Not to mention being in the Land of Bread Worth Eating again. The horror of the preservative-laden spongy matter that passes for "bread" in much of the country never ceases to shock me. If I ever leave the city I will simply have to invest in a bread-making machine (or live in a community that bakes its own).
There's nothing good about drug use. Drug use destroys societies. Drug use, some might say, is destroying this country. And so if people are violating the law by doing drugs, they ought to be convicted and they ought to be sent up.It's really precious hearing conservatives wonder aloud if liberals and leftists will stay true to our objection to drug criminalization and advocate going easy on Limbaugh for his apparent drug abuse problems.
-- Rush Limbaugh
Why should we? He chose to preach his "lock 'em up, throw away the key" idea as a response to drug use. Nobody held a gun to his head and forced him to say such things. Now he's getting hoisted by his own petard. Poor baby.
If you can't stand the heat, stay out of the kitchen. And if you're unwilling to live in the kind of pits that you dig for others to fall into, then (a) maybe you shouldn't be digging those pits, (b) kindly explain why we shouldn't just let you live in your pit and thus prevent you from digging any more of them.
The Cough That Just Won't Go Away (tm), that is.
It had almost completely vanished during my ten days on the Olympic Peninsula, and its gradual reappearance over the past several days seems to be consistent with it being an allergic reaction.
I have to say that Portland has got to be one of the worst, if not the flat-out worst, places for allergies that I have ever lived in. Combine that with the lack of economic opportunity, and it doesn't look like I'll be staying put here much longer.
Which is sort of a pity, because aside from those two factors (aside from that Mrs. Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play?) I really like it, to the point that I've purchased a home here.
Let's see now, every state I've lived in requires motor vehicle operators to have their vehicles insured. And it's been like magic, hasn't it? Car insurance is well-known for being cheap and affordable, and one just never hears of people driving without insurance because they can't afford it. Yeah, right.
Get it straight: no insurance company paper-pusher ever had one particle to do with a sick person being healed. That's what doctors and nurses do. Insurance companies get rich on charging premiums as high as the law will get away with, denying claims as much as they can get away with, and spending their customer's premium dollars ensuring that universal health care will never come to pass.
If you wanna help the sick, pass legislation to cut the parasites out of the picture and remove money as an obstacle between patients and doctors. Something along the lines of Canada's single-payer model, for example. Or pick another Western nation of choice. They all spend less per-capita than the USA on health care and have better health statistics.
Just noticed the following:
Businesses would have the option to provide health coverage or pay a fee to the state, which would obtain coverage.Given that most public-sector health plans already have lower overhead than most private-sector ones, that would appear to be a safety valve on the mandate being nothing but a huge gravy train for the insurance companies.
It appears that The Best Electorial System Money Can Buy (TM) has just given California the Governator.
I'd say something snide about being glad I don't live in California but (a) it's not as if any of the other 49 states don't also have variations of The Best Electorial System Money Can Buy (TM), (b) all the Pacific Coast states tend to have similar direct-democracy provisions in their state constitutions, and (c) experience has shown that whatever noxious political crud gets invented in California works its way north fairly soon.
So maybe I'll see a naturopath or someone about what can be done before considering the drama queen's solution of packing up and moving. Which is not something I enjoy at all (though if that's what it takes to get better health, that's what I'll do).
No, not traditional Western medicine for this one. Tried that last spring, had a typically hurried quickie appointment followed by a prescription for some synthetic drugs that did nothing. Worse than nothing, actually, because in trying them I had discontinued using the over-the-counter synthetic chemicals that had been doing something, albeit not enough. So I went from being miserable to being in absolute hell. And it was a damned expensive bottle of synthetic drugs at that, so I paid through the nose for the "privilege."
What seemed to work best was trying herbal remedies (nettles and bioflavonids) I had tried before with mixed results. It's possible the pollens that I'm allergic to happened to go away the time I started taking the herbals, but (a) the local grass pollen counts stayed sky-high, and (b) my friends with allergies continued to stay just as miserable as they were before.
A word of introduction for those not familiar with Portland: If you live west of the river, thunderstorms don't roll in as much as suddenly engulf you. There's a range of hills 1000 feet high starting right at the west edge of the core "inner city" area. Much of that core is within a mile of the hills; I live at the very base of them. So there's no western horizon to scan for approaching weather; edges of clouds appear at the ridgeline, and there's no easy way to tell at first glance if it's the edge of a puffy little do-nothing cloud, or the leading edge of a black thundercloud.
Sure enough, drops started falling almost as soon as I leave the door, gentle at first but within three blocks suddenly pretty hard with a few small hailstones thrown in. That's not a good sign, so I put my poncho on. By the time I'm three blocks away from the store I hear a distant low grumbling from over the ridge. As I walk in the door I see the first flash, followed by a real thunderclap a dozen or so seconds later.
I spend over an hour in the store waiting for it to stop. By any real standards, it's real wimpy in the thunder-and-lightning department, as 95% of our thunderstorms tend to be. But just for drama, one strike does make the lights briefly flicker. By the time I get home, it's clearing up, and for the next four hours only do-nothing clouds step onto the stage. But just in time for my friend to take his bike out of the building where he works, a rain-producer just made its appearance a few minutes ago.
Forget car-washers; it's bicyclists that bring the rain clouds out in this town.
And I learned something, too. I had always thought the "Weathermen" were mindlessly violent and killed lots of people. They did definitely have a bomb fetish, but according to the movie, the only people actually killed by a Weather Underground movie were three Weathermen who were amateurishly attempting to assemble their first time bomb.
A bomb that was intended to kill, by the way. But the accident prompted a reassessment of tactics where it was apparently decided that all reasonable steps should be taken to ensure that the effects of future bombings are limited to property destruction. As all evidence indicates it was.
I mention this not to say that all bombings are OK so long as you don't kill anyone, but to put a particularly smarmy, clueless, and sanctimonious quote by Professor Todd Gitlin into context: "They brought themselves to the point they were at. They were not brought."
Oh, really? Wasn't that society they were rebelling against killing millions in Indochina? And weren't they part of that society (at least before they started rebelling against it)? Therefore, any acts of violence they committed were not excursions to a moral space alien to that society, they were part and parcel of the moral space that society already inhabited. In a way, Gitlin's right (though certainly not the way he intended): the Weathermen took pains to not kill innocents, a concern that was absent from the acts of the government they were opposing. In other words, they had "brought themselves to" a more humane and less violent moral space.
I was originally going to similarly pick apart an oft-quoted excerpt from Brian Flanagan: "When you feel you have right on your side, you can do some horrific things." However Flanagan himself has apparently professed disappointment upon seeing the film in that it portrayed his feelings about it too negatively.
Not that Flanagan's statement is in any way untrue, merely that (to reiterate) the horrific things the government did because it felt it had right on its side were far worse any the Weathermen did because they felt similarly.
All in all a most attention-holding and (for me) educational film. If it comes your way, go see it. (Here in Portland, its run at Cinema 21 just ended, but word is the Fox Tower will probably be picking it up.)
We felt that doing nothing in a period of repressive violence was itself a form of violence. That's really the part I think is hardest for people to understand.I don't find it hard to understand at all. As one of the stickers on one of my bicycles says:
-- Naomi Jaffe
go to work
pay your taxes
that fund the
military, and
the military
bombs women,
men, children.
you kill
children.
Okay, sure, it's not the same as killing children directly and consciously --
it's hard to distill any coherent thought down into enough words to fit onto
a small sticker. All slogans are in some sense inaccurate. But the complicity
is certainly there.
I'll admit that many radical concepts were hard to understand when I first ran across them. Hard, but not impossible if one makes the effort to keep one's illogical gut reactions in control and think about the concept rationally and logically. What's hard for me to understand is so many people's inability or unwillingness to do just that; so much of national politics is dominated by those illogical gut reactions and nothing more.
As much as I have my differences with them, I guess I have my parents to thank for being able to think instead of simply respond to feelings on a base level. They both were trained as scientists, and (however inconsistently) the values of thinking of the world in a scientific and logical fashion were encouraged in the home I grew up in.
It is a sick era when "environmental terrorist" is a label used for people who destroy Hummers and fight urban sprawl, rather than the people who daily poison our air and the politicians who aid and abet their assault on our children's lungs.More here.
I'll have to eat some of the words I've recently written about rain and bicycles. It had been raining all day till I wheeled my bike out the door for a trip to the post office. Then the sun came out.
You'd never know it from the total absence of coverage in the establishment media, but there's a popular uprising taking place in Bolivia. Both Indymedia Bolivia (scroll down, there are some articles in English there) and Big Left Outside have extensive coverage.
Triggering event was when the (minority, president had less than 30% of the vote) Bolivian government decided to sell off the country's gas reserves to the US and Mexico. That provoked protests, which were (and still are being) met with machine gun fire. Many dozens of deaths have resulted.
I'm just wondering what slimy misleading spin the establishment media will put on it when (and if) they start covering it. Perhaps some crapola about "undemocratic political change" (hello, president with less than 30% of the vote, political system warped by gross wealth inequality, hello, hello) or something. Only time will tell.
US soldiers driving bulldozers, with jazz blaring from loudspeakers, have uprooted ancient groves of date palms as well as orange and lemon trees in central Iraq as part of a new policy of collective punishment of farmers who do not give information about guerrillas attacking US troops.Full story here.
Looks like the Bush regime is already trying to quash the people's uprising in Bolivia:
The weekly Pulso (http://www.pulsobolivia.com) also denounced the arrival of military material from the US to reinforce the Bolivian army. In an edition that was confiscated by govt. agents in the street of La Paz at the beginning of this week, the weekly announced the presence in Bolivia of four officials of the US that may be directing and coordinating all the repressive measures of the last few weeks.Full story here.
U.S. support for de Lozada is now moot. He's resigned.
In an nine-hour visit, Mr. Bush for the first time drew explicit comparisons between the transition he is seeking in Iraq and the rough road to democracy that the Philippines traveled from the time the United States seized it from Spain in 1898 to the present day.Full story here.
Here's what Mark Twain had to say for this "humanitarian" mission of a century ago:
And for those who are unaware, the Philippine-American War (not "Spanish-American War", please) involved the US taking sides (yes, initially against the Spanish as part of the wider Spanish-American War) in a pre-existing war of independence in the Philippines, and then double-crossing our Filipino allies and proclaiming the Philippines to be a colony of the US. The double-crossing happened in December of 1898, and from then until 1913 the US waged a war of colonial subjugation against the Filipinos.But I have thought some more, since then, and I have read carefully the treaty of Paris, and I have seen that we do not intend to free, but to subjugate the people of the Philippines. We have gone there to conquer, not to redeem.
...
It should, it seems to me, be our pleasure and duty to make those people free, and let them deal with their own domestic questions in their own way. And so I am an anti-imperialist. I am opposed to having the eagle put its talons on any other land.
And it was a particularly bloody and gruesome war, marked by widespread torture of Filipinos, frequent massacres of both surrendered Filipino forces and unarmed civilians, and the herding of civilians into concentration camps plagued by disease and starvation. More information on the Philippine-American War can be found here.
And this is our current Emperor's model to base the treatment of Iraqis upon. Well, at least I'll give him credit for being honest.
In case you don't realize it, Diebold Corporation is legally threatening people who mirror copies of leaked internal memos that underscore how insecure and unreliable Diebold's electronic voting machines are (and how Diebold is lying to its customers).
I've managed to locate a mirror of the e-mail archive containing the memos here. I've also mirrored the archive on my home page as a very long PDF document, as well as putting up a text file containing some of the most incriminating memos.
Just in case Swarthmore gets intimidated into making the user who's hosting it take it down.
Eighty-one degrees in late October? Is this California, or is it the Pacific Northwest?
I thought I had put the window fan away for good this year.
For those of you who are unaware, ivy has no natural enemies here and enjoys a climate similar enough to its native England that it grows rampant. It takes over the forest floor, essentially choking out all non-ivy vegetation (say goodbye to the trilliums, spring beauties, and inside-out flowers). Then it heads into the trees. Our trees didn't evolve to cope with the weight of evergreen lianas; worse, ivy adds to the wind-load the trees are subject to (the increase is especially serious when it comes to deciduous trees that go leafless through our stormy season). That's aside from the leaves of the trees that get out-competed for light when ivy gets into the crown. End result is the destruction of the forest.
There's so much of the damned stuff in the lower part of Washington Park that it's hopeless for one person to get rid of it all. I'm concentrating on saving the trees, because if those go, then it'll take 50 to 100 years to get anything approaching the canopy that's there now. The forest floor will come back within a decade of the ivy being removed from it, as long-dormant seeds will germinate when the choking cover of ivy is removed. (I've seen other areas of forest floor that were an ivy monoculture a decade ago, and today are a diverse patchwork of native plants.)
And no, it's not necessary to climb up into the crown of the tree and pull the ivy out of it. All one needs to do is cut all the stems running up the trunk; the ivy in the tree is now doomed and nature will take its course. In a few years it'll all have rotted and fallen out.
I had picked out a Douglas fir with ivy reaching into its crown, for the reason that thanks to logging about 100 years ago, there's nowhere near as many coniferous trees in the West Hills as there were naturally. This makes it especially important to save what native seed sources there are. I had only done one other tree there on my own, a bigleaf maple. That was a lot of work; it was in the clutches of anastomosed ivy stems, many 3 cm or more in diameter, and one 12-15 cm in diameter.
A pleasant surprise: the Douglas fir had no ivy stems more than 3 cm in diameter. I only had to use the saw and crowbar a few times; everything else was easily severed with the shears. I made such good progress that I was able to move onto its neighbor and free two Douglas firs before dusk fell.
Just in case anyone reading this actually believes all the sanctimonious crap about the Iraq War being all about ridding the world of an evil and brutal dictator, check out the Human Rights Watch page on Uzbekistan.
This charming little dictatorship, which regularly employs the practice of torturing prisoners to death, received $500 million in aid from the USA. $87 million of that went to the SNB, the Uzbek national police.
It's not for the faint of heart, but if you want to see what might happen to you if you're a Uzbek who disagrees with the government, click here. (For those who don't click, it contains pictures Muzafar Avazov, an Uzbek dissident who was executed by being immersed in boiling water, after first being thoroughly beaten and having his fingernails pulled out.)
Update: The correct figure is $79 million to the SNB. Obviously I was thinking of the $87 billion extra appropriation for the Iraq Mess when I wrote that. My bad.
In a repeat of last year, the waning days of October have been accompanied by an outflow of modified arctic air from the Columbia Gorge. It's been blustery and cool (which feels downright cold because of how mild it's generally been this month) for a day or two. If the weather forecast is to be believed, it should be in the low to mid 20s by tomorrow morning.
I'm not sure how much to believe that, since the same National Weather Service was predicting the upper 20s to near 30 last night, but thanks to it staying windy all night it never got much colder than 38. And it's very unusual for October frosts here to amount to anything more than going a degree or two below the freezing mark.
The private "Accu-Weather" service is forecasting a low of 20 degrees tonight, which is patently ridiculous. That's a temperature that is only occasionally reached here, and then only in the dead of winter in the coldest of years.
At any rate, it all should ensure that tonight's Critical Mass ride will take place in appropriately crisp Halloween weather.
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