Quotes, URL's, Links And References-by:older Femmes, Butches, Ftms, Mtfs, Queer, Etc.

[sweetlady]

Warren, Mercy Otis (1728-1814) Born on Cape Cod, Mercy Otis moved a few miles north to Plymouth when she married; she never saw anything beyond eastern Massachusetts -- but the life of her mind was so rich that she was respected by the most cosmopolitan and politically important men of her era.

Though her brothers attended Harvard, she (like most girls in her era) got only the education that she picked up for herself. Naturally political, she involved herself from girlhood in the conversations of her father and her older brother James, a well-connected lawyer. That she waited to wed until age twenty-six showed something of her independent nature, but she married James Warren in 1754. While he developed a career in the colonial legislature, she went on to bear five sons.

When the colonies increasingly rebelled against English rule, Mercy Otis Warren became perhaps the most important of Revolutionary War women. Like the men of her family, she was among those ready to throw out the colonial governor. In 1772 -- four years before the Declaration of independence -- she anonymously published The Adulateur, a satire that cast the governor as "Rapatio," a villain intent on raping the colony. Rapatio appeared again in her second play, The Defeat (1773), and she published her third, The Group (a title she used two centuries before Mary McCarthy), in 1775, just as the rebellion began to be violent. All were thinly disguised attacks on specific public officials, for she unhesitatingly urged the taking of risks to achieve American independence.

Much later, at the time of the French Revolution, Warren wrote tellingly that revolutions are "permitted by providence, to remind mankind of their natural equality." More than most of the men of her era, she saw the American Revolution as having significance beyond its apparent economic and political warfare; instead, she foresaw a deep and permanent shift of Western ideology. At a time when even most Americans still thought of democracy as an impossible notion tainted by ignorant rabble, Mercy Otis Warren understood that the natural rights philosophy inherent in the Declaration of Independence would inevitably mean democracy and egalitarianism. Indeed, so thorough a radical was Warren that she joined the minority who opposed ratification of the Constitution in the late 1780s.

The Revolution was scarcely begun before Warren began recording the history of it. During the next three decades, she worked steadily on the three volumes that were finally published -- when Warren was seventy-seven-- as History of the Rise, Progress, and Termination of the American Revolution (1805). Her work not only provided an insider's view of the Revolution, but also set an important precedent for women authors. Until that time, the few who existed in American did not set out to consciously publish, but instead wrote primarily for themselves (as in the case of Anne Bradstreet and Phyllis Wheatley). Warren thus became the first to publish books that marked her as a professional writer of nonfiction who -- despite her upper class status -- offered her work for sale.

Bitterly resentful; in her old age of the restrictions imposed upon women, Warren focused particularly on educational reform. She chafed at the memory of doing needlework while her brothers were taught Latin and Greek, and she argued that such artificial limits on achievement harmed both men and women and were a violation of the natural rights philosophy espoused in the Revolution. Though it may have appeared that few understood her message at the time, the first serious educational institution for women, Emma Willard's Troy Female Seminary, appeared less than a decade after her death. Warren's thoughts on the subject may have had more influence than she knew.

Mercy Otis Warren had a clear, analytical mind that brought logic even to her poetry. Poems, Dramatic and Miscellaneous (1790), a collection published when she was sixty-two, was the first of her works that bore her name ("Mrs. M. Warren"), but she kept other poetry so personal that it was not published until almost two centuries after her death. Hundreds of Warren's letters to contemporaries (including Franklin, Jefferson, Hamilton, and Abigail Adams and her husband John -- with whom Warren quarreled as John Adams grew increasingly conservative) also have been published. They provide historians with interesting details and insightful commentary on the founding of the nation by one whose gender excluded her from the direct participation that she doubtless would have preferred.


http://www.pinn.net/~sunshine/whm2002/warren.html


http://www.masshist.org/bh/mercybio.html


http://www.samizdat.com/warren/


http://library.thinkquest.org/10966/data/bwarren.shtml


(*) (*) Bravo, bravo!! (f) (f) (f)


(k) (k) 's,

SL & DTB

[sweetlady]

PHILLIS WHEATLEY (1753-1784)

Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral. London: Printed for Archibald Bell and Sold in Boston by Cox and Berry, 1773.

Phillis Wheatley was one of the most well- known poets in America during her day. Wheatley was born on the western coast of Africa and kidnapped from the Senegal-Gambia region when she was about seven years old. Not being of suitable age to be sold as a slave in the West Indies or the southern colonies, she was transported to Boston, where she was purchased in 176l by John Wheatley, a prominent tailor, as an attendant to his wife. Phillis learned English quickly and was taught to read and write, and within sixteen months of her arrival in America she was reading passages from the Bible, Greek and Latin classics, astronomy, geography, history, and British literature.

Phillis published her first poem in the Newport, Rhode Island, Mercury on December 21, 1767. Unable to get her poems published in Boston, Phillis and the Wheatleys turned to London for a publisher, with the result that in 1773 thirty-nine of Phillis' poems were published as Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral. This collection, of which a first edition is shown, is Phillis Wheatley's only book, and the first volume of poetry to be published by an Afro-American. The poems reflect the religious and classical background of her New England education. Over one- third consist of elegies, the remainder being on religious, classical and abstract themes.


http://www.lib.udel.edu/ud/spec/exhibits/treasures/american/wheatley.html


http://earlyamerica.com/review/winter96/wheatley.html


http://www.forerunner.com/forerunner/X0214_Phillis_Wheatley.html


http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~rbear/wheatley.html


(*) (*) Bravo, bravo! (f) (f) (f)


(S) (S) ,

SL & DTB

[sweetlady]

http://home.midmaine.com/~lopez/mollypitcher.htm


http://www.randomhouse.com/teachers/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9780679891871&view=tg


http://score.rims.k12.ca.us/score_lessons/women_american_revolution/mccauley.html



(*) (*) (*) (f) (f) (f)


(k) (k) 's,

SL & DTB

[sweetlady]

The Random Mae West Quotes Page: http://www.therightside.demon.co.uk/quotes/maewest/


The Cybersuite of the Legendary Mae West: http://members.aol.com/char2go/611.htm


http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0922213/


(Photos!):


http://www.bombshells.com/gallery/west/


http://www.bombshells.com/gallery/west/west_gallery.php


Some Great Quotes! http://www.quotationspage.com/quotes/Mae_West/


(*) (*) :o :o And I can do a couple of imitations..... ;)


(f) (f) ,
SL & DTB

[sweetlady]

"Tulip" by Theodore James

One of the most popular of all spring-flowering bulbs, the tulip has a history that is as colorful as the flower itself. In the 1600s, in the heyday of "tulipomania," these stately blooms were rare, very expensive, and considered status symbols by Europian aristocrats. Fortunately, today just about all of us can afford to "tiptoe through the tulips" right in our own gardens. This easy-to-use, abundantly illustrated guide tells novice and expert gardeners everything they need to know to successfully grow many exquisite varieties, from the bizarre Parrot to the classic Rembrandt.

This new title includes instructions for selecting, planting, caring for, cutting, and forcing tulips, as well as how to combine them with other plants in the garden; authoritative text and gorgeous photographs by an acclaimed author/photographer team with 10 previous books; a convenient format--information is well-organized and immediately accessible; and a list of sources.

**************************************

Photos of all kinds of tulips:

http://images.google.com/images?q=tulip&hl=en&lr=&c2coff=1&sa=N&tab=wi



(*) (*) Takes me back to being on the high-speed train from Antwerp to Amsterdam a few years ago and it was in Feb.......and dreaming of re-visiting when the flowers were all in bloom... (f) (f) (f) (f) (f) (f) (f) (f) (f)


(k) (k) 's and ({) (}) 's,

Sweetlady and Doc the Boxer

[sweetlady]

Rembrandt

http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&lr=&c2coff=1&biw=1000&q=Rembrandt&btnG=Search


********************************

http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/rembrandt/


http://www.artchive.com/artchive/R/rembrandt.html


(*) (*) Where are artists like this one, Leonardo and others with talent so unimaginable-to-grasp except to reach as far as we can in trying to understand their works? <sigh...but a good sigh...> (a)


(f) (f) ,

Sweetlady and Doc the Boxer

[sweetlady]

:( Can't find this in the netflix database. :(

Director: Jennie Livingston

Amazon.com essential video
Paris Is Burning closes with two neon-lit boys holding each other on the streets of Harlem. One looks into the camera and asks, "So this is New York City and what the gay lifestyle is all about--right?" This documentary takes an honest, humorous, and surprisingly poignant peek into one of America's overlooked subcultures: the world of the urban drag queen. It's a parallel dimension of bizarre beauty, where "houses" vie like gangs for turf and reputation ... only instead of street-fighting, they vogue their way down makeshift catwalks in competitive "balls." The only rule of the ballroom: be real.

In surprisingly candid interviews, you discover the grace, strength, and humor it takes to be gay, black, and poor in a straight, rich, white world. You'll meet young transsexual "cover girls," street hustlers saving up for the big operation, and aging drag divas reminiscing about the bygone days of sequins, feathers, and Marilyn Monroe.

Made in the late 1980s, this fashion-conscious film shows its age less than you'd expect. It's still a great watch for anyone interested in the whole range of humanity, or anyone who's ever been an outsider, desperately wanting something the world hides out of reach. --Grant Balfour


Review:
Defiance and Pathos, March 21, 2000

Reviewer: A viewer (Honolulu, Hawaii, USA)

In the beginning of this film, one of the commentators says that he was told that he has two strikes against him: he is black and male. But in addition to that, he has a third strike: he's gay. "You're going to have to be stronger than you ever imagined," he is told. "Paris is Burning" is a documentary about gay black and Hispanic men who are tranvestites (men who dress in women's clothing) or transsexuals (people who have The Operation and become, biologically, the opposite sex). They come together and hold "balls" in which they compete in categories like "Executive Realness," "Opulence," and "the Boy Who Robbed You a Few Minutes before Arriving at the Ball." Although several of these categories seem like a satire of society at large, we are told by elder stateswoman/cynic/voice of reason Dorian Corey that "this isn't a parody or take-off. They are very seriously trying to pass as what they are dressing up as." The miracle of "Paris is Burning" is that director Jennie Livingston takes a subject that could have very easily become a freak show and allows the people in it their humanity. We learn their views of homosexuality, men, women, their hopes, their disappointments, their dreams. [...]

This is not a film for everyone. There are shots in this movie of nude transsexuals. It is definitely not for children, and if you have a problem with homosexuality, then this movie isn't for you, either. But if you do see this movie you'll realize "Paris is Burning" isn't really about men wearing women's clothes, it's about a group of people who are routinely marginalized and put down by society at large, and what they do to get a sense of community in their lives.

I've watched this movie four times since it was released in 1991, because it says so many things: it's a commentary about materialism in our culture, about gender roles, about rich and poor people, about the media and what it celebrates, about fame and adulation. "Paris is Burning" is one of the most humane, and one of the saddest, movies I've ever seen.


(*) (*) I'll have to keep an eye out for it on cable - yea, yea, when I have a chance that is....... ;)


Carpe diem!

Sweetlady and Doc the now-sleeping Boxer (S) (S)

[sweetlady]

June 19, 2005

A Free Woman

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

After the Pakistani government tired of kidnapping Mukhtaran Bibi, holding her hostage and lying about it, I finally got a call through to her.

Pakistani officials had just freed Ms. Mukhtaran and returned her to her village. She was exhausted, scared, relieved, giddy and sometimes giggly - and also deeply thankful to all the Pakistanis and Americans who spoke up for her.

"I'm so thankful to everyone that they keep a woman like me in mind," she said fervently. Told that lots of people around the world think she's a hero, she laughed and responded: "God is great. If some people think I'm a hero, it's only because of all those people who give me support."

President Pervez Musharraf's government is still lying about Ms. Mukhtaran, saying that she is now free to travel to the U.S. Well, it's true that government officials removed her name from the blacklist of those barred from leaving Pakistan, but at the same time they confiscated Ms. Mukhtaran's passport.

Let me back up. Ms. Mukhtaran is the indomitable peasant whom I first wrote about in September after visiting her in her village. Three years ago, a village council was upset at her brother, and sentenced her to be gang-raped. After four men raped her, she was forced to walk home nearly naked before a jeering crowd.

She then defied tradition by testifying against her attackers, sending them to prison, and she used compensation money to start elementary schools in her village. She herself is now enrolled in the fourth grade; a measure of her passion for education is that the day after the government released her, she was back in class.

Ms. Mukhtaran is using donations (through www.mercycorps.org) to start an ambulance service and a women's shelter, and she is also campaigning against honor killings, rapes and acid attacks that disfigure women. But President Musharraf, defensive about Pakistan's image, regards brutality as something to cover up rather than uproot.

So when Pakistani officials learned that Ms. Mukhtaran planned to visit the U.S. this month, they detained her and apparently tried to intimidate her by ordering the release of those convicted for her rape. This wasn't a mistake by low-level officials.

Mr. Musharraf admitted to reporters on Friday that he had ordered Ms. Mukhtaran placed on the blacklist. And although Pakistan had claimed that Ms. Mukhtaran had decided on her own not to go to the U.S. because her mother was sick (actually, she wasn't), the president in effect acknowledged that that was one more lie. "She was told not to go" to the U.S., Mr. Musharraf said, according to The Associated Press.

"I don't want to project a bad image of Pakistan." he explained.

I sympathize. From Karachi to the Khyber Pass, Pakistan is one of the most hospitable countries I've ever visited. So, President Musharraf, if you want to improve Pakistan's image, here's some advice: just prosecute rapists with the same zeal with which you persecute rape victims.

Ms. Mukhtaran says she can't talk about what happened after the government kidnapped her. But this is what seems to have unfolded: In Islamabad, government officials ferociously berated her for being unpatriotic and warned that they could punish her family and friends. In particular, they threatened to have the father of a friend fired from his job.

Fittingly, the government is facing its own pressures. Government officials have denounced Pakistani aid groups for helping Ms. Mukhtaran, and Mr. Musharraf added that they were "as bad as the Islamic extremists." So now the aid groups are threatening to pull out of their partnership with the government.

Mr. Musharraf has helped in the war on terrorism and has managed Pakistan's economy well. But in my last column, I reluctantly concluded that he is "nuts," prompting a debate in Pakistan about whether this diagnosis was insolent or accurate. After Mr. Musharraf's latest remarks, I rest my case.

On Friday, Ms. Mukhtaran told me that one of the prime minister's aides had just called to offer to take her to the United States. It seems Mr. Musharraf wants to defuse the crisis by allowing Ms. Mukhtaran a tightly chaperoned tour of the U.S., controlled every step of her way.

"I said, 'No,' " she said. "I only want to go of my own free will."

Hats off to this incredible woman. President Musharraf may have ousted rivals and overthrown a civilian government, but he has now met his match - a peasant woman with a heart of gold and a will of steel.


(*) (*) (*) (*) Talk about modern-day heroines!! What a remarkable womyn. I don't think I could have found the courage to stand up to Pakistan's President the way that she did. A miracle that she not only survived, but took on the patriarchal establishment. Definitely sending her my prayers tonight. (S) (S)


Peace,

Sweetlady and Doc the Boxer

[sweetlady]

"I apologize again for accidentally getting a few splashes of ketchup on your trousers. Obviously your financial need as a senior associate is greater than mine as a mere secretary."

-- Excerpt from an e-mail exchange which inspired the manufacturers of Heinz tomato ketchup to offer to pay the dry cleaning bill of an attorney who claimed his secretary spilt the condiment over his trousers.


http://www.suntimes.com/output/news/cst-nws-stain20.html


Spat over ketchup stains lawyer's image

June 20, 2005

LONDON -- Removing the ketchup stain from his trousers cost Richard Phillips $7.30 (4 pounds). The subsequent spat over who would pay the bill may have cost the lawyer his dignity.

An e-mail exchange allegedly between Phillips and his secretary, Jenny Amner, has been forwarded around Britain's legal community, spread across the Internet and become a talking point in the press.

Newspapers Friday reprinted the exchange, which began with a May 25 message purportedly from Phillips, a senior associate at the law firm Baker & McKenzie of Chicago, to his secretary.

"Hi Jenny. I went to a dry cleaners at lunch and they said it would cost 4 pounds to remove the ketchup stains. If you cd let me have the cash today, that wd be much appreciated," it said.

Amner, who was off work because of her mother's death, replied in piquant style June 3.

"I must apologize for not getting back to you straight away but due to my mother's sudden illness, death and funeral I have had more pressing issues than your 4 pounds. ... Obviously your financial need as a senior associate is greater than mine as a mere secretary," her e-mail read.


(*) (*) Good for the secretary!! And what a d-head her boss was. :@ I laughed when I read that she replied to her boss in "replied in piquant style". ;) ;)


(k) (k) 's

SL * DTB

[sweetlady]

http://www.themonsterengine.com/openingpage.html


(*) :| :| ;)


(k) (k) 's

Sweetlady and Doc the Boxer

[sweetlady]

http://www.grynx.com/index.php/projects/laptop-on-the-wall-walltop/


(*) (*) ;) ;) (h)


(k) (k) 's

SL & DTB

[sweetlady]

Posted on Mon, Jun. 20, 2005

By Michael Bazeley San Jose Mercury News


For years, eBay has been defined by its uniquely loyal ``community'' -- the enthusiastic masses of sellers and buyers who have turned it into the world's largest online marketplace.

This week, thousands of them will descend on San Jose for the annual, three-day eBay Live! convention, where they'll schmooze with company executives, including Chief Executive Meg Whitman, meet fellow sellers they've only talked to online and polish their merchandising skills.

This year, though, some sellers may arrive questioning their devotion to eBay.

As the company celebrates its 10th birthday this year, it faces new challenges to keeping its community happy. Fee increases, complaints of slowing sales and growing concerns about fraud and other issues have tested the patience of many eBay loyalists.

At the same time, other opportunities for selling goods online -- from niche auction sites to Amazon.com's merchants program to simply setting up a Web site and buying ads on Google -- are putting competitive pressure on the San Jose company and its flock of sellers.

Three years ago, retiree Sally Keefe was a typical eBay devotee, clearing as much as $800 a month selling books, movies and collectibles out of her home. She loved the freedom eBay offered.

But Keefe shuttered her eBay business in December because of slowing sales, increased listing fees and a feeling that eBay isn't watching out for small sellers as much anymore. She prefers the online store she started on Amazon.com, where her costs are lower.

``Lots of people have closed stores,'' said Keefe, of Oregon. ``They've been burned too many times.''

Taking the pulse of eBay users is an inexact science. The service had 147 million registered users worldwide in the first quarter, and their opinions on the company range widely.

Growing strongly

In fact, company leaders often question the depth of user discontent. EBay is still growing strongly -- suggesting that satisfied users far outnumber disgruntled ones. Revenue, which comes mostly from fees and commissions eBay charges sellers, jumped 36 percent in the first quarter from a year earlier, and the company expects revenue for 2005 to hit at least $4.27 billion. The collective worth of merchandise sold on the site was more than $34 billion last year, up more than sixfold from 2000.

But the past several months have been unusually tumultuous. A steep fee increase announced in January raised the monthly cost for store owners by 50 percent and the commissions they pay on sales by as much as 60 percent. Those hikes sparked unusually strong anger among users. And it unmasked problems in the way the company communicated with users.

Executives readily admit they fumbled their relationship with users. The company did a poor job, for example, of explaining the reasons for the fee increases, which took effect in March, said Bill Cobb, president of eBay North America.

``It's a broad community to deal with, and I think we recognized in a lot of ways we had fallen down on our communication with the community,'' Cobb said. ``The site had grown exponentially and we were just trying to get the information out to people as opposed to putting things in context.''

Now, Cobb said, the company is trying to better explain changes and listen to user complaints more closely. Cobb now regularly hosts online town hall meetings where he fields questions from members. Telephone customer support has been expanded. And e-mail from users is far more likely to get a human response now, the company says.

The furor over the March fee increase has died down, and many members say they've never been happier.

`Punk goth' eyelashes

Amy Doan started selling her own line of punk rock-style corsets, tops and skirts on eBay about four years ago, while still in college. The venture now provides a living for the San Jose resident, and Doan has expanded into selling shoes, makeup and flamboyant ``punk goth drag queen'' eyelashes.

Doan gets to work in her sweatpants. But best of all, she says, eBay has opened up new business opportunities, including a chance to design the wardrobe for a band and a deal to create her own line of makeup.

``EBay isn't just a dorky Internet thing for me anymore,'' Doan said. ``So many people have found me through it, which has led to lots of cool real-life opportunities and jobs.''

Even when they are not completely happy, sellers find it hard to go elsewhere. EBay's reach is so vast it connects sellers with buyers throughout the world.

Kim MacBeth, who sells high-end intimate apparel from the office in her Los Gatos home, was taken aback by the March fee increases.

``But I reach an incredible number of people through eBay,'' said MacBeth, who ships to buyers in Hong Kong, the Netherlands, Italy and elsewhere. ``They give me visibility and exposure that is unprecedented. I couldn't get that with another auction site or with my own Web site.''

MacBeth works 50 to 60 hours a week, photographing her high-end European bras, camisoles and chemises on a mannequin tucked in the corner of her office. Her dining room serves as the packing area, where she gently wraps each item in tissue paper and a bow. A handwritten note adds a personal touch.

``It's a lot of hours,'' said Doan, who grosses $6,000 to $7,000 a month as a second family income. ``But I do it when I want to.''

Doan and MacBeth exemplify the stereotypical, home-based eBay seller. But eBay's rapid growth is also fueled by far larger, professional sellers who pay tens of thousands of dollars a month in listing fees and commissions, and whose needs are more complex.

These sellers are often more sensitive to price increases and more willing to explore selling options beyond eBay.

David Yaskulka is marketing chairman for the Professional eBay Sellers Alliance, a group of 800 high-volume sellers who claim to generate a collective $1 billion in eBay sales annually.

Yaskulka, who operates a popular shirt and tie store, said the group is pressuring eBay to make it easier for buyers to find their stores on the vast virtual bazaar. He said many PESA members are hungry for a more traditional e-commerce experience on eBay, and want the site to promote stores that are bonded or offer money-back guarantees on purchases.

EBay officials say they understand PESA members' concerns. But eBay continues to hew to one of its founding principles, which is that eBay is a level playing field for all sellers.

`Started small'

``Remember,'' eBay spokesman Hani Durzy said, ``a lot of these big sellers started small on eBay and got where they are because of the level playing field.''

In the meantime, Yaskulka said, many store owners are trying other options, such as building their own Web sites and buying advertising on search engines -- even as they remain devoted to eBay.

``Two years ago, if you were to look at PESA sellers and ask where they sold the most, they would usually say eBay,'' said Yaskulka. ``That's changing rapidly. When we asked where they're targeting their growth, 85 percent said off eBay. They're not leaving eBay, but they're looking for growth elsewhere.''


(*) (*) Sounds like there's oppotunities for other, smaller firms to compete and for alot less commissions especially for the small entrepreneur just getting started. Just my two cents on how to sell things online without paying eBay's outrageous commissions. :| :|

Maybe the old fashioned way.....placing an ad in the local newspaper. ;)


(k) (k) ,

SL & DTB

[sweetlady]

Posted on Mon, Jun. 20, 2005

Video-sharing firm's challenge to Microsoft

By Mike Langberg San Jose Mercury News

DivX is a small San Diego company with clever software for compressing and sharing video files, standing courageously -- or perhaps foolishly -- directly in the path of a full-bore Microsoft marketing assault.

Last week, DivX rolled out new products that go somewhat beyond what Microsoft now offers.

There is a clear need for what DivX is selling. High-quality video files are huge, much too big to easily distribute online in the way legal music services such as Apple's iTunes Music Store sell songs. A two-hour movie on DVD takes up about 4 gigabytes, which would take at least several hours to download through a broadband cable or DSL connection.

DivX sells products under the same name centering around a ``codec,'' software for compressing and decompressing video. The DivX codec can squeeze that same two-hour movie down to about 1 gigabyte, while a 90-minute movie might be only 650 megabytes, with almost no decline in image quality. That's small enough to make online distribution practical.

Everyone in Silicon Valley and Hollywood believes movies will soon be sold and consumed online, and everyone recognizes huge profits will come from being the codec of choice. That's why Microsoft is spending heavily to develop and promote its Windows Media codec. And, no surprise, Microsoft's deep pockets are very attractive to Hollywood. DivX, so far, can't get past the studio gates.

But Hollywood just might take notice of DivX version 6, introduced Wednesday. The upgraded format allows for the full DVD experience -- including menus, scene selection, multiple audio tracks and subtitles -- in one file. Windows Media and earlier versions of DivX only provide a single stream of audio and video with none of these interactive features.

You can see for yourself, if you've got a computer running Windows XP or Windows 2000 and broadband Internet service. A software package called the DivX Play Bundle is available free on the Web (www.divx.com). It's a relatively small file, 7.5 megabytes, that's easy to install and lets you watch DivX video.

The company Web site is also offering a free download of ``Star Wars Revelations,'' a 47-minute movie created by fans of the ``Star Wars'' series on a $20,000 budget. The 396-megabyte DivX 6 version of ``Revelations,'' when viewed with the DivX 6 player, presents a full DVD-like menu where you can jump to specific scenes and listen to commentary by the director. Video and audio quality is good enough that you'd think you were watching a DVD on your computer.

If you want to go a step further and make your own DivX files, the DivX Create Bundle at $19.99 adds a program called DivX Converter. The converter will turn any type of digital video into a DivX file, often at a strikingly smaller size.

I tried DivX Converter and came away very impressed. I grabbed a previously recorded 40-second video clip of my daughter, Sara, shot in a high-quality video format that resulted in an unwieldy 146-megabyte file. In just under 90 seconds, DivX Converter transformed the clip into a 5.6-megabyte DivX file that -- to me, at least -- looked and sounded no different than the original.

Your library of DivX video can be viewed on any computer running the DivX player. Version 5 of the player is available for older Windows PCs and for the Macintosh. DivX 6 files will run in the DivX 5 player, but won't show any interactive menus.

There are also a number of DVD players that will run DivX files burned on a CD or DVD. These include a few models from Apex, JVC, Philips, Pioneer and RCA. But there won't be DVD players supporting DivX 6 until early next year. Today's DivX-compatible DVD players will run DivX 6 files, again without interactive menus.

You can also buy DivX movies online. You download the files and watch them on your computer. A handful of titles can be burned on disc to watch in a DivX-compatible DVD player.

Here's where DivX is hurt by the lack of Hollywood support. There are no mainstream movies legally available in DivX format, only a motley collection of obscure independent films, dusty grade Z productions and soft-core porn.

I tried the ``Burn-to-Rent'' program at GreenCine (www.greencine.com), a San Francisco distributor of independent films that is one of DivX's biggest supporters. For lack of any better choice, I paid $4.99 for an awful 85-minute science-fiction film from 1967 called ``They Came From Beyond Space.'' I then downloaded the 568-megabyte DivX file of the movie and burned the file on a CD, with rights to view the movie 10 times.

Now I could watch the move on an I-O Data model AVLP2 DVD player, loaned to me by DivX. But configuring the player to accept the copy-protected disc involved jumping through several hoops that weren't fully explained by GreenCine or DivX. I had to call DivX tech support to finish the process.

One other problem for DivX is the lingering taint of piracy. When the format started in 1999 and 2000, it was heavily favored for illegal online sharing of first-run movies. DivX never did anything to encourage the pirates, and the movie industry has never complained to DivX. But even though pirates have since largely moved along to other formats, one unspoken lure for DivX-compatible DVD players is the ability to watch pirated movies on a TV set.

This could be one reason why the big studios have yet to support DivX -- even as they've chosen Microsoft's Windows Media for limited tests of legal downloads through Movielink (www.movielink.com) and CinemaNow (www.cinemanow.com).

DivX is an easy and effective way to reduce the size of your personal video files, if you're willing to shell out $20 for the DivX Create Bundle. And DivX 6 points the way to DVD-like downloads. The quality of DivX compressed video appears roughly comparable to Windows Media. But none of that matters if Hollywood doesn't get behind DivX, and that looks like a long shot.


(l) (h) (l) (h) (l) (h)


(f) (f) 's,

Sweetlady and Doc the Boxer

[sweetlady]

Q U O T E D

Friday, June 17: "Plenty of skeptics are predicting embarrassment; like an arthritic old lady who takes to the dance floor, they say, the Los Angeles Times is more likely to break a hip than to be hip. We acknowledge that possibility. Nevertheless, we proceed."

Monday, June 20: "Unfortunately, we have had to remove this feature, at least temporarily, because a few readers were flooding the site with inappropriate material. Thanks and apologies to the thousands of people who logged on in the right spirit."

-- The Los Angeles Times comments on the launch and subsequent abandonment of its Wikitorial feature.


http://blogs.siliconvalley.com/gmsv/2005/06/quoted_14.html#comments


;) ;) ,

SL & DTB

[sweetlady]

http://www.milkandcookies.com/links/31749/


;) ;) ,

SL * DTB

[sweetlady]

http://www.polaroidonizer.nl.eu.org/


:| :|


SL & DTB

[sweetlady]

http://www.peterkinne.com/


:o :o ;)


(S) (S) ,

Sweetlady and Doc the Boxer

[sweetlady]

It's taken ages to do it, but Advanced Micro Devices has finally broken Intel's choke hold on the corporate laptop microprocessor market. This morning, AMD said Hewlett-Packard and Acer have agreed to use its Turion 64 chip in a new laptop for business customers, a market long dominated by Intel's Centrino. For AMD, which has had a tough time gaining traction in the corporate laptop microprocessor market, these deals are important victories. Roughly 60 percent of all notebooks sold are business machines. "This is a key win for AMD,'' Rob Enderle, an analyst at the Enderle Group, told The Mercury News. ``AMD has been trying to break into the mainstream business market for a long time, but they haven't had the chips to do it until this year.''


http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/11956580.htm


http://www.itworld.com/Comp/1982/050622amdturion/


(*) (*) Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD) has won the further support of two major PC vendors for its Turion mobile technology, with the introduction of new laptops from Hewlett-Packard Co. and Acer Inc. this week. The expected introduction on Wednesday of the HP Compaq nx6125 notebook for small and medium-sized businesses marks the third announcement HP and AMD have made in the last several weeks related to AMD's Turion chips. HP just released an AMD notebook that will partially benefit cyclist Lance Armstrong's foundation, and announced several AMD models during a quarterly refresh of its notebook lineup last week.

Acer Tuesday released its newest Ferrari notebook, the previously announced Ferrari 4000, with AMD's Turion processors. Acer's Ferrari notebooks have been hot sellers since they were introduced with AMD's chips in late 2003, said Rob Enderle, principal analyst with The Enderle Group in San Jose, California.

Turion is AMD's first processor designed for a mobile environment. It is basically the same chip as its desktop Athlon 64 processor but has been modified to consume less power. HP is using the ML class of Turion chips, which are the more powerful category of the two Turion varieties introduced earlier this year.


(l) (l) from the grrl-propeller-head........ ;)

SL & DTB

[sweetlady]

Posted on Wed, Jun. 22, 2005

Women's share of IT jobs plunges

LATINOS, BLACKS LAG EVEN FURTHER BEHIND

By Nicole C. Wong San Jose Mercury News


The percentage of women in information technology has dropped sharply since 1996, according to a report being released today.

Women held 32.4 percent of IT jobs in 2004, down from 41 percent eight years earlier, despite holding steady in the overall workforce. And the percentages of Latinos and African-Americans in IT jobs still lag far behind their representation in the workforce, according to the report by the Information Technology Association of America.

The report suggests that corporate outreach, government initiatives and other diversity efforts have not made a long-lasting impact. The results come as U.S. companies face increasing competition abroad and an impending talent shortage at home -- with baby boomers edging closer to retirement and student interest in IT continuing to lapse.

``We're certainly concerned that after several years of noting this trend, we see no improvement,'' said Bob Cohen, senior vice president for ITAA. ``If we don't draw from the full talent pool . . . we're really competing with one hand tied behind our back.''

The data is drawn from the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics, and includes IT jobs in industries ranging from banking to retail.

Among reasons for the decline, one in three women in information technology holds (or held) an administrative job, such as entering data or operating computers -- the kind of jobs that have taken the brunt of cutbacks in recent years. Women have made up 80 percent of data-entry keyers since 1996, suggesting they aren't climbing the IT ladder, the report said.

Another reason could be a reduction in flexible work arrangements after the dot-com boom.

Carolyn Leighton, chair of Women In Technology International, is surprised at the loss of ground.

``IT is such a critical piece of every single industry, every size business,'' she said. ``Normally when there's such a high demand, it motivates people to move into that field.''

Barriers persist

But there are still persistent barriers, such as the lower enrollment of girls in math and science classes and stereotypes that women are less able at math and science. At Silicon Valley's High Tech U this week, an introductory computer science program for high school students, only eight of the 28 participants are girls. The program is hosted by San Jose-based SEMI Foundation, Intel and Applied Materials.

Jameka March, a 15-year-old African-American girl attending High Tech U, said her girlfriends don't understand why she signed up for the program.

``They think I'm strange being in summer school,'' said Jameka, who will be a sophomore at San Jose's Notre Dame High School in the fall. ``I don't have bad grades. I just want to learn more.''

When it comes to racial diversity, the presence of African-Americans in IT slid from 9.1 percent in 1996 to 8.3 percent in 2004. They held steady in the overall workforce.

The Latino presence increased slightly in both IT and the workforce. But Latinos made up only 6.4 percent of IT workers, compared with 12.9 percent of the workforce.

The reasons may include barriers such as a lack of mentors and role models in corporate management, negative perceptions of IT work as isolating and geeky, and again, the lack of student enrollment in math and science classes.

The percentage of whites has also dropped in IT from 85.1 percent in 1996 to 82.8 percent in 2004. Still, whites make up by far the majority of the workforce, both in IT and overall.

Asians stood out as the only overrepresented racial group in IT, making up 12.1 percent of IT jobs but 4.3 percent of the overall workforce.

Still, between 2003 and 2004, the percentage of Asians in IT declined, probably due to political pressure to restrict visas for immigrants, especially highly skilled workers. The report also notes anecdotal evidence of a brain drain, with foreign-born workers from countries like India, Pakistan and China now returning home to lead tech companies.

Aging IT workforce

The report showed that on average IT workers are getting older. The percentage of IT workers 45 and older jumped from 25.3 in 1996 to 35.1 in 2004. It could be that IT employers have come to appreciate the value of more seasoned employees. Or it could be that employees now feel the need to work to a later age.

Among solutions, the report proposed stronger commitment to diversity from corporate leadership; increased outreach and mentoring, stronger partnerships between companies and colleges; increased collaboration with minority recruitment groups and more flexible work arrangements.


http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/business/columnists/gmsv/11956570.htm


:o :| :o :| Let's knock those stupid barriers down! And pressure firms large and small to get into ACTION starting with the solutions provided in the last paragraph...........beyond the PR type wording......!! Older womyn unite. (l)


<eyes getting weary if the brain still isn't....>


(h) Stay tuned....never the same bat-time, often from the same bat-place. ;)


Sweet dreams. (f) (f)

Sweetlady and Doc the Boxer

[sweetlady]

Media

Being Batman

David M. Ewalt, 06.20.05, 7:28 PM ET Forbes

NEW YORK - Dark clouds have gathered over Gotham. Crime is rampant, despair is widespread and no one is safe. Who will rescue the metropolis from itself, fight the forces of evil and save the good people of the city?

Why don't you do it?

Plenty of us would love to fight for truth and justice, if only we had magic powers or mutant genes. Americans love superheroes. Last weekend, Batman Begins was the No. 1 film in the country, pulling in $71.1 million over its first five days. The Batman movie franchise is also one of the most lucrative of all time, with five movies (not counting Batman Begins) grossing nearly $1 billion.

Plenty of moviegoers had to leave those theaters a little sad that they can't fly through a city and crack muggers' heads. But don't despair--if Batman is to be believed, you can still save the day even if you're only human. Unlike Superman or Marvel Comics' (nyse: MVL - news - people ) X-Men, Batman doesn't have any superpowers. He survives on martial arts training, intense drive and a cave full of pretty serious psychoses.

OK, so he also has a couple billion dollars. Batman's alter ego, Bruce Wayne, is an old-money heir and the owner of Wayne Enterprises, a massive international-technology conglomerate. In our Forbes Fictional Fifteen, we estimated his net worth at $6.3 billion. If he were a real guy, he'd be the 28th richest person in America, right behind News Corp.'s (nyse: NWS - news - people ) Rupert Murdoch.

Wayne uses his riches and corporate connections to equip himself with the latest and greatest in military hardware, and uses those tools to help him fight villains like the Joker, the Riddler, and Ra's Al Ghul.

But you don't have to be a billionaire to become a caped crusader. Using commercially available training, technology and domestic help, the average guy could conceivably equip himself to become a real-world superhero, provided he's got at least a couple million to spare.


http://www.forbes.com/digitalentertainment/2005/06/20/batman-movies-superheroes-cx_de_0620batman.html


SLIDE SHOW: http://www.forbes.com/business/2005/06/20/cx_de_batmanslide.html?thisSpeed=60000&boxes=custom


;) ;) ,

Sweetlady and Doc the Boxer

[sweetlady]

http://www.theonion.com/2056-06-22/index_b.php


;) ;) ,

SL & DTB

[sweetlady]

http://www.knight-foundation.com/hoffplane.html


;) ;)


(o) (S) (o) (S) Time for bed........well, a walk with Doc first, some light reading as in a book and not the computer screen......and getting into some comfy, light (and cool) nightgown.

(l) Have a lovely Thursday and rest of your week! (f) (f)


({) (}) Hugs from,

Sweetlady and Doc, my Best Friend

[Lady_Di]

Hi Lady_Di,

Long time no "see". Thanks for your wonderful posts here. I LOVED the dog quotes too - Andy Rooney's was totally hilarious as was the one about dogs being able to count dog biscuits! I really liked them all!

By "Eagle's Nest", are you referring to a particular geographical place or a philosophical one? I would love to visit Alaska, maybe even spend a summer there on some university campuses - but I don't intend to live there. But then, it's often the cosmic winks and life's sweet serendipities that make all of my so-called plans evaporate...... (8) (8)

The Rockies are quite beautiful and I've been to many places along them from Mexico and up into Canada. Have you ever read the book, "Backbone of the World"? It's about living in and in the alluvial fans that make up the Rockies - actually it's about stories that a writer learns about visiting many places and people living along the "backbone of the world".........wonderfully-well-written book that makes you feel that you're right there.


Adieu for now,

SL & DTB


gosh, now I don't even remember what I was referring to

probably a place where you can nest, high in the mountains
which is what you have described on more than one occasion

But my first novel takes place in and around Eagle's Nest here in NM. Up in what they call the Golden Triangle of Taos, Red River and Eagle's Nest.

I have not read that book, but it sure does sound like something I would enjoy. Tonight is the culmination of a long hot day, a good day. Time for a bath and then to bed with me as well.

Get some rest there, Sweet One.

d


.... and I really get that

it's often the cosmic winks and life's sweet serendipities that make all of my so-called plans evaporate......


and how!

[sweetlady]

Special Report: Best Cities For Singles (as in young people!!) ;) ;)

Davide Dukcevich, 06.25.04, 8:00 AM ET

Looking for jobs galore, cheap beer and highly educated, unattached young people? Head for the mountains! The Denver-Boulder metro area is America's best place for singles. The Mile High City edged out larger metros like Boston and Washington, D.C., thanks to its booming job market, relatively low cost of living and large university population. Our annual listing of America's Best Cities For Singles ranks the 40 largest metropolitan areas in seven different categories: night life, culture, job growth, number of other singles, cost of living alone, coolness and public opinion.

The Cities

1. Denver-Boulder
2. Washington-Baltimore
3. Austin
4. Atlanta
5. Boston
6. Los Angeles
7. Phoenix
8. New York
9. San Francisco
10. Miami
11. Chicago
12. Dallas-Fort Worth
13. San Diego
14. Minneapolis-St. Paul
15. Philadelphia
16. Houston
17. Raleigh-Durham
18. Seattle
19. New Orleans
20. Orlando

21. Columbus
22. St. Louis
23. Milwaukee
24. Portland
25. Tampa
26. Las Vegas
27. Indianapolis
28. San Antonio
29. Nashville
30. Kansas City
31. Sacramento
32. Detroit
33. Cleveland
34. Salt Lake City
35. Providence
36. Charlotte
37. Greensboro
38. Norfolk
39. Cincinnati
40. Pittsburgh


http://www.forbes.com/2004/06/23/04singleland.html?partner=netscape


Forbes' Methodology:

http://www.forbes.com/maserati/singles2004/cx_dd_04single_methodology.html

:o :o

Click on the Best and Worst of's. I was surprised that Las Vegas and Austin are near the top for best job growth for example.


(*) (*) At the end of the day? I think it's probably better to live where it feels the best in terms of mental, spiritual and physical health and THEN work from there whether via broadband Internet or nearest airport for those who travel. That my two cents - and I'm sure this article and research wasn't targeting a lady in her (ahem) "late forties" AKA "39 and holding"!!..... :| :| ;) ;)


(l) (l) (l) (l) DOC'S CBC AND OTHER BLOOD TESTS CAME BACK PERFECT EARLIER TODAY!!! (l) (l) (l) I still need to take him to the other oncology office that's two hours (driving, no worries!) on Thursday, July 14th. Just to make sure through another set of ultrasound and xrays - that the lymphoma is staying in remission. I didn't know that there would be these tests on a continual basis but then, I am so very, very grateful that my little boy is feeling as well as he is (given the high temps and even his mama is melting...). (l) (l) (l) (l) Thank goodness for "Frosty Paws!!! (h) (h) (for Doc) I could go for a nice ice-cold drink right now....and iced coffee doesn't seem to be "it". I'll keep up with my Internet research and postings and see what I feel like having in a few minutes......frosted mug of peach tea perhaps? ;)


Love, peaceful thoughts and white light,

Sweetlady-the happy-mama, and Doc the now-napping Boxer

[sweetlady]

1. http://www.indiancountry.com/

(l) (l) Respectful, insightful and I saved in my bookmarks. (l) (l)

(Of course, I'd list this one first as it refers to American Indians....not Tom Friedman's "beat" in Bagladore, India and his carping about shipping American jobs overseas - it is SO getting OLD....)


2. http://www.truthout.com/


3. http://www.newshounds.us/ (GREAT tag line........coffee warning....)


4. http://www.airamericaradio.com/


5. http://www.dollarsandsense.org/


6. http://www.ifex.org/


(*) (*) Enjoy the exploration through some really nice left-leaning web sites as I did this afternoon. (f) (f)


(k) (k) 's

Sweetlady and Doc the Boxer

[sweetlady]

The Great Live 8 Debate

By Traci Hukill, AlterNet

Posted on June 23, 2005, Printed on June 23, 2005

http://www.alternet.org/story/22285/

It's official, again. People suck.

You give them free tickets to a concert for a good cause and they try to sell them on eBay for hundreds of dollars. You organize eight kick-ass shows around the world and they complain that the lineup is too white, too commercial, too whatever. You call attention to one of the modern world's deepest sources of shame --a continent pillaged for centuries, now left to fester -- and they criticize you for being negative. They accuse you of grandstanding, of heaving your aging rocker's carcass back into the spotlight for one last pitiful boogie with fame.

If I were Bob Geldof, I'd go live in a cave after all this Live 8 business is over with. July 7 would be a good day to leave. By then, the free concerts that Geldof organized in London, Cornwall, Philadelphia, Paris, Berlin, Rome, Johannesburg, Tokyo and Toronto will be over. The Long Walk to Justice will have come to an end, culminating in hordes of people arriving on July 6 in Edinburgh, 20 miles from Gleneagles, where the leaders of the eight richest countries in the world are gathered for their annual summit July 6-8. The strains of Dido and Travis will have died out in Edinburgh's Murrayfield Stadium. The headaches will be over. Geldof can listen to results of the G-8 summit, the impetus for it all, on the transistor radio in his cave, absently finger-combing his unruly, sexy-old-rocker locks.

But Sir Bob, knighted in 1985 for his work fighting African poverty, is undoubtedly too tough, egotistical and committed for that, so he'll probably hang around for the end of the G-8 (which gathers the presidents of Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia and the United States) before going on back home to London. There, he'll most likely continue doing the kind of work that got him named, alongside Tanzanian President Benjamin Mkapa and Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, to British Prime Minister Tony Blair's seventeen-member Commission for Africa.

That's where the real work has been done; Live 8 is just unofficial publicity for it. The Commission's work has driven Blair's agenda of debt forgiveness, increased aid and better trade terms for Africa, with impressive success so far: the G-8 nations have agreed to write off all $40 billion of debt for Africa's poorest 14 nations and four others in Latin America. In response to the Commission's recommendation to double current aid to sub-Saharan Africa to $50 billion by 2010, Europe has agreed to raise its foreign aid spending to .7 percent of GNP, though Washington stubbornly refuses to budge from the .15 percent range.

People like to sneer at rock stars like Geldof and Bono, another crusader for Africa, as dilettantes whose egos have deluded them into thinking they are political forces to be reckoned with. In recent weeks, Geldof's been accused of hubris and megalomania by British politicians, of all people, for inviting Nelson Mandela and the Pope to the concerts. British commentator Peter Hitchens wrote in the Mail that it was in fact Africa's starving children who were rescuing the "sagging reputations" of "balding, clapped-out rock stars." Spiked Online's Mick Hume calls the whole thing "every bit as paternalistic as the old imperialist attitudes."

But from here, it looks like Geldof has rung the bell, musically and politically.

Musically, the nine shows scheduled for July 2 add up to an astounding lineup: the Sex Pistols, Coldplay, Madonna, Scissor Sisters, U2, Green Day, Roxy Music, REM, Stevie Wonder, Brian Wilson, A-ha, The Cure, P. Diddy and Youssou N'Dour are just a few of the luminaries. There were immediate complaints that it was too white an event -- the United Kingdom's Black Information Link called it "hideously white" -- and the fact that most of the big-name African bands are relegated to Cornwall does in fact seem random. Live 8 organizers responded that the goal was simply to get as many big-name stadium-filling acts onstage as possible.

Politically, Live 8 is brilliant. Live Aid, 1985's spectacular charity concert, raised $100 million for Ethiopia, then in the grip of a four-year famine. After that Geldof was done, uninterested in lame follow-ups. But as soon as it became evident that things were conspiring to put Africa on the global stage in 2005, friends wouldn't let Geldof rest. First there was the Commission for Africa, which completed its work in March. Blair planned to use the U.K.'s turn at the head of the G-8, and its shift at the rotating helm of the European Union presidency starting in July, as bully pulpits to promote the Commission's recommendations. This in turn would coincide with United Nations' five-year checkup of the world's progress on meeting the Millennium Development Goals, which aim to end the world's worst poverty in 2015. Politically, it couldn't be a better moment to focus on Africa.

And it also happened that Live Aid's 20th anniversary was coming up. Friends Bono and Richard Curtis (who wrote Notting Hill) hectored Geldof into staging another event -- but Geldof made this one different, and herein lies the genius of Live 8. Twenty years ago, Live Aid was an appeal to individuals to give money, and they did, by purchasing expensive tickets for shows in London and Philadelphia. But this time, the eight concerts are free, the tickets given away by lottery, because Geldof has apparently realized that individual contributions to charity will not haul Africa out of poverty. It's gone way past the point where that can work. Only real political will in the world's richest capitals can do the job. And so Live 8's goal is not to raise cash, though that would help in the short run, but to raise awareness -- political awareness that can translate into political pressure to bring Africa into the family of self-sufficient nations.

"It's about justice, not charity," Geldof says. That represents an awakening on his part, a sophistication that was not in place 20 years ago when he was a conscience-stricken former frontman for the Boomtown Rats who had happened to catch a BBC documentary on Ethiopia on the tube. Band Aid, the group of musicians he gathered to record "Do They Know It's Christmas" in November 1984, was named in humble recognition of the limitations of cash aid. Now Geldof is putting that recognition into action and trying to use his influence to change policy.

That didn't quell his aggravation when Live 8 tickets started turning up on eBay. They were going for as much as $1,800, and Geldof did two things: he encouraged people to bid fake millions for the tickets to stop the bidding, and he bitched at eBay, prompting a firestorm of self-righteous whining after eBay backed down. "[This] may have serious consequences for the long-term shape of the online world," fretted BBC commentator Bill Thompson. "After all, if Geldof can get items removed from aution, who else is going to use this as a tactic in the future?" To which some of us might respond: Who cares?

The standoff had some symbolic import; Geldof refused to accept eBay's offer to donate the auction fees to charity, calling it "filthy money made on the back of the poorest people on the planet -- stick it where it belongs."

Good for him. Anyone who pays attention to what is happening in Africa -- and it's not that easy to keep doing that, because it is awfully depressing -- knows Africa needs it. There are eight U.N. peacekeeping operations in Africa and 15 million people who can't go home because of conflicts. In Sub-Saharan Africa, 300 million people -- about the population of the United States -- live on less than $1 a day. Another 300 million people lack access to clean water. Each year, 1 million African children, one every 30 seconds, die of malaria. Every day, 8,500 Africans contract HIV.

Okay, so this is too negative. There may be good news coming out of Africa about inspiring individuals and the resilience of the human spirit and the incremental victories of stable nations like Botswana and Ghana against AIDS and poverty, but I'm looking at the Human Development Report of the U.N. Development Program, and it tells a different story. The HDR 2004 ranks countries according to a formula that considers life expectancy, educational attainment and adjusted real income. The first African country on the list is Seychelles, number 35, a little-populated tourist mecca and island paradise. The next is Libya, 58 -- oil country. Then there's Mauritius, 64 (island paradise); Algeria, 108 (oil and gas); and so on. Only at 119, South Africa, do you reach one of the continental Sub-Saharan countries that does not enjoy oil wealth -- in other words, a typical African country. And there are only 177 nations on the list. Most of Africa's 54 nations fill the bottom of it.

Live 8 is not going to make Africa whole, but it might start the ball rolling toward a solution. Forgiveness of debt is a start. Increased aid is needed to help get infrastructure, health care, education and agriculture up and running, according to economist and Millennium Goals adviser Jeffrey Sachs. Perhaps most important in the long run, though, is trade. Africa has just 2 percent of the world's trade, and the easing of textile tariffs on China could drain even that small amount by pressuring the infant textiles industry in southern Africa and Uganda. Economists suggest that if Africa could get just 1 percent more of global trade, it would equal $70 billion a year -- almost three times what it gets in annual development aid.

Geldof acknowledges the difficulty of all this, the quixotic nature of believing a handful of rock concerts staged four days before the start of a political summit can change the course of history. But, as he told Reuters, "How do we create domestic heat to pressure them into doing something they don't particularly want to do? We will not get there if we don't do ludicrous circuses like giant concerts ... and stars being rallied."

Traci Hukill is a freelance journalist based in Monterey, Calif.
© 2005 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.


(*) (*) Astute observations in my view. And I am SO NOT looking forward to the million or so folks coming into town soon. I am so glad that I live in the suburbs an hour away!!.......for the moment that is.......I'm looking, I'm looking..... ;) ;) Exploring is the first step......

(l) This is an event to watch on TV I think. Or, better yet? Just get involved and volunteer or donate money. Rock, folk and other musicians changing the outcome of a global summit? I so do not think so! :| :| I pray that I'm wrong and that my view is cynical. I'd LOVE to see grass-roots efforts dramatically impacting global change. (but I have lost hope in the separation of the three branches of American government........i.e.? Supreme Court elects a President in 2000; Executive branch (as in the Village Idiot) blowing smoke up legislators' asses including Hourse and Senate on WMDs in Irag to go to war there and now everyone's looking stupid in terms of getting the hell out. Need I go on?


(f) (f) Stepping gingerly off my soapbox in one of new pairs of high heel sandals........ ;)


(k) (k) 's

SL & DTB

[sweetlady]

http://www.alternet.org/



(*) (*) Worth the time I think. If only for one or two articles that definitely aren't covered in this manner in the "regular" media. I hope you enjoy as I did.


(k) (k) 's

Sweetlady and Doc the Boxer

[sweetlady]

(*) (*) I now understand! Well, better, anyway. I hope this enlightens and interests others as it did for me. I usually pass over these articles as I can't keep all of the South American continent countries' violence and other events in an understandable format in my mind - and am so glad that I read this in the paper version on Bolivia earlier this week. (*) (*) I'm so absolutely delighted to now have a subscription to The Nation - both the "snail-mail" version as well as on-line. The online version will allow me to share my favorites. I was MOST enlightened by the American media (gov't-spoon-fed by all means) coverage - and how I have simply accepted the CIA killings of so-called "bad guys" over the past 20+ years. Many are not bad guys at all!!! :o :o

*************************************
Bolivia's Battle Of Wills

by CHRISTIAN PARENTI

[from the July 4, 2005 issue] The Nation

At a roadblock on the Bolivian altiplano, a group of indigenous tin miners in brown fiberglass helmets, their jaws bulging with coca leaves, lounge around on an empty strip of road. Suddenly the thin, high-altitude air shakes with a quick explosion. Everyone laughs. The comrades are killing time by tossing lit dynamite into a field. Tomorrow they will march across these high empty plains, through the sprawling, impoverished, majority Indian city of El Alto and over the edge of a steep canyon down into the capital of La Paz, and there lay siege to the government.

The miners have held this road for the past twenty-four hours. Both main arteries linking La Paz to the outside world are shut down. The Bolivian economy is beginning to sputter and stall; before long the restaurants, hotels and offices of the capital will start to run out of food and fuel; uncollected garbage will pile up in the streets. Soon six major cities will be sealed off by more than eighty blockades.

"The Congress is dominated by the transnational corporations. We are fighting to recover our natural resources. It is our right," says a stern miner named Miguel Sureta.

The social movements--a host of mostly indigenous organizations representing Aymara and Quechua peasants, miners, teachers, urban community organizations, coca growers and the oldest national labor federation--are demanding nationalization of the country's massive natural gas reserves, now estimated to be the second-largest in the hemisphere, at 53 trillion cubic feet. Their other plank is a constituent assembly to reformulate Bolivia's political system and give greater power to the majority indigenous population.

Throughout South America, center-left governments are taking power, with Uruguay and Ecuador being the latest to join the trend. Bolivia, home to some of the most well-organized and radical popular movements on the continent, could be next. But the challenges facing the Bolivian left are enormous: Despite all its strength, it is riven by ideological disputes, pervasive Quechua versus Aymara ethnic factionalism and the constant clash of leadership egos.

Meanwhile, the right is also mobilizing. European-descended elites in the gas-rich lowland provinces of Santa Cruz and Tarija are agitating for autonomy or possible secession. The major oil companies operating in Bolivia are all threatening disinvestment if the industry is restructured. There are also rumors of a possible military coup.

On June 6 the centrist president, Carlos Mesa Gisbert, resigned. For a tense week it seemed the next president would be Hormando Vaca Díez, president of the Senate, a right-wing cattle rancher who warned that continued protest would "end in authoritarian government." But now Eduardo Rodriguez, head of the Supreme Court, has been sworn in as Bolivia's president. He is obliged to hold elections within six months.

The recently departed Mesa inherited his job in October 2003, the last time the issue of natural gas exploded. In that conflict his predecessor, then-president Gonzalo "Goni" Sánchez de Lozada, ordered troops to open fire on demonstrators. At least sixty-seven people were killed, and in the outrage that followed, Goni fled to the United States.

Back at the miners' blockade, three weeks before Mesa's resignation, nine trucks are sitting before a string of stones laid across the highway. In the center of this is a homemade bomb of dynamite, packed in a bottle full of pebbles. A few of the stranded drivers play soccer next to their vehicles.

"With the blockades we all lose out," says Fernando Chavez, an Aymaran shepherd from the nearby village of Achica Arriba, where the miners have bivouacked. "The dynamite scares the children," he says, one eye on his flock of fifty sheep. "President Mesa should talk to all sectors."

In a truck called Rey de Reyes ("King of Kings") and painted with evangelical inscriptions sits Johny Miranda. He had dropped off a load of soybeans in Peru and was headed home to Cochabamba when he hit this barrier last night. If he tries to run the blockade, he says, the miners will slash his tires and destroy his truck. He doesn't support such tactics, but he wants the people to get more of the revenue from natural gas.

"Instead of blockades they should go right for the power, attack the gas fields and the Parliament," says Miranda. Within hours that's exactly what happens.

Crucial in all of this is the character of Evo Morales and his party, the Movement Toward Socialism (MAS). Morales is of mixed Aymaran and Quechuan descent and got his start as a coca farmer, or cocalero. He lost the last presidential election, in 2002, by only one percentage point. MAS is now the second-largest group in Parliament. But Morales is not the driving force behind Bolivia's social movements.

Most grassroots organizations in Bolivia are far more radical than the social democratic MAS. Morales originally called for a 50 percent royalty on foreign oil companies, while most of the movement wants 100 percent nationalization. This has caused Bolivian sociologist Carlos Crespo to describe Morales as "Lula-ized," and to call MAS "hierarchical" and just "a presidential vehicle." Antonio Peredo, a senior MAS senator, has a different critique of his party: "If we took power now we wouldn't last ten weeks. We're not ready." But neither is anyone else on the left, and as Alex Contreras, a radical Bolivian journalist, puts it, "MAS is the only organization capable of uniting enough factions to win elections. They're not corrupt and they're not fanatics. They're the only real option."

To find out what Morales thinks of the unfolding turmoil I track him down at the party offices in Cochabamba. Morales shows up late for the interview, a crowd of campesino activists, cooperative miners and two television crews in tow. He politely locks them out of his office and sits for the interview at a simple desk. Behind him hangs a wiphala, the square, rainbow-checked flag of indigenous self-determination. On other walls are posters bearing pictures of Che Guevara and Evo Morales himself.

How does MAS plan to win elections to be held before the end of this year? "We are the primary political force in the country. If there had been a runoff in 2002 we would have won," says Morales, as if victory had been almost assured. Not all agree with this assessment--many suspect that the traditional rightist parties would have united to smash MAS in a runoff.

When I press Morales on various issues--such as how to expand his base and reach out to Aymaran organizations that are now openly hostile to MAS, which is seen as heavily Quechuan--Morales is surprisingly reticent. He appears tired and distracted. What would the party do once in power? Morales says they would abolish a few ministries and create a few new ones that would better serve the poor. How will MAS woo the middle classes? "Who knows about the middle class, they are fickle," says Morales with an evasive grin. "Mesa is damaging the middle class. He can't walk in the streets now." Other than pointing out Mesa's faults, Morales seems to have no real plan for winning and using state power.

As for the famous Aymaran leader Felipe Quispe, who is one of Morales's main rivals, "sometimes we get along, sometimes we don't," says Morales. What are the biggest challenges MAS faces? "Political meddling from the United States." When I ask him about the difference between his call for 50 percent royalties and the increasingly popular demand for nationalization, he offers a contorted attempt to reconcile the two. "If we renegotiate all of these illegal contracts, and insure local community consultation on the new contracts, that is essentially nationalization."

A week later, when the airports have not yet been shut down, Morales and I end up on the same flight to La Paz. He can't remember our recent hourlong interview. I remind him of all the details; he looks at me with earnest, tired eyes but still can't remember. I am traveling with a colleague, Ryan Grim from Slate. Neither of us can decide whether Morales's total lack of pretense should be read as reassuring honesty or simple incompetence. After all, glad-handing journalists is Politics 101. As we take our seats in coach and Evo slides into first class, Grim leans over to me: "If you hear a loud bang and see a bright light, you know the CIA has gotten rid of the Evo Morales problem with a 'mysterious plane crash.'"

The lowland jungle of the Chaparé region, a few hours east and downhill from Cochabamba, is where Morales got his start as a union leader among the cocaleros. Driving into the Chaparé on alternately paved and washed-out dirt roads, the jungle looms up--lush, wet and claustrophobic. The roadside villages are mildewed and feel broken down. The air is soft and full of oxygen, unlike planet La Paz at 13,000 feet.

The first white and mestizo settlers in this area were deserters from the Chaco War with Paraguay in the late 1930s. Disease whipped most of the local Yuki Indians. In the 1980s a new wave of immigrants arrived, pushed out of the highlands by the layoffs and deindustrialization of president Victor Paz Estenssoro's monetarist "new economic policy." To survive, the former miners and displaced highland Quechua campesinos turned to growing coca, some of which made its way to the legal market to be chewed as a mild stimulant and hunger suppressant but most of which was, and is, purchased by Colombia-connected drug traffickers who turn it into cocaine.

In many ways the first chapter in Bolivia's current season of political upheaval began here in the Chaparé during the 1990s, when the US-orchestrated drug war began targeting these new cocaleros and their openly socialist and indígenista trade unions. Known simply as the Six Federations, the cocaleros' unions function as a de facto state, mixing traditional Quechuan communitarian custom with more modern forms of political organizing. Though land is formally titled to individuals, it is really the Six Federations that collectively manage it. Cocaleros who do not cultivate their plots and refuse to participate in union and community struggles have their land repossessed and redistributed by the unions.

In the city hall of Villa Tunari, one of the damp little towns in the Chaparé, MAS party mayor Feliciano Mamani takes a break from meetings to explain the politics of the Chaparé. "The drug war is a political fight. It's about dismantling our union organizations," says Mamani, who came up through the ranks with Evo. "First they called us communists, then they called us narco-traffickers, now they call us terrorists."

To emphasize his point Mamani rolls up his pants to reveal his dented and blackened shin, where he took a canister of police tear gas five years ago. The wound exposed his bone and remained open and weeping until recently. As he explains the story of his injury, a gray Huey helicopter sweeps low and loud overhead.

For the past six years the Chaparé has been in the grip of a very-low-level guerrilla war and counterinsurgency: The military kills unarmed civilians, tortures detainees, uproots the cocaleros' crops and occasionally burns down their homesteads, while police and prosecutors jail union leaders and MAS officials on charges of drug trafficking and terrorism. So far, 150 MAS leaders have faced such charges, often based on evidence as flimsy as possession of coca or pamphlets by Che Guevara.

The cocaleros fight back with blockades, protests, roadside sniping, occasional abductions and homemade bombs hidden in the coca fields, set to kill the military eradication teams. According to Kathryn Ledebur of the Andean Information Network, an NGO that monitors human rights conditions in the Chaparé, the violence has claimed the lives of about sixty cocaleros and twenty soldiers since the conflict began, with hundreds more, mostly cocaleros, wounded and maimed. During my trip to the Chaparé two corpses show up: One is a possible snitch, found in the field of a local union leader.

The cocaleros claim that the drug war has only made them stronger, but I can't help getting the impression that MAS and the Six Federations would be better off if the United States were not giving the Bolivian police and military roughly $90 million every year to harass and prosecute rank-and-file activists.

Off one of the back roads, through some coca fields and up a dirt path lives Hilaria Perez, a Quechuan woman who was shot in the back by the military when they tore up her coca crop in 2003. The bullet went through her right lung, but she survived. She still farms coca and lives in a dark brick shack with her husband and four little children. Since the shooting, the Perezes have drifted from the union.

"I haven't been to a meeting in two months," says Hilaria's husband. To enforce participation, the unions--like all Bolivian social movements--impose fines on members who shirk their political duties such as attending meetings, marches and blockades. The new social movements fit the romantic activist's vision of a reinvented left in that they are "networked," highly democratic and rooted in indigenous forms of community decision-making. But politics in Bolivia are deadly serious, and the movements use subtle forms of coercion to bolster consent and to keep the cadre marching.

Despite the drug war and grinding poverty, MAS has run the local governments of the Chaparé remarkably well. Over the past decade they have practiced a type of Third World gas-and-water socialism, investing their meager budgets in an infrastructure of roads, schools and clinics.

To the left of Morales and MAS are myriad other organizations and leaders. One of the most important is the Aymaran nationalist and former guerrilla Felipe Quispe (a k a "El Mallku," the Condor), who now heads a large peasant union called the CSUTCB.

I meet Quispe in the CSUTCB's chilly and barren La Paz offices in a brick building with a round facade. He wears a dusty black fedora and a heavy leather jacket. His face is set in a permanent, take-no-crap frown. He begins the interview by offering a small pile of coca leaves and sweet herbs. Throughout the discussion he methodically strips the stems from the small leaves.

Quispe's worldview is nothing if not radical. Forget the presidency, the Parliament, the squabbles over gas royalties and tax rates. He sees a future indigenous nation run by a council of elders and encompassing Bolivia along with parts of Peru, Argentina and Chile. Quispe tried his hand at liberal democracy; he was a congressman from the indigenous party, MIP, but walked out, dismissing Parliament as a decadent talking shop.

"My mother was a slave," says Quispe with a blunt stare. Indeed, many indigenous Bolivians were serfs, tied to the land they worked until 1946. "I am accustomed to living dirty. Eating simple food. How much money do those pigs in Congress spend? One deputy could pay the salary of ten or twelve teachers. While I was there my brethren continued to live in poverty. The deputies are supposed to start work at 8 but show up at 11." He strips and chews more coca.

Quispe insists his vision of an Aymaran nation is not atavistic or fanciful. "We want technology; we will have relations with other countries." And as for white people?

"The foreigners can stay as long as we get 90 percent of the power. If not, there will be war. But the foreigners will have a hard time here. They don't own any land. We don't want to exterminate white people. We just want power."

As for Evo Morales's more mundane quest to be president, Quispe is dismissive. "Evo is like [President Alejandro] Toledo in Peru. Nothing will change for the Indians if he is president." Getting back to the big picture, he sums up: "We will rewrite history with our own blood. There will be a new sun, and even the rocks and the trees will be happy."

Another radical, but pragmatic, vision comes out of the Cochabamba Water War of 2000, in which Bechtel's privatization bid was defeated. Oscar Olivera is one of the most respected local leaders in this region, known for his humility, honesty and hard work. Like many others he sees elections and the quest for state power as distractions.

"We need self-management," says Olivera. "That is what we are trying to do with the water company here." Later I tour the outlying self-managed water districts. As in the Chaparé, the movements here function as a de facto government and do so with remarkable efficiency.

But what about Bolivian elections in a hemispheric context--doesn't Olivera think adding another country to Latin America's new left bloc is important? He pauses, then almost apologetically says, "It's true. We become very regionalized and localized here in Bolivia and do not think about the wider context much. Maybe we should."

And how would self-management work in relation to a highly complex oil and gas industry? In El Alto, some activists with the powerful neighborhood organization FEJUVE tell me of plans to occupy and "self-manage" the gas fields. But later the head of the engineering and technicians' organization supporting them says that such occupations would not involve pumping and selling gas.

It's late May, and week two of protests is under way. A general strike has been called. At a huge march descending from El Alto to La Paz I meet a young street vendor named Ricardo. He supports nationalization, but adds: "If I didn't march I would be fined by the union. The union controls everything--where you can sell, if you can sell."

When some of his fellow merchants find a few street stalls still active in La Paz, they knock down the offending merchants' umbrellas. The laggards quickly close up. "We are fighting for everyone's rights," says one of the stick-wielding women merchants. "They have to respect that."

The next day the cadre of the CSUTCB, along with miners, teachers and landless peasants from the Movimiento Sin Tierra, march down from El Alto. In typical highland dress of heavy jackets, bowlers and felt hats and bearing sticks, pipes, shepherds' whips and the colorful wiphalas, the weather-beaten columns of Aymara farmers move fast through the narrow streets of old La Paz, occasionally tossing dynamite down empty streets for effect. Their destination is Plaza Murillo, where the Congress and the presidential palace sit. Nervous police in riot gear have blockaded all the key entry points.

The marchers smash in the windows of the few minibuses that have ignored the strike. A journalist appears on a balcony with a camera. Rocks are let loose and just miss his head as he ducks back inside. These rugged peasants are furious--it's been 500 years, and the bill is due.

At a standoff with police there is some yelling in Aymaran, and people back away. Someone tosses a small charge of dynamite in front of the cops, who fall back and block the blast with their Plexiglas shields. The police answer with volleys of tear gas and shotguns firing rubber bullets. Ryan Grim and I sprint with the crowd up a narrow colonial side lane, sucking in the harsh gas as we go. Rubber bullets ricochet through the toxic clouds. One catches Grim in the back and we get separated in the mayhem. Hours later the police and protesters clash again. This time the gas is extremely thick. It's like drowning on dry land. The streets are cramped and chaotic.

The next day brings more of the same. Protesters and journalists rely on the Bolivian remedy for tear gas: smoking cigarettes. Strangely, this actually cuts the effect of mild gassing. At one point, when we are standing among cops with a few other journalists, a man uphill tosses what looks like a potato down toward the police lines. The cops scatter. The potato detonates in the biggest dynamite blast yet. The collision of air is deafening; windows shatter up and down the block. The cops regroup and fire more gas and rubber bullets.

The battle goes on like this for three weeks, with La Paz and most of Bolivia's other major cities blockaded, with food and fuel running low, the buses and taxis idled. Seven gas fields and a pipeline station are seized. Before bowing out, Mesa agreed to take the first steps toward a constituent assembly; the new president, Eduardo Rodriguez, will have to organize emergency elections. The blockades have just now started to lift but Bolivia is still locked in stalemate; the core issues are unresolved and the path forward unclear.

Many in the social movements dismiss elections as a trap; they attempt to go around the machinery of government by turning protest into what Oscar Olivera calls self-management, and they critique Evo Morales and MAS for being fixated on the presidency. But making radical demands on the old political class is insufficient. Nationalization and a reconstruction of the political order are projects so massive that they may require the left to take power, ready or not.


(*) (*) And many folks wonder WHY natural gas and oil are so expensive? This article really brought an "aha!!" moment in terms of what nationalization means to the poor of many of these countries - and how American oil firms are at odds. :| Now, I do drive an SUV very seldom - 19,000 miles on a 2000 SUV.

BUT - so there's an extremely knotty challenge in terms of working in (again) a respectful manner with people in poor countries with rich natural resources. (l) (l) (l) (l)



(k) (k) 's,
Sweetlady and Doc the Boxer

[sweetlady]

After He Responded to the Autopsy Report on Terri Schiavo's Irreversible Brain Damage by Accusing Her Husband Of Complicity in Her Death

Is Jeb a ghoul


Or just a fool?


;) ;) ,

SL & DTB

[sweetlady]

The Dutch-Muslim Culture War

by DEBORAH SCROGGINS

[from the June 27, 2005 issue]

Ayaan Hirsi Ali is supposed to be on the run, but, as one last spring snowstorm turned Amsterdam's lacy bridges and gabled canal houses into a confectioner's delight, she seemed to be everywhere. On television the slim, pantsuit-clad, Somali-born legislator demanded that the Dutch intelligence service investigate the honor killings of Muslim girls. In the pages of newspapers she harangued the health authorities to examine schoolgirls for evidence of genital mutilation. At prize ceremonies she warned European governments that women in their Muslim communities remain under threat.

Seven months ago, Hirsi Ali's implacable campaign against what she views as Islam's oppression of women prompted a Muslim fanatic to ritually slaughter Theo van Gogh, her Dutch collaborator on the film Submission. The murderer used his knife to affix a five-page letter to the corpse promising the same treatment for Hirsi Ali and another Dutch politician who has criticized Islam. The murder sent Dutch society into paroxysms of rage and fear, sparking dozens of attacks on mosques and schools. But it didn't seem to faze Hirsi Ali. In a series of defiant interviews, the former refugee refused to be intimidated. When a group of Muslims tried to block her from making a sequel to Submission, she fought back in court and won. Like a dark avenging angel, she seemed to loom over Holland's wintry Dutch, her ubiquitous media presence a virtual guarantee of further conflict.

In the United States, where few people have had the chance to read or see her critiques of Islam, the 35-year-old Hirsi Ali has been almost exclusively portrayed as a champion of free speech and women's rights. In the Netherlands, however, she remains the subject of intense controversy. Well before van Gogh's murder, she had become a major hate figure among Dutch Muslims, who accuse her of stirring up Islamophobia on behalf of a cabal of right-wing politicians and columnists. Since the murder, a surprising number of native-born Dutch intellectuals have come around to the Muslim point of view.

In a series of "Letters to Hirsi Ali" published this spring in the newspaper De Volkskrant, several well-known, mostly male writers charged her with poisoning the political atmosphere with her strident attacks on Islam and the Prophet Mohammed. They argued that by pandering to Dutch prejudices and putting Muslims on the defensive, she contributes to the very Islamic radicalization she claims to want to stop. In a book rushed into print in February, the popular historian Geert Mak went so far as to compare Submission to Joseph Goebbels's infamous Nazi propaganda film The Eternal Jew. He warned that the Netherlands could be on the road to civil war. "When the time comes for us to tell our grandchildren, how will we tell the story of the last months of 2004?" Mak asked breathlessly. "The tone, the new tone that suddenly had taken hold? Where did it all begin?"

The backlash against Hirsi Ali has astonished and disappointed many Dutch feminists, who continue to count themselves among her biggest fans. Margreet Fogteloo, editor of the weekly De Groene Amsterdammer, said flatly that Mak is crazy. "People like him feel guilty because they were closing their eyes for such a long time to what was going on," she said. In what appears to be a Europe-wide pattern, some feminists are aligning themselves with the anti-immigrant right against their former multiculturalist allies on the left. Joining them in this exodus to the right are gay activists, who blame Muslim immigrants for the rising number of attacks on gay couples.

The woman who has stirred so many emotions is slight and doe-eyed, with a soft voice and small hands. Her life is itself a testament to the fluidity of Muslim politics: Today's radical feminist was once a teenage Islamist. Born in 1969, she's the daughter of a Somali opposition politician who attended Columbia University in the 1960s, becoming a staunch anti-Communist. But exposure to the West failed to change his traditional attitudes about the proper place of women, and he justified those attitudes by invoking Islam. Back in Somalia, he eventually took four wives. As is customary in Somalia, Hirsi Ali's mother and grandmother forced her to undergo what she calls "the cruel ritual" of female genital mutilation at the age of 6. "I remember the lesson I learned more than the pain," Hirsi Ali told one interviewer. "That to be a Muslim woman is to be born for the pleasure of men." A year later, after the Somali dictator Mohammed Siad Barre imprisoned her father, the family was forced to flee the country. In Saudi Arabia she and her sister were veiled and kept indoors, forced to endure what she now calls "gender apartheid."

Under the influence of an Iranian teacher, Hirsi Ali spent her high school years fully veiled. She has said that when the Ayatollah Khomeini issued his 1989 fatwa against Salman Rushdie, her first thought was, "Oh, he should be killed." Later Hirsi Ali began trying to find a way out of what she would eventually call "the virgin's cage," the obsession with sexual morality that she now argues has crippled the Muslim world. At the age of 22, she saw her chance. "As a Muslim girl, I was given in marriage to a nephew, after which I was expected to live out my days in isolation, as a housewife and mother," she has written. The nephew lived in Canada. In Germany on the way to join him, she fled from relatives, hopped a train to Amsterdam and asked the Netherlands for asylum. Perhaps because she had already placed herself outside the social pale of the local Muslim community, she took another unusual step. Rather than turning to other immigrants for help, as most newcomers do, she found herself a Dutch foster mother. Her foster mother helped her learn the language. She took jobs as a cleaner and at a factory. Eventually she managed to earn a degree in politics at Leiden University.

Hirsi Ali began translating for the Dutch social services in shelters and hospitals while she was still in the asylum center. Over the years, she met women who had been locked inside their homes for years; she interviewed others who had been raped and beaten. She heard about girls who had been killed for holding hands with non-Muslim boys. Armed with her new understanding of women's rights under Dutch law, she was outraged to learn that the authorities seldom interfered in such cases, writing them off as "family conflicts." She had read and strongly agreed with the late American feminist Susan Moller Okin's argument that multiculturalist policies aimed at protecting "culture" often end up contributing to the repression of women and children. She took particular exception to the Dutch policy of subsidizing more than 700 Islamic mosques, schools and clubs. She said conservative Muslim men use them to perpetuate their ideas about gender and sexuality and to prevent Dutch Muslim women from exercising their legal rights.

There was always a latent conflict in the idea of Europe's most sexually wide-open country funding institutions aimed at promoting traditional Muslim values. Pim Fortuyn, an openly gay sociology professor, seized on that conflict after a number of assaults on gay couples by Muslim youth. He ran for office in Rotterdam in 2001 and won handily on a platform calling for a halt to Muslim immigration. Labeling Islam a "backward" religion, he questioned whether Muslim attitudes toward women and homosexuality were compatible with Dutch ideas of individual rights. Fortuyn's anti-Muslim rants coincided with a series of attacks on mosques. Nevertheless, the popularity of his ideas soon had every Dutch party moving to the right on immigration.

In this climate of rising social tensions, Hirsi Ali landed a job at the Labor Party's think tank, the Wiardi Beckman Institute. Shortly after the 9/11 attacks she was invited to discuss Islam and gender on television. Asked to comment on Fortuyn's descriptions of Islam, she said, "By some criteria, Islam could be considered a backward religion." The reaction that followed shocked everyone, except possibly Hirsi Ali herself. There were written death threats, and when she walked in the street, groups of Muslim boys called her a whore and shouted that they wanted to kill her. She had to leave the country briefly. Pim Fortuyn's shocking assassination in May 2002, Holland's first political murder in 300 years, hardened Hirsi Ali's determination to press forward. That fall she wrote an article calling upon Muslim women to abandon the "outdated religious opinions" that prevented them from claiming their rights under Dutch law. A circle of older Dutch writers and politicians began to gather around her. Some, like the University of Utrecht philosopher Herman Phillipse, warned that Holland's Muslim community was rapidly becoming indigestible. Others, such as the writer Paul Scheffer, favored using the government to promote integration. The politician Geert Wilders was perhaps the most inflammatory. "Why are we afraid to tell Muslims to adapt to us, simply because our values and norms represent a higher level of civilization--better, more pleasant and more humane. No more integration, but assimilation!" Wilders wrote.

Meanwhile, Hirsi Ali focused her broadsides more and more plainly on Islam itself. She wrote that the Prophet Mohammed was a "despicable" individual who had married "the 9-year-old daughter of his best friend." "Mohammed is, by our Western standards, a perverse man," she wrote. "A tyrant. He is against free speech. If you do not do what he says, then you will have an unhappy ending. It makes me think of all those megalomaniac rulers in the Middle East: bin Laden, Khomeini, Saddam." By this point, Hirsi Ali had gravitated further to the right; she left the Labor Party for the center-right Liberal VVD Party and won a parliamentary seat in 2003.

Hirsi Ali's many critics contend that far from being a revolutionary, she brings a message that the West is all too willing to hear. They say that in calling for European governments to protect Muslim women from Muslim men, she and her admirers recycle the same Orientalist tropes that the West has used since colonial times as an excuse to control and subjugate Muslims. "White men saving black women from black men--it's a very old fantasy that is always popular," Annelies Moors, a University of Amsterdam anthropologist who writes about Islamic gender relations, said dryly. "But I don't think male violence against women, a phenomenon known to every society in history, can be explained by a few Koranic verses."

Moors and others don't dispute the existence of the social problems Hirsi Ali identifies. Many Dutch Muslim women do live in segregated "parallel cities" where Islamic social codes are enforced. Muslims make up only 5.5 percent of the Dutch population, but they account for more than half the women in battered women's shelters and more than half of those seeking abortions. Muslim girls have far higher suicide rates than non-Muslim girls. Some Muslim girls, mostly African, are genitally mutilated. But in putting all the blame on Islam, they say, Hirsi Ali ignores the influence of patriarchal custom as well as the work of a generation of Muslim feminists. They point to thinkers like Fatima Mernissi and Amina Wadud, who have shown that Islam's sacred texts can be interpreted in a more female-friendly way. And they say Hirsi Ali avoids mention of the role the West has played and continues to play in assisting the rise of the Islamist movements. "The rightist forces and the radical Islamists feed on each other, and she contributes to that," Moors said.

Karima Belhaj is the director of the largest women's shelter in Amsterdam. She's also one of the organizers of the "Stop the Witchhunt!" campaign against what she sees as anti-Muslim hysteria. On the day we talked, she was despondent. Arsonists had set fire for the second time to an Islamic school in the town of Uden. A few days later a regional police unit warned that the rise of right-wing Dutch youth gangs potentially presents a more dangerous threat to the country than Islamist terrorism. "The rise of Islamism is not the problem," Belhaj said. "The problem is that hatred against Arabs and Muslims is shown in this country without any shame." With her message that Muslim women must give up their faith and their families if they want to be liberated, Hirsi Ali is actually driving women into the arms of the fundamentalists, said Belhaj: "She attacks their values, so they are wearing more and more veils. It frightens me. I'm losing my country. I'm losing my people."

If Belhaj was sad, another "Stop the Witchhunt!" organizer was angry. Like Belhaj, Miriyam Aouragh is a second-generation immigrant of Moroccan background. A self-described peace and women's activist, Aouragh was the first in her family to attend university. She's now studying for a PhD in anthropology. She scoffs at the idea that Hirsi Ali is a champion of oppressed Muslim women. "She's nothing but an Uncle Tom," Aouragh said. "She has never fought for the oppressed. In fact, she's done the opposite. She uses these problems as a cover to attack Islam. She insults me and she makes my life as a feminist ten times harder because she forces me to be associated with anti-Muslim attacks."

Aouragh accuses Hirsi Ali and her political allies of deliberately fostering the hostility that has led to the attacks on Islamic institutions and to police brutality against young Muslim men. "I'm surprised the Arab-Muslim community isn't more angry with her," Aouragh said. "When she talks about Muslims as violent people, and Muslim men as rapists, this is very insulting. She calls the Prophet a pedophile. Theo van Gogh called the Prophet a pimp, a goat-fucker. Well, no, we don't accept that."

Although the press has focused on the threats against critics of Islam like Hirsi Ali and Geert Wilders, Aouragh says that there have been many more attacks on Dutch Muslims than on non-Muslims. She suspects that what the Dutch really fear is not Islamic fundamentalism but the prospect of having to deal with a new generation of highly educated young Muslims who demand a fair hearing for their values. "We are telling them, 'We have rights, too. You have to change your idea about freedom or face the consequences.'"

Whatever happens to Hirsi Ali, the debate she helped polarize over women and Islam is sure to spread and intensify all over Europe in the next few years. As Ronald Inglehart and Pippa Norris have argued in their book Rising Tide, the true clash of opinions between Islam and the West is not about democracy but sex. Successive World Values Surveys, in which social scientists polled public opinion in more than eighty countries between 1981 and 2001, have shown that people in Muslim countries share broadly the same views on political participation as people in the West. What they disagree strongly about is gender equality and sexual liberalization.

In the United States the distinction is not as sharply drawn. Conservative Muslims are not the only religious group here opposed to what they see as sexual license; it's their opposition to Israel and US foreign policy, not their sexual politics, that sets American Muslims apart from the rest of the right. But in Europe, acceptance of gender equality and homosexuality have become core values across the political spectrum, said Jocelyne Cesari, a Harvard research associate and the author of When Islam and Democracy Meet. "Here it is part of a national debate that doesn't involve immigrants only," Cesari said. "In Europe, this is seen as proof that Muslims are still outsiders whose values are in contradiction to ours."

Islamist thinkers have often argued that women are the key to culture, since they have the responsibility of raising children. An emerging coalition of European feminist and anti-immigration forces seems to be adopting the same view. In France, Belgium, Germany and Scandinavia, as in the Netherlands, the "woman question" is at the center of the debate over how to integrate the Muslim community. "I know most of my Muslim friends will disagree with me, but in my opinion the gender issue is the most important issue," says Martijn de Koning, an anthropologist at Leiden University who studies jihadi groups. "The head scarf, the Islamic schools, the policy of family reunification--every debate here more or less concerns the position of women."

Hirsi Ali is only the most prominent of a number of young Muslim women who have lately begun to criticize their own communities for their treatment of women. In Sweden, Fadime Sahindal campaigned against forced marriages before her father killed her in 2002 for having a relationship with a Swedish man. In France, Fadela Amara heads the Ni Putes ni Soumises ("Neither Whores nor Submissives") movement against Islamist groups she calls "the green fascists." In Germany, where six honor killings have taken place just this year, Seyran Ates, a Berlin-based lawyer, has charged the government with allowing Islamic fundamentalism to flourish under a policy of false tolerance.

In the United States, too, some of the Islamists' most vigorous opponents have been female. Asra Nomani, a former Wall Street Journal reporter, and Amina Wadud, a professor of Islamic studies, have led the fight to open Muslim prayers to women. Most of the members of the newly formed Progressive Muslim Union, which aims to provide liberal Muslims with a platform, are women, according to co-founder Ahmed Nassef.

Many conservative Muslims have been almost as hostile to these female critics as they have been to Hirsi Ali. As with Hirsi Ali, they tend to disregard the women as deviants who want to change Islamic sexual mores because of their personal failure to live up to them. Nomani, who bore a son out of wedlock, was expelled from her hometown mosque in Morgantown, West Virginia. She and Wadud received death threats and condemnation from religious authorities around the Muslim world for organizing a female-led prayer service in March in New York.

But particularly in Europe, some Islamists are beginning to see the woman question as their Achilles' heel. The influential Swiss Islamist Tariq Ramadan recently warned Muslims that they were going to have to change their attitudes. "We are going through a reassessment," he said, "and the most important subject is women. Our experience in Europe has made it clear that we must speak about equality." In Austria in April, a meeting of 160 imams called for equality between men and women.

But talk may not be enough, at this point. In Human Visas, a new book that probably points in the direction Europe is going, Norwegian journalist and human rights activist Hege Storhaug argues that strict controls on immigration are the best way to protect European values and Muslim women's rights. Storhaug, the information director of Human Rights Service, says that Europe's concept of Muslim integration used to amount to "Get the father a job and integration will follow." The new motto, she says, should be "Integrate the mother and two-thirds of the job is done, because the mother will integrate the children."

Storhaug says that to dry up radical Islam, European governments need to break up the "parallel societies" Muslims have established in cities across the continent. Older men in these communities prevent integration by controlling marriages. "The families are under tremendous pressure to bring relatives from the home country to Europe," she said. "Relatives are willing to pay a lot for those residency visas. Especially with young immigrant brides, they become completely dependent on their husbands and in-laws. Young women who are born in Norway are forced to marry cousins who can then come to this country." She says that in the ninety such forced marriages her group studied, all but three of the brides said they had been raped.

Denmark has been widely criticized for passing a law in 2002 establishing a number of tests for citizens or residents who wish to bring spouses into the country from overseas: Both partners must be at least 24 years old. They must demonstrate that the marriage is voluntary. They must have a certain income and own a residence with at least two rooms. And they must show a stronger connection to Denmark than to any other country. As a result, the number of people from outside the European Union who were allowed to join Danish spouses or other close family members fell from 10,950 in 2001 to 3,835 last year. In November the Netherlands became the first to follow Denmark's example, raising the age to 21 to qualify for family reunion.

When the Danish measure was proposed, Muslim groups opposed it vigorously. But Storhaug quotes immigrant parents who now say the law has released them from family pressures to use their children as "human visas." And she says young Muslims can continue their education without fear of being married off. "It's rubbish to say the Danish policy is racist," she said. "It's the best policy for women in Europe."

Her group, Human Rights Service, is giving Hirsi Ali its "Bellwether of Europe" prize this month. "I think she is doing a great service to democracy and the future, because Islamism is the biggest threat to democracy and to Europe," she said.


(*) (*) (l) (f) (l) (f) (l)


(k) (k) 's

SL & DTB

[Lady_Di]

Special Report: Best Cities For Singles (as in young people!!) ;) ;)

Davide Dukcevich, 06.25.04, 8:00 AM ET

Looking for jobs galore, cheap beer and highly educated, unattached young people? Head for the mountains! The Denver-Boulder metro area is America's best place for singles. The Mile High City edged out larger metros like Boston and Washington, D.C., thanks to its booming job market, relatively low cost of living and large university population. Our annual listing of America's Best Cities For Singles ranks the 40 largest metropolitan areas in seven different categories: night life, culture, job growth, number of other singles, cost of living alone, coolness and public opinion.

The Cities

1. Denver-Boulder
2. Washington-Baltimore
3. Austin
4. Atlanta
5. Boston
6. Los Angeles
7. Phoenix
8. New York
9. San Francisco
10. Miami
11. Chicago
12. Dallas-Fort Worth
13. San Diego
14. Minneapolis-St. Paul
15. Philadelphia
16. Houston
17. Raleigh-Durham
18. Seattle
19. New Orleans
20. Orlando

21. Columbus
22. St. Louis
23. Milwaukee
24. Portland
25. Tampa
26. Las Vegas
27. Indianapolis
28. San Antonio
29. Nashville
30. Kansas City
31. Sacramento
32. Detroit
33. Cleveland
34. Salt Lake City
35. Providence
36. Charlotte
37. Greensboro
38. Norfolk
39. Cincinnati
40. Pittsburgh


http://www.forbes.com/2004/06/23/04singleland.html?partner=netscape


Forbes' Methodology:

http://www.forbes.com/maserati/singles2004/cx_dd_04single_methodology.html

:o :o

Click on the Best and Worst of's. I was surprised that Las Vegas and Austin are near the top for best job growth for example.


(*) (*) At the end of the day? I think it's probably better to live where it feels the best in terms of mental, spiritual and physical health and THEN work from there whether via broadband Internet or nearest airport for those who travel. That my two cents - and I'm sure this article and research wasn't targeting a lady in her (ahem) "late forties" AKA "39 and holding"!!..... :| :| ;) ;)


(l) (l) (l) (l) DOC'S CBC AND OTHER BLOOD TESTS CAME BACK PERFECT EARLIER TODAY!!! (l) (l) (l) I still need to take him to the other oncology office that's two hours (driving, no worries!) on Thursday, July 14th. Just to make sure through another set of ultrasound and xrays - that the lymphoma is staying in remission. I didn't know that there would be these tests on a continual basis but then, I am so very, very grateful that my little boy is feeling as well as he is (given the high temps and even his mama is melting...). (l) (l) (l) (l) Thank goodness for "Frosty Paws!!! (h) (h) (for Doc) I could go for a nice ice-cold drink right now....and iced coffee doesn't seem to be "it". I'll keep up with my Internet research and postings and see what I feel like having in a few minutes......frosted mug of peach tea perhaps? ;)


Love, peaceful thoughts and white light,

Sweetlady-the happy-mama, and Doc the now-napping Boxer


Soooooo happy for the great news. Shall be sending more of the white light and good mojo. Dancing here in the Rockies for you both!

d

[sweetlady]

Soooooo happy for the great news. Shall be sending more of the white light and good mojo. Dancing here in the Rockies for you both!

d

Lady_Di,

Thanks so much for the great mojo!!!

Are you traveling and posting as you do so or do you live in/near the Rockies?

I am so (nicely and with respect) envious...... ;)


Peace, love and white light,

Sweetlady and Doc the now-fed and under my desk....Boxer

[sweetlady]

After Downing Street

by STEVE COBBLE

[posted online on June 6, 2005] The NATION

It's not exactly a news flash that the Bush Administration lied to the public before the invasion of Iraq. What should be on front pages, though, is new proof of the Bush Administration's lies brought to light by the previously unknown Downing Street Minutes, recently obtained and printed in the Times of London. (The Downing Street Memo is a transcript of minutes of a secret meeting chaired by Tomy Blair in Britain in July of 2002 to discuss preparations and propaganda before going to war. It was marked "Secret and strictly personal--UK eyes only.")

The Downing Street Minutes are deserving, in the words of constitutional lawyer John Bonifaz, of an official "Resolution of Inquiry directing the House Judiciary Committee to launch a formal investigation into whether sufficient grounds exist for the House of Representatives to exercise its constitutional power to impeach George W. Bush, President of the United States."

Bonifaz, who two years ago took the Bush Administration to court on behalf of a coalition of US soldiers, parents of soldiers and twelve Members of Congress (including John Conyers Jr., Dennis Kucinich, Jesse Jackson Jr., Jim McDermott, José Serrano, Sheila Jackson Lee) to challenge the constitutionality of the Iraq war, adds:

"The question must now be asked, with the release of the Downing Street Memo, whether the President has committed impeachable offenses. Is it a High Crime to engage in a conspiracy to deceive and mislead the United States Congress and the American people about the basis for taking the nation into a war? Is it a High Crime to manipulate intelligence so as to allege falsely a national security threat posed to the United States as a means of trying to justify a war against another nation based on 'preemptive' purposes? Is it a High Crime to commit a felony via the submission of an official report to the United States Congress falsifying the reasons for launching military action?"

As in previous investigations of "High Crimes and Misdemeanors," such a "Resolution of Inquiry is the appropriate first step in launching this investigation."

B