Iraq Is A Local War

Jimmy Breslin, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and author, poses for a portrait May 19, 1971 in Brooklyn, New York.

In order to arrive at that which thou knowest not,
Thou must go by a way that thou knowest not.
In order to arrive at that which thou possesseth not,
Thou must go by a way that thou possesseth not.

---St. John of the Cross

The more faithfully you listen to the voice within you, the better you will hear what is sounding outside. And only he who listens can speak.

---Dag Hammarskjold

Earth's crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God.

---Elizabeth Barrett Browning

My good friend Quinty (Paul Quintanilla http://www.lqart.org/ ) sent out yesterday's column by Jimmy Breslin with this comment~~~

"What is poetry? The truth burning through lies? The sharp taste of reality? Here's Jimmy Breslin burning a whole forest of lies down."

For the sake of younger readers and folks from outta town, Wikipedia at least has this stub of a description of him~~~

Jimmy Breslin (born October 17, 1930) is an American columnist who has appeared regularly in various newspapers in New York City, where he lives. On November 2, 2004 he retired as a regular columnist from Newsday but stated his intention to continue writing. In his final Newsday column, Breslin incorrectly predicted a Kerry victory in the 2004 election.

In 1969, he ran unsuccessfully as an independent for New York City Council President allied with writer Norman Mailer running for Mayor, with the agenda of New York City secession as the 51st state.

He won the 1986 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary.

Among his notable columns, perhaps the best known was published the day after John F. Kennedy's funeral, focusing on the man who had dug the President's grave. The column was indicative of Breslin's style, which often highlights how major events or the actions of those considered "newsworthy" affect the "common man."

Breslin is the author of a biography of Damon Runyon (Damon Runyon - ISBN 044050502X) and several novels, the best-known of which is The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight (ISBN 0316111740).

COMMENTARY

War must be a local issue
Jimmy Breslin
November 9, 2005

The church was empty at dusk. You stood in the stillness and looked at the place, right there on the side of the altar, where Michael Bloomberg spoke over the casket of a fallen aristocrat of the city, Riayan A. Tejeda, Marine, dead in Iraq at age 26.

Bloomberg pronounced, "He died to keep the weapons of mass destruction out of the hands of ..."

You heard no more. He was up there in the presence of a gallant New Yorker and he spread a lie and for me it was the start of his campaign and it ended with me not voting for him last night.

He says of Iraq, "It is not a local issue."

This was almost two years ago at St. Elizabeth's Catholic Church on Wadsworth Avenue in Washington Heights, which is more than somewhat local.

By myself, I have been at the deep grief of another soldier's funeral in the Bronx, one in Ridgewood, another in Brooklyn.

If the kid who gets killed is local, then - the war is local.

This war continues without an official protest that would call out the will of the people of the City of New York and might count in a nation that by now realizes it has been the victim of a president who is a fake and a fraud and a shill and a sham and now is going around with the blind staggers.

Only the other night, in a television appearance with the opponent, Ferrer, Bloomberg was asked about withdrawing troops from Iraq and - heavens! - you can't do that. Why, that would mean that New York's fallen military would have died in vain. And why you could never say that about the three or four who would be killed on the day after that, and tomorrow and tomorrow.

They die in the splendor of bravery, the prayer of valor. And fall in vain because the government causes them to die in vain.

Around this great city yesterday, the day went into the heart of the night without excitement. There was an election for mayor and the streets should have been loud with the shrieks of people crying for your vote. Bloomberg last night finished spending at least $70 million to get re-elected and the money suffocated the election. That is not democracy. Every one of those dollars should form the seeds of a revolt.

He is the mayor in a time of National Alzheimer's, and New York, too, is stricken. We have Bloomberg silent on a war. And once in this state we had as senators at the same time, Robert F. Kennedy and Jacob Javits. Look at the citizenry here accepting as United States senators, Clinton and Schumer, who both supported the war. The coin has cheapened and no outcry is heard.

How can Mike Bloomberg be the mayor of this city and not try to put his voice and weight into saving lives?

Bloomberg follows the smirking, deadly lies of a president who had people getting killed for what? For oil, for Dear Old Dad, for a racist disdain for a guy in an alley with a rag on his head. Bush saw the rag but never noticed the gun the guy carried.

Last night, Julio Cesar Tejada, the dead Marine's father, stood in the swarms of people going past his building at 602 W. 180th St. He is 53 and stocky, with short black hair and a pleasant face. On the sidewalk next to him was the small, permanent grotto to his son. A photo. Flowers. Candles. Prayers in Spanish and English.

"How has it been?" he said. He patted his chest. "My heart fell apart. I cannot work. I spend all the days going to the doctor."

"The wife?"

He shook his head. "It is very bad for her."

He said he had to get the Con Edison bill paid. "They turn off the lights if you don't."

At the corner, a young woman, a college student, asked him about Bloomberg clinging to the war. Now I mentioned the speech at his son's funeral.

Julio shook his head. "I was too mixed up at the funeral."

He said then he was going to vote.

"For whom?"

He shook his head. "I don't know 'til I get there."

Copyright 2005 Newsday Inc.http://www.newsday.com/news/columnists/ny-nybres094505071nov09,0,5025678.column?coll=ny-news-columnists

I found most enlightening this page of Breslin quotes...if you're in the mood for more~~~

http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/j/jimmy_breslin.html

Tears For Baghdad

An Iraqi man cries over the bodies of his children in Hillah, some 110km south of Baghdad, after US troops bombed a residential quarter of the town. (Photograph:Reuters, April 1, 2003)

In proportion as our inward life fails, we go more constantly and desperately to the post office. You may depend on it, that poor fellow who walks away with the greatest number of letters, proud of his extensive correspondence, has not heard from himself this long while.

---Henry David Thoreau

Pride flees from the man who penetrates into the self as the light of a campfire before the rays of the sun.

---Zen saying

You should know that no one can hold the mind by himself, if it not be held by the Spirit. For it cannot be held, not because of its mobile nature but because, through neglect, it has acquired the habit of turning and wandering hither and thither....A mind thus inclined and withdrawn from God is led captive everywhere.

---St. Gregory Of Sinai

How many civilians, the elderly, women, children, male noncombatants, have died in the War on Iraq? It used to be that a casualty count was important in warfare. It's how you knew you were winning. Of course that's when soldiers would gather on a field of battle, face each other, march up with some fancy footwork and football plays, and shoot it out. Civilians got killed in the seige of a castle or city...or mass execution later...but it's been fewer than a hundred years of glorious history since we've improved ourselves enough to provide access to air attack.

To begin the generals played by the old rules, lobbing bombs onto troop locations, splattering civilians only by accident. But then, maybe troops started hiding behind the lady's skirts, so the only thing to do was aim at buildings and homes. This activity required a new kind of behavior and discipline from the average pilot...and I imagine it still does the first time a pilot is ordered to shoot a rocket where there might be babies. But it looks as though humans can get used to anything...and of course duty calls.

At first, the firebombing campaign against Dresden by the team of the USAAF Eighth Air Force and RAF Bomber Command in 1944 and 1945 wasn't talked about much. So many tens of thousands of people were killed and almost the entire city flattened by tens of thousands of tons of high-explosive bombs and incendiaries that folks had trouble even thinking about it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Dresden_in_World_War_II Possibly Kurt Vonnegut, who experienced the February 1945 attack as a prisoner of war and survived, is more responsible than our history teachers for making us remember that it happened at all.

Besides, when we almost immediately went on to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the business at Dresden seemed like small potatoes. At least 120,000 people were killed immediately, almost 95% of them civilian. Nearly twice that number have died since from their injuries and radiation. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_and_Nagasaki Obviously the Japanese army wasn't hiding in schools and hospitals in those cities. This was a preventive attack, an object lesson, a morality tale. The Allies were the Good Guys, and here was the proof. No, I'm not arguing anything in favor of the Nazi Axis, but I do call into question the sense of superiority that particularly the United States assumed 60 years ago and has labored on ever since.

We've never been really proud of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but I don't think we apologized either, did we? In the Orient official apologies from one nation to another are highly honored. Generally I think Americans feel it was horrible to do it, but it had to be done. This is how war goes. We've never thought of ourselves as war criminals in any sense. We expect our own court martials to take care of perpetrators of massacres a la Viet Nam. We know that people freak out in war, and now with television and instant computer communication we know such things occur more than we used to.

Which brings us to Shock And Awe. Here we were going after one man who might be in Baghdad. The whole strategy was planned out with pinpoint accuracy. http://www.shockandawe.com/ How many civilians died during the display...and after? General Tommy Franks, of the US Central Command, replied, "We don't do body counts." http://www.iraqbodycount.net/ Why not? What happened to the tally that tells us whether or not we're winning? Are we ashamed? Don't we want anyone to know? Is this the way our leaders hide behind the lady's skirts these days? We just don't talk about it? We aren't allowed to think about it?

How many women and children and elderly have died in Iraq? This past weekend the generally excellent PRI show "This American Life" featured a Johns Hopkins survey done in Iraq and published an entire year ago that attempted to answer that question. You can hear the show here http://www.thislife.org/ and you can read the survey after you register (quick and free) at the distinguished British journal The Lancet http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140673604174412/fulltext . The estimate then---over a year ago---was 100,000 people. The method of the survey generally has been applauded by major scholars everywhere who keep up with those kinds of investigations and statistics. The guys from Johns Hopkins who conducted it were lucky to get in and get out alive.

What Ira Glass was wondering during his broadcast is how come no one heard about this study? The authors thought their results would be all over the media...and they even confess to having expected moral outrage. But almost nobody carried the release and results at all. I wonder why. Do you think there's a conspiracy of publishers to keep news from us? Are we all too confused and numb to deal with our own consequences? Has the United States come to a point where its population just can't handle it? How dangerous would be such a state of mind? What does it take to drive an Iraqi son, husband, and father insane with grief? What would it take to make you that way?

To My Friends On The Right

Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald (L), who says he doesn't photograph well, arrives at his Washington office October 27, 2005. (REUTERS/Micah Walter)

We must be able to let things happen in the psyche. For us, this actually is an art of which few people know anything. Consciousness is forever interfering, helping, correcting, and negating, and never leaving the simple growth of the psychic processes in peace. It would be simple enough, if only simplicity were not the most difficult of things.

---Carl Gustav Jung

To know that you do not know is the best.
To pretend to know when you do not know is a disease.

---Lao Tzu

Give me, kind Heaven, a private station,
A mind serene for contemplation.

---John Gay

I like to maintain dialogue with people of conservative philosophies, and several get these dispatches I send to cyberspace from time to time. Apparently a few even read them and sometimes lash back when they get mad. This is OK because usually there are other things at the heart of our friendship...and we just go back to those topics. I'm not being demeaning because there are elements of the conservative view, including the basic tenets of Hobbes, that are very convincing to me. I like best to talk with conservatives because I may be wrong about things and they help me be the first to know when I am.

There are two things I know about conservatives that come to mind this morning. One is they allow more secrecy in planning and government than I like or agree with. They respect the sanctity of the huddle. I must admit the intrusion of television technology onto the playing field can spoil the fun. I do not want to learn what the next pitch is going to be, or what the manager just whispered into the coach's ear. But politics is not a game to me, and if Cheney's energy cronies have carved up the world for their financial gain, using the public office of the Vice Presidency to do it, I want to know!

But the second conservative conviction that I think of today I do agree with and respect tremendously. Conservatives believe in playing by the rules. Fascists don't. They believe in making up rules by "necessity" as they go along. And so conservatives I've been talking to are anticipating the announcements by Fitzgerald today as much as I am. When Miers withdrew yesterday one such associate said to me, "Now we'll get a nominee to replace her so far to the right there won't be a confirmation before Christmas!" His remark helped temper my excitement.

The left is going wild on the Internet at this hour. I understand it. I woke up at 3 and had to get down to the computer to read the news. Some of you write or tell me you like it when I chart where I've been because it saves you time. Google News is featuring well over 2000 entries at this hour on who in the White House is about to be indicted, and an extension of the grand jury investigation for more about Karl Rove. Yahoo is carrying the basic AP story http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20051028/ap_on_go_ca_st_pe/cia_leak_investigation , but Reuters' Adam Entous kept updating his coverage until after midnight sometime. You can type in www.reuters.com and find yourself with the latest news, but I like Entous' earlier story which appeared on The Boston Globe site last night http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2005/10/27/leak_case_announcement_seen_friday/ . It also sums up The New York Times story, appearing in this morning's edition, that says Karl Rove will not be charged today because Fitzgerald is looking for more.

Another excellent summary I think is at BradBlog http://www.bradblog.com/archives/00001956.htm#comments . There are lots of hyperlinks there to lead your curiosity to the original sources. The most significant I think is the reference to a dispatch from Murray Waas at the National Journal http://nationaljournal.com/about/njweekly/stories/2005/1027nj1.htm . Here we learn, "Vice President Cheney and his chief of staff, I. Lewis 'Scooter' Libby, overruling advice from some White House political staffers and lawyers, decided to withhold crucial documents from the Senate Intelligence Committee in 2004 when the panel was investigating the use of pre-war intelligence that erroneously concluded Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, according to Bush administration and congressional sources.
"Among the White House materials withheld from the committee were Libby-authored passages in drafts of a speech that then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell delivered to the United Nations in February 2003 to argue the Bush administration's case for war with Iraq, according to congressional and administration sources. The withheld documents also included intelligence data that Cheney's office -- and Libby in particular -- pushed to be included in Powell's speech, the sources said. " While still at BradBlog, especially those of us in Ohio, be sure to check out his writeup of Tom Noe's 3 count indictment of money laundering for Bush and Blackwell http://www.bradblog.com/archives/00001954.htm#comments . Dana sent this out to her list already last night.

If you want to get farther out, brace yourself for Arianna Huffington's blog, which actually is a legion of liberal bloggers http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ . The latest headlines and links to those sites are also there, and lots of photos. Her own entry today is about Macbeth and Bush and how they both lost their mojo. Well...you catch the drift.

The piece that captured most of my attention was an analysis of the whole Bush collapse by Tom Englehardt, who attended both Yale and Harvard and is involved, I guess, in a couple liberal thinktanks and publishing projects. He maintains something called TomDispatch http://tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml and yesterday put out this essay that TruthOut and a number of others have picked up http://tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=31576 . Clearly Englehardt is a bit on edge himself , as he chronicles how hard he's been working over the past year for this moment. Yeah well, haven't we all? But further into the piece he gets going~~~

"In all their guises -- in relation to the media, the federal bureaucracy, and other countries -- they actually were dominating isolationists. They took a once honorable Republican heartland tradition -- isolationism -- turned it on its head and thrust it into the world. They acted in Iraq and elsewhere as armed imperial isolationists. Where the elder Bush and Bill Clinton were multinationalists and globalizers; they were ultra-nationalists and militarists, focused only on the military solution to any problem -- and damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!
"But when you are a cabal, using such close-to-the-breast, not to say mom-and-pop, methods of ruling, and you falter, whether in Iraq or at home, unilateralism becomes weakness. And when it turns out that what you rule is the 'last superpower' and you've sidelined, pacified, or punished large numbers of people in the vast, interlocking worlds of the governmental bureaucracy and the media, your enemies still retain the power to strike back.
"When something closer to the full story of our moment is known, I suspect we'll see more clearly just how the bureaucracy began to do so (along with, as in this week's New Yorker magazine in the person of Brent Scowcroft, the old multinational ruling elite). In the meantime, it's clear that what the potential implosion moment awaited was the perfect storm of events now upon us. If this moment were to be traced back to its origins, I would, for the time being, pick the spring of this year as my starting point and give the mainstream media -- anxious, resentful, bitter, cowed, losing audience, and cutting staff -- their due. The Bush slide has been a long, slow one, as the opinion polls indicate; but like that famed moss-less rolling stone, it picked up speed last spring as the President's approval ratings slipped below 50%, and then in the ensuing months plunged near or below 40%, putting him at the edge of free-fall.
"If there's one thing that this administration and Washington journalists have in common, it's that both groups parse opinion polls obsessively; so both saw the signs of administration polling softness and of a President, just into a second term, who should have been triumphant but was failing in his attempt to spend what he called his 'political capital' on social security 'reform.'
"Vulnerability, it gets the blood roaring, especially when it seeps from an administration so long feared and admired as the 'most disciplined' and 'most secretive' in memory, an administration whose highest officials (as the Plame case showed) regularly whacked their opponents with anything at hand and then called on their media allies, always in full-battle-mode, for support. Probably the key moment of weakness came in August, when Cindy Sheehan ended up in that famed ditch at the side of a road in Crawford, Texas, and the President and his men -- undoubtedly feeling their new-found vulnerability, anxious over an Iraq War gone wrong and the protesting mother of a dead soldier so near at hand -- blinked."

I hope this has helped you with your Friday morning and the announcement to come later today. Enjoy it, especially if it's payday besides! And get your chores done tomorrow.

In Memoriam Rosa Parks

Pride means the end of wisdom.

---Japanese proverb

It is just like learning archery; eventually you reach a point where ideas are ended and feelings forgotten, and then you suddenly hit the target.

---Ying-An

We find great things are made of little things,
And little things go lessening till at last
Comes God behind them.

---Robert Browning


Rosa Parks, 1913 - 2005


"I am leaving this legacy to all of you ... to bring peace, justice, equality, love and a fulfillment of what our lives should be. Without vision, the people will perish, and without courage and inspiration, dreams will die — the dream of freedom and peace."

http://www.voanews.com/english/2005-10-25-voa3.cfm

US Civil Rights Icon Dies at Age 92
By Matthew Schneider
Washington
25 October 2005

Rosa Parks, a seamstress from Montgomery, Alabama, who would not give up her bus seat to a white man in 1955, died Monday at the age of 92. Historians mark the date of her quiet-but-revolutionary act as the start of the modern civil rights movement in the United States.

If you had seen Rosa Parks walking down the street, in recent years, you would never guess that the slender, silver-haired lady with large spectacles had anything to do with an event that ignited black civil rights as one of the main national issues of the middle 20th Century.

On December First, 1955, Mrs. Parks had finished her work as a seamstress in a Montgomery, Alabama, store and boarded a city bus to go home. She took a seat in the 11th row, behind the seats reserved exclusively for white passengers, as required by the city's segregation law at that time. Blacks were entitled to seats from the 11th row to the rear of a bus. However, the city law said if the first 10 rows were filled, a white passenger could request a seat in the back of a bus. Rosa Parks remembered the bus was crowded with people standing in the aisle when several whites boarded. A white man told the driver he wanted a seat. The driver, who had the authority under city law, went to the rear of the bus and ordered Mrs. Parks and three other black passengers to get up. The others reluctantly stood. Rosa Parks, tired after a day of work, refused.

"When they stood up and I stayed where I was, he asked me if I was going to stand and I told him that 'no, I wasn't,' and he told me if I did not stand up he was going to have me arrested. And, I told him to go on and have me arrested," Mrs. Parks said.

The bus driver called the police and when they arrived he told them he needed the seats for his white passengers.

"He pointed at me and said, 'that one won't stand up.' The two policemen came near me and only one spoke to me. He asked me if the driver had asked me to stand up? I said, 'yes.' He asked me why I didn't stand up," Mrs. Parks said. "I told him I didn't think I should have to stand up. So I asked him: 'Why do you push us around?' And he told me, 'I don't know, but the law is the law and you are under arrest.'"

Mrs. Parks said her decision to remain seated was based on her desire to be treated with decency and dignity:
"This was not the way I wanted to be treated after I had paid the same fare this man had paid -- he hadn't paid any more than I did but I had worked all day and I can recall feeling quite annoyed and inconvenienced. And I was very determined to, in this way, show that I felt that I wanted to be treated decently on this bus or where ever I wasMrs. Parks said.

Rosa Parks, who worked for the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the NAACP, continued to assert that she had not intended to provoke her arrest.

"I had only intended to go home and take care of whatever matters I had because I had an NAACP youth conference that weekend and I also was getting out the notices for the senior branch of the NAACP (convention). I didn't move because I didn't feel like it was helping us or making things lighter [easier] for us -- me as an individual and us as a people to continue to be pushed around because of our race and colorMrs. Parks said.

Her arrest for violating the city segregation law was the catalyst for a mass boycott by blacks of the city's buses, whose ridership had been 70 percent black.

That boycott brought the young minister Martin Luther King, Junior, to national prominence as the head of the Montgomery Improvement Association, the group that organized and led the protest. The Montgomery Improvement Association also filed a federal suit challenging the constitutionality of the segregation law on February first, 1956. The boycott continued 382 days, until December 20, 1956, when the United States Supreme Court ordered city officials to desegregate their buses.

Rosa Parks was born Rosa Louise McCauley on February Fourth, 1913, in Tuskegee, Alabama. Her father was a carpenter and her mother, a teacher. They enrolled Rosa in the Montgomery Industrial School for Girls, a private school that encouraged each girl to "take advantage of the opportunities, no matter how few they were." In those days, "few" was the key word for blacks, especially in the southern states of America. Rosa told a newspaper that blacks didn't have any civil rights. She said, "It was just a matter of survival...of existing from one day to the next. I remember going to sleep as a girl and hearing the Ku Klux Klan ride at night and hearing a lynching and being afraid the house would burn down."

When she was 19, she married Raymond Parks, a barber who was active in black civil rights and voting registration. She attended a small black university in Montgomery for a few years and then worked for the Montgomery Voters League, the NAACP Youth Council and other civic and religious organizations. Having gained a reputation for getting things done, she was elected secretary of the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP in 1943. At that time the civil rights organization had to spend much of its energy working on cases of white violence against blacks. Aside from beatings and murder, blacks had to contend with peonage, a system where blacks who owed money or were in jail would be forced to perform labor without receiving pay. She said, "We didn't seem to have too many successes. It was more a matter of trying to challenge the powers that be, and to let it be known that we did not wish to be continued as second class citizens."

During the next 20 years Mrs. Parks helped support her family by taking sewing at home. She also worked as a house cleaner and for a brief period as an insurance agent.

The Parks family moved to Detroit, Michigan, soon after the conclusion of the bus boycott because of continuing threats of violence by the racist organization the Ku Klux Klan as well as by angry individuals who held Mrs. Parks responsible for the desegregation of the city buses.

Raymond Parks resumed working as a barber. Rosa, after recovering from stomach ulcer problems, was hired by Michigan Congressman John Conyers, Junior, as a secretary and administrative assistant.

In the following years the shy lady conquered her fear of public speaking and became a spokeswoman for civil rights issues.

In later years, Rosa Parks received honorary university degrees and various awards from civil rights organizations. The city of Detroit, Michigan, named a street for her. In 1989, one of the most unusual tributes came from the Neville Brothers singing group who honored her by writing a song entitled "Sister Rosa." Its reggae chorus is: "Thank you Miss Rosa / You are the spark / You started our freedom movement."

Rosa Parks said she wanted to be remembered "as a person who wanted to be free and wanted others to be free." In a 1984 radio interview she said that sometimes she couldn't escape the fame and responsibility that was thrust upon her:

"I've managed -- someway -- but there are times when I didn't want to take as much responsibility as they put upon me, but I accept whatever comes if it's going to be of any help to other peopleMrs. Parks said.
Rosa Parks, who ignited the modern civil rights movement in the United States when she refused to surrender her seat on a bus to a white man on December First, 1955. Rosa Parks -- dead at the age of 92.

Dear Europe, Get Out Your Woolens!

The Gulf Stream can be seen (red) in this thermal satellite image.
© NOAA

As for sitting in mediation, that is something which MUST include fits of ecstatic blissful laughter---brayings that will make you slump to the ground clutching your belly, and even after that passes and you struggle to your feet, will make you fall anew in further contortions of side-splitting mirth.

---Hakuin

When the striving ceases, there is life waiting as a gift.

---Saul Bellow

Please do not get caught in that place where you think you know.

---Zen saying

Last month NCN.org member and chemist Silvia Martinez, who lives in Spain, answered my request for links to articles she has been reading about a decrease in the flow of the Gulf Stream. I had heard dire predictions about this occuring some 30 years ago, but then it was all theoretical and frankly rather confusing. The idea is salt water can't freeze unless it's so cold the salt gets expelled in the process. For the last hundreds of years this has happened in the Greenland Sea most noticeably. The salt sinking causes warmer water from the southwest to flow in, washing the lower salt water southerly and forming a cycle we call the Gulf Stream (since it ends up and turns around in the Gulf of Mexico). More fresh water from the melting of ice age glaciers is diluting the salt water around Greenland to the extent that sinking salt isn't bringing in the same rush of warmer water. Here is the note Silvia sent me and the links.

Dear Richard,
I've been following this topic since a few years, and have read many reports. As you probably know, there is too much especulation & prediction, but few scientific data.
In this report, they comment that the melting ice in the Arctic Ocean is causing that more fresh water goes into the ocean, thus slowing down the Gulf Stream because of a decrease in the salinity of the water: http://www.emagazine.com/view/?2518
And this is the Times of London article that the above website refers to, reporting that the Gulf Stream slowdown is already occurring:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-1602579,00.html
Others don't give so much importance to this stream in the context of the climate change: http://www.earthinstitute.columbia.edu/news/2002/story09-27-02.html
This is a review pretty interesting and gives a lot of information about these ocean streams as it was observed in the past until the nineties, it's long but IMHO its reading is worthy. Besides, the main page has a lot of interesting reports.
http://www.aip.org/history/climate/oceans.htm
Light and love,
Silvia

A few hours ago UK's Independent put online its lead story of the day, which warns of a catastrophic winter ahead for countries warmed for centuries by the Gulf Stream~~~

Are we heading for a new winter of discontent?
By Jonathan Brown, Jeremy Laurance and Barrie Clement
Published: 22 October 2005

Britain could be left paralysed by energy shortages, a health crisis and gridlock on the roads if the predicted Arctic winter strikes with severity.

Prolonged sub-zero temperatures after nearly a decade of mild winters could result in the death of tens of thousands of people, with fears that the National Health Service faces the prospect of a full-blown winter bed shortage for the first time since Labour came to power in 1997.

The Confederation of British Industry warned that power shortfalls caused by the rising domestic demand to keep warm and Britain's dwindling strategic stockpiles could lead to factory shutdowns and a return to the three-day week. At present, only 11 days' supply of gas is being held in reserve, compared with 55 days' worth elsewhere in Europe. Consumer groups fear that hardest hit will be members of the two million poor households already struggling to cope with the 40 per cent rise in energy prices since 2003.

Transport specialists also warn that the authorities have not acted fast enough to keep motorways and other routes open in the event of heavy snowfalls. The situation would be worse in Scotland.

Concern has been mounting since the Meteorological Office took the unprecedented step of issuing a long-range forecast predicting the likelihood of a much harsher-than-average winter. The "amber alert" was based on lower-than-average sea temperatures recorded near Iceland and off the Azores this spring. The findings are a typical precursor for a phenomenon known as the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) which has resulted in some of the harshest winters on record. The effects of the NAO were felt most spectacularly in 1963, when temperatures dropped as low as minus 22C, the Thames iced over and large swaths of southern England were blanketed more than a foot of snow for weeks on end.

Forecasters say they are 67 per cent confident that this winter will be among the coldest on record, and are urgently working on models predicting exactly how cold it will be and for how long Britain will freeze. A spokesman said the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, John Prescott,had been informed immediately, as had the NHS, the Highways Agency and other relevant departments. "We told them to go back and look at their plans. We have had nearly 10 years of warm winters and society has changed in that time," the Met Office spokesman said.

The Arctic temperatures could not come at a worse time for Britain's energy consumers. All six power companies have relentlessly increased prices in the past two years in the midst of worsening volatility in the global energy markets. Average customers can now expect to pay £750 a year on fuel costs. Already two million households are spending 10 per cent of their income on gas and electricity bills. Three-quarters of these are classified as vulnerable - among them the elderly, sick or very poor. "When it is really cold at a time when prices have already gone up dramatically, will people make the decision to keep warm? We pray to God that they do," said Adam Scorer, head of campaigns at Energywatch.

An extra 8,000 deaths are anticipated for every one degree centigrade that the temperature falls below the winter average. When home temperatures drop below 16C, resistance to respiratory diseases falls. Cold air temperatures lead to a rapid rise in the number of strokes and heart attacks.

A DoH spokeswoman said plans were being made to clear beds and cancel operations should the worst-case scenario unfold. A spokesman for the department said: "We are aware of the Met Office's severe weather forecast for this winter but we always prepare for the worst anyway." Concerns are growing that the Government has seriously underestimated the impact of an exceptionally cold winter on business. Sir Digby Jones, the director general of the CBI, said this week that "businesses will shut down" and that the biggest energy users will be forced to "throw the switch".

Demand peaked in the relatively mild January of 2003, when 449 million cubic metres (mcm) of gas were used. This year, total availability will be lower than in previous years at 476mcm - allowing a margin of error of just 6 per cent. Lord Woolmer of Leeds, chairman of the House of Lords European Union Committee, warned that the situation had deteriorated since he submitted a report on the supply situation last year.

North Sea supplies have been run down faster than envisaged over the summer to exploit high prices on the Continent. Meanwhile the European energy market, from which Britain must now import much of its supplies, remains unreformed, and serious doubts have been expressed that it can meet the extra demand.

The severe hurricane season in the Gulf of Mexico means that production of liquefied natural gas (LNG) has been badly disrupted. Consignments destined for Britain have been diverted to the United States. Big industrial energy users, such as steel and chemical companies, may have tohalt production on very cold days to allow domestic suppliers to take precedence. "The Government said that voluntary agreements will be sufficient. But the real danger is that they may not be enough," Sir Digby said.

The Energy minister, Malcolm Wicks, dismissed the talk of a three-day week as "scaremongering". A Department of Trade and Industry spokesman said: "The market is likely to correct itself in the event of any shortfall of supplies. A mechanism is in place to restrict supplies to some parts of industry should the situation require it."

http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/this_britain/article321425.ece

A Pause And Applause For Pinter

Playwright Harold Pinter in a rare appearance at the Orange Word Screenwriters Programme, at the British Library, in 2004.
Bruno Vincent/Getty Images

The individual becomes perfect when he loves his individuality in the all to which he belongs.

---D.T. Suzuki

Value judgments are destructive to our proper business, which is curiosity and awareness.

---John Cage

When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world.

---John Muir

I don't remember how I stumbled across Harold Pinter. It must have been in the mid-60s sometime, but I don't know if it was a live performance of a couple one acts or that terrifying Dirk Bogarde movie The Servant. It might have been Anne Bancroft and Peter Finch duking it out in The Pumpkin Eater. All I know is his plays grabbed me by the throat instantly. I already was a fan of Samuel Beckett, and had staged Waiting For Godot as a student in 1960. Pinter was trickier. For a production of The Homecoming in 1974, my colleagues and I felt we had to build a 2 story house in the theater. Getting the pauses right required actors literally to count off seconds to themselves. One of the eeriest moments of my life occurred in the late 60s as I walked along Fifth Avenue, and Pinter and his wife at the time, Vivien Merchant, came towards me, each on either edge of the sidewalk, obviously in the midst of an argument and issuing forth icy silence. In the instant they passed on each side I was living a Pinter play. O why hide it, my whole life has been a Pinter play. Isn't everybody's?

Giving Us Pause
Nobel laureate Harold Pinter: The silences demarcate the warring lines on the battlefield of words.

by Michael Feingold
October 14th, 2005 5:39 PM

Every playwright of stature has a single most famous line, and Harold Pinter's is undoubtedly (Pause.). The key moments of Pinter's drama, notated as carefully as key changes in chamber music, are those precious seconds of silence in which something important is intentionally left unsaid. The surrounding text may vary from the reddest fury to the tenderest expressions of love or the wooziest flights of surreal fancy, but sooner or later, the Pinter silence, marked off from the dialogue by that tiny italicized word, is sure to fall. As if confirming the inherent truth of his art, Pinter himself was afflicted with a momentary silence last week, on learning that he had been chosen as the recipient of this year's Nobel Prize for Literature. There's something gloriously human—and authentically Pinteresque—in the idea that a master of language could tell the chairman of the Nobel committee, "I don't know what to say."

Words are the dialectical battleground of Pinter's works, sometimes treasured and hoarded like irreplaceable gems, sometimes scattered heedlessly like junk in a looted dime store. His people live by them, betray them, bicker over them, flay one another with them. A Pinter woman says "casserole" when she means "wife." A Pinter man, asked if he went "the whole hog," replies that you can sometimes be satisfied "without going any hog." At times, the words are the action; at others, they exist in a schizophrenic counterpoint to it, placid where the physical life is violent or fast and furious while the bodies onstage remain in utter stasis. The silences demarcate the map of this double battlefield, temporary truces in both the war over words and the war between words and actions.

These perennial clashes are the essence of Pinter's artistic identity, coming from a personal identity which is itself a sort of permanent conflict: English and Jewish, he is an actor who became a poet who became a playwright and screenwriter who became a stage director who became a prominent political figure; with the arguable exception of poetry, he has done outstanding work in all these fields. To examine his work in any of them is to discover more instances of his dualism. While his plays are celebrated for their terse, brutal contemporaneity, his best-known screenplays are steeped in a haunted, pre-modern past (The Servant, The Go-Between, The French Lieutenant's Woman). As a director he has delved in the works of both predecessors and disciples: Who else could have produced notable stagings of such antithetical works as Noel Coward's Hay Fever and David Mamet's Oleanna?

When the news of the Nobel award broke, many reporters mentioned Pinter's outspoken opposition to the war in Iraq, but this was no surprise to those who have followed Pinter's public outcries, both in his works and in active political statement, against torture, against the suppression of artists and journalists, against ethnic hatred and violence. The gratifying paradox is that his stance on these matters has carried weight globally precisely because of the powerful role that violence, torture, and degradation play in his works, from the time of his very earliest plays, like The Room and The Birthday Party. Pinter, the world can agree, is an artist who fully understands the human heart's potential for cruelty, and one of the rare ones who has been able to express it without exploitation. From the interrogation of Stanley in The Birthday Party and the tormenting of Davies in The Caretaker to the evocation of torture in One for the Road and gulags in Mountain Language, Pinter eschews all possibility of letting his audience revel in violence. It is there because it is in us; disconcertingly, he puts a human face on it so that we can see it in ourselves. At such moments the silences in Pinter test the extremes of human behavior: They are the silence of resistance, of terrified or complacent acquiescence, of outrage.

In this respect, Pinter's actor training and actor's instinct are the core of his philosophic vision. The ability to imagine oneself as someone else, which is the essence of all acting, becomes in his hands the terrifying possibility that all human beings possess, of becoming something that is within them but that they never perceive as part of themselves. The past 75 years, which have witnessed inconceiveable cruelties while at the same time making previously unimaginable progress in human healing and comfort, are perfectly expressed in Pinter's contradictory, obstinately convincing works, the products of an artist who, himself a paradoxical figure, has become a guide and a primary influence in his art without ever giving lip service to any shibboleths, dogmas, or ideals of the kind that have so often been proven false by the bitter experiences of his—of our—time.

http://www.villagevoice.com/theater/0542,webfeingold,68923,11.html

Mush & Carolyn: A Burn

The painting by Marshall Arisman was done for an issue of Time magazine on violent crime, and can be seen online here http://hypnotic.club.fr/folie_14.html

Everything you learned in school as "obvious" becomes less and less obvious as you begin to study the universe. For example, there are no solids in the universe; not even the suggestion of a solid. There are no absolute continuums. There are no surfaces. There are no straight lines.

---R. Buckminster Fuller

People born into this floating world
Quickly become like roadside dust:
At dawn, little children,
By sunset, white-haired and old,
With no inner understanding
They struggle without cease.
I ask the children of the universe,
Why do you bother to pass this way?

---Ryokan

We are all many persons. Some of these people we know and others we don't---only someone else knows them. Some of these people we like and some of them we don't like....All of this is music; it is the music of our lives if we could only stop and listen. Music doesn't have any meaning; you can't explain it. Eating a meal doesn't have any meaning, either, but if there's no eating there's no life, and if we don't hear music we can't dance. This is our practice---to eat our meals and clean up; to dance to the music of our lives, each one in our own way, and then die when it's time.

---Norman Fischer

What follows are some accompanying notes to a CD I've been assembling and creating essentially as a gift for an old friend whose birthday is fast approaching. Now I think I'll make a few more copies to send out to friends who might be interested. (Let me know if you'd like one.) The reason I decided to publish the notes like this is Mr. Arisman, whom you'll meet, is being honored with a retrospective of recent paintings later this month and continuing through December at the Brooklyn Lyceum (details at his website the link to which is in the text below). I didn't know that when I wrote this, but it does seem like a good opportunity to advertise the exhibition as repayment of the many gifts of his friendship. It looks as if the opening will be October 22nd, and I certainly wish I could be there. If you'll be in the New York area the next few months, you may want to get down to Brooklyn. And if you see Marshall, tell him "Philly Joe says Hello."

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

This collection is mostly about Blue Note CD reissues, which almost always generously and irresistibly include some alternate takes or cuts never released before. Since all this stuff is from the Golden Era of New York jazz for us older guys...AND recorded by Rudy Van Gelder, every sound is revitalizing.

However, the third cut on this Burn is different and quite personal. When I was a sophomore in high school, one of the seniors who was nice to me and seemed to recognize and encourage a commonality was a guy named Mush Arisman. I first had run into him when I was in junior high because he had a little band, in which he played alto in all styles...but I would say mostly it was a mellow rhythm 'n blues kind of group. It was well behaved enough to get booked for some of our sock hops...and we had plenty of them in the '50s. There also were fraternities and sororities for kids back in the day, and they had dances too. Mush did OK for work...although I later learned he liked art courses even more, and made paintings.

Once a night during the dances, Mush would let loose on that alto, the group would kick in, and we'd have a honking blues that prompted some of us to jitterbug to oblivion. Somehow things turned into dance battles, which Mush would oblige by continuing to play until the last kid turned into a puddle of sweat. When the inevitable BUMP...-badah-BUMP started up, I always excused myself from whomever had been my date and headed for Carolyn Valone. Carolyn and I had been pals since about 1st grade, both liked music and, though we kissed and hugged a couple times, never really ventured into the heat of teen romance with each other---but we went crazy when we danced a fast one. And so, with Mush blasting away, Carolyn and I took on everybody...and always made it to last couple standing. It is quite possible that 50 years later, each of us has a very fond memory of those times.

Carolyn now is professor emerita of art history at Trinity University in San Antonio, but has lived in Rome for many years. I believe her specialty has been to unearth the influence of women upon art, both as creators and patrons, during the Renaissance. A couple years ago I decided to try to find her and so emailed Trinity. The folks in her department were happy to help out and without hesitation gave me her telephone number in Rome. They said she never emailed...and to be prepared for a little wait if I phoned, because it was in a deli downstairs from her apartment and they'd have to yell for her. Undaunted I called the place, and lucked out. Of course she was floored, and surprised me back by mailing a lengthy treatise she'd written. She may be getting more involved with the Internet now, since I see she offers an online course at a site specializing in Rome. The thing is called "Soul Sisters"---huh?---but is about Renaissance matrons who built architecturally amazing churches and monasteries with their inheritances. http://www.urban-iconography.org/sisters.htm

As for Mush...I doubt anyone calls him that anymore. I knew he had gone to New York, and I used to see illustrations he'd made in The Village Voice and various leftwing (usually) magazines. For years I had his drawing of a black guy playing an alto sax that was chained around his neck, which I hung lovingly in my record room wherever I lived (you'll meet that guy I think on the CD). I guess fairly recently, one of his terrifying depictions of war and violence turned up on the cover of Nation or something...and I decided to resort to Google. There he was, Chairman of the MFA degree program at the School of Visual Arts in NYC...and even better here~~~ http://www.marshallarisman.com/ . I wrote, and soon back came a package that contained a book of his work and a CD called Cobalt Blue. That's what you'll hear. Now look, I've tried for at least a year to get more copies of that CD so I can send them out...and I wrote Marshall asking for help and to his agent as well. No dice, so I figure he won't mind terribly if I burn a couple for really close friends. If the thing ever becomes easily available again, I'll buy up a bunch.

I imagine neither Carolyn nor Mush knows whatever happened to each other...and I think it will be my sheer delight to lay this info on 'em. I mean, what good is aging if you don't stumble across this kind of stuff? The thought of the 3 of us sharing some laughs around a little table together is almost more delicious than I can stand! By the way, I don't really buy that story Marshall tells about giving up the alto as soon as he heard Charlie Parker. There's no way he didn't hear Bird by 1956. I mean Tony Haworth would have MADE him listen---but that's another story. BUMP...-badah-BUMP...

THE MUSIC

Art Blakey, drums: It's A Long Way Down (Wayne Shorter, tenor)
Lee Morgan, trumpet; Curtis Fuller, trombone; Cedar Walton, piano; Reggie Workman, bass (April 15, 1964)

Joe Henderson, tenor: In 'N Out (Henderson) alt take
Kenny Dorham, trumpet; McCoy Tyner, piano; Richard Davis, bass; Elvin Jones, drums (April 10, 1964)

Marshall Arisman, narrator: Cobalt Blue, True Stories About The Art World
Music composed and performed by Chuck Hammer, although Mush sings and plays a little soprano sax (2003)

Hank Mobley, tenor: A Baptist Beat (Mobley) alt take
Freddie Hubbard, trumpet; Wynton Kelly, piano; Paul Chambers, bass; Blakey, drums (November 13, 1960)

Tina Brooks, tenor: Good Old Soul (Brooks) alt take
Hubbard, trumpet; Duke Jordan, piano; Sam Jones, bass; Art Taylor, drums (June 25, 1960)

Hubbard, trumpet: Arietis (Hubbard) alt take
Bernard McKinney, euphonium; Shorter, tenor; Tyner, piano; Art Davis, bass; Jones, drums (November 30, 1962)

Horace Silver, piano: How Did It Happen (Don Newey)
Blue Mitchell, trumpet; Junior Cook, tenor; Gene Taylor, bass; Louis Hayes, drums (August 30, 1959)

A Taste Of Victory

The photo, Sept. 24: part of the massive turnout for the three-day D.C. antiwar mobilization.

To see into impermanence, to actually see impermanence...this is the mind which determines that I must wake up for the benefit of all beings.

---Dogen, describing his experience as a small boy

The center is everywhere. Bent is the path of eternity.

---Friedrich Nietzsche

I cannot come nearer to God and Heaven
Than I live to Walden even.
I am its stony shore,
And the breeze that passes o'er;
In the hollow of my hand
Are its water and its sand,
And its deepest resort
Lies high in my thought.

---Henry David Thoreau

Since Mr. Gore, in a political panic, was denied the presidency, many in the United States have worked tirelessly---and with increased vigor this past year, as Mr. Kerry found himself in a sort of rerun---to point out errors and alleged crimes that initiated and have carried on our horrifying decline. Obviously some of us have lost sleep (it's 3AM) over stupefying Yankee blindness. My own writings have become increasingly aggressive, and I have lost favor with some...who prefer my essays about Nature and humorous reminiscences. I haven't kept up with editing my online logs as I used to, but what has piled up here http://www.newciv.org/nl/newslog.php/_v63 , http://www.upsaid.com/jazzolog/ or http://jazzolog.blogspot.com/ may provide some kind of record at least of one family's re-involvement with American grassroots political process. Sometimes lately I have felt the hopelessness of despair that the real promise and hope of the United States has been lost forever in the decay and fall of another Western civilization. And worse, I have feared we're taking the planet with us. Crash, explode and burn is a popular deathwish. Here in the countryside rarely does an evening pass by anymore that some neighbor or another isn't out on his hillside target-shooting with an automatic weapon.

But despite the new study that shows there'll be no ice in the Arctic by the end of the century http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/20050928/arctic_sea_ice_050928/20050928?hub=CTVNewsAt11 , in the past week there has been some evidence that American know-how and a spirit that built our system of Justice may pull us out of this slump yet. I don't have a nourishing and nutritious banquet of victory before me, but there is a whiff maybe of something cooking in the kitchen. A summary of good news was sung to us yesterday by our burgeoning young writer William Rivers Pitt. If you remember the tune, do sing along~~~

Hey, Hey, Woody Guthrie, I Wrote You a Song
By William Rivers Pitt
t r u t h o u t Perspective

Wednesday 28 September 2005

I'm out here a thousand miles from my home, Walkin' a road other men have gone down. I'm seein' your world of people and things, Your paupers and peasants and princes and kings. Hey, hey, Woody Guthrie, I wrote you a song 'Bout a funny old world that's a-comin' along. Seems sick and it's hungry, it's tired and it's torn, It looks like it's a-dyin' an' it's hardly been born.

-- Bob Dylan, "Song for Woody"

The unbelievably arrogant and power-mad GOP Representative from Texas, Tom DeLay, got a taste of the whip hand on Wednesday. Indicted on a charge of conspiracy in a campaign finance scheme, DeLay has been forced to step down as Majority Leader in the House. There is no telling how long it will take for the case to wend its way through the courts, but informed opinion puts the time frame at about a year or so. If Tom gets convicted, however, we will never again see his political face. One hopes he saved his bug exterminator equipment. Perhaps, in his new career, he can disprove that old chestnut about not being able to go home again.

Republican Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist is staring down the barrel of an SEC charge that he dumped stock based on insider information. The stock he owned was from HCA, Inc., a company his family founded. Almost immediately after Frist dumped his stock, the value of those holdings dropped nine percent. "If there is really any evidence of insider trading, then he's in very serious trouble, and so is his party,'' said Gary Jacobson, professor of political science at the University of California in San Diego. "It adds another brick to Democrats' argument that Republicans are corrupt.'' Is it possible that Frist could have been given insider information on a company his own family started? Do the math, and then subtract from Frist's chances of being President in 2008.

A little more than a week ago, the White House's top federal procurement officer, David Safavian, was arrested - not accused, not indicted, but actually slapped with the bracelets - for lying and obstructing a criminal probe against super-lobbyist Jack Abramoff. Safavian is part of a larger investigation surrounding Abramoff's indictment on charges of wire fraud and conspiracy. The names flying around these charges include GOP Rep. Robert Ney of Ohio, former Christian Coalition leader Ralph Reed, and anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist. Had Safavian not resigned his White House post on the day he was arrested, they would have clapped him in irons right there inside 1600 Pennsylvania. Sic semper moral majority.

Oh yeah, and there's still that pesky matter of the investigation into an outed CIA agent floating around. According to a variety of reputable and rock-solid sources, folks in the White House are decidedly unhappy and nervous about this one. What on earth is the world coming to? These guys control the government, right? They control all the agencies responsible for these kinds of investigations. Despite that, DeLay and Frist and Safavian and Abramoff and Lord only knows who else are getting a crash course in the Justice system.

And how is Mr. Bush coping through all this? One answer can be found in this week's Newsweek, which describes George watching Hurricane Rita like a hawk after the Katrina debacle. "His eyes," reads the Newsweek piece, "were puffy from lack of sleep (he had been awakened all through the night with bulletins), and he seemed cranky and fidgety. A group of reporters and photographers had been summoned by White House handlers to capture a photo op of the commander in chief at his post. Bush stared at them balefully. He rocked back and forth in his chair, furiously at times, asked no questions and took no notes. It almost seemed as though he resented having to strike a pose for the press."

Rocked back and forth? Furiously at times? Sounds like a pathological response. I guess 40% approval ratings across the board will do that. These guys are sharp, though. They'll dig their way out. Or will they? On Monday, just before the DeLay indictment came out, the White House released a statement of support. "Majority Leader DeLay is someone the president considers a friend," read the statement. "The president looks forward to continuing to work closely with the majority leader to get things done on behalf of the American people." Oops. Keep rocking, George.

The Washington Post's Terry Neal published an article titled "Echoes of 1994 with Current Scandals?" on Tuesday. "Is it 1994 all over again?" asked Neal. "Dark and ominous clouds are gathering over the Republican Party these days, with a series of ethical and legal scandals that threaten to further damage a White House and Congress already reeling from a sharp drop in public approval ratings. On top of all of that, a special prosecutor and grand jury continue to investigate what, if any, role White House officials may have played in the leaking of the name of a covert operative to reporters. And the White House has come under increasing scrutiny, in the wake of the Hurricane Katrina fiasco, for rampant cronyism in its appointments to top level jobs, including director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency and nominees for head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and deputy attorney general, among others."

Somewhere close to a half million people showed up in Washington last weekend to shout the White House down. A variety of organizations, such as Progressive Democrats of America, held conventions to plan their electoral strategies for 2006. On Monday, hundreds of activists swarmed House offices on Capitol Hill to demand an exit from Iraq. The anti-war movement, dismissed as non-existent by the GOP, has gained strength and speed with the actions of heroes like Cindy Sheehan, who got herself arrested on Monday for praying in front of the White House.

Woody Guthrie used to paint "This Machine Kills Fascists" on his guitars. I think he'd be pleased to see how fast the rock has started rolling down the hill.

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/092805Q.shtml
William Rivers Pitt is a New York Times and internationally bestselling author of two books: War on Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn't Want You to Know and The Greatest Sedition Is Silence.

And more good news: it's raining in Southeast Ohio at last.

America Dies In Its Sleep

A British soldier, his uniform in flames, prepares to jump from a personnel carrier during rioting that broke out in Basra when Britain sought the release of two detained commandos. (By Atef Hassan -- Reuters)

Sitting in an outhouse, I concentrated upon this doubt, and as time passed I forgot to leave. Suddenly a violent wind came, first blowing the outhouse door open and then shut again with a loud crash. My spirit instantly advanced and ripped apart my previous doubt; it was like suddenly awakening from a dream, or remembering something forgotten. I began to dance in a way I had never learned, and there are no words to convey my great joy.

---Gesshu

A reasonable amount o' fleas is good fer a dog---
keeps him broodin' over bein' a dog, mebbe.

---Edward Noyes Westcott

Corruption is more dangerous than terrorism.

---Hadi al-Amiri, Head of Iraqi National Assembly's Integrity Commission

Americans love a good night's sleep...and we spend tons of money trying to get one here and there. Maybe we spend more money on it, including fees to psychologists and therapists, than almost anything else. Yes, we need oil for all the stuff in our garages...and flying around in airplanes. And we spend lots more on our obesity problems than we contribute to the world's populations of the starving. And of course there is a fortune to be spent finding a sex partner and getting any enjoyment out of the activities. But mostly we really love to sleep...and hate to be awakened!

So let's say that while you were asleep, certain parties "disappeared" $10 billion from the United States Treasury. And let's also say that your sons and daughters were standing guard at those vaults of marble. Not only that, the 10 billion dollars was to be spent for weapons and protection for those duties your children have accepted. In fact, some of those kids are doing that work to get enough money to go to college. If that happened and it was discovered, do you think the story would be in a newspaper the next morning? Maybe? Definitely? Absolutely not?

Iraq Losing Billions to Corruption, Lawmakers Say

"(Al-Sabah) Iraq has lost $10 billion because of financial and administrative corruption, Hussein al-Shahristani, deputy head of the National Assembly, said in a press conference Sunday organized by the assembly's Integrity Commission. Hadi al-Amiri, head of the commission, said corruption is more dangerous than terrorism. He cited contracts the former ministry of defense held with a company known as 'al-Ain al-Jariya' to purchase 24 helicopters for $226.8 million. The helicopters were not bought and no check was made as to where the money went, al-Amiri said." (Al-Sabah is issued daily by the Iraqi Media Network.) http://www.iwpr.net/archive/ipm/ipm_325.html

The Scotsman
Tue 20 Sep 2005
Ex-minister faces arrest for 'biggest robbery in the world'

LUKE BAKER
IN BAGHDAD

"IRAQ'S former defence minister is expected to be arrested in the coming days in connection with the disappearance of more than $1 billion from the country's defence budget, a senior corruption investigator said yesterday.

"Hazim Shaalan, who served in interim prime minister Iyad Allawi's government, ran a ministry which worked with intermediaries, rather than foreign companies or governments, for the supply of defence equipment including helicopters, armoured vehicles, bullets and weapons.

"Not only were contracts with intermediaries forbidden at the time, but the prices paid for the equipment were vastly inflated and the contracts often not fulfilled. On one occasion, it is alleged more than $230 million had been spent on a collection of 28-year-old, second-hand Polish helicopters whose design life was just 25 years.

"Radhi al-Radhi, the head of Iraq's Commission on Public Integrity, said he handed a file of evidence against Shaalan to Iraq's central criminal court two months ago and expected a warrant for his arrest to be issued within ten days.

"'What Shaalan and his ministry were responsible for is possibly the largest robbery in the world,' Mr Radhi said. 'Our estimates begin at $1.3 billion and go up to $2.3 billion.'

"Shaalan, who lives in Jordan and also spends time in London, has denied any wrongdoing and has said that whatever he did was ultimately approved of by US authorities." http://thescotsman.scotsman.com/international.cfm?id=1964832005

But WHERE, you ask, is American coverage of such a report? Sure, maybe the disappearance of somewhere between 1 and 10 billion dollars isn't from our own US Treasury, but our tax dollars must have sponsored at least some of that procurement budget. And it was for equipment for indigenous soldiers so our kids can get out of there. Check Google News and see how many US papers and media are carrying the story. I find only the Washington Post has an Opinion piece on it. http://blogs.washingtonpost.com/worldopinionroundup/2005/09/iraqi_corruptio.html Of course we're watching all our hurricanes...and wondering how to pay for all that disaster relief (and nothing for disaster prevention). Coincidentally, $10 billion of it will come from cuts to Medicaid. http://www.thehill.com/thehill/export/TheHill/Comment/OpEd/092105_oxford.html Molly Ivins was wondering the other day "exactly why the right-wing Republicans chose to make FEMA a political football." http://www.creators.com/opinion_show.cfm?next=3&ColumnsName=miv Is Molly losing her grip? Girl, disaster relief is where the big bucks are! BILLIONS.

But wait...there's more. You remember the 2004 Election? The long-awaited Carter-Baker Report on our electoral system is out and guess what? Even though there is nothing vitally wrong with our system...except a few computer glitches here and there, the report concludes that public confidence in elections is disappearing. http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2005/1462 Disappearing...just like all that money. Just...gone with the wind. And we wonder why we're losing sleep.

Work To Save Planet Earth

Natures Bounty by Severin Roesen

The truth is where the truth is, and it's sometimes in the candy store.

---Bob Dylan

I played the wrong wrong notes.

---Thelonious Monk

The path up and down is one and the same.

---Heraclitus

There are some people in the United States whose faith is shaken in private initiatives to confront various challenges to continued life on this great globe. The news these last few days has been particularly daunting. We need to go through it, and I hope this entry will be helpful to establish your focus in the coming week at least.

Let's begin with the exhaustive chronicle of the Katrina disaster to the Gulf Coast assembled by FactCheck.org on Friday. The group already has edited the timeline twice as additions and corrections have been offered, including one from FEMA. They begin with warnings about the Lake Pontchartrain levees from FEMA itself in July of 2004. Bookmark this one for future reference~~~http://www.factcheck.org/article348.html

Then we have some Federal responses from a couple of sides. First is an article Friday in the Jackson (Mississippi) Clarion-Ledger that reports an email has circulated within the Department of Justice. The message requests various US attorneys' offices to forward information of any lawsuits by environmental groups that may have interfered with the work of the Army Corps of Engineers around New Orleans. Let's see, wasn't the buzzword around DC the "blame game" last week? http://www.clarionledger.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050916/NEWS0110/509160369/1260 The second move was reported Thursday in the Washington Post, as Republican Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma announced new legislation he is proposing to suspend the authority of the EPA for the Katrina cleanup. Inhofe is chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, which group just had concluded a briefing with the administrator of the EPA who had asked that no waivers be applied. Reaction was swift~~~

"Sen. James Jeffords, I-Vt., the committee's senior non-Republican, said Johnson told the committee 'that current environmental laws and regulations do not stand in the way of EPA's response to Hurricane Katrina.
'"'Based on the administrator's response, I am opposed to a blanket waiver for environmental laws,' Jeffords said. 'If adopted, this waiver could undermine public health protections. We should be focusing our energy on protecting the health and safety of people impacted by this hurricane, not paving the way for environmental abuse.'
"Sen. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J., said he would fight Inhofe's 'sweeping, unnecessary and ill-conceived' plan, and any attempt to attach it to a bill authorizing relief from Katrina. He said it could allow EPA to put off telling Congress of any waivers for up to two weeks afterward. A provision also says the EPA can seek an extension to continue issuing waivers after the 120 days laid out in the bill.
"Environmentalists also denounced the emerging proposal. 'Here comes the mother of all environmental rollbacks,' said Frank O'Donnell, president of the Clean Air Watch advocacy group. 'This could become a blank check for big polluters. It would also be a terrible precedent.'" http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/15/AR2005091501223.html

Also on Friday came a headline in The Sacramento Bee (California) that read "Greenhouse-Gas Suit Tossed Out By Judge." SacBee.com is requiring free registration to its site now, so I'll post this whole article for the time being~~~

California, 7 other states had sought emission limits on power plants.By Chris Bowman -- Bee Staff WriterPublished 2:15 am PDT Friday, September 16, 2005Story appeared on Page A3 of The Bee

California's pioneering lawsuit to cap global warming gases from coal-fired power plants as distant as Kentucky and Florida was tossed out of federal court Thursday on jurisdictional grounds.

U.S. District Judge Loretta A. Preska in Manhattan ruled that the case brought by state Attorney General Bill Lockyer and prosecutors for seven other states and New York City raised sweeping questions of public policy best resolved by Congress and the president, not the courts.

At issue were emissions of carbon dioxide, the primary heat-trapping gas that alters the Earth's temperature, and the nation's highest emitters of the gas - old coal-fired power plants, mainly in the Midwest and the South.

Lockyer and an attorney for a companion complaint brought by three Northeast land conservancies said they would appeal the decision.

The plaintiffs - including Connecticut, Iowa, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Vermont, Wisconsin and New York - sought a court order requiring the nation's top five power producers to cut carbon dioxide emissions every year for at least a decade, by an amount to be determined later by the court.

The electric power industry argued that the technology to capture these gases in the plant doesn't exist, at least not at affordable prices

In her ruling, Preska said the plaintiffs sought "to impose by judicial fiat" limits on carbon dioxide emissions that Congress and President Bush explicitly refused to mandate.

"These actions present non-justiciable political questions that are consigned to the political branches, not the judiciary," Preska concluded.

Lockyer said the opposite is true.

"When Congress has not taken action on a pressing environmental issue, states have the right to take legal action to protect themselves," Lockyer said in a press release responding to the dismissal.

"We filed this lawsuit because global warming poses a serious threat to our environment, our public health, and our economy. We must act now, not later, to combat this threat."

Attorneys for the targeted power companies said they were not surprised by the dismissal.

"We were curious why we were included in the first place," said Pat Hemlepp, spokesman for American Electric Power Co. of Columbus, Ohio.

"We were doing much of what they were seeking through voluntary reductions of carbon dioxide."

The other four companies named in the suit were Southern Co., Xcel Energy, Cinergy Corp. and the Tennessee Valley Authority.

The companies own about 175 plants in 20 states that together emit about 652 million tons of carbon dioxide every year, roughly 25 percent of the carbon dioxide from power plants in the nation, according to the suit.

About the writer:The Bee's Chris Bowman can be reached at (916) 321-1069 or cbowman@sacbee.com.Copyright © The Sacramento Beehttp://www.sacbee.com/content/politics/ca/story/13572818p-14413223c.html

And all of this comes on top of a most disheartening report Friday by the Science Editor for the UK's Independent Online Edition. Here we read a consensus that global warming now is "past the point of no return." Analysis and evidence is presented in the article of a vicious cycle that has begun in the melting of Arctic sea ice. If you want a refreshment course on what that means, here's the link~~~http://news.independent.co.uk/world/science_technology/article312997.ece

At this point, I certainly wish I had some comfort to offer. I think the best we all can do is spread the word of these developments and enter into discussion with those who doubt the reports and who have opposing views. In this country it is clear there are many people whose heads just are in the sand---and I do mean sand.

How To Make A Recess Appointment Part 1

Jeezus, I gotta take a leak bad. What'll I do?

How To Make A Recess Appointment Part 2

Condi, I need a bathroom break. Is that possible here?

How To Make A Recess Appointment Part 3

Yes Mr. President, but you have to raise your hand and ask for the hall pass.

How To Make A Recess Appointment Part 4

God I hate asking for things!

Photos by Larry Downing for Reuters September 14th at the United Nations.

A Demonstration

Back row: Mia Lorraine, Kelissa Stanley, Todd Dusenbury, Hart Viges, Vince George
Front row: Lietta Ruger, Beatriz Sadivar

The sparrow is sorry for the peacock for the burden of his tail.

---Rabindranath Tagore

The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.

---Marcel Proust

Zen practice emphasizes being present with your actual experience. By placing our attention with the minute details of our physical posture, we get to know our selves, where we have tension, where we are crooked, where we are holding, where we let go, where we are at ease. Our body reveals who we are. Through this awareness, we enter the path of practice.

---Pat Phelan

I happened to mention, in reply to cancellation of a potluck/teaching I was hoping to attend last Friday down by the River, how busy everyone seems to be these days. It's hard to fit in everything we want to do...and even to keep track of coming events. I explained I probably wouldn't have been able to come to it anyway, since Ilona and I had gone up to Columbus the night before to see Cindy Sheehan and hadn't gotten back until late. With school and work Friday, we were going to be pretty tired by potluck time. A new friend Annie wrote back and said, "Oh, write about what the Sheehan tour is like. I didn't see anything in the news."

Well the first thing to say is Cindy wasn't at the Columbus stop. I could have known that by taking the time really to explore the site http://bringthemhomenowtour.org/ but there I had been, early Thursday morning, just stumbling upon it...and in my rush and excitement there was no time. When Cindy Sheehan concluded her encampment outside the Bush ranch in Crawford, Texas, on August 31st, the word was she would work her way east to Washington by September 24th, when what promises to be among the largest demonstrations in recent history will be held http://www.unitedforpeace.org/article.php?list=type&type=91 . Not sure if I would get to Washington, I vowed at least to connect to this Tour if it came anywhere near Athens.

It turns out there are 3 different branches of the Tour, and Cindy goes from one to the others. She was with the North Tour the day the Central Tour came to Columbus. We got up to Trinity Episcopal Church from school about 4:30, and managed to hear most of a debriefing about visits the group had done to the offices of Senators DeWine and Voinovich. The figurehead of the Central Tour seems to be Bill Mitchell, a veteran of Viet Nam and father of a son killed in Iraq during the same operation that took Casey Sheehan. You may recall seeing pictures of him next to Cindy at Camp Casey. Other members were mothers and fathers of soldiers in Iraq, both living and deceased. There was a wife there of a Guardsman who has completed one tour of duty and is being sent back.

I have to tell you their presentations may be more intense than most of us care to anticipate. They don't necessarily agree with each other on what they think the nation ought to be doing, and you and I might not agree with them or one another either but it doesn't matter. It seems that, like Cindy, everyone in the Mennonite Meeting Hall, where we had gathered after a magnificent supper together, wants clarity about the Noble Cause for which our country suffers in this warfare. As each parent told his and her tearful story, we realized the normal anger at the loss of a loved one, one's child, one's husband, has been compounded by a sense of betrayal we people feel toward our President and government. Mostly this Tour, and I think Cindy's encampment in Crawford, is about grieving...and I believe the force of that passion is what captured the nation's attention during August. These people are so present in the moment, which is how you get this close to a death, that they are radiant and luminous as they speak and answer questions.

One of the speakers had joined the Tour that day, just having passed by the group as they arrived. Another woman traveled today from Philadelphia to speak at length about the loss of her son. She said she wanted to get to Ohio because so much has happened in this state over the last year...and we represent the true battleground for the heart and soul of this country. Someone else reminded us the rest of the world looks upon Ohio this way too. I only hope the people of Ohio realize it! The Tour looks like this, with individuals coming along because they were in Crawford, or because they heard about it. Anyone with a personal story to tell and a desire to share grief in this way is welcome. It is impossible to look at this array of individuals and think it is some well-oiled conspiracy of the Left. As if the splintered Left even could organize such a project!

We had the opportunity Sunday to compare this approach to the Right's Freedom Walk at the Pentagon to honor the losses of 9/11. Here we had a setup many of us got used to during the past year if we attempted, for instance, to see the President during one of his presentations. The first thing you had to do, for Freedom's sake, is register and be accepted. No one was allowed on the Freedom Walk Sunday unless they had signed up by Friday afternoon at 4:30. No exceptions. The Walk itself was within a snow-fenced area lined with policemen. Allison Barber, assistant secretary of defense (yes, this was government sponsored), said she wanted the demonstration to be "sterile." The Washington Post's story Friday about the coming event declared, "The U.S. Park Police will have its entire Washington force of several hundred on duty and along the route, on foot, horseback and motorcycles and monitoring from above by helicopter. Officers are prepared to arrest anyone who joins the march or concert without a credential and refuses to leave, said Park Police Chief Dwight E. Pettiford." Clint Black was to sing his song "Iraq and Roll." http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/08/AR2005090802140.html I guess probably nobody sang "O Freedom!"

I hope the folks going to Washington on September 24th don't have to face this kind of security..but maybe they will. Maybe Homeland Defense is planning to protect participants with more preparation than was mustered for Katrina. It's hard to predict what's going to happen on that day, and I confess to a feeling a bit more than ominous. The passion of grieving is strong, but there also is the passion of aggression on the other side. Tempers flare and there is cruel laughter. One member of a megachurch congregation and former Marine in Viet Nam asked me last week if I knew the new name for garbage can liners. When I said no, he said, "New Orleans suitcases," and laughed at his own joke. There are 2 clashing realities in America today. I hope we can sort out the differences peacefully.

Beautiful New Orleans Stirs America's Soul At Last

The body of a victim of Hurricane Katrina floats in floodwaters in New Orleans September 1, 2005. Up to 300,000 survivors from the hurricane still needed to be evacuated out of disaster zones in Louisiana, Governor Kathleen Blanco said Thursday.

We sit to settle the self on the self and let the flower of our lifeforce bloom.

---Dainin Katagiri

You are not thinking. You are merely being logical.

---Niels Bohr to Albert Einstein

A monk was asked, "What do you do there in the monastery?"
He replied, "We fall and get up, we fall and get up, we fall and get up."

---St. Benedict

American humorist Harry Shearer devoted his entire hour to a loving portrait of New Orleans last night. If you've never lived there, which is probably the only way really to know this uniquely diverse gumbo of a city, this show might be the best way to get inside. It will be available for streaming sometime this week at his site http://www.harryshearer.com/ by clicking Le Show link. He said, "Here is a city, known throughout the world for its cuisine, on its knees begging for food."

The lead story featured by Google News at the moment is a feature from BBC News that went up an hour ago. Its author is Matt Wells, a journalist uniquely qualified in the UK to write a story like this.

BBC News
Viewpoint: Has Katrina saved US media?
By Matt Wells
BBC News, Los Angeles

As President Bush scurries back to the Gulf Coast, it is clear that this is the greatest challenge to politics-as-usual in America since the fall of Richard Nixon in the 1970s.

Then as now, good reporting lies at the heart of what is changing.

But unlike Watergate, "Katrinagate" was public service journalism ruthlessly exposing the truth on a live and continuous basis.

Instead of secretive "Deep Throat" meetings in car-parks, cameras captured the immediate reality of what was happening at the New Orleans Convention Center, making a mockery of the stalling and excuses being put forward by those in power.

Amidst the horror, American broadcast journalism just might have grown its spine back, thanks to Katrina.

National politics reporters and anchors here come largely from the same race and class as the people they are supposed to be holding to account.

They live in the same suburbs, go to the same parties, and they are in debt to the same huge business interests.
Giant corporations own the networks, and Washington politicians rely on them and their executives to fund their re-election campaigns across the 50 states.

It is a perfect recipe for a timid and self-censoring journalistic culture that is no match for the masterfully aggressive spin-surgeons of the Bush administration.

'Lies or ignorance'

But last week the complacency stopped, and the moral indignation against inadequate government began to flow, from slick anchors who spend most of their time glued to desks in New York and Washington.

The most spectacular example came last Friday night on Fox News, the cable network that has become the darling of the Republican heartland.

This highly successful Murdoch-owned station sets itself up in opposition to the "mainstream liberal media elite".

But with the sick and the dying forced to sit in their own excrement behind him in New Orleans, its early-evening anchor Shepard Smith declared civil war against the studio-driven notion that the biggest problem was still stopping the looters.

On other networks like NBC, CNN and ABC it was the authority figures, who are so used to an easy ride at press conferences, that felt the full force of reporters finally determined to ditch the deference.

As the heads of the Homeland Security department and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) appeared for network interviews, their defensive remarks about where aid was arriving to, and when, were exposed immediately as either downright lies or breath-taking ignorance.

And you did not need a degree in journalism to know it either. Just watching TV for the previous few hours would have sufficed.

Iraq concern

When the back-slapping president told the Fema boss on Friday morning that he was doing "a heck of a job" and spent most of his first live news conference in the stricken area praising all the politicians and chiefs who had failed so clearly, it beggared belief.

The president looked affronted when a reporter covering his Mississippi walkabout had the temerity to suggest that having a third of the National Guard from the affected states on duty in Iraq might be a factor.

It is something I suspect he is going to have to get used to from now on: the list of follow-up questions is too long to ignore or bury.

And it is not only on TV and radio where the gloves have come off.

The most artful supporter of the administration on the staff of the New York Times, columnist David Brooks, has also had enough.

He and others are calling the debacle the "anti 9-11": "The first rule of the social fabric - that in times of crisis you protect the vulnerable - was trampled," he wrote on Sunday.

"Leaving the poor in New Orleans was the moral equivalent of leaving the injured on the battlefield."

Media emboldened

It is way too early to tell whether this really will become "Katrinagate" for President Bush, but how he and his huge retinue of politically-appointed bureaucrats react in the weeks ahead will be decisive.

Government has been thrown into disrepute, and many Americans have realised, for the first time, that the collapsed, rotten flood defences of New Orleans are a symbol of failed infrastructure across the nation.

Blaming the state and city officials, as the president is already trying to do over Katrina, will not wash.

Beyond the immediate challenge of re-housing the evacuees and getting 200,000-plus children into new schools, there will have to be a Katrina Commission, that a newly-emboldened media will scrutinise obsessively.

The dithering and incompetence that will be exposed will not spare the commander-in-chief, or the sunny, faith-based propaganda that he was still spouting as he left New Orleans airport last Friday, saying it was all going to turn out fine.

People were still trapped, hungry and dying on his watch, less than a mile away.

Black America will not forget the government failures, nor will the Gulf Coast region.

Tens of thousands of voters whose lives have been so devastated will cast their mid-term ballots in Texas next year - the president's adopted home state.

The final word belongs to the historic newspaper at the centre of the hurricane - The New Orleans Times-Picayune. At the weekend, this now-homeless institution published an open letter: "We're angry, Mr President, and we'll be angry long after our beloved city and surrounding parishes have been pumped dry.

"Our people deserved rescuing. Many who could have been, were not. That's to the government's shame."

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/world/americas/4214516.stm

Published: 2005/09/05 06:58:16 GMT
© BBC MMV

Matt Wells was a reporter at the Edinburgh Evening News, before moving to The Scotsman, first as its education correspondent and then as London reporter. He joined the Guardian in 1999 and moved and became its media correspondent the following year. Like everyone I suppose, he's always had mixed feelings about the BBC.