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We need a war on these drug makers
Teaching Old Drugs New Tricks Suppose a researcher discovered that some cheap, long-available drug could treat a devastating disease. Patients wouldn't need exorbitantly priced new drugs, and they might be able to avoid surgery. Insurers and hospitals would save millions by adopting the economical new treatment. It would be great news for everyone—except pharmaceutical companies. They don't care if old, off-patent drugs have novel uses. Their profits depend on new, expensive, patented drugs. They're not about to undertake costly testing to prove that a discount drug whose patent has expired works as well a pricey new one.
Since the pharmaceutical companies are the economic engine behind drug development, and since there is no incentive for them to find new uses for old drugs, such research is no one's mission. A Wall Street Journal story last month nicely illustrated the problem, describing the inability of Dr. G. Umberto Meduri to get sufficient backing for a major study to prove what his small, promising studies have indicated: Low doses of common steroids can help prevent death by sepsis, an often deadly bloodstream infection. The steroids, no longer under patent, cost about $50 per course of treatment. Eli Lilly & Co., the Journal points out, has just released a new sepsis drug that costs $7,000 per course. And Lilly is spending millions to promote its drug. Isn't the free market just wonderful?
Another bunch of fucking crooks story — sorry if I'm getting too wound up over this shit
Analyze This: Wall Street Gives Investors The Finger We’ve dodged the recession bullet. The worst is past. Everything’s coming up roses. At least, that’s what Washington wants you to believe -- even as Wall Street stubbornly refuses to shake off its doldrums. Whenever more bad news arrives -- such as Monday’s sell-off that sunk the market to an eight month low, more CEO scandals, and more corporate execs unloading company stock at a frenzied pace -- it’s greeted with a note of surprise. Isn’t it time the designated mouthpieces of the political-financial complex wiped that look of incredulity off their faces?
Why should battle-scarred investors return to their bullish ways when next to nothing has been done to restore their trust in the smooth and efficient¸ not to mention fair functioning of our free markets? Indeed, every day brings more reasons for them to hide their money in the mattress or bury it in the backyard.
Global Warming Very weird. The Bush administration has acknowledged that the U.S. will experience far- reaching and, in some cases, devastating environmental consequences as a result of global warming. But it does not plan to do much about it.(...) And yet even this most minimal acceptance of reality was too much for the troglodyte wing of the president's party. Shrieks of outrage arose among conservatives, who immediately and loudly demanded that the president turn his back on the report and bury his head even more deeply in the sand.
So on Tuesday there was George W. Bush dutifully distancing himself from his own administration's handiwork. He assured one and all that he had no plans to lead any assault on global warming. He was coldly dismissive of the interagency effort. "I read the report put out by the bureaucracy," he said. ---------- Here is an excellent blog that has many posts on global warming.
thanks to wood s lot As the globe warns up, Bush won't believe it AT THE WHITE HOUSE, where science is a seance by Exxon Mobil, the driftwood of the South Pole itself could float up the Potomac, flood onto the grass of the Rose Garden, and President Bush still might not believe in global warming. The mystics and their oodles of cash remain capable of freezing Bush into the world's most cataleptic leader on climate change, absolutely unmoved by chunks of Antarctica falling off or projections in our children's lifetime of pronounced disease, hunger, storms, bleaching of coral reefs, and swamping of island nations.
With eyes frozen and lips moving at the controlling wave of big oil, big gas, big coal, and ridiculously big cars, the same Bush who demands that students and teachers be held accountable to mandatory standards in math refuses to account for the data on climate change. thanks to Quark Soup
Israel/Palestine U.S. says unclear on Israeli objectives for Ramallah raid Foreign Minister Shimon Peres revealed Thursday that the U.S. is shaping a new diplomatic initiative in which the Palestinians will have to waive the right of return in exchange for Israel's evacuation of all the settlements. "There is something new emerging in the U.S., which says that the Palestinians will give up on the right of return in exchange for Israel giving up on all the settlements."
Peres reiterated his view that even if it will take time to reach an agreement with the Palestinians, Israel should not wait to reengage the Palestinians in negotiations. A renewal of the political process, Peres added, would help to solve many of the problems besetting the Israeli economy. ---------- Bush to announce new strategy after Sharon, Mubarak meetings That said, Bush is in no hurry to adopt his State Department's plan, which was drawn up by a member of the National Security Council. According to this proposal, Israel would agree to evacuate the settlements, while the Palestinians would waive their demand for the right of return for refugees. The plan proposes a three-year process, at the end of which the sides ould reach a permanent agreement accompanied by "serious reforms" within the Palestinian Authority. Sharon has expressed his reservations about the plan, and Bush is not keen to go up against the prime minister. A senior official, during a White House press briefing, made light of reports of a future U.S. plan. "I'm not sure where those reports came from," he said, "but I'd be happy to find out."
Bush is also busy helping his brother Jeb Bush win his election in Florida. With so many Jewish votes in that state, Bush is not likely to do anything that would alienate Jewish voters, who are showing increasing support for the Republicans, by going head-to-head with Ariel Sharon. The State Department seems to have a grasp on the situation but the future of peace in the mideast will more likely be sacrificed by Bush to get his brother reelected. Can this get more depressing? Unfortunately, I'm sure it can. ---------- Militant's Claim that Arafat Can't End Attacks If there is one thing that the Palestinian militant group Islamic Jihad does not fear, one of its leaders said today, it is the repressive force of Yasir Arafat and his Palestinian Authority.
"The Palestinian Authority is broken; its institutions are destroyed," the leader, Sheik Abdallah al-Shami, said calmly as he sat in the living room of his home here. "How can the Palestinian Authority assure the security of the Israelis when it cannot even protect its own people?" thanks to Cursor ---------- Israelis debate expelling Arafat The unrelenting wave of terror attacks is causing a growing clamor in Israel for the expulsion of Yasser Arafat, but key security advisers caution against such a gambit and officials say it's not on the agenda for now. The idea was the talk of the street Thursday, a day after a Palestinian suicide bombing killed 17 Israelis on a bus. Arafat condemned and disavowed the attack, but his words fell on deaf ears among Israelis after 20 months of violence in which many suicide bombings and other attacks came from groups associated with the Palestinian leader.
"Don't fear expelling Arafat," wrote the mass-circulation Maariv daily in an unprecedented editorial, and a front- page commentary by respected analyst Zeev Schiff in the liberal Haaretz daily predicted the idea would receive renewed government consideration. This seems to be another case demonstrating the Israeli's amazing ability to delude themselves. (An ability also demonstrated in this country.) They somehow seem to believe that all their problems are caused by Arafat and that the realities of their brutal occupation have nothing to do with the increase in terror. Who will they blame if Arafat is removed and the terror continues?
Globalization sure is good for everyone The World Food Summit: What Went Wrong?
Why do more than 800 million people still go hungry in a world marked by incredible affluence? 180 nations are gathering in Rome from June 10 to 13 to address just that question at the "World Food Summit: Fives Years Later" meeting. At the 1996 World Food Summit, also held in Rome, 185 nations signed a commitment to cut the number of hungry people in half by 2015. There, Cuban President Fidel Castro made waves--echoing the feelings of many--when he called that goal "shameful" for its abandonment of any notion of eliminating hunger. Subsequent trends have been more shameful still. thanks to also not found in nature
Photography
 I have mounted on my wall a most remarkable image. It's a gloriously vibrant water lily, with creamy colors and almost infinite deepness in detail and tone. It's large, about two feet square. It was neither painted, nor is it technically a photograph. It's beautiful. Everyone who has seen it has remarked on how stunning it looks, and how unlike a typical photograph. It looks like a painting but it is much to finely tuned and rendered, too polished. It's different.
This flower is one of a series of ravishing images made by Katinka Matson; the images in both her series, Forty Flowers (January, 2002) , and the current Twelve Flowers, can be seen here in low resolution versions. Katinka Matson's digital images are both pioneering and representative. She is in the venerable mode of following the technology. thanks to wood s lot Jesusfuckingchrist! How hard can this be? Plop a flower on a scanner. She titled her series Twelve Flowers. Maybe I'll do a series called Dead Flowers (this has nothing to do with Jerry Garcia). So I approached my shrine to Dame Edna and gently removed the piece of gladiola that she had thrown to me (only to me) at the Moore Theater during one of her experiences.
 I call it Homage to Dame Edna. I scanned this little five inch momento at 2,400 dpi and ended up with a file over 200mb. Maybe a little overkill. I brought it down to 300 dpi at 12 x 17 inches. Only 55mb. Here is a 1,080 pixel wide version (95kb) and a 2,000 pixel wide version (289kb). See? Bigger is better! Now I need to get that 13 inch wide Epson printer and some archival inks. I also need to kill some more flowers. By the way — what is "nor is it technically a photograph"? What, technically, is a photograph? Looks like one to me. By the way (again) — I like her photographs and I'm sure her prints are spectacular.
Graphic arts
GETTING THE PICTURE
 thanks to wood s lot
Jazz Post-War Jazz: An Arbitrary Road Map
Gary Giddins presents a personal road map to post-war jazz, introducing 57 of his most cherished tracks from 1945 to 2001.
Israel/Palestine The images of the bombing at the Megiddo Junction that showed up on American TV screens yesterday are just a promo for the joint press conference Bush and Sharon will have after their meeting next Monday at the White House. Who cares if Arafat is about as responsible for the Islamic Jihad as Sharon is responsible for the plot to blow up the girls school in Abu Dis?
Religious fundamentalists are behind both. Both groups have declared a "holy war" on secular regimes. The difference is that Arafat isn't ready or isn't interested in paying the political price for aggressively restraining the religious zealots, without getting any political payoff in return. Sharon, meanwhile, is only ready to offer him a declaration that - with or without an end to terror - he'll never consider removing the extremists among the settlers. The incentive for the Palestinians to punish their extremists is more land expropriations from Palestinian farmers and shepherds by the settlers of Bat Ayin, under the watchful eyes of the IDF. ----------
Strangers in a strained land
One would think, however, that all the "rapture" and "end-times" talk would raise a huge red flag for Jews. After all, when the day of reckoning comes, they will be among those left behind. Stillman writes that it is not surprising that "born-again Christians rarely cite their personal interest in meeting Christ as the actual reason they embrace Israel." Gary Bauer recently told the Washington Post that conservative Christians believe that "America has an obligation to stand by Israel" based on "readings of the Scripture, where evangelicals believe God has promised that land to the Jewish people." Stillman says that Bauer "didn't mention that once Christ returns, Jews — at least those Jews who have not accepted Jesus as a personal savior — get a one-way ticket to hell." ----------
Our son, the rebel He won't sit down to lunch on time. He won't shake the hand of an old legal acquaintance. And he won't let his dad admonish him for that rudeness. It is, at times, exasperating to be the adoptive parents of a 47-year-old rebel, particularly when your son is Mordechai Vanunu, now in his 16th year of imprisonment for exposing Israel's secret nuclear programme.
The years have seen a world of changes since Vanunu was convicted of treason and sentenced to 18 years in Israel's highest-security prison. In 1986, the former technician at the desert plant near the town of Dimona leaked photographs of and information about Israel's nuclear facilities to the Sunday Times, destroying Israel's policy of "nuclear ambiguity". Using his pictures and testimony, nuclear experts estimated that Israel had the world's sixth-largest stockpile of nuclear weapons - about 200 warheads.
Business as Usual The Business of America Is Out of Control Last weekend I went shopping for electrical wiring at one of those sprawling home improvement centers. I encountered an employee who was battling to keep his temper in check. He was loading items in a shopping cart and muttering about the world going to pot. As it turns out, his world is.
Customers are quietly rebelling. For the last six months or so, shoppers have been making a mess in the section of the store he supervises.
War Against the Poor Punishing the Poor on Workfare
LAST WEEK, in this space, I wrote about the administration's plans to ''reform'' welfare reform. The White House plans are so perverse that the subject deserves a deeper look.
Better Living Through Modern Grow Bags
 Welcome to the Spore Bank. We bring you the best strains of spores and we give them to you at the best prices on the Internet. Check out our Mushshroom Grow Bag, it is the BEST and EASIEST, Dummy Proof GROW YOUR OWN System ever developed! Our spores are guaranteed and tested viable. All of our prints and syringes are prepared in sterile lab conditions to eliminate the possibility of contamination.
The purpose of this web site is to provide information and mushroom spores for educational purposes. The authors provide the information "as is" and cannot be held responsible for errors in the content of this site. It is not the intention of the authors to encourage people to break the law or to promote the use of illicit drugs. Purchasing our products indicates that the buyer is legally able to do so and is over 18 years of age. Psilocybe and Panaeolus spores and spore products are intended for microscopy use only. Psilocybe and Panaeolus spores may be illegal to possess in California or Georgia without the proper permissions. I could use a little microscopy right about now.
Stephen Jay Gould A couple of articles about Stephen Jay Gould and another by him.
 thanks to Travellers Diagram ---------- QThis spring marks the publication of two of your books: a 10th collection of your essays from Natural History, ''I Have Landed,'' and a 1,400-page treatise, ''The Structure of Evolutionary Theory.'' How would you describe the differences between the two?
'The Structure of Evolutionary Theory'' is 20 years' work. It's something I've always meant to write. In fact, if you look in the acknowledgments to my first book, I thank Ernst Mayr, who is happily still with us at age 97, for suggesting that I do that one before I do this one. I'm just glad he lived to see this one. I've been promising it to him for 20 years. thanks to Ethel the Blog ----------
I Have Landed
Dear Papa Joe, I have been faithful to your dream of persistence and attentive to a hope that the increments of each worthy generation may buttress the continuity of evolution. You could write those wondrous words right at the beginning of your journey, amidst all the joy and terror of inception. I dared not repeat them until I could fulfill my own childhood dream—something that once seemed so mysteriously beyond any hope of realization to an insecure little boy in a garden apartment in Queens—to become a scientist and to make, by my own effort, even the tiniest addition to human knowledge of evolution and the history of life. But now, with my 300, so fortuitously coincident with the world's new 1,000 and your own 100, perhaps I have finally won the right to restate your noble words and to tell you that their inspiration still lights my journey: I have landed. But I also can't help wondering what comes next!
War Against Some Terrorists This is just getting too depressing. thanks to BookNotes ----------
FBI Slaps Helping Hand thanks to Cursor ----------
War Against Some Drugs
While they were sweeping While Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaida minions were diligently preparing for their murderous mission, the FBI was looking the other way with equal determination. More than twice as many FBI agents were assigned to fighting drugs (2,500) than fighting terrorism (1,151). And a far greater amount of the FBI's financial resources was dedicated to the war on drugs. And this pathological prioritization of the drug war extended well beyond the allocation of money and manpower. It was ingrained in the culture. Counterterrorism units were treated like the bureau's ugly stepchildren, looked down upon by FBI management because they weren't making the kind of high-profile arrests that spruce up a supervisor's resume and make the evening news. Let's face it, canvassing flight schools in search of suspicious students is nowhere near as sexy as one of those big drug busts with the bags of coke or bales of pot piled high for the cameras.
It's now painfully clear that there were terror warning signs aplenty but that they were disregarded by distracted FBI officials who had their eyes on a very different prize.
Victory at Midway My grandfather, Griffith Baily Coale, started the U.S. Navy's combat artist program in 1941. He was a mural painter by trade in New York City. He also wrote about his experiences in two books. I have been putting his writings and paintings up on a site called Griff's Story. (I work at it in fits and starts. I need to get back at it.) He wrote North Atlantic Patrol and Victory at Midway. I have both books online. The following was 60 years ago. Victory at Midway Chapter 8 The Battle
 June 4th Midnight, 0000, the zero hour. A second ticks and another day is born in darkness. The Navy patrol bombers sweep on seaward, streaming through the night, bearing their adopted loads of deadly torpedoes. Above the pilots’ heads the big twin engines protrude beyond the wings, drone hoarsely in the sky. In the long narrow bodies abaft the wings, the blisters bulge like insects’ eyes. There, cramped on small stools, the machine-gunners squat, or stand for stretching. The slim tunnel of the metal fuselage is dark and filled with noise. Officers and crew are alert at their dim stations. The leading ship rises on an air wave, dips down, as the following PBY’s rise and fall in turn. Monotonously the unseen swells undulate through the formation, as the waning moon casts her cold pale light on the stiff and rigid wings. The mysterious rays weakly, indistinctly touch the dark obscure sea—a detached, unreal world below. The planes now are slowly turning north to intercept the eastward moving enemy. Two hours before dawn they find the same force, a dusky line, stretching below across their path. Unobserved, the leader peels off and drops stealthily down like a hawk from the sky, followed at once by the others in turn. Down they swoop on the unsuspecting prey. Ten big ships in two columns rush up out of the darkness, growing bigger, blacker, fast. Six enlarging destroyers divulge their curving trails. “Let go ! “—and the first torpedo dives into the sea, aimed toward the big ship that will pass ahead. The second plane launches her long tube at the next ship, and another plane dives in for a shot at the second column. Alarm sounds throughout the surprised Jap force as the planes zoom up, over, and away into the sky. Above the racket of the ships’ guns come the two shuddering thumps, the bright columns of fire and white water, as the tin fish explode in their targets. Circling in her climb aloft, the last plane sees the sinking transport’s stern rise up—the heavy list of the big cargo ship, dead in the dark water. She also gets indications of another large force nearby, all still bearing 261º from Midway—distance 500 miles. This attack at night by the Catalinas was a daring and historic feat. For two of the planes to be able to press home their attacks unobserved was a stunning exploit.
The ships were apparently riding a weather front, bearing down on Midway from the northwest under the protecting clouds. One carrier had been reported yesterday among the ships west of Midway, but this contact was not verified.
Environment It's official, global warming does exist, says Bush In an extraordinarily secretive manoeuvre, the Bush administration has subtly altered its position on global warming, officially admitting that there is a crisis while still declining to offer policies to combat it. A government report to the UN says that global warming exists, that it is man-made, and that it will transform the environment - all points that the current US government, while never actually denying, has been reluctant to accept. However, the report suggests that the country will have to accept the changes, rather than take any action to try to avert them.
"Adapting to a changing climate is inevitable," it says. "The question is whether we adapt poorly or well." ---------
Stop digging According to The New York Times, the United States has reported to the United Nations that that global warming will substantially alter our climate in the next few decades, but the report "recommends adapting to inevitable changes. It does not recommend making rapid reductions in greenhouse gases to limit warming, the approach favored by many environmental groups and countries that have accepted the Kyoto Protocol, a climate treaty written in the Clinton administration that was rejected by Mr. Bush." For the first time, the Bush administration acknowledges that global warming is mostly caused by humans burning fossil fuels, but it proposes to do exactly nothing about it.
"Adapt to the inevitable changes"? The changes are not inevitable. The changes, according to scientists, can be mitigated, the effects ameliorated and at the very least we can stop aggravating the potential catastrophe. The First Rule of Holes is that when you are in one, you should stop digging. To keep right on doing what is already causing disastrous consequences is either insane or profoundly stupid. thanks to BookNotes
India/Pakistan
Wage peace, not war There is something dreamlike about our contemplation of the drift to war in Kashmir. While India and Pakistan move their missiles into position, in Britain our concerns are focused on the evacuation of our own citizens, the destination of the likely refugees, and the possibility that the Indian cricket team might be prevented from visiting England at the end of this month. That 12 million people could be vaporised if the war begins in earnest is viewed as regrettable, but nothing to do with us. In the United States, the sense of detachment is even more palpable. On Sunday, President Bush told the nation that "we cannot put our faith in the word of tyrants, who solemnly sign non-proliferation treaties, and then systematically break them. If we wait for threats to fully materialise, we will have waited too long." But he was talking not about India or Pakistan, but about rogue states which might one day attack the US. He mentioned "South Asia" once, but only as an example of a region whose leaders had been recruited to his cause.
In waging war, Bush and Blair were tumid with moral leadership and purpose. In waging peace, they display only vapidity and irresolution. Deputies are dispatched on half-hearted missions to ask the two governments to negotiate, but no one is proposing the measures necessary to prevent what could become the most lethal conflict since the second world war. The "moral imperatives" so often invoked during the bombing of Afghanistan turn out to be nothing more than old-fashioned power politics. Now, with few clearly formulated domestic interests at stake, the new world order's moral leaders are looking the other way. thanks to Cursor ----------
The Most Dangerous Place in the World The present Kashmir crisis feels like a déjà vu replay of the last one. Three years ago a weak Indian coalition government led by the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party had just lost a confidence vote in India's Parliament and was nervously awaiting a general election. At once it began to beat the war drums over Kashmir. Now another coalition government, still led by the B.J.P. and deeply tainted by B.J.P. supporters' involvement in the massacre of hundreds of Muslims in Gujarat State, may be about to lose another general election. So here goes the government again, talking up a Kashmiri war and asking India to stand firm behind its leadership. Three years ago in Pakistan, the equally weak government of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif had bankrupted the national economy and was facing well- documented corruption charges. Mr. Sharif, too, had much to gain from war fever — fed by the various Muslim terrorist groups operating in Kashmir. The hawkish Pakistani general then responsible for communicating with and training those terrorist groups was one Pervez Musharraf. (By the way — just so we're clear on who Mr. Musharraf, now Pakistan's president, really is — some of these groups were almost certainly sent by Pakistan's intelligence service to Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan.) When Nawaz Sharif succumbed to American pressure and promised to rein in the terrorists, General Musharraf was furious. A few months later he overthrew Mr. Sharif in a coup and seized power.
Will the outcome also be a replay of three years ago? Will the conflict be contained again? thanks to Cowlix
Israel/Palestine Incarceration or Transfer: The Post-Incursion Plan
Like Israel's war in Lebanon, which was minimized as an "operation,"- Operation Peace for the Galilee-Operation Defensive Shield had political goals far beyond that indicated by its modest "defensive" name. Under the guise of destroying the "infrastructure of terrorism," Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and his willing partner, Israeli Defense Minister and head of the Labor Party, Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, believe they have accomplished two major goals that fundamentally alter the political situation. In Jenin, Israel destroyed the Palestinians' ability to resist the ever-expanding occupation. In Ramallah, Israel destroyed the infrastructure of Palestinian civil society, rendering the Palestinians unable to govern themselves. Aware that terrorist "incidents" will continue, the Israeli army is engaged in a mopping up exercises, entering Palestinian areas with absolute impunity, and little opposition from the international community. thanks to Palestine Indy Media ---------- Israel beginning land seizures The Israeli army is quietly taking over West Bank land privately owned by Palestinians in what it says is a temporary move to protect its citizens from militants. But Palestinians -- mindful that similar tactics were once used to establish Jewish settlements -- fear they will never get their land back. According to Israeli military documents, copies of which were obtained by The Associated Press, some of the land seized is in areas where officials want to build a fortified fence to keep Palestinian militants from entering Israel. Other documents indicate Israel is trying to create buffers between Jewish enclaves and Palestinian towns deep within the West Bank -- including this town of Salfit, which is surrounded by 17 large and small settlements.
Critics say the scattered and in some cases sizable seizures could carve up the West Bank in a way that would make it difficult for the Palestinians to create a viable state on land Israel captured in the 1967 Mideast War. ---------- Reform in the territories for the Jews too The headlines about reforms in the Palestinian Authority are reminiscent of the reports about efforts to establish a government without Haredim. Both are meant to distract public opinion from the real story. Inflating the importance of the argument between the prime minister and the American president's envoy about Yasser Arafat's status helps Ariel Sharon pull the wool over the eyes of everyone. Assessments on the prime minister's desk anyway say there isn't a single Palestinian leader who can, or wants to, lay down the law in the territories for the glory of the Greater Land of Israel.
"When the Palestinians speak with us about reforms," says a senior American official, "it's clear to everyone they are meant to advance toward Palestine, and not perpetuate Bantustans." Therefore, anyone talking about reforms without making clear they are meant to lead the Palestinians to independence - said the official - is deceiving themselves or the public. A European diplomat last week asked if anyone would expect the Irish Republican Army to lay down its arms in exchange for a vague promise that afterward it would take part in discussions about "painful concessions." A recently issued B'Tselem report, the most comprehensive study of the settlements issued in recent years, says Israel has created a separation- cum-discrimination regime in the territories. The regime enables the settlers to take over land, establish separate planning institutions and use one law - civilian - for Israelis, and another law - military - for Palestinians. The Supreme Court gives this unique phenomenon a legal sheen, whether by legitimizing wrongdoing by the government and army, or by generally refusing to intervene to prevent harm to the Palestinian residents.
And what reform is Israel proposing to correct these distortions of the law and proper rules of government? To mark 35 years of occupation, the management of the Israel Broadcasting Authority has instructed that its broadcasters replace the term "settlers" with the expression "residents of Netzarim," etc. While the Palestinians look for a new leader to undertake reforms in "Judea and Samaria," Sharon and Ben-Eliezer will continue putting together governments without Haredim and conducting a peace process without Arabs.
War Against Some Terrorists Bush and Putin unite against a common 'foe' As a result of 9/11, Chechen and Kashmir independence fighters have now joined Palestinians in a triumverate of evil. According to the new Bush interpretation, any Muslims who resist the status quo, no matter how unjust, may be terrorists - especially if they use their own bodies or bombs as weapons. Political militants who blow up buildings and airliners, or slaughter civilians, are terrorists. Unfortunately, revolutionary warfare always involves a certain degree of terrorism. Let's recall Jews who waged a campaign of terrorism against the British in Palestine; India's bloody suppression of Sikh separatists; the Irish uprising against British rule, and so on.
There is no clear line between "clean" legitimate resistance and terrorism. Terrorism remains the weapon of the poor, the unarmed, the oppressed. If Muslim militants had tanks and helicopter gunships like the Russians, Indians and Israelis, they would use them instead of suicide attacks. But they do not. How is an oppressed people without arms to resist? thanks to Cursor
I'm baaack! I've finished the archive for last night's TestingTesting with Courtney Campbell. It was a fun show. Now back to work.
This is from the great online poetry magazine Jacket. Check out their latest issue. This was written in 1966. Jack Anderson: American Flag This is an American flag.
Here it is. Let these words be spoken or read, and if you
A match is approaching the American flag. The American flag
The reason why the American flag has been set on fire is to
The American flag is burning. It blazes. The flames leap
Listen, listen and look: whenever you read these words, or
TestingTesting Every other Mondy night I, with a little help from my friends, webcast a one hour music show, called TestingTesting, from my living room. Tonight's the night. Click on in. Enter your comments in the show guestbook during the show and I'll read them to the performers.
Blogrolling My blogroll has been getting out of synch. Some I stop reading and others take their place. I've update the blogroll to include plep, random Walks, reenhead.com, and robot wisdom weblog. Added other links: Ralph, Palestine Chronicle, Palestine Indy Media, BBC News, BBC News Middle East, The White House, and Landover Baptist Church. It's a beautiful day. I'm going outside.
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