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."

Bonifaz's memorandum making the case for launching a Resolution of Inquiry is posted at www.afterdowningstreet.org/, a new website founded by David Swanson, Bob Fertik, Bonifaz and others (including this writer), together with a broad array of public interest groups that is posted on the web site.

Our memo is written to Representative Conyers, both because he is the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee and because he has been a brave truth-seeker on this issue and so many others. We support his letter demanding answers from the Bush Administration, signed originally by eighty-eight of his House colleagues; his call for 100,000 signatures to back up that letter; and his plan to go to London to seek more answers.

We have also made contact with several other members of Congress, and we believe that it will not be long before a group in Congress officially calls for an ROI.

Unfortunately, as most Nation readers know, the Downing Street Minutes have only been a story in the rest of the world, especially in Britain. In the United States it is taking much longer for the mainstream to pick up on it, and the issue is still being treated far less seriously than the seriousness of the charges warrant.

Fortunately, the blogosphere has found this new proof of George W. Bush's "misleadership" much more compelling than the mainstream press has; writers like Apian have posted incisive diaries on www.dailykos.com/, which regularly covers the story, as has Georgia10 and her friends, who founded the wonderful site www.downingstreetmemo.com/.

Despite a slow start, the Downing Street Minutes may have a long life expectancy, and the Misleader of the Pack may yet have to confront the truth.


(*) (*) Check out URL in last paragraph........ :o :o


(k) (k) 's,

Sweetlady and Doc the Boxer

[sweetlady]

A Class Act

Jennifer Ladd and Felice Yeskel

June 23, 2005

Felice Yeskel, Ed.D, and Jennifer Ladd, Ed.D, are founders and co-directors of Class Action, a national organization working to bridge the class divide. Yeskel is co-author of Economic Apartheid in America: A Primer on Growing Inequality and Insecurity. See their web site www.classism.org for more information and links to the two series described in this article.

In the last month, two of our country’s most elite newspapers published a series of unprecedented articles about social class in America. On May 13, 2005, The Wall Street Journal published part one of “Moving Up: The Challenges to the American Dream”, a series chronicling declining mobility and opportunity in the United States. Two days later, The New York Times began their “Class Matters” series, declaring “class is still a powerful force in American life.” The month-long series examined class disparities in marriage, educational opportunities, religious life and comparative immigration experiences. Although these articles address an often-taboo subject, they overlook a crucial element: potential ways to remedy the flaws in the current system.

In a journalistic tour de force, the second Times article chronicled three New York City residents who suffered heart attacks within several weeks of one another. The health and longevity prognosis for each of them varies widely and is largely dictated by their class differences: working poor, middle class and wealthy.

In our boundless tell-all culture, there is no word or concept that is more off-limits than "class." As a society, we have, over the course of several generations, developed a common language to talk about differences of gender, race and sexual orientation. Newspapers and TV interview shows explore every aspect of American life through the lens of cultural diversity, such as aging, disability and mental illness. Almost everything…but class.

These high-profile newspaper series sound a cultural and economic policy alarm bell. One assertion is that inequality matters. In the last three decades, we’ve become a vastly more unequal society. The rungs of the ladder of opportunity are weakening, threatening our national self-image as a meritocracy based on opportunity. Three years ago, British commentator Will Hutton observed:

U.S. society is polarizing and its social arteries are hardening. The sumptuousness and bleakness of the respective lifestyle of the rich and poor represent a scale of difference in opportunity and wealth that is almost medieval—and a standing offence to the American expectation that everyone has the opportunity for life, liberty, and happiness.

Many progressives have long argued that trends of inequality are bad for the economy, our democracy and culture. But many conservatives and some liberals, while uncomfortable with the accelerating income and wealth gap of the last three decades, believe that inequality is the price we pay to maintain a dynamic, growing and opportunity-creating society. As long as there is mobility, they argue, we should tolerate high levels of inequality. Indeed, our culture celebrates the rising number of millionaires and billionaires as a harbinger of broader prosperity.

But if mobility has stalled, and one’s opportunity is tied increasingly to inherited status, then the defense of inequality vanishes. Too much inequality in a nation can lead to restricted opportunities.

It is unlikely that either newspaper series will address ways in which the advantaged can use their money and power to rewrite the rules of the game, contributing to the erosion of opportunity. Tax cuts lead to budget cuts, forcing many states to cut education spending and financial aid for higher education. At a time when moving up the economic ladder is closely tied to attending a four-year college program, the opportunity becomes farther out of reach for poor and working-class young adults. Meanwhile, elected officials are reluctant to pass legislation or make the educational investments that contribute to a level playing field. So as we hardwire inequality into the rules of the economy, tackling our collective misunderstanding about class becomes all the more important.

One remarkable finding in the first Times article is the glaring disparity between the public perception of mobility in American and the reality. Americans overwhelmingly believe that we live in a mobile society. Half of those polled believe they have a chance to become financially wealthy. But data now shows that the United States has less mobility than the countries of Europe, which are often thought to have rigid class and caste systems.

Unfortunately, the Times also perpetuates this misunderstanding. In discussing class mobility, the newspaper uncritically cites the bootstrap boosterism of Forbes magazine, reporting that only 37 members of Forbes 400 inherited their wealth, significantly down from almost 200 in the mid-1980s. Indeed, while 37 people may have directly inherited their way onto the list, how many of the Forbes 400 were born into privileged families already in the top quintile or top 5 percent?

Forbes classifies Philip Anschutz—net worth of $5.2 billion—as “self made,” not as an inheritor. But Mr. Anschutz inherited an oil and gas field worth $500 million. Regardless of how much sweat and toil he may have contributed to his enterprise, he is hardly a rags-to-riches story. How many more “self-made” fortunes on the Forbes list had inheritances or robust opportunities provided to them as young adults? This is just one way the Times fails to apply its own broader framing of class privilege and opportunity that it brings to the overall series.

One positive element of both series is that class is understood to be more than economics. Those who are raised poor and working class are different because people are more likely to die from the manifestations of class oppression: poor health care and food, stress, overwork, etc. Our classist system provides real material rewards and benefits for the owning and upper-middle class at the expense of the poor and working class.

The premise of a meritocracy is that people earn and get what they deserve, based on their effort, drive and intelligence. But if a society advertises itself as such, and, in practice, allocates success based on hereditary advantage, how are those who are not winners supposed to respond? Such a contradiction leads many members of the poor and working class to blame themselves, rather than demanding that society live up to its promise of opportunity.

The fact that these two newspapers have taken on the topic of class is important. The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times have approved the subject as valuable to American discourse. Now university presidents, foundation officials, legislators and journalists have the green light to explore themes of opportunity, mobility and class.


http://www.tompaine.com/print/a_class_act.php


(*) (*) Must have been the Jane Fonda in North Vietnam that ticked me off and when I wrote off her then-husband. As the kids say today, "whatever!".


(l) (l) ,

SL & DTB

[sweetlady]

The Principle of Hope

by ADAM SHATZ

[from the July 4, 2005 issue] The Nation

On the morning of Thursday, June 2, the Lebanese journalist Samir Kassir left his apartment for the offices of the daily Al-Nahar in downtown Beirut. Kassir's editorials, which appeared in Al-Nahar each Friday, were models of lucidity and passion, expressing the hopes shared by many Lebanese for freedom from Syrian domination. His writing not only captured the popular mood in Lebanon; it inspired people to take chances they would not have otherwise risked.

Kassir never made it to work: When he got into his car, a bomb placed under it exploded. In killing him, Kassir's assassins silenced one of the leading progressives in the Middle East, and one of its bravest voices: an unflagging advocate of democracy, an opponent of Arab dictatorships and of Western double standards, a champion of Palestinian rights who was also a scathing critic of anti-Semitism.

Born in 1960 in Beirut to a Palestinian father of Greek Orthodox confession and a Syrian mother, Kassir taught history at St. Joseph's University in Beirut. A fully bearded, dashing man of considerable charm and wit who bore more than a passing resemblance to the Italian cinéaste Nanni Moretti, he cut a glamorous profile. His charisma was more than matched by his mind. Equally at home in the newsroom and in the archives, in Arabic and in French, he wrote for Le Monde diplomatique and La Revue d'études palestiniennes and published several important works of scholarship in French, including a massive history of his native city and a study of the Lebanese civil war.

Independence seemed to come naturally to Kassir, who never shied away from a cause merely because it was unpopular. In the late 1990s he led a lonely crusade against the French Holocaust denier Roger Garaudy, who had been making inroads into otherwise progressive Arab intellectual circles; four years ago, he helped prevent the pernicious Institute for Historical Review, a Garaudy-affiliated revisionist group based in the United States, from holding a conference in Beirut. At even greater personal risk, Kassir protested what he called Syria's "mafia-type protectorate" over Lebanon, campaigning tirelessly for independence and railing against a security apparatus most of his colleagues were too timorous to name. Kassir's open defiance of Damascus brought him unwanted attention from the pro-Syrian security establishment, which harassed him with menacing phone calls, briefly confiscated his passport on the spurious grounds that he was an "influential agent of the Palestinian Authority" and tailed him in unmarked police cars.

Yet Kassir was not "anti-Syrian," as the American press glibly described him. In fact, he was a supporter and publisher of Syria's secular dissidents, who shared his contempt for the Assad regime and who drew hope from the withdrawal of Syrian troops from Lebanon two months after the February 14 assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. The desire to extinguish this hope may have figured in the plot to kill Kassir, who was scheduled to make a speech in Damascus in mid-June, and who had recently dared to suggest that the end of the Assad dynasty might be closer than anyone could imagine.

Kassir stood apart in other ways from the anti-Syrian movement that he helped spawn. He understood that restoring--or, rather, establishing--Lebanon's sovereignty was not simply a matter of driving out Syrian troops and intelligence services or, contrary to the Americans, of demilitarizing Hezbollah. (Although Kassir despised the party for its assassinations of Lebanese leftists in the 1980s, and for the "cult of death" it had spread among the children of Lebanon and Palestine, he told me that he would oppose any "aggressive policy against Hezbollah" by the US government.) Kassir espoused both these goals, but he viewed Lebanese independence as only a prelude to the struggle for popular sovereignty, secularism and democracy. With its extraordinary diversity, its history of constitutional politics, its rich intellectual and literary tradition, its magnificent port city, its longstanding openness to the West, Lebanon had the potential to become a "laboratory for modernity," he argued, but only if it broke with the ways of the past and challenged the entrenched privileges of the country's political elite.

And so, as elated--and, indeed, startled--as he was by the success of the Independence Intifada ("We can at last speak freely," he said the night before his death), he was disheartened that some of the movement's leaders had fallen back on old habits as soon as the Syrians departed, bickering over the spoils of power, playing the old game of confessional politics that led to the civil war thirty years ago--and that allowed Damascus to present itself as a peace broker. Nor did he hesitate to raise his voice against this trend. Having led the call for the repatriation of Christian General Michel Aoun, who had fled to France after mounting a failed uprising against the Syrians in 1990, Kassir was planning to criticize Aoun in his next column for cozying up to the intelligence services upon his return to Lebanon, thus dividing the opposition. Returning to business as usual would only leave Lebanon vulnerable once again to the designs of bigger powers.

The Movement of the Democratic Left that Kassir helped found was an alliance of Lebanese progressives, many of them former Communists who had come to recognize that Israeli expansionism and American imperialism, although obstacles to Arab progress, had become alibis for autocracies that refused to reform. The creation of democratic, accountable institutions and the establishment of the rule of law, Kassir underscored, are vital aims in themselves; for what was the point of overthrowing colonialism if not to put something better in its place? Some of his critics complained that, with his focus on Lebanese-Syrian relations, he had abandoned the cause of Palestine. Rather, as a Lebanese citizen, he understood that his first obligation was to liberate his own country--a lesson lost not only on his peers in the pan-Arab camp, who have long dreamed that the liberation of Palestine would spark a revolution in their own countries, but on our own liberal-hawk missionaries.

At the same time, Kassir understood that Lebanon's predicament could not be separated from regional struggles over land and capital, faith and power. The Lebanese could not afford to be provincial, the curse of small countries. With the Saudis building mosques in Beirut (and turning seaside resorts into a holiday harem); the Iranians arming Hezbollah and funding its schools and hospitals; Israel and Hezbollah trading fire on the border; the United States vying for influence with France, Lebanon's former colonial master; hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees in wretched camps, still awaiting their fate; and, not least, the Lebanese fractured into more than a dozen clans, many connected by religion and ethnicity to groups beyond the country's borders--with this intricate web of forces, Lebanon held up a mirror to the wider Arab world. The political and intellectual stagnation of that world, what he called the "Arab malaise," was the subject of his last book, Considérations sur le malheur arabe. In Kassir's view, the region had succumbed to this malaise not only because the West had overtaken it but because the Arabs had failed to modernize, instead taking consolation in false solutions like pan-Arabism and Islamism.

Predictably, Kassir was accused of being an "Arab pessimist" who had lost faith in his own society. In fact, he was animated by a quality seldom found in the Middle East: hope. "If a liberal Middle East were not possible," he told Michael Young, the opinion editor of the Beirut Daily Star, in an interview with Reason, "things would be unbearable for secular people like us." But "for it to be possible,"

the liberal West must also be liberal in the Middle East: It must abandon its support for dictatorships, even those considered as moderates and allies. Look what happened with Libya: Once Muammar al-Qadaffi renounced his nuclear ambitions, Bush and Blair acclaimed him. What a message when you are calling for democracy in the Middle East!... Most importantly, the West must accept that the strategic importance of the Middle East must not justify denying its peoples the rights to self-determination, and that means, particularly, the Palestinians.

Kassir's murder went almost unnoticed by the American left, in large part because few here had even heard of him. But there was perhaps a less innocent reason: Kassir's cause converged inconveniently with the anti-Syrian agenda of the American government, which promptly turned up the heat on Damascus after his death. (Imagine the outcry from the left if a man of his stature had been cut down by American or Israeli arms.) It was his misfortune to incur the wrath of a state vilified by the United States; this deprived him of the sympathy to which he was entitled. No such parochial calculation deterred the Palestinian left--or Syrian dissidents, who have made it plain they do not wish to be rescued from Baathism by the American military--from paying tribute to Kassir, whom they recognized as a kindred spirit.

In Lebanon he has ascended, if that is the word, to the status of "the martyr Kassir." Yet Kassir was an unusual kind of martyr in today's Middle East, a staunch secularist who wanted to live in a free country, not to die for one. In a region driven increasingly by a politics of death and sacrifice, he stood for a vision of peaceful reform, progressive social change and democratic secularism--the values of any left worthy of the name. The day after Kassir's murder, hundreds of journalists poured into Martyrs' Square in downtown Beirut to observe an hour of silence. Many raised black pens to the sky, visually evoking the adage that the pen is mightier than the sword. It is not. But to wield the pen rather than the sword in the face of mortal threats requires uncommon courage. This Samir Kassir had in abundance. His death is a terrible blow not only to his family and friends but to Lebanon, Syria and the cause of Arab freedom.


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


Respectfully,

Sweetlady and Doc the Boxer

[sweetlady]

subject to debate by Katha Pollitt

If the Frame Fits...

[from the July 11, 2005 issue]

In the wake of the 2004 election, Democrats have embarked on an orgy of what the linguist George Lakoff calls "reframing"--repositioning their policies linguistically to give them mass moral appeal. Prime candidate for a values makeover? Abortion, of course. It's as if the party, with its longstanding, if lukewarm, support for reproductive rights, were a family photo with Uncle Lou the molester right in the middle. Maybe if we cropped it to put him way off to the side? Or Photoshopped a big shadow onto his face? Or just decided to pretend he was nice Uncle Max? In "The Foreign Language of Choice," posted on AlterNet, Lakoff writes that he doesn't like "choice"--too consumerist. In fact, he doesn't even like "abortion"--too negative. He wants to "reparse" abortion in four ways. Dems should talk about it as an aspect of personal freedom from government interference, and as the regrettable outcome of right-wing opposition to sex ed and contraception. They should reclaim "life" by talking about the fact that "the United States has the highest rate of infant mortality in the industrialized world," thanks to poverty and lack of healthcare, which are the fault of conservatives, "who have been killing babies--real babies...[who] have been born and who people want and love" and damaging their health through anti-environmental policies that put toxins in mother's milk. Finally, they should talk about the thousands of women each year who become pregnant from rape: "Should the federal government force a woman to bear the child of her rapist?"

George Lakoff is really smart and eager to help, so why does this way of talking about "medical operations to end a pregnancy" make me want to reparse myself to a desert island? Is it the sly reference to rape victims coerced by the "federal government," object of much red-state loathing, when surely he knows that the relevant policies--on giving out emergency contraception in ERs for example, or using Medicaid funds for abortions--are set at the state level, like most abortion laws? Is it the singling out of rape victims as uniquely deserving, which tacitly accepts the conservative "frame" of abortion as a way for sluts to evade the wages of sin? In fact, most American voters who favor abortion restrictions already make an exception for rape. The ones who don't--the 11 percent who would ban abortion completely--have already framed it to their satisfaction: Yes, the government should force rape victims to carry to term because the "child" should not be murdered for its father's crime.

Perhaps I'm naïve, but I keep thinking that reframing misses the point, which is to speak clearly from a moral center--precisely not to mince words and change the subject and turn the tables. I keep thinking that people are so disgusted by politics that the field is open for progressives who use plain language and stick to their guns and convey that they are real people, at home in their skin, and not a collection of blow-dried focus-grouped holograms. I think this despite ample evidence to the contrary, like the successful Republican reframings of the estate tax as the "death tax" and George W. Bush as a salt-of-the-earth rancher. But honestly: They say abortion, we say mercury in the breast milk? What if anti-choicers suggest going halfsies? Some abortion opponents--progressive evangelicals, seamless-garment Catholics--do care about babies after they are born.

Still, reframing proceeds apace. Hillary Clinton talks about abortion as sorrow, while calling on Republicans to join her in passing the Prevention First Act promoting contraception and, with Patty Murray, going after acting FDA head Lester Crawford for failing to make emergency contraception available over the counter. Howard Dean says he wants the "pro-life" vote, and before you know it anti-choice Democrats get the nod to run for the Senate--Bob Casey in Pennsylvania and Jim Langevin in Rhode Island (who has since bowed out). NARAL, or, as it has reframed itself, NARAL Pro-choice America, placed an ad in The Weekly Standard calling for the right to "Please, Help Us Prevent Abortion" through better access to birth control. Responding to a poll showing that only 22 percent of Americans say abortion should be "generally available," NARAL is emphasizing "freedom and responsibility"--birth control, sex ed, emergency contraception. Responsibility is surely a bedrock American value. The trouble is, as William Saletan pointed out in a perceptive column on Slate, it means different things to different people. It can mean moral autonomy and free will, or it can mean suffering the consequences, accepting punishment. To NARAL "freedom and responsibility" means knowing your body and using contraception, with EC or abortion as unmentioned backup; to an anti-choicer, the same words might mean abstinence, with childbirth as the price of getting carried away.

There's a word that doesn't show up much in the new abortion frames: women. Maybe it doesn't poll well. "Reframing" abortion is actually a kind of deframing, a way of taking it out of its real-life context, which is the experience of women, their bodies, their healthcare, their struggles, the caring work our society expects them to do for free. Lynn Paltrow, the brilliant lawyer who runs National Advocates for Pregnant Women, thinks the way to win grassroots support for abortion rights is to connect it to the whole range of reproductive and maternal rights: the right to have a home birth, to refuse a Caesarean section, to know that a miscarriage or stillbirth--or simply taking a drink--will not land you in jail. The same ideology of fetal protection that anti-choicers wield against abortion is used against women with wanted pregnancies. More broadly, Paltrow argues that the right to abortion would have more support if it were presented as just one of the things women need to care for their families, along with paid maternity leave, childcare, quality healthcare for all, economic and social support for mothers and children, strong environmental policies that protect fetuses and children.

But when was the last time you heard a Democrat talk about paid maternity leave? It's been reframed right out of the picture.



http://www.thenation.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20050711&s=pollitt


(*) (*) :( :( :| :| ......... (l) (l) (f) (f)

(and if you can figure those faces out, then you know me and why I feel the way I do....... ({) (})


(k) (k) 's

SL & DTB

[sweetlady]

diary of a mad law professor by Patricia J. Williams

Just a Theory

[from the July 4, 2005 issue]

I was curled up on my couch listening to a radio program about neurobiology. Apparently there is an area of the brain that, when damaged, causes a loss of the ability to understand metaphor. If you tell certain stroke victims, for instance, that "George Bush is no rocket scientist," they understand it to mean that he is a politician with no background in the aeronautical sciences. Since this was one of the examples actually cited by the researchers speaking on the radio, it rather begged for a little meditation on literalism in politics as well as the religiously inspired fundamentalism that seems to have swept our public discourse.

Let me start with a disclaimer: I do not want to imply that literalism is a form of brain damage. But I thought the broadcast was interesting because the mental condition seemed like (as in simile) the kind of speech so prominent in debates that increasingly pit "secular humanists" against certain religious and political conservatives. If every word in "George Bush is no rocket scientist" is read only in its narrowest sense, the literalism of its "truth" would require skinning from it all unspoken, contextual, syllogistic and cultural meaning: to wit, that if rocket science is a complex area of study, George Bush is not therefore a student of complexity.

Let me make a second disclaimer for those who are quick with inference: I do not think George Bush is a dimwit. (Wrong as rain, but not a dimwit. Not, let me hasten to add, that I think rain is wrong.)

What triggers the disinclination to metaphor? What would make someone so resistant to the wordplay, the poetry, the malleable space that allows the mind to leap and compare and fictionalize and pretend? Literal readings make words holy; and whether that is an impulse motivated more by respect, fear of blasphemy or mere authoritarianism is becoming an issue in a world where hundreds of millions are newly born-again evangelical/literalist/fundamentalists of one sort or another. I must confess that I am suspicious of a mindset that never veers from face value. I think that metaphor is related to the ability to empathize. You substitute one concept for another, you imagine that two very different things are somehow the same. When I say that the room is hotter than an oven, I'm invoking the oven symbolically, parabolically and yes, hyperbolically. Metaphor is a tiny unit of relativism, I suppose, and relativism is certainly under siege as the property of atheists and communists. But while the image of me-in-the-roasting-pan is not true in one sense, it is accurately evocative as a communicative matter, the kind of expression that connects us in our distinct and foreign bodies one to another. You are likely to feel the urgency of my misery just a little bit more than if I said, "I'm hot."

Why am I going on about this? I guess because I've been arguing with an evangelical friend of mine who sees my understanding of language as dangerous. My friend takes me to task for what he calls my "nihilism" and "postmodernism." And by that he meant specifically that I'm the sort who "views the Bible as fairy tale." He's a true-blue believer, one who carries a wad of those "Just a Theory" stickers to paste on "evolutionist" biology textbooks, Harry Potter novels and Barney dolls.

The culture wars that began in the early 1990s have long since braced me for debates in which I'm called a vulgar relativist. But recently it seems as though this discussion goes well beyond careless epithet and has entered a land where there can be no middle ground. It is as though we've entered a place of utterly incompatible "worldview." I know, I have my own convictions that are abundantly self-evident to me. Perhaps that faith in the transparent rightnesss of what I'm saying is my own form of evangelical self-righteousness. And, I admit, I was raised to think of the Bible as parabolic, meaning I always thought of it as a book with lessons that were to be applied in daily life, but in a metaphoric way, because that is how we bring that ancient wisdom to bear in the present. You take two situations and make a comparative leap, a reasoned deduction. You relate the two not because they are identical but because they have some crucial element in common. It's the same thing I do in analogizing two cases in the law. There is creative play in that, but it also contains the seed, the first step, of something like the scientific process.

And so I read with some curiosity and foreboding about creationists who continue to wage war against the notion of evolution, who argue with flat insistence that God made the earth in six days and rested on the seventh. They dispute claims of paleontologists that fossils are tens of millions of years old as inconsistent with the Bible's characterizations of the world as 6,000 years old. (The Answers in Genesis website advises believers to ask of nonbelievers: "Were you there?") In response to religious pressure, the Cobb County Children's Museum, in Georgia, is rumored to be "updating" the displays of Tyrannosaurus rex by "adding footprints next to the dinosaur bones to show that man and beast once lived side by side."

And in northern Kentucky, evangelical minister Ken Ham is building a $25 million Museum of Creation, which will show, purportedly, AIDS as God's punishment of homosexuals, and a Tyrannosaurus rex chasing Adam and Eve upon their expulsion from the Garden of Eden. I know, too, that this is a matter of faith, of perspective. What worries me is the general collective shift in this direction. The insistence upon flat meanings is a way of not looking behind words. The injunction not to look behind words is a habit of deference, of faith, of doing as one's told without question, even where the physical evidence is overwhelmingly contradictory. It would not be anything I'd be concerned about if this didn't seem also to be at the heart of an increasingly successful evangelical push to merge the interests of church and state. And an ideology of obedience to the literal word is the last thing we need in a world as overheated (metaphor: oven, pressure cooker, boiling pot) as ours.


http://www.thenation.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20050704&s=williams


(*) (*) Sometimes I can be so simple - as in the first paragraph........ (h) (h)


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

Doc the Boxer and hys Sweetlady Mama

[sweetlady]

Ethnic media survey

Posted: June 10, 2005 by: Jim Adams / Indian Country Today

Who do you trust? No surprise: Your own media

NEW YORK - Indians trust tribal newspapers more than the mainstream press.

This not altogether startling statement is now borne out by a major new survey released June 7. Pollster Sergio Bendixen found ethnic media to be a significant force among a number of minority groups.

His report, subtitled ''The Giant Hidden in Plain Sight,'' used 10 different languages to interview members of 14 racial subgroups Reflecting his California base, five of the groups were Asian; but the national sample of 1,895 respondents also included six Spanish-speaking subgroups, Arab- and African-Americans and American Indians.

The 114 American Indians made a large enough sample to draw statistically significant conclusions, Bendixen said. (The poll had a margin of error of 9.4 percent.)

The sample represented 64 million ethnic Americans, or nearly one-quarter of the population. Some 29 million of these, almost 13 percent of all Americans, preferred ethnic media to mainstream outlets, showing the ''striking impact'' of news sources generally overlooked by the dominant culture.

In a teleconference with ethnic journalists, poll co-sponsor Sandy Close said, ''the cutting edge of journalism isn't the blogs, it's the ethnic media.''

Close is the executive director of New California Media, which commissioned the study along with the Center for American Progress and the Leadership Conference for Civil Rights Education Fund. Karen Lawson, executive director of the Leadership Conference, said the poll would guide its efforts to win support for its agenda, including civil rights issues and opposition to judicial appointees she described as ''right-wing.''

The panelists also said the findings should interest advertisers and the major political parties.

According to the survey, conducted by political consulting firm Bendixen & Associates, 23 percent of the American Indian population are ''primary consumers'' of Native newspapers. Some 39 percent are ''secondary consumers.'' Indians in the poll said they relied on a variety of publications, naming national papers like Indian Country Today and tribal publications like the Apache Scout, the Cherokee Phoenix and Windtalker.

Nearly half of the American Indian population has internet access, said the report, and 14 percent regularly visited Native Web sites. But American Indian radio and television had a much smaller audience than their equivalents in other groups, presumably because their reach was more restricted.

The national and international Spanish television networks, by contrast, reached 87 percent of the Hispanic population, but only one-quarter of it had Internet access.

Perhaps the major conclusion was that ethnic news sources inspired more trust than did mainstream news outlets. The American Indian population preferred Native publications for news ''important to their community'' by 49 percent to 41 percent, actually a lower margin than the Hispanic, Asian and Arabic population. Most groups, however, turned to the general press for news of politics and government. About 60 percent of American Indians relied more on national papers, about the same as all the other groups except Hispanics, who preferred their much more extensive Spanish sources by 64 percent.

The panelists suggested that this finding might inspire ethnic papers to strengthen their general reporting.

Bendixen said his survey underscored a changing model for immigrants in the United States. Instead of a ''melting pot,'' he said, ''we have a salad.'' Newcomers, he said, felt they could retain ties to their original country and maintain its language and culture while being good Americans. He said the importance of the non-English press also reflected the increasing percentage of families who spoke their native language at home. ''They are not comfortable in English,'' he said.

Bendixen acknowledged the different situation of African-American and American Indian newspapers, which appear in English. He also called them the historic originators of the ethnic press.


http://www.indiancountry.com/content.cfm?id=1096411055


(*) (*) :o :o :o


(f) (f) 's,

Sweetlady and Doc the Boxer

[sweetlady]

The Giant Hidden in Plain Sight

Editors' note: This report has been edited for style only, not content. It was prepared from a poll conducted by Bendixen & Associates For New California Media (NCM) in partnership with Center for American Progress Leadership Conference on Civil Rights Education Fund.


This executive summary summarizes the findings of the first-ever comprehensive survey of ethnic American adults on their media usage. The poll surveyed 1,895 African-American, Hispanic, Asian-American, Arab-American and American Indian adults in the United States, representing some 64 million ethnics overall. The interviews were conducted in 10 languages: Arabic, Cantonese, English, Hindi, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, Spanish, Tagalog and Vietnamese.


Major findings:

Twenty-nine million ethnic adults are ''primary consumers'' of ethnic media

The study reveals the striking impact of ethnic media in the United States. Forty-five percent of all African-American, Hispanic, Asian-American, American Indian and Arab-American adults prefer ethnic television, radio or newspapers to their mainstream counterparts. These ''primary consumers'' also indicated that they access ethnic media frequently. This means that a staggering 29 million adults (45 percent of the 64 million ethnic adults studied), or a full 13 percent of the entire adult population of the United States, prefer ethnic media to mainstream television, radio or newspapers.

More than half of all Hispanic adults are primary consumers of ethnic media. Approximately two-fifths of African-Americans and Arab-Americans and a fourth of Asian-Americans and American Indians prefer ethnic media to mainstream media.



Ethnic media reach 51 million adults - one-fourth of the entire U.S. population

In addition to the 29 million people classified as ''primary consumers,'' ethnic media reaches another 22 million ethnic adults on a regular basis. These adults prefer mainstream media, but they also access ethnic television, radio or newspapers on a regular basis. Therefore, our study indicates that the overwhelming majority (80 percent) of the ethnic populations studied (64 million adults) are reached by ethnic media on a regular basis. The 51 million Americans reached by ethnic media represent about a quarter of the entire U.S. adult population.



Groups surveyed show different characteristics in ethnic media consumption

Hispanics:

The reach of Spanish-language media is almost universal in Hispanic America. Eighty-seven percent of all Hispanic adults access Spanish-language television, radio or newspapers on a regular basis. The success of the major television networks (Univision and Telemundo) is well documented but this study also indicates that Spanish-language radio and newspapers are rapidly increasing their penetration in this market.

For example, more than a quarter (29 percent) of Hispanic adults report that they now prefer Spanish-language newspapers to their English-language counterparts. There are only small variations in the media usage of the Hispanic groups studied but the poll indicates that Cubans watch Spanish-language television and listen to Spanish-language radio more often than the other Hispanic groups studied, while a higher percentage of South Americans read Spanish-language newspapers. This study also reveals that Hispanics have very low access (24 percent) to the Internet.

African-Americans:

African-American radio - stations that focus on African-American themes and content - is the most popular ethnic medium among blacks in the United States. A substantial majority of African-American adults listen to ethnic radio stations on a regular basis. African-Americans who are 40 years of age or older and those with annual incomes above $30,000 listen to ethnic radio more often than those that are younger or poorer.

It should also be noted that the reach of African-American newspapers is impressive. Even though African-Americans read mainstream daily newspapers more often, African-American newspapers - mostly weeklies - reach 57 percent of all African-Americans. Almost half (49 percent) of African-American adults have access to the Internet.

Asian-Americans:

Asian-American newspapers reach a substantial percentage of the nine million Asian-American adults in the United States. Approximately 80 percent of all Korean, Chinese and Vietnamese adults read an ethnic newspaper on a regular basis. The reach of Asian Indian, Filipino and Japanese newspapers is smaller but still impressive - more than half of the adults in these groups read an ethnic newspaper a few times a month or more. The poll also indicates that Korean and Chinese television stations are rapidly increasing in popularity - a quarter of those interviewed reported watching Korean- and Chinese-language television more often than English-language television. Access to the Internet is very high (67 percent) among all Asian-Americans and half of them prefer ethnic websites to mainstream websites. Asian Indian adults access the Internet more often than other Asians.

Arab-Americans:

The Arabic media reaches three-quarters of all Arab-Americans. Television is the preferred medium. Internet access among Arab-Americans is higher than it is for any other ethnic group studied. Three-quarters of all Arab-American adults have access to the Internet and a majority of them visit Arabic websites.

American Indians:

Approximately one quarter (23 percent) of all American Indians are primary consumers of ethnic newspapers. They read tribal newspapers more often than their mainstream counterparts. American Indian television and radio stations have much smaller audiences. Nearly half of the American Indian adult population has access to the Internet and 16 percent access websites with a focus on American Indian issues.



Ethnic media audiences look to mainstream media for coverage of politics and government

The survey finds that while the ethnic populations studied tend to rely on the ethnic media for information about their communities and countries of origin, when it comes to information about politics and the U. S. government most turn to the mainstream media.



Methodology

The findings of this report are based on a poll of 1895 African American, Hispanic, Asian American, Arab American and Native American adults in the United States. The total sample is comprised of 14 sub-samples, which break down as follows:

Sample group Sample size

African-American 300

Arab-American 100

Asian-American (Total) 601

Asian Indian 100

Chinese 100

Filipino 100

Japanese 100

Korean 100

Vietnamese 101

Hispanic (Total) 780

Central American 102

Cuban 111

Mexican 316

Puerto Rican 118

South American 101

American Indian 114



Each of the samples is representative of that specific ethnic population in the United States. Interviews for the study were conducted in the following languages: Arabic, Cantonese, English, Hindi, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, Spanish, Tagalog and Vietnamese. All of the interviews were conducted between April 26 and May 26 of 2005. The margin of error varies between +/-3.5 and +/-10 percentage points at the 95 percent level of confidence depending on the size of the sample.

The polling project was commissioned by New California Media in partnership with The Center for American Progress and the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights Education Fund, and was organized and coordinated by Bendixen & Associates of Coral Gables, Fla.


About NCM and poll co-sponsors:

NCM, founded in 1996 by the nonprofit Pacific News Service to promote ethnic media, has been a pioneer of multilingual polling since 2002, with support from a broad range of foundations and organizations, including The California Endowment, The California Wellness Foundation, The Ford Foundation, The James Irvine Foundation, The Overbrook Foundation, The Evelyn and Walter Haas Jr. Fund, and Open Society Institute. NCM has partnered with the Institute for Justice and Journalism at USC Annenberg School for Communication and with the Chinese American Voter Education Committee in developing multilingual polling nationwide.

The Center for American Progress is a nonpartisan research and educational institute dedicated to promoting a strong, just and free America that ensures opportunity for all. CAP believes that Americans are bound together by a common commitment to these values and they aspire to ensure that our national policies reflect these values.

The Leadership Conference on Civil Rights Education Fund is the research, education and communications arm of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, the nation's oldest, largest and most diverse civil and human rights coalition.

Bendixen & Associates is a public opinion research, management, and communications consulting firm based in Miami, Fla. Founded in 1984, the firm has grown from a company with roots in political campaigns and polling into an international consulting company that incorporates many disciplines and sectors. The firm has managed projects throughout the U.S., as well as in Mexico, Puerto Rico, Colombia, Argentina, Brazil, Venezuela, Peru, Chile, the Dominican Republic, Panama, Costa Rica, Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Bonaire and the Antilles.


http://www.indiancountry.com/content.cfm?id=1096411053


(*) (*) Have a restful evening. Doc the Boxer is happily (he's smiling) napping under my desk and hys mama is starting to feel tired. Been a long, long week and to tell you all the truth.....2005 year.


Stay cool. (h) (h)


(k) (k) 's,

Sweetlady and Doc the Boxer

[sweetlady]

On2 Technologies Partners With NowPublic.com To Create First Collaborative Video Blogging Experience
NowPublic.com Taps On2’s Flix Engine to Enable Bloggers to Create and Share Video Blogs

New York, NY (June 22, 2005) - On2 Technologies, Inc., today announced it has partnered with NowPublic.com, a leading independent news media hub, to create the world’s first collaborative video blogging experience for news. Using On2 Technologies newly-enhanced Flix Engine video encoding technology, NowPublic.com is enabling an emerging army of bloggers with the tools to post high quality video clips to accompany news stories from their desktop or mobile device.

Leveraging On2’s powerful Flix Engine technology, NowPublic.com can encode video clips in broadcast quality digital formats for delivery to any web-enabled device, at any bandwidth. This new collaborative video blogging capability is well positioned to tap into the growing demand for video tools in personal publishing and blogging platforms.

NowPublic.com will debut its new video-enhanced collaborative site tomorrow during Gnomedex 2005, the premiere Internet Publishing Event for A-list bloggers, enthusiasts and influencers, in Seattle, WA.

“We launched NowPublic.com to transform the way people collaborate in the blogosphere, providing everyone with a way to share news they care about and offer news readers a deeper connection to news in their communities,” said Michael Tippett, Founder and CEO of NowPublic.com. “Teaming up with On2 has enabled us to quickly build on the momentum we’ve created by extending high quality, collaborative video blogging to our members. We’ve created a next generation video blogging tool that promises to help bloggers all over the world to work together.”

“NowPublic.com is representative of the creative visionaries capitalizing on high quality Internet video to create entirely new, provocative media-rich online environments that has appeal to mainstream audiences around the globe,” added Douglas McIntyre, chairman, president and chief executive officer of On2 Technologies. “We are on the threshold of unlimited possibilities with Internet video and we’re proud to be driving these new paradigms with our codec technologies.”

On2’s Flix Engine technology enables users to add video encoding capabilities to their software and enables website visitors to convert their video, audio and image files to multiple streaming video formats, including Flash. The Flix Engine also enables users to allow anyone within the intranet to have access to Flix solutions.


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


(k) (k) 's

Sweetlady and Doc the Boxer

[sweetlady]

1. http://www.coldwatercreek.com/aspx/product.aspx?np=true&channel=2&productId=22346&deptId=38&ensembleId=23597



2. http://www.coldwatercreek.com/aspx/product.aspx?np=true&channel=2&productId=20576&deptId=38&ensembleId=21387

(Okay, okay! It's for church if I ever do find one that I can stand or perhaps top teach an adult class for older folks?)



3. http://www.coldwatercreek.com/aspx/product.aspx?np=true&channel=2&productId=21222&deptId=38&ensembleId=22238


(Perhaps for a birthday dinner......)


4. http://www.coldwatercreek.com/aspx/product.aspx?np=true&channel=1&productId=18526&deptId=1&ensembleId=24332


5. http://www.coldwatercreek.com/aspx/product.aspx?np=true&channel=2&productId=22349&deptId=38&ensembleId=23562


6. http://www.coldwatercreek.com/aspx/product.aspx?np=true&channel=2&productId=21436&deptId=38&ensembleId=22468


7. http://www.coldwatercreek.com/aspx/product.aspx?np=true&channel=2&productId=21229&deptId=38&ensembleId=22132


(*) (*) :( :( Some of the dresses that I ordered are gone! Oh well. It was wonderful getting them for 80 to 90 percent off - and I still an left wondering why I am attracted to flowery dresses that I would never wear before in my life.


(l) (l) Imelda that I am? Okay here's the shoes:


1. Hard to walk in but look nice: http://www.coldwatercreek.com/aspx/product.aspx?np=true&channel=2&productId=21363&deptId=40&ensembleId=22129


2. These Look "Maavelous, Daa-ling!!!" They fit and look great:

http://www.coldwatercreek.com/aspx/product.aspx?np=true&channel=2&productId=22839&deptId=40&ensembleId=24285



3. Very, very sexy and I don't have to wear pantyhose!!

http://www.coldwatercreek.com/aspx/product.aspx?np=true&channel=2&productId=21615&deptId=40&ensembleId=22668



4. Did not order these since they did not have my size but they remind me of Jennifer Grey in "Dirty Dancing"!!!!!

http://www.coldwatercreek.com/aspx/product.aspx?np=true&channel=2&productId=20751&deptId=40&ensembleId=21433


(*) (*) (l) (l) (l) ...........and now to wear these wonderful clothes out someplace..... (a) (a)


Off to make dinner for me......Doc is still having his after-dinner-nap. ;)


({) (}) 's

Sweetlady and Doc the Boxer

[Lady_Di]

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


I live in NM, which is a small part of this huge range of incredible mountains. Currently nestled in the big city here, looking up at the Sandias, which means I am in Albuquerque, in the actual house I grew up in, one of them actually. Because we also have a place up near Chama.

Before I came back here last spring, I was in Salt Lake City, also part of this mighty range. That is where I was in awe of the luxurious mountain splendor that is Park City and is Sundance. Robert Redford was no fool back in the sixties when he invested his earning in a huge amount of land near Bridal Falls. Spectacular, to say the least. Sundance for anyone that loves movies like you and I do, a must see. The palpable energy is something to behold in all that splendor. I love that creative spirit, that energy that abounds here.

From a happy Rocky Mountain grrrrl, come visit anytime. Bring the flowered dresses, we will paint the town red. Santa Fe is a blast when you have the time, I will take you around. There is a bed and breakfast you might enjoy just between here and there...


http://www.highfeatherranch.com

... where she has as a running statement

"A Cowgirl's Guide to Life : A bumble bee is considerably faster than a tractor! "

lol, I get that!

Does Doc travel with you sometimes?

This place is boxer heaven, it is what the house has always been full of - boxer energy. He would have his own doggie door, should he ever be well enough to travel.

I sure do enjoy reading what you post, though I can't thru them all. Time is so limited these days. There is just so much info out there, so many astute minds sharing so much. Can be a bit overwhelming at times. So thank you for helping heighten my awareness.


kotc
d

[Beaudyk]

Quotes from the The American Taliban

Ann Coulter
"We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity. We weren't punctilious about locating and punishing only Hitler and his top officers. We carpet-bombed German cities; we killed civilians. That's war. And this is war."

"Not all Muslims may be terrorists, but all terrorists are Muslims."

"Being nice to people is, in fact, one of the incidental tenets of Christianity, as opposed to other religions whose tenets are more along the lines of 'kill everyone who doesn't smell bad and doesn't answer to the name Mohammed'"


Bailey Smith
"With all due respect to those dear people, my friend, God Almighty does not hear the prayer of a Jew."


Beverly LaHaye (Concerned Women for America)
"Yes, religion and politics do mix. America is a nation based on biblical principles. Christian values dominate our government. The test of those values is the Bible. Politicians who do not use the bible to guide their public and private lives do not belong in office."


Bob Dornan (Rep. R-CA)
"Don't use the word 'gay' unless it's an acronym for 'Got Aids Yet'"


David Barton (Wallbuilders)
"There should be absolutely no 'Separation of Church and State' in America."


David Trosch
"Sodomy is a graver sin than murder. – Unless there is life there can be no murder."


Fob James (Governor of Alabama)
"Behind this judicial wall of separation there is a tyranny of lies that will fall... I say to you, my friends, let it fall!"

"A good butt-whipping and then a prayer is a wonderful remedy."


Fred Phelps (Westboro Baptist Church)
"If you got to castrate your miserable self with a piece of rusty barb wire, do it."

"Hear the word of the LORD, America, fag-enablers are worse than the fags themselves, and will be punished in the everlasting lake of fire!"

"You telling these miserable, Hell-bound, bath house-wallowing, anal-copulating fags that God loves them!? You have bats in the belfry!"

"American Veterans are to blame for the fag takeover of this nation. They have the power in their political lobby to influence the zeitgeist, get the fags out of the military, and back in the closet where they belong!"

"Not only is homosexuality a sin, but anyone who supports fags is just as guilty as they are. You are both worthy of death."


Gary Bauer (American Values)
"We are engaged in a social, political, and cultural war. There's a lot of talk in America about pluralism. But the bottom line is somebody's values will prevail. And the winner gets the right to teach our children what to believe."


Gary North (Institute for Christian Economics)
"The long-term goal of Christians in politics should be to gain exclusive control over the franchise. Those who refuse to submit publicly to the eternal sanctions of God by submitting to His Church's public marks of the covenant–baptism and holy communion–must be denied citizenship."

"This is God's world, not Satan's. Christians are the lawful heirs, not non-Christians."


Gary Potter (Catholics for Christian Political Action)
"When the Christian majority takes over this country, there will be no satanic churches, no more free distribution of pornography, no more talk of rights for homosexuals. After the Christian majority takes control, pluralism will be seen as immoral and evil and the state will not permit anybody the right to practice evil."


George Bush Sr. (President of the United States)
"I don't know that atheists should be considered citizens, nor should they be considered patriots. This is one nation under God."


George W. Bush (President of the United States)
"I don't think that witchcraft is a religion. I wish the military would rethink this decision."*

"God told me to strike at al Qaida and I struck them, and then he instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did, and now I am determined to solve the problem in the Middle East. If you help me I will act, and if not, the elections will come and I will have to focus on them."

"Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists."

"This crusade, this war on terrorism is going to take a while."

*Comment about Wiccans in the military


Henry Morris (Institute for Creation Research)
"When science and the Bible differ, science has obviously misinterpreted its data."


J. B. Stoner (White Supremacist)
"We had lost the fight for the preservation of the white race until God himself intervened in earthly affairs with AIDS to rescue and preserve the white race that he had created.... I praise God all the time for AIDS."

"AIDS is a racial disease of Jews and Niggers, and fortunately it is wiping out the queers. I guess God hates queers for several reasons. There is one big reason to be against queers and that is because every time some white boy is seduced by a queer into becoming a queer, means his white bloodline has run out."


James Dobson (Focus on the Family)
"Those who control the access to the minds of children will set the agenda for the future of the nation and the future of the western world."

"State Universities are breeding grounds, quite literally, for sexually transmitted diseases (including HIV), homosexual behavior, unwanted pregnancies, abortions, alcoholism, and drug abuse."

"Today's children... They're damned. They're gone."


James Kennedy (Center for Reclaiming America)
"The Christian community has a golden opportunity to train an army of dedicated teachers who can invade the public school classrooms and use them to influence the nation for Christ."


James Watt (Secretary of the Interior)




"We don't have to protect the environment, the Second Coming is at hand."*

*Secretary of the Interior in the Reagan Admin. Responsible for National Policy regarding the Environment


Jay Grimstead (Coalition on Revival)
"We are to make Bible-obeying disciples of anybody that gets in our way."


Jerry Falwell


"We're fighting against humanism, we're fighting against liberalism...we are fighting against all the systems of Satan that are destroying our nation today...our battle is with Satan himself."

"AIDS is the wrath of a just God against homosexuals. To oppose it would be like an Israelite jumping in the Red Sea to save one of Pharoah's chariotters."

"The Bible is the inerrant ... word of the living God. It is absolutely infallible, without error in all matters pertaining to faith and practice, as well as in areas such as geography, science, history, etc."

"AIDS is not just God's punishment for homosexuals; it is God's punishment for the society that tolerates homosexuals."

"If you're not a born-again Christian, you're a failure as a human being."


Jesse Helms (Sen. R-NC)

"The New York Times and Washington Post are both infested with homosexuals themselves. Just about every person down there is a homosexual or lesbian."

"All Latins are volatile people. Hence, I was not surprised at the volatile reaction."

"Your tax dollars are being used to pay for grade-school classes that teach our children that cannibalism, wife-swapping and murder of infants and the elderly are acceptable behavior."

"Homosexuals are weak, morally sick wretches."


Jimmy Swaggart (Jimmy Swaggart Ministries)
"The Media is ruled by Satan. But yet I wonder if many Christians fully understand that. Also, will they believe what the Media says, considering that its aim is to steal, kill, and destroy?"

"Sex education classes in our public schools are promoting incest."

"Evolution is a bankrupt speculative philosophy, not a scientific fact. Only a spiritually bankrupt society could ever believe it...Only atheists could accept this Satanic theory."


John Ashcroft (Attorney General)
"Civilized people – Muslims, Christians, and Jews – all understand that the source of freedom and human dignity is the Creator."


John Whitehead (Rutherford Institute)
"The [Supreme] Court, by seeking to equate Christianity with other religions, merely assaults the one faith. The Court in essence is assailing the true God by democratizing the Christian religion."


Joseph McCarthy (Sen. R-WI)
"Today we are engaged in a final, all-out battle between Communistic Atheism and Christianity."


Joseph Morecraft (Chalcedon Presbyterian Church)
"Nobody has the right to worship on this planet any other God than Jehovah. And therefore the state does not have the responsibility to defend anybody's pseudo-right to worship an idol."


Joseph Scheidler (Pro-Life Action League)




"I would like to outlaw contraception...contraception is disgusting – people using each other for pleasure."*

*I get the distinct impression that Mr. Scheidler's poor wife isn't guilty of feeling any pleasure…


Kay O'Connor (Kansas Senate Republican)
"I'm an old-fashioned woman. Men should take care of women, and if men were taking care of women today, we wouldn't have to vote."


Keith A. Fournier (Catholic Way)
"We need a legal strategy which protects the rights of those of us who hold Christian convictions which will afford us the opportunity to contend once again for the mind of this culture."


Laura Schlessinger
"I want to coin a phrase here, and I don't mind help. What would be the communication version of "ethnic cleansing?" Because that's what in particular the homosexual activists try to do."


Lester Roloff (Texas Homes for Wayward Youth)




"Better a pink bottom than a black soul."*

*Roloff opened a chain of homes for "wayward" youth in the state of Texas; he was later jailed in 1973 and again in 1975 for child abuse due to the punitive punishment techniques used in his homes. He would have been finished had he not of been specifically given permision to re-open his homes by, you guested it, Governor George W Bush.


Lt. Gen. William G. Boykin
“George Bush was not elected by a majority of the voters in the United States, he was appointed by God.”


Pat Buchanan (Presidential Candidate)
"Our culture is superior. Our culture is superior because our religion is Christianity and that is the truth that makes men free."

"There were no politics to polarize us then, to magnify every slight. The "negroes" of Washington had their public schools, restaurants, bars, movie houses, playgrounds and churches; and we had ours."

"Rail as they will about 'discrimination,' women are simply not endowed by nature with the same measures of single-minded ambition and the will to succeed in the fiercely competitive world of Western capitalism."


Pat Robertson (Christian Coalition)

"The Islamic people, the Arabs, were the ones who captured Africans, put them in slavery, and sent them to America as slaves. Why would the people in America want to embrace the religion of slavers."

"Just like what Nazi Germany did to the Jews, so liberal America is now doing to the evangelical Christians. It's no different...More terrible than anything suffered by any minority in history."

"When lawlessness is abroad in the land, the same thing will happen here that happened in Nazi Germany. Many of those people involved with Adolph Hitler were Satanists, many of them were homosexuals – the two things seem to go together."

"The feminist agenda is not about equal rights for women. It is about a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism, and become lesbians."

"You say you're supposed to be nice to the Episcopalians and the Presbyterians and the Methodists and this, that, and the other thing. Nonsense, I don't have to be nice to the spirit of the Antichrist."

"I know this is painful for the ladies to hear, but if you get married, you have accepted the headship of a man, your husband. Christ is the head of the household and the husband is the head of the wife, and that's the way it is, period."

"[Homosexuals] want to come into churches and disrupt church services and throw blood all around and try to give people AIDS and spit in the face of ministers."

"[Planned Parenthood] is teaching kids to fornicate, teaching people to have adultery, every kind of bestiality, homosexuality, lesbianism – everything that the Bible condemns."


Patrick Mahoney (Christian Defense Coalition)


"It is deeply troubling to have an appointed, unelected commission remove an elected official from office [Roy Moore]. The Court of Judiciary has overturned an election and crushed the democratic process through their actions."*

*Interesting perspective coming from someone who's President was appointed by a group of "unelected judges", thus overturning a democratic election.


Paul Cameron

"I think that actually AIDS is a guardian. That is I think it was sent, if you would, about forty years ago, to destroy Western civilization unless we change our sexual ways. So it's really a Godsend."

"Homosexuality is a crime against humanity."

"Causes of homosexuality include: 'sex with animals'"*

"Unless we get medically lucky, in three or four years, one of the options discussed will be the extermination of homosexuals."



*Paul Cameron was discharged from the American Psychological Association, the Nebraska Psychological Association, and the American Sociological Association due to his unethical practices and biased research regarding Homosexuals. His "research" has since been discredited by the scientific community; however his work is still referenced by many fundamentalist organizations as credible.


Randall Terry (Operation Rescue)

"I want you to just let a wave of intolerance wash over. I want you to let a wave of hatred wash over you. Yes, hate is good...Our goal is a Christian nation. We have a biblical duty, we are called by God to conquer this country. We don't want equal time. We don't want pluralism."

"Our goal must be simple. We must have a Christian nation built on God's law, on the ten Commandments. No apologies."

"I don't think Christians should use birth control. You consummate your marriage as often as you like – and if you have babies, you have babies."

"When I, or people like me, are running the country, you'd better flee, because we will find you, we will try you, and we'll execute you. I mean every word of it. I will make it part of my mission to see to it that they are tried and executed."*

"There is going to be war, [and Christians may be called to] take up the sword to overthrow the tyrannical regime that oppresses them."



*It is interesting to note that Randell Terry's son is Gay


Jerry Vines (Southern Baptist Convention)
"They would have us believe that Islam is just as good as Christianity. Christianity was founded by the virgin-born son of God, Jesus Christ. Islam was founded by Muhammad, a demon-possessed pedophile who had 12 wives, the last one of which was a nine-year-old girl."


Rick Santorum* (Sen. R-PA)




"If the Supreme Court says that you have the right to consensual [Gay] sex within your home, then you have the right to bigamy, you have the right to polygamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right to adultery. You have the right to anything!"

*Now known as Rick "Santorum" Santorum


Robert Simonds (Citizens for Excellence in Education)
"As the church watches from the sidelines, the ungodly elect atheists and homosexuals to school boards and legislatures to enact policies and laws that destroy our Christian children and discriminate against Christian families."

"Atheistic secular humanists should be removed from office and Christians should be elected...Government and true Christianity are inseparable."

"We'll take away their power and their money. Money comes from students. We'll break their backs by taking 24 million kids out of the public schools."


Robert T. Lee (Society for the Practical Establishment of the Ten Commandments)

"Raising your children under Americanism or any other principles other than true Christianity is child abuse."

"You do not have the right to be wrong, regardless of what any man-made or demonic charter says."

"Democracy originated in the mind of a rational being who has the deepest hatred for God."

"Do you realize that the only thing that gives democracy existence is sin? The absence of democracy is perfect obedience to god."

"The best way to insure the earth is never over populated is for sensible and righteous governments to clear all forms of atheism and heresy."


Ronald Reagan (President of the United States)
"For the first time ever, everything is in place for the Battle of Armageddon and the Second Coming of Christ."


Roy Moore (Former Alabama Judge)




"If they want to get the Commandments, they're going to have to get me first."*

"Worship With Your Vote"

*Interesting observation of the Radical Right, Judge Roy Moore commits peaceful civil disobedience by refusing to remove the Ten Commandments Monument from the Court. He is considered a Hero. Mayor Gavin Newsom commits peaceful civil disobedience by issuing same-sex marriage licenses. He is considered an Anarchist.


Rush Limbaugh

"Feminism was established to allow unattractive women easier access to the mainstream of society."

"If you commit a crime, you're guilty."*

"There is only one way to get rid of nuclear weapons... use them"

*Seems logical enough, doesn't it Rush?


Star Parker (Coalition on Urban Renewal & Education)
"Anybody that believes in separation of church and state needs to leave right now."


Tony Evans (Promise Keepers)
"The demise of our community and culture is the fault of sissified men who have been overly influenced by women."


William Rehnquist (Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court)
"The 'wall of separation between church and state' is a metaphor based on bad history, a metaphor which has proved useless as a guide to judging. It should be frankly and explicitly abandoned."


Michael Savage (Savage Nation)


"Oh, you're one of the sodomites. You should only get AIDS and die, you pig. How's that? Why don't you see if you can sue me, you pig. You got nothing better than to put me down, you piece of garbage. You have got nothing to do today, go eat a sausage and choke on it."*

*Statement made on live national television

[sweetlady]

Literary Maine: A reader's pilgrimage

From Longfellow to Stephen King
CAMDEN, Maine (AP) -- Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote a poem that would bring her fame, "Renascence," about the view from Mount Battie in Camden. Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote "Uncle Tom's Cabin" in 1850 while living in a house near Bowdoin College. And tiny Bucks Harbor, in South Brooksville, still looks a lot like the drawings in Robert McCloskey's beloved 1952 children's book, "One Morning in Maine."
Literary pilgrims can find these and many other places associated with famous writers all over Maine, from Portland, birthplace of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, to Bangor, home of Stephen King. Here are some details to help you plan a trip.

Edna St. Vincent Millay
Drive to the top of Mount Battie in Camden Hills State Park and you'll find a plaque bearing the words to "Renascence." The verse describes the view:
"All I could see from where I stood,
"Was three long mountains and a wood.
"I turned and looked another way,
"And saw three islands in a bay."
Nearby, Camden's Whitehall Inn maintains a room dedicated to Millay, with photos and other memorabilia on display. Millay's sister worked at the hotel and invited her to attend a party there one night in 1912. She read her poem "Renascence" to the guests, and one of them became her patron. Millay went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for poetry and was a huge celebrity in her day.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Longfellow turned American history into legend, with poems like "The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere" and "Hiawatha" that remain well-known today.
But visitors who tour the brick house in Portland where he grew up -- now a National Historic Landmark -- may find they know more Longfellow quotations than they realized. The home was built in 1786 by his grandfather, a Revolutionary War general whose war stories may have led Longfellow to pen the observation that great men leave "footprints in the sands of time." And as the poet mourned his first wife's death, he composed the line, "Into each life some rain must fall."
Upstairs, look for his portable writing desk, a wood and brass case with receptacles for papers and pens that was the laptop of its day.

Stephen King
The "Tommyknockers & More Bus Tour" of Bangor may well be the most entertaining two hours you ever spend on a bus, whether you're a die-hard Stephen King fan or are only barely familiar with King classics like "Carrie" and "The Shining."
Many of King's stories are set in a fictionalized version of Bangor called Derry, and the bus will take you to see the ominous standpipe from "It" along with the manhole where a murderous clown emerges in the same tale.
But the tour is far more than a trip to every local landmark that ever turned up in King's work. It also tells the fascinating and increasingly rare story of a regular guy who became enormously successful, then set out to help the place that inspired him.
The tour will take you past the coin-operated laundry where King worked for $1.60 an hour; he based the character of the mother from "Carrie" on a woman he met there, according to the tour. You'll drive past the rundown house where he lived when he got a telegram that his work had been accepted by a publisher; he was too poor to have a phone.
The bus tour also includes stops at the many municipal improvements he's helped pay for, like a community swimming pool and baseball field. But the highlight for King fans is a stop outside his red-and-cream Italianate-style mansion, where the wrought-iron gates have a spider-web design and decorations like a black bat and a three-headed Hydra.

Robert McCloskey
If you loved McCloskey's "One Morning in Maine" as a child, or if your own child loves it now, visiting Bucks Harbor will be like walking into a full-color, three-dimensional version of the story.
Bucks Harbor is located in a peaceful cove lined with tall evergreens in South Brooksville. Small boats are tied up at the dock. On the main street, you'll find Bucks Harbor Market and Condon's Garage.
The scenery looks remarkably like the simple drawings in the book, which tells the story of a father rowing his little girls across the water to have ice cream at the market and to get his boat's motor repaired.
Literary pilgrims will want to get lunch at the market, sit on the dock, and take some pictures to match the book.

Harriet Beecher Stowe
It's sometimes said that the town of Brunswick was responsible for the beginning and end of the Civil War. It was here that Stowe wrote "Uncle Tom's Cabin" while her husband taught at Bowdoin College. President Lincoln reputedly said upon meeting her, "You're the little lady who started this great war."
Another Bowdoin professor, Joshua Chamberlain, commanded the Union troops that formally accepted the surrender of the South.
Stowe lived in a white house with black trim at 63 Federal St. Nearby is the First Parish Church, United Church of Christ, where she had a vision that inspired her to write the famous book. Chamberlain worshipped there as well and visitors can see where they sat. The church is across from the Bowdoin campus, where Longfellow and another famous writer, Nathaniel Hawthorne, were classmates.

Henry David Thoreau
In "The Maine Woods," Thoreau describes his 1857 trip to Greenville, where he hired an Indian guide to help him cross Moosehead Lake in a "little eggshell" of a boat, an 18-foot-long birch canoe.
Visitors to Moosehead today have more options. Take a comfortable cruise from Greenville on a boat called the Katahdin; rent a kayak or canoe; try a moose-watching cruise from The Birches lodge in Rockwood; or hop on the Kineo Shuttle, a small boat that runs hourly in July and August from Rockwood to Kineo Island, where you can hike or golf.

Edwin Arlington Robinson
Robinson's fame has dimmed, but he won the Pulitzer for poetry three times. His tragicomic portrait of a New Englander who feels that life has passed him by was widely taught to 20th century schoolchildren:
"Miniver Cheevy, born too late,
"Scratched his head and kept on thinking;
"Miniver coughed, and called it fate,
"And kept on drinking."
You'll find a monument to Robinson on the Gardiner town common; nearby is his childhood home, at 67 Lincoln Ave., an Italianate-style house on the National Register of Historic Places, now privately owned.


http://www.cnn.com/2005/TRAVEL/DESTINATIONS/06/23/literary.maine.ap/index.html


(*) (*) I had no idea that so many gifted writers called Maine their home - what an enlightening article.... (l) (l)


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

[sweetlady]

New Thumb Shape USB Stick !


http://www.cdrinfo.com/Forum/tm.asp?m=112718&mpage=1&key


(*) (*) Too funny..... ;)



(k) (k) ,
SL & DTB

[sweetlady]

1. In the Spring: http://www.desertusa.com/july96/du_sag3b.jpg


2. http://www.personal.psu.edu/users/j/m/jmo163/images/OTRA/0514/1.jpg


3. http://www.arizona-horses.com/art/cactus.jpg

These stately succulents stand guard throughout the desert, proudly displaying the arms that have taken years to grow. This grampa of the desert, at left, is over 20 feet tall and could be up to 200 years old.

The saguaro begins life under the protection of a nurse plant. As it grows, it will develop arms that reach toward the sky. It will be 50 years before the plant blossoms with the beautiful state flower of Arizona and it takes 75 years before appendages sprout.

Saguaros provide high rise dormitories for a number of desert dwellers. They are used as nesting homes by birds (including elf owls, house finches and cactus wrens (below) as well as rats, mice, snakes and lizards. Primary architects of the cactus cavities are the gila woodpeckers and gilded flickers who are also residents.

As the saguaro ages, it begins to deteriorate until only its skeleton remains. You may see saguaro carcass still standing, or lying on the ground like a pile of old bones. The "bones" of the saguaro are the woody tubes within the plant which draw water up from the ground to its outer extremities. Its anatomy enables the cactus to store enough moisture to survive without rain for periods of up to two or even three years.

In many ways, the life of a saguaro reflects that of a human being. From early life, it is guarded and protected like a small child by its nurse plant. As it grows it stands short and stout, armless and not fully developed. Coming of age occurs when it blossoms and begins to sprout, adding appendages to its frame. As a mature adult, it stands tall and strong and ready to face the challenges of nature.

In a crowd of cactus (or cacti), each has its own personality and appearance. One may have a smoother, healthier complexion. The arm on anther appears to be waving hello. One bears the wounds caused by nature's forces; an arm lost to lightning. There a handsome, firm saguaro standing next to a rather mutated fellow. Like people, no two look alike.

Age catches up to the saguaro as it does in the human race. After a century or maybe even two, the saguaro starts to slump and lose color. Wrinkles and creases may appear. Inevitably, life begins to fade until all that is left is a scattering of cactus bones. A long life comes to an end, but a new one begins under the protection of a nurse plant, giving another saguaro tender loving care until it's ready to go it alone.

Saguaros have long been revered and today are protected in order to preserve these guardians of the Sonoran Desert.


4. Coffee Warning!!! http://www.mannhaupt.com/christian/Arizona/Foto/Saguaro%20Cactus%20On%20Ford%20600x400.jpg


5. http://www.nps.gov/sagu/Saguaros/images/08%20Mature%20Saguaro_jpg.jpg


6. Breathtaking light! http://members.aol.com/thedesert1/cactus5_cactus15.jpg


7. http://www.terragalleria.com/images/np-desert/sagu1225.jpeg


8. Curly!! http://www.allmyeye.com/images/pcd/pcd0786/saguaro-curly.3.jpg


9. Talk about looking straight up: http://www.pollackphoto.com/us/sw/other/large/D01-2400.jpg


10. Flowers and bird, lovely: http://mk23.image.pbase.com/u48/kmbloss/upload/30834027.2004_06_280004ajohseweb.jpg


11. http://www.roundamerica.com/images/april/2003-04-24/trip-2003-04-24-AZ-Tucson-Saguaro-cactus-200.jpg


12. Never saw one like this in all of the years traveling: http://www.vividlight.com/33/images/CRISTALE%20SAGUARO%20CACTUS.jpg


13. Forest: http://artemis.austincollege.edu/acad/bio/sgoldsmith/desert_biology/saguaro_forest.jpg


14. Look at this sky and distant mountains: http://www.gdargaud.net/Climbing/Arizona/SaguaroCactus.jpg


15. Romantic: http://www.wildnatureimages.com/images%202/040210-058..jpg


16. Which way did she go? http://personal.riverusers.com/~sabinocanyon/images/sagupdwn.gif


17. Romantic Sunset: http://www.branimirphoto.ca/gallery/arizona/saguaro-sunset.jpg


18. Night: http://giltphoto.com/images/saguaro/cactnite.jpg


19. Cactus Valley: http://www.izix.com/personal/photos/southwest/images/CactusValley.jpg


20. Twisted: http://www.hcn.org/allimages/1999/may10/graphics/990510.025.jpg


21. Lovely Couple: http://www.dallasbay.net/gallery/RoadTrips/Tucson/sabino_canyon/m-dswn0514.jpg


22. I've actually seen this one a few times and no comment...;-) http://www.visualsunlimited.com/images/watermarked/555/55515.jpg


23. Big Sigh: http://www.filmmusic.de/foto/arizona/saguaro%20cactus/images/saguaro%20cactus02.jpg


24. Awesome Saturation Color Differences: http://www.windows.ucar.edu/earth/images/cactus_big.jpg



(*) (*) Ah, what a nice respite to look at these gorgeous photos.....although I'm glad not to be in the 100+ heat in and around Phoenix right now... ;) The temps in Flagstaff and other places in higher elevations (7,500 and above) - I noticed that the nights there are nice and cool.. (S) (S) (S)

(o) (o) Off to the kitchen....need a refill on coffee to chase the mental cobwebs away.... :o ;)


Carpe Diem!!

Sweetlady and Doc the Boxer

[sweetlady]

Hush Among the Saguaro: Hiking the mountains outside of Tucson, Arizona

By Betty Leavengood

Tucson's sunsets are one of our city's trademarks. The mountains are silhouetted on postcards are the Tucson Mountains, the smallest of ranges that surround Tucson. The high point, Wasson Peak at 4,687 feet, is barely a mountain by most standards.

The Tucson Mountains are different in character from the others. No ponderosa pines will shade your path while you are hiking. This is the land of mesquite and palo verde, of the saguaro, pear, cholla, and hedgehog cacti, of creosote bushes, ocotillo, and catclaw. The terrain is a jumble of boulders and craggy ridges.

http://away.com/gifs/states/az/snow_sag.jpg

The Sweetwater Trail is a a good introduction to the plants of the area. The Hugh Norris Trail to the summit of Wasson Peak is the most difficult trail, but the one that provides the best views of the Tucson area.

But even if you turn your back on the city, you can't get away from its rich human history.

From A.D. 900 to 1300, the Hohokam lived in the river bottoms in their pit houses and hunted in the Tucson Mountains. Petroglyphs King Canyon and Picture Rocks remain as evidence of the Hohokam's existence. The Hohokam were gone when the Jesuit priest, Father Kino, first came to the Tucson area in 1692. By then, the Pima were living at the base of the mountain we now call Sentinel Peak, or"A" Mountain.

The Tucson Mountains were significant in the early history of Tucson. When in 1772, King Carlos II of Spain, who possessed this land on paper, issued an order calling for the reorganization of the presidios (forts) in Mexico and the Southwest, the site selected was a point near the Santa Cruz River opposite the Pima village. Here, beginning in 1776, a new presidio was to be built. Progress was slow, and it was not until December 1783 that the task was completed. A lookout was maintained on top of Sentinel Peak, and the fort was warned when the Apaches swept down out of the Santa Catalinas or the Rincons. Several attacks were withstood, and the Royal Presidio of San Agustin del Tucson outgrew the walls of the fort by the mid-1800s. Sentinel Peak was no longer needed as a lookout.

The mountain did serve other purposes. Many early Tucson homes and the wall around the University of Arizona were built from black rock quarried from the side of Sentinel Peak. Today, a huge, white "A" representing the University of Arizona dominates the peak.

Copper was discovered in the 1870s at Silver Bell, and mining became important. Hikers in the Tucson Mountains today can see much evidence of early mining. The Sendero Esperanza Trail passes the old Gould Mine, once thought to be the bonanza of the territory. The Hugh Norris Trail passes several mines. The Starr Pass Trail follows the route of a shortcut through the mountains to the mines of Quijotoa.

As late as the 1920s and 1930s the land in the Tucson Mountains was open to homesteading. A stone house remains on the David Yetman Trail that was homesteaded in 1930 by a newspaper man from Illinois. Ranchers ran cattle in the mountains.

It seemed that the Tucson Mountains were open for grabs. Mining, cattle grazing, and homesteading were being carried on with little regard for the ecology of the mountains, until Pima County agricultural agent C. B. Brown took it upon himself to preserve the Tucson Mountain area. With the help of Senator Carl Hayden, Brown was able to persuade Congress to withdraw 60,000 acres from the Homesteading Act of 1873 to be used as Tucson Mountain Park.

World War I veterans complained that their rights were being violated because they could not homestead, and, as a result, all but 28,988 acres were turned back over to the United States Department of Interior to be used for homesteading. On April 11, 1929, the remaining acreage was designated as Tucson Mountain Park. The Pima County Parks Commission was established, and Brown was named chairman.

In 1933, part of the land designated for homesteading became part of Saguaro National Monument. In 1994, the designation was changed to Saguaro National Park.

The area was still not pristine and secure from development. Mining was still permitted on much of the land. In 1939 Columbia Pictures leased 300 acres of state land that was within the park for movie production and built Old Tucson. In one scene, 6 acres of desert were set on fire, completely destroying all vegetation, including several mature saguaros. Public uproar caused the Pima County Park Commission to purchase the lease from Columbia Pictures, ensuring control and that no fires would be set in the desert again.

In 1952, Arthur Pack, a member of the park commission, recommended a living museum be established in Tucson Mountain Park to educate the public about the Sonoran Desert, and the world famous Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum was formed. This excellent facility competes with the Grand Canyon as the most visited attraction in Arizona.

In 1961 President John Kennedy added 15,360 acres of federally owned land in Tucson Mountain Park to the Saguaro National Monument, to be administered by the National Park Service. This change of jurisdiction was made specifically to prevent mining claims in the area and to preserve the natural beauty. Because of this move, the Tucson Mountain Park was reduced to 13,628 acres, to which an additional 3,000 acres were added in 1974, as a result of a bond election.


http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://away.com/gifs/states/az/snow_sag.jpg&imgrefurl=http://gorp.away.com/gorp/publishers/pruett/hik_tucs.htm&h=384&w=256&sz=88&tbnid=O_mwpACJetUJ:&tbnh=119&tbnw=79&hl=en&start=1&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dsaquaro%2Bcactus%26hl%3Den%26lr%3D%26 c2coff%3D1%26sa%3DG


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


(k) (k) 's,

Sweetlady and Doc the Boxer

[sweetlady]

Plots, paranoia and Monty Python... inside the world of G8 anarchists

SCOTT MCCULLOCH

A SIX-MONTH investigation by Scotland on Sunday into the heart of the G8 protest movement has uncovered the often cranky, yet deadly serious face of anarchists and dissenters who want to bring the meeting of world leaders to a standstill.

Their preparations for the July 6-8 summit at Gleneagles include a series of training camps being held this weekend to teach activists how to break into the Faslane naval base on the Clyde, in a protest timed for Monday, July 4. They will be taught fence-cutting techniques, how to climb over razor wire and how to avoid being injured by guard dogs.

Meanwhile, 'factories' have been set up in Edinburgh and Glasgow to manufacture 'lock-on tubes' - devices which protesters wear on their arms to hinder police attempts to clear them from road blockades.

Mission control for the disruption during the summit will be an 'eco-village' at Forthbank, near Stirling, which was approved by the local authority and Central Police on Friday.

The plans are ambitious and there is no doubt Scotland could be plunged into chaos even if they only partially succeed.

But there have also been moments of unintended comedic brilliance straight out of a Monty Python sketch. The groups planning the disruption pride themselves on their non-hierarchical decision-making structure. At meetings, the organisers shun the use of a table as it is regarded as too corporate.

The words 'yes' and 'no' appear to have been banished in this strange world as a means of indicating approval or disapproval. Instead, they wave both hands in the air - up to agree, down to disagree. Then there is the ever-present fear of infiltration. Planners hide surnames from one another and detailed discussions about direct action are restricted to tight-knit huddles of only the most trusted activists.

It is clear, though, that a major tactic will be to block roads leading from Edinburgh, Glasgow, Dundee and Perth to Gleneagles to prevent administrative staff from reaching the hotels where world leaders and their aides will be staying. Crucial sites for road closure have already been scouted, down to the specific road sign poles that will be used to link chained demonstrators.


www.news.scotsman.com


(*) (*) Definitely interesting events coming up.....I pray for peaceful demonstrationsat the G8 itself as well as at the Live 8 Concerts coming up this weekend around the world including Philadelphia. A million people expected in Philly :| :| :| Hopefully, all will focus on the intended topic. (l) (l) (*)


(f) (f) Have a wonderful week!


(k) (k)'s,

Sweetlady and Doc the Boxer

[sweetlady]

Q U O T E D


"I have a lot of trouble with your remote controls. Too many arrows."


-- Queen Elizabeth II tells Sony's new CEO Howard Stringer the company's UI designs need work.


www.siliconvalley.com


(*) (*) Interesting that the actual link to the quote was removed over the weekend.......I wonder who complained? My bet is someone in the Village Idiot's admin or other Repub lackey....... :o :o :| :| Grrr.


(f) (f) ,

SL & DTB

[sweetlady]

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2005/05/seacell_seaweed.php


(*) (*) :o ;)


(k) (k) ,

SL * DTB

[sweetlady]

High Court Sides With RIAA in File-Sharing Case

A WALL STREET JOURNAL ONLINE NEWS ROUNDUP
June 27, 2005 10:51 a.m.

The U.S. Supreme Court sided with the entertainment industry in its legal battle against online file-sharing networks in a decision that has broad implications for Hollywood and Silicon Valley.

The high court said that Grokster Ltd., StreamCast Networks Inc. and other file-sharing companies can be responsible if their software is intended to swap copyrighted music and movies. The unanimous decision reverses two lower-courts rulings, and is a key victory for the recording industry and movie studios. The case was brought by 28 entertainment companies, including giants like Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Inc., Walt Disney Co. and Time Warner Inc.

Grokster makes an Internet tool under the same name that allows individuals to share music or video files for free. StreamCast's file-sharing program is called Morpheus. Unlike the original Napster service, which the courts shut down in 2001 after finding that it aided copyright infringement, Grokster and Morpheus don't upload files to a central location, but rather allows individuals to find the files on each other's computers.

The case hinged on the court's assessment of what percentage of Grokster use was for "substantial noninfringing uses" versus what percentage was used for activities that violated copyright conditions. That language stems from a 1984 case, involving Sony Corp.'s Betamax video recorder. In that case, the high court ruled that Sony wasn't liable for "contributory infringement" since the video recorder had "substantial noninfringing uses" that didn't run afoul of copyright conditions. Essentially, the court said it was clear the device wasn't designed expressly for breaking the law but left open to interpretation what percentage of use is considered "substantial."

Donald Verrilli, lead attorney for the plaintiffs in the Grokster case, made his clients' position clear, when presenting his case before the justices in March: "Copyright infringement is the only significant use of Grokster."

Justice John Paul Stevens then asked Mr. Verrilli about the legitimate uses of Grokster, which spurred a lively debate that highlighted the justices' comprehension of file sharing, a subject that has primarily been the domain of teenagers and college students.

Taking Sides in Grokster Case

In addition to file-sharing companies like Sharman Networks Ltd., maker of Kazaa file-sharing software, some less obvious companies, such as chip giant Intel Corp., sided with Grokster and StreamCast. In supporting file-sharing, companies like Intel are looking out for any future technologies they might come with, since they widely believe that sharing some copyrighted material is crucial to innovation.

In a friend-of-the-court brief filed in this case, Intel said that "Expanding the scope of secondary liability for products that are capable of substantial noninfringing uses would chill innovation and stifle the development of new generations of Intel's products, including products designed to enhance lawful access to copyrighted works."

Tech industry groups such as the Consumer Electronics Association and National Venture Capital Association, as well as the American Civil Liberties Union, also sided with Grokster and StreamCast. In their brief to the court, the NVCA noted that key technologies such as computers, the Internet, email, CD burners, iPods and peer-to-peer file-sharing, can be used for lawful purposes as well as copyright infringement.

Christian groups have long criticized Hollywood, but in this case, the Christian Coalition fell on the side of the plaintiffs, citing their desire to "stop the proliferation of child pornography and other forms of obscenity being distributed by file-sharing companies such as Grokster."

High Court Backs FCC in Brand X Case

Also Monday, the Supreme Court erased uncertainty about Federal Communications Commission oversight of cable-based Internet services, ruling 6-3 the federal agency is free to regulate broadband cable services as an information service.

The decision means the FCC can continue regulating cable modem services lightly, allowing companies to deny competitors access to their cable lines. Telecommunications companies, which are in contrast more heavily regulated, are currently required to grant competitors access to their telephone lines.

The decision is a victory for the Bush administration and the FCC, which concluded that limited access is best for the industry. The majority opinion was written by Justice Clarence Thomas.

More than 19 million homes have cable broadband service. At issue is whether cable Internet access is a "telecommunications service" under federal law that makes it subject to strict FCC rules requiring companies to provide access to independent providers.

The FCC said no, voting in March 2002 to exempt cable companies from the strict rules to stir more investment. The agency reasoned that high-speed Internet over cable was just an "information service," making it different from phone companies.


(*) (*) :( :( :( :( :( :s :s :s :s :s


SL & DTB

[sweetlady]

(*) (*) I learn something new every day!

Southwest Decor: Somebody's Ponytail And Photos of Pets

Airline Employees Turn Walls Into a Kitschy Scrapbook; Old Ads, Cardboard Herbs

By SUSAN WARREN Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

June 27, 2005; Page A1

DALLAS -- At 8 a.m. one recent Saturday, Jon Shubert organized a hanging party at Southwest Airlines headquarters.

As 80 employees filed sleepily into the room, he asked each to grab a hammer, a level and a pencil. "Don't be intimidated," he urged them as he paced back and forth in front of the group. "It's really easy to hang pictures."

The purpose of the pep talk was to fire up the employees for a day of decorating. While some other corporations adorn their headquarters with fine art, Southwest uses its walls as an obsessional, slightly kitschy tribute to the company's aggressively high-spirited culture.

Anything with a link to Southwest is framed and put on the wall. Memorabilia such as a suit stitched out of peanut packages, a male employee's shorn ponytail and a gas tank from a wrecked Harley-Davidson motorcycle are displayed in clear plastic window boxes. Hundreds of thousands of photographs of Southwest employees, events, even pets, hang in giant collages, along with publications and historic documents.

The result is "our scrapbook on the walls," says Southwest's President Colleen Barrett, 60 years old, who has been the airline's chief curator since she started saving newspaper clippings as Chairman Herb Kelleher's secretary in the 1960s.

New employees are sometimes dispatched on scavenger hunts through the building for a crash course in Southwest lore. When stumped for a historical fact, public-relations people "go to the wall," says Ginger Hardage, head of corporate communications. She once determined the date of Southwest's first government certificate of operation by tracking down a framed copy on display.

The yard-sale chic is in keeping with the airline that gave cheap a good name and wooed customers and employees by emphasizing fun over frills, from joke-cracking flight attendants to the annual company Halloween party where employees are rewarded for the most elaborate costumes. Southwest's distinctive culture has cultivated an intensely loyal customer base and work force that has helped put the company in the front ranks of the world's airlines. It is one of the few U.S. airlines to consistently report profits as fuel prices have skyrocketed. It now flies more passengers than any other U.S. carrier as it continues to expand its nationwide service.

Mr. Kelleher made sure architects designed wide halls in the airline's new headquarters in 1990 to allow groups of people to walk down the hall without causing traffic jams. The resulting labyrinth of 16-foot-wide corridors makes the structure feel more like an airport terminal than an office building. Ms. Barrett was charged with decorating the vast walls based on the airline's low-cost standards.

The collection has grown to more than 18,000 framed pieces. Employees use the displays, which are grouped by themes such as pets or sports or country music, to navigate an otherwise nondescript building. "You never walk straight down the hall, you zigzag," says Joan Farris, a leadership-development trainer. Says Ms. Barrett: "I spend all my time in the halls straightening pictures."

The opening of a new wing this spring was a major redecorating opportunity. Mr. Shubert, 50, the administration manager, organized the undertaking, which meant stripping and painting the walls, then reorganizing and rehanging every picture and finding more stuff for the new wing.

He calculated that the expansion gave him 21,753 additional square feet of wall space to fill -- enough for thousands of pictures. Employees responded with donations of photographs, hats, shoes, watches and, in one case, an old telephone. Mr. Shubert divided the items into 75 categories and assigned each group a place on the walls.

About 80 employees showed up for the hanging party after getting three pages of emailed instructions from Mr. Shubert. For each two days of work, Southwest rewarded each volunteer with a free roundtrip Southwest ticket to anywhere, valued at as much as $598.

With a walkie-talkie strapped to his waist, Mr. Shubert demonstrated the art of picture-hanging with a level and tacks. "It may take a few before you get the...hang of it," he said.

Volunteers scattered across the building to their assigned walls. Sunny Stone, director of culture, a kind of events coordinator, had the toughest wall: advertisements. Thousands of framed copies of Southwest ads through the years were put in chronological order, starting with the early 70s, when a stewardess in hot pants was used to emphasize the slogan, "We're spreading love all over Texas."

Love is a big theme for the walls, inspired by Southwest's home airport, Dallas Love Field, and the company's stock symbol, LUV. But even love takes a back seat to the chain-smoking, whiskey-drinking Mr. Kelleher, whose personality still dominates the company culture, even though he relinquished the CEO job in 2001. Mr. Kelleher is in countless photographs hugging and mugging with employees and corporate guests. The photos are accented with several life-size cardboard Herbs scattered throughout the building. The centerpiece of one display: Herb's "emergency kit" outfitted with a pack of cigarettes and Jack Daniel's Tennessee whiskey.

There are fewer images of the new CEO, Gary Kelly, who started with Southwest as controller in 1986 and who is more low-key. "He just got started," explains Mr. Shubert. "We've got a lot of Gary Kelly coming up."


(*) (*) And I never preferred to fly this airline because of the "cattle-car" approach to seating - they still don't provide pre-assigned seating; rather you get a plastic card with a number on it when you check in and they call numbers out to allow "first-come (to check-in), first-seated". Got lousy seats many times because of tight connections. Still, Southwest has been touted as "IT" because of their stellar profits while all of the other airlines were/are running in the red. :|


(f) (f) Good the them, I say!


(k) (k) 's and a couple of ({) (}) 's,

Sweetlady and Doc the Boxer

[Lady_Di]

Good morning Sweet Lady, kotc for you and a milk bone to Doc. It is a glorious day here in the Rockies, we have had Rolling Thunder scrubbing the aires clean. Cool weather, probably up to 73 degrees right now. Might get up to 90. But hardly any humidity, even after the glorious afternoon showers, and the soft rain all night long.

Went to an Art Show yesterday at the State Fair Grounds. Wanted to share my favourite sculptor I found there. I really am wanting some of his work, big time. I wouldn't mind cooking this guy dinner and just talking art late on into the night.

www.johnboomerart.com

hasta luego, hope this day finds you both well...

d

[Lady_Di]

(*) (*) I learn something new every day!

Southwest Decor: Somebody's Ponytail And Photos of Pets

Airline Employees Turn Walls Into a Kitschy Scrapbook; Old Ads, Cardboard Herbs

By SUSAN WARREN Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

June 27, 2005; Page A1

DALLAS -- At 8 a.m. one recent Saturday, Jon Shubert organized a hanging party at Southwest Airlines headquarters.

As 80 employees filed sleepily into the room, he asked each to grab a hammer, a level and a pencil. "Don't be intimidated," he urged them as he paced back and forth in front of the group. "It's really easy to hang pictures."

The purpose of the pep talk was to fire up the employees for a day of decorating. While some other corporations adorn their headquarters with fine art, Southwest uses its walls as an obsessional, slightly kitschy tribute to the company's aggressively high-spirited culture.

Anything with a link to Southwest is framed and put on the wall. Memorabilia such as a suit stitched out of peanut packages, a male employee's shorn ponytail and a gas tank from a wrecked Harley-Davidson motorcycle are displayed in clear plastic window boxes. Hundreds of thousands of photographs of Southwest employees, events, even pets, hang in giant collages, along with publications and historic documents.

The result is "our scrapbook on the walls," says Southwest's President Colleen Barrett, 60 years old, who has been the airline's chief curator since she started saving newspaper clippings as Chairman Herb Kelleher's secretary in the 1960s.

New employees are sometimes dispatched on scavenger hunts through the building for a crash course in Southwest lore. When stumped for a historical fact, public-relations people "go to the wall," says Ginger Hardage, head of corporate communications. She once determined the date of Southwest's first government certificate of operation by tracking down a framed copy on display.

The yard-sale chic is in keeping with the airline that gave cheap a good name and wooed customers and employees by emphasizing fun over frills, from joke-cracking flight attendants to the annual company Halloween party where employees are rewarded for the most elaborate costumes. Southwest's distinctive culture has cultivated an intensely loyal customer base and work force that has helped put the company in the front ranks of the world's airlines. It is one of the few U.S. airlines to consistently report profits as fuel prices have skyrocketed. It now flies more passengers than any other U.S. carrier as it continues to expand its nationwide service.

Mr. Kelleher made sure architects designed wide halls in the airline's new headquarters in 1990 to allow groups of people to walk down the hall without causing traffic jams. The resulting labyrinth of 16-foot-wide corridors makes the structure feel more like an airport terminal than an office building. Ms. Barrett was charged with decorating the vast walls based on the airline's low-cost standards.

The collection has grown to more than 18,000 framed pieces. Employees use the displays, which are grouped by themes such as pets or sports or country music, to navigate an otherwise nondescript building. "You never walk straight down the hall, you zigzag," says Joan Farris, a leadership-development trainer. Says Ms. Barrett: "I spend all my time in the halls straightening pictures."

The opening of a new wing this spring was a major redecorating opportunity. Mr. Shubert, 50, the administration manager, organized the undertaking, which meant stripping and painting the walls, then reorganizing and rehanging every picture and finding more stuff for the new wing.

He calculated that the expansion gave him 21,753 additional square feet of wall space to fill -- enough for thousands of pictures. Employees responded with donations of photographs, hats, shoes, watches and, in one case, an old telephone. Mr. Shubert divided the items into 75 categories and assigned each group a place on the walls.

About 80 employees showed up for the hanging party after getting three pages of emailed instructions from Mr. Shubert. For each two days of work, Southwest rewarded each volunteer with a free roundtrip Southwest ticket to anywhere, valued at as much as $598.

With a walkie-talkie strapped to his waist, Mr. Shubert demonstrated the art of picture-hanging with a level and tacks. "It may take a few before you get the...hang of it," he said.

Volunteers scattered across the building to their assigned walls. Sunny Stone, director of culture, a kind of events coordinator, had the toughest wall: advertisements. Thousands of framed copies of Southwest ads through the years were put in chronological order, starting with the early 70s, when a stewardess in hot pants was used to emphasize the slogan, "We're spreading love all over Texas."

Love is a big theme for the walls, inspired by Southwest's home airport, Dallas Love Field, and the company's stock symbol, LUV. But even love takes a back seat to the chain-smoking, whiskey-drinking Mr. Kelleher, whose personality still dominates the company culture, even though he relinquished the CEO job in 2001. Mr. Kelleher is in countless photographs hugging and mugging with employees and corporate guests. The photos are accented with several life-size cardboard Herbs scattered throughout the building. The centerpiece of one display: Herb's "emergency kit" outfitted with a pack of cigarettes and Jack Daniel's Tennessee whiskey.

There are fewer images of the new CEO, Gary Kelly, who started with Southwest as controller in 1986 and who is more low-key. "He just got started," explains Mr. Shubert. "We've got a lot of Gary Kelly coming up."


(*) (*) And I never preferred to fly this airline because of the "cattle-car" approach to seating - they still don't provide pre-assigned seating; rather you get a plastic card with a number on it when you check in and they call numbers out to allow "first-come (to check-in), first-seated". Got lousy seats many times because of tight connections. Still, Southwest has been touted as "IT" because of their stellar profits while all of the other airlines were/are running in the red. :|


(f) (f) Good the them, I say!


(k) (k) 's and a couple of ({) (}) 's,

Sweetlady and Doc the Boxer


Have you tried Jet Blue?

Doesn't go everywhere, but they have some real differences. And hey, Salt Lake City is one of their hubs. Interesting philosophy there, nice leather seats for everyone.

Still like Delta, I admit it.

Private would even be better, so shoot me.

d

[sweetlady]

Courage and Shame in Pakistan

By JIM HOAGLAND The Washington Post - accessed through the Wall Street Journal this morning through their "Opinions" page:

June 27, 2005

WASHINGTON -- A straw breaking the camel's back, a pebble triggering the avalanche: Choose your own image for Mukhtar Mai and the troubles she creates for her country's frightened and duplicitous leadership. If there is justice, any of those images will fit.

Ms. Mai is the courageous Pakistani woman who has refused to be silenced after being gang-raped as a tribal "punishment." She has also refused to knuckle under to the unconscionable shut-up-or-else treatment inflicted on her by President Pervez Musharraf's government.

By standing up and getting her story noticed at this particular moment, Ms. Mai may have dealt a crippling blow to the credibility of Gen. Musharraf, who has buffaloed the Bush administration into deluging him with fulsome praise, money and arms in return for Pakistan's incomplete help in fighting al Qaeda and the Taliban.

The sordid details of the campaign to break Ms. Mai's will are emerging at a moment of strategic change in South Asia. The Bush administration is greatly expanding the bet it initially put down on India, while beginning to hedge its investment in Islamabad's military-dominated regime. The effect is to free U.S. relations with India from decades of "tilt" toward Pakistan. It may also count that President Musharraf no longer deals with retired Gen. Colin Powell as U.S. secretary of state. Instead, Condoleezza Rice, a woman sensitive to the humiliations and personal destruction aimed at the 33-year-old Ms. Mai, now runs U.S. diplomacy.

President Bush has decided not to call Gen. Musharraf on his fairy tales about Pakistan's reckless nuclear proliferation being the work of one man -- scientist A.Q. Khan -- or to press the general publicly on Pakistan's support for terrorism in Kashmir or its manifest unwillingness to do everything it can to capture Osama bin Laden and his Taliban allies. What Bush would not do in those cases, Ms. Mai has done in hers. She has spoken truth to power and let the consequences fall where they may. Aided by Pakistani reformers in her village and abroad, she has challenged the inhuman conventions of her country's misogynist rural society, forcing Gen. Musharraf to take sides. To his eternal shame, he backed the primitive conventions instead of her.

In June 2002, Ms. Mai was raped by four men. They had been given license to assault her sexually by a tribal council charged with retaliating against an alleged social infraction by her brother. In the normal course of things, Ms. Mai would have been murdered by her family as a matter of "honor" or expected to commit suicide.

Instead she went to court and secured the conviction of her rapists. They were briefly imprisoned, then freed after Ms. Mai accepted an invitation to speak in the United States this month. When this intimidation did not work, the central government put Ms. Mai on a restricted travel list and then confiscated her passport.

Gen. Musharraf acknowledged his involvement in blocking the trip to reporters two days after the Pakistan embassy in Washington implausibly denied that and much more. Ms. Rice authorized a tough scolding of Pakistan by the State Department's spokesman, and other officials finally began to speak critically of Pakistan's tolerating al Qaeda's presence in its border regions with Afghanistan.

Pakistan is the ultimate hard case for U.S. strategy: As a persistent critic of the Bush team's hype about Gen. Musharraf and of the general's own shortcomings, I have to acknowledge that the Pakistani leader is less corrupt and more courageous than the weak civilian governments that preceded him, including the one that forced him to take power in 1999 to save his own life. And Gen. Musharraf does put limits on the extremists who control Pakistan's malignant intelligence services.

But one Pakistani woman has shown that like all autocrats the general needs to be constantly monitored and challenged, not conspired with and consoled with rewards.


(f) (l) (f) (l) (f) (l) (f) Talk about courage.........this womyn never ceases to amaze me. I am so grateful to live in a place where things like this don't happen. Thank goodness for the Internet and global mass media that got her story out to everyone. I hope that she will decide to visit the U.S. soon.


(f) (f) ,

SL & DTB

[sweetlady]

http://www.fedexfurniture.com/



;) ;)


(k) (k) 's

Sweetlady and Doc the Boxer

[sweetlady]

Intel to play Luca Brasi role in "Godfather" remake:


And here I thought Microsoft was the Tanya Harding of technology. Advanced Micro Devices filed a broad antitrust lawsuit against Intel late Monday, accusing the company of using illegal inducements to dissuade OEMs from buying AMD processors and "knee-capping" those who did. In a 48-page complaint (PDF), AMD alleges Intel used illegal subsidies to win sales and in some cases threatened companies with "severe consequences" for using or selling AMD products. Just like Standard Oil and Alcoa before it, the suit charges, Intel has unlawfully maintained its monopoly for more than a decade by engaging in a relentless, worldwide campaign to coerce customers to refrain from dealing with its rivals.

A damning accusation, this, but one supported by some anecdotal evidence. In 2000, for example, Michael Capellas, then chief executive of Compaq Computer, allegedly told AMD that Intel had withheld the delivery of some microprocessors he needed for servers because of Compaq's relationship with AMD. He told AMD he would stop buying from it, saying he "had a gun to his head." And in 2004, Gateway officials told AMD that Intel "beat them into guacamole'' in retaliation for their limited dealings with its rival. These are but two incidents in a list that includes similar acts of coercion by Intel involving 38 other computer makers, distributors and retailers, and it paints a disturbing portrait of the chipmaker. In a statement, AMD Chief Executive Hector Ruiz said, "Customers deserve freedom of choice and the benefits of innovation -- and these have been stolen away in the microprocessor market. Whether through high prices or monopoly profits, fewer choices in the marketplace or barriers to innovation -- people from Osaka to Frankfurt to Chicago pay the price in cash everyday for Intel's monopoly abuses."



Judge likens Microsoft to Tonya Harding:

http://archives.cnn.com/2002/TECH/biztech/12/06/microsoft.sun.ap/



http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/12004804.htm


http://www.eweek.com/article2/0%2C1759%2C1832180%2C00.asp


http://eetimes.com/news/latest/showArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=XYMPRTY0VZY1OQSNDBESK HA?articleID=164903291


http://www.amd.com/us-en/Weblets/0,,7832_12670_12684,00.html?redir=CORBF02


(*) (*) GO AMD, GO! GO AMD, GO!! Too bad the three major computing operating systems have been runnning for so very long on Intel CPU's. Still - with the EU and others around the world sick of Intel's monopoly & doing something about it legally - Avanced Micro Devices certainly has a chance to break out and capture some of Intel's 90 percent marketchare. (h) (h) AMD rocks and Intel sux. ;)


(k) (k) ,

SL & DTB

[sweetlady]

Q U O T E D


"If, for example, I call up a pizzeria and ask whether they offer delivery, both common sense and common "usage" would prevent them from answering: "No, we do not offer delivery -- but if you order a pizza from us, we'll bake it for you and then bring it to your house." The logical response to this would be something on the order of, "so, you do offer delivery." But our pizza-man may continue to deny the obvious and explain, paraphrasing the FCC and the Court: "No, even though we bring the pizza to your house, we are not actually 'offering' you delivery, because the delivery that we provide to our end users is 'part and parcel' of our pizzeria-pizza-at-home service and is 'integral to its other capabilities.' " Any reasonable customer would conclude at that point that his interlocutor was either crazy or following some too-clever-by-half legal advice.


In short, for the inputs of a finished service to qualify as the objects of an "offer" (as that term is reasonably understood), it is perhaps a sufficient, but surely not a necessary, condition that the seller offer separately "each discrete input that is necessary to providing ... a finished service," ante, at 19. The pet store may have a policy of selling puppies only with leashes, but any customer will say that it does offer puppies -- because a leashed puppy is still a puppy, even though it is not offered on a "stand-alone" basis.


Despite the Court's mighty labors to prove otherwise, the telecommunications component of cable-modem service retains such ample independent identity that it must be regarded as being on offer -- especially when seen from the perspective of the consumer or the end user."


-- Supreme Court Justice Anton Scalia taps The Big Book of Analogies for his dissent in the Brand X case



http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=US&amp;vol=000&amp;invol=04-277&amp;friend=washingtonpost#dissent1



(*) (*) :o :o :| :| ;) ;)


(k) (k) 's

SL & DTB

[sweetlady]

Prosecutors want the judge presiding over the Bernie Ebbers case to throw the biggest book in the law library at the former WorldCom CEO. Federal prosecutors are seeking a maximum, 85-year sentence for Ebbers, who was convicted on nine counts of fraud in March for orchestrating the $11 billion accounting fraud that drove WorldCom into bankruptcy (see "In bold variation, defense will argue that Ebbers is a twinkie" and "Ex-WorldCom CEO adds 'Prison Etiquette' to Amazon wish list"). In seeking what is essentially a life sentence, prosecutors are asking the court to turn a deaf ear to Ebber's defense teams call for leniency on the grounds of their client's remarkable "kindness to others." "The enormity of the crimes that Ebbers committed cannot be overstated: The fraud at WorldCom was the largest securities fraud in history," prosecutors wrote. "Along with Enron, the name WorldCom has become synonymous with fraud. ... Case law is legion with convicted felons who, other than their criminal conduct, appear to be otherwise compassionate and praiseworthy people. The Sentencing Guidelines do not, however, authorize a downward departure merely because a defendant has shown kindness, even considerable kindness, to others or because he or she has had an otherwise successful career."


http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/12005577.htm


http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/business/columnists/gmsv/10739510.htm


http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/business/columnists/gmsv/11142112.htm



(h) (h) Too funny:
http://www.corporatecrimereporter.com/ebbers062805.htm



;) ;) ,

SL & DTB

[sweetlady]

June 28, 2005

Remembrance of Things Future: The Mystery of Time

By DENNIS OVERBYE

There was a conference for time travelers at M.I.T. earlier this spring.

I'm still hoping to attend, and although the odds are slim, they are apparently not zero despite the efforts and hopes of deterministically minded physicists who would like to eliminate the possibility of your creating a paradox by going back in time and killing your grandfather.

"No law of physics that we know of prohibits time travel," said Dr. J. Richard Gott, a Princeton astrophysicist.

Dr. Gott, author of the 2001 book "Time Travel in Einstein's Universe: The Physical Possibilities of Travel Through Time," is one of a small breed of physicists who spend part of their time (and their research grants) thinking about wormholes in space, warp drives and other cosmic constructions, that "absurdly advanced civilizations" might use to travel through time.

It's not that physicists expect to be able to go back and attend Woodstock, drop by the Bern patent office to take Einstein to lunch, see the dinosaurs or investigate John F. Kennedy's assassination.

In fact, they're pretty sure those are absurd dreams and are all bemused by the fact that they can't say why. They hope such extreme theorizing could reveal new features, gaps or perhaps paradoxes or contradictions in the foundations of Physics As We Know It and point the way to new ideas.

"Traversable wormholes are primarily useful as a 'gedanken experiment' to explore the limitations of general relativity," said Dr. Francisco Lobo of the University of Lisbon.

If general relativity, Einstein's theory of gravity and space-time, allows for the ability to go back in time and kill your grandfather, asks Dr. David Z. Albert, a physicist and philosopher at Columbia University, "how can it be a logically consistent theory?"

In his recent book "The Universe in a Nutshell," Dr. Stephen W. Hawking wrote, "Even if it turns out that time travel is impossible, it is important that we understand why it is impossible."

When it comes to the nature of time, physicists are pretty much at as much of a loss as the rest of us who seem hopelessly swept along in its current. The mystery of time is connected with some of the thorniest questions in physics, as well as in philosophy, like why we remember the past but not the future, how causality works, why you can't stir cream out of your coffee or put perfume back in a bottle.

But some theorists think that has to change.

Just as Einstein needed to come up with a new concept of time in order to invent relativity 100 years ago this year, so physicists say that a new insight into time - or beyond it - may be required to crack profound problems like how the universe began, what happens at the center of black hole or how to marry relativity and quantum theory into a unified theory of nature.

Space and time, some quantum gravity theorists say, are most likely a sort of illusion - or less sensationally, an "approximation" - doomed to be replaced by some more fundamental idea. If only they could think of what that idea is.

"By convention there is space, by convention time," Dr. David J. Gross, director of the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics and a winner of last year's Nobel Prize, said recently, paraphrasing the Greek philosopher Democritus, "in reality there is. ... ?" his voice trailing off.

The issues raised by time travel are connected to these questions, Dr. Lawrence Krauss, a physicist at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland and author of the book "The Physics of Star Trek," said. "The minute you have time travel you have paradoxes," Dr. Krauss said, explaining that if you can go backward in time you confront fundamental issues like cause and effect or the meaning of your own identity if there can be two of you at once. A refined theory of time would have to explain "how a sensible world could result from something so nonsensical."

"That's why time travel is philosophically important and has captivated the public, who care about these paradoxes," he said.

At stake, said Dr. Albert, the philosopher and author of his own time book, "Time and Chance," is "what kind of view science presents us of the world."

"Physics gets time wrong, and time is the most familiar thing there is," Dr. Albert said.

We all feel time passing in our bones, but ever since Galileo and Newton in the 17th century began using time as a coordinate to help chart the motion of cannonballs, time - for physicists - has simply been an "addendum in the address of an event," Dr. Albert said.

"There is a feeling in philosophy," he said, "that this picture leaves no room for locutions about flow and the passage of time we experience."

Then there is what physicists call "the arrow of time" problem. The fundamental laws of physics don't care what direction time goes, he pointed out. Run a movie of billiard balls colliding or planets swirling around in their orbits in reverse and nothing will look weird, but if you run a movie of a baseball game in reverse people will laugh.

Einstein once termed the distinction between past, present and future "a stubborn illusion," but as Dr. Albert said, "It's hard to imagine something more basic than the distinction between the future and the past."

The Birth of an Illusion

Space and time, the philosopher Augustine famously argued 1,700 years ago, are creatures of existence and the universe, born with it, not separately standing features of eternity. That is the same answer that Einstein came up with in 1915 when he finished his general theory of relativity.

That theory explains how matter and energy warp the geometry of space and time to produce the effect we call gravity. It also predicted, somewhat to Einstein's dismay, the expansion of the universe, which forms the basis of modern cosmology.

But Einstein's theory is incompatible, mathematically and philosophically, with the quirky rules known as quantum mechanics that describe the microscopic randomness that fills this elegantly curved expanding space-time. According to relativity, nature is continuous, smooth and orderly, in quantum theory the world is jumpy and discontinuous. The sacred laws of physics are correct only on average.

Until the pair are married in a theory of so-called quantum gravity, physics has no way to investigate what happens in the Big Bang, when the entire universe is so small that quantum rules apply.

Looked at closely enough, with an imaginary microscope that could see lengths down to 10-33 centimeters, quantum gravity theorists say, even ordinary space and time dissolve into a boiling mess that Dr. John Wheeler, the Princeton physicist and phrasemaker, called "space-time foam." At that level of reality, which exists underneath all our fingernails, clocks and rulers as we know them cease to exist.

"Everything we know about stops at the Big Bang, the Big Crunch," said Dr. Raphael Bousso, a physicist at the University of California, Berkeley.

What happens to time at this level of reality is anybody's guess. Dr. Lee Smolin, of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario, said, "There are several different, very different, ideas about time in quantum gravity."

One view, he explained, is that space and time "emerge" from this foamy substrate when it is viewed at larger scales. Another is that space emerges but that time or some deeper relations of cause and effect are fundamental.

Dr. Fotini Markopoulou Kalamara of the Perimeter Institute described time as, if not an illusion, an approximation, "a bit like the way you can see the river flow in a smooth way even though the individual water molecules follow much more complicated patterns."

She added in an e-mail message: "I have always thought that there has to be some basic fundamental notion of causality, even if it doesn't look at all like the one of the space-time we live in. I can't see how to get causality from something that has none; neither have I ever seen anyone succeed in doing so."

Physicists say they have a sense of how space can emerge, because of recent advances in string theory, the putative theory of everything, which posits that nature is composed of wriggling little strings.

Calculations by Dr. Juan Maldacena of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and by others have shown how an extra dimension of space can pop mathematically into being almost like magic, the way the illusion of three dimensions can appear in the holograms on bank cards. But string theorists admit they don't know how to do the same thing for time yet.

"Time is really difficult," said Dr. Cumrun Vafa, a Harvard string theorist. "We have not made much progress on the emergence of time. Once we make progress we will make progress on the early universe, on high energy physics and black holes.

"We are out on a limb trying to understand what's going on here."

Dr. Bousso, an expert on holographic theories of space-time, said that in general relativity time gets no special treatment.

He said he expected both time and space to break down, adding, "We really just don't know what's going to go."

"There is a lot of mysticism about time," Dr. Bousso said. "Time is what a clock measures. What a clock measures is more interesting than you thought."

A Brief History of Time Travel

"If we could go faster than light, we could telegraph into the past," Einstein once said. According to the theory of special relativity - which he proposed in 1905 and which ushered E=mc² into the world and set the speed of light as the cosmic speed limit - such telegraphy is not possible, and there is no way of getting back to the past.

But, somewhat to Einstein's surprise, in general relativity it is possible to beat a light beam across space. That theory, which Einstein finished in 1916, said that gravity resulted from the warping of space-time geometry by matter and energy, the way a bowling ball sags a trampoline. And all this warping and sagging can create shortcuts through space-time.

In 1949, Kurt Gödel, the Austrian logician and mathematician then at the Institute for Advanced Study, showed that in a rotating universe, according to general relativity, there were paths, technically called "closed timelike curves," you could follow to get back to the past. But it has turned out that the universe does not rotate very much, if at all.

Most scientists, including Einstein, resisted the idea of time travel until 1988 when Dr. Kip Thorne, a gravitational theorist at the California Institute of Technology, and two of his graduate students, Dr. Mike Morris and Dr. Ulvi Yurtsever, published a pair of papers concluding that the laws of physics may allow you to use wormholes, which are like tunnels through space connecting distant points, to travel in time.

These holes, technically called Einstein-Rosen bridges, have long been predicted as a solution of Einstein's equations. But physicists dismissed them because calculations predicted that gravity would slam them shut.

Dr. Thorne was inspired by his friend, the late Cornell scientist and author Carl Sagan, who was writing the science fiction novel "Contact," later made into a Jodie Foster movie, and was looking for a way to send his heroine, Eleanor Arroway, across the galaxy. Dr. Thorne and his colleagues imagined that such holes could be kept from collapsing and thus maintained to be used as a galactic subway, at least in principle, by threading them with something called Casimir energy, (after the Dutch physicist Hendrik Casimir) which is a sort of quantum suction produced when two parallel metal plates are placed very close together. According to Einstein's equations, this suction, or negative pressure, would have an antigravitational effect, keeping the walls of the wormhole apart.

If one mouth of a wormhole was then grabbed by a spaceship and taken on a high-speed trip, according to relativity, its clock would run slow compared with the other end of the wormhole. So the wormhole would become a portal between two different times as well as places.

Dr. Thorne later said he had been afraid that the words "time travel" in the second paper's title would create a sensation and tarnish his students' careers, and he had forbidden Caltech to publicize it.

In fact, their paper made time travel safe for serious scientists, and other theorists, including Dr. Frank Tipler of Tulane University and Dr. Hawking, jumped in. In 1991, for example, Dr. Gott of Princeton showed how another shortcut through space-time could be manufactured using pairs cosmic strings - dense tubes of primordial energy not to be confused with the strings of string theory, left over by the Big Bang in some theories of cosmic evolution - rushing past each other and warping space around them.

Harnessing the Dark Side

These speculations have been bolstered (not that time machine architects lack imagination) with the unsettling discovery that the universe may be full of exactly the kind of antigravity stuff needed to grow and prop open a wormhole. Some mysterious "dark energy," astronomers say, is pushing space apart and accelerating the expansion of the universe. The race is on to measure this energy precisely and find out what it is.

Among the weirder and more disturbing explanations for this cosmic riddle is something called phantom energy, which is so virulently antigravitational that it would eventually rip planets, people and even atoms apart, ending everything. As it happens this bizarre stuff would also be perfect for propping open a wormhole, Dr. Lobo of Lisbon recently pointed out. "This certainly is an interesting prospect for an absurdly advanced civilization, as phantom energy probably comprises of 70 percent of the universe," Dr. Lobo wrote in an e-mail message. Dr. Sergey Sushkov of Kazan State Pedagogical University in Russia has made the same suggestion.

In a paper posted on the physics Web site arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0502099, Dr. Lobo suggested that as the universe was stretched and stretched under phantom energy, microscopic holes in the quantum "space-time foam" might grow to macroscopic usable size. "One could also imagine an advanced civilization mining the cosmic fluid for phantom energy necessary to construct and sustain a traversable wormhole," he wrote.

Such a wormhole he even speculated, could be used to escape the "big rip" in which a phantom energy universe will eventually end.

But nobody knows if phantom, or exotic, energy is really allowed in nature and most physicists would be happy if it is not. Its existence would lead to paradoxes, like negative kinetic energy, where something could lose energy by speeding up, violating what is left of common sense in modern physics.

Dr. Krauss said, "From the point of view of realistic theories, phantom energy just doesn't exist."

But such exotic stuff is not required for all time machines, Dr. Gott's cosmic strings for example. In another recent paper, Dr. Amos Ori of the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa describes a time machine that he claims can be built by moving around colossal masses to warp the space inside a doughnut of regular empty space into a particular configuration, something an advanced civilization may be able to do in 100 or 200 years.

The space inside the doughnut, he said, will then naturally evolve according to Einstein's laws into a time machine.

Dr. Ori admits that he doesn't know if his machine would be stable. Time machines could blow up as soon as you turned them on, say some physicists, including Dr. Hawking, who has proposed what he calls the "chronology protection" conjecture to keep the past safe for historians. Random microscopic fluctuations in matter and energy and space itself, they argue, would be amplified by going around and around boundaries of the machine or the wormhole, and finally blow it up.

Dr. Gott and his colleague Dr. Li-Xin Li have shown that there are at least some cases where the time machine does not blow up. But until gravity marries quantum theory, they admit, nobody knows how to predict exactly what the fluctuations would be.

"That's why we really need to know about quantum gravity," Dr. Gott said. "That's one reason people are interested in time travel."

Saving Grandpa

But what about killing your grandfather? In a well-ordered universe, that would be a paradox and shouldn't be able to happen, everybody agrees.

That was the challenge that Dr. Joe Polchinski, now at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara, Calif., issued to Dr. Thorne and his colleagues after their paper was published.

Being a good physicist, Dr. Polchinski phrased the problem in terms of billiard balls. A billiard ball, he suggested, could roll into one end of a time machine, come back out the other end a little earlier and collide with its earlier self, thereby preventing itself from entering the time machine to begin with.

Dr. Thorne and two students, Fernando Echeverria and Gunnar Klinkhammer, concluded after months of mathematical struggle that there was a logically consistent solution to the billiard matricide that Dr. Polchinski had set up. The ball would come back out of the time machine and deliver only a glancing blow to itself, altering its path just enough so that it would still hit the time machine. When it came back out, it would be aimed just so as to deflect itself rather than hitting full on. And so it would go like a movie with a circular plot.

In other words, it's not a paradox if you go back in time and save your grandfather. And, added Dr. Polchinski, "It's not a paradox if you try to shoot your grandfather and miss."

"The conclusion is somewhat satisfying," Dr. Thorne wrote in his book "Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein's Outrageous Legacy." "It suggests that the laws of physics might accommodate themselves to time machines fairly nicely."

Dr. Polchinski agreed. "I was making the point that the grandfather paradox had nothing to do with free will, and they found a nifty resolution," he said in an e-mail message, adding, nevertheless, that his intuition still tells him time machines would lead to paradoxes.

Dr. Bousso said, "Most of us would consider it quite satisfactory if the laws of quantum gravity forbid time travel."



(*) (*) I'll worry about time travel after I solve the problem which is my biggest interest: being in two places at once! :| :| ;) ;)


(f) (f) 's

Sweetlady and Doc the Boxer (listening to approaching thunder.... :(

[sweetlady]

LOOSE WIRE

By JEREMY WAGSTAFF WSJ

A New Way of Listening

June 24, 2005

Podcasting is one of those ideas that didn't exist a few months ago but is now so commonplace that you wonder why we didn't think of it earlier. For those of you still in the dark, Podcasting is basically a way to syndicate audio files -- recordings, to you and me -- on the Internet in a way that makes it easy for listeners to find and get what they want, when they want. The recordings themselves are in the popular MP3 format, meaning you can transfer them to your MP3 player or iPod. Hence the term podcasting. The new bit isn't the file format, but the way you can subscribe to a particular podcasting service, in exactly the same way you can subscribe to an RSS feed, as I explained a few weeks back1. Think of it as radio on demand: being able to listen to more or less anything you like wherever you like, whenever you like.

Podcasting has taken off in a big way. Now everyone seems to be doing it, from one-man operations to the BBC. Texas-based consumer researcher the Diffusion Group last week predicted the number of people listening to podcasts would rise to 57 million by the end of the decade from 4.5 million this year. While it is probably a good idea to take such figures with a pinch of salt, there is no question that podcasting has caught the imagination of a large and varied group of people. One online directory, Podcast.net2, lists more than 1,400 podcasts in the entertainment category alone, ranging from a show entirely dedicated to "the screen's greatest team, Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn" to a live music jam.

The Long Tail

Why so popular? Well a lot of people have MP3 digital music players already, and most of them know how to get music onto it from their computer, either by grabbing it from a CD or by downloading it. Getting a podcast from your computer to your MP3 player or iPod is no different. Finding the podcast material online is a little different, but it still involves a technique that a growing number of people are familiar with: RSS, short for Really Simple Syndication, is the tool for subscribing to blogs and stories from newspapers and other Web sites. Recording podcasts and turning them into RSS feeds is also easy, although it could be simpler.

I suspect there's another factor at play in podcasting's popularity. Users are beginning to look at the Internet and technology a little differently. Blogs -- online journals, or Web logs -- have made it really, really easy to build impressive looking Web sites with little or no knowledge of HTML, the fiddly code behind a Web page. Digital photography and video cameras have gotten cheaper, easier to use, and, perhaps most importantly, more closely tied to the Internet, so posting a photograph from, say, your cellphone to a Web page doesn't involve cables, complicated formatting or a degree in computer science. All this multimedia dexterity has helped blur the distinction between consumer and producer: Now anybody who wants to can be a publisher.

This is having another important effect. Before, during the dot.com boom, everyone was looking for the money. Everyone was thinking big scale. Nowadays, not everyone thinks like that. The buzzword du jour is "the long tail," shorthand for the idea that not every business needs to worry about finding a huge audience for its product, (the fat end of the long tail) but instead could find success in catering to smaller, more specialized or localized chunks of the audience (the thin end of the long tail).

And while many people are still looking to monetize this long but thin tail, those actually in the long tail seem to be more interested in just doing stuff for other people interested in their slice of the long tail. Like blogging. Like posting pictures to a site such as Flickr.com. Like podcasting. Why should I care if the podcast I produce on my obsession with the lesser spotted woodpecker (Dendrocopos minor to its fans) is listened to by only 10 people if they are all fellow enthusiasts?

Museum Guides

In any case, podcasting isn't just radio broadcasting about woodland-based birds. Podcasting offers a way to deliver all sorts of interesting audio content, from commentaries of tours, museums, movies, books and airline flights to lectures and schoolwork.

Take the kids of Musselburgh Grammar School, just east of Scotland's Edinburgh, who use podcasting to make an entertainment show for parents and the local community or create audio guides to the town in French and German for tourists, while the teachers use the medium to create language-listening exercises. That's just the start, says Ewan McIntosh, a language teacher at the school. "The kids keep having other ideas on how it could be used."

Or consider Frank De Graeve, a 26-year-old Belgian whose Web site (www.podguides.net5) is dedicated to creating and collecting audio-walking guides. Using MP3 players that also display pictures, such as Apple's iPod Photo, users can see a map of where they are, and quickly jump to podcasts that match numbered locations.

This is all just a beginning. Audio guides (what are sometimes called sound seeing tours) could offer extra information or instruction about more or less anything you are doing, from exercising to cooking to watching a movie. The television series "Battlestar Galactica" even offers podcast commentaries by its producer of each episode, to be listened to while watching the show. I can see a lot of other people offering similar commentaries -- from erudite observations to trivia -- to other TV shows, movies, sports events and concerts, indeed anything that can be synchronized (railway trips? airline flights?).

I'm sure a lot of current podcasters will lose interest in the medium. But as it matures and users stop thinking about just recreating a radio station in their bedroom and explore the outer limits of what can be done, I reckon podcasting will become as exciting and fulfilling a way to get information as blogs are now. Like blogs, people will agonize about how to make money from it while others go ahead and do interesting things with it.
Loose Connections

Tapping Into the Sounds

How to get started with podcasts? Simple enough: Podcasts are simply MP3 files, so if you already have an MP3 player, and the software to listen to them on your computer, you're ready to go. If you have an iPod and are running Apple's iTunes software then you're in luck as podcast downloading software work closely with it. Check out iPodder (www.ipodder.com6), which offers an online directory of podcasts as well as an easy way to find, subscribe to and organize podcasts. Apple has promised to build even better podcasting services into later versions of the software, but until that day comes there's still a bit of fiddliness involved, especially if you're using an MP3 player that isn't an iPod. If you aren't using iPodder, or can't find podcasts you might be interested in, check out directories such as PodNova (www.podnova.com7), Podscope (www.podscope.com8) or Podcast Networks (www.podcast.net9).

Want to make a podcast? Cameron Reilly, who runs the Australia-based Podcast Network (www.thepodcastnetwork.com10), a collection of podcasts made in-house, recommends Windows users check out this article: http://tinyurl.com/ar62711, and Mac users this one from the MacDevCenter: http://tinyurl.com/8etvz12. More podcast resources at my blog, loosewireblog.com13.


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


Carpe Diem!

Sweetlady and Doc the Boxer (and I need to get going now to sedate him if the thunderstorm doesn't pass quickly..... poor guy....)

[sweetlady]

Two Insightful (and difficult to accurately answer) questions:

New Notre Dame president takes over

Friday, July 1, 2005; Posted: 11:06 a.m. EDT (15:06 GMT)

SOUTH BEND, Indiana (AP) -- John Jenkins had two questions on his mind when he received his philosophy degree from the University of Notre Dame in 1976: "What kind of life would be deeply meaningful? What kind of life would be so important to me that I'd be willing to give my life for it?"

The answer dawned as he pursued a master's degree at Notre Dame: a life in the priesthood. A life dedicated to teaching young people -- a life at Notre Dame.

He became the school's 17th president Friday -- just the third man since 1952 to lead perhaps the nation's best-known Roman Catholic university.

Jenkins, 51, takes over at a time of enormous growth. Student and faculty numbers have risen steadily, the university's endowment has grown from $456 million in 1987 to $3 billion this year, and the campus has expanded its fabled football stadium and added new research laboratories, student housing and a performing arts center.

Much of that growth occurred under the Rev. Edward Malloy, who led the university for 18 years. He succeeded the Rev. Theodore Hesburgh, who held the job for 35 years and oversaw key changes, including the admission of female students, while serving as an adviser to popes and presidents.

Jenkins doesn't dwell on the legacy he inherits.

"If I thought about those things, I'd get very nervous. My approach is to think one year at a time, one week at a time, even one day at a time," Jenkins said. "What do we have to do today to fulfill the mission of Notre Dame? I just don't allow myself to think a lot about those long tenures of my predecessors."

Like most of his predecessors, Jenkins is a Notre Dame graduate. Hesburgh attended just two years, but the last president not to attend the university was the Rev. Thomas E. Walsh (1881-93).

Jenkins' familiarity with the university will serve him well, Malloy said.

"It's helpful in a university of this kind to be familiar with and comfortable in the world of the academy," Malloy said.

Andrew McKenna, a longtime board of trustees member, agreed.

"It was clear to us that he understood the Notre Dame culture. He went to school there, he was ordained a priest there, he taught there, he was a member of the provost's office there, so a lot of things about the place he understands," he said. "I think what Father Jenkins will have to do is get his own stamp on the university."

Jenkins said he will wait until his inauguration ceremonies September 22-23 to outline his goals.

"I think we're at a moment in Notre Dame's history where we have the potential to move ahead dramatically -- it's a great university -- while remaining faithful to the Catholic character of the university," he said. "I think that's the thing we have to focus on."

Jenkins said the Catholic character should permeate every part of life at Notre Dame, whether it is studying religion, literature or technology.

"At Notre Dame you can have conversations that bring in faith and morality as well as the kind of technical or scientific or intellectual issues in an integrated away," he said. "We are really distinctive in that and it's a tremendous contribution we can make to society and the world."

The approach also can cause controversy, as Malloy discovered when he allowed "The Vagina Monologues" and a Queer Film Festival on campus. The decision, which Malloy never discussed publicly, drew criticism from Bishop John D'Arcy of the Fort Wayne-South Bend Diocese and others. Supporters argued that academic freedom is necessary on a college campus, even a Catholic college campus.

Jenkins said he's prepared for criticism as he puts his stamp on the university.

"Father Hesburgh gave me great advice on this," Jenkins said. "He said, 'Look, be thoughtful, take in all the points of view, take in all the evidence you can, then make the best decision you can, then don't worry about it. Don't listen to the criticism, don't listen to the praise, just make the best decision you can.' That's what I'm going to do."


http://www.cnn.com/2005/EDUCATION/07/01/notre.dame.jenkins.ap/index.html


(a) (a)

(k) (k) 's,

SL & DTB

[sweetlady]

1. http://www.americanprogress.org/site/c.biJRJ8OVF/b.8473/


2. http://www.ifex.org/


3. http://mediacitizen.blogspot.com/ (Coffee warning on top story headline....)


4. http://www.newshounds.us/ (Their motto is " We watch Fox Network so that You don't have to!")


5. http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/


6. http://www.prospect.org/web/index.ww


7. A Feminist Folk Hero (Sort Of): Sandra Day O'Connor managed to both support and curtail conservative social restrictions.

By Adele M. Stan Web Exclusive: 07.01.05

The announcement of Sandra Day O'Connor's resignation from the Supreme Court heralds a dark road ahead for women -- not just because she will undoubtedly be replaced by some reactionary right-winger but because women will lose a genuine advocate and protector on the high court.

When, in 1981, Ronald Reagan introduced the nation to Sandra Day O'Connor, his first nominee to the Supreme Court, feminists looked on warily. It figured, we thought, that the increasingly anti-woman GOP would be the first to land a woman on the high court. Would she turn out to be a Margaret Thatcher -- an iron lady sent to do the right's bidding?

In fact, she turned out to be anything but, often foiling right-wing justices by joining the somewhat liberal wing in its decisions. It was O'Connor who consistently upheld the rights of women to labor free of sexual harassment in the workplace, joining the majority in the Court's precedent-setting 1986 decision Meritor Savings Bank v. Vinson, the case that established the principle of "the reasonable woman," which, whatever its legal weaknesses, at least affirmed the existence of such a creature. In subsequent sexual-harassment cases, O'Connor fiercely asserted that sexual harassment is a form of discrimination, and wrote the majority opinion in Harris v. Forklift Systems, the 1993 decision that made it easier for plaintiffs to make a sexual-harassment claim.

Yet O'Connor is hardly a feminist folk hero. If anything, she has functioned as the "yeah, but" justice -- willing to give her right-wing colleagues on the bench a good bit more than an inch, but usually stopping them far short of making the mile mark.

On their merits, O'Connor's opinions appear to reflect a mind at odds with itself -- or, perhaps, to reflect the old sexist saw about a woman's prerogative. In the 1986 decision that upheld Georgia's sodomy law, O'Connor joined the majority. In the 2003 decision that struck down a similar law in Texas, O'Connor concurred with that outcome while refusing to join the majority in overturning the Court's previous decision in the Georgia case.

She sees herself as a fierce defender of the First Amendment's establishment clause, leading her to agree with the prohibition of a municipal display of a single Christmastime nativity crèche. However, she does not agree that religious expressions should be struck from the public square, as shown by her embrace of a government display that included symbols from several different religions -- including a crèche. While the principle therein may be clear to O'Connor, it has been less than obvious to those following the Court.

She has upheld affirmative-action programs while narrowing their scope, and forestalled the overturning of Roe v. Wade while granting the states significant powers to place certain obstacles in the way of that choice, including a 24-hour waiting period and parental notification requirements for minors. Yet her refusal to concur with a spousal-notification clause in a restrictive Pennsylvania law that her opinion helped to uphold saved women from that onerous precedent, writing that such a provision would give their husbands undue power over women.

However frustrating the figure of Justice O'Connor has been for feminists, she has been downright infuriating to the right wing. Until recently, there was no Supreme Court justice more loathed and more maligned on the right than O'Connor. She represents everything they abhor and fear: a fully empowered woman who often stops the boys from having their way. And as the Court's "swing vote," O'Connor's unpredictability and apparent lack of ideology have driven those angry fellows to distraction.

And therein lies an authentic, homegrown sort of feminist defiance in the legacy of the Supreme Court's first female justice. However inconsistent her opinions may appear on their face, a consistent theme runs throughout the contexts in which they were rendered: Sandra Day O'Connor has time and time again acted as a hedge on male hegemony. In the Constitution as originally written, women have virtually no rights -- and conservatives such as Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas have made quite explicit their desire to return to the original Constitution. O'Connor's deep-rooted aversion to rigidity may be the single most important factor in the Constitution's survival as a living document in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. It remains to be seen whether that bulwark will prove O'Connor's legacy -- or only a temporary redoubt.

Adele M. Stan is the author of Debating Sexual Correctness: Pornography, Sexual Harassment, Date Rape and the Politics of Sexual Equality, and the author of the blog AddieStan.com

http://www.prospect.org/web/printfriendly-view.ww?id=9930

Other articles on their main web page: http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewWeb&articleId=9930

***************************
8. A Regular Antidote to American Mainstream Media compiled and edited
by Tom Engelhardt:

http://www.tomdispatch.com/


9. http://www.truthout.com/



(*) (l) (l)

(f) (f) ,

Sweetlady and Doc the Boxer

[sweetlady]

Up in Smoke? Medical marijuana is now fair game in every state.

by Philip Dawdy

Three weeks ago, it looked as though the hopes of medical marijuana users around the country would go up in smoke. On Monday, June 6, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that medical marijuana laws passed by 10 states, including Washington, didn't matter and that the federal government and federal law enforcement agencies could proceed with using federal drug laws to bust medical marijuana users. Now, it appears that medical marijuana users will receive different treatment depending on where they live—things have quickly gotten worse in California, but Washington is experiencing no change as yet.

So far, the feds have made a great show of going after so-called clubs selling pot to patients in California. On Wednesday, June 22, the feds busted 13 people in raids of three clubs in Northern California.

But in Washington there are no clubs and there is no official distribution network for getting pot to medical marijuana patients. Neither is there a state-operated medical marijuana registry as in Oregon. Oddly, because Washington's system is underground, that may work to medical marijuana patients' advantage, even though it clouds the issue in other respects.

Both U.S. Attorney for Western Washington John McKay and the local outpost of the federal Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) would have to get very interested in busting small-time users, who also happen to be people enduring cancer or AIDS or chronic pain, in order to get at medical marijuana.

For now, it looks as though that won't happen.

"Our view is that this [court ruling] does not change the way we do our job," says Emily Langlie, a spokesperson for McKay. "The emphasis of this office is on complex drug organizations and organized crime dealing in drugs."

In the past, local attorneys say that, in the Seattle area at least, the feds have not messed with medical marijuana users very much, if at all.

The local DEA office did not return a request for comment.

Nationwide, part of the response to the ruling has come from states' rights advocates, who see the Supreme Court justices operating like Big Brother and Big Sister. In Oregon, state Attorney General Hardy Myers issued an opinion that the state could continue to issue medical marijuana cards on the grounds that principles of states' rights weren't stripped from the U.S. Constitution by one court ruling.

Rob McKenna, Washington state attorney general, has largely remained mute on the tension between Washington state statute and federal law. "The decision has no bearing on the operation of our statute," says Janelle Guthrie, his spokesperson.

All of that sounds like reassurance that the winking and nodding given to medical marijuana in this state since the passage of Initiative 692 in 1998 will continue.

Not everyone trusts leaving it to benign neglect, however, because there's nowhere to turn for aid and comfort now that the feds have been given full permission to go after medical marijuana users.

"For the court to say to us, 'Go to Congress,' is about like telling me to go to my closet and talk to my sports coats," says Jeffrey Steinborn, a local attorney who defends pot patients.

"What I'd like to see is a strong statement in support of the statute" from McKenna, says Andy Ko with the Washington chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union. "There are a lot of prosecutors' offices that could use some guidance."

McKenna's office says there are no plans for McKenna to issue any opinion.

Ko says the real worry isn't with the feds right now but with prosecuting attorneys in Thurston, Stevens, and other more rural counties where they've prosecuted medical marijuana users in disregard of the state's medical marijuana law.


http://www.seattleweekly.com/features/0526/050629_news_drugwar.php


(k) (k) 's,

Sweetlady and Doc the Boxer

[sweetlady]

Review | posted June 23, 2005 (July 11, 2005 issue) The Nation
REVIEWED HERE:

The Life of Graham Greene: Volume 3, 1955-1991
by Norman Sherry

The Quiet American
by Graham Greene

"The Heart of the Matter":

by: Matt Steinglass

They killed him because he was too innocent to live. He was young and ignorant and silly and he got involved. He had no more of a notion than any of you what the whole affair's about, and you gave him money and York Harding's books on the East and said, "Go ahead. Win the East for Democracy." --The Quiet American

The cathedral at Phat Diem in northern Vietnam, which Graham Greene visited twice in 1951 and where he set one of the more memorable scenes in The Quiet American, is today a placid and mildly kitschy tourist attraction. Its claim to fame is its extraordinary architecture, which resembles a sort of Franco-Sino-Vietnamese pagoda: sloping tile roofs with up-curving dragons at the corners, wooden colonnades and carved stone reliefs of bamboo and lotus flowers. The altar is topped with icons of the Vietnamese martyrs slaughtered by Emperor Tu Duc in the 1850s during the anti-Catholic purges, which would serve as a casus belli for French colonization. Up until 1951, in a peculiarly medieval arrangement, Phat Diem was essentially ruled by its bishop, who had his own small army. But in June 1951 that army collapsed in the face of a Communist Vietminh offensive and was replaced by French troops. In early December 1951, when Greene paid his second visit, the town had nearly been overrun by a surprise attack; the Vietminh had infiltrated under cover of the annual festival of Our Lady of Fatima. French paratroopers were retaking the town, block by block.

Norman Sherry, in his massive and recently completed biography, meticulously shows where Greene drew the inspiration for each of the elements in the Phat Diem chapter of The Quiet American. On Greene's first visit, in January 1951, he met a certain Father Willich, an "unpleasant" Belgian who doubled as an amateur surgeon. In the novel, this becomes an encounter atop the cathedral's bell tower with a disillusioned priest in a bloodstained cassock, who responds to the narrator Fowler's distaste for the confessional with a dry barb: "I don't suppose you've ever had much to regret." The backdrop to this conversation, meanwhile, is drawn from Greene's second visit: mortar fire bursting across the "Low Country landscape" of rice paddies, canals and church towers, and in the distance a supply plane circling over the spectacular limestone mountains of Ninh Binh.

Later Fowler, a world-weary British journalist, accompanies a French patrol across a canal full of bodies, like "an Irish stew containing too much meat." They end up accidentally shooting a woman and her young child. These horrible incidents in fact happened to Greene, who described them in an article for Paris Match. The only major event in the Phat Diem scene to spring wholly from Greene's imagination seems to be the entrance of the dashingly naïve "quiet American" himself, Alden Pyle. He wakes Fowler at 3 in the morning, having foolhardily crossed enemy territory to do the gentlemanly thing by declaring that he has fallen in love with Fowler's Vietnamese mistress, Phuong, and intends to marry her. In later years, accused of skewing his reporting to conform to the aesthetic constraints of the seedy, fallen world critics called "Greeneland," Greene would insist that "the bodies in the canal at Phat Diem lay exactly as I said they did." And perhaps, like Fowler, Greene passed the evening at Phat Diem playing cards with hospitable French troops given to deadpan Hemingwayesque romanticism. ("You will see that Monsieur Fowlair has everything he needs, a candle, matches, a revolver.") But the "Greeneland" critics have a point. Greene's Phat Diem is a collage of elements that surface in his fiction again and again, whether he is writing about Vietnam, Mexico, Sierra Leone or Britain.

We have the doubting, doctrinally unsound priest, like the "whisky priest" of The Power and the Glory and the gossip-mongering Father Rank of The Heart of the Matter. We have the quasi-intentional murder of innocents, as in The Heart of the Matter, Brighton Rock and The Third Man. We have the extramarital affair involving one or more Catholics, as in The Heart of the Matter, The End of the Affair, The Comedians, The Honorary Consul and the play The Living Room. We have the wry blend of duty and cynicism among men in uniform, as in The Heart of the Matter and The Third Man. We have the amoral journalist, as in Orient Express and A Burnt-Out Case. We have the moral (and sexual) naïf who blunders into complicated situations, as in Brighton Rock, The Heart of the Matter, The Comedians, even the comic Our Man in Havana and Travels With My Aunt. We have the protagonist who wishes to die, as in Orient Express, Brighton Rock, The Heart of the Matter, A Burnt-Out Case and the play The Potting Shed. And ultimately, as in The Man Within, Brighton Rock, The Power and the Glory, The Heart of the Matter, The Third Man, The Fallen Idol, A Burnt-Out Case, The Comedians, Our Man in Havana and The Honorary Consul, we have the setup for a Judas-like betrayal.

The Quiet American continues to be read by many Americans as a Vietnam War prophecy. (The book "defined the tragedy taking shape for America long before the Marines arrived," as a writer in this magazine put it in 1977.) Greene's reportage may have been solid, and some of his analysis of the war was insightful. But what's remarkable is not so much how Greene's book foreshadowed America's war in Vietnam as how America's understanding of its war in Vietnam came to mirror Greeneland.

Greene invited Norman Sherry to write his biography in 1974, famously insisting that Sherry visit every place he had ever traveled to. It took Sherry twenty-eight years. Greene liked to compose elaborate practical jokes, and one suspects that he may have played a particularly cruel one by driving his biographer mad. In the biography's first volume, published in 1984, Sherry's prose is competent, his structuring often superb. By the third volume, published last fall, Sherry seems to have lost his grip. His hero worship of Greene has reached alarming proportions: Greene is an astute businessman, a brilliant spy, a Don Juan among women, a tireless champion of the weak and gadfly critic of the powerful.

Some of these claims may be only slight exaggerations, but Sherry's language is slavish. (On Greene as a publishing executive at The Bodley Head in the late 1950s: "Ever a watchdog for the firm"; "a dynamo"; "never stopped writing, never stopped thinking, never stopped reading"; his "suggestions often turned to gold"; "ever-vigilant"; "a sterling publisher.") He employs lines from his own bad poetry as epigrams. His attempts at the high style go woefully awry. (On his reaction to Greene's death: "I was, we all are, a close witness to death's perpetual annihilation of the womb-born." Lay on, MacDuff!) But while Sherry has his screwy passages, he does a fine job of teasing out the real-world material to which Greene would return in his fiction throughout his life.

Greene was born in 1904, the third son of the headmaster of a middle-ranked English public school called Berkhamsted. He was physically awkward and shy, and of his two companions in adolescence, one, a boy named Carter, tortured him ruthlessly. The other, a fellow victim named Wheeler, seems in some irreparable way to have betrayed Greene to Carter. Sherry convincingly argues that this planted the seeds of Greene's artistic obsession with treachery. By age 16 Greene had begun attempting suicide, and eventually entered psychiatric care. He made a willful recovery, partially conquering his shyness, but continued to suffer from intermittent depression, and while studying at Oxford--where he enjoyed a frenetic social and artistic life--he took to playing Russian roulette.

Sherry's greatest triumph in the biography's first volume is his depiction of the romance between Greene and his future wife, Vivien. Anyone who knows Greene chiefly from The Quiet American and The End of the Affair will have surmised that he had a failed but indissoluble Catholic marriage. So when we meet Vivien, a persnickety 19-year-old Catholic convert, we are prepared for the worst. Our apprehension deepens when we learn that Vivien has an almost pathological fear of sex, and that while Greene has fallen madly in love with her, she does not seem to reciprocate. He converts to Catholicism for her. When the desperate Greene suggests a sexless marriage, and Vivien responds with interest, we feel we are watching the slow unfolding of a particularly bloody train wreck.

Sherry shows us this sequence entirely from Graham's point of view, never using his interviews with Vivien herself. And so, when the two do marry in 1927, and Sherry at last gives us Vivien in her own words, we are shocked to find her perfectly lovely. She is perceptive, with a charming prose style that is the equal of Greene's; what's more, she is utterly devoted to him. They set up house in a village near Oxford and produce a pair of children, while Vivien throws herself into supporting her struggling author of a husband. And the biography suddenly opens out into a truly novelistic complexity, as we realize that it is not Vivien but Graham who will destroy the marriage. Graham is going to betray her.

He did so often, as his diaries reveal, at first mainly with prostitutes, later with lovers. The first serious mistress, Dorothy Glover, was the unprepossessing daughter of the landlady from whom he rented a writing studio, after literary success allowed the Greenes to move to London. Greene's affair with Dorothy deepened during the Blitz. He then joined the SIS, Britain's intelligence service, and shipped out to Sierra Leone for more than a year; by the end of this period Vivien was reduced to pleading letters in an increasingly desperate version of their earlier pet language. When Greene returned to London he was tired of Dorothy, but he kept on with her until after the war, out of guilt. He then fell madly in love with the stunning Catherine Walston, the American socialite wife of a wealthy British politician.

Vivien knew about both liaisons, but it wasn't until she intercepted a love letter from Graham to Walston, well after Graham had promised to end the affair, that she finally kicked him out. In one of Sherry's interviews with Vivien, it becomes clear that Graham had been telling Vivien about his affairs: At the end of the war, when he abruptly suggested having another child, according to Vivien, "I thought to myself, 'You've had all these women and you live with them and you say you love them and then come back after all these years to me, and expect to pick up everything just as it was.'"

Greene's relationship with Catherine was bizarre, passionate and, for him, convenient. She initially wrote to Greene as a fan, asking him to sponsor her in converting to Catholicism; his novel The Power and the Glory, about anti-Catholic persecution in revolutionary Mexico, had won her over. Catherine's husband, Harry, tacitly accepted her affair with Greene, as well as her numerous other lovers, including at least one of the Catholic priests who frequented the gatherings of artists and intellectuals at the Walston country estate. It was only when Greene, separated from Vivien, urged Catherine to divorce Harry and marry him that Harry began to set some limits, and the affair gradually tailed off. Even so, it lasted into the 1960s, and it may have been Greene's two-timing of Catherine with subsequent mistresses--notably the Swedish actress Anita Bjork and a French diplomat's wife named Yvonne Cloetta--that brought it to an end.

Sherry sees Catherine as the great love of Greene's life. He's clearly right that the affair with Catherine and the clash with Harry were the model for The End of the Affair, and that the affair with Dorothy Glover provided the emotional structure for The Heart of the Matter. In both novels, sexual love becomes a moral and theological problem that requires the protagonist to twist his ideas about God into paradoxical shapes; in the latter, the Catholic police officer Scobie, whose strongest emotion toward his wife and lover is pity, commits suicide, deliberately damning himself in the belief that he is sacrificing himself for them.

But it's also clear that the tortured reflections on sex and sin that define the emotional terrain of Greeneland are driven by Greene's own especially problematic relation to sexuality. No one finds it easy to reconcile sex and morality, but Greene found it harder than most. We're suddenly reminded of this halfway through Volume 3 in an interview with Greene's good friend, the critic Michael Meyer. Commenting on Greene's attraction to prostitutes, Meyer says he never understood it; it "seems to me like paying someone to let you beat them at tennis."

Greene's fame derives chiefly from his reputation as a traveler, an adventurer and an intellectual engagé. His early loves were adventure fiction and Joseph Conrad. His admiration for Conrad led him astray as a young writer; after a promising first novel, he published two self-absorbed Conradesque failures that left him, in 1932, on the brink of severe poverty. It was under this pressure that he finally hit his stride, in 1933, with Orient Express.

Greene considered Orient Express one of his "entertainments," which he contrasted with his more serious novels. In fact, the book is tougher-minded than many of the latter. It's here that Greene discovers the pitiless gaze that came to typify Greeneland. The characters are driven largely by selfish, concealed agendas; they are only inadvertently teased into sympathy or engagement. Everyone's plans are compromised, and the reader's hopes are ruthlessly frustrated. Characters like the Jewish businessman Myatt, the chorus girl Coral Musker and the tough lesbian reporter Mabel Warren waver between manipulative greed and a touching, loyal sincerity.

Greene perfectly strikes the tone that became a signature flavor of the 1930s, the fast-talking exoticism of early film noir. But the central issues are Greene's own: sex, betrayal, suicide, the chasm between ideology and sentiment. The Communist Dr. Czinner speeds willingly toward death, aware that his insurrection has failed. Mabel Warren's kept lover, Janet Pardoe, mulls leaving her for the security of marriage to Myatt. Myatt lets the weary Coral use his first-class cabin; she lets him sleep with her; the transaction produces an unexpected sympathy between them, and when she disappears at the Serbian border, mistakenly arrested with Czinner, Myatt must decide whether loyalty demands that he go back for her.

Greene had always been a traveler, but Orient Express made it clear that foreign locales would be crucial to his work. His first grand trip came in 1935, when he and his cousin Barbara undertook a backbreaking five-week walking trip through the jungles of Liberia. In 1938 he headed to Chiapas, where he got the material for The Power and the Glory. Then came his wartime stint as an MI6 agent in Freetown, Sierra Leone; though there was little to uncover, by all accounts he did a fair job, and the experience provided him with material for The Heart of the Matter. In 1943 Greene was called back to London to work in counterintelligence (under the notorious Soviet mole Kim Philby) and began to show great talent. Of course, the new job was more suitable to a novelist: He was running fake Nazi agents who made up bogus stories to feed to the Germans. These experiences were eventually put to use in Greene's classic fake-agent comedy, Our Man in Havana.

After the war, with Catherine Walston, Greene's traveling was of the jet-set variety--New York, Antibes, Rome, Mediterranean cruises on the yacht of film producer Alex Korda. In 1948 he and Korda collaborated with director Carol Reed on The Third Man, and Greene headed to bombed-out Vienna for the research. In late 1950 he went to Malaya, where his brother Hugh was working for the British anti-Communist counterinsurgency. (Hugh would eventually become director of the BBC.) Greene headed to Saigon in early 1951, where he unexpectedly fell in love with the country; he returned in 1952 for Paris Match, and again in 1955 for the Sunday Times.

In 1953 the Sunday Times sent him to Kenya to cover the Mau Mau rebellion. In 1957 he went to China and Moscow. Then Cuba in 1958, where he wrote Our Man in Havana, and again in 1959 with Carol Reed to make the film; he met Castro while the revolution was under way, and would return later, after the overthrow of Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista. Haiti several times with Walston in the 1950s, then in 1963, during the Duvalier dictatorship, to gather material for The Comedians. Leper colonies in the Congo in 1959 for A Burnt-Out Case. In the 1960s Israel, Argentina and Paraguay, which appeared in Travels With My Aunt and The Honorary Consul. In the 1970s Panama, where he became a friend of dictator Omar Torrijos. And, more or less finally, Nicaragua under the Sandinistas.

Greene's experience in intelligence and journalism has given him the reputation of a novelist with an unusually clear-eyed grasp of world affairs. In fact, as his embrace at different times of Castro and Torrijos shows, Greene's politics were often romantic, based on personality as much as on principle. His visceral anti-anti-communism led him to a myopic enthusiasm for the Soviet Union. Out of a misplaced sense of personal loyalty, he refused to break with his old friend Kim Philby, even after it was revealed that Philby had betrayed British agents to their deaths; and in his otherwise admirable letter on behalf of the imprisoned Russian writers Yuli Daniel and Andrei Sinyavsky in 1967, he declared that if forced to choose between living in the United States or the Soviet Union, "I would certainly choose the Soviet Union." Sherry, whose understanding of international affairs is not terribly sophisticated, nonetheless recognizes this as "deliberate political folly."

Greene was exceptionally good at complex and unsentimental portraits of individuals caught up in the gears of powerful organizational interests, and at creating an atmosphere of pitiless amorality. But his political analyses themselves were often far off the mark. (In his Paris Match article on Phat Diem, he held out the risible notion that only Catholicism could beat Communism in Vietnam.) What Greene did have, at his best, was a good ear for information and an undeterrable honesty. This allowed him to write openly about certain things that anyone should have been able to see: that Batista was going to fall, for example, and that the French were going to lose in Vietnam. It did, however, take great foresight to realize that the Americans were taking over where the French left off, and to start to think about what that takeover would look like.

Americans today come to Greene mainly through The Quiet American, for obvious reasons. If it is not his best book, it is the one that most tightly wraps his trademark sexual and political concerns into a neat, explosive package. (Greene's spiritual side takes a bit of a breather in this novel; his Catholicism was waning.) Greene borrows the novel's trope of Americans as political innocents and sexual puritans stumbling destructively into a complex, "fallen" Old World from Henry James, another idol of his youth. The book's genius is to project this trope into the postcolonial cold war violence of Vietnam. It is by now such a familiar vision of the war that it takes some effort to recognize how peculiar Greene's version of it is.

To begin with, the "quiet American" himself, Alden Pyle, is a somewhat unconvincing American. This is an issue that surfaces in other works of Greene's as well. In The Third Man, Holly Martins, an American writer of cheap westerns, indefatigably pursues the truth about his friend, Harry Lime, a black marketeer in postwar Vienna, because they had been close "back at school." To an American, this sounds a bit weird; such old-boy loyalty would make sense only to a graduate of an English public school. The film's Hollywood producer, David O. Selznick, also thought Holly's pursuit of Lime inexplicable, and went into a sort of anglohomophobic panic over it. "It's sheer buggery," Selznick ranted, according to Greene's memoirs. "It's what you learn in your English schools."

As for Pyle, readers have been pegging him for a closet limey ever since A.J. Liebling's review in The New Yorker in 1956. Liebling argued that Pyle is actually a Frenchman's idea of an Englishman--"a naive chap who speaks bad French, eats tasteless food and is only accidentally and episodically heterosexual." The implication that Pyle is gay is a stretch, but he is definitely unusual. He is supposed to be 32, yet he appears never to have had a serious sexual affair. This is too odd, even in 1951, for Pyle to stand as an American archetype, as Greene wants him to.

Pyle's sexual immaturity is supposed to make it plausible that he might fall in love with Fowler's paramour Phuong, and decide to marry her, after little more than an hour of dancing. Greene is trying to make a point about Americans' moral rigidity: Pyle cannot admit that he might desire Phuong without desiring to marry her, just as he can't admit that America's intervention in Vietnam might stem from the will to power rather than the love of freedom. But Pyle's courtship of Phuong is simply too rushed, too programmatic, to be credible.

If The Quiet American's main American feels a bit off, its Vietnamese seem strangely absent. Phuong is at the novel's fulcrum: She stands for a Vietnam in play between exhausted, colonial Europe (Fowler) and the rising American hegemon (Pyle). The metaphor of the colonized land as a duskily beautiful woman of uncertain loyalty is as old as Antony and Cleopatra. But Phuong is no voluble queen; she is a pliant cipher, her emotions almost entirely opaque--at least to Fowler, the narrator. Greene's treatment of her flirts with the pure colonialist cliché of the inscrutable Oriental. Characters talk about her in her presence, while she remains silent. "One always spoke of her like that in the third person," Fowler remarks, "as though she were not there."

Indeed, almost all of the novel's Vietnamese are "not there," in one way or another. Apart from Phuong's iron-willed sister, none of the novel's dynamic characters are Vietnamese. The dynamic Vietnamese--the Vietminh, in particular--are held offstage, spoken of but never seen or heard. In one of the novel's central scenes, Fowler and Pyle find themselves holed up in a watchtower at night, arguing about Phuong and the future of the country while the Vietminh circle invisibly in the darkness and two young Vietnamese conscripts look on, mute. It's a brilliant allegory for the insularity of the Western debate on Vietnam. But the novel starts to feel rather strange after a while: One expects to read about Americans in Vietnam, and finds instead a slightly improbable American and a lot of invisible Vietnamese.

The most fully present character in the novel is the Englishman Fowler, and if the reader finds it hard to get a grip on Pyle and Phuong, it's largely because our somewhat unreliable narrator can't get a grip on them either. Fowler is a perfectly rendered portrait of the wryly cynical expat, as accurate today as it was then. The Orientalist stereotypes in the book aren't necessarily Greene's, they're Fowler's, and it is his inability to understand Phuong that drives him to fall back on them. "It's a cliché to call [the Vietnamese] children," Fowler acknowledges to Pyle, before going on, helplessly, to recycle the cliché. Later, railing angrily at Pyle, he spins a contradictory vision of Phuong:

"She's no child. She's tougher than you'll ever be. Do you know the kind of polish that doesn't take scratches? That's Phuong. She can survive a dozen of us. She'll get old, that's all...she'll never suffer like we do from thoughts, obsessions--she won't scratch, she'll only decay." But even while I made my speech...I knew I was inventing a character just as much as Pyle was.

It would be easy to accuse Greene of creating a Fu Manchu cartoon with Phuong, and indeed some Vietnamese readers I know find her a Western stereotype. But Greene is a much better writer than that: The book doesn't really claim to show us Phuong. It shows us Fowler's idea of Phuong, and his frustration at his inability to grasp her. It is in the gaps and chinks in Fowler's depiction of Phuong that we catch glimpses of her as she might seem to herself: a self-controlled young woman, fenced in by her beauty and her familial obligations, working every possible angle to carve out a bit of autonomous space.

What's true of Greene's treatment of Phuong is true of the book as a whole: It never really shows us Vietnam. What we get instead are the expats' and colonials' failed attempts to grasp Vietnam. Greene spent most of his life writing about the colonial and postcolonial Third World, the conundrums and misadventures of the West among the rest, and part of the reason Greeneland maps so easily onto Vietnam--the reason Greene's Phat Diem looks so much like his Chiapas and his Freetown--is that these conundrums and misadventures are so similar, the world over. They are the result of one society's attempts to impose its ideals, institutions, economic models, clothing styles, mating rituals and dining habits on another. It's the incongruity of occupying ideologies in occupied societies that opens up the space in which Greene wants to work: hypocrisy, cynicism, catastrophic misunderstanding; the callous disengagement of the world's Fowlers, and the violently misguided engagement of its Pyles.

What's wrong with Pyle, in Fowler's view--and, it seems likely, in Greene's--is that he claims to know: to know Phuong, to know Fowler, to know Vietnam and to know himself. Fowler keeps paradoxically calling Pyle "innocent," even after he discovers that Pyle has been feeding plastic explosives to a rogue general for use in terrorist attacks. Pyle is innocent not because he does no harm but because he never suspects that words might not mean what they claim to mean, that things might be complicated and that people's motives, including his own, might be far darker than they seem. It is his innocence, ultimately, that makes Pyle dangerous. "Innocence is a kind of madness," Fowler eventually decides.

Every Western journalist stationed in Saigon during the war read The Quiet American, and, as ex-CBS correspondent John Laurence writes in his memoir The Cat From Hue, they all aspired to Fowler's knowing cynicism. This was a tremendous change in attitude from that of earlier war correspondents, like Pyle's namesake Ernie. Of course, if Greene's sensibility became attractive to Vietnam correspondents, it was largely because of their disillusionment with an obviously futile war. But when one reads the ubiquitous homages to Greene's "prophetic" writing on Vietnam one can't help but feel that what was prophetic was less his analysis than his attitude.

By the 1970s a Greenelandish vision of Vietnam, with roots in Conrad, had become the dominant one in American popular culture. One thinks especially of Apocalypse Now, with the disillusioned, hollow-eyed Martin Sheen as antihero, and Marlon Brando channeling Orson Welles's performance in The Third Man as the elusive evil genius. Or of the first big post-Vietnam novel, Robert Stone's 1975 National Book Award winner Dogs of War, whose antihero John Converse--a morally disengaged, heroin-dealing, Saigon-based journalist--is clearly descended from the morally disengaged, opium-smoking Fowler. Other iconic 1970s representations of Vietnam refracted Greene's skepticism in different ways: the wry anti-institutionalism of M*A*S*H and Doonesbury, the bitter absurdism of Tim O'Brien's Going After Cacciato, the gritty sentimentalism of The Deer Hunter--even Taxi Driver, the ultimate American vision of righteous violence gone awry. Greene's cynicism meshed well with the wisecracking and suspicious branch of 1970s radicalism, the paranoid radical flip side of Flower Power.

But the view that innocence is madness is not one that can sustain itself for long in America, where innocence is an integral part of the national creed. America's Vietnam narratives became increasingly sentimental and un-Greeneian as time went on; their innocents became innocent again. During the Reagan era, in Bobbie Ann Mason's novel In Country or the Springsteen song "Born in the U.S.A.," the Vietnam War became a trauma--not something Americans did but something that happened to them. Martin Sheen's nihilism in Apocalypse Now gave way to his son Charlie's naïveté in Platoon. Vietnam movies still acknowledged American war crimes, but their leading men, once dangerous and complicated (Nick Nolte in Who'll Stop the Rain, Robert DeNiro and Christopher Walken in The Deer Hunter) were now mainly fresh-faced youths betrayed by their government (Michael J. Fox in Casualties of War, Tom Cruise in Born on the Fourth of July). By the time of Birdy and Forrest Gump, the American GI's fervently maintained innocence had reached the point of mental deficiency.



.....See next posting for last paragraphs if you've read this far......... ;)


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


(k) (k) 's,

SL & DTB

[sweetlady]

To read Greene today, in the context of the war in Iraq, is to be reminded of how much The Quiet American got right about Americans' style of engagement with the world, and also of how reluctant we are to accept a skeptical, Greenelandish vision of it. America's embrace of violence in the export of democracy, and our simplistic rhetoric of freedom, have re-emerged with a ferocity not seen since the days of Alden Pyle. We are still busily searching for Third Forces, with (the now discarded) Ahmad Chalabi perhaps the most dismal contestant since Ngo Dinh Diem.

Over the past few years, moreover, the world, which for a while in the 1990s looked as if it were becoming a well-regulated, transparent open house of free-market liberal democracies (remember "the end of history"?), seems to have taken a Greenelandian turn. Intragovernmental and corporate intrigues, self-interest masquerading as patriotism and terrorist plots hatched by failed intellectuals in dusty Third World casbahs leap out at us from the newspapers every day. Al Qaeda has reinvigorated the espionage narrative and opened up the same kind of ideological chasm that the cold war represented for Greene. Meanwhile, the domestic Greene, the novelist of obsessive affairs and marriages gone sour, is more contemporary than ever; the 1999 film adaptation of The End of the Affair came at the breaking edge of a continuing wave of unsentimental, post-Clintonian treatments of lying and infidelity, from Roth's The Human Stain to The Sopranos to Closer.

It's odd, really. So many of Greeneland's key elements--the doubting priests, the Communist revolutionaries, the colonial regimes--seem frozen in another epoch. Other elements, like the fixations on betrayal and suicide, seem peculiar to Greene's psyche. How could Greeneland feel recognizable now?

Then again, how could Greene's Phat Diem look so much like his Vienna--and still be convincing? The strength of Greeneland, obviously, isn't in the specifics. It's in a mood and a set of tensions: between individuals and organizations, between emotions and ethics, between lovers and loved. Greeneland is an arrangement for translating apocalyptic conflicts to a personal scale; it is a morally bankrupt stage set for the mounting of moral dramas of vast consequence. At this moment of particular moral bankruptcy and particularly compelling moral stakes, we pick up Orient Express, Brighton Rock or The Quiet American and feel ourselves weirdly at home.


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



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

Sweetlady and Doc the Boxer

[sweetlady]

(*) (*) ....and I wondered back in the late 70's and early 80's why Ireland took out pages and pages of advertising space in business mags like Business Week and newspapers using photos of people and their countryside - extolling the virtues of setting up businesses there! (*) (*)


June 29, 2005

The End of the Rainbow

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Dublin

Here's something you probably didn't know: Ireland today is the richest country in the European Union after Luxembourg.

Yes, the country that for hundreds of years was best known for emigration, tragic poets, famines, civil wars and leprechauns today has a per capita G.D.P. higher than that of Germany, France and Britain. How Ireland went from the sick man of Europe to the rich man in less than a generation is an amazing story. It tells you a lot about Europe today: all the innovation is happening on the periphery by those countries embracing globalization in their own ways - Ireland, Britain, Scandinavia and Eastern Europe - while those following the French-German social model are suffering high unemployment and low growth.

Ireland's turnaround began in the late 1960's when the government made secondary education free, enabling a lot more working-class kids to get a high school or technical degree. As a result, when Ireland joined the E.U. in 1973, it was able to draw on a much more educated work force.

By the mid-1980's, though, Ireland had reaped the initial benefits of E.U. membership - subsidies to build better infrastructure and a big market to sell into. But it still did not have enough competitive products to sell, because of years of protectionism and fiscal mismanagement. The country was going broke, and most college grads were emigrating.

"We went on a borrowing, spending and taxing spree, and that nearly drove us under," said Deputy Prime Minister Mary Harney. "It was because we nearly went under that we got the courage to change."

And change Ireland did. In a quite unusual development, the government, the main trade unions, farmers and industrialists came together and agreed on a program of fiscal austerity, slashing corporate taxes to 12.5 percent, far below the rest of Europe, moderating wages and prices, and aggressively courting foreign investment. In 1996, Ireland made college education basically free, creating an even more educated work force.

The results have been phenomenal. Today, 9 out of 10 of the world's top pharmaceutical companies have operations here, as do 16 of the top 20 medical device companies and 7 out of the top 10 software designers. Last year, Ireland got more foreign direct investment from America than from China. And overall government tax receipts are way up.

"We set up in Ireland in 1990," Michael Dell, founder of Dell Computer, explained to me via e-mail. "What attracted us? [A] well-educated work force - and good universities close by. [Also,] Ireland has an industrial and tax policy which is consistently very supportive of businesses, independent of which political party is in power. I believe this is because there are enough people who remember the very bad times to de-politicize economic development. [Ireland also has] very good transportation and logistics and a good location - easy to move products to major markets in Europe quickly."

Finally, added Mr. Dell, "they're competitive, want to succeed, hungry and know how to win. ... Our factory is in Limerick, but we also have several thousand sales and technical people outside of Dublin. The talent in Ireland has proven to be a wonderful resource for us. ... Fun fact: We are Ireland's largest exporter."

Intel opened its first chip factory in Ireland in 1993. James Jarrett, an Intel vice president, said Intel was attracted by Ireland's large pool of young educated men and women, low corporate taxes and other incentives that saved Intel roughly a billion dollars over 10 years. National health care didn't hurt, either. "We have 4,700 employees there now in four factories, and we are even doing some high-end chip designing in Shannon with Irish engineers," he said.

In 1990, Ireland's total work force was 1.1 million. This year it will hit two million, with no unemployment and 200,000 foreign workers (including 50,000 Chinese). Others are taking notes. Prime Minister Bertie Ahern said: "I've met the premier of China five times in the last two years."

Ireland's advice is very simple: Make high school and college education free; make your corporate taxes low, simple and transparent; actively seek out global companies; open your economy to competition; speak English; keep your fiscal house in order; and build a consensus around the whole package with labor and management - then hang in there, because there will be bumps in the road - and you, too, can become one of the richest countries in Europe.

"It wasn't a miracle, we didn't find gold," said Mary Harney. "It was the right domestic policies and embracing globalization."


(*) (*) :o :o (h) (h)


(f) (f)'s & (k) (k) 's

SL & DTB

[sweetlady]

"Girl in the Cafe"

http://www.hbo.com/films/girlinthecafe/

http://www.hbo.com/films/girlinthecafe/cast/

http://www.hbo.com/films/girlinthecafe/community/

An HBO Films/BBC co-production, The Girl in the Cafè is both a romantic character drama with comedic elements, and a powerful political wake-up call by Richard Curtis, the acclaimed writer of Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill and Love Actually. Curtis' first film since Love Actually, The Girl in the Cafè literally addresses one the most important questions of 2005: Will this be the year when world powers seriously address the issue of world poverty once and for all? The film is a passionate plea to humankind - wrapped in a love story, a comedy and a unique drama. It is a call to arms that shamelessly sets out to entertain, inform and challenge audiences to act. Above all, the film seeks to raise awareness about the important political choices facing the G8 leaders at the next Summit, in Scotland in 2005, and for all of our actions to match our principles.

Set and filmed in London and Iceland (where the fictional G8 Summit of the film takes place), The Girl in the Cafè follows the journey of Lawrence, a lonely bureaucrat working for the UK's Chancellor of the Exchequer, after he meets an enigmatic woman named Gina in a cafè. After a couple of dates, he takes a chance and invites her on a weekend trip to Reykjavik, where he'll be working the G8 conference. His team's hope is to push an agenda the Millennium Goals agreed to at the 2000 G8, which if met will greatly decrease world poverty by 2015. This conference is especially crucial, as little has been pledged so far, but compromise is almost always a given.

As she learns more, Gina (to Lawrence's initial horror) becomes increasingly outspoken at the conference, challenging his boss, representatives of other nations, and even the English Prime Minister to do more to end poverty and save dying mothers and children. For his part, Lawrence begins to wonder who Gina really is, even as their physical connection intensifies. Lawrence's bosses warn him that Gina may cost him his job - the one thing he ever cared about until Gina. While the romance reaches a bittersweet place, Gina's courage ends up changing Lawrence's staid life - and perhaps even influences the politicians who wield the power to save millions of lives.

The two leads of The Girl in the Cafè are Bill Nighy, who turned in a memorable portrayal of the aging rocker in Curtis' Love Actually (he won multiple awards for the role, including BAFTA and LA Film Critics Association honors), and who will appear in the new Pirates of the Caribbean movie, and Kelly Macdonald, whose credits include Finding Neverland (as Peter Pan), Gosford Park, Elizabeth and Trainspotting. The Girl in the Cafè was directed by David Yates, who won numerous awards for directing the UK miniseries "State of Play." Yates is slated to direct the next "Harry Potter" movie, as well as the film version of "Brideshead Revisited."


http://www.hbo.com/films/girlinthecafe/synopsis/


(k) (k) 's,

SL & DTB

[sweetlady]

1. Independent and alternative coverage of political and social events. http://www.indymedia.org.uk/


2. Progressive writers on the G8. http://www.ukwatch.net/section/39


3. Technorati - keep track of what the bloggers are saying about the G8 summit. http://live8.technorati.com/


4. http://www.thecatsdream.com/blog/
Art and knowledge for political and social changes.


5. http://www.phillyfuture.org/live8
News and views from Live 8 in Philadelphia.


6. http://www.paulmason.typepad.com/
Newsnight's correspondent Paul Mason on the road to Gleneagles.


7. http://stonedwolf.blogspot.com/
G8 dissent - an activist's diary.


8. http://redpepper.blogs.com/
George Galloway, celebrity media ... all the angles on the G8 summit.


9. http://historybooksuk.blogspot.com/
G8 summit alternative action news.


10. http://g8bikeride.blogspot.com/
Welcome to the lazy version of the G8 bike ride.


11. http://g8.blogbound.com/
An aggregation of blogs by those involved in and talking about the G8 protests in Scotland.


12. http://lordrich.com
The thoughts of a self-styled geek, student and activist.



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


(k) (k) 's

SL & DTB

[sweetlady]

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2005/more/06/30/fish.ap/index.html?cnn=yes



(*) (*) :o :o :o :| :| ;) ;)


.....and now? Back to bed....... (S) (S)


(k) (k) 's,

Sweetlady and Doc the Boxer

[sweetlady]

http://www.nytimes.com/video/html/2005/06/29/technology/highbandwidth/windowsmedia/20050629_GUEST_VIDEO.html



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


(k) (k) 's

SL & DTB

[SpinxxieFairy]

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2005/more/06/30/fish.ap/index.html?cnn=yes



(*) (*) :o :o :o :| :| ;) ;)


.....and now? Back to bed....... (S) (S)


(k) (k) 's,

Sweetlady and Doc the Boxer


That is ONE big fish.. omg

[sweetlady]

That is ONE big fish.. omg


I appreciate your taking the time.......and you brought a smile to my face.

I started a new quarter this week.....after taking a quarter off to take care of Doc the Boxer. I was a little worried about taking three four-credit courses at the same time - but it seems as if it may work out allright.

I have been considering taking two courses Pass/fail so that my 4.0 GPA isn't affected. I'm taking an Operations' Mgt. course, a Strategic Information Mgt. course from the Graduate School of Business and then a lifelong learning course from the School of Education.......

Again, thanks so much for your lovely posting.

({) (})'s

Sweetlady and Doc the Boxer

[sweetlady]

http://www.attackchi.org.au/kits.htm



(*) (*) :o :| :| :( :(


(k) (k) ,

SL & DTB

[sweetlady]

http://amazing1.com/ultra.htm


(*) (*) :| (S) (S)


Too tired to contribute.....

Sweet dreams,

SL & DTB

[sweetlady]

Q U O T E D

"I watched them put it on. You can figure out how to get it off. It's on the Internet. I looked it up."

-- Martha Stewart (or M. Diddy, as she was known in the joint) says she could shed that annoying ankle monitor anytime if she wanted to go on the lam.



http://www.abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory?id=909977


(*) (*) ;) ;) (h) (h) (h) (h) (and I definitely do not care for her at all!!)


(k) (k) 's,

Sweetlady and Doc the now-sleeping-after-thunderstorm Boxer

[sweetlady]

George Clooney stands up: Actor also directs, produces -- and pushes for his beliefs

LOS ANGELES, California (Hollywood Reporter) -- Wouldn't it be great if more movie stars were like George Clooney?

He's the modern model: He's too cool to demand a $20 million salary to prove his self-worth; he writes, directs and produces; and he expends his movie star capital to push for the things he believes in.

"I'm a hybrid," Clooney said recently, after he accepted the Los Angeles Independent Film Festival's first Spirit of Independence Award. "I succeed in both worlds. I hope that selling out on 'Ocean's Eleven' is not such a bad deal. The trade-off is, I get to go make something uncommercial that will probably lose money."

Clooney is confident enough to go toe to toe with Fox News' Bill O'Reilly or to protect a movie extra from an abusive director or to coax not only fellow "flaming liberals" to join his campaign against hunger in Africa but also Pat Robertson as well. (On ABC's "Nightline," Clooney got the televangelist to admit that in certain extreme situations, condom use is a good thing.)

And when a completion bond company backed out of Clooney's second directing effort, the $8 million black-and-white drama "Goodnight, and Good Luck," starring David Strathairn as newsman Edward R. Murrow, Clooney offered to put up his house, worth $7 million, to insure the movie himself.

This is not your average star. So though Clooney boasts a production deal on the Warner Bros. lot, he has more than earned the label "independent." Along with his Section Eight producing partner Steven Soderbergh, Clooney balances such big-budget studio pictures as "Ocean's Eleven" and "Ocean's Twelve" that rake in cash with riskier fare that he sometimes stars in and produces -- such as "Solaris," "Insomnia," "Far From Heaven," "Welcome to Collinwood," "Criminal" and his directing debut, "Confessions of a Dangerous Mind."

Section Eight's next three movies also push the edge of the studio envelope: Besides "Goodnight, and Good Luck," in the fall Clooney will star in the provocative Middle East terrorist thriller "Syriana," written and directed by Oscar-winning "Traffic" writer Stephen Gaghan -- "We're going to get in a lot of trouble for putting a face on the evildoers," Clooney says -- and he is just starting to shoot Soderbergh's post-World War II mystery "The Good German," which he also expects to stir controversy.
'We make the kinds of films we want'

So it wasn't a total surprise when Clooney accepted the Spirit of Independence Award "for someone of undeniable integrity who inspires us," as Film Independent director Dawn Hudson put it.

After a fancy sit-down awards dinner in a Westwood office penthouse, during a probing Q&A from film critic-turned-studio-exec Elvis Mitchell, Clooney revealed his unusual filmmaking philosophy.

"Steven and I have a great relationship inside the studio system," Clooney said. "We make the kinds of films we want and commercial films at the same time. Steven and I have lost a lot of money. We are way in the hole. But this is not a day job. I've got some cash. I have a nice house in Italy. I do OK."

Clooney's change in approach came, he said, after he starred in two studio duds, "The Peacemaker" and "Batman & Robin." "I got tagged. So I said, I've got to be responsible. What are you going to do at 70 years old and they're doing a retrospective and they're all big commercial films? I started looking for scripts. I held out for a year."

Clooney went on to make Soderbergh's "Out of Sight," the Coen Brothers' "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" David O. Russell's "Three Kings" and Wolfgang Petersen's "The Perfect Storm." Now, the triple threat prefers to take more chances on movies by slashing his salary, as he and the ensemble cast did on the "Ocean's" movies.

Basically, Clooney figures that it makes sense to take his $20 million upfront salary and put it onscreen to produce a better, riskier movie -- hopefully along with a few other movie stars to help carry the picture. (It's also a lot less stressful and more fun.) This "Ocean's Eleven" model "has paid me big-time, on the back end," he said.

It's a smarter bet to finance and market a $30 million picture with three stars, Clooney argues, than a $40 million movie with only one. "If you do that," he said, "you're free to try and pick the best films possible. I don't want to work with people where you feel like they're just collecting footage. If you want to get these films made, you have to be an investor."
'Part of the deal'

It was not easy to put together "Goodnight, and Good Luck," a serious drama set during the McCarthy era that Clooney insisted on shooting in black and white, which lessens a film's value. The only way to wedge nonmarquee actor Strathairn into the leading role was to play CBS News chief Fred Friendly himself, Clooney said: "I cast myself to pay for the film. That's part of the deal."

Clooney looks back fondly on the '70s golden age, he told Mitchell, "when the inmates were running the asylum." He has assembled 100 films from the period to give to his friends, including all the best movies that were released between "Dr. Strangelove" in 1964 and "All the President's Men" and "Network" in 1976: "One of the great dark comedies ever," he said of "Network." "Everything Paddy Chayefsky wrote about has happened."

On the horizon: Clooney plans to follow up his most recent Coens film, "Intolerable Cruelty," with "Hail Caesar," about theater actors in the 1920s putting on a play set in ancient Rome. "The star would have an idiot toga and a pencil mustache," he said. "This would complete my idiot trilogy."

That's another thing we like about Clooney: He enjoys making an ass of himself. Onscreen, that is.

Copyright 2005 Reuters. All rights reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.



Find this article at:
http://www.cnn.com/2005/SHOWBIZ/Movies/07/05/film.clooney.reut/index.html


(*) (*) (k) (k) ({) (}) ({) (}) 's and (S) (S) (S) (S) (S)


Sweetlady and Doc the now-in deep-REM Boxer (storm passed)

[sweetlady]

I hope Sanjay Kumar's personalized color workup tags him as an "autumn" because he may end up wearing a lot of prison orange. This morning the government amended its indictment against the former Computer Associates CEO, accusing him of paying off a client who'd threatened to talk to investigators about the company's generally unaccepted accounting principles (see "Kumar, facing jail time, disavows concept of 35-day month"). According to court papers, Kumar authorized a $3.7 million no-work consulting contract to a client who threatened him with "future consequences." Kumar, who stepped down from CA last year, has pleaded not guilty to charges in the original 10-count indictment, including obstruction of justice and securities fraud.


http://www.latimes.com/technology/la-fi-ca30jun30,1,7310082.story?coll=la-headlines-technology&ctrack=1&cset=true


http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/business/columnists/gmsv/9741185.htm


(S) (S) (S) ,

Sweetlady and Doc the Boxer

[sweetlady]

http://www.thecoolhunter.net/lifestyle/intellegent-smart-bath.php


(*) (*) (*) Yummy..... (S) (S) (S) I ache all over so much that this looks wonderful! (a)


Peace, love and sweet dreams,

Sweetlady and Doc the Most-handsome Boxer (S) (S)

[sweetlady]

;) ;) ;)

A little old lady, well into her eighties, slowly enters the front door of
a sex shop. Obviously very unstable on her feet, she shakily wobbles the
few feet across the store to the counter.


Finally arriving at the counter and grabbing it for support, she asks the
sales clerk,
" Dddooo youuuu hhave ddddiilllldosss?"


The clerk, politely trying not to burst out laughing, replies,
"Yes we do have dildos; actually we carry many different models.


"The old woman then asks: "Dddddoooo yyyouuuu ccaarrryy aaa pppinkk onnee, tttenn inchessss lllong aaandd aabboutt tttwoo inchesss ththiickk that
vibbbrrraaaattttesss?"


The clerk smiles to herself and responds, "Yes we do."


The poor little old lady replies, "Ddddooo yyoooouuuu knnnoooww hhowww
tttooo ttturrrnnn ttthe ffffuuccckkkinggg ttthingggg offffff?"


(*) :| ;) ;) ;)


<listening to the pouring rain.....remnants of one hurricane last night and today with another on its way next week sometime.> :(


(k) (k) ,
SL & DTB

[sweetlady]

http://www.sonician.com/live8/list.html


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


(k) (k) 's,

SL & DTB

[sweetlady]

http://www.ohgizmo.com/?p=332


(*) (h) ;)


(k) (k) 's,

SL & and napping DTB (while his mama works on three (!) PhD courses that started this past Tuesday. Yea, yea, THAT's where I've been.... ;)

[sweetlady]

Maybe broadband over power line (BPL) really is coming of age. Trials, as well as commercial deployments of BPL systems have been on the rise lately, and now investment dollars are beginning to drift toward the companies developing them. Case in point, Google's investment in Current Communications Group, one of the more promising BPL ventures in the space. The search leader, with Goldman Sachs and Hearst, is investing about $100 million in Current, which today operates the largest BPL deployment in the country in Cincinnati. The investment is a noteworthy one for Google, which has long expressed interest in promoting universal access to the Internet and BPL as well. BPL, while a difficult environment for transmitting digital information, promises to someday transform the broadband market and the utility space, the former by turning every electrical outlet into an always-on Web connection and bringing broadband access to remote rural areas, the latter by clearing the way for utility companies to claim a portion of the broadband market.


http://www.wave-report.com/tutorials/bpl.htm


http://www.cioupdate.com/trends/article.php/3485801


http://home.businesswire.com/portal/site/google/index.jsp?ndmViewId=news_view&newsId=20050707005333&newsLang=en


http://news.enquirer.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050417/BIZ01/504170315/-1/all


http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/31652



(*) ...things like this make me think...<hmmmm....> :o :|


Carpe Diem!

Sweetlady and Doc the Boxer

[sweetlady]

Arab view: 'Enough, enough'

Some Muslims fear backlash after UK bombs

By Octavia Nasr
CNN Senior Editor for Arab Affairs

(CNN) -- Arabs and Muslims in Britain and across the world expressed outrage at the terrorist attacks in London, with the dominant viewpoint summed up by one person who wrote on a Web site, "Enough ... enough."

The loud condemnation of the attacks that targeted civilians reverberated on the street, over the Internet, in newsrooms, and in Arab and Muslim seats of power.

Minority voices praised the attacks with anti-Western invective, but they were largely drowned out. On one popular Web site, one person wrote: "How can you gloat and thank God for terrorist acts that were committed in the name of God???? Shaaaaaaaaaaaame on you Muslims.

"Don't you know that Islam is growing in Europe??? What the heck are you doing mingling things up??? What you're doing has no logic and certainly doesn't fall under the good wisdom God has asked us to follow."

Still, some stated anger at what they say are brutal U.S. and British policies targeting Arabs and Muslims. And many expressed fears that a stretch of bad times is in store for Arabs and Muslims.

The London terror strikes, targeting three subway stations and a double-decker bus, killed more than 50 people wounded hundreds. Authorities are looking into the possibility of al Qaeda's involvement. London Police Commissioner Ian Blair said the attacks showed the "hallmarks of al Qaeda."

The September 11, 2001 al Qaeda attacks in the United States sparked some anger at Arabs and Muslims, which U.S. leaders and others worked to quickly counteract.

Officials from countries like Iraq and Iran issued condemnations of the strikes.

Some prominent Arab writers said the attacks were a reminder that efforts to fight terrorism were necessary.

Jihad al-Khazen, an op-ed columnist for the London-based pan-Arab Al-Hayat newspaper, wrote: "Such criminal terror acts prove that no measure is enough to fight terrorism.

"Actions that governments take to fight terrorism are totally justified because protecting life is a lot more important than protecting civil liberties."

He said he was saddened "that there are people in our Arab world that continue to sympathize with terrorism."

"This is our sick reality and it doesn't help anyone to pretend this mentality doesn't exist. One can't ignore the fact that Arab governments didn't act early on to crush the extreme movements growing in our midst."

He criticized the United States and Britain, saying he hoped they would change policies that fostered "hatred around the world and make it easy for groups like al Qaeda to recruit and execute terror attacks."

On the Arabic-language TV network Al Jazeera, Mohammed Amara -- identified as an Islamist thinker in Cairo -- said "those who want to perform jihad (Muslim holy war) should go and fight the occupiers in the battlefield and not kill unexpecting innocent people.

"We (Muslims) do not kill clerics, we do not kill women, we do not kill children, we do not kill trees. This is what the prophet taught us. The U.S. and Britain are committing atrocities against our people everywhere but we shouldn't respond to a crime with a crime."

TV network Al-Arabiya, on its Web site, solicited readers' responses to the attacks. Several expressed happiness, with comments such as "Allahu Akbar, thanks be to God," "More power to al Qaeda leader Osama (bin Laden)," and "What did you expect? This is only a response to the what the British government has done to the group regardless of which group it is."

In response, these notes were posted: "To the heroes of Arabism and Jihad, since you are sparing no method to attack the West and you gloat as you try to kill the largest number of civilians. How would you like it if the West relieves itself of your headache by hitting you with one of its nuclear weapons. It takes only minutes and then there will be no heroes, no men and no shish kebab."

Another wrote: "Why you are so happy about something like this?" What if one of your family members in London died? Even in a war, don't kill women, children, old people ... please Muslims think before you judge any action, and think about your actions and judge yourself before you judge people."

There were similar responses to another posting, in which someone said: "What happened to them is less than what they deserve" because of all of the people killed in the Muslim world daily. "I hope they will get more and more every day," this writer said.

Writers punched back, saying there was no excuse for such attacks. Responses included:

* "Those terrorists have ruined the reputation of Arabs in Europe" and have hurt the religion.

* "Arabs will be facing more harassment now. That's why Arabs should stand together against these terrorist groups which has only one goal of killing innocent women, elderly and children."

* "We are entering a difficult times in Europe, especially difficult for our brothers who live in dignity and prosperity in Europe while they enjoy the vastness of the continent after they escaped their governments' dictatorships."

* "One of the targeted areas today is Edgware road, which is entirely accommodated by Muslims and Arabs. Do you know that no politicians, army troops, or any important governmental employees use the underground or buses, because simply they have no much more money to use a private car.

* "This is not Islam. Aldgate station is a two-minute walk from the largest Muslim community in London. So please don't be happy."

One writer said "innocent people have been attacked while going about their daily routine... Londoners are the most hard working and efficient city folk I have ever seen, and they shall overcome these awful events and prevail. Blair has a lot of explanation to be done. I am an Arab, and rest assured that we are all shocked and angry.

"We love London!"


Find this article at:
http://www.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/europe/07/08/london.muslims/index.html


(*) (*) :| :| :| ...Yea, right. :|


(w) (w)


SL & DTB

[sweetlady]

Frida Kahlo at the Tate Modern
by Frida Kahlo

(London)
Through: 10/7/2005

“This beautifully staged retrospective” of Frida Kahlo’s paintings reveals her to be a complete narcissist, said Sean O’Hagan in the London Observer. That, of course, was part of her genius. She painted “the self relentlessly laid bare.” Her self-portraits as a mustachioed penitent with stigmata or as a hunted deer have become so iconic, it’s a challenge to see her fresh. Their appeal is, in fact, testament to Kahlo’s “ability to give visual form to physical suffering,” said Richard Dorment in the London Daily Telegraph; suffering, of course, being a universal experience. She also made the sorrowing people in Mexican folk imagery as important as the stricken saints of European traditions. “More audaciously, Kahlo turned herself into a symbol of Mexico itself.” In her famous The Two Fridas, she presents herself as both a Spanish colonial in a white dress and a traditional peasant, with one hand severing the vein that connects their two hearts. Kahlo clearly had a flair for the dramatic: Her flat, front-facing portraits force you to accept her “on her terms, or not at all.”

http://www.tate.org.uk/


(*) (*) (a) (a) (a)


(k) (k) 's
SL & DTB

[sweetlady]

Italy: Can the CIA really be that dumb?
Paolo Biondani
Corriere della Sera

The CIA doesn’t try very hard to cover its tracks, said Paolo Biondani in Milan’s Corriere della Sera. As a result of its clumsiness, an Italian judge last week issued arrest warrants for 13 American agents. The Americans “apparently violated Italian sovereignty” in 2003 by kidnapping Egyptian-born militant cleric Abu Omar, the imam at a prominent Milan mosque, and spiriting him off to Egypt to be interrogated and tortured. While conducting surveillance of Abu Omar and preparing his kidnapping, the agents were hardly discreet, littering Milan with evidence that has now wound up in Italian courts. The agents slept “in five-star hotels like the Hilton and the Prince of Savoy,” where their passport photos are now on file. And they used Italian phones to communicate with each other, with the U.S. Consulate, and with the U.S. air base from which the plane bearing Abu Omar took off for Cairo, so the times and locations of all the calls are on record. Could the CIA really be so “naive” and sloppy? Or were they so careless because the Italian government secretly “gave permission” for an American spy operation on our soil?

United Kingdom
How not to discipline the yobs
Jon Robins
The Guardian

The much ballyhooed “anti-social behavior orders” aren’t working, said Jon Robins in the London Guardian. When they were introduced in 2003, “ASBOs,” as they’re called, seemed the perfect weapon against “yobs”—the young ruffians who spend their free time wallowing in public drunkenness, brawling, and vandalism. An ASBO could be a restraining order, forbidding a thug to go near his old victims, or it could be a curfew, requiring a yob to be home every night by 11. It sounded good, but critics say the program is both too easily abused and too easily flouted. City councils abuse ASBOs by slapping them on people who are merely eccentric, not criminal. Orders have been served on “a Norfolk farmer after his pigs ran amok in neighbors’ gardens” and on “a Scottish woman banning her from answering her front door in her underwear.” The real yobs, meanwhile, simply ignore their curfews. And none of this is helping those whose lives are truly “made a misery from anti-social neighbors.”


Germany
A soldier’s right to disobey
Because of our country’s Nazi past, said Reinhard Müller in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, German soldiers have long been given the right to refuse orders to do anything they consider “patently wrong,” such as killing a prisoner, or bombing a hospital. A federal court has just expanded that right, ruling that a soldier can also refuse to do anything that might—even indirectly—further the cause of a war he does not believe in. Maj. Florian Pfaff, 48, a career army officer, was working on a software program to integrate the armed forces’ computer networks. After the Iraq war began in 2003, he refused to continue his work because his superiors could not guarantee that the program would not be used by U.S. forces stationed in Germany. A military court demoted Pfaff to captain for insubordination. But the higher civilian court has restored his rank, saying that he was exercising his constitutional right to freedom of conscience.

This excellent decision proves that German army is not like other armies, said Stefan Geiger in the Stuttgarter Zeitung. “It wants soldiers who think. It actually commands them to disobey any order they deem illegal.” Freedom of conscience is seen as the highest form of patriotism. After the national shame of World War II, when Nazi soldiers who massacred civilians used the excuse that they were just following orders, Germany went to great lengths to ensure that its soldiers would never commit such crimes again.

It’s the first thing recruits learn, said the Leipziger Volkszeitung in an editorial. No soldier is obliged to follow any order that goes against his conscience. “Obviously this does not apply to an order to polish one’s boots,” but it does apply to important ethical questions. The freedom to say no is what makes our Bundeswehr different from—and better than—Hitler’s Wehrmacht. “Dictatorships can’t allow their troops such leeway. Democracies must. Otherwise they wouldn’t be worth protecting.”

But when soldiers have the right to disobey orders at their own whim, said Kurt Kister in the Süddeutsche Zeitung, how do you run an army? It would make more sense to give soldiers the right to quit the armed forces altogether if they don’t want to participate in a given war. “It is not his prerogative to examine every single order in the light of his individual interpretation of politics and international law and then decide whether he’d like to follow it.” No army could function under such rules. Generals are already beginning to panic, wondering whether they can count on their troops. And what about NATO? “If Bundeswehr soldiers in important positions suddenly start invoking their consciences,” said retired Gen. Jörg Schönbohm, “our allies may doubt our reliability.”

And well they should, said Richard Meng in the Frankfurter Rundschau. The implications of this ruling go far beyond the army. The court has, in effect, ruled that the Iraq war is illegal. “After all, if there were no substance in the major’s argument that the war was an act of aggression, he couldn’t have won his case.” That means that Germany is in breach of its own constitution, which forbids military aggression. The government has tried to finesse the issue by insisting that, since no German troops are in Iraq, Germany isn’t helping the war effort. But that argument is disingenuous. Germany sent troops to Bosnia specifically to free up U.S. troops for deployment in Iraq. The “correct conclusion” to draw, then, is that we need to renegotiate the terms of our cooperation with NATO—and particularly, with the U.S.


Iran
The reformists are kicking themselves
Iranian voters are a contrary lot, said Nilufar Dashani in Tehran’s E’temad. Their surprise choice of former Tehran mayor Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as president is a slap to the entire political establishment. It wasn’t just the reformist groups who were supporting the candidacy of Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a former president. Plenty of conservative clerics were campaigning for him as well. Conservatives preferred the 70-year-old Rafsanjani because he comes from the first generation of revolutionaries, the group that founded the Islamic Republic. Ahmadinejad, a mere child of 48, represents the future—and the future always “frightens conservatives.” But the people ignored the advice of both ends of the political spectrum and made their own decision.

The reformists have only themselves to blame, said E’temad in an editorial. They should have protested much more vehemently several months ago, when nearly every reformist candidate was banned from running. Then, amid allegations of fraud, the first round of elections eliminated the few reformists on the ballot, and “the vast majority of the reformist and moderate figures accepted the outcome.” With the field narrowed to two choices, they selected Rafsanjani as the lesser of two evils and campaigned for him vigorously, as if he were a reformer himself. Yet voters knew he wasn’t. They seemed to feel they were being manipulated. The more the political elite mobilized behind Rafsanjani, the more the people “opposed what they saw as an imposition on them.”

Rafsanjani was a sorry choice anyway, said Tehran’s Aftab-e Yazd in an editorial. Many voters genuinely don’t like him. Ahmadinejad was an unknown quantity, at least outside of Tehran. While voters may not have been sure what he would do in office, at least he was something new. Rafsanjani, by contrast, actually had a record to run on—largely a “negative” one. Rumors persist that Rafsanjani amassed a private fortune when he was president from 1989 to ’97. “Ahmadinejad now owes his victory mostly to those who did not, for whatever reason, want Rafsanjani’s re-election.”

Look on the bright side, said Mohammad Quchani in Tehran’s Sharq. Iran just witnessed democracy in action. We reformists were in power for the past eight years, under outgoing President Mohammad Khatami, and we proved ourselves “ineffective in fulfilling either the economic or political demands of the people.” So the voters decided to make a change. That’s what the reform movement is about, after all—giving the people the right to choose. That this time they chose a hard-line conservative may actually be a good development, because it will reassure conservatives that they can trust the electorate. Through this election, “the Islamic Republic has learned that it need not be afraid of democracy.”


(*) (*) POV definitely depends on geography........ ;)


(S) (S) ,

Sweetlady and Doc the Boxer

[sweetlady]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/thenation/20050711/cm_thenation/35295/nc:742


(*) (*) .........he....he....he. About f* (o) !!


SL & DTB

[sweetlady]

.....during "break week" for three (!) :| :| :| PhD courses this summer Quarter. Yea, yea, THAT's where I've been...... ;)


San Juan River: Floating through Utah's red rock

By Barry Massey
The Associated Press

ALONG THE SAN JUAN RIVER, Utah (AP) -- After floating six miles (nine kilometers) down the silty river, across from alcoves perched in a red rock bluff, we row to shore and tie off the rafts.

A short hike through a tamarisk thicket and sandy flats leads us to ruins of an Indian cliff dwelling, known as "River House." There, ancient paintings, or pictographs, of bighorn sheep, human hands and snakelike figures fill the walls. Petroglyphs are etched into the stone along a ledge near the ruins.

It's just one of many stops we'll make along our recent 84-mile (135-kilometer) journey down the lower San Juan River in southeastern Utah. The trip offers something for nearly everyone -- rock art, ancient Indian ruins, canyonland scenery and hikes, including a trail that zigzags to the top of the canyon 1,200 feet (360 meters) above the river.

Commercial rafting companies provide plenty of opportunities for multi-day trips down the river. Our group of private boaters launched at Sand Island, just downstream from the community of Bluff, and pulled off the water six days later at Clay Hills Crossing.

The usually lazy river ran high and swift in May, fed by snowmelt from mountains far upstream in Colorado.

For river runners, the allure of the San Juan isn't the heart-thumping thrill of whitewater. The river's few rapids are mild; the most difficult rated as Class III and is trickiest at lower water when it becomes necessary to navigate through exposed rocks.

This river soothes and calms the soul. The canyon delights the eyes with tan and red sandstone, stained bluish-black with "desert varnish."

And there are the sand waves. They appear without notice, often in mid-river. They're small at first and then swell as they move upstream.

A few backstrokes, a pivot on the oar and my cataraft -- an inflatable boat on pontoons -- rides up and over the crest of the leading wave. It's a roller coaster ride -- up and then down into the trough. Up, then down, up, down. Then the waves are gone and the river again flows smooth.

Sand waves are a rafter's treat on the San Juan. The waves, uncommon on most rivers, form because of the high silt load and the river's steep gradient. Sand ripples form on the bottom of the river and waves build in response.

With this year's high water, sand waves popped up frequently. There were few during a trip down the river in 2004, when water levels were much lower.

Among the highlights of the San Juan are a hike up Chinle Wash, where one can find Anasazi ruins; a large rock panel filled with petroglyphs, including a reclining flute player, called a Kokepelli; and a brilliant red and white pictograph of human figures.

The Goosenecks, where the river twists and meanders through the canyon, are a visual and geologic delight.

The Honaker Trail -- named after a gold prospector who built the trail to access a mining claim -- provides stunning views for hikers willing to climb to the canyon rim.

Slickhorn Gulch offers a series of pools -- one almost 10 feet (3 meters) deep. A swim or soak in the cool water provides welcome relief from the heat and a hike up from the river. Ferns thrive beneath ledges where water trickles over and the lush green seems almost out of place in contrast to the red and gray desert hues.

One of our party -- a veteran of several rafting trips through the Grand Canyon -- rates the San Juan as among his favorite rivers.

"I love it. I always have," says David Salm of Graton, California "The whole Colorado Plateau is breathtaking."

So much so, he and others in our group snag another rafting permit and head back to float the San Juan again -- just a few days after our trip ended.

Copyright 2005 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.



Find this article at:
http://www.cnn.com/2005/TRAVEL/DESTINATIONS/07/11/utah.river.ap/index.html


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


(k) (k) 's and ({) (}) 's from:

Sweetlady and Doc the Boxer

[sweetlady]

If you go ...

(AP) -- Tips for rafting the San Juan River:

Location: The San Juan River is in the southeast corner of Utah, near the borders of New Mexico, Colorado and Arizona.

Planning the trip: Boaters need a permit from the Bureau of Land Management to float the river; contact the BLM office in Monticello, Utah, at (435) 587-1544 or visit www.blm.gov/utah/monticello/river.htmexternal link. The Web site also provides details about what to expect on the trip, where to launch, local regulations and required rafting gear.

Outfitters: Many commercial rafting companies provide trips down the river. See the BLM Web siteexternal link for a list of outfitters with permits or call the San Juan County Travel Council.

When to go: Rafting is most popular in May and June, when the river runs at its highest levels. Summers are hot, with average high temperatures in the 90s in June, July and August. Low water trips in the fall are possible, particularly the 26-mile (42-kilometer) stretch from Sand Island to Mexican Hat.

Nearby attractions: The region offers plenty of hiking and car touring for those who don't want to float the river. Visit www.americansouthwest.net/utah/external link and click on the map for more information.

* Lodging and restaurants can be found in Bluff and Mexican Hat.

* Monument Valley, the location for many of director John Ford's western movies, is southwest of Mexican Hat.

* There's a panel of petrogylphs near the boat launch at Sand Island, three miles (five kilometers) west of Bluff.

* Goosenecks State Park is near Mexican Hat and provides spectacular views of the twisting river far below.

* The left bank of the river is part of the Navajo Indian Reservation. A permit is required for camping and hiking there. Call the Navajo Parks and Recreation Department, www.navajonationparks.org/external link or (928) 871-6647.



Find this article at:
http://www.cnn.com/2005/TRAVEL/07/11/if.you.go/index.html


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


(h) (h) ,

SL & DTB

[sweetlady]

received this from moveon.org yesterday:

Dear MoveOn member,

On Sunday, Newsweek magazine revealed that Karl Rove, the President's key political advisor, was responsible for disclosing the identity of undercover CIA agent Valerie Plame.1 Rove's lawyer has confirmed that he was involved.2

Last year, President Bush promised that anyone at the White House involved in the leak would be fired.3 We believe that the President should stick to his word. That's why we're calling on him to fire Karl Rove.


(*) (*) (*) (*) (*) Sign the petition to Bush right now at:

http://www.moveonpac.org/firerove/?id=5782-5863024-aR9y.f6NjlHGD4XY1KSwlQ&t=1


Valerie Plame was an operative working on stopping the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction the most important beat at the CIA and one of the most important jobs in the country.4 Rove revealed her identity and destroyed her network of connections to settle a political score. He weakened America's national security. For that alone, he deserves to be fired.

But as it turns out, that's also the White House's official position. Press Secretary Scott McClellan told the press in September of 2003, when the story first broke, that anyone at the White House who was involved would be fired "at a minimum."5 And when asked on June 10th, 2004, if he would "stand by your pledge to fire anyone found" to have leaked the agent's name, President Bush responded, simply, "Yes."6

Of course, in the past the White House has strenuously denied that Rove had anything to do with it. In 2003, McClellan said that he'd asked Rove if he was involved, and Rove had said he wasn't.7 "The president knows that Karl Rove wasn't involved."8 "I've made it very clear, he was not involved, that there's no truth to the suggestion that he was."9 Asked again if Rove was involved, McClellan responded, "That's just totally ridiculous."10

So what did McClellan have to say about the clear discrepancies between what the President Bush and he had said in 2003 and what Newsweek reported on Sunday? Nothing. Here's an excerpt from the transcript:

Q: Do you want to retract your statement that Rove, Karl Rove, was not involved in the Valerie Plame expose?

A: I appreciate the question. This is an ongoing investigation at this point. The president directed the White House to cooperate fully with the investigation, and as part of cooperating fully with the investigation, that means we're not going to be commenting on it while it is ongoing.

Q: But Rove has apparently commented, through his lawyer, that he was definitely involved.

A: You're asking me to comment on an ongoing investigation.

Q: I'm saying, why did you stand there and say he was not involved?

A: Again, while there is an ongoing investigation, I'm not going to be commenting on it nor is ... .

Q: Any remorse?11

It's worth noting that both Bush and McClellan have commented on the case repeatedly since 2003.12

Republicans claim that the furor over this case is just politics as usual. But what Rove did has serious ramifications. Here's the story in a nutshell: In 2002, former Ambassador Joe Wilson was sent by the CIA to investigate rumors that Saddam Hussein had attempted to purchase uranium from Niger. Wilson found nothing, and wrote about it in a New York Times op-ed column on July 6, 2003 after President Bush used the claim as part of the case for war. Wilson was married to Valerie Plame, an undercover operative, who was revealed shortly thereafter by conservative columnist Robert Novak. Novak cited "senior administration officials" as his source that Plame was an operative.13

Why out Plame? While we don't know the full story, there are a couple of reasons to do so: to exact revenge on Wilson for refusing to toe the Administration line, and to send a message to would-be whistle-blowers that they should keep their mouths shut.

In any case, Plame's work was important, and by exposing her identity, the leaker destroyed ten years of covert relationship-building and could have jeopardized the lives of other covert agents in the field. At best, it was recklessly irresponsible; at worst, it was malicious; and either way, the leaker undermined our national security.

That's why we, like the President, believe it's time to fire anyone who was involved with the leaking of Plame's name. And now we know that means firing Karl Rove.

Sign our petition now at:
http://www.moveonpac.org/firerove/?id=5782-5863024-aR9y.f6NjlHGD4XY1KSwlQ&t=2

And thanks for everything you're doing.

Sincerely,
Eli, Jennifer, Wes, Matt and the MoveOn PAC Team
Tuesday, July 12th, 2005

FOOTNOTES:

1.http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8525978/site/newsweek
2. http://www.moveon.org/r?r=776
3. http://www.moveon.org/r?r=777
4.http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2002374617_leak12.html
5.http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/09/print/20030929-7.html
6.http://www.moveon.org/r?r=777
7.http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/11/politics/12rove-quotes.html?pagewanted=print
8.http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/11/politics/12rove-quotes.html?pagewanted=print
9.http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/11/politics/12rove-quotes.html?pagewanted=print
10.http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/11/politics/12rove-quotes.html?pagewanted=print
11.http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/07/11/AR2005071100991.html
12.http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/07/11/AR2005071101284.html
13.http://www.townhall.com/columnists/robertnovak/printrn20030714.shtml


(*) (*) Poor Valerie Plame. Rove should be fed into a wood chipper feet first.


(a) <stepping down off soap box> Thank goodness there's certain karmic balance and that regardless of how the Village Idiot tries to save his chief-strategist and puppet-master Rove - if not in this life - he'll get what his just deserts. And thinking about it a bit more? Won't they all? (6) (6) Teehee!

Good to get THAT off my chest and feel a bra-size smaller..... ;) Tomorrow Doc and I are off for his every-two-month ultrasound and x-rays. Two hours each way. I'm praying for all to be well. I haven't felt good this week...running a decently high fever and severe pain in left breast. (really tough sleeping this week and last because of the pain and fever and I'm a light sleeper anyway..... :(

With 2005 being so tied up with Doc's chemo - I didn't go to my gyn and mammagram appts. Dec. 2004. :| :| They're scheduled (and I will go...if only for peace of mind to return....) August 9th. Until then, I pray all's okay, and focus on Doc's oncologist appts. and my three courses' reading and writing assignments. (and my friends of course! (f) (f) )


(S) (S) Have a lovely rest of your Wednesday, wherever you are.


Peace, love and kindest thoughts,

Sweetlady and Doc the Boxer

[sweetlady]

(h) (h) (h) been to the train museum several times back in 1991 while living in Santa Monica - saw quite a few Baldwin engines as well as an FDR and other luxury cars being refurbished to original condition! It was lovely!


70 perfect miles
In San Diego County, Highway 94 is a great back road drive

By Laura Randall
Sunset magazine

(Sunsetexternal link) -- Let's make it clear. State Highway 94 is one of the best back road drives in California: a picturesque, twisting route that runs 70 miles through rural San Diego County, winding past little settlements with names like Dogpatch and Cameron Corners and lined with the kind of attractions that delight travelers.

Spending a day driving through a classic Southern California landscape of chaparral-covered hills and groves of oak trees (especially beautiful beneath winter's cornflower blue skies) may just remind you why you own a car in the first place.
Lemon trees and Airstreams

Our tour of Highway 94 begins near Jamacha Junction, south of El Cajon. It crosses the Sweetwater River, runs past the town of Jamul, twists southeast around 4,000-foot mountains, and runs along the U.S.-Mexico border until it meets Old Highway 80.

Also known as Campo Road, Highway 94 started life as the main stagecoach route between San Diego and Yuma, Arizona. But in the 1920s, when what is now Old Highway 80 was built to meet the demands of commercial freight haulers and cross-country travelers, Highway 94 lost its status as one of the main pathways to the West. Still, remnants of the old days are everywhere, most notably in the road's twists and turns. A few years back, locals had bumper stickers made that read, "pray for me -- i drive highway 94," recalls Roger Challberg, a Campo resident and president of the Mountain Empire Historical Society.

"They didn't have the grading equipment to go through the mountains back then, so they went around them," he explains. "Some of the segments of the old road are still there. Sometimes they wander off into nothing, but you can imagine what it was like to travel those roads by wagons. They're very, very narrow and have a lot of twisty curves."

A good place to start your tour is with a visit to Simpson's Garden-Town Nursery in Jamul, a 25-acre wonderland of avocados, Meyer lemons, junipers, oleanders, and many other kinds of plants. For fun, owners Lee and Cathy Smith have decorated the grounds with bits of Americana such as restored Ford Model-Ts, vintage gas pumps, "canned ham" and Airstream trailers and Burma Shave signs.

"There are maybe a few more vehicles on the road, but it hasn't changed much in 25 years," says Lee, who lives at the nursery property with Cathy and their two sons. "It's the backcountry, but we have everything we want."

From Jamul, Highway 94 begins to turn rural, winding past grassy ranchlands and century-old establishments like the Dulzura Cafe, a tidy diner whose wall decorations are an ode to its roadhouse past: license plates, horse collars, ancient eggbeaters, corn shuckers.

About 10 miles beyond is another down-home eatery, the Barrett Junction Cafe & Mercantile, a former dance hall that once served as a key social outlet for residents of Highway 94 towns. Today, the cafe still serves a terrific all-you-can-eat fish fry in a World War II Quonset hut that the owners bought in 1950 and attached to the original building. Although the price has risen from 75 cents to $13, the recipe for the tasty batter hasn't changed in more than 40 years.
Meandering to Campo

Several miles beyond Barrett Junction, you'll come to the turnoff for Tecate, Mexico, which is about 4 miles to the south (expect frequent sightings of U.S. immigration officials). From there, Highway 94 meanders east to Campo.

Hikers know Campo as the southern point of the Pacific Crest Trail, which runs 2,650 miles from here north to the Canadian border. But the little town has a lot more to offer.

At the Gaskill Brothers' Stone Store Museum, you will learn the story of the great shoot-out that took place here a century ago, when a gang of Mexican bandits showed up at Silas and Lumen Gaskill's establishment, intending to rob it and flee back to Mexico. They underestimated the determination of the town's founding brothers and ended up on the losing end of one of the bloodiest civilian gun battles in the history of the American West.

Now a museum, the store chronicles the rich history of the two-lane road that the bandits traveled. A second-floor display details the history of nearby Camp Lockett, a World War II Army cavalry post and base for the Buffalo Soldiers, a group of elite black cavalrymen whose unit was one of the most decorated in the history of the U.S. Army.
Cabooses and candy

Campo is also home to the Pacific Southwest Railway Museum, which displays old locomotives and cabooses and runs weekend excursions on restored diesel-powered trains. A mile east is another homage to transportation: the Motor Transport Museum, a work-in-progress collection of vintage trucks that are displayed on the grounds of an old feldspar mill.

Cap your tour of Highway 94 with a stop at tiny Wisteria Candy Cottage in Boulevard for peanut brittle and old-fashioned pulled taffy, then take an easy detour to the Desert View Tower, a 60-foot stone structure on the north side of Interstate 8 at the In-Ko-Pah Park Road exit.

Completed in 1922 to commemorate the pioneers who made the rough prehighway journey west, the tower features a dusty gift shop, exhibits of Native American artifacts, and (across the parking lot) a not- to-be-missed hillside of granite boulders that have been carved into three-dimensional snakes, lizards, and buffalos, among other figures.

Climb to the top of the tower, survey the 360-degree views of rugged desert and mountain landscape, and tip your hat to the early travelers who braved the terrain you just traversed.

Looping through southeastern San Diego County, Highway 94 leads you to an unspoiled Southern California of ranches, nurseries, and broad vistas.



Find this article at:
http://www.cnn.com/2005/TRAVEL/DESTINATIONS/06/29/highway.94/index.html


(*) (*) .....reading about places where I have visited many times and places where I'd love to experience for the first time is such a relaxing past-time for me......and surely takes those nagging worries away, if only for a little while. It's so much more fun sharing them here than lying down trying to sleep and staring at the ceiling and then watching the alarm clock every so often and think "okay, if I fell asleep now I'd have so many hours of sleep before 7:00 a.m. " (S) (S) ;)

(l) (l) ,

Sweetlady and Doc the Boxer

[sweetlady]

Posted on Wed, Jul. 13, 2005

Strategy from a general:

KLEINER PERKINS ENLISTS COLIN POWELL TO ADVISE START-UPS
By Matt Marshall

Mercury News

Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, the well-known Silicon Valley venture capital firm, has appointed retired Gen. Colin Powell as a ``strategic limited partner.''

Powell, the former U.S. secretary of state who resigned in January, will not relocate to Silicon Valley from his office in Virginia. But Kleiner Perkins has created a new kind of position for him, to draw on Powell's considerable global experience to help mentor entrepreneurs.

``I wanted to be on the leading edge of technology developments in America and in the world, which will not only benefit America, but all of human kind,'' Powell said in an interview.

It's rare that Silicon Valley venture firms boast such high-profile partners. Despite the popular image of venture capitalists cutting deals on the golf fairways, the business of early-stage venture capital can be sweat-heavy. Venture firms invest money into start-up companies in exchange for an ownership stake. That requires long board meetings, tireless networking and lending sundry help and advice to entrepreneurs.

Kleiner has invested early in companies such as Google, Netscape, Amazon and Sun Microsystems.

As a ``limited partner,'' Powell is an investor in the fund -- and so is not part of the core team of Kleiner Perkins' full partners who manage the firm's activities day to day. In that way, Powell is similar to scores of other individual and institutional investors. However, his role extends beyond just investing, which is why the two sides agreed on the additional title ``strategic,'' Powell said.

Powell, 68, said he will give talks to entrepreneurs and employees at the start-ups that Kleiner has backed. He also will advise entrepreneurs on how to lead the kinds of large global companies that Kleiner's start-ups hope to become. He will make regular trips to California, both as part of his existing lecture circuit and to assist Kleiner Perkins, he said.

`Mentorship' role

``We don't call on any other limited partners to provide wisdom and guidance in these areas,'' Kleiner partner John Doerr said in a conference call. Partner Brook Byers added: ``The real role he's going to play for us is mentorship.''

Powell said he has grappled with the issues of outsourcing and offshoring over the past few years, and has concluded that the United States can maintain its leadership position in the global economy only by investing in new technologies. That means providing entrepreneurs with managerial help, advice and money, he said.

He plans to be in touch at least weekly with Kleiner by video conference, Powell said, but does not expect to attend the firm's weekly partnership meetings. He said he and Doerr have been in almost daily contact over the past several weeks, adding, ``If the e-mail and phone calls over past few weeks are any indication, I'm going to be doing something with Kleiner almost every day.''

Doerr began recruiting him after Powell announced his resignation in November. The two had gotten to know each other in the 1990s, when Powell served on the boards of America Online and Gulfstream. During that time, Powell became familiar with the Silicon Valley start-up life, and worked with people like former AOL CEO Steve Case, former Netscape CEO James Barksdale, and Kleiner partner Frank Caufield.

He knows tech

He is not a technology novice. Powell owns a Treo, a Motorola Razr phone, and has three computers -- all different makes -- in his home office, he says. He's also proud of his accomplishment at the State Department. He pledged in 2001, when he arrived, that he would get rid of the archaic Wang computers the employees used, and hook everybody up with broadband-enabled computers. He did it.

Powell says he'll also continue to be outspoken about the need for places like China to respect intellectual property rights. He will travel to South Korea and Japan starting today, he said, where he will address that issue.

``I feel even more strongly about it, with my Kleiner Perkins association,'' he said. Intellectual property, once created, is being ``immediately stolen and given away for almost nothing, without any benefit to the creator,'' he said.

``We can't have a balanced trade relationship without'' respect for intellectual property rights.

http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/business/columnists/gmsv/12122195.htm


(*) (*) (*) (*) (*) On this, the Village Idiot did good ole Colin a favor! I wish him all the best in his new gig and digs. (*) (*) (*) (*) (*)


SL & DTB

[sweetlady]

http://www.likelystories.com/choc/


(*) (*) ;) ;)


SL & DTB

[sweetlady]

Netflix IT department preannounces new download service: Netflix' long awaited move into the video-on-demand market (see "TiVo, Netflix spotted making out in back row") may be in the offing. Hacking Netflix reports that an apparent technical cockup at the DVD rental service's Web site Friday briefly exposed a registration screen for a "Netflix Player." Wrote one Hacking Netflix reader: "I just noticed in my account info page, there is a section for 'Netflix Player' with a link to 'Register Player.' I haven't noticed this before. I wonder if this is a new service that they are rolling out. Could this be something to do with movies-on-demand?"


http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/business/columnists/gmsv/9601041.htm


http://www.hackingnetflix.com/netflix/2005/07/glitch_exposes_.html


http://economist.com/people/displayStory.cfm?story_id=4149765


(*) (*) :o <.....hmmm, I guess some things are "accidently announced" on purpose...... ;) As long as it's easy and less or the same as the DVD mail service......it's the same.

SL & DTB

[sweetlady]

Dannybot, a podcast parody: http://www.dannybot.com/mpg.html

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

Covering the Hurricane Coverage:

http://chris.pirillo.com/blog/_archives/2005/7/10/1013300.html%22

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

Why the Fantastic 4 Human Torch ATV (with Light-Up Headlights!) is the Worst Movie Tie-In Toy Ever:

http://www.portlandmercury.com/2005-07-07/feature3.html

*******************************************
Too strange:

http://www.xochico.com/acc/access.htm



(S) (S) ,

SL & DTB

[sweetlady]

Canada Accommodations Directory. Search through our list of hotels, motels, resorts, vacation rentals, cottages, cabins, bed & breakfasts, and other pet-friendly lodging from across Canada that your whole family can enjoy! (Pets are family, too!) (l) (l) http://www.petfriendly.ca/



Russian River: http://www.rrgetaways.com/



<aw, how cute!!> (l) (l) Hilton Head, S.C.:

http://www.hiltonheadvacation.com/petfriendly.asp



http://www.petfriendlytravel.com/



http://www.rent101.com/pet-friendly-vacation-rentals.html


(l) (l) Mt. Hood!! http://www.mthoodrentals.com/



(l) (l) New Hampshire Vacation Rentals White Mountains:

http://www.northconwayrentals.com/



(l) (l) (l) Lake Champlain Vacation Rentals:

http://www.vermontproperty.com/rentals/lakechampreg.html



(l) (l) (l) Oh yes, baby!! Sedona and Oak Creek:

http://lodging4vacations.com/redrockrealty/


(*) (*) ....and thinking of the winding drive up Oak Creek Canyon ( I mean probably two or three dozen times "commuting from Sedona up to Flagstaff to guest-lecture at NAU in the early to mid 1990's (sigh).....I bid all adieu and good evening........ (k) (k)



({) (}) 's and restful sleep...... (S) (S) (S) (S) (S) ,

Sweetlady and Doc the Boxer

[sweetlady]

Bad news. Doc came out of remission based on his ultrasound yesterday, and Dr. Jeglum (who owns both clinics and Chaired the Dept. of Vet Oncology at University of Penn Vet Hospital...) told me that when dogs come of such a short remission (only two months!), she treats them with TWO chemo drugs administered together via I.V. which I asked her to go ahead and do. Apparently Doc's chest lymph nodes were enlarged and the oncologist said something (I was dazed at that point) about it near his liver and another organ - so she wanted to take strong steps right away.

The next step is that I take Doc to Chalfont (the back road hour drive) next Wed. for him to get another two chemo I.V. treatments.

It's Friday afternoon and I have nine writing assignments for the three PhD graduate courses plus eight other learner feedback postings yet. Probably wait until Sunday to do the other learner feedback.

It's been such a long week - myself having a 100 degree fever and severe pain in my left breast for the second time in two weeks. It was "so nice of my mom" to tell me about her friend Winnie who years ago has an abscess which turned out to be cancer and she had her own left breast removed. Then my mom told me that "she had to go since dad and my brother Danny were coming in". That was Wednesday - when I called to tell her that I was driving directly to the oncologist's "other" office for Doc's appt. on Thursday and not picking my dad up to go with me. She said, "yea, yea, same old story...."

I am so glad that my dad wasn't with me like May 5th - the last time Doc had an ultrasound and x-rays - since Dad would have made a scene yelling at me in the waiting room to put Doc down rather than start the chemo again. I guess being grateful for that is a good thing. Dad has had two strokes which definitely impact his impulse control verbally and physically...... :s

I sure hope someone "up there" is listening.....I feel like that book title from the 1970's - "Been Down so Long, It Feels Like Up to Me". :| :| :| :| :|

I'm tired and want to go to sleep. However, I will open my books and folders and attempt to concentrate on writing Unit (week) two assignments instead.


(h) (h) Stay cool wherever you are.....Doc and I are staying inside a comfortable place with the temp set for 67 but it's about 70 degrees - and I'm grateful for that!! Cool temps are good for trying to think clearly while it's in the 90's with liquid-JELLO-like humidity outside! :|


Love, (f) (f)
Sweetlady and Doc the Boxer

[sweetlady]

http://www.bowserandblue.com/colorectalsm_prog.mov


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


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

[sweetlady]

July 17, 2005

What Price Love? Museums Sell Out

By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN NYTimes

WHAT'S remarkable about the Tut show at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, for which the museum has effectively sold its good name and gallery space to a for-profit company, is that people still find this arrangement shocking.

Outrageous? Sure. It's an abdication of responsibility, integrity, standards. But it's becoming the norm.

Money rules. It always has, of course. But at cultural institutions today, it seems increasingly to corrupt ethics and undermine bedrock goals like preserving collections and upholding the public interest. Curators are no longer making decisions. Rich collectors, shortsighted directors and outside commercial interests are. When the New York Public Library traded away one of the city's great civic treasures, Asher B. Durand's "Kindred Spirits," in a closed auction, for $35 million, the library's curators didn't find out about the sale until hours before the public read about it in the newspaper.

Meanwhile, the Los Angeles County Museum has entered into an arrangement even more problematic than the one for the King Tut show. Tut, after all, will come and go. But the museum is making more lasting plans with the billionaire contemporary art collector Eli Broad, letting him build a museum that he can oversee, with his name on it, on museum property - on public, tax-free land. Los Angeles County will then pay to maintain it.

The gamble is that someday the museum will inherit the art. "Why would I be spending at least $60 million if my collection were going elsewhere?" he asked a reporter for The New York Times, Susan Freudenheim, before adding: "There are no promises." When word went around the art world this spring that Mr. Broad was considering his own candidates for the position of deputy director for contemporary art, Andrea L. Rich, the museum's director, announced she was retiring.

I think the apt business term is leveraged buyout.

Business is also behind the Boston Museum of Fine Arts's renting out Impressionist paintings to the Royal Academy in London and to a subsidiary of a commercial dealer, PaceWildenstein, which runs a for-profit gallery in the Bellagio Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas.

The arrangement may seem like a harmless way to generate revenue. But renting is tricky. Every time a work of art goes on the road, there's a chance it will be damaged or lost. As custodians of public treasures, museums are supposed to decide which exhibitions are worth the risk - based on public learning, not short-term profit. That's the principle, anyway.

The model also depends on the notion of collective benevolence. Museums and libraries share collections and expertise because, ultimately, the public owns the art and pays for the expertise. In the real world, the richest museums and libraries command the best loans and stiffest terms, and favors (curatorial trips, goods and services) in exchange. But sharing, for the mutual end of cultural improvement, remains the goal.

Cash alters that equation. Last year Boston rented 21 Monets to the Bellagio. Now it is leasing art to the show in London and also to another Bellagio exhibition, "The Impressionist Landscape from Corot to van Gogh," run by PaceWildenstein. Ticket price: $15 (which, if you look on the bright side, is half the fee at Tut). When collections become assets, it's a short step from renting art to selling it. Not casting off a bit of detritus, but deaccessioning multimillion-dollar pictures to capitalize on a red-hot market, as standardbearers are now doing.

Despite the firestorm over "Kindred Spirits," the Public Library is preparing to auction off more of its American art collection this fall, including paintings by Gilbert Stuart. And the Museum of Modern Art has sold, among other things, a Picasso, a de Chirico, a de Kooning and a Pollock, artists to whom it has historic commitments. Last month it raised eyebrows by dispensing with a $5.4 million landscape by the 19th-century French painter Henri-Edmond Cross, a colleague of Seurat and Signac.

The museum's director, Glenn D. Lowry, explained that Cross (in contrast to Picasso and Pollock?) was not an artist to whom the Modern had any particular commitment, and he said that the picture would never be shown, as if future tastes were predictable. This, after the Modern justified its new building (admission fee: $20) by saying it provided more room to show a wider range of art.

The Modern and the Public Library point out that they sell to buy - to upgrade the collections. Perhaps. But museums have made mistakes in the past, tastes change, and what seemed extraneous at one moment becomes desirable at another. Moreover, when collections become fungible, trustees may no longer feel compelled to raise money themselves.

Boston and Los Angeles say that the Vegas shows and the Tut show give ordinary folk the chance to see what they otherwise couldn't. It's the bread and circuses argument, which also misses the larger point: who controls public property. A steady corrosion of faith in the integrity of institutions will be the long-term price for short-term wheeling and dealing.

With faith goes the delicate ecosystem of charitable contributions and tax-free privileges. Why, the public will ask, do institutions like these reap the benefits of nonprofit status if they service private interests who shape the content of what's on view and/or reap cash rewards?

Mr. Broad can continue to buy and sell his own pictures while they accrue prestige through their association with the museum. With Tut, it's hard to say what's worse: that the museum agreed to give up curatorial authority over an exhibition in its own galleries or that it isn't even making much money in return. That is "the way the deal is structured," Ms. Rich informed The Los Angeles Times.

What the museum hopes to gain are new members. But spikes in membership, occasioned by blockbusters or the opening of new buildings, are notoriously fickle. They evaporate once the event that caused them passes. It's another case of short-term fiscal thinking.

This is the mindset of Wall Street quarterly earnings reports and the way that many members of museum and library boards are now accustomed to think. They view nonprofits as staid. Collections in storage are underutilized commodities; the booming art market is a golden opportunity; success should be judged by hard numbers. Are attendance and membership up? Is the museum expanding? Is its budget growing? Is the museum getting enough headlines for new acquisitions and blockbusters?

But museums and libraries are not commercial enterprises. Growth is not necessarily good. Expansion is not always wise. Often it's the reverse. True success is measured by hard-to-quantify intangibles: the quality of research and education; the study, care and maintenance of the collections; the level of public trust.

Maybe trust now sounds like one of those platitudes that purist fogies bark while the caravan rolls on. So call it accountability. The public ought to demand more of it, along with greater transparency. Attorneys general should, too.

In Europe, museums are government-run. Here, capitalism rules. So museums must compete for cash, collectors, visitors. On the whole, the system works.

But it rests on faith that fundamental decisions (what to acquire, what to sell, what to exhibit and how to exhibit it) belong not to private and commercial interests but to specialists, curators and scholars, serving the public and posterity. When philanthropists see a museum or library cannibalizing its collection, they may think twice before anteing up. When museums lease their art and pay cash for shows whose content is then subcontracted, other museums may decide that lending is naïve. They'll rent to the highest bidder, never mind whether other museums wish to borrow art for better reasons.

And when collectors see some institutions turn themselves inside out to cater to a donor, they will expect the same. The Modern grabbed headlines not long ago by taking a gift of nearly 2,600 drawings that a trustee, Harvey S. Shipley Miller, amassed on a two-year shopping spree. Mr. Miller is the sole trustee of the Judith Rothschild Foundation, which Rothschild, a painter who died in 1993, established "to stimulate interest in recently deceased American painters, sculptors and photographers whose work is of the highest quality but lacks wide recognition."

Mr. Miller, who previously oversaw the foundation's donation of more than 1,100 Russian avant-garde books and related works to the Modern, decided to spend millions (including $140,000 on travel, according to a recent article in the magazine Art on Paper) touring galleries with a private curator, buying drawings by more than 640 artists, living and dead, famous and unknown, American and otherwise. It was widely reported that he informed galleries he was buying on behalf of the Modern; to a reporter for New York magazine he said that the museum could not reject any artist; it would have to take or leave the whole collection. Dealers were eager to help an enthusiastic buyer with a self-imposed deadline.

"I doubt there has been an acquisition at the museum that has been reviewed more thoroughly than this," Mr. Lowry said, defending the gift. Great collections are historically put together over many years. Connoisseurship, the highest standard of which the Modern is expected to uphold, entails discrimination, and discrimination generally takes time. Mr. Lowry said the museum's drawings curator, Gary Garrels, was "involved at conception and conclusion, and had a lot of input along the way, which isn't to say that Harvey didn't make decisions on his own." The Modern's director pointed out that trustees on the committee in charge of the department of drawings, in the event, had the right to accept none, some or all of the collection, which meant that they specifically decided to take every single work.

But how thoroughly and responsibly could they, or anybody, for that matter, review 2,600 drawings? As Mr. Lowry described the process, the committee members - those who chose to make trips to a warehouse in Long Island City, where the collection was kept - had about a week or two to evaluate the works, which included bulk purchases of drawings by young, obscure artists. The Modern has declined in the past to sell pictures by living artists so as not to undermine their livelihoods. Storage and conservation are costly. There are hundreds of artists involved in this case. The commitment to preserve their works would, unless the Modern changes its practice, last for more than a generation. "Over time, it will get sorted out," Mr. Lowry said. "There will inevitably be certain artists who don't materialize as critical to the collection." Like Henri-Edmond Cross, presumably.

Millions love Tut. Las Vegans love Monet. Other museums would regard Mr. Miller's lavish gift as a godsend, Mr. Lowry pointed out. And about the deal with Mr. Broad, Ms. Rich made a similar point: "I ask myself what's the worst that could happen? We don't get the art, and we get a great building."

That's one way of putting it. But another is that museums, having devalued their principles for short term gains, may earn the public's contempt in the long run.


(*) (*) (w) :( :( ...........Oh well, on to other things......have a cool Friday! (k) (k)


Carpe Diem!

Sweetlady and Doc the Boxer

[sweetlady]

July 17, 2005

How Costco Became the Anti-Wal-Mart

By STEVEN GREENHOUSE

ISSAQUAH, Wash.

JIM SINEGAL, the chief executive of Costco Wholesale, the nation's fifth-largest retailer, had all the enthusiasm of an 8-year-old in a candy store as he tore open the container of one of his favorite new products: granola snack mix. "You got to try this; it's delicious," he said. "And just $9.99 for 38 ounces."

Some 60 feet away, inside Costco's cavernous warehouse store here in the company's hometown, Mr. Sinegal became positively exuberant about the 87-inch-long Natuzzi brown leather sofas. "This is just $799.99," he said. "It's terrific quality. Most other places you'd have to pay $1,500, even $2,000."

But the pièce de résistance, the item he most wanted to crow about, was Costco's private-label pinpoint cotton dress shirts. "Look, these are just $12.99," he said, while lifting a crisp blue button-down. "At Nordstrom or Macy's, this is a $45, $50 shirt."

Combining high quality with stunningly low prices, the shirts appeal to upscale customers - and epitomize why some retail analysts say Mr. Sinegal just might be America's shrewdest merchant since Sam Walton.

But not everyone is happy with Costco's business strategy. Some Wall Street analysts assert that Mr. Sinegal is overly generous not only to Costco's customers but to its workers as well.

Costco's average pay, for example, is $17 an hour, 42 percent higher than its fiercest rival, Sam's Club. And Costco's health plan makes those at many other retailers look Scroogish. One analyst, Bill Dreher of Deutsche Bank, complained last year that at Costco "it's better to be an employee or a customer than a shareholder."

Mr. Sinegal begs to differ. He rejects Wall Street's assumption that to succeed in discount retailing, companies must pay poorly and skimp on benefits, or must ratchet up prices to meet Wall Street's profit demands.

Good wages and benefits are why Costco has extremely low rates of turnover and theft by employees, he said. And Costco's customers, who are more affluent than other warehouse store shoppers, stay loyal because they like that low prices do not come at the workers' expense. "This is not altruistic," he said. "This is good business."

He also dismisses calls to increase Costco's product markups. Mr. Sinegal, who has been in the retailing business for more than a half-century, said that heeding Wall Street's advice to raise some prices would bring Costco's downfall.

"When I started, Sears, Roebuck was the Costco of the country, but they allowed someone else to come in under them," he said. "We don't want to be one of the casualties. We don't want to turn around and say, 'We got so fancy we've raised our prices,' and all of a sudden a new competitor comes in and beats our prices."

At Costco, one of Mr. Sinegal's cardinal rules is that no branded item can be marked up by more than 14 percent, and no private-label item by more than 15 percent. In contrast, supermarkets generally mark up merchandise by 25 percent, and department stores by 50 percent or more.

"They could probably get more money for a lot of items they sell," said Ed Weller, a retailing analyst at ThinkEquity.

But Mr. Sinegal warned that if Costco increased markups to 16 or 18 percent, the company might slip down a dangerous slope and lose discipline in minimizing costs and prices.

Mr. Sinegal, whose father was a coal miner and steelworker, gave a simple explanation. "On Wall Street, they're in the business of making money between now and next Thursday," he said. "I don't say that with any bitterness, but we can't take that view. We want to build a company that will still be here 50 and 60 years from now."

IF shareholders mind Mr. Sinegal's philosophy, it is not obvious: Costco's stock price has risen more than 10 percent in the last 12 months, while Wal-Mart's has slipped 5 percent. Costco shares sell for almost 23 times expected earnings; at Wal-Mart the multiple is about 19.Mr. Dreher said Costco's share price was so high because so many people love the company. "It's a cult stock," he said.

Emme Kozloff, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Company, faulted Mr. Sinegal as being too generous to employees, noting that when analysts complained that Costco's workers were paying just 4 percent toward their health costs, he raised that percentage only to 8 percent, when the retail average is 25 percent.

"He has been too benevolent," she said. "He's right that a happy employee is a productive long-term employee, but he could force employees to pick up a little more of the burden."

Mr. Sinegal says he pays attention to analysts' advice because it enforces a healthy discipline, but he has largely shunned Wall Street pressure to be less generous to his workers.

"When Jim talks to us about setting wages and benefits, he doesn't want us to be better than everyone else, he wants us to be demonstrably better," said John Matthews, Costco's senior vice president for human resources.

With his ferocious attention to detail and price, Mr. Sinegal has made Costco the nation's leading warehouse retailer, with about half of the market, compared with 40 percent for the No. 2, Sam's Club. But Sam's is not a typical runner-up: it is part of the Wal-Mart empire, which, with $288 billion in sales last year, dwarfs Costco.

But it is the customer, more than the competition, that keeps Mr. Sinegal's attention. "We're very good merchants, and we offer value," he said. "The traditional retailer will say: 'I'm selling this for $10. I wonder whether I can get $10.50 or $11.' We say: 'We're selling it for $9. How do we get it down to $8?' We understand that our members don't come and shop with us because of the fancy window displays or the Santa Claus or the piano player. They come and shop with us because we offer great values."

Costco was founded with a single store in Seattle in 1983; it now has 457 stores, mostly in the United States, but also in Canada, Britain, South Korea, Taiwan and Japan. Wal-Mart, by contrast, had 642 Sam's Clubs in the United States and abroad as of Jan. 31.Costco's profit rose 22 percent last year, to $882 million, on sales of $47.1 billion. In the United States, its stores average $121 million in sales annually, far more than the $70 million for Sam's Clubs. And the average household income of Costco customers is $74,000 - with 31 percent earning over $100,000.

One reason the company has risen to the top and stayed there is that Mr. Sinegal relentlessly refines his model of the warehouse store - the bare-bones, cement-floor retailing space where shoppers pay a membership fee to choose from a limited number of products in large quantities at deep discounts. Costco has 44.6 million members, with households paying $45 a year and small businesses paying $100.

A typical Costco store stocks 4,000 types of items, including perhaps just four toothpaste brands, while a Wal-Mart typically stocks more than 100,000 types of items and may carry 60 sizes and brands of toothpastes. Narrowing the number of options increases the sales volume of each, allowing Costco to squeeze deeper and deeper bulk discounts from suppliers.

"He's a zealot on low prices," Ms. Kozloff said. "He's very reticent about finagling with his model."

Despite Costco's impressive record, Mr. Sinegal's salary is just $350,000, although he also received a $200,000 bonus last year. That puts him at less than 10 percent of many other chief executives, though Costco ranks 29th in revenue among all American companies.

"I've been very well rewarded," said Mr. Sinegal, who is worth more than $150 million thanks to his Costco stock holdings. "I just think that if you're going to try to run an organization that's very cost-conscious, then you can't have those disparities. Having an individual who is making 100 or 200 or 300 times more than the average person working on the floor is wrong."

There is little love lost between Wal-Mart and Costco. Wal-Mart, for example, boasts that its Sam's Club division has the lowest prices of any retailer. Mr. Sinegal emphatically dismissed that assertion with a one-word barnyard epithet. Sam's might make the case that its ketchup is cheaper than Costco's, he said, "but you can't compare Hunt's ketchup with Heinz ketchup."

Still, Costco is feeling the heat from Sam's Club. When Sam's began to pare prices aggressively several years ago, Costco had to shave its prices - and its already thin profit margins - ever further.

"Sam's Club has dramatically improved its operation and improved the quality of their merchandise," said Mr. Dreher, the Deutsche Bank analyst. "Using their buying power together with Wal-Mart's, it forces Costco to be very sharp on their prices."

Mr. Sinegal's elbows can be sharp as well. As most suppliers well know, his gruff charm is not what lets him sell goods at rock-bottom prices - it's his fearsome toughness, which he rarely shows in public. He often warns suppliers not to offer other retailers lower prices than Costco gets.

When a frozen-food supplier mistakenly sent Costco an invoice meant for Wal-Mart, he discovered that Wal-Mart was getting a better price. "We have not brought that supplier back," Mr. Sinegal said.

He has to be flinty, he said, because the competition is so fierce. "This is not the Little Sisters of the Poor," he said. "We have to be competitive in the toughest marketplace in the world against the biggest competitor in the world. We cannot afford to be timid."

Nor can he afford to let personal relationships get in his way. Tim Rose, Costco's senior vice president for food merchandising, recalled a time when Starbucks did not pass along savings from a drop in coffee bean prices. Though he is a friend of the Starbucks chairman, Howard Schultz, Mr. Sinegal warned he would remove Starbucks coffee from his stores unless it cut its prices.

Starbucks relented.

"Howard said, 'Who do you think you are? The price police?' " Mr. Rose recalled, adding that Mr. Sinegal replied emphatically that he was.

If Mr. Sinegal feels proprietary about warehouse stores, it is for good reason. He was present at the birth of the concept, in 1954. He was 18, a student at San Diego Community College, when a friend asked him to help unload mattresses for a month-old discount store called Fed-Mart.

What he thought would be a one-day job became a career. He rose to executive vice president for merchandising and became a protégé of Fed-Mart's chairman, Sol Price, who is credited with inventing the idea of high-volume warehouse stores that sell a limited number of products.

Mr. Price sold Fed-Mart to a German retailer in 1975 and was fired soon after. Mr. Sinegal then left and helped Mr. Price start a new warehouse company, Price Club. Its huge success led others to enter the business: Wal-Mart started Sam's Club, Zayre's started BJ's Wholesale Club and a Seattle entrepreneur tapped Mr. Sinegal to help him found Costco.

Costco has used Mr. Price's formula: sell a limited number of items, keep costs down, rely on high volume, pay workers well, have customers buy memberships and aim for upscale shoppers, especially small-business owners. In addition, don't advertise - that saves 2 percent a year in costs. Costco and Price Club merged in 1993.

"Jim has done a very good job in balancing the interests of the shareholders, the employees, the customers and the managers," said Mr. Price, now 89 and retired. "Most companies tilt too much one way or the other."

Mr. Sinegal, who is 69 but looks a decade younger, also delights in not tilting Costco too far into cheap merchandise, even at his warehouse stores. He loves the idea of the "treasure hunt" - occasional, temporary specials on exotic cheeses, Coach bags, plasma screen televisions, Waterford crystal, French wine and $5,000 necklaces - scattered among staples like toilet paper by the case and institutional-size jars of mayonnaise.

The treasure hunts, Mr. Sinegal says, create a sense of excitement and customer loyalty.

This knack for seeing things in a new way also explains Costco's approach to retaining employees as well as shoppers. Besides paying considerably more than competitors, for example, Costco contributes generously to its workers' 401(k) plans, starting with 3 percent of salary the second year and rising to 9 percent after 25 years.

ITS insurance plans absorb most dental expenses, and part-time workers are eligible for health insurance after just six months on the job, compared with two years at Wal-Mart. Eighty-five percent of Costco's workers have health insurance, compared with less than half at Wal-Mart and Target.

Costco also has not shut out unions, as some of its rivals have. The Teamsters union, for example, represents 14,000 of Costco's 113,000 employees. "They gave us the best agreement of any retailer in the country," said Rome Aloise, the union's chief negotiator with Costco. The contract guarantees employees at least 25 hours of work a week, he said, and requires that at least half of a store's workers be full time.

Workers seem enthusiastic. Beth Wagner, 36, used to manage a Rite Aid drugstore, where she made $24,000 a year and paid nearly $4,000 a year for health coverage. She quit five years ago to work at Costco, taking a cut in pay. She started at $10.50 an hour - $22,000 a year - but now makes $18 an hour as a receiving clerk. With annual bonuses, her income is about $40,000.

"I want to retire here," she said. "I love it here."


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


(f) (f) ,

Sweetlady and Doc the Boxer

[sweetlady]

Never Fear Here! Top 10 Safest Spots

From an ultra-secure parking garage in central England to the top secret military complex known as Area 51 in Nevada, the world's most safe and secure places are a peculiar lot, according to a new study by the British science magazine Focus.

While one would expect some locations to appear on this list, such as Fort Knox or Air Force One, the site that comes in at No. 10 is most unexpected: a 10-story parking garage that has space for 440 vehicles. It's in Derby in central England, and in the six years it has been open to the public, there has never been a single break-in, theft, or act of vandalism. The Bold Lane parking garage uses a sophisticated web of security to protect its clientele's automobiles that includes CCTV cameras, panic buttons, entry doors, and bar-coded tickets. Every parked vehicle is monitored by sensors so if there is any disturbance, the cameras are immediately activated and the incident is transmitted to the control room. If the sensors detect a car has moved ever so slightly when it should be totally still, the garage is locked down immediately.

Here are the top 10 most secure places in the world as identified by Focus magazine:

Cheyenne Mountain Air Force Station: Built 2,000 feet underground, it serves as the command, control, communication, and intelligence center for the North American Air Defense Command (NORAD) and Air Force Space Command missions. Cheyenne Mountain uses a worldwide system of satellites, radars, and sensors to provide early warning of any missile, air, or space threat to North America.

HavenCo: This data-protection company based six miles from Great Britain at Sealand in the North Sea has a finite list of people who are allowed access: authorized staff, investors, and members of the British royal family.

ADX-Florence Prison: This Colorado maximum security prison uses highly sophisticated technology, such as electronic doors, cameras, and audio equipment, which allows a single prison guard to control the movements of numerous prisoners in several cell blocks.

Deposed Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's Baghdad bunker: This is no ordinary shelter. It was designed so its occupants could survive a direct hit from an atomic bomb and then live for six months.

The Mormon Church records vault: It's not enough that the vaults are encased in rock at Granite Mountains, Utah. Metal gates bar the tunnel entrance. In order to visit, you must first pass inspection by an armed guard and sensitive metal detection equipment. Only then will the gates open.

Fort Knox: Our nation's gold is safe. This bank vault that is lined with granite walls is protected by a door that weighs 24.6 tons. No one person is entrusted with the combination to the vault. Various members of the Depository staff must dial separate combinations known only to them. A nearby Army post provides additional protection.

The 1960s Bar: This 1960s-era radiation-proof British pub is located deep underground in the Burlington bunker in Wiltshire, England. It's part of the British government's emergency government headquarters. Focus magazine says the pub's secluded location makes it perfect for the ultimate lock-in. Cheers!

Air Force One: The president's personal aircraft is a modified Boeing jet that features the most recent safety technology. The airplane's mission communications system provides worldwide transmission and reception of normal and secure communications. The equipment includes 85 telephones, as well as multi-frequency radios for air-to-air, air-to-ground, and satellite communications.

Area 51: UFOs and aliens beware! This top-secret U.S. military facility, located about 90 miles north of Las Vegas, was originally used to test the U2 spy plane. The area is also associated with UFOs and various conspiracy stories. The number 51 refers to a 6-by-10 mile block of land, at the center of which is a large air base the government will not discuss.

Bold Lane parking garage: The most secure parking garage on Earth. Conveniently, it's located near a shopping center in Derby, England. Shop until you drop!


http://channels.netscape.com/ns/homerealestate/package.jsp?name=fte/safespots/safespots


(l) (l) .....Shopping? Online the ONLY way for me to go...that is, if I can't get to a Nordstrom's sale - that's the ONLY store I will actually go into and shop because of their creme-de-la-creme, very professional and kind sales people. The last time I was in a Nordstrom's was three years ago to get several outfits for a wedding in Anterp. Belgium and day trips to Amsterdam, Netherlands. I still love their shoe department too. (l) (l)

(*) (*) This article touched a nerve about feeling safe which is why I saved and posted it here on this thread....... (f) (f) ;)


(k) (k) ,

Sweetlady and Doc the Boxer

[sweetlady]

http://www.cenedella.com/stone/archives/2005/07/worstest_album_3.html


;) ;) ,

SL & DTB

[sweetlady]

"The great street wines are pretty much evenly priced, and range between $1.10 and $2.80, depending on the tax and transportation costs in your area. Of course, with all five, the first sip is always the foulest. You will feel a trail of flames all the way down your esophagus and into your stomach. ... Or, if you like to smell your hand after pumping gas, look no further than Thunderbird.


http://www.bumwine.com/


(*) (*) ;) ;) <laughing......for the first time in days!> ;)


(l) (l) ,

Sweetlady and Doc the Boxer

[sweetlady]

http://www.wiredatom.com/blog/?p=88


(*) (*) Have a lovely rest of your Friday afternoon. This morning, I dropped one of those three PhD courses that I started three weeks ago and feel like I lost a bra size.... ;) I'm now taking the usual two courses which I have been taking each Quarter and feel I can keep up especially now with Doc back in chemo. And I don't know what's what with me until August 9th - probably nothing. Positive thoughts, energies and prayers....yea, yea, that's it. (f) (f)

(l) (l) ,

Sweetlady and Doc the Boxer

[Lady_Di]

http://www.wiredatom.com/blog/?p=88


(*) (*) Have a lovely rest of your Friday afternoon. This morning, I dropped one of those three PhD courses that I started three weeks ago and feel like I lost a bra size.... ;) I'm now taking the usual two courses which I have been taking each Quarter and feel I can keep up especially now with Doc back in chemo. And I don't know what's what with me until August 9th - probably nothing. Positive thoughts, energies and prayers....yea, yea, that's it. (f) (f)

(l) (l) ,

Sweetlady and Doc the Boxer

Holding you and Doc in my prayers. As always, I wish you both nothing but the best. Hope you have time to talk soon, I want to know how things are going with you, sweet lady.

Glad to hear you lightened your load. There really is no rush, is there? Remember your health matters. You matter.

Take care of yourself.

kotc
d

[sweetlady]

Holding you and Doc in my prayers. As always, I wish you both nothing but the best. Hope you have time to talk soon, I want to know how things are going with you, sweet lady.

Glad to hear you lightened your load. There really is no rush, is there? Remember your health matters. You matter.

Take care of yourself.

kotc
d

Hi Lady_Di!

Thanks so much for your encouraging words. I appreciated reading your thoughtful posting. It certainly does feel less constricting taking only two courses - and it gives me more time to play with the Doc'meister!

I'm heading back to jot down some thoughts on other learners' posts - we're required to reply to at least two others in each course. I print them out - the ones that are especially interesting, unusual and in particular, those where I can tell the person spent alot of time as I do on our assignment postings to the course room.

Doc is lightly napping. No chemo this past Wed. since his white blood cell count was too low. He needs to be taken back to the clinic that's a bit closer this Wed. CBC and then they tell me what they want to do - although they don't know that I'm going to make decisions based on how Doc has been feeling. So far, he's doing fine and not like he was two weeks ago.

You are in my prayers also. One of these days, we definitely have to talk more interactively. Meanwhile, the Internet may not be real time, but provides asynchronous communication for us and others.

Take good care, stay cool and don't work too hard. (f) (f) (f)

Kindest Wishes,

Sweetlady and Doc the Boxer

[sweetlady]

http://www.exoticfashionmall.com/images/gloves/G1200.jpg


http://www.exoticfashionmall.com/images/gloves/G1205.jpg


http://www.exoticfashionmall.com/images/gloves/G1260.jpg


http://www.exoticfashionmall.com/images/gloves/G1860.jpg (l) (l) (Love these in black!)


http://www.fitforaqueenfashions.com/images/gloves/soh219[1].jpg


Royal Blue: http://greatlookz.zoovy.com/c=KK2vL8789MeRLakUIWkJeXOIr/product/3GLDA7282


http://greatlookz.zoovy.com/c=KK2vL8789MeRLakUIWkJeXOIr/product/3GMG879W


I like the longer ones too: http://greatlookz.zoovy.com/c=KK2vL8789MeRLakUIWkJeXOIr/product/3GMG318


One in each color! http://greatlookz.zoovy.com/c=KK2vL8789MeRLakUIWkJeXOIr/product/3GLAY610


http://greatlookz.zoovy.com/c=KK2vL8789MeRLakUIWkJeXOIr/product/3GLAY620


http://greatlookz.zoovy.com/c=KK2vL8789MeRLakUIWkJeXOIr/product/3GMG8798


http://greatlookz.zoovy.com/c=KK2vL8789MeRLakUIWkJeXOIr/product/3GLFE095


(l) Opera Length in Black...Yummy: http://greatlookz.zoovy.com/c=KK2vL8789MeRLakUIWkJeXOIr/product/3GMG1415


(l) Another one and sexy in black: http://greatlookz.zoovy.com/c=KK2vL8789MeRLakUIWkJeXOIr/product/3GSS930012


(l) Opera Length Lace: http://greatlookz.zoovy.com/c=KK2vL8789MeRLakUIWkJeXOIr/product/3GMG87916


(l) http://greatlookz.zoovy.com/c=KK2vL8789MeRLakUIWkJeXOIr/product/3GLFE0013


(l) Long, Gathered Velvet! http://greatlookz.zoovy.com/c=KK2vL8789MeRLakUIWkJeXOIr/product/3GMG987


(l) One that I'm buying: http://greatlookz.zoovy.com/c=KK2vL8789MeRLakUIWkJeXOIr/product/3GMG2016


(l) Rodeo? <eehaaa!>: http://greatlookz.zoovy.com/c=KK2vL8789MeRLakUIWkJeXOIr/product/3GLAY1418


(l) Opera Length In Velvet, several colors: http://greatlookz.zoovy.com/c=KK2vL8789MeRLakUIWkJeXOIr/product/3GLAY840


(*) (*) .....that was definitely fun and certainly a right brain activity to rest form school work... ;)


(f) (f) Have a peaceful, relaxing Sunday..... ({) (})


Love, peace and sun thoughts,

Sweetlady and Doc the Boxer

[sweetlady]

Coffee Warning!!


One afternoon a lawyer was riding in his limousine when he saw two
men along the roadside eating grass. Disturbed, he ordered his driver
to stop and he got out to investigate.


He asked one of the men, "Why are you eating grass?"


"We don't have any money for food," the poor man replied.
"We have to eat grass."


"Well, then, you can come with me to my house and I'll feed you," the
lawyer said.


"But sir, I have a wife and two children with me. They are over
there, under that tree."


"Bring them along" the lawyer replied.


Turning to the other poor man he stated, "You come with us
also."


The second man, in a pitiful voice then said, "But sir, I also have a
wife and SIX children with me!"


"Bring them all, as well," the lawyer answered.


They all entered the car, which was no easy task, even for a car as
large as the limousine was. Once underway, one of the poor fellows
turned to the lawyer and said, "Sir, you are too kind. Thank you for
taking all of us with you."


The lawyer replied, "Glad to do it. You'll really love my place.
The grass is almost a foot high."



(*) (*) :o ;) ;)


(k) (k) 's,

Sweetlady and Doc the Boxer

[sweetlady]

The following appeared on Boston.com:
Headline: Voice of
Date: April 17, 2005

"Most people don't know Steve Zirnkilton's name or his face. But get
him to read two of the most familiar sentences on TV, and they might
well know his voice."
__________________________________________________ __________


http://www.boston.com:80/ae/tv/articles/2005/04/17/voice_of_law_and_order_works_from_small_town_maine


(*) (*) (h) (h) (h) (h) (h) How cool!!!


(k) (k) 's,

SL & DTB

[sweetlady]

http://artlebedev.com/portfolio/mus/



;) (h)


(k) (k) 's

Sweetlady and Doc the Boxer

[sweetlady]

July 21, 2005

Keeping T-Shirts in the Moment

By GUY TREBAY NYTimes

NEVER underestimate the power of a martini when drafting a business plan. This point may not be taught at the Wharton School, but it is probably worth keeping in mind. It was over a boozy discussion of guy trouble three years ago that Kristin Bauer and Liz Vassey had the light-bulb moment that led them to found JustDumped.com, a company that makes T-shirts with slogans that read like semaphores flared from the battleground of contemporary romance.

"It seemed so unfair that you had to hang around with someone for six months before you found out what their issues were," Ms. Bauer said by telephone from the annex of the house in Burbank, Calif., where she runs her business. "Why not put it all out front?"
Why not? The first shirts produced by the two women, who both work regularly as actresses, bore the tag lines, "Wasn't picked for Cheerleading," "Ignore Me and I'm Yours" and "Emotionally Unavailable Men Rock." If the messages were a little heavy on the ironic masochism, the result of the women's impromptu foray into business was surprisingly empowering.

"We had six of each phrase printed up for $15 a shirt, which is an outrageous price I found out later," Ms. Bauer said. "And I wore one to all the press stuff for a show I was doing for NBC called 'Hidden Hills.' "

The sitcom was eventually pulled, but the shirts caught on when a TV Guide reporter wrote an item about Ms. Bauer's new company, so loosely organized at the time that it lacked a dedicated phone line. "After TV Guide came out, we got a call that 'Extra!' wanted to do a story. We had 60 shirts we were giving to a few friends and a Web site that didn't work. So we went out to dinner, were drinking martinis again, came back and logged on and there were 500 orders," Ms. Bauer said. "We decided, 'O.K., I guess we get some boxes and figure this thing out.' "

Without realizing it, the two women had accidentally stumbled into the slipstream of a pop cultural trend.
Lately limited edition T-shirts, most likely made in someone's cellar in Brooklyn, have suddenly become the hipster's preferred mode of expression. Whether produced by college pals with studio art degrees or sold by highly organized Web companies like threadless.com - visitors to the site offer ideas and vote on designs, which are then put into microproduction - the limited edition T-shirt has become impossible to avoid.

Often crude and uncommercial-looking, its imagery represents a kind of generational response to the bland uniformity of the mass-marketed "vintage" lines found in every mall. This development has not been lost on those same manufacturers, however. Some are already producing T-shirts that mimic the do it yourself look of indie T-shirts. "T-shirts are a really cheap blank slate," said Ariel Foxman, the editor of Cargo, Condé Nast's shopping magazine for men. "People have found a relatively inexpensive way to distinguish themselves."

The trend partly reflects the great democratic welter of the e-commerce ether, and it partly serves as a marker of hipness, defined by the savvy with which a consumer can navigate the Web labyrinth in search of the coolest obscurities. For a snapshot of the estimated 1,500 sites now selling limited edition T-shirts, one might double click on Wowch.com, whose designs ring changes on the visual conventions of painting-on-velvet kitsch, or to Trainwreck Industries, a 10,000-shirts-a-year site run by a San Francisco designer, Alec Patience, whose motifs run to sight gags like Mao as a D.J., or Che Guevara's face morphed into that of Ace Frehley, the lead guitarist of the rock band Kiss.

For that matter, one might even check out Prada's recent foray into the arena, a collaboration with the Chilean graffiti artist Flavien Demarigny, also known as Mambo. His shirt, the first in a series of proposed limited edition T-shirts grouped under the highfalutin' title "Unspoken Dialogues," has a drawing of a figure and a boom box that could politely be termed an homage to Keith Haring, as if drawn by a 5-year- old.

"It all goes hand in hand with the vintage thing," said Molly Spaulding, the proprietor of Narnia, an inventive boutique on the Lower East Side of Manhattan that was known as Pullover until about a week ago. "People like the idea that there's only one, there's only one size. They like the feeling that it's their own style."

That identification with what Kim France, the editor of Lucky magazine, calls "the thinking coolsters," may help account for the insider fan base behind the success of Kadorables, a subscription T-shirt company Paul Marlow and Matthew Sandager run from a cellar hidden below a sewing factory in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

In a subterranean space that can be reached through sidewalk trap doors, Mr. Sandager, a 32-year-old graphic designer, and Mr. Marlow, 33, who has a background in fashion, print their designs onto T-shirts that are then sold to subscribers who have paid $145 to receive a shirt a month by mail for five months. Like Ms. Bauer and Ms. Vassey, the Kadorables duo (the name is a loose play on a Spanish phrase meaning, roughly, "How cute") hatched their T-shirt business several years ago over drinks with a friend. ]

"We were just boys who wear jeans and great tennis shoes, and we wanted great T-shirts," Mr. Sandager said. "And a friend said, 'Why don't you make me five shirts and gave us some cash.' "

Now, Kadorables shirts have been featured in GQ and Cargo and the two are on their 34th edition of shirts in oddly appealing de rigueur drab colors and with unassuming and often primitive graphic motifs. "In order to buy into it, you have to go into the unknown and be excited about that," Mr. Sandager said.

As recently as three years ago, when mass marketers latched onto the Salvation Army tastes of a generation, a consumer bored with fake vintage trucker or high school team T-shirts would have been lucky to happen on a place like Zakka, an inventive boutique in NoLIta in Manhattan.

There, in what amounts to a toy store for the dedicatedly hip, Toshiki Okazaki, the owner, sold the obligatory anime drawings and plastic collectibles by James Jarvis or Be@rbrick, alongside racks of delightfully original and subversive shirts silk-screened by artists as well known as Ryan McGinnis or as obscure as Print Mafia, Civil Defense, Akane Kodani, Star Electric Eighty Eight or Mana Mizukuchi, a Japanese graphics designer whose bleach-painted T-shirts go on view at the Grand Street store at the end of the month.

"With a T-shirt, it is much easier to show your work than trying to find a gallery," said Mr. Okazaki, referring to the production of T-shirts in limited editions made by artists looking less for a killing than a populist way to present their art. "Four years ago, nobody really did this," he said.

These days, whenever two or more people gather to consider the future of consumer society, "customization" and "niche" are certain to be their most frequently uttered terms. Bored and satiated, consumers first took music dissemination into their own hands, via Internet programs like Napster, and then information, in the form of blogs, and, finally, even so-called hard goods, now that it is clear that anyone, more or less, can start a clothing company. As with garage bands and personal Web pages, a little alcoholic lubrication rarely seems to hurt at the point of conception; neither does a taste for unabashed amateurishness, communal expression and the exuberantly ad hoc.
"We could spin our wheels and do progressive graphics all day long, but we didn't want a force-fed brand aesthetic," said Olin McKenzie an architect and partner in Momimomi, a three-year-old two-man operation based in Los Angeles. Their limited-edition T-shirts feature poetic images inspired by aerial photographs of freeway traffic patterns or else drawings made from photographs of friends asked to enact expressions of joy or rage.

"The beauty of this whole thing is that no one's trapped by a dominant brand aesthetic," Mr. McKenzie said. "And if you're not locked into that, then the aesthetic is free to change." There is, of course, one other irresistible element of the T-shirt as cultural marker and Web-era phenomenon. "T-shirts, like blue jeans, are forever," Mr. McKenzie said. "Nobody is going to stop wearing them any time soon."


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


(k) (k) 's,

Sweetlady and Doc the Boxer

[sweetlady]

Main site: http://threadless.com/catalog

(l) (l) My faves:


1. http://threadless.com/product/212/You_Sank_My_Battleship


2. http://threadless.com/product/133/Game-set-match


3. http://threadless.com/product/109/I_Am_Analog


4. http://threadless.com/product/268/On_The_Plains ( I LOVED this one! (Coffee warning...)


5. http://threadless.com/product/267/Who_F*cking_Cares


6. http://threadless.com/product/262/Miss_Scarlet_in_the_Hall_with_a_Revolver


7. http://threadless.com/product/254/We're_Toast (Coffee warning...)


(*) (*) I hope that you enjoyed this as much as I did. Hmmm, someone needs to start some of these businesses for older folks who are still young inside (and on the outside too!) ;)


({) (}) 's,

Sweetlady and Doc the Boxer

[Beaudyk]

Been really busy but this was too funny (sad funny?) and well written to not share!
OK I have to admit, this was the first time I actually laughed when reading an article about a wingut, fundie organization. I like the way this one is written. ('Concerned Women for America' are extremely anti-choice and anti-gay, of course)




Religious wingnut gets fired by same @ PageOneQ

Sandy Rios, former Concerned Women President and nutcake with big hair, was canned as the Director of Programs for the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews. The I.F.C.J is a group started by a "rabbi" named Yechiel Eckstein who has found a way to inveigle millions of dollars from conservative Christians. The evangelicals give tons of money to his "Jewish" group so he can help assure them that Israel will be in Jewish hands, which will set the stage, according to their beliefs, for a happy Jesus to return to Jerusalem.


Of course, once Jesus returns, the Jews must convert or die in Armageddon. It is a tidy scam, really. Jesus isn't coming anytime soon, so Eckstein gets to collect an endless fortune from gullible Midwestern fundamentalists. (Before you write, I promise if He returns I'll apologize profusely.)


Back to Rios. The New York Times Magazine did a cover story on this brilliant rabbi/businessman. (What he does is only unethical, not illegal in any way) While trying to convince America that the fundamentalists don't mean any harm to Jews, Sandy Rios - the zealous buffoon - interjects and offers this advice:

Throughout this conversation, [Sandy] Rios was clearly eager to join in. And as soon as there was a pause in the discussion, she did. "You know," she said, "the truth is, Christians do want to convert Jews."


Eckstein and Mamo exchanged glances. "Not by some bait-and-switch trick," she said. "But we believe it's part of God's plan." Eckstein winced the way he had when Pastor Munsey called him a born-again Christian.


"Anyway," Rios said, "we love Jews, notwithstanding their rudeness and hatred for us."


Three days later, Eckstein called me in New York. Rios had been fired, but her gaffe, and the impression it made, was still on his mind. "It' s really my fault," he said. "Hiring staff is a problem. Truthfully, it's extremely hard to find people who understand exactly what we're doing here."

Way to go Sandy. Not only did you lose your job, but you also exposed the I.F.C.J. for the right wing front group that it actually is. People who want to help Jews only to expedite the End Times are no friend of Israel. Eckstein should disband his group before it does any more harm. As for Sandy, I think I may have seen a want ad for a crackpot fundamentalist on Monster.com last week.

[Beaudyk]

Critic tries to get Souter's home seized
Wants town to turn it into 'Lost Liberty Hotel'

WEARE, New Hampshire (AP) -- A critic of the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling that governments may seize private property for economic development is suggesting the process be used to replace Justice David Souter's New Hampshire home with a hotel.

"The justification for such an eminent domain action is that our hotel will better serve the public interest as it will bring in economic development and higher tax revenue to Weare," Logan Darrow Clements wrote in a fax to town officials in Weare Tuesday.

Souter, a longtime Weare resident, joined in last week's 5-4 court decision that said governments may seize private property for private development, if doing so would benefit a community. (Full story)

Clements is CEO of Los Angeles-based Freestar Media, which fights "abusive" government. "This is not a prank," he said in a news release on the Freestar Media web site.

Clements did not immediately respond to an e-mail seeking additional comment Wednesday. A telephone call was answered with a recording saying his voice mailbox was full.

Police cars were parked at the edge of Souter's property Tuesday in response to the letter. "It was a precaution, just being protective," said police Lt. Mark Bodanza. Souter was assaulted while jogging in Washington in May 2004.

Clements' letter was given to the board of selectmen. If the five-member board were to endorse the hotel project, zoning laws would have to be changed and the hotel would have to get approval from the planning board.

"At this point, the Board of Selectmen are taking no action," chairwoman Laura Buono said Wednesday in an e-mail.

"Am I taking this seriously? But of course," said Charles Meany, Weare's code enforcement officer. "If it is their right to pursue this type of end, then by all means let the process begin."

Meany did not immediately respond to a call seeking details on the process.

There was no immediate response to a call seeking comment from Souter.

Souter's two-story colonial farmhouse is assessed at just over $100,000 and brought in $2,895 in property taxes last year.

The Supreme Court case involved the city of New London, Connecticut, which wants to seize property to make way for a hotel and convention center.

The majority opinion said New London could pursue private development under the Fifth Amendment, which allows governments to take private property if the land is for public use. It said the project the city has in mind promises to produce jobs and revenue.

Copyright 2005 The Associated Press. All rights reserved

[sweetlady]

(l) :( I don't know what's more heart-breaking, this story of a wonderful mom lost, or a cruel, mean-spirited one who is still alive and continues to cause pain. :(

*********
July 26, 2005

The Books of Summer

By ALICE HOFFMAN NYTimes

Wellfleet, Mass.

SUMMER is what we look forward to, it is the far away goalpost when we're slogging through winter, the antidote to ice and snow. It's the season of freedom, hydrangeas, drive-in movies, baseball. Just as there are songs that forever remind you of a certain summer in your life, there are books that claim a particular summer: the summer when everyone read "The Mists of Avalon"; the Harry Potter summers; the summer you tackled Dickens.

For me it's the Shirley Jackson summer I remember best, the year when I was 12. That summer my mother added an hour to her morning commute to work, driving me and my best friend to the Malibu Beach Club on Long Island's Lido Beach. Along with the El Patio and the Sands, the Malibu was one of a string of aspiringly exotic, California-themed clubs on the island.

My mother picked us up every day after work too, another extra hour of battling the rush hour traffic along the Southern State Parkway from her office in Mineola - on afternoons when it was so hot the asphalt melted and stuck to the tires of our Chrysler.

It was the perfect summer, the one perched between childhood and adolescence; the dividing line between then and now. At the time, my best friend seemed so important in my life (we were fixated on looking for mermaids) but now what I remember most from that summer are our daily drives. My mother let us turn the radio to top volume. She rolled down all the windows till it was so noisy, hot and windy, we had to shout to be heard. My mother knew how to have fun. It was her saving grace and her downfall.

As a child, I hugely resented that ability, but at 12 I was just beginning to realize that my mother had something special. Unlike my friends' mothers, she was interesting. My mother was a single working woman in a world of stay-at-home moms. She liked rock 'n' roll. She took me to scream my head off outside the Plaza hotel when the Beatles were staying there. She had a favorite Rolling Stone, Mick. She preferred red lipstick, chiffon dresses, sling-back sandals. She was a social worker who was always on the clients' side - an anti-authority figure.

On weekends in the summer, before we knew about skin cancer and sunscreen, my mother always stayed on the beach too long; she'd turn bright red and all night long she'd have to douse herself with white vinegar to stop the burning. She and her best friend - a woman notable for wisecracks and a turquoise and white sports car - had barbecues in our backyard and invited their boyfriends, one from Moscow, the other from Coney Island, two untrustworthy men who liked to dance. While they drank Manhattans and sat in the shade of our mimosa trees, I sat out on the grass reading "Raising Demons" and "The Haunting of Hill House," along with the darkly brilliant, "The Lottery" - a story that speaks to anyone who feels like an outcast.

I was already starting to lead a separate life from my mother. At the beach club, I smoked, I talked to strangers. I told my best friend my secret plans for the future yet I refused to tell my mother my plans for that evening. But despite the growing distance, my mother and I shared something far more important: reading Shirley Jackson.

On rides back from the beach, stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic, I noticed that my mother had "Life Among the Savages" atop the files she kept in the back of the car. We didn't discuss the books, but we both knew that this summer, we had entered the same world. Jackson's scary, brilliant reality had been superimposed onto the white sand, the perfect families, and I knew my mother felt as I did: the words on the page seemed truer than real life.

Summers are precious and fleeting; there are never as many, nor are they as long as we want. My best friend of that summer moved away, I went to high school, my mother stopped talking to her best friend, who had spied my mother's boyfriend at a dance with his fiancée, and soon the boyfriend disappeared as well.

We thought about these days often during my mother's last summer. It was the July when John F. Kennedy Jr. disappeared. My mother felt it was so unfair that this young man would never get another summer; she couldn't stop talking about him. We spoke five times that day as helicopters searched the waters around Martha's Vineyard.

As we did, I couldn't stop thinking about the summer when I was 12 - the hot wind on the Southern State Parkway, my mother in her white sunglasses. That July weekend in 1999 we cried about Mr. Kennedy, but we were also crying because we would never go to the beach together again. The time was gone and we knew it. The drinks on the patio, the best friend with the turquoise sports car, the search for mermaids.

My mother died the next day. We had been reading Anne Tyler. It was our Anne Tyler summer. And it was the last thing we shared.

Alice Hoffman is the author, most recently, of "The Ice Queen."



(*) (*) It's supposed to be 98 here today.....GOK (God/dess Only Knows) what the heat index will be with the high humidity. I have been thinking about an article I read in the snail-mail version of "The Week" - about an island so far north of Alaska - that it is closer to Russia than the U.S. - and they NEVER, ever, see their roads as they're covered with five FEET of snow year-round!! :| :| Now THAT's a cool place... ;) (h)

Tomorrow, Doc and I are off again to his oncologist's for his CBC. I guess we'll find out what's what and if he'll get more chemo then. I'm focusing on today - he's napping here under my desk and I'm getting my second cup of fresh coffee soon... (a) It's still cool here inside yet. It must be since I'm not putting the coffee on ice!


Big ({) (}) 's to Beau (thanks for your recent posts, they rocked!) and to Lady_Di from me and Doc the Boxer... ({) (})

[sweetlady]

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

If you are not in the pursuit of a degree but interested only in learning, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology offers hundreds of free on-line courses through its OpenCourseWare project at

www.ocw.mit.edu


I also have lots of research on MIT's coming up on 2,000 online courses if you're interested. PM me and let me know where to email the Word files as attachments.

(*) (*) M.I.T. certainly has set the standard for self-paced adult on-line learning globally. I can't believe the breadth and depth of the types of courses offered and for free. (l) (l) Such a deal! ;) (h) (h)


(k) (k) 's

Sweetlady and Doc the Boxer

[sweetlady]

July 25, 2005

Measuring the Distance From Here to Eternity

By RICHARD PANEK, NYTimes Book Review

You can't get there from here: the traditional traveler's lament takes on a new meaning when the landscape not being traversed is the universe. But if you can't physically cross the cosmos, you might mentally do so by measuring how far it is from the Earth to out there, wherever there is. We have been trying to make this intellectual journey for as long as we have been looking at the night sky, but the modern race up that Mount Olympus began about a hundred years ago, in a sweatshop of sorts, among a group of underpaid and underappreciated women who deserve more credit than they have received, according to George Johnson's "Miss Leavitt's Stars."

This isn't the book he set out to write, Mr. Johnson acknowledges in the preface. An old press release on the publisher's Web site says the subject of this book was originally to be "Hubble and the measurement of the universe," and the sufficiently famous Edwin Hubble eventually does make an appearance here.

But it was a Harvard College Observatory astronomer - no, make that assistant - Henrietta Swan Leavitt, who "refused to exit on cue from the story" that Mr. Johnson thought he was trying to tell.

"I couldn't get this woman out of my mind," he adds, his authorial voice still betraying some wonder at the seduction. "Miss Leavitt's Stars" is not a biography, he emphasizes. Nor could it have been. Leavitt left almost no paper trail: "No personal diaries, no boxes of letters, no scientific memoirs." Instead, Mr. Johnson found himself writing a brief mystery of sorts. "Why," he wonders, "given the remarkable, completely unexpected nature of her observation, didn't she push beyond it"?

To some extent the answer lies in her times. She began work at the observatory in 1893 as one of several "computers," the term for women who did the grunt work of astronomy for 25 cents an hour, or "what amounted to the minimum wage." Their job was to examine the observatory's thousands upon thousands of photographic plates and determine the apparent brightness of individual stars. Leavitt was good enough at this task that after a decade she got a raise to 30 cents.

But she was also gifted enough to go beyond that task. Part of her job was to compare plates of the same section of the night sky taken days or weeks apart to try to identify variables, those stars that constantly brighten and dim, brighten and dim, each with its own metronomic regularity. In 1908 she published a paper that suggested there might be a straightforward relationship between a variable star's apparent brightness and the duration of one brightening-dimming cycle, or its period. "The brighter the star," Mr. Johnson paraphrases, "the slower it blinked."

Leavitt hadn't set out to measure distances across space. But she realized that if she made one simple assumption, her data would contain a (literally) far-reaching implication. Because the variables she was examining resided in the same nebulous patch, the Small Magellanic Cloud, she assumed that they were all, roughly speaking, the same distance from earth. In that case, a variable star's period wouldn't be related only to how bright its light was when it reached our eyes, but also to its absolute brightness, or luminosity; that is, how bright its light was when it left the star, compared to other stars at the same distance from our eyes.

Almost at once astronomers understood that they would be able to apply Leavitt's discovery to other variable stars, and that it would enable them to calculate distances across the vastest stretches of the universe - if they could first figure out the distance to the Small Magellanic Cloud.

Mr. Johnson devotes the final third of the book to how Leavitt's peers determined that distance, and to how subsequent generations, including today's, have used the period-luminosity relationship to hopscotch across the cosmos to a distance of 13 billion light-years, making leaps of faith every step of the way.

Mr. Johnson has set himself a similar literary task. "The measurements remain fraught with uncertainty," he writes of current cosmological estimates of distance. The same can be said of his attempt to get from here to Henrietta Leavitt. He leans heavily on qualifiers such as "perhaps," especially concerning the central question of why Leavitt didn't do more with her data. Yes, her superiors could be condescending - she never rose above the rank of assistant - and the insistence of the observatory director that she turn her attention from variables to other projects didn't help. But Leavitt also frequently disappeared from the observatory, sometimes for years at a time, for reasons Mr. Johnson often can't discern. And her death from cancer in 1921, at 53, came two years before Hubble finally nailed the data that placed other galaxies, including the Small Magellanic Cloud, outside our own.

"Given the opportunity - better health, better times - maybe she would have joined them at the forefront," Mr. Johnson concludes about Leavitt in relationship to her peers. "Or maybe not." Besides, he adds, somewhat confoundingly, "It is the discovery not the discoverer that matters."

In the preface to his book on quantum computing, "A Shortcut Through Time," Mr. Johnson, a science reporter for The New York Times, described his ambition to construct a narrative out of ideas rather than personalities. In "Miss Leavitt's Stars," he has constructed a narrative out of two ideas (the period-luminosity relationship and the subsequent measurements of the universe) and one enigmatic personality. Alternately illuminating and frustrating, this book nonetheless does more than solve a mystery. It honors the memory of the lowly observatory assistant - no, make that astronomer - who taught us how to get from here to the farthest there there is.

Richard Panek is the author of "The Invisible Century: Einstein, Freud, and the Search for Hidden Universes."


(*) (*) This article brought to mind a quote someone gave me several years ago: "Reach for the Moon and if you don't quite reach it, you'll still be hanging out with the stars...." I hope that I've paraphrased it properly.. ;)


(*) (*) Back to week four of the "salt mines" soon...and I'm so relieved to have only two now, having dropped a course. Things are much, much smoother, less stressful and I still have the chance to add two more "A's" to my transcript as well as what has been really enjoyable learning experiences in the two course rooms so far since the Summer Quarter started July 5th. LOTS of reading this week...... :| :| :o


(k) (k) 's

Sweetlady and Doc the Boxer

[sweetlady]

Japan's art of giving gifts

TOKYO, Japan (CNN) -- When traveling for business, one of the biggest challenges is knowing what gift to give work colleagues or partners overseas to strengthen a relationship.

Japan is one culture where giving and receiving presents is crucial and now is the summer season of "Ochugen," or gift giving.

Some of these corporate gifts do not come cheap. At the Mitsukoshi Department Store, presents such as a $300 bottle of sake, or Japanese rice wine, is just one of the many given to clients. The store believes it is an important cultural practice.

"Japanese people value politeness and formality. This is a national characteristic and gift giving has existed for a long time in our society," says Megumi Kosaki, who works at the store.

"In many corporations, people send gifts to their bosses, as well as their clients to show their gratitude and that they care."

Kwintessential, an intercultural training firm, advises companies to do their research before traveling, so they know what is expected of them.

"All the gift giving and hospitality is very much ritual based. There is a lot of tradition," says Kate Berardo one of the trainers at Kwintessential.

"There are also a lot of unwritten rules -- when you sit down to a meal there will be a hierarchy that represents people's power, based on where people sit."

In Japan a gift is also symbolic of a person's status. Berardo believes it is important not to give the same gift to two people with different roles in an organization.

It is generally customary to give gifts that you have purchased from back home. This is a way of bridging the divide between cultures.

You should also take time to think about the color and symbolism. For example, the number four is associated with death in Japan, while the number two is considered lucky, while white flowers are given only in times of bereavement.

Once you have decided on cultural considerations, there is the issue of cost. The typical range for approved gifts in Japan is around $100. But sometimes your business partners will have their own rules.

If you are given a gift that you consider inappropriate according to company directives -- say about the amount the gift is worth -- you should handle the situation very carefully.

"It is important to remember the concept of face in Asian cultures and you should never embarrass somebody," says Berardo.

"It may mean accepting the gift initially and then reviewing your corporate policy -- if you cannot accept the gift, find a diplomatic way to return it."

While it is important to stay in your client's good books, make sure your own books look equally as good for the regulators.


Find this article at:
http://www.cnn.com/2005/TRAVEL/07/17/bt.japan.gifts/index.html


(*) (*) Wouldn't it be nice if Americans had such a practice? I've been to Japan on business and had the chance to stay a few extra days. *Everything* is gift-wrapped in the stores by sales people when you buy things, even pens. The only surprise was the candies and cookies that looked too beautiful to eat - what a shock to find that they weren't sweet like Western treats. :o

Hostess gifts are still in my repetoir - I'd never go to anyone's home without taking something. (f) (f) Oh yes, and sending hand-written thank you notes...... (a)

(o) ....off to "da books"! Stay cool. (h)


Carpe Diem!

Sweetlady and Doc the Boxer

[sweetlady]

That's Amore


When the moon hits your eye
Like a big pizza pie
That's amore.


When an eel bites your hand
And that's not what you planned
That's a moray.


When our habits are strange
And our customs deranged
That's our mores.


When your horse munches straw
And the bales total four
That's some more hay.


When Othello's poor wife
becomes stabbed with a knife
That's a Moor, eh?


When a Japanese knight
Used his sword in a fight
That's Samurai.


When your sheep go to graze
In a damp marshy place,
That's a moor, eh?


When your boat comes home fine
And you tied up her line
That's a moor, eh?


When you ace your last tests
Like you did all the rest
That's some more "A"s!


When on Mt. Cook you see
An aborigine,
That's a Maori.


Alley Oop's homeland has
A space gun with pizzazz,
That's a Moo ray....


A comedian-ham
With the name Amsterdam
That's a Morey.


When your chocolate graham
Is so full and so crammed
That smore.


When you've had quite enough
Of this dumb rhyming stuff
That's "No more!", eh?


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


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

Sweetlady and Doc the Boxer

[sweetlady]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/leaders/story/0,3604,1536607,00.html



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


({) (}) 's and peaceful thoughts for restful sleep tonight,

Sweetlady and Doc the Boxer

[sweetlady]

Dear Red States,

We're ticked off at the way you've treated California, and we've decided we're
leaving. We intend to form our own country, and we're taking the other Blue
States with us.

In case you aren't aware, that includes Hawaii, Oregon, Washington, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Illinois and all the Northeast. We believe this split will be beneficial to the nation, and especially to the people of the new country of New California.

To sum up briefly: You get Texas, Oklahoma and all the slave states. We get stem cell research and the best beaches. We get Elliot Spitzer. You get Ken Lay.

We get the Statue of Liberty. You get OpryLand. We get Intel and Microsoft. You get WorldCom and Enron. We get Harvard. You get Ole' Miss.

We get 85 percent of America's venture capital and entrepreneurs. You get
Alabama. We get two-thirds of the tax revenue, you get to make the red states pay their fair share.

Since our aggregate divorce rate is 22 percent lower than the Christian
Coalition's, we get a bunch of happy families. You get a bunch of single moms.

Please be aware that Nuevo California will be pro-choice and antiwar, and we're going to want all our citizens back from Iraq at once. If you need people to fight, ask your evangelicals. They have kids they're apparently willing to send to their deaths for no purpose, and they don't care if you don't show pictures of their children's caskets coming home. We do wish you success in Iraq, and hope that the WMDs turn up, but we're not willing to spend our resources in Bush's Quagmire.

With the Blue States in hand, we will have firm control of 80 percent of the
country's fresh water, more than 90 percent of the pineapple and lettuce, 92
percent of the nation's fresh fruit, 95 percent of America's quality wines (you
can serve French wines at state dinners) 90 percent of all cheese, 90 percent of the high tech industry, most of the U.S. low-sulfur coal, all living redwoods,
sequoias and condors, all the Ivy and Seven Sister schools, plus Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Cal Tech and MIT.

With the Red States, on the other hand, you will have to cope with 88 percent of all obese Americans (and their projected health care costs), 92 percent of all U.S. mosquitoes, nearly 100 percent of the tornadoes, 90 percent of the hurricanes, 99 percent of all Southern Baptists, virtually 100 percent of all televangelists, Rush Limbaugh, Bob Jones University, Clemson and the University of Georgia.

We get Hollywood and Yosemite, thank you.

Additionally, 38 percent of those in the Red states believe Jonah was actually
swallowed by a whale, 62 percent believe life is sacred unless we're discussing
the death penalty or gun laws, 44 percent say that evolution is only a theory,
53 percent that Saddam was involved in 9/11 and 61 percent of you crazy bastards believe you are people with higher morals then we lefties.

By the way, we're taking the good pot, too. You can have that dirt weed they
grow in Mexico.

Sincerely,
Unknown Citizen of New California.


(*) (*) .....laughing until there's lipstick on my earlobes and my tummy hurts! This was hilarious! I enjoy finding on my own as well as receiving emails with things like this since laughter is indeed, the best medicine....especially for "worried pet parents" to kick back and enjoy life a little.

(h) Progressive left type folks unite! (h)


(S) (S) .......getting near that time since I'm getting up at "o-dark-hundred" in the morning. (o)


Peaceful dreams tonight,

Sweetlady and Doc the Boxer

[blackknight1]

Wow...those were some of the most powerful posts I have read in a long time. Having recently lost my best friend, mentor, sounding board, mother to cancer, I can relate...all the way through the posts to the very last one on 7-26-05 about the red/blue states. I wholehearatedly agree with the notion of splitting up the country. Let the village idiot have the red...in the meantime, the blue can elect someone that can at least speak intelligently!

[sweetlady]

Wow...those were some of the most powerful posts I have read in a long time. Having recently lost my best friend, mentor, sounding board, mother to cancer, I can relate...all the way through the posts to the very last one on 7-26-05 about the red/blue states. I wholehearatedly agree with the notion of splitting up the country. Let the village idiot have the red...in the meantime, the blue can elect someone that can at least speak intelligently!

(f) (f) (f) Thanks so much for your kind words! I was pleased that you found some of my posts pertinent. It's wonderful when someone takes the time to say hello and that there was something they related to. ({) (})

With Respect,
Sweetlady and Doc the Boxer

[sweetlady]

Have you ever spoken and wished that you could immediately take the words back...or that you could crawl into a hole? Here are the testimonials of a few people who did....



1. I walked into a hair salon with my husband and three kids in tow and asked loudly, How much do you charge for a shampoo and a blow job?" I turned around and walked back out and never went back. My husband didn't say a word .. he knew better.



2. I was at the golf store comparing different kinds of golf balls. I was unhappy with the women's type I had been using. After browsing for several minutes, I was approached by one of the good-looking gentlemen who works at the store. He asked if he could help me. Without thinking, I looked at him and said, "I think I like playing with men's balls."



3. My sister and I were at the mall and passed by a store that sold a variety of candy and nuts. As we were looking at the display case, the boy behind the counter asked if we needed any help. I replied, "No, I'm just looking at your nuts." My sister started to laugh hysterically, the boy grinned, and I turned beet-red and walked away.



To this day, my sister has never let me forget.



4. While in line at the bank one afternoon, my toddler decided to release some pent-up energy and ran amok. I was finally able to grab hold of her after receiving looks of disgust and annoyance from other patrons I told her that if she did not start behaving "right now" she would be punished.



To my horror, she looked me in the eye and said in a voice just as threatening, "If you don't let me go right now, I will tell Grandma that I saw you kissing Daddy's pee-pee last night!" The silence was deafening after this enlightening exchange. Even the tellers stopped what they were doing.



I mustered up the last of my dignity and walked out of the bank with my daughter in tow. The last thing I heard when the door closed behind me were screams of laughter.



5. Have you ever asked your child a question too many times? My three-year-old son had a lot of problems with potty training and I was on him constantly. One day we stopped at Taco Bell for a quick lunch in between errands. It was very busy, with a full dining room. While enjoying my taco, I smelled something funny, so of course I checked my seven-month-old daughter, and she was clean. Then I realized that 3 year old Danny had not asked to go potty in a while, so I asked him if he needed to go, and he said "No."



I kept thinking, "Oh Lord, that child has had an accident, and I don't have any clothes with me." Then I said, "Danny, are you SURE you didn't have an accident?" "No," he replied.



I just KNEW that he must have had an accident, because the smell was getting worse. Soooooo, I asked one more time, "Danny, did you have an accident?" This time he jumped up, yanked down his pants, bent over and spread his cheeks and yelled. "SEE MOM, IT'S JUST FARTS!!"



While 30 people nearly choked to death on their tacos laughing! He calmly pulled up his pants and sat down. An old couple made me feel better by thanking me for the best laugh they'd ever had!



6. This had most of the state of Michigan laughing for 2 days and a very embarrassed female news anchor who will, in the future, likely think before she speaks. What happens when you predict snow but don't get any....a true story...



We had a female news anchor who, the day after it was supposed to have snowed and didn't, turned to the weatherman and asked: "So Bob, where's that 8 inches you promised me last night?" Not only did HE have to leave the set, but half the crew did too they were laughing so hard!



(*) (*) ...... ;) ............... ;) ............... ;)



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

Sweetlady and Doc the Boxer

[sweetlady]

http://www.cioinsight.com/article2/0,1540,1836236,00.asp



(*) (*) This "map" was from CIO Insight's July Issue,:

http://www.cioinsight.com/current_issue/0,1542,i=1738,00.asp


Enjoy! (h) (h) (h) (h)


(k) (k) 's,

SL & DTB

[sweetlady]

July 31, 2005 NYTimes Book Review Section

Bad News

By RICHARD A. POSNER

THE conventional news media are embattled. Attacked by both left and right in book after book, rocked by scandals, challenged by upstart bloggers, they have become a focus of controversy and concern. Their audience is in decline, their credibility with the public in shreds. In a recent poll conducted by the Annenberg Public Policy Center, 65 percent of the respondents thought that most news organizations, if they discover they've made a mistake, try to ignore it or cover it up, and 79 percent opined that a media company would hesitate to carry negative stories about a corporation from which it received substantial advertising revenues.

The industry's critics agree that the function of the news is to inform people about social, political, cultural, ethical and economic issues so that they can vote and otherwise express themselves as responsible citizens. They agree on the related point that journalism is a profession rather than just a trade and therefore that journalists and their employers must not allow profit considerations to dominate, but must acknowledge an ethical duty to report the news accurately, soberly, without bias, reserving the expression of political preferences for the editorial page and its radio and television counterparts. The critics further agree, as they must, that 30 years ago news reporting was dominated by newspapers and by television network news and that the audiences for these media have declined with the rise of competing sources, notably cable television and the Web.

The audience decline is potentially fatal for newspapers. Not only has their daily readership dropped from 52.6 percent of adults in 1990 to 37.5 percent in 2000, but the drop is much steeper in the 20-to-49-year-old cohort, a generation that is, and as it ages will remain, much more comfortable with electronic media in general and the Web in particular than the current elderly are.

At this point the diagnosis splits along political lines. Liberals, including most journalists (because most journalists are liberals), believe that the decline of the formerly dominant ''mainstream'' media has caused a deterioration in quality. They attribute this decline to the rise of irresponsible journalism on the right, typified by the Fox News Channel (the most-watched cable television news channel), Rush Limbaugh's radio talk show and right-wing blogs by Matt Drudge and others. But they do not spare the mainstream media, which, they contend, provide in the name of balance an echo chamber for the right. To these critics, the deterioration of journalism is exemplified by the attack of the ''Swift boat'' Vietnam veterans on Senator John Kerry during the 2004 election campaign. The critics describe the attack as consisting of lies propagated by the new right-wing media and reported as news by mainstream media made supine by anxiety over their declining fortunes.

Critics on the right applaud the rise of the conservative media as a long-overdue corrective to the liberal bias of the mainstream media, which, according to Jim A. Kuypers, the author of ''Press Bias and Politics,'' are ''a partisan collective which both consciously and unconsciously attempts to persuade the public to accept its interpretation of the world as true.'' Fourteen percent of Americans describe themselves as liberals, and 26 percent as conservatives. The corresponding figures for journalists are 56 percent and 18 percent. This means that of all journalists who consider themselves either liberal or conservative, 76 percent consider themselves liberal, compared with only 35 percent of the public that has a stated political position.

So politically one-sided are the mainstream media, the right complains (while sliding over the fact that the owners and executives, as distinct from the working journalists, tend to be far less liberal), that not only do they slant the news in a liberal direction; they will stop at nothing to defeat conservative politicians and causes. The right points to the ''60 Minutes II'' broadcast in which Dan Rather paraded what were probably forged documents concerning George W. Bush's National Guard service, and to Newswee