Category: General

Now that’s a sound bite! Can we package this guy? Dr. Joep Lange reduced the problem to its essentials with an analogy he made in addressing the Barcelona AIDS Conference just ended:

He said that expanding treatment for infected people in third world countries required a country-by-country inventory and plan. “We need to go about it like a military operation,” he said.
“If we can get cold Coca-Cola and beer to every remote corner of Africa, it should not be impossible to do the same with drugs,” Dr. Lange said.
“Of all the ills that kill the poor, none is as lethal as bad government,” he said. “Bad government and lack of leadership has actually killed more people with H.I.V. than anything else.”

Yes, I think so!
Not since the last almost-presidential election have I been so hopeful about the ability of our polity to turn itself around, or correct (at least part of) itself, as I am tonight!
Except that I’ve been feeling this good thing all day long, I would look for its origin in the wonderful meal and good cheer Barry and I shared this evening. [No, Jim, must remember to be less self-referential.]
So many people seem to be absolutely fed up, and so many are speaking out when they would have shut up, or been shut up, especially in the past ten months. These are people at every level and in almost every part of our society. They are not a party; they are not a faction; they are the people. I think.
[This just might be the beginning of the end.]
Look at the stories we are seeing hourly even in the commercial press (they do want to sell their stuff, after all, and they can’t do it with only a continuing campaign of sycophancy)! I can’t even begin to link here all the evidence of the shift I believe I am seeing. Am I just kidding myself, or does it not really look like they (you know who I mean) aren’t going to be able to hold on?
I mean, they look very very bad, like total fuck offs! [I never used to use this language, but then I never had such provocation.]
Even their little minds can’t be unaware of what’s happening, and this means were still in real danger. They may still deploy the ultimate weapon, a *real* war improvised to save their skins, but at the expense of ours, and of the future of the entire planet.
Don’t let it happen [or it really will be the end].

Alright, how’s this take on what passes for our pretended chief executive? I know, it’s wasted upon you, dear reader (preaching to the converted is stangely both immediately satisfying and ultimately unrewarding), but I gotta ask it anyway, and this is my only forum. What does it say about what our betters in the Republican and Democratic establishment think of the American yoeman that they would even think of foisting upon us the idiot puppet who they represent as our President?
I believe it may be the worst crime they have visited upon this former republic, precisely because it mocks everything it should represent, and in so doing it engineers its demise.
Our only remaining hope may lie in the very good possibiity that the puppeteers are as incompetent as the dummy itself (and there is now plenty of evidence to support that argument), even if it means we find ourselves almost rooting for bad news. But in a small world and a nuclear age, is it better to have idiots at the helm, or wizards? And finally, can we assume no additional timely terrorist events or cynically-improvised war will once again send the population running for cover and the imagined safely of flag-ism?

Great headline, but still, it’s a serious subject for anyone but the diminutive.
As far as I’m concerned, I’d now rather be drugged unconscious, slipped into a tube and shipped off to my ultimate destination than fly any skies no matter how friendly.
P.S. Re “Ryan Dilley,”—he of the byline—are reporters really allowed to look like that in the U.K.?

Before I walked into my local U.S. Post Office (or whatever official semi-autonomous profit-center designation it may go by these days) to update my stash of obsolescent 34-cent stamps this afternoon, I was prepared for at least the possibility of a federal confrontation over my current discomfort with representations of the stars and stripes.
I needn’t have worried as it turned out, since my studly, shaved-head clerk had two armfuls of gorgeous colorful tattoos falling out of his short sleeves, and he replied sadly, when I said I needed ten three-centers, and after he had sighted my slash-war button, that unfortunately there was only one kind available.
Displaying the stamp’s image of a stylized star in the national colors, he smiled but suggested, “It’s not too bad.” Still, he was not the least surprised when I told him I’d prefer to see what he had in one-cent stamps. I took thirty of one of the non-flag designs available (a familiar and not very exciting image of the “American Kestrel”), and I also selected and bought a number of microscoptically-reduced images of John James Audubon birds as currently the least jingoistic of the new 37-cent issues.
Mr. tattoo and the birds had saved me, and I was temporarily quite pleased with the world.

He’s worked for decades, with his heart and with his mind, as an effective advocate for racial justice, but he admits that even today he often feels like an outsider.

“I live basically in a white world, day in and day out. I’m surrounded by white people. That’s the reality, and very often I’m aware that I’m looking at them, to some extent, almost like I am black. I am waiting for them to express views that I find so appalling. What little purpose I have in life is to try and help white people understand the reality of racism and how it adversely affects all of us, how destructive it is to our society, our community, our ideals.”

…to fill their piggy banks even further.
The Administration’s plans to cut funding for the cleanup of 33 toxic waste sites in 18 states are only the latest in a tragic run of disastrous attacks on the environment which belongs to us all, but these environmental terrorists don’t quite see it that way.

We’ve been trashing, soiling, even destroying the wonders of nature for countless ages. Why stop now? Who is Mr. Bush to step in and curb this venerable orgy of pollution, this grand tradition of fouling our own nest?
Oh, the skies may once have been clear and the waters sparkling and clean. But you can’t have that and progress, too. Can you?
….
The Superfund decision is the kind of environmental move we’ve come to expect from the Bush administration. Mother Nature has been known to tremble at the sound of the president’s approaching footsteps. He’s an environmental disaster zone [my italics].

The people who run Capitalism, that is. Not happy at all, I’m sure.
Today, first the NYDaily News with a dramatic front page graphic and the headline, “BUSTED TRUST, Wall St. scandals spooking big, small investors,” then the NYTimes Week in Review banner headline, “CLAY FEET, Could Capitalists Actually Bring Down Capitalism?,” at the top of a somewhat less pessimistic but no less smashing description of what’s going on. And these are not lefty journals. These is The Establishment.
Now I know I shouldn’t necessarily be gleeful at the possible or impending sudden disappearance of or depressive shift in the cycle of this “system”, since it would mean havoc perhaps even exceeding the evil it does now. Moreover, as someone living on a fixed income produced by, no, not the sweat of my brow, but by years of borrrre-dom, I should have a selfish interest at stake. And in the end, we know the ones who will suffer regardless of how this all works out will not be the very rich. BUT, I will admit I’m absolutely fascinated by what’s happening right now.

To those inured to corporate wrongdoing � perhaps by the insider trading scandals or the savings and loan debacle of recent decades � the latest scourge of white-collar malfeasance might seem like more of the same, with greedy executives cutting corners to make a profit. But in truth, the corporate calamities of the new millennium are of a different ilk, one that challenges the credibility of the financial reporting system, and in turn the faith of investors in the capital markets � the very engine that has driven capitalism to its success.

It used to be you trusted either biz’nez or the guv’ment.
Since the powers of each have dispensed with the fiction that the two were separate, it will now be very hard to look up to either, whether your primary allegiance is to liberal politics or capitalist economics.
Americans gave up on regarding government as a force for good long ago, but lately even the monied classes have lost faith in institutions which handle money.
You mean they actually do teach “responsible business practices and organizational ethics” to businesspeople? We’re told that’s the subject of Barbara Toffler’s teaching at Columbia Business School, but the classes must have been very small indeed.
She worries now about what will bring investors back to a market whose image has been shattered in recent months. She says the ethics problem is “systemic and intractable.”

“And we’re not going to be able to get out of this crisis of credibility and concern about who can we trust, because nobody really wants to break up the nice, neat little ring of conflicts of interest that go from the corporate world to the streets of Wall Street to the political suites of our government,” Hoffman said.

Doesn’t sound good for the home team.

Terrorists dropped two atomic bombs on Japanese cities at the end of the Second World War.
Why, to save money and/or avoid risking American soldier’s lives? But few today believe Japan was not about to surrender anyway, The agument was apparently specious even then, for “In 1946 the US strategic bombing survey came to the conclusion that ‘Japan would have surrendered even if atomic bombs had not been dropped’.”

[In the summerof 1945] Sixty-six of Japan’s largest cities had been burned down by napalm bombing. In Tokyo a million civilians were homeless and 100,000 people had died. They had been, according to Major General Curtis Lemay, who was in charge of the fire bombing operations, “scorched and boiled and baked to death”. President Franklin Roosevelt’s son and confidant said that the bombing should continue “until we have destroyed about half the Japanese civilian population.” On July 18 the Japanese emperor telegraphed President Truman, who had succeeded Roosevelt, and once again asked for peace. The message was ignored.
A few days before the bombing of Hiroshima, Vice Admiral Radford boasted that “Japan will eventually be a nation without cities – a nomadic people”. The bomb, exploding above a hospital in the center of the city, killed 100,000 people instantly, 95% of them civilians. Another 100,000 died slowly from burns and effects of radiation.

Dresden could be invoked here as well, but additional examples aren’t needed to give us enough of the historical perspective we ignore now at such risk.
Incredibly today we are told that only desperate individuals and the insurrections of which they may be a part can be terrorists, and that nations, at least the good guys, those that aren’t “rogue,” cannot.