy in the U.S. is well
below that in Canada, Japan and every major nation in Western Europe. On
average, we can expect lives a bit shorter than those of Greeks, a bit longer
than those of Portuguese. Male life expectancy is lower in the U.S. than it is
in Costa Rica.
________
A few months ago the conservative cyberpundit Glenn Reynolds made a splash
when he pointed out that Sweden's G.D.P. per capita is roughly comparable with
that of Mississippi -- see, those foolish believers in the welfare state have
impoverished themselves! Presumably he assumed that this means that the
typical Swede is as poor as the typical resident of Mississippi, and therefore
much worse off than the typical American.

But life expectancy in Sweden is about three years higher than that of the
U.S. Infant mortality is half the U.S. level, and less than a third the rate
in Mississippi. Functional illiteracy is much less common than in the U.S.

How is this possible? One answer is that G.D.P. per capita is in some ways a
misleading measure. Swedes take longer vacations than Americans, so they work
fewer hours per year. That's a choice, not a failure of economic performance.
Real G.D.P. per hour worked is 16 percent lower than in the United States,
which makes Swedish productivity about the same as Canada's.

But the main point is that though Sweden may have lower average income than
the United States, that's mainly because our rich are so much richer. The
median Swedish family has a standard of living roughly comparable with that of
the median U.S. family: wages are if anything higher in Sweden, and a higher
tax burden is offset by public provision of health care and generally better
public services. And as you move further down the income distribution, Swedish
living standards are way ahead of those in the U.S. Swedish families with
children that are at the 10th percentile -- poorer than 90 percent of the
population -- have incomes 60 percent higher than their U.S. counterparts.
________
Kevin Phillips concludes his book ''Wealth and Democracy'' with a grim
warning: ''Either democracy must be renewed, with politics brought back to
life, or wealth is likely to cement a new and less democratic regime --
plutocracy by some other name.'' It's a pretty extreme line, but we live in
extreme times. Even if the forms of democracy remain, they may become
meaningless. It's all too easy to see how we may become a country in which the
big rewards are reserved for people with the right connections; in which
ordinary people see little hope of advancement; in which political involvement
seems pointless, because in the end the interests of the elite always get
served.


{ ok. guy in a limousine, guy driving the limousine, stopped at a stoplight, homeless guy with cardboard sign on traffic meridian. guy asks chauffeur to give the homeless guy a $20. chauffeur makes $65K a year. guy in back makes $12.5 mil. homeless guy might hit $5K, including food stamps etc. ok average income for all the people in that transaction is....$12.57 mil divided by 3. which is...let me think here...$4.19 mil annually. cool. America. way to go.}

edison's ark

patent office litter salvation crew

The purpose of this chronology is to show plainly and clearly that:

1. President George W. Bush did indeed have material non-public knowledge of adverse financial conditions at Harken Energy Co. prior to the sale of his Harken stock and therefore violated 15 U.S.C. � 78u-1 , insider trading of securities based upon material non-public information.

2. The Securities and Exchange Commission was indeed aware of Bush�s insider trading violation and chose to stand down.

3. While serving on the Board of Directors at Harken Energy Company, George W. Bush�s performance, motives and ethics were no different than those of the corporate executives and officers of Enron, Worldcom or any other national corporation being criticized by Bush for doing what he did.

4. The Aloha Petroleum sale was an act of fraud and Bush was in a position to know it and prevent it.

One of the most successful business promotions in U.S. history was sponsored by the International Apple Shippers' Association in 1930. It recruited 6,000 peddlers. Within months, ragged street figures selling apples became a standard Depression picture.
___
Miners don't kill rats underground.

L.M.Boyd

another time, a different world

baseball's first negro

Freud in his dotage

Micro-waves of grain

When the railroad work he undertook proved too strenuous, his life deteriorated, and he became an indigent in Los Angeles. Having lost the power of speech, Ramirez was picked up by authorities in 1930, placed in a local mental institution, and transferred seven months later to DeWitt State Mental Hospital in Auburn, where he spent the remaining thirty years of his life.

After twenty years of hospitalization, Ramirez commenced making remarkable drawings and collages on sheets of paper formed of scavenged scraps glued together with mashed potatoes. Having hidden his drawings from the hospital staff, whose policy it was to confiscate and burn such works in order to keep the wards clean, Ramirez in 1954, presented a bundle of them to Dr. Tarmo Pasto, a psychology professor at Sacramento State College, who was conducting research at the hospital. Recognizing the mastery of artistic craft, Pasto asked the staff's permission to keep the drawings. Pasto regularly visited Ramirez thereafter, bringing art supplies and saving the drawings, some of which he used in his classes. In 1968, while teaching at the college, Chicago artist Jim Nutt discovered Ramirez's work in the storage bins of the audiovisual department and with the assistance of Pasto organized the first exhibition of Ramirez's work.

The Bard's earring

troubletown- a nod to Harry Bridges

while slowpoke wags the dog

The Council on Foreign Relations in New York released a report arguing that the Bush Administration will never succeed in cutting off funds to Al Qaeda and other terrorists until it confronts Saudi Arabia, where most of such funds are raised. It was reported that the CIA has begun covert operations in Kurdish Iraq, and American officials acknowledged that the CIA had put the wrong man's face on its wanted poster for Mullah Muhammad Omar, the former head of the Taliban. Maulvi Hafizullah, whose picture does appear on the poster, has been forced into hiding. An American soldier in Afghanistan accidentally blew up a giant container of Coca-Cola

{ok. here we go again. the 'sniper' has killed how many people? 13? 15? say 20. it's less than that but say 20. ok. that's really scary. random death. you never know when or where. so the military's on it, and people all around the country are on it and the news is on it.

ok. in 2001 according to MADD. in the combined areas of Maryland, Virginia, and D.C., around 1600 people died in traffic fatalities.
now this is a very tender area for some folks, those who've lost relatives to drunk drivers are real sensitive about this especially those who had to fight for years to get the public aware of the 'acceptance' of drunk driving, and the long struggle to change that.
BUT. MADD's statistics point to around a consistent 40 per cent or so of 'alcohol related' fatalities. obviously there's no accurate way of pinpointing alcohol as cause so it's about post-accident blood alcohol levels for the drivers involved. which we're just going to accept, that still will leave us with 60% non-alcohol related deaths. 60% of 1600 is over 900 (and I've shortened these numbers, underestimating for rhetorical effect, the real figures are way higher, plus the area affected by the sniper-paranoia is much wider than Maryland/Virginia/D.C.).
ok. 900 deaths a year. that's over 70 a month. or roughly 2 a day. these numbers are WAY under the real ones. plus there's no reason not to include the alcohol related ones because as far as we're concerned here, it's the random unpredictable nature of the deaths involved, so both types of traffic fatality have the same effect. but still. 2 a day, since the 2nd of October. it's now the 23rd. that's 42 people. let's say folks are staying at home a whole lot more. let's cut that number in half. 21 people. random violent death. with no reason, no cause but the chance presence of the victim in the wrong place at the wrong time.

remember, these figures are reduced, dramatically. a statistics major could give you far more accurate numbers. they would be much higher. much higher. and no one gives a shit. every single day all over the country. 40,000 plus human lives every year ended violently for no purpose, and no one says a word, except about the drunk on the highway, as though the rest of it is perfectly acceptable.
but hey, that sniper, man. they gotta stop him. people are scared. oh yeah. terrified to go out of the house. oh yeah. because what if it's you, or one of the kids next time.}

"pato," which is now played in Argentina with a partially buried ball with handles, but which originally was played by burying a duck up to his neck and attempting to yank it up while on horseback.

from News of the Weird

and this

A medical toxicologist testified that Tom's lead levels were still so high in January 2000 that at the time of exposure he had to have received doses that could easily have killed him. Co-worker Karl Moll is sick. Inmate-worker Janis Horton has suffered kidney failure, which can be caused by lead poisoning. Other inmate-workers -- who were quickly dispersed throughout the prison system when they developed lead-related health problems -- have alleged that they, too, were contaminated.

Judy Charles' health also has been affected by lead. And Moll has testified that his wife died suddenly of no apparent cause four days after the project ended.
____________
Prison officials' response? There was no lead in the room. Or if there was, it wasn't dangerous.

Officials refused to provide the immediate medical care that could have saved the workers' health. The bureau has successfully fought off workers' compensation and administrative law claims. Records show that, when the Charles brothers became too ill to work, they were fired for abusing their sick leave.
_________
Tom Charles testified that his boss, Terry Davis told him it was a rush job: Convert the long-unused room on the prison hospital's fifth floor into a laundry room for chronic-care patients in time for the hospital to pass its first inspection by the Joint Commission on Accreditation for Health Care Organizations. The hospital needed the independent group's stamp of approval to receive Medicare and Medicaid funds, and it needed the laundry room to get the approval. The visit was scheduled for mid-October.
__________
On that morning in 1999, he hadn't received a work request for the laundry room re-fit. He was told to start without one. When he asked Davis how he and his crew should charge their time, Charles testified, he was told to "put it on the mental health project" -- an ongoing maintenance job in another part of the hospital.

This job, Charles thought, isn't going to have a paper trail. No work order appeared until February 2000.

Taking apart and removing an old set of stainless-steel cabinets shouldn't be a problem, Charles figured -- until he examined them, and discovered that they were almost entirely encased in lead. He asked Davis what the room had been used for and was told that no one knew.

Safety engineer Randy Vaslik testified later that he had examined the room earlier and discovered "about 1,000 pounds" of lead bars in a corner of the room. He had them picked up by the nearby Naval Air Reserve recycling center. Vaslik said he wasn't even curious about what the room had been used for.
_____________
This whole nightmare started, Charles believes, with a hospital administration that had run out of time to come into compliance with the Joint Commission's regulations. They decided to bypass the law to get the job done quickly and cheaply, with no clue as to the consequences of their actions.

"They didn't set out to kill me and endanger all our lives," he said. "I truly believe that." But when it began to be obvious that that was exactly what they had done, he said, they scrambled to cover up their liability.

"There was just a few of us," he said. "We were expendable, don't you see?"

....whether to go after the longshoremen's union based on a federal court order that reopened the ports last week after a 10-day lockout.

Officials with the International Longshore and Warehouse Union pounced on Friday's delay as evidence the association was scrounging for a case � and unable to grasp one because workers are doing their best to move cargo under difficult and dangerous conditions.

But a spokesman with the Pacific Maritime Association, which represents shipping companies and port terminal operators, dismissed that suggestion....

Consider my experience: I'm a recording artist who has sold multiple platinum records since the 1960s. My site, janisian.com, began offering free downloads in July. About a thousand people per day have downloaded my music, most of them people who had never heard of me and never bought my CDs.

Welcome to 'Acousticville'

On the first day I posted downloadable music, my merchandise sales tripled, and they have stayed that way ever since. I'm not about to become a zillionaire as a result, but I am making more money...

Janis Ian continues to resonate

Ol' Sparky

drugs and/or medicines

s'up t'you

the terrifying Black Panther Party, back when

Listen to King Kong�s mighty war cry, thundering across the jungle: "The United States and our allies call on North Korea to comply with its commitments under the nonproliferation treaty and to eliminate its nuclear weapons program in a verifiable manner."

Gee, that�ll scare the bejeezus out of the NorthKoreans. And that came right after George Bush was thumping his chest at Saddam Hussein. Of course there are differences. Sharon isn�t on the phone every day, ordering Bush to please hurry up and raze Pyongyang.....

human footprint

Freudian Furniture

The Solar Mower cuts your grass in a random pattern. This may sound like the perfect recipe for leaving certain parts of you lawn untouched, but as the Solar Mower begins working as soon as there is enough light to power it, it can roam up to 20 km on a sunny day. During this time, it has turned around lots of times, and every time it turns, it cuts in a random pattern that is not repeated. And remember, it cuts your grass every day. That means that every bit of your lawn will be cut every second day or so, as long as your lawn meets the requirements told about on the other pages on this site.

Aramaic, an ancient Semitic language, was the lingua franca of the Middle East for many centuries. At the time of Jesus' life, Aramaic was the common language of the Jews. Hebrew was the language of government, religion and the upper classes.

{not that Jesus was killed by the Jews, that's like saying he was killed by humans. he was killed, executed, by "government, religion, and the upper classes"}

good boys doing a hard job

my mountain home

A long tradition

artistic homes of California, 1887

pony

RESEARCHERS at the University of Milan mixed swine sperm with the DNA of a human gene called decay accelerating factor, or DAF, and then used the modified sperm to fertilize pig eggs. The eggs were implanted into sows to produce litters of pigs that carried the human gene.
"What we obtain at high efficiency and low cost is genetically modified pigs expressing the human protein..."
msnbc/news


This is not a problem for the stories of
Cordwainer Smith. The scope of his vision and the uniqueness of his style remove them from a direct reliance on current events. Plus, in Norstrilia, there are moments of serendipity that serve to make the novel seem like it was written last week. Rod completes his purchase of the Earth with the help of a sentient computer, who, as one tactic, sends the largest amount of "Instant Messages" on record. Rod also becomes involved in a recurring sub-plot in Cordwainer Smith's stories {written in the 50's}, the plight of the underpeople.
The underpeople are genetically altered animals who act as servants and do the dirty work for humans. No doubt inspired by the Civil Rights movement when these stories were written, the underpeople's problems remain fresh and topical today, whether you read them as a metaphor for exploited people, or as a straightforward commentary on the issue of animal rights itself.

Greg L. Johnson at sfsite



{while nobody was looking, something truly evil took over everything}

The new Arts Council funding levels in England, earmarked for 2005-2006, total $639 million. The current NEA budget, pending Senate approval: $126 million. America is a rather larger country than England. Why does it think so much less of itself as a cultural entity?
Playwright Arthur Miller's early career involved a stint as a Works Progress Administration-funded writer in the waning Depression years. Then as now, for practical and philosophical reasons, he believes in his government spending seed money for the arts, and for artists.
"When the cannons have stopped firing, and the great victories of finance are reduced to surmise and are long forgotten," Miller said recently, accepting an award, "it is the art of the people that will confront future generations."
"The arts can do more to sustain the peace than all the wars, the armaments and the threats and the warnings of the politicians."

Sources close to the matter say Timothy Belden, who previously ran Enron's trading office in Portland, Ore., is prepared to implicate a number of other industry players in what could shape up to be one of the biggest conspiracies in U.S. corporate history.
Deputy Attorney General Larry Thompson declined at a news conference last week to identify other alleged conspirators in the fleecing of California ratepayers.
But he did say that "Belden and others conspired to defraud California electricity consumers and customers."
This confirms a lot of hunches here in the Golden State, where folks knew something was screwy with the power grid long before federal authorities finally decided to weigh in on the matter.
Now we know exactly how it was done, at least as far as Enron was concerned.
Belden said he and his cronies would provide bogus data on how much juice was available at any given time to state utilities.
This would create the impression of congestion on power lines when none in fact existed, driving up demand and, better still, allowing Enron to charge an extra fee to relieve the congestion that wasn't actually there in the first place.Enron also exported power generated in California to other states and then turned around and sold it back to us at a big markup as electricity generated elsewhere.

this link went down @worldpress.org b4 I could read it


it was about Doina Cornea. a google for her turned up this ABBA site.
so there.
whaddya know.

possible Scopes

the 5 year-old plan

my shoes are lifting me above this world

And it was very discouraging, really, because then, when I sat down to write, I often had thought too much about the story, and the way I was getting it down was terribly disappointing. And now I'm sort of used to that.


Now you have a dedicated schedule, don't you?


When I'm doing the first draft, I have a so-much-a-day schedule. But when I start putting it on the computer I can get carried away, and I try to go as far as I can every day, as if I were going to die in the night or something.


You said that you write in a hallway with a little window.


I like to look out the window. I have spent freely so much of my time doing this, and sometimes it strikes me how little I know of the various things other people can do. I can't play bridge. I don't play tennis. All those things that people learn, and I admire, there hasn't seemed time for. But what there is time for is looking out the window.

Alice Munro interview

For more than a year, Kapor and his small team have been working on what they're calling an open-source ``Interpersonal Information Manager.''

The software is being designed to securely handle personal e-mail, calendars, contacts and other such data in new ways, and to make it simple to collaborate and share information with others without having to run powerful, expensive server computers.

As with other open-source software, the source code (programming instructions) will be freely available along with the working program. An early version of the calendar part of the software should be posted on the Web by the end of this year, and version 1.0 of the whole thing is slated for the end of 2003 or early 2004.

Code-named ``Chandler'' after the late mystery novelist Raymond Chandler, the software will run on the Windows, Mac OS X and Linux operating systems. Initially, it will be aimed at individuals and small businesses, but it's also being designed as a platform upon which other developers can build useful software and services of their own.

Patti Smith
Wave (1979)
Wave


hi. hi. i was running after you for a long time.
i i was watching you from. . .
actually I've watched you for a long time.
i like to watch you when you're walking
back and forth on the beach.
and the way your the way your cloth looks.
i like i like to see the edges
-the bottom of it-
get all wet when you're walking near the water there.
it's real nice to talk to you.
i didn't. i-i-i-i-i . . . how are you? how are you?
(oh albino)
i saw i saw you from your balcony window
and you were standing there waving at everybody
it was really great because there was about
a billion people there, but when i was waving to you,
uh, the way your face was, it was so, the way your face was
it made me feel exactly like we're
it's not that you were just waving to me, but
that we were we were waving to each other.
really it was really wonderful
i really felt happy
it really made me happy
and. um. i. i just wanted to thank you
because
you
you really really you made me
you made me feel good
and
oh i, it's nothing.
i um. i. well i'm just clumsy.
yeah.
no, it's just a bandaid.
no, it's ok.
oh no, i'm always doing
something's always happening to me
yeah. well. i'll be seein' ya.
goodbye. bye.

wave thou art pretty.
wave thou art high
wave thou are music
wave thou are white
(oh albino)
(oh albino)
wave thou art high
(wave thou art pretty)
wave to the city
wave
goodbye.
goodbye sir.
goodbye papa.

God's vague figures standing

Berkeley Breathed @ storyopolis

Major fast food companies, including Subway and KFC, have recently said they will not buy chicken fed medically important antibiotics for nontherapeutic purposes. But McDonald's, the second largest U.S. chicken buyer after KFC, has adopted no new policy.

"If McDonald's wants to improve public health, it should stop contributing to the unnecessary use of millions of pounds of antibiotics each year," said Michael Khoo, an analyst for the Union of Concerned Scientists. "Our antibiotics deserve a break today."

UCS estimates that the poultry industry feeds 10.5 million pounds of antibiotics and related drugs to healthy chickens every year to promote growth and to compensate for unsanitary conditions on factory farms. This overuse of antibiotics in poultry contributes to the loss of efficacy of drugs that are used to treat serious diseases in people, including food poisoning.

....states that glass is a liquid. This is incorrect. Glass is a solid at normal temperature. It will not flow and experiments have been done to show this.Bubbles in obsidian, a volcanic glass, are still spherical after more than a million years in spite of the weight of overlying rocks, which exert a much larger force than gravity does on the glass alone. A shorter term experiment was performed by Fred Ernsberger of Corning Glass Works, who subjected glass rods to a constant bending stress of 150 000 pounds per square inch for 26 years. When the stress was released, there was no permanent deformation.

Glass is a liquid at temperatures above the glass transition (about 500�C for window glass) but below the transition it is a solid which is perfectly elastic up to its breaking point. Microbalances using glass springs take advantage of this property. They are extremely linear and never need to be rezeroed.Old glass window panes are usually thicker at the bottom because they were installed that way for convenience (they do not fall over easily and remain in position while they are pointed). Even so, old panes are sometimes found installed thick edge up, especially in stained glass windows where an inverted prism effect was desired.

If the panes are carefully measured they will also be found to taper from side to side. This double taper is obviously not due to gravity, which acts in only one direction, but is a product of the crown process of glass making, which created a disc of glass that tapered radially from the centre.

The crown process, which involved spinning a molten glass gob into a disc, also produced the flow lines and elongated bubbles that are seen in old glass. The window panes were cut from the disc after it had cooled. Crown glass window panes were produced in large volumes in England until the 1830s.

Ross Firestone, Winnetka Illinois

The value of these virgin stands of tropical hardwoods has now begun to attract the attention of major logging companies -- primarily backed by U.S.-based Newman Lumber. These companies are clearcutting old-growth forest, destroying wildlife habitat, and robbing locals of their traditional livelihood. In the past few years an estimated 3,000 to 6,000 loggers have illegally invaded the area and are threatening the lives of vulnerable nomadic tribes such as the Mascho-Piro, Amahuaca, and Nahua. More recently, the loggers and timber companies have been inciting riots and other violence in an attempt to intimidate Peru's president into allowing their harmful practices to continue.


biogems

Which of these two great spots should we air on CNN for Buy Nothing Day (November 29)?

Justice Scalia told a gathering in Chicago that any judge who did not believe in the death penalty should resign. Some judges have said that the death penalty represents "cruel and unusual punishment" and is thus unconstitutional.

"Abolition has taken its hold in post-Christian Europe," Justice Scalia said. He argued that non-believers in Europe found death frightening because they did not believe in an afterlife, but that in America stronger religious beliefs meant that the death penalty was seen as acceptable.

"For the believing Christian, death is no big deal," he added. "I do not find the death penalty immoral."





{leave aside the obvious hypocrisy, the lack of joyful celebration as young children are sent to heaven by violent death or disease, ask any upstanding Christian why exactly Jesus Christ was killed. immediate mumbo-jumbo about saving our souls. then say, ok but what reason did the people who killed him give? blank stares. nothing but blank stares. they don't know. it's not covered in the Bible. and it's never talked about in churches.
only now of course the great hive-mind churns toward its own defense and within days they'll have some kind of insect response ready.

but the truth is he was executed by the state, given the death penalty, and why? for rocking the boat, pure and simple, for challenging the power structure of his moment. for being a radical. for getting in the way of the vampire suck that was in place. the roman equivalent of present state government, aided by the big men of Jerusalem, put him to death for getting in their way. just as modern 'christians' like Scalia and Ashcroft and their wimp-cohort would and are doing, and more dangerously, are about to do on a much larger scale.}

Analyzing Dubya's psychological challenges is not enough - he's the symptom not the cause, and while the rapidity of societal decline has seemed to accelerate since 2000's farcical US presidential election, the framework for rollback was in place long before. If it hadn't been, citizens quite simply wouldn't have tolerated the rigged results.

But what mechanisms could have been used to facilitate the rollback? How can an unwilling population be trained to blindly accept a new, repressive social order?

A CIA instruction manual entitled "Psychological Operations in Guerrilla Warfare" provides some clues. Written in the early 1980s (coincidentally, soon after Bush Sr. headed the Agency) the document was part of the US government's crusade to bring down Nicaragua's leftist government, by providing training and weapons to the Contra rebels. Detailing how to gain a community's support through propaganda and selective violence, the manual begins "In effect, the human being should be considered the priority objective in a political war ... Once his mind has been reached, the 'political animal' has been defeated, without necessarily receiving bullets."

The following are quotes from the original psyop textbook, along with contemporary examples-

PSYOP quote: "It is appropriate ... to guide the discussion of a group to cover a number of points and to reach a correct conclusion." The people "should feel it was their free and own decision."

Interesting to note that up until early 2000, military personnel from the Fourth Psychological Operations Group based in Fort Bragg, North Carolina were active at CNN's Atlanta-based headquarters - and left only after public outcry when CNN admitted to employing them. Their presence was perhaps not surprising given former CIA director William Colby's boast that "the Central Intelligence Agency owns everyone of any major significance in the major media."

So much for a democratic free flow of information.

Also striking is how the "discussion" around attacking Iraq is being guided "to reach a correct conclusion." After both the House and Senate agreed to give Bush his blank check to attack Iraq (requesting only that Bush report to Congress every 60 days if he does decide to take action) Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle called the endorsement of war "a statement of American values and resolve." Apparently Daschle was unaware of the large anti-war street protests taking place across the country, and the overwhelming number of anti-war phone calls flooding House and Senate offices.

http://www.heatherwokusch.com/

Question

A small toadstool that glows brightly at night is growing on a rotting log in my garden in south-east Queensland. What is the evolutionary advantage of such a characteristic? Does it attract things which it eats, or does it repel things which would eat it?

Thubten Gyatso , Eudlo, Queensland

Answers

Fungi glow not to attract things which they eat but to attract things which eat them. Many fungi benefit from animal dispersion. Truffles, for example, emit a strong aroma that attracts animals, which then eat the subterranean fungus. The spores pass through the gut and are not only dispersed but also provided with nutrients.
Virtually all members of the fungal family Phallales (stinkhorn fungi) give off an unpleasant odour redolent of rotting meat or sewage, which attracts beetles or flies. These disperse the spores, either when they pass through the gut or when they become attached to the insects' head or thorax. Similar dispersal mechanisms are common among flowering plants.
Phosphorescent fungi attract night-flying insects, such as moths, which perform the same role. It is quite common to find the fruiting bodies of such fungi moth-eaten and full of larvae, by which time the glow is reduced to that of the palest moonlight.
Michael Mcbain , Australian Fungal Mapping Project Monash University

The questioner is correct--it is possible to produce ice cubes more quickly by using initially hot water instead of cold. The effect can be achieved when the container holding the water is placed on a surface of frost or ice. The higher temperature slightly melts the icy surface on which the container rests, greatly improving the thermal contact between the container and the cold surface. The increased rate of heat transfer from the container and contents more than offsets the greater amount of heat that has to be removed. The effect cannot be obtained if the container is suspended or rests on a dry surface.

Question

The handles of felling axes are curved, whereas the handles of pickaxes, mattocks, sledgehammers, broadaxes and double-bitted axes are straight. What is the physical principle involved?

Peter Read , Taroona Tasmania

Answers

Pickaxes, mattocks, sledgehammers and double-bitted axes have straight handles because they are designed to be used in a downward manner. The tool is struck from a near vertical stance to a point in front of the operative. The straight handle is reversible and allows both points of the tool to be used: a pick has a chisel and a sharp point, a mattock has one blade at 90 degrees to the other. The straight handles are oval in section and bell towards the operator's end, giving grip and preventing the tool from slipping out of the hands. These tools are extremely difficult to use horizontally.

A felling axe is designed to be used in the horizontal and vertical positions and any angle between within reason. The design allows a constricting grip to give control when the tool is swung, so that it will not slip out of the operator's hands. The end of the handle thickens and bends so that if the hand slips there will still be a grip at the end to prevent the axe from becoming a missile and risk damaging one's legs. The axe, under certain circumstances, may be used with one hand and still be safely controlled.

An adze, used for shaping wood, has a single blade head at 90 degrees to the line of the shaft which has more of a curve than the felling axe. It is used by swinging it down and towards the user who stands astride the timber. This tool requires a high degree of control, hence the handle shape, otherwise one may then need it to shape a wooden leg.

R Trewinnard , Newmilns Ayrshire

Question

It is well known that when washing is hung out to dry in the open air the clothes develop a pleasant fresh smell. What is the reason for this and what chemicals are released?
E Ramon Moliner , Quebec

Answer
The agent responsible could be the Open Air Factor, a bacterial component of open air discovered by Harold Druett and Ken May at Porton Down in 1968.OAF is probably produced by the initial reaction between ozone and olefinic hydrocarbons from petrol or trees. It has the right properties to be attracted by damp washing, being highly condensable (zero vapour pressure) and having a high affinity for water.Considerable amounts could therefore concentrate in washing after only a few hours on the line. This is important when you are dealing with something like OAF which is in the parts-per-billion range in the air.OAF is unstable, and the fresh smell of washing is possibly caused by some volatile aldehydes being released when OAF splits, the remainder being an involatile polar peroxide.A systematic study identifying the aldehydes, leading perhaps to a PhD for someone, is clearly indicated here.
Tom Nash , Sherborne Dorset

This type of mould may present the greatest hazard of any to the health of occupants of mouldy buildings. Its airborne spores are allergenic and powerfully toxicogenic. Its toxins inhibit protein synthesis, and are immunosuppressive, an irritant and haemorrhagic.

It is well known that fodder contaminated by Stachybotrys can kill horses, and it is also harmful to the stable hands. Currently, this mould is of particular concern in North America, where it has been implicated in episodes of building- related illness ranging from chronic fatigue syndrome in adults to fatal pulmonary haemosiderosis in infants

"The numbers don't appear to be artificial," said Dr. Robert Byrd, the pediatrician and epidemiologist who led the research team at the university's MIND Institute. "And they challenge our understanding of autism as primarily a genetic condition. It should be concerning for all of us."

"Those who have simply refused to believe that we are in the midst of a real autism epidemic no longer can put forth their simplistic explanations and denials," said Rick Rollens, a catalyst for the state's scrutiny of the burgeoning caseload who is convinced that his 12-year-old son is autistic because of vaccines he received as an infant.
...
They did find, however, that more children in the younger group suffered from gastrointestinal problems than in the older group, and that fewer in the younger group also were mentally retarded.

Finally, in a finding that challenges a link between vaccines and autism, Byrd found no difference between the two groups in the percentage of children who had regressed in their development -- for example, by losing the ability to use certain words.

He found that about 30 percent of children in both study groups appeared to have lost developmental milestones. If a vaccine such as the often-blamed measles-mumps-rubella immunization were responsible for the autism increase, Byrd said, researchers would have seen a difference between the two groups in the proportion of parents reporting regression.

"My hope is this would be the beginning of serious federal investigation, at a funding level no private foundation can afford," added Portia Iversen, vice president of the Cure Autism Now Foundation in Los Angeles. "It's a major health issue. It's gigantic."

In fact, if we really want to take modern physics seriously, we should go further. We have traditionally thought of a world that works by cause and effect as a fundamental assumption of science, even as a presupposition of rational thought. But in modern physics, ordinary causality breaks down in the microscopic realm. Not only do we have events that happen at random, there is no distinction between forward and backward directions in time. Our familiar, macroscopic sense of cause and effect is, like the arrow of time, not something basic to the world. These both emerge in our macroscopic environment, out of a microscopic substrate that is radically different.

Everyone knows a stone bounces best on water if it is round and flat, and spun towards the water as fast as possible. Some enthusiasts even travel to international stone-skimming competitions, like world champion Jerdone Coleman-McGhee, who made a stone bounce 38 times on Blanco River, Texas, in 1992.

Airlines could boost their emissions of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide and still halve their impact on global warming. That is the paradoxical conclusion of a new study into the effects of commercial aviation on the environment.
The CO2 emitted from their engines is not the only way aircraft affect climate. They also do so through their contrails, the long trails of water vapour and ice that form in an aircraft's wake and which can persist for several hours. Contrails trap heat in the atmosphere by reflecting infrared radiation emitted from the Earth's surface.

Your Hand Can Stop Atomic War

4 Americans and one Quaker

Trumbo the commie takes the 5th and heads to prison.

despite anonymous threats of violence

Colombian assault troops and police backed by tanks and helicopter gunships laid siege Wednesday to an impoverished neighborhood in Medell�n, the South American nation�s second largest city.
The operation, the biggest counterinsurgency campaign to be waged in a crowded urban area in recent years, was launched on the direct order of Colombia�s new right-wing president, Alvaro Uribe.
At least 14 people were killed in the first day of fighting, including a 16-year-old boy. Scores were wounded, most of them old people, women and children.
Medell�n�s mayor, Luis P�rez, said Uribe had instructed the army to continue the operation until it secures full control of the district, known as Comuna 13, which is home to some 130,000 of Medell�n�s 2.5 million people. General Mario Montoya, the army commander in the Medell�n area, said that his forces intended to carry out house-to-house searches in a hunt for weapons.

contemptible


absolutely,thoroughly, contemptible

MOSCOW, Russia -- A car has exploded outside a McDonald's fast food restaurant in Moscow, police have confirmed.

Russian NTV reported one person died in the blast but police would only confirm to Reuters three people were injured.

ITAR-Tass news agency, citing police sources, said that the victims were located inside the restaurant's first and second floors and on the street near the car at the time of the explosion.

The Interfax news agency said that a five-year-old child was among the casualties

doonesbury Oct 18 (archives).

Inconsistent and overlapping legislation on forest exploitation has resulted in the total area of forest and mining concessions, of around 200 million hectares, exceeding Indonesia's total land area of 191 million hectares, according to a non-governmental organization (NGO). "Indonesia's total land area is only 191 million hectares, with another 330 million hectares of maritime zone," said the Mining Advocacy Network (Jatam). The forest and mining concession areas also exceed Indonesia's total remaining forest area of 104 million hectares, Jatam said in a recent report

All over the world, mining is men's work. When the Canadian personnel manager of Inco's mine in Soroako{Indonesia}was asked why the workforce was all male he looked surprised - to him this was unremarkable. 'It's government legislation,' he said. Indonesian labour legislation (inherited from the Dutch) prohibits the employment of women in mines. And even in countries where it is legal, workers often consider women in mines taboo or bad luck.

Mining is seen as so 'naturally' masculine that few people consider its effects on women. What they don't realize is that the low-cost labour of Third World men as miners is sustained and subsidized by unpaid female labour; in the household, on farms and at markets.

In Soroako, men once worked in an egalitarian fashion alongside their wives and other family members in the fields. But mining companies soon set up hierarchical self-contained settlements. The mineworkers at Soroako live in segregated housing according to their job at the mine and wear different uniforms and helmets to signify their company status. The women also have set roles now - mostly as company wives or mining-town prostitutes.

The influx of expatriates heightens indigenous women's awareness of class - they are astounded by the wealth of the managers' wives and families. In the case of the remote Freeport mine in West Papua, the company regularly flies the wives of management to Queensland. They return from their weekend of shopping draped in new clothes and jewellery.

The managers' wives in the mining town of Soroako are expected to take on a leadership and welfare role in the community through involvement in the Association of Inco Families, an organization in which their position parallels that of their husband in the workforce. They give out packages of goods on the birth of babies and run adult literacy classes for the wives of labourers. Local women value many of these 'welfare' benefits; improved medical services in particular mean their babies are less likely to die.

But the colonial attitudes of the company also change social roles. Many incoming men are single and have high incomes. Bars and brothels are as inevitable in the company towns and squatter settlements throughout Asia and the Pacific as they are around military bases.

Companies actively encourage prostitution around the mining towns and at popular destinations for the miners' holidays. While in Soroako, I attended a publicity night for an airline at the company-built club. It was billed as a film screening but after showing us a short advertising film, the presenter became embarrassed. He explained to the audience of men, women and children that his presentation was aimed at mining and timber camps in Indonesia. The reason for his embarrassment became clear as the images lit up on the screen. We were presented with scenes of the 'sex capitals' of Asia - streets of bars, strip and sex shows. The people in the images were primarily white men partnered by beautiful young Asian women. The voice-over had messages such as 'Come to Perth for a change and a rest... and you'll come back for the rest' accompanying images of a topless Aussie girl (the only non-Asian woman) sunbaking on a Perth beach. The message worked on sexual innuendo and the image of male sexuality needing immediate and frequent gratification. Migrant workers expect sexual services to be available near where they live.

There are more! Many, many more examples! There's no shortage of information about what western corporations are involved in, and anyone who has learned about what some of them are prepared to do for profit in their own countries should not be surprised that human lives matter less the further from home they are. Anyone wanting to learn more about international mining ought to visit: mines and communities org

In most less developed/poor countries the same goes on, over and over again. In the Mideast and some other places it's oil that is wanted by the west and causes one intervention after another. How many people in Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela have a chance to share in the resources of their own country? And how much is controlled by the western oil dinosaurs? In Africa and Asia it's mainly minerals, diamonds and gold. Congo, Angola, and many other African states are blessed with more natural wealth than are US. Sadly that wealth is not helping the Congolese and Angolans but running in wide streams to London's City and Wall Street. It's coffee, cocoa, peanuts, bananas, copra, rubber and cheap labor elsewhere. Forced on poor countries by the WTO, IMF and the World Bank or by US forces. Do we expect those countries to be thankful that we in the west sell them expensive food and machinery after forcing them to produce coffee and peanuts cheap for us to the exclusion of needed eatables? Do we think that selling weapons to the rulers is adequate compensation for taking the oil from under the sands that the forefathers of their people walked?

Lest you think that my own profile is of a gun-control zealot, you are wrong. I am not talking of outlawing guns, even pistols, or taking them away from people who use them for hunting or self-protection.

I am talking instead of taking reasonable measures to track those guns and the ammunition used in them so that the authorities have a fighting chance to stop killers before, as has been happening over and over, they kill again. If the Constitution forbids such measures, then I ought to have the right to own an unregistered car and drive it without a license.


By Richard Cohen in the washington post

John Perry Barlow's Pox Americana:
But George II has been working for the Lord ever since he was divinely instructed some years back to stop snorting blow. He knows that God wants us to have oil and that the world's second largest petroleum reserves are not to be entrusted to a people whose divine messenger was, to quote Jerry Falwell, "a terrorist."

I don't think that our new Emperor is an evil man. But he has the kind of unquestioning belief in his own virtue that is the richest loam for growing evil. He is simply too weak to possess this kind of power without misusing it. And now we have removed all the Constitutional impediments that might have checked his hubris. We have thrown ourselves on the mercy of a conscience too clear to be reliable.


{Barlow's got that same thing most everybody else does, that it's all about evil by intention. so that blowing up the world is more evil than doing it by accident. I feel that less and less the closer we get. I think it comes from being spanked as toddlers. the idea that why you did something is more important than what got done. and in the family in the parent/child relationship I think that's valid accurate and true, at the scale of planetary annihilation I think the distinction's meaningless. about 7 years ago I got this hit that what 'we' were, whoever 'we' are, could disappear and something here would go on, just like always, that's one of the conceits they brainwashed us with at the get, that we're essential, at the same time we were dwindling away, that urgency that sense of TRY and don't quit, that's its origin. so now it's about fighting the sense of futility, the cynical nausea, the madness of pudge-brained refusal to face the mirror. my personal very personal struggle is with the increasing hunger for the removal of the human race from the planet. that seems like a pretty irrevocable move all in all. but I'm so thoroughly disgusted with people like Bush/Cheney and Falwell, and their counterparts in the world of finance, and they seem so inextricably attached to the way things are, like a tick with its head buried in your brain,you know? can't remove it without major damage, leave it there and it'll kill you, the times call for brain surgeons everywhere to work ceaselessly....me, I'm off to the bakery for another day of daily bread delivery}
{which all misses the point pretty well. on my part. the point is I agree with Barlow, except that I'm getting closer every day to having no ability to distinguish between evil on purpose and evil by accident.
what difference does it make if Bush is a moronic sock puppet or the devil's yardboy incarnate? if he causes the death of the human race the human race is dead. you have to believe in an afterlife don't you? I mean you HAVE to, otherwise it doesn't matter why. it just matters what.}

The 11,000-year-old snow cap of Mount Kilimanjaro, famed in literature and beloved by tourists, will be gone in two decades, according to re-searchers who say the ice fields on Africa's highest mountain have shrunk by 80% in the past century.

Research shows the oldest ice layers on the famed mountain were deposited during an extremely wet period starting about 11,700 years ago.

But, a temperature rise in recent years is eroding the 45-metre-high blocks of ice that gave Kilimanjaro its distinctive white cap.

"The ice will be gone by about 2020," said Thompson, the first author of a study appearing today in the journal Science.

A judge yesterday threw out the convictions of two boys, ages 13 and 14, in the slaying of their father, who was bludgeoned with a baseball bat as he slept.
The judge said he will order a new trial for the boys, and in the meantime will encourage the prosecution and defense to work out a deal.
The brothers were facing prison terms of 20 years to life because they were tried as adults. They were convicted of second-degree murder without a weapon, as well as arson, for setting the house on fire to cover the crime.


{try em as adults.... but if they had sex with an adult....but hey. we're not mentally ill, we're Americans! by God!}

The clinic ran out of needles, a lot of blood was collected and it will begin again tomorrow morning at 9am. People asked if I thought it was safe to stay and if they should maybe leave. Before, I always reassured them that Bali was safe. I could only say, I hoped so, and that I thought Ubud was safe but I didn't know anymore.

The location of the bomb is one of the most crowded on Bali. It�s packed with tourists and local Balinese and other Indonesians who sell cigarettes, water and food on the streets in front of the tourist spots and work in the discos and restaurants, or just hang out there on Saturday nights. People live in the back of their shops and there are private Balinese houses and boarding rooms for workers tucked between the bars and restaurants. There are small shops that sell food to locals next to shops that sell souvenirs to tourists. It is a densely populated area. One entire block was destroyed. Not just the discos where the bombs went off, but the shops, restaurants and houses surrounding them. The fire finished what the bombs didn't.

Balinese TV is not as timid as U.S. TV. The images from the hospital, were for me, unwatchable. There are handwritten signs outside the hospital that say: "Young girl in intensive care, 11-14 years old, face burned, in coma. Caucasian." And "Girl in intensive care, about 5 years old, 130 cm., fair skin, reddish brown hair. Caucasian."

One could presume that these children's parents are also in hospital unconscious or are dead. These children were not in the disco, but perhaps walking down the street with their families or in a nearby restaurant eating.

The Balinese are all in shock. They are Hindus who make offerings to their gods several times a day. They do not know what to do, how to help, what to expect. But their future is not likely to be very good or easy.

On a fine - and relatively unpolluted - day, particularly when the humidity is low during winter, the observatory offers spectacular views of Mt. Fuji to the west, the Boso and Miura peninsulas (on either side of Tokyo Bay), the Hakone mountains and Mt. Tsukuba to the northeast.

The object of attacks from Godzilla, Tokyo Tower, which was snapped in half by the creature, has been forever lodged in pop culture folklore. But its finest moment might have been in 1983 when the supernatural psychic Uri Geller used the Tower as a relay station to bend spoons and fix broken watches in homes all over Tokyo.

LOFTY PLANS: Construction of a 600-meter-high tower -- which would make it the tallest in the world -- is being planned for Ueno Onishi Park in Tokyo's Taito Ward, it was learned Oct. 5. The tower, tentatively named the New Tokyo Tower, would transmit next-generation terrestrial digital broadcasting

Almost there. . . Japan edged closer toward a financial crisis on Oct. 10 as stock prices tumbled to a new 19-year low for the third time in a week, adding urgency to the government's plans to cushion the pain of a promised cleanup of the ailing banking sector. The Nikkei closed at 8,439.62, its lowest close since April 1983.

FRANCE: Paris Mayor Bertrand Delanoe -- one of France's few openly gay politicians -- was recovering in hospital Oct. 6 after being stabbed in the stomach in an apparent homophobic attack. During questioning, suspect Azedine Berkane said "he did not like politicians and in particular he did not like homosexuals.

3 items from Japan Times Weekly round-up.

Now Ms Hauksdottir, who helped her daughter produce her first record at the age of 11, is hoping her action will mobilise opposition to the project.
"I'm more optimistic now than I was at the start of the hunger strike," she said.
"People are pledging their support and for me that gives me a lot of strength.
"I don't believe that Alcoa or the Icelandic Government should underestimate the will of the Icelandic people.

{ Hauksdottir. Ahh.}

{this article in the ever-so-informative ABC website came via the odious Drudge. but it was obviously filled with reeking bogosity. so off to the Google, for this "Dr." Martin Cohen. who is not a physician at all. but rather the cheese at this bureaucratic oddment here. one notices the nepotistic proliferation of his cohort therein.


not that this space is pro-cannabis necessarily. pro-truth though.
to the death. no more lies.}