In an e-mail newsletter Rep. Rick Larsen asked me to select the three issues that are most important to me from the following list:
Health, Education, Agriculture, Methamphetamine, Defense, Economic development, Housing,
Homeland security/border security, Environment, Transportation, Small business, Social services, Energy, Trade, Armed services
Funny thing, although there are categories for defense and armed services, and the bulk of the newsletter was about veterans, there wasn’t a word about the Iraq war.
But then, like most Democrats, he likes the war – as long as he can blame Bush for “mismanaging” it.
Today, for the first time since my stroke three years ago, I resumed writing my mystery.
Actually, of course, I can’t really blame it all on the stroke. I hadn’t been writing for ... mumble... years before that.
Nevertheless, it’s good to be back.
TiVo helpfully taped a ‘Frontline’ show on the Insurgency in Iraq which, the blurb told me, continues to challenge the “world’s military”
The world’s military? .
The WORLD’s military?
The US is now the world?
Oh, I forgot. We’re getting a little help from the Brits. So, between us, we are the world.
I hope the Russians, Chinese, Indians, etc. understand this.
A rock fan I'm definitely not. I have quite a few years on my wife, anghara, and she often wails that I was there at the beginning of the rock era and she can't believe I blew the opportunity!
But as I write this, I'm listening to Neil Young’s wonderful anti-war album, Living With War , which begins with singing that we “won’t need no shadow men running the government, won’t need no stinking war."
But it's his song 'Impeach the President' that embarrasses the wimpy left and infuriates the moronic murderous right. It goes in part:
“Let’s impeach the president for lying and misleading our country into war... Let’s impeach the president for spying on citizens… What if Al Queda blew up the levees? Would New Orleans been safer that way? ... Or was someone just not home that day.”
Today I'm a rock fan.
I can’t match my wife, of course. She’s going to the stars. A poem she wrote for the online magazine, Swans.com, is being reprinted on a NASA poster honoring women astronauts.
More modestly, I’m going to the classroom. A high school English teacher in Ontario has asked permission to use an article I wrote for Swans about the ills of technology in his grade 12 class.
The article:
-----
Man vs Machine
The good news is that we now have machines that make life easier, more comfortable and more exciting for the average individual than it was for the richest and most powerful king in the not-so-distant past.
The bad news is that those same machines threaten our lives, the ecology, our privacy, our jobs, our sense of self, and sometimes our sanity.
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic," author Arthur Clarke once said." And much of our technology is close to magical. We control the weather in our homes. We travel in what our ancient ancestors would have considered magic carpets, watch events as they happen halfway around the world, talk to people thousands of miles away, eat food grown a continent away, send space ships to the outer reaches of our solar system and beyond.
At the same time, the machines that make all this possible can also spy out our most private secrets, monitor our every move, pollute our air and water, destroy our forests and marshes, obliterate an office building, a city, or even a country — and keep us alive and in pain long after we're ready to die.
Rest at:
http://www.swans.com/library/art8/rdeck012.html
Do you suppose it’s scary for all the rabid Cold War enthusiasts, both left and right, to see that a dirty old Commie is making a lot more sense than the U.S. ‘victors?’
Former Soviet President Gorbachev wants industrialized nations to set up a 50-billion-dollar fund to support solar power. He warns that oil or nuclear energy can’t cut it.
Oil problems are obvious – limited supply, pollution that is going to fry the planet with global warming.
And nuclear? ... well, there’s Chernobyl.
But what does a Commie know.
I don’t know what kind of music President Bush likes, but it probably won’t be rock anymore.
First we have Neil Young rocking Dubya's world with a new album that features a song, "Let's Impeach the President."
Then, it turns out, that Mick Jagger got the hotel room Bush wanted.
The Rolling Stone booked a plush suite (£3,600 a night) in the luxury Royal Suite at the five-star Imperial Hotel in Vienna for June when the Stones are due to play a gig in the city. Bush’s aides then tried to book it to tie in with a summit meeting.
A friend said, “Bush’s people seemed to be under the impression that they would just hand over the suites but there was no way Mick was going to do that.”
President Bush's approval rating has fallen to 32 percent, according to a new CNN poll.
That’s frightening.
You mean that 32 percent DO approve of the actions of the malicious moron?
AP is all over a story that a judge has issued a temporary restraining order requiring actor Charlie Sheen to stay away from his estranged wife.
It’s important news – the private affairs of celebrities are always important.But it’s a good thing that Sheen’s recent charges about 911 were pretty much ignored by AP and the rest of the corporate media.
I mean, after all, how important could it be if the official story on 911 turns out to be a silly conspiracy theory? You know the theory, the one that says 19 amateurs with box cutters took over four commercial airliners, flew three of them into buildings and took down three skyscrapers, all on the orders of some clown in a cave in Afghanistan.
Even if it isn’t true, what’s the difference, eh? Just because we’re fighting a couple of wars and gave up the Bill of Rights to avenge 911 is no reason to worry about a few discrepancies in Big Brother’s scenario.
Good citizens always believe what the government tells them.
If they know what’s good for them.
According to Yahoo AP’s top stories of today are:
* 5 Kan. Students Arrested
* FBI Says 2 Plotted Terrorism
* Plane Crash Kills 5
* Furor Grows Over Boot Camp Death
* Hu Wraps Up U.S. Tour
* Democrat Exits House Ethics Panel
* Bush Won't Declare Disaster for Levees
* Nick Lachey Says He Still Loves Jessica
* Dow Closes Up 5, Nasdaq Finishes Down 20
Exciting? Important? Even entertaining? Or none of the above?
Meanwhile, on AntiWar.com is you can read:
Iraq War Costs May Hit $1 Trillion
Grand Jury Hears Evidence Against Rove
Oil Reaches $75 a Barrel
Israel Preparing to Retake Gaza
6 Police, GI Killed in Afghan Violence
Iran Still Years Away From Having Nukes
Bush Approval at New Low: 33%
Rumsfeld Admits Democracy Could Fail in Afghanistan, Too
Brazil Quietly Pursues Own Nuclear Path
We report; you decide
Halliburton watch, a web site dedicated to – what else – keeping an eye on one of our most horrendous corporations has three fascinating charts entitled Three Years in Iraq.
The first shows the steady climb of Halliburton stock prices,
the second shows the steady climb of US casualties, and the
third shows the steady climb of Halliburton Iraq revenues.
Halliburton is a company that you can love to hate, but it won’t make any difference to the company. Thanks to Bush’s war, it is making billions of dollars no matter what it does.
It can serve US troops contaminated food and contaminated water, for example, and no one really seems to care. Congress was told that Halliburton's dining halls in Iraq had repeatedly served spoiled food to unsuspecting troops. Others have reported that the company knowingly exposes troops and civilians to contaminated water from Iraq's Euphrates River.
It doesn’t matter. When you have friends in the White House and Pentagon, you are golden.
http://www.halliburtonwatch.org/
I’m currently rereading the best book on nutrition I’ve ever read, ‘The China Study’ by T. Colin Campbell. Quite possibly you have never heard of it. It hasn’t made a splash like the Atkins diet, the South Beach diet, or any of the other quick fix prescriptions for getting slim that never work.
That’s because this massively researched study proves once and for all that our Western diet, with its heavy emphasis on meat, animal products and highly processed food is making us fat -- and killing us with cancer, heart disease, diabetes, and all the other diseases of affluence.
Campbell proves that it is not just animal fat that is dangerous, but animal protein as well, and demonstrates that a vegetarian diet is the only way to go if you want to live a long and healthy life.
And, of course, one of the reasons that the study has not made much of a splash is that smashes the toes of too many powerful corporations who are promoting our current deadly lifestyle – McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, as two prime examples. You know, the people that pay for all the ads in the corporate media.
Most of us aren’t ready to embrace vegetarianism. If we knew the facts however, that a vegetarian diet can prevent – and even cure – cancer and heart disease, we might be willing to try it.
Our powerful corporations are working very hard to make sure that we never do.
The Supreme Court has rejected an appeal from two Chinese Muslims who were mistakenly captured more than four years ago and are still being held at the U.S. prison in Cuba. The military has decided that the two men snatched up in Pakistan in 2001are not "enemy combatants" after all.
Oops. Our bad. Just one of those things.
So we want to ship them somewhere else, anywhere else. You know, somewhere where if they complain about what we did to them we won’t hear about it. (Not that the corporate media would pay any attention to them anyway.) So far, there are no takers so we won’t let them go.
Whatever. The Supreme Court is not interested. If they don’t care about the rape of our own Bill of Rights, why should they care what we do to a couple of damn foreigners.
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Apr. 15th, 2006 | 10:15 pm
It’s not only my Martian friend Yyuran who has doubts about 9/11 (see below *), Douglas Herman reports that Sherlock Holmes is also questioning the common wisdom.
In an article entitled “The Greatest Detective Examines The Greatest Unsolved Crime Mystery,” Herman quotes Holmes: "Always remember, Watson: Crime is common. Logic is rare. And justice even rarer. Therefore it is upon the logic rather than upon the crime that you should dwell. Detection is, or ought to be, an exact science and should be treated in the same cold and unemotional manner. The real culprits of 9-11 still lurk in the shadows and may even be disguised as friends."
The “friends” that the great detective is talking about may surprise you, and you may want to read the whole thing at:
http://www.rense.com/general70/sherlock.htm
(*) My Martian friend, Yyuran, you may remember, recently said the following: “...the real conspiracy theory is the government's."
http://www.swans.com/library/art12/rdeck061.html