What should have been said to AIPAC

Michael C. Desch
via

A Resolution, Articles of Impeachment of George Bush, President of the United States. Resolved: That President George W. Bush be impeached for high crimes and misdemeanors and that the following Articles of Impeachment be exhibited to the United States Senate:

Articles of Impeachment exhibited by the House of Representatives of the United States of America in the name of itself and of the People of the United States of America in maintenance and support of its impeachment against President George W. Bush for High Crimes and Misdemeanors.

It is conduct while President of the United States, George W. Bush, in violation of its Constitutional Oath to faithfully execute the office of President of the United States and to the best of his ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States, and in violation of its Constitutional duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed has committed the following abuses of power.

Kucinich

“Now, that may mean I have made my last speech to the House … But at least my electorate and the nation … would have had the opportunity to debate and consider one of the most fundamental issues of our day… And if they do send me back here, it will be with a single message – that the monstrosity of a law that we passed yesterday will not stand.”

David Davis
IndependentUK
via

un poquito español, pero no es very good:

“I would initiate discussions with our enemies in Cuba and Venezuela…I would cancel the travel restrictions for those who have family in Cuba…I want to join with countries like Brazil to look for cleaner forms of energy…I will approve the Free Trade Agreement with Peru, but I oppose that of Colombia until I have confidence that union leaders are not being killed there…this kind of paramilitary activity has to stop,” said Barack Obama.

And Hugo Chávez? Is he a threat to the national security of the United States and the rest of the continent, I asked?

“Yes, I believe he’s a threat, but a manageable one,” he answered. “We know for example, that he may have been involved in supporting the FARC, harming a neighbor. This is not the kind of neighbor we want. I believe that it’s important, through the Organization of American States (OAS) or the United Nations, to initiate sanctions that say that this behavior is unacceptable.

machetara

It will represent a huge intellectual achievement and a big leap forward in our understanding of the Universe on the largest and smallest scales simultaneously...

Harvard Doctors:

if a researcher is taking money from a drug company while also receiving federal dollars to research that company's product...

"He single-handedly put pediatric bipolar disorder on the map," Diller said in a telephone interview yesterday.
The number of kids diagnosed as bipolar increased 40-fold between 1994 and 2003, according to a recent study. Sales of drugs used to treat the condition doubled from 2003 to 2006.
[...]
According to Grassley, the three researchers initially disclosed receiving less than $80,000 from Lilly, the maker of Zyprexa, an antipsychotic, and Strattera, a drug used to treat attention deficit disorder. On further review, in March, they said they had received $172,198 while the company told Grassley it had paid the three a total of $259,756.
Biederman initially said he had gotten less than $10,000 from Johnson & Johnson, the maker of the antipsychotic Risperdal. In March, he said the amount was $5,500. The company told Grassley it paid Biederman $64,378.

Bloomberg 06.Jun.08
via

a deeply disturbing portfolio of devastation

where am I, and where are my friends?

a windfall of billions of dollars annually

QUESTION: But, sir, not to dispute what you said, but how are they working on fixing that problem when it looks like it's not going anywhere? Officials from the Palestinian Authority --

MR. GALLEGOS: Yeah.

QUESTION: -- have even said it's a broken process, the Annapolis peace process, because of the violations -

MR. GALLEGOS: Well, I think one of the other issues that we've - that we've - one of the other issues that we've decided not to do is to speak publicly about where the negotiations are. We do believe that there has been progress. We do believe that we have two committed parties on both sides of this. We're going to continue working with them. We're only about halfway through the year, and we'll see what the end of the year brings.

QUESTION: And I'd just like to note one last thing. The Bureau of Statistics also released a report that says no humanitarian aid from the United States, aside from nongovernment organizations, has reached Gaza. And that's mainly because a piece of legislation that was passed that bans the United States from sending humanitarian aid because of Hamas being elected in 2006.

MR. GALLEGOS: Unfortunately, I don't see - I don't have those details at my fingertips. I'll have to take a look at that.

And we're at a point with a lot of these species that they must – they will stop consuming them and their body parts, our endangered animals, either voluntarily and leaving some of them alive and in the wild, or very soon they're going to have to stop consuming because there just aren't going to be any more. And for instance, our tigers are at that point right now. The estimates are anywhere from 4,000 left in the wild, to today, I've heard, 1,400. And we're at a point of no return, where they just won't be in the wild in our lifetime.

MR. MCCORMACK: You talked a little bit about the demand side.

MS. DEREK: Yes.

MR. MCCORMACK: Here in the United States, people may say, "Well, you know, this isn't that big an issue. Why are you devoting your time to this?" Talk to us a little bit about the scope of the problem in terms of demand here in the United States.

MS. DEREK: It's a lot bigger than I ever knew. The trafficking in wildlife and endangered wildlife is, in some estimates, second to drugs, bigger than arms and humans. And it's anywhere from $10 billion to $20 billion internationally.

MR. MCCORMACK: Ten to – ten to 20 billion?

MS. DEREK: Yes. And I suspected China and Asia were the biggest consumers, which they are. But I was really embarrassed to find out that the U.S. is number two, in consuming endangered wildlife.

a gesture:

The family of Corporal Gilad Shalit, the soldier abducted in the Gaza Strip nearly two years ago, has received a letter from their son.
[...]
"The letter was sent in a goodwill gesture to former President Jimmy Carter and to indicate Hamas's seriousness in its desire to reach a prisoner swap deal that will close the Shalit file and fulfil the demands of the Palestinian groups who abducted Shalit."

aljazeera.net

90 per cent of the funds needed to address global warming will derive from the private sector, Mr. Kerim said

"We don't want climate change to be reduced to an environmental issue," he told reporters after speaking at the event. "It is rather an issue of sustainable development and sustainable development must be based on economic growth."

One of the more surreal moments of my recent hospital stay was listening to Barbara Boxer list the goals of the Senate Bill on Global Warming, as she ran down the things it would have to do:

Reduce greenhouse gases to avoid catastrophic climate change
Encourage a robust economy and growth
Do this without impacting American workers

Considering how American workers are already getting impacted that seems more than a little sketchy.
Far more surreal was Thomas Friedman's hyping his new book Hot, Flat, and Crowded on CSPAN's BookTV.
I don't want to get lengthy on either topic right at the moment, but a thought I had earlier today, under trees I knew well in a park I played in as a boy many years ago, was how much despair there must be out there now - the debilitating sense of hopelessness hitting the best of us, the clearest-eyed, the most knowledgeable.
Friedman comes on like this is all fresh news and he's in on the ground floor, ready for the green revolution. But I was hearing people talk about global warming inducing catastrophic climate change back in the 80's. The mantra of "We need to do something now, before it's too late" began then, or even more marginally, before then.
Where are those voices today? I don't mean voices like that, I mean those same people. How false to pretend they were never there.
They were right, this is obvious, but there's a mask on the public face of things, a rigid mask that doesn't allow that kind of acknowledging, that kind of historical deference. It has to own everything the common folk think about the world - it has to hand-feed knowledge to them.
What's under that mask?
Raw evil I think, a visage so disgusting and horrible no human tongue can tell its features.
I'm pretty sure the multiple universe idea, or something like it, something that opens out to other worlds, other ways of being, is key to understanding this. To explaining how this has happened. It's a childish thought that, given the existence of parallel worlds, there could be no cross-contact, or no meta-existence, no being, or beings, with a presence in many worlds at once.
This opens a path toward a scientifically valid view of the divine in some form, if not in the trademarked and proprietary forms we've inherited. But it opens just as much to the diabolical.
It could explain the constant refrain of unimportance and disregard for what happens here; it could also explain, if those beings were immortal, god-like, the bizarre taboos and prohibitions and hypocrisies of institutional religions.
What I'm poking at there is the idea that the next levels up are possibly a lot like this one, filled with opportunists and scam-artists and danger, where the virtuous and the noble are beleaguered and outnumbered, just like they are here, now.
What we want, what I want anyway and I think it's a pretty common hunger, is refuge, entry to that paradise where strife is no longer, where there is no conflict, no sickness, no toil, no danger. To deserve that somehow, cringing at self-knowledge, how undeserving I am.
I'll leave that meditation to another time though, what I wanted to record here tonight is a recognition - that too many people out there must be suffering despair in isolation, because nothing unites us around this, not in the larger culture anyway.
I've been doing some informal polling, of nurses and aides at the hospital, clerks in stores in town when I got out, relatively random samplings. The gamut runs from it's too late to it's very late, almost no one denies its validity, its actuality.
In that role as survey-taker I'm able to withhold my own view, people don't ask about it for one thing. For another I'm closed to it, held back from communicating the weight of how it really feels, too much formless emptiness, that sense of everything sucked out and eaten up, oxidizing; watching the weakest carrying silly torches and ridiculous banners, the worst leering and smug, almost gloating - some Texan pol in a powder-blue suit harping on the price of fuel as though that's all that matters - the naive and the innocent still not infected by the grim news. Cynical hedonism gains, virtue and self-sacrifice depreciate.
Selfishness has its one goal intact right to the end, selflessness needs faith, and hope.
One risk in communicating your own despair is you'll drag someone else down with you, someone who's kept more hope, or innocence.
And without some plan, some way forward, something to do, what good can come from facing what's too big and final to see anyway? Best to ignore it. Or pray.

the answer is not really zero:

The notion that there are a zillion universes, whose individual properties are just a cosmic dice throw, is a story that has been told before and “raises the blood pressure of many physicists seriously,” as Dr. Livio put it. But the idea has rarely been mentioned by Dr. Witten, who is seen in the community as a symbol of the old Einsteinian ideal.

Dr. Witten said he was just doing his duty to explain what dark energy meant to physics.

“As for how I feel personally, I am not sure what to say,” he said in an e-mail message. “I wasn’t terribly enthusiastic the first, or even second, time I heard the proposal of a multiverse. But none of us were consulted when the universe was created.”

Waiting in the Food Line

"...What can we do? What can we do? they cried, with wide-open eyes as
if I had answers..."

At home, such as it is

Still in rx

Posted from rx bed, by cellphone. Cheers

Posted from rx bed, by cellphone. Cheers