intent is bunk!

The gods do this in shame of cowardice:
Caesar should be a beast without a heart,
If he should stay at home today for fear.
No, Caesar shall not: danger knows full well
That Caesar is more dangerous than he:
We are two lions litter'd in one day,
And I the elder and more terrible;
And Caesar shall go forth.

A witness told rangers the shark approached Casey from behind, then tossed him into the air and let go as fellow surfers began screaming.

"I remember thinking I just want more. This isn't it. Fame is not the goal. Money is not the goal. To be able to know how to get peace of mind, how to be happy, is something you don't just stumble across. You've got to search for it."

The final toll of the General Slocum fire has never been fixed: 1,021 dead at least, perhaps 1,031, perhaps 30 more than that, and that number counts only those who were roasted or drowned in 30 awful minutes. Later, dozens of survivors committed suicide in their desolation; more yet were led vacant-eyed to mental wards. In the end, an entire neighborhood � a lively, laughing, gracious, prosperous, bustling lower East Side community called Weiss Garten � disappeared forever.

The granddaughter of Mahatma Gandhi, Ela Gandhi, joined some 100 peace activists from 45 countries on the outskirts of New Delhi on Friday to launch a major new peace movement.

Known as Nonviolent Peaceforce, the international non-governmental organization was to be formally inaugurated during a five-day conference in Surajkund, which borders New Delhi, organizers said.
________
Ela Gandhi, now a member of the South African parliament, told AFP of her struggle against the apartheid rule and how she would accompany her father to marches against the brutal former white minority government.

She was put under house arrest for close to a decade by the apartheid regime, which was finally ousted in South Africa's first all-race elections in 1994.

Her grandfather, the Mahatma, spent 21 years in South Africa, where he went to practice law. He returned to India in 1914 after suffering racial abuse in South Africa.

{what gets lost, what they trained us to miss, is these are moments, and only moments, not a thing in and of itself, like the homeless, the way we see them as a thing, like a profession, but it's only a little period of time then something happens, something changes, they go somewhere become something else, are gone, the dystopic stories, the dream landscapes of post-apocalypse, we learn to see that as a place, but it's a moment, one of a continuous flow of moments, and all these moments too, become something else, we think we recognize the true thing through the image but really we stop there, at the surface, as we were trained to, to not see, to miss what really happens.}

reed man

russetly

Interface to the Future

A version of real-time developed for the Montefoire Children's hospital, the 'Interface to the Future' (IF) is a public device that is simple to use and understand. The interface is in the foyer, the public context of the hospital, in which people often walk past or gather. The interface contains a (directional) microphone that is recording at all times. The interface also has a speaker that is near the microphone (within visual distance but some physical distance for audio separation). The speaker plays back constantly. There is exactly a one year lag between the recording and the playing of the sound.
_______________
Trigger the Loma Preita Pony

Trigger the Loma Preita Pony is an information display that uses movement to represent movement. When you put 25 cents in this adapted kiddie ride the motor follows the ground motion acceleration profile of the 1989 Loma Preita earthquake. This renders the US Geological Survey (USGS) public data as a shared experience, exploiting proprioceptive sensitivity to changes in acceleration. The data is the same, however the genre of representation is altered from 'fact' to 'experience.'
_____________
The tree(s) will become a networked instrument that maps the microclimates of the Bay Area, connected through their biological materiality. People can view the tree(s) and compare them, a long, quiet, and persisting testament to the Bay Area's diverse environment.

This brings the suicide rate closer to 0.68 suicides/day and suggests that the estimated rate of this phenomenon in the previous accounts is too small by a factor of 4. Using this projected figure and a mid-range value of life estimate (that is, the National Highway and Transport Safety Authority figure used in the cost-benefit analysis of the 55 mile per hour limit legislation of $500,000 dollars per life) we can recalibrate the rate of loss in economic terms as $182- $238 per day. This is less then 1% of the revenue generated at the toll gates. However, there are a number of ways to interpret the data. To provide an evaluate of the Bureau1s method we need to compare to other data sources. While there are other databases that provide correlates to the suicide rate, such as those used in life insurance calculations, there is none known that has the capacity to store video images of their source statistical data. Why this is the case is an open question but can probably be attributed to data storage convenience and expediency of calculation. The Bureau has not only produced a method for the consistent collection of video enhanced comprehensive data and the proprietary algorithms to capture and store the information, but has done pioneering work to index this data to market indicators. This provides the possibility for this information to be integrated into the daily economic concerns, incorporating it into the micro attention that market indicators receive. The first application of this data, is the opportunity to characterize the value of suicide.

"So, Ivan Ubiquovich, congratulations on surviving two years under the security regime here at Punish.Net. Have a federally subsidized tobacco cigarette."

Ivan lights his cigarette with an ID-tagged, globally-positioned, wi-fi desk lighter.

"Ivan, I hope you've learned your lesson about smoking that terrorist-subsidized Zapatista marijuana."

"Mr. Parole Officer sir, as I told the martial law court, I never actually inhaled that marijuana. I was just standing next to a Dutch guy. That was my big mistake."

"Ivan, the Comprehensive Homeland Security Act made it a federal crime to possess even airborne molecules of marijuana. Our air-sampling drug detection chips can sniff out marijuana fumes, coast to coast. So we're finally rooting out narcoterrorism where it lives: where the American people themselves really enjoy it. Another cigarette?"

"No thanks, sir. I've got that blood test to pass."

OUT THERE, in happy family homes, in the offices of corporate executives, in toy stores through out the globe, is an army of robotic dogs. These semi-autonomous robotic creatures, though currently programmed to perform inane or entertaining tasks: begging for plastic bones; barking to the tune of national anthems; walking in circles; are actually fully motile and AWAITING FURTHER INSTRUCTIONS.

Appropriately, Kissinger is a man on the run for his past misdeeds. He is the target of two lawsuits, and judges overseas have sought him for questioning in war-crimes-related legal actions. In the United States, the family of Chilean General Rene Schneider sued Kissinger last year. Schneider was shot on October 22, 1970, by would-be coup-makers working with CIA operatives. These CIA assets were part of a secret plan authorized by Nixon--and supervised by Kissinger--to foment a coup before Allende, a Socialist, could be inaugurated as president. Schneider, a constitutionalist who opposed a coup, died three days later. This secret CIA program in Chile--dubbed "Track Two"--gave $35,000 to Schneider's assassins after the slaying. Michael Tigar, an attorney for the Schneider family, claims, "Our case shows, document by document, that [Kissinger] was involved in great detail in supporting the people who killed General Schneider, and then paid them off."

On September 9, 2001, 60 Minutes aired a segment on the Schneider family's charges against Kissinger. The former secretary of state came across as partly responsible for what is the Chilean equivalent of the JFK assassination. It was a major blow to his public image: Kissinger cast as a supporter of terrorists. Two days later, Osama bin Laden struck. Immediately, Kissinger was again on television, but now as a much-in-demand expert on terrorism.
_________________
With Kissinger in control, the secret-keepers of the White House--who already have succeeded in preventing the House and Senate intelligence committees' investigation of 9/ll from releasing embarrassing and uncomfortable information--will have little reason to fear.

The Bush-Cheney administration has been a rehab center for tainted Republicans. Retired Admiral John Poindexter, a leading Iran-contra player, was placed in charge of a sensitive, high-tech, Pentagon intelligence-gathering operation aimed at reviewing massive amounts of individual personal data in order to uncover possible terrorists. Elliott Abrams, who pled guilty to lying to Congress in the Iran-contra scandal, was warmly embraced and handed a staff position in Bush's National Security Council. But the Kissinger selection is the most outrageous of these acts of compassion and forgiveness. It is a move of defiance and hubris.

For many in the world, Kissinger is a symbol of US arrogance and the misuse of American might. In power, he cared more for US credibility and geostrategic advantage than for human rights and open government. His has been a career of covertly moving chips, not one of letting them fall. He is not a truth-seeker. In fact, he has prevaricated about his own actions and tried to limit access to government information. He should be subpoenaed, not handed the right to subpoena. He is a target, not an investigator.

"Others at a higher level of the fruit picking industry seem complicit in one way or another with how these activities occur," U.S. District Judge K. Michael Moore said while handing down the sentences. "I think there is a broader interest out there the government should look into as well."

Relatives of three men convicted in June of forcing the 700 illegal workers into slavery packed a small courtroom Wednesday, but not one victim was there to watch them be sentenced. Prosecutor Adrianna Vieco told Moore the victims couldn't afford to take a day off work.

The latest audiotape statement attributed to Osama bin Laden is not authentic, according to a Swiss research institute.

The Lausanne-based Dalle Molle Institute for Perceptual Artificial Intelligence said it was 95 per cent certain the tape does not feature the voice of the long-absent terrorist leader.

US experts say the tape may never be fully authenticated because of its poor quality, but those who have heard it generally support US law enforcement officials' conclusion that it probably is bin Laden speaking.

Mahfood had no idea how to react to the prisoners, who were always looking to pick a fight. Mahfood got into so many fights her colleagues nicknamed her "Suicide." During her first year, Mahfood took on an inmate who was off his medications. He'd already knocked out two guards when Mahfood jumped on his back. He threw her on the ground and beat her, then kicked her upside the head. In hindsight, Mahfood says she should have gone to the hospital. Instead, she crawled to her feet and finished her shift.

"You don't want to lose a fight in prison. You'll lose grace," Mahfood says, adding that she had an image to keep up. "There's something I had to prove, because I'm a girl."

Ongoing Efforts In the Cultivation of
Worthy Thinking & Acting by Michael James Hauan

lovable hero
_____________
"It is at such a time and circumstance that I became aware of my own arrogance. For a stupid moment, I had thought I discovered Mahalia Jackson�We are seated in her Prairie Avenue flat, oh, shall we say about twenty-five years ago?�. Her hands are clasped on the kitchen table. They are delicate, graceful hands. Not dainty, not soft. The calluses are eloquently there. She had scrubbed floors of other people's parlors. She had laundered other people's finery. She had nursed other people's children. A bitter reflection some years later: 'I nursed little Jimmy like he was my own. Do you think he was in that mob that threw rocks at Dr. King?'"

"In recalling Chicago '68, it is these moments that most immediately come to mind. A fusing of the mindlessness to the Theatre of the Absurd. For [writer] James Cameron, it shall always be a unique experience. Only a few weeks before, he had observed the Paris riots. There, too: the police versus the young. The French police, he believes, are more calculatedly cruel; there is more style to their sadism; they are more personal. 'Here, it was mindless and thus more shocking.' and perhaps, as consequences appear to indicate, more numbing to the young."

Although the others managed to drive the lizard back into the jungle, the damage had been done. Within half an hour the young man bled to death before the eyes of his helpless father and brother.

This nightmarish story is not fiction; it happened in Indonesia a few decades ago. The killer was the world�s largest lizard, the Komodo monitor, alias the Komodo dragon. (It gets its name because it belongs to the group of lizards known as monitors and because it lives on the tiny Indonesian island of Komodo.) While its usual diet consists of animals rather than people, some large individuals do become dangerous to humans. Their victims have included European tourists as well as Indonesian villagers

the cynicism of the decision and the gross insult to democracy and to the families of the victims that it represents has to be analyzed to be believed.

1) We already know quite a lot, thanks all the same, about who was behind the attacks. Most notable in incubating al-Qaida were the rotten client-state regimes of the Saudi Arabian oligarchy and the Pakistani military and police elite. Henry Kissinger is now, and always has been, an errand boy and apologist for such regimes.

2) When in office, Henry Kissinger organized massive deceptions of Congress and public opinion. The most notorious case concerned the "secret bombing" of Cambodia and Laos and the unleashing of unconstitutional methods by Nixon and Kissinger to repress dissent from this illegal and atrocious policy. But Sen. Frank Church's commission of inquiry into the abuses of U.S. intelligence, which focused on illegal assassinations and the subversion of democratic governments overseas, was given incomplete and misleading information by Kissinger, especially on the matter of Chile
________________
5) On Memorial Day 2001, Kissinger was visited by the police in the Ritz Hotel in Paris and handed a warrant, issued by Judge Roger LeLoire, requesting his testimony in the matter of disappeared French citizens in Pinochet's Chile. Kissinger chose to leave town rather than appear at the Palais de Justice as requested. He has since been summoned as a witness by senior magistrates in Chile and Argentina who are investigating the international terrorist network that went under the name "Operation Condor" and that conducted assassinations, kidnappings, and bombings in several countries. The most spectacular such incident occurred in rush-hour traffic in downtown Washington, D.C., in September 1976, killing a senior Chilean dissident and his American companion. Until recently, this was the worst incident of externally sponsored criminal violence conducted on American soil. The order for the attack was given by Gen. Augusto Pinochet, who has been vigorously defended from prosecution by Henry Kissinger

Many people think that Chinese government's attitude of ignoring AIDS means that the government doesn't want to ruin its reputation and investment environment by a virus. But if the government keeps on acting this way, the virus will spread faster.

Then I have another thought. AIDS issue in China is more related to economy, or poverty. The villagers in Henan became HIV positive during the process of selling blood. The reason of selling blood is that many of them make a living on this. Because of being poor, they have to sell blood to support their family. And because of being poor, they are not educated and have no knowledge of AIDS. Or even they know something about the virus, they can not make their ends meet except they sell blood.

I'm not sure how the western countries do to this. What I know from globalization is that the developing countries see the prices of the medicines needed rising.

The Eugene City Council passed a resolution Monday night opposing the USA Patriot Act. Congress passed the legislation shortly after September 11th in hopes of cracking down on terrorism.

Eugene Councilors agreed to pass a resolution after listening to dozens speak out on the controversial anti-terrorism law during a public forum at the Eugene City Hall. Alexander Gonzales said, "If we grow up thinking that it's ok to profile, it's ok to subject people to searches, then what is ok?" Dawn Peebles said, "Now, ordinary citizens are fearful that the government can come into their homes without honoring the Bill of Rights."

In LQG, reality is built of loops that interact and combine to form so-called spin networks-- first envisioned by English mathematician Roger Penrose in the 1960s as abstract graphs. Smolin and Rovelli used standard techniques to quantize the equations of general relativity and in doing so discovered Penrose's networks buried in the math. The nodes and edges of these graphs carry discrete units of area and volume, giving rise to three-dimensional quantum space
______________
Markopoulou Kalamara approached LQG's extraneous space problem by asking, Why not start with Penrose's spin networks (which are not embedded in any preexisting space), mix in some of the results of LQG, and see what comes out? The result was networks that do not live in space and are not made of matter. Rather their very architecture gives rise to space and matter. In this picture, there are no things, only geometric relationships. Space ceases to be a place where objects such as particles bump and jitter and instead becomes a kaleidoscope of ever changing patterns and processes.

full color led flashlight

sad optimism of an ant farm
the wide-open mind of a kid
the room the ant farm lives in
science
all of it
the innocent beauty of scientific inquiry
all of it makes me sadder than I can hold

but it passes quickly

{calm unbiased summing up of the history of Zionism }
"The search for secure borders�even when it did not involve the domination of one people by another�was carried too far. No border is ever deemed absolutely secure before it seems absolutely insecure to the other side and so makes the next war inevitable.

The vast settlement project after 1967, aside from being grossly unjust, has been self-defeating and politically ruinous."

100 quotes from Shakespeare

when police officers swooped in on Mr. Sirven last Friday, he removed the microchip from his cell phone, chewed it and swallowed.

it's always High Noon somewhere

Q. What's an "infix"?

A. A word placed within another word to modify its meaning. Such as "abso-darned-lutely." That's not just the cute exception. It's done all the time in Arabic. And was pretty common in American Indian languages, too.
L.M.Boyd

Studies thus far have neither shown nor ruled out a link between the vaccines and neurological damage in children. But in the summer of 1999 the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Public Health Service urged vaccine manufacturers to stop using thimerosal as quickly as possible.

Thus, thimerosal, which was developed by Eli Lilly & Company in the 1920's and was in widespread use by the 1990's, is no longer added to vaccines commonly given to children. But a serious controversy continues. Lawsuits have been filed by parents across the country who are convinced that their children suffered severe neurological damage from the mercury in the vaccines. Talking to them can be heartbreaking.

Lyn Redwood, a nurse practitioner and the wife of a physician in suburban Atlanta, spoke to me last week about her 8-year-old son, Will. "I have a little boy who was completely normal at birth � walking, talking, smiling, meeting all of his developmental landmarks," she said. "Then, shortly after he turned 1 year old, he lost his ability to speak, to make eye contact. He started regressing and ultimately was diagnosed with pervasive developmental disorder, which falls into a spectrum of autism disorders."
_______________
At this point we must interrupt our narrative and turn our attention to the federal government's effort to fight terrorism in the United States.

Last week the Senate approved legislation to establish a Department of Homeland Security and it will soon be signed into law by the president. Buried in this massive bill, snuck into it in the dark of night by persons unknown (actually, it's fair to say by Republican persons unknown), was a provision that � incredibly � will protect Eli Lilly and a few other big pharmaceutical outfits from lawsuits by parents who believe their children were harmed by thimerosal.

Now this has nothing to do with homeland security. Nothing. This is not a provision that will in any way protect us from the ferocious evil of Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda. So why is it there? Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that the major drug companies have become a gigantic collective cash machine for politicians, and that the vast majority of that cash goes to Republicans.
_____________________
Or maybe it's related to the fact that Mitch Daniels, the White House budget director, is a former Eli Lilly big shot. Or the very convenient fact that just last June President Bush appointed Eli Lilly's chairman, president and C.E.O., Sidney Taurel, to a coveted seat on the president's Homeland Security Advisory Council.

There's a real bad smell here. Eli Lilly will benefit greatly as both class-action and individual lawsuits are derailed. But there are no fingerprints in sight. No one will own up to a legislative deed that is both cynical and shameful.

An official spokesman for Eli Lilly, Edward Sagebiel, insists the company knew nothing about it, nothing at all..
____________
Senator John McCain of Arizona characterized the provision as "among the most inappropriate" in the homeland security legislation. He said: "This language will primarily benefit large brand-name pharmaceutical companies which produce additives to children's vaccines � with substantial benefit to one company in particular. It has no bearing whatsoever on domestic security."

The politicians with their hands out and the fat cats with plenty of green to spread around have carried the day. Nothing is too serious to exploit, not even the defense of the homeland during a time of terror

{Al Kay eeda! Al Kay EEda! AAAANTHRAAXX!! Tourists!!! International Tourists!!! TOURISM!!!!! and these scumsucking pigs have poisoned thousands of children. here. in their own country. among their own people.}

Attorneys for the Bush Administration asked a federal court on Monday to order that documents on hundreds of cases of autism allegedly caused by childhood vaccines be kept from the public.

Department of Justice lawyers asked a special master in the US Court of Federal Claims to seal the documents, arguing that allowing their automatic disclosure would take away the right of federal agencies to decide when and how the material should be released.

Attorneys for the families of hundreds of autistic children charged that the government was trying to keep the information out of civil courts, where juries might be convinced to award large judgments against vaccine manufacturers.

The court is currently hearing approximately 1,000 claims brought by the families of autistic children. The suits charge that the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine, which until recently included a mercury-containing preservative known as thimerosal, can cause neurological damage leading to autism.

Federal law requires suits against vaccine makers to go before a special federal "vaccine court" before any civil lawsuit is allowed. The court was set up by Congress to speed compensation claims and to help protect vaccine makers from having to pay large punitive awards decided by juries in state civil courts. Plaintiffs are free to take their cases to state courts if they lose in the federal vaccine court or if they don't accept the court's judgment.

The current 1,000 or so autism cases are unusual for the court. Because it received so many claims, much of the fact-finding and evidence-gathering is going on for all of the cases as a block.

Monday's request by the Bush Administration would prevent plaintiffs who later go to civil court from using some relevant evidence generated during the required vaccine court proceedings

oreofuchi for ambassador

From his prison cell in the Tower of London, a Frenchman named Charles, Duke of Orleans, on Feb. 14, 1415, sent his wife a rhyming letter. History records it as the world's first Valentine.

By the time the dust kicked up in that meeting had settled, Halsey would be forced to reckon with the hypothesis that thimerosal had damaged the brains of immunized infants and may have contributed to the unexplained explosion in the number of cases of autism being diagnosed in children.

That Halsey was willing even to entertain this possibility enraged some of his fellow vaccinologists, who couldn't fathom how a doctor who had spent so much energy dismantling the arguments of people who attacked vaccines could now be changing sides. But to Halsey's mind, his actions were perfectly consistent: he was simply working from the data. And the numbers deeply troubled him. ''From the beginning, I saw thimerosal as something different,'' he says. ''It was the first strong evidence of a causal association with neurological impairment. I was very concerned.''

One of Canada's feeble, American-neocon wannabes, summoning every ounce of authority his pinkish, plump, baby face is capable of displaying (ever notice how many of these people resemble plump babies? - Gingrich, Falwell, Robertson, Limbaugh, etc. Likely there's a solid clue here to some unknown syndrome or genetic abnormality.) demanded an apology and the dismissal of Ms. Ducros. But Prime Minister Chretien is made of sterner stuff. He was photographed in Parliament with his hand covering a yawn.

To my mind, these events add considerable force to arguments for women's greater involvement in politics. Women have demonstrated a superior ability to recognize the embarrassing nakedness of a very eccentric emperor.

Japanese Foreign Minister Makiko Tanaka, daughter of a former prime minister, last year made the private observation at a dinner in America that Bush "is totally an asshole." This, again publicized by "neocons," of course, involved precisely the word Bush himself had used during his election campaign to describe a newspaper reporter, not a politician who threatened world peace, whose honesty he resented. Bush refused to apologize for what was a private remark made before a live microphone. Tanaka's remark, too, was private, but she was soon forced out of the Japanese government.

German Justice Minister Herta D�ubler-Gmelin, another tough, astute woman, made the observation recently that Bush's approach to avoiding domestic difficulties through war had previously been tried by Hitler. Students of history will know that her statement was no more than dry fact, but, to this day, Washington's Baby-Face-in-Chief refuses even to meet with the German Chancellor, a pathetic display for a man holding such power

Isabel Letelier learned more about torture than she ever wanted to know. Her husband, Orlando Letelier, served as Ambassador to the United States from Chile under the government of Salvador Allende before being called home to serve in the cabinet. His expertise in economics was needed when the Nixon administration, having failed to subvert Allende�s election and inauguration, worked to undermine the Chilean economy.

Because their first attempt to overthrow the democratically elected government of Chile by a military coup had failed, Nixon told the CIA, "We will make the economy scream."

"They did, too," Isabel said, "Our major export is copper which moved in American trucks. Manufacturers refused to give us spare parts. They subverted the economy every way they could."

A second coup, backed by the CIA, succeeded. Allende was overthrown by General Augusto Pinochet and the military. Orlando Letelier was tortured, beaten, his fingers broken. He was sent to Dawson Island, a concentration camp near Antarctica. Pressure from friends and colleagues led to Letelier�s release and deportation, first to Venezuela, then to the United States. In Washington he continued to speak out against the Fascist regime. He received numerous threats.

Anonymous callers told Isabel she was not a wife but a widow. When a dead chicken was found in her front hallway, she called the police.

"It�s a chicken," an officer said. "What do you want us to do?"

"It�s a threat," she said. "They are planning to kill my husband."

"It looks fresh," the officer said, pointing to the blood pooling from its headless body. "Maybe you can eat it for dinner."

Ducros was at the centre of a storm since last Thursday when it was reported she referred to U.S. President George W. Bush as a "moron" during a chat with a reporter at the NATO Summit in Prague.

In an exchange of letters yesterday, Ducros told the PM that after reflection over the weekend, "It is very much apparent to me that the controversy will make it impossible for me to do my job."

Chretien replied, "As you take your leave, you can be proud of the fact not only that you have filled one of the most senior positions ever held by a woman in a Prime Minister's Office, but above all, of the exemplary manner in which you have carried out your duties."

"Nearly every state is in fiscal crisis," the governors said in a new survey of the states.

Raymond C. Scheppach, executive director of governors association, said the problems would affect people across the country. States, he said, are increasing tuition at public colleges and universities, cutting Medicaid eligibility and benefits, increasing taxes on individuals and corporations and laying off state employees.

"You will see huge cuts in Medicaid," Mr. Scheppach predicted.

Medicaid and other health costs, like employee health benefits, account for 30 percent of state spending and grew last year by 13 percent, the largest rate of increase in a decade, the report said. At a time when revenues are declining, Mr. Scheppach said, such growth is unaffordable and unsustainable.

Relatively few of the newly elected governors have said precisely how they will deal with these fiscal problems. "Most of them don't understand how bad it is," Mr. Scheppach said.

{virtually every 'artist' listed in this gallery has images of children in what are, if not sexual poses, oddly disturbing and not gentle poses. there's something really creepy about almost all the images I've seen here, though I still love Nancy Burson's work, and Simen Johan's a master photgrapher/visionary}

Ms Nigot killed herself last Tuesday, two weeks after the death of a healthy couple in their late 80s, each of whom could not face the prospect of outliving the other.

After attending three workshops with Dr Nitschke, Syd and Marjorie Croft took a drug overdose at a retirement village at Bundaberg in south-east Queensland.

Ms Nigot's death has triggered a police coronial investigation which will examine how she died and whether anyone assisted her death. But she said she took an overdose of medication which she had bought in the United States.

In a note to Dr Nitschke, thanking him for his support, she described him as a crusader working for a worthwhile humane cause.

However, the West Australian Health Minister, Bob Kucera, expressed anger. "It is one thing for Dr Nitschke to be supporting people who have terminal illness and whose quality of life has reached rock bottom. It's quite another to be talking about cases where there is no apparent physical problem ... we know of many people who are living highly fulfilling lives well into their 80s and 90s."

Ms Nigot, who moved to Australia in 1967, was awarded the highest French academic award, the Office of the Palmes Academiques, in 1995, eight years after retiring from the Department of French Studies at the University of Western Australia.

An atheist, she wrote in her final statement: "The life of an individual, voluntarily terminated, is of small importance compared with the death statistics relative to crime, accident, war and other similar causes of human demise which are viewed by society as a whole with regret, but accepted with relative equanimity.

"Why is there pressure against helping or allowing people who have had enough of living ... to fulfil the longing for final peace?"

She led what she described as three lives - in France, the United States and Australia. After World War II, she was promotions manager of the exclusive Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York and met the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, the then French president, Charles de Gaulle, Marilyn Monroe and Salvador Dali.

She asked to be cremated - no speeches, no mention of God.

A secret population of orang-utans has been discovered in the forests of the island of Borneo.


Conservationists believe about 2,000 rare apes are living out of sight in a remote lowland region of East Kalimantan.


The find, if confirmed, will raise the number of known orang-utans in the world by about 10%

{so that means there's..........uhmmm....20,000 orangs(known) worldwide? 20K? and Jerry Falwell, man of God, goes on TV and brags how he'll be motoring about in his SUV in a decade's time. 20,000 orangutan.}

Primate experts have predicted that the apes will be found only in zoos by the year 2020 unless immediate steps are taken to protect them.


According to a report by the United Nations Environment Programme (Unep), the annual 5% loss of habitat means there will be virtually no intact forest left for them by 2030.


London-based Orang-utan Foundation International says there has been a dramatic decline in wild orang-utan populations throughout the tropical rainforests of Borneo and Sumatra.

Stuck in the Basque country in the eighties with not much of the language and a lot of food poisoning, ORT kept me off an intravenous drip and nursed me back to life in a couple of days. Since then, whenever I've had really bad diarrhea, oral rehydration salts been the first thing I've bought or mixed up to get me back on my feet.

ORT is was described by the Lancet as "the most important medical advance this century. It was discovered by US researchers in 1968, and is now used by 38% of all diarrhea cases in the world, saving millions of lives. It's also fantastically cheap - it's just a magic ratio of sodium and glucose and water.

Unfortunately, I have a really bad memory, so I can never remember what the magic ratio is. So, for the record, it's:

1 Liter of Clean Water

One level teaspoon of salt

Eight level teaspoons of sugar

Mix it up well, and drink in small sips. It's as easy as that.
___________
....there was lying in bed a gentleman named Ilya Ilyitch Oblomov. He was a fellow of a little over thirty, of medium height, and of pleasant exterior. Unfortunately, in his dark-grey eyes there was an absence of any definite idea, and in his other features a total lack of concentration. Suddenly a thought would wander across his face with the freedom of a bird, flutter for a moment in his eyes, settle on his half-opened lips, and remain momentarily lurking in the lines of his forehead. Then it would disappear, and once more his face would glow with a radiant insouciance which extended even to his attitude and the folds of his night-robe.

Concoctions included the huMouse, a mixture of man and mouse; the humanzee, a cross between a human and chimpanzee; and blends of human with pig and human with baboon. The chimeras�named after the mythical Greek monster with a goat's body, a lion's head, and a serpent's tail�could potentially be used to study embryonic development, raise organs for transplants, or test new drugs.

The chimeras' real purpose, however, is their shock value. If the notion of human-ape half-breeds rising from the laboratory makes your stomach churn and your mind reel, then the monsters are serving their creator's subversive goals. Newman is both a developmental biologist and a founding member of the Council for Responsible Genetics, one of the nation's oldest biotechnology watchdog groups, and he has been writing and lecturing about the ethical perils of genetic engineering since the late 1970s. Ten years ago, he got a call from the economist, rabble-rouser, and fellow biotech critic Jeremy Rifkin, who asked if Newman could come up with a genetically engineered invention that was technically feasible, scientifically useful, and "so disturbing that it would draw the public's attention to the possibilities of genetically engineering humans." It took a few years for all the pieces to come together; in December 1997, Newman and Rifkin jointly submitted their application to the patent office.
______________________

{I just finished a half hour hunt for a concise rendering of Cordwainer Smith's 'underpeople'. while there's lots of stuff out there about him, nothing I found did more than glancingly mention what I think is a powerfully realistic depiction of genetically altered animals, bred 'up' to serve humanity, much like slaves were beaten and bound into doing. dogs with essentially human bodies and fur and soulful eyes and unbreakable loyalty and obedience, buffalo capable of half-ton burdens and speech, and the rejects, the unfinished, the incomplete, the wrong, huddled at the margins of complete control, in disused corners of the decaying perfection of a far-future metropolis. and the police swooping in on ornithopters, bird-genetics transformed into organic helicopter-like vehicles. and all as real as your imagination can make it. reading his name on the back of the Buffalo Springfield album in the 60's earned Neil Young my unswerving allegiance.}

_________
You're just in there and you're swimming and he trusts you to go along with him. And at the end of a sometimes 5000 word short story, you've been in the future and in a complex imaginative future with real characters and situations that will stretch your mind.. This is the kind of the kind of thing that I think science fiction was designed to do, and he was I think perhaps the ultimate of far future science fiction writers

____________

Neither man has any intention of actually making a chimera.

The people of Ecuador have elected a former coup leader who has pledged to fight corruption as their sixth president in six years, results showed today.

Lucio Gutierrez, 45, won 54.3% of yesterday's runoff vote, beating the 45.7% awarded to his billionaire rival in the bitter election campaign, Alvaro Noboa.

Mr Gutierrez's supporters included a small Marxist party, radical Indian groups and leftwing unions, leading his opponents to fear his stance would scare away potential investors.

But since he won the first round of elections on October 20, Mr Gutierrez has toned down his rhetoric and described himself as "centre-left". He travelled to New York to woo Wall Street investors, and softened his opposition to the US military's use of Ecuador's Manta airbase for operations targeting the drugs trade.

When you take time to read a book or listen to music or look at a picture, the first thing you are doing is turning your attention inwards. The outside world, with all of its demands, has to wait. As you withdraw your energy from the world, the artwork begins to reach you with energies of its own. The creativity and concentration put into the making of the artwork begin to cross-current into you. This is not simply about being recharged, as in a good night's sleep or a holiday, it is about being charged at a completely different voltage.

When I read Seamus Heaney or Ted Hughes, I'm not just reading a poet's take on the world, I am entering into a different world - a world built from the beginning on other principles. William Carlos Williams said: "It's hard to get the news from poems, but men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there."

Art's counterculture, however diverse, holds in plain sight what the material world denies - love and imagination. Art is made out of both: a passionate, reckless love of the work in its own right, as though nothing else exists, and an imaginative force that creates something new out of disparate material. Art's experiments are not funded by huge state programmes, venture capital, or junk bonds; they are done when someone picks up a pen or a brush, or sits down at the piano, or takes a piece of clay and changes it for ever. A money culture wants the figures, the bottom line, the sales, the response, it wants a return on its investment, it wants more money.

......he believed that art affirms and sustains life at its highest level. He became an antique dealer because he wanted to be surrounded by what the Jews call "real presences". A real presence is one where spirit and body, or spirit and object, have never been separated. It doesn't matter whether we are talking a chair, a picture, a book or a human being; what makes us feel alive is the living quality lodged there.

This quality is abundant in art. It is the reason why art is timeless. It is the reason why art does not date. We don't go to Shakespeare to find out about life in Elizabethan England; we go to Shakespeare to find out about ourselves now. Go and visit Antony Gormley's Angel of the North and you will meet the same imaginative hugeness as in Chartres or Westminster Abbey. The scale is different, the sensibility has changed, but the spirit is the same.

Mass production is about cloned objects. Art is about individual vision. Individuals can work together, as they must in theatre or opera, or where assistants work under a master, or they can work alone. However it happens, art is never a factory or a production line. Even Duchamp's Readymades were a way of forcing us to concentrate on the thing in itself as it really is.

Capitalism doesn't want you to concentrate - you might notice that much is amiss. A blurred, out-of-focus consuming is what suits the marketplace best.

For more than 20 years, Antokoletz marched, clutching a picture of her son Daniel, a lawyer and university professor who defended political prisoners and vanished in 1976.


The mothers began their marches in April 1977. Antokoletz, who frantically sought information about her son, together with 13 other women took up a vigil on the plaza. This simple act drew international attention to the estimated 30,000 people who had been abducted, tortured, and killed under Argentina�s military dictatorship. After democracy returned, the mothers continued their protests, demanding justice and accountability. Some succeeded in tracking down grandchildren who had been kidnapped with their parents, or who had been born in captivity and illegally adopted.illegally adopted.

{it would be dishonest to say that the slaughter of so many in Argentina was done with the approval and co-operation of the government of the United States, just as it would be dishonest to say it was done with the approval and co-operation of the citizens of the United States. some members of the government of the United States, some citizens of the United States, not all.}

Places by which Russia's ranking in the U.N.'s Human Development Index of living standards has fallen since 1990 : 31
Harper�s Index
{that'll teach 'em}

I blame the Vietnam War. That's safe enough; nobody likes the Vietnam War.

The ability of rich kids to buy their way out or buy an easy ride through exacerbated the class bias of the military caste system. The political elite no longer has a personal stake in talk, pro or con, of war: the last President to have made a career in the military was Jimmy Carter.

Even more disastrously, the left and the Democratic Party got stuck with "anti-military" rhetoric while the right and the Republican Party get to claim that they're "pro-military."

Talk about being "pro-military" or "anti-military" is as nonsensical (and common) as talk about being "pro-economy" or "anti-economy." There are at least two sides to an economy -- worker security and big business profits -- with party lines drawn between them. Just as clearly, there have always been at least two sides to the American military: the armed forces themselves and the profiteers who leech from them.
http://www.bellonatimes.com/

http://meltingobject.blogspot.com/
http://www.wherethreadscomeloose.com/links.html
http://www.bellonatimes.com/

Early this morning, during my clandestine coffee at the rural-commuter branch of the State University, I overhear a student discussion about how hard it is to afford classes, and how some lucky devil scored tickets to hear Ollie North speak.

Scattered newspapers announce the election returns.

{the most eloquent political commentary I've seen in a month of Sundays}
in UFO Breakfast

glimpses of another world
where people eat differently
smile the same
find similar solutions to cold weather
and from which children move into still further worlds

glimpses of another world

Even as Chilean courts have continued to pursue actions against retired military officers alleged to have participated in the torture and murder of political prisoners, Guti�rrez wrote, a leading participant in the Comando Conjunto asserted that members of the unit still obey �strict orders to lie, deceive, block, and hide evidence.�

In a series of interviews, the anonymous informant identified as �Colmillo Blanco,� or �White Fang� (alleged by El Siglo to be Otto Trujillo), revealed how Comando Conjunto�formed in 1975 as a special unit drawn from all branches of the armed forces under air force oversight to coordinate repression of leftists�has resumed its covert activities. �We have access to economic resources for operatives, surveillance, wiretapping, threats, theft of court papers, bribes, and domestic and international operations�all under the protection and orders of the Chilean air force,� he said.

The air force high command disclaimed any support for the unit

Mexican Gen. Jos� Gallardo once seemed an unlikely candidate for human-rights activist. One of the youngest officers to earn the rank of brigadier general in the Mexican army, Gallardo was on the fast track to the highest echelons of power.

But the general's career took a sharp left-turn when he enrolled at Mexico City's National Autonomous University, where he pursued a course of study in political science. During his time at the university, Gallardo concluded the armed forces needed an independent ombudsman to investigate charges of human-rights abuses by military personnel.

Shortly after publishing a magazine article in which he laid out this proposal, Gallardo found himself facing charges of theft and destruction of documents. A military court convicted him in December 1993, but his real crime, according to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and Amnesty International, was to shine a light on the military's unsavory human-rights record.

In response to intense international pressure, Mexican President Vicente Fox freed Gallardo earlier this year after Gallardo had spent nine years in jail. Fox has received praise for his release of a few high-profile political prisoners�including Gallardo�and his authorization of an official inquiry into past human-rights abuses.

But there remain serious human-rights problems in Mexico. Last fall, one of the country�s most prominent human-rights lawyer, 38-year-old Digna Ochoa, was shot dead.
_________________
Ochoa, a former Roman Catholic nun, was famous for taking on high-profile cases, like the defense in May 1999 of Rodolfo Montiel Flores [see �People,� WPR, August 2000] and Teodoro Cabrera�arrested on gun and drug charges�who lead a peasant group opposed to wildcat logging by local political bosses. Ochoa was repeatedly threatened, twice kidnapped, tortured, and nearly killed. Her assassination has raised suspicions of military involvement,

Todd Warren, a Sunday School teacher at Prairie Oak Community Church in Andover, Minnesota, questioned a 16-year-old boy about masturbation and homosexuality, then told him to write "What would Jesus do?" on his penis in order to avoid temptation. Nobody is that kinky.

from Joe Bob Briggs

{probably most males raised in a mainstream Christian religious environment have thought about this, especially around the onset of puberty. what Jesus would do is precisely the point. Jesus disappears from public view at 13. without a trace. and doesn't re-appear until he's 30. so what he'd do about sex is entirely and completely not available. to boys who most need guidance at that time. and are then forced to rely on the council of 'men' who are repressed at best, and often perverted whether conscious of it or not.}

the truly most astonishing astronomy photo I've yet seen

The struggle against detention certainly didn't end post-Woomera. In fact, the Federal Government continues with the construction of Fortress Australia, and fewer and fewer people are even making it to our shores. Many remain incarcerated and the government is shifting most of those from Woomera to the new, high-tech Baxter Detention Centre outside Port Augusta.

"Why did you run from the police?" Chavez is heard to say over the sounds of nurses and doctors.

"Did you get his gun? ... Did you to try to shoot the police?"

Martinez in a low voice responds: "I don't know.... I don't know."

Lawyers for Martinez say he panicked when the officer tried to tackle him, but they say he did not grab the officer's gun.

In the emergency room, he is heard asking Chavez several times to leave him alone. "I don't want to say anything anymore."

"No? You don't want to say what happened?" the sergeant continues.

"It's hurting a lot. Please!" Martinez implores, his words trailing off into agonized screams. Undaunted, Chavez resumes. "Well, if you're going to die, tell me what happened." Silence came only when pain medication took hold, and Martinez faded into unconsciousness.

Mayor Ed Garza said Thursday that he hadn't spoken with Ortiz about the mix-up, but that he had asked for a full report.

"I am not ready to make any comments until I've seen the official report," he said.

It began about 8 p.m. Wednesday when a team of SWAT officers stormed through a glass door at a home on Fairshire Road without warning, said the three cousins who live there.

The cousins said officers shot out the door with soft bullets and threw in a concussion grenade that left a hole and a black scar on the wall.

The men, who work at a Mexican restaurant, said they were watching television when the officers stomped in, flinging punches, kicks and profanities. The cousins said they thought they were being robbed.

Marcos Huerta, 19, was taken to a hospital where doctors stitched a wound above a puffy eye. Salvador Huerta, 20, was left with a chipped front tooth and a bruised face. Both said they fell to the floor without resistance and covered their heads as officers hit them at least 20 times.

Dr Zhou said the temptation to add a longer tail would have been difficult to resist. "This specimen was presumably assembled by a Chinese farmer who wished to make it a more complete looking fossil, which could be sold for a higher price," he said.

The specimen ended up in America where it was bought by a private collector for $80,000 (�51,000). It appeared to be the perfect example of a creature that was half dinosaur, half bird and it became an icon for the evolutionary transition between the two.

Soon after the accounts were published, though, the other half of the slab containing the fossil was discovered at the same site in China.

Previously, Herrin and Teplitz speculated that it would be possible to search for seismic events that might indicate passage of strange quark matter (also known as nuclearites) through the Earth because such events would have a distinct seismic signal - a straight line.
This seismic signature would be caused by the large ratio of the nuclearites speed to the speed of sound in the Earth. It was estimated that the strange quark matter might pass through the earth at 400 km per second (250 miles per second), 40 times the speed of seismic waves.
Data collection halted
The team also determined that the minimum requirement for detection of a nuclearite would be detection of its signal by seven monitoring stations.
The researchers latest findings single out two seismic events with the linear pattern they were looking for.
In two cases, the arrival times and forms of seismic waves at nine far-flung stations pointed to linear bursts of energy. The ruptures ripped through the planet at hundreds of kilometres per second rather than fracturing only near the surface, as typical earthquakes do.
One event occurred on 22 October 1993, when, according to the researchers, something entered the Earth off Antarctica and left it south of India 0.73 of a second later.

Gloria Murillo�s one-acre farm in this central Colombian municipality looks like it met a forest fire. Her banana trees and corn stalks sag, their leaves brown. On the ground lie the charred remains of yucca, beans, rice and coffee. U.S.-supplied crop dusters have sprayed a high-octane version of Monsanto�s Roundup, killing not just her crop of coca�the raw material for cocaine�but also her family�s food crops. And the herbicide seems to have contaminated tributaries of a nearby river, the Cimitarra. Now Murillo�s four children have diarrhea and white sores. �They fumigated us like insects,�

One candidate screened by the White House was William Miller, a widely respected researcher and professor at the University of New Mexico who was nominated to serve on the advisory council on drug abuse. Miller says he's never been secretive about his politics. "If somebody started digging, they wouldn't have to dig too far to find out I'm a lifelong liberal," he says. "I've never been arrested or joined the Communist Party -- I'm just what Garrison Keillor calls a 'museum quality' liberal Democrat."

That apparently was enough to trigger alarm bells at the White House. Last January 15, a liaison staffer interviewed Miller by phone. According to Miller, the staffer told him that he needed to determine whether Miller held "any views that might be embarrassing to the president." He began by asking Miller's views on drug legalization and needle exchange; when Miller responded that he was opposed to the former and in favor of the latter, the staffer replied, "You're one for two." The staffer then asked a series of questions that had no apparent relevance to Miller's qualifications to serve on the council: Did he favor capital punishment for drug kingpins? (No.) Was he opposed to abortion? (No.) Had he voted for Bush?

Questions were mounting yesterday over the death of Iain Hook, the British United Nations relief worker killed in Jenin refugee camp, after it emerged that the Israeli army had failed to react to repeated telephone calls from Mr Hook pleading for a ceasefire so he could evacuate staff from the UN compound where he died.

An initial investigation by the Israeli army found that it was an Israeli soldier who fired the bullet that killed Mr Hook, Israeli radio reported yesterday. The Israeli army declined to confirm the report, saying its investigation was not yet finished.

Mr Hook, 54, from Felixstowe in Suffolk, was shot dead inside a clearly marked UN compound on Friday. The Israeli army had surrounded a building nearby where a wanted Palestinian militant was believed to be hiding, and gunfire broke out.

"We requested repeatedly to the Israelis that they cease fire long enough for us to be able to evacuate not only UN staff, but also a disabled woman who was living in the building opposite the one the Israeli operation was centred on," said Paul McCann, a spokesman for UNRWA, the UN agency Mr Hook worked for, which provides humanitarian assistance to Palestinian refugees. UNRWA's office in Jerusalem had also made several calls to the Israeli army without success.

women squat on the sidewalk using their bare hands to pull apart the hazardous guts of a small mountain of PCs.

This is where many of America's computers go to die.

In the Pearl River Delta less than 180 miles away, in factories as immaculate as Guiyu is filthy, growing legions of young women work up to 18 hours a day, soldering chips and wires to motherboards, making the PC boxes that one day will bear the name of Hewlett-Packard or Dell or IBM.

This is where the world's personal computers are born.

A computer may spend its working days in a comfortable home in Boston or in a programmer's cubicle in San Jose. But at both ends, the dirty work behind a typical PC's life is done in China. This is the dark secret of a famously ``clean industry.''
__________________
Re:I Have But One Word for Computer Recycling: Give it to a school. Get the tax rebate.
Who do they contact for a replacement? The fly-by-night Pricewatch vendor you bought it from? What are they going to use your Pentium 133 for, anyways? They're not going to be doing any physics simulations on it. You want to explain to them why they should make this the lone Linux PC in their entire computer lab? Especially after they see how horribly slow KDE runs with 32MB RAM and a 2MB video card that doesn't have XF86 4.x drivers...

Earlier this year, in what appears to have been the result of a clash of personalities, Dr Venter stepped down as president of Celera, as the company moved away from the uncertainties of selling genetics information towards the more profitable business of making drugs.

Last month, Dr Venter came up with a plan to put the entire genetic sequence of any individual on CD-ROM for around �450,000.

If nothing else, his make-life project demonstrates his talent for staying in the headlines.

His quick gene-finding technique was a widely admired breakthrough when it came, and the controversy over the human genome masks a large body of often non-commercial work deciphering other, less glamorous animal genomes.

If his work leads to the ability to design bespoke organisms, or the ability to sequence an entire human genome in 24 hours, he could still join the ranks of the mega-rich.

In early April, scientists reported that the early thaw in the Gulf of St. Lawrence the bodies of hundreds of dead seal pups, normally born on ice floes, washed ashore because their mothers were forced to bear them in open water. Researchers worried that the eventual toll might involve hundreds of thousands of harp seals more... In early April, a surprise storm dumped 8 inches of snow on the upper Midwestern U.S. snarling flights and causing hundreds of traffic accidents seals more... In China a prolonged drought, coupled with deforestation, triggered a massive dust storm which dropped more than 50,000 tons of dust on Beijing more... In the Eastern U.S., a prolonged and persistent drought, intensified by the region's second April heat wave in the last 100 years, threatened to exact major economic impacts on housing, agriculture and manufacturing businesses more... A long period of droughts and floods have left more than 2.5 million people at risk of severe malnutrition in Southern Africa, according to U.N. food officials more... In April, a team of climate scientists in the U.K. announced that the first three months of 2002 were the hottest such months ever recorded. That warmth was especially significant given the lack of an El Nino this spring more... In late April, Shackelford County, Texas was inundated when it received 11 inches of rain in six hours more... The worst-ever epidemic of dengue fever in Rio de Janeiro, which followed the area's heaviest rains in 30 years, began to abate in late April, giving way to an unusual rise in malaria more... At the end of April, parts of the Midwestern U.S. received 20 inches of snow, leaving more than 100,000 homes without power more... At the same time, an unusually wide swath of tornadoes and thunderstorms damaged communities from Missouri to Maryland more... By the end of April, torrential rains and mudslides had destroyed more than 9,000 homes in Ecuador more...

And when those entries are laid end to end in a timeline, as Dr. Walsh has done in a paper published last week in Environmental Science and Technology, they shatter a lot of myths.

The much-lauded greatest generation of the 1920's and 1930's, for example, threw out far more garbage, Dr. Walsh found, than New Yorkers living today in the era of shrink wrap and single-serve. Pounds of trash per person peaked not in the prosperous 1990's, but in 1940.

As for the remaining six political parties, the Germans allowed them into form one new entity called the National Unity Party. The leaders of this party had an impossible balance act to maintain: to promote Dutch interests and yet at the same time not offend the Germans. It proved to be impossible goal and within a year the organization dissolved. There remained but one legal political party: the NSB. Newspapers were subject to heavy censorship and radio stations were all under Nazi control.

In the schools German became for Dutch children the major foreign language of study. New courses began to be taught in the schools, ones which promoted Nazi racial theories. History text books were rewritten, reflecting Nazi thought and deleting any mention to Queen Wilhelmina. Laws had long been enacted prohibiting the displaying of the Queen's portrait; likewise, through out Holland the Germans changed the name of any street which bore her name or that of any living member of the royal family.
_____________________
With the Nazis in full control of the media, and the radio now dominated by Nazi propaganda, many Dutch began to turn on the radio to listen broadcasts from London--either to the BBC or to the Dutch government in exile. Such listening was in itself an illegal act and a form of resistance. Dutch newspapers also, as stated earlier, were firmly in the hands of the Germans and their Dutch sympathizers. As a means of disseminating out the truth, several Dutch individuals took it upon themselves to produce and distribute underground papers. This was highly illegal, and many Dutch people were to lose their lives for such activity.

ANTON MUSSERT AND THE DUTCH NAZI PARTY

More than 280 women have been found dead in the Mexican border town of Ciudad Ju�rez over the past decade, almost half in brutal murders that remain unsolved.

As the number of women murdered in Ciudad Ju�rez continues to rise, an international human rights commission has held its second hearing on the issue.

On October 18, representatives of the Mexican government appeared before the the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, a branch of the Organization of American States, to explain their failure to find and prosecute the perpetrators and prevent more women from dying. Just two days after the hearing, what seemed to be the remains of another woman were found half-buried on a secondary road near Ju�rez, in the state of Chihuahua, adding to four others discovered in the past month.
______________
�Irregularities keep happening in the investigations,� Andi�n says. One of the latest bodies to be discovered was initially identified as a woman already found dead last November.

Most of the victims were very young, and 80 percent worked in maquiladoras, Acosta adds. �They were poor and vulnerable women,� from risky parts of the city without safe public transportation or paved and lighted streets. �It seems justice in our state is designed to be inaccessible to poor people,� she says.
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see also:
Juarez, Laboratory of Our Future (also here, and again, here)by the uncompromising Charles Bowden

The vanity of the lilac's flowering
Is in the brevity of those white or purple blossoms.
The rest of the year, it is a woody weed,
Dark-leaved, serviceable for a border or a little shade,
A sermon in humble usefulness.
(The saint's severity, Freud said,
Is the proof of desire. And what is greater
Than the pride of the outwardly humble?)

The lilac's bark is tough, and rasps the knuckles.....

Jordan Smith
For Appearances
2001 Tampa Review Prize for Poetry
in Poetry Daily

Liu Fang: The biggest challenge is to fully express the soul of pipa and guzheng music in EVERY concert. To give a good concert today doesn't mean that the concert tomorrow would also be as good. To have given 100 excellent concerts doesn't guarantee that it would be always excellent in the future. This is a constant challenge more for the heart than for the skill. This means that one needs always to learn to keep the heart in such a state as to give the music its life. For this, one needs to learn many things besides music. I believe this is true for all kinds of music.
_________________
Like many other musicians, quite often I also have to face financial difficulties, because a lot of our income is used for travelling. But I don't care. I love my career. I also enjoy travelling: such as sitting in a plane dreaming, or staying in a hotel. Comparatively, I don't like talking with people as much, because it is too easy to have misunderstandings because of language. By making music, I feel the freedom and joy that I can never have by talking.

The Nishikawa Ensemble is a chamber group that explores the frontiers of both traditional and contemporary music. Founded by Kohei Nishikawa, one of Japan's most accomplished players of Japanese and Western flutes, the Ensemble's focus is to create a truly global sound that bridges the often-encountered divide between the ancient and the modern. The repertoire of the Ensemble blends traditional music and instruments of various origins, such as Asian and European, with contemporary pieces written directly for the group. The result is a sound, which is both subtle and evocative, and virtually unique in the world of chamber music.


The Nishikawa Ensemble exists as a collective. The aim is to stimulate creativity and diversity through the interaction of the highly trained and dedicated musicians that makeup the organization. Emphasis is placed on a deep understanding of the performing traditions involved, and a willingness to challenge and extend the conventions of these traditions through collaboration.


An important aspect of this arrangement is the inclusion of a composer within the collective. It permits the Ensemble to have a constant supply of new repertoire composed in direct consultation with the performers, and the composer is assured of performances that truly reflect the nature and intention of the pieces. In addition, the Nishikawa Ensemble is active in commissioning pieces by other composers, and regularly premieres innovative new works.
_________________
If I were to live here, I would want to learn French, and improve my English. And I would have to learn the Western way of thinking, which is very different from the Asian way of thinking. You must understand music with not only your mind, but with your whole body. When I play in a more contemporary style, it is not so easy to understand the music's origins with my whole being. So I definitely do not want to stop working in Japan, but I feel I should spend more days and months here. But there is time for that

{I saw Limbaugh on whatever talk show that was, and I have to take back my lumping him in with Falwell and Ailes. he's all firm and pugilistic. hormonal chin and the testosterone especially flatlining his mouth. it's hard because I feel like I have a choice in the few minutes before bedtime-I could try to pin what's even scarier and more repugnant about him now, or I could continue to research Liu Fang, and keep downloading samples of her brilliant mastery.
no contest really, but I'm picking up a vibe from some of the little chipmunks, or whatever they are, they're feeling bruised.
they win, the bad guys win. that's that. work with what is. they win. the reason why it's bad that they win is there isn't room enough for all of us now. so they're gonna get rid of us. work with what is. I personally believe that the best among us are more directly connected to the center, to the heart of what is most beautiful about life, most beautiful about the existence of things in the universe; and that's what all this poison and death is about, they hate life, though like cowards always do, they love their own lives more than any other person or thing, even as they talk about protecting the innocent and all that schizoid imperative buncomb.
and I don't say that lightly, I think what makes their position evil ultimately isn't that they're going to eat our children, or that they already have eaten many of our children, but that they're going to eat all our children and then die themselves, most probably taking the last of animal life down with them.
work with what is. there is nothing in the world or the universe that puts truth above everything else. that's something people made up to make themselves feel better. so Limbaugh's a scammy little puke that carved a career out of contract-distorting reality for the overclass. so? the truth of that isn't changing anything, I mean knowing it or telling other people about it, even getting them to see it, unless you get enough of them, and then it's not about truth but the weight of numbers, which is what they have now.
use 'The Silence of The Lambs' as main metaphor. you're down in that pit, Buffalo Bill and his yappy friend are up above. it matters not at all that he's as creepy-crazy as it gets, that his little friend is oblivious to the weird evil that permeates the house.
you're in the pit.
either somebody busts in and gets you out, you get yourself out, or he skins you alive, and you suffer a while, horribly, then you're dead.
the truth, the moral truth, has nothing to do with any of it. right or wrong is only your internal conversation. you're not gonna talk to Bill about it are you? or the dog eh?
that little well-fed dog up there, barking and barking.}

Raising the Temperature: W Laser

Dr. Tony Tether, DARPA (15-21 Oct): to Singapore to evaluate local S&T & explore potential collaborations. Interests: Genome research, Chem./Bio warfare, using Singapore as operational test bed to spiral A160 Hummingbird UAV development. A160 is part of the FCS program to be transitioned to Army. IMPACT: Project could meet Singapore's requirements for high altitude surveillance UAV. DARPA interested in accelerated fielded asset.

3) RECENT PRODUCTS

a. NAVAL ARCHITECTURE & SHIP SYSTEMS: Koenig, P. C., Narita, H., & Baba, K. "Lean Production in the Japanese Shipbuilding Industry?" Journal of Ship Production. IMPACT: From 1993-00, the USA "Lean Aircraft Initiative" expended $M in an effort to implement lean production in military airframe manufacturing but results were inconclusive. Recently a push has been initiated in shipbuilding. Paper assesses lean production as it stands in Japanese shipyards.

b. BIOSCIENCES: IFO provided African Pouch Rat Humanitarian Demining Project info (Apopo, Belgium) to CDR J. Wood, Special Ops, NAVCENT, Code N36. IMPACT: NAVCENT expressed interest in unique mine clearing technologies as it applies to the Yemen demining efforts.

Swaziland�s attorney general has been charged with sedition after ordering the dismissal of three judges hearing a case about a girl allegedly abducted to marry the king. The director of public prosecutions said the action by Phesheya Dlamini had caused the Swazi Government to be viewed with contempt at home and abroad. The attorney general said he was acting on instructions. Legal observers believe he was following orders from the palace and has been made a scapegoat because of the bad publicity surrounding the case.

The chairman of the massive Rio Tinto mining company has stated unequivocally that the company will not go ahead with a proposed uranium mine at Jabiluka, next to the Kakadu National Park in northern Australia, without the consent of the Mirrar Aborigines, whose ancestral land it is. The Mirrar have been protesting for many years against plans for the mine, which would have destroyed several of their sacred sites

The decision followed three days of riots in the West African nation which killed more than 100 people.

In a brief statement, officials said Miss World was moving to London "in the overall interests of Nigeria and the contestants".

The violence was sparked by a newspaper article suggesting that the Prophet Mohammad would probably have married one of the Miss World beauty queens.

I have an agent now. This guy writes me down � the producer of all the Farrelly brothers movies � and he�s like this kid is whatever whatever, this ad is pretty funny, so he writes my name down and he�s trying to get in contact with my agent. Since I didn�t have an agent at that point � well it�s a kind of confusing story, but anyway, they wanted me to be in one of their movies, but since they found out how old I was they don�t think I can be in one. Supposedly, though, my agent is �floating my image,� quote unquote. I don�t know what the hell that means.

So have you made a bunch of new friends at school?
No, it isn�t that weird. I get a lot of really obvious comments from people like �Did you know that there are mugs with your face on them?� and I�m like, �No I didn�t; why don�t you tell me about that?� Just comments like that. It�s like, �Thanks for telling me about that.�

Are you OK with all the Web sites, and people walking around wearing your face on their T-shirts?
Oh, whatever, I think it�s kind of funny. These people don�t have lives. I don�t know, it was kind of bizarre at first. I went to my Web site but I decided not to read any of the comments because I thought it would be too weird. I heard about some of them, though, so I was like, �Weeell, I�m not going to read those.�
ellen feiss

a letter to a friend, for a few hours:
____________________
hey you

bay tree plaza I heard some little uppermiddle class fluffy
talking about trailer trash. remember my campaign against trailer
trash as a descriptive noun? then. how the fuck is it that you feel
most vulnerable around the size of your bosoms? isn't that it tho?
some yuppie spawn starts to get in your face and her scorn for your
chest is the unprotected chink in your armor.....jesus fucking
christ, and you could toughen up by a trip to the knife doctor and a
silicon pump up. fuck all that

notice how people will wait and drive around and go out of their way
to park close to the entrance of like say Long's or Safeway. it has
nothing to do with wussy physicality nothing to do with TV watching
softness everything to do with having two tons of body armor on and
then suddenly being nakedly vulnerable out on the blacktop. like a
shellfish w/out its shell. that's the whole deal right there. armor.
the subject of today's meditations. also I notice on my rounds two
things. it's about 10 to 1 chickas running. I mean track running you
know with new balance and pony tails. way more females than males.
the other is car chickas with self-phones. driving one-handed. that's
gotta be pumping the accident stats. has to be.


going to employment now

Iraqi flag

as the good professor muttered "where is the camera?" and moved, so that said camera could get a good shot of the brain in situ, the camera moved with him, resolutely behind his back. i can only assume that either the cameraman was also not equal to his task, or that his bosses had decided that the less medical footage they showed, the lower their chances of legal action.


as a milestone of television history, then, this was vaguely significant, probably less so than kenneth tynan saying fuck. i am sad to say, that it failed on both educational and entertainment grounds. when the germans and the one brave british doctor throwing his career to the wind were allowed to comment, on the structure of the body, on the procedures they were performing and how these related to common autopsy practise, i was rivited. who knew that diseased lungs actually stick to the ribcage? or how a heart under stress will grow itself larger, and the implications of this for the rest of the body? not i. but there was just not enough of this.
Sue Bailey

Thomas McGuane IV, blade smith

MADRE�s Direct Relief Efforts

MADRE purchased 25 water treatment units for families in Barcenas, a make-shift neighborhood of Guatemala City, where hundreds of women who work in local sweatshops live;

MADRE delivered a shipment of operating room supplies to hospitals in Cuba;

MADRE sent support to one of our Guatemalan sister organizations for members of their weaving cooperative to be trained in more intricate designs and learn traditional patterns as part of their efforts to preserve Mayan culture;

MADRE sent support to the Rigoberta Menchu Organization to develop a security system for their Guatemala City office. In April, Guillermo Ovalle, a staff member of the organization, was killed outside of their office. His murder, which MADRE publicly condemned, is part of a growing pattern of killings of human rights workers in Guatemala.

Human trafficking involves controlling and exploiting people after transporting them to a new location, often beyond the borders of their homeland. In this modern form of slavery, traffickers use threats, intimidation, and violence to break their victims' will and resistance.

This trafficking in humans has become a global business, reaping huge profits for traffickers and organized crime syndicates, generating massive human rights violations, and causing serious problems for governments. Despite the magnitude of the problem, however, it has only recently seized policy makers' attention. As recently as 10 years ago, the expression "human trafficking" rarely appeared in migration policy debates. Today, however, trafficking is one of the major concerns of both governments and organizations active in the migration field, and has become a priority for those working in many other policy areas such as human rights, health, law enforcement, and social services.

There is still very limited information on the scale of trafficking, how it works, and the most effective means to halt it. One of the biggest knowledge gaps lies in the area of data collection. Despite the growing literature on trafficking, relatively few studies are based on extensive research, and information on the actual numbers of people trafficked remains very sketchy.
"Few governments systematically collect trafficking data."
{surely, Mr. Ashcroft, Mr. Ridge, Mr. Bush..........}

Robert(Birnbaum): Was your detailed description of the horsemanship and riding�was that a kind of nose-thumbing gesture directed at Eastern readers?



Thomas(McGuane): No, no, no. For some reason the concretia that is associated with these kind of ritual processes is something that has always appealed to me. I used to fish with a guy who had an old wooden rowboat. He was a great fisherman. I was always trying to figure out why he was such a successful fisherman. He did everything in a ritualistic way. He had a bailing can that was an old Maxwell house can, cut off in this perfect way. Always went there. Oars went there. After you anchored the anchor went here, the line was coiled there. The whole outfit wasn�t worth a hundred dollars. It was nearly all he had, but it was so deeply ritualized that it had a kind of glow. I don�t know what this all means, but there is a lot of that in horsemanship. It�s part of its appeal in a way. All those things the vacarros did, hang up their bridles with the reins hanging down. Most people would just throw the reins over the hook where they hang everything. Well, if you hang 'em like that when you go to ride the horse, they�ve got these two weird curves in them. So the vacarros would hang their reins hanging in opposing directions. They�d pulled the bridle down on the horse and the reins would hang like they are supposed to. There are thousands of little things like that associated with horsemanship or fishing or aviation. I think it�s a mistake for people not to have a good bit of that in their lives. A good bit of reassuring ritual�empty ritual being the thing to be avoided.
_________________
and again:

Robert: Is there a movement to identify a Western school of, in the way that Southern writing is marked?



Thomas: That attempt is in place. I don�t see a lot of merit in it, frankly. (laughs) I get asked about that, �What about the Montana school of writing?� I have this filthy little trick I play. I answer, �It would be like talking about the New Jersey School of writing.� They all burst into laughter. I say, "Wait a minute. We�ve got Walt Whitman, We have William Carlos Williams. We have Allen Ginsberg. We can put Bruce Springsteen in there. We can put Stephen Crane. Maybe New Jersey writing is not as negligible as you horse laughers think it is?� (laughs) Anyway, I don�t even believe in American writing. I�ve heard myself saying that a lot. The problems of writing, the issues of writing are really universal. They are the same in Mexico, the same in the Yugoslavia and the same in Montana. And getting away from that notion you are headed down the twisted road to local color and other things.

EC: Oh, he's not mad. Everyone else might be, but... (both laugh)...he is the sanest person I have ever seen except that moment when he cut off his ear and took it to a prostitute. He comes across as kind and compassionate and he is not worried what other painters think of him.


RB: Really?


EC: It pains him but in his letters to his brother...it's not that he doesn't get depressed about it, but in those letters you see how it doesn't stop him. It doesn't stop his vision that he wants. The world told him not to paint the peasants, he doesn't stop painting peasants. It saddens him that no one sees what he is doing, but his vision stayed clear.

Allen Ginsberg died a few days ago. You knew him, and I'm wondering if you have any thoughts about him.



I was very moved to hear about it. I've known Allen off and on since back in the late '50s, although I didn't get to know him well until the early '60s. We weren't close friends, but we'd stop on the street and talk. Although Allen wasn't a Christian, in a way he really was the one true Christian of the last 70 years. He was absolutely fearless. I once saw him read a poem about the Hell's Angels right in front of a whole gang of them. He wasn't fazed for a moment. He had the qualities of a genuine shaman. He may not have been the greatest poet of his generation, but he was absolutely the real thing as a teacher and as a shaman. He didn't do anything for the publicity, or to advance himself. Many of the greatest things he did never made the newspapers. He believed in the holiness of things, and he stood against the American public's complacency at a time when we really needed it. Attacks are already being made on him, three days after his death. I find that disgusting. I miss him already.

Robert Stone in Salon April '97

and again:

He's depressed and when he looks at the books on his shelf they all seem so useless to him. Is your sense that literature can only help you so much?



It's partly a sort of joke at my own expense. I think that writers are often jerks -- and in my work, inquiring jerks. I often find myself in the role of inquiring jerk, and often have in the past when I was in Vietnam or on a shrimp boat or wherever. So it's partly a joke, but it's also a somewhat serious comment on the fact that, sure, literature can only get you so far. Anything can only get you so far. I value narrative in literature and insight more than I value anything else -- that is, I value insight anyway. So literature and narrative, poetry -- anything that represents insight in language -- is something I see as very valuable. And when that fails people they're in real trouble. And when my characters experience this failure of their most beloved works to pull them through, they're in extremis.

and again:

You don't condemn him. But he's wrestling with some pretty dark things.



You can take the darkest impulses and turn them into art. On the other hand, art that employs language can never separate itself from moral perspective because the imperatives of language are necessarily moral. The imperatives of insight are necessarily moral. Something like humor is moral; it represents a moral perspective. It's very hard for art to remove itself from a moral reference point, and it's impossible for art that's made out of language to separate itself from a moral reference point, because it consists entirely of judgments. Often those judgments are difficult and laced with incredible ambiguity, but ambiguity is not the absence of morality. It's just a confusion about morality.

It's in the White House and Senate and judiciary. It's in the editorial rooms of newspapers. It's in the minds of propagandists and ideological assassins like Kersten who stay up nights thinking up fresh ways to spin, and impugn, and consolidate power through disinformation.


Ridiculous to imagine a true believer like Katherine Kersten ever challenging the righteousness of her own side. She's not a "free thinker," as she piously proclaims. She's an ideologue with an agenda, and no reluctance to deceive the unwitting public with red herrings and fuzzy math.


Yet the paper presents her as a "thinking person." True thinking surprises. Ideological propaganda may be clever to a fault, but it never ultimately surprises, because you know who they are out to get.


Do you think Katherine Kersten, with the power and security her party now feels, will ever object to following a president who deserted from the armed forces in time of war, and who pretends to be a patriot today?

we win again
tho it's always touch and go
and even when we're ahead
victory is never assured

A Longview woman who sells sex toys has been charged with felony obscenity after White Oak police found some of her wares in her car during a traffic stop

The arrest report describes the 17 items as "obscene materials and obscene devices," but Police Chief Charlie Smith said the items were mostly lotions and objects defined in a dictionary as having the shape and often the appearance of the male genitalia, used in sexual stimulation.

{female sex toys, female as in for not of; men with tiny apparatuses making big laws}