A Few Fine Reads

I don’t want to work any more today — after two weeks of days in the 90’s, and on the third day of temp’s over 100 not counting humidity, I’m feeling baked and boneless; kind of a like a dinner entree. I need to redirect some energy from my brain to my body. I don’t want to think too hard; it takes a toll, you know … maybe that’s why a lot of us DON’T.

Anyhow — Bush is, hopefully, engaged in zen-ranching, whacking limbs and popping brush [and, by the way, looks like the guy who is so afraid of horses and critters that run on real spreads in Texas that he turned himself into a pseudo-ranch hand should have been more mindful of TICKS] so the world won’t blow up if I don’t deliver any more grisly news to you today.

Here’s a handful of inspiring or entertaining reads on this and that … the kind that go down easy, like a frosty glass of lemonade on a blistering August day — which is where I’m headed now.

I’m throwing in a snippit of Jon Stewart to start you out. Enjoy.

Jude

Dude, Where’s My Karl?
Jon Stewart, Comedy Central

Good Riddance Turd Blossom
Garrison Keillor, The Chicago Tribune
Wednesday, August 15, 2007

What truly cheers me up through these dog days of summer is the thought that two old friends of mine are up north on a canoe trip in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area and that I am not there with them.

I am here, reading the paper, and if I wanted to go to a movie, I could go, and if I wished to use a flush toilet, I could do that, too. But for the grace of God, I could be sitting on the ground, filthy, embittered, homeless, eating freeze-dried food and listening to the Master Woodsman tell me what a great experience I’m having and meanwhile a cloud of mosquitoes has come out to avenge the white man’s colonizing of North America. I have been on canoe trips, I know what goes on.

Every canoe trip has a self-appointed Master Woodsman. In civilian life he may be a mild-mannered clerk in a cubicle but out on the trail he is transformed into the song leader, pathfinder, the great helmsman, the tier of correct knots and the authority on bears. He shows you how to do everything except the things you really need to do, such as (1) relieve yourself in some dignified manner and (2) get out of here and find a hotel. Your body aches from sleeping on the ground and you are thinking about “Lord of the Flies” and what it says about the fragility of civilization, but he is relentlessly upbeat. And then it dawns on you: Your suffering is what turns him on. The man is a sadist.

At this point, the current administration is like a very, very bad canoe trip with a week left to go, and Karl Rove is the Head Counselor who has found a path to the highway.

He left the White House with a wave and a grin and not in handcuffs as some had hoped, followed by the usual backwash of commentary on how important he was, or how not important in comparison to how important some people thought he was, and what I find eerie about the man is his inexhaustible self-confidence and optimism. He was the Master Woodsman. According to some accounts, his positive outlook was responsible for the Current Occupant’s sunny disposition in the face of bad news. No wonder Rove’s nickname was “Turd Blossom.” He could put fecal matter on his lapel and call it a boutonniere.

There are basically two types of Americans and the first is the type most of the world considers typical: the Americans who when the big smiley preacher stands in the pulpit and says, “How about everybody turn around and shake hands with the person behind you and give them a big howdy!” they all turn around and shake and say howdy and feel uplifted by this. And then there are the Americans who would do anything to avoid this, including staying away from church entirely.

The first type, when the preacher says he is going to show us a way we can double our net worth in the next year, thinks, “Boy, this is my lucky day.” The second does not. There are more of the second type than the first.

Mr. Rove believed in himself 150 percent and believed he could make history and create the permanent Republican majority to run the country, but when people look at what he actually brought to pass ā€” this wretched war that costs us $10 billion a month or more, a mortgaged economy, the corruption of the Department of Justice ā€” somehow the permanent majority seems less and less interesting.

His last big assignment was to get the immigration bill passed. It failed in large part because Congress was tired of Rove and his boy-genius high-handedness.

Instead, Homeland Security announced a new crackdown on illegal immigrants, which aroused protests from farmers who said that 70 percent of farm workerstoday are illegal ā€” a stunning fact, if true: Most of the people who pick our beans and tomatoes are men and women forced to sneak across the border, and why? Because they’re a security threat? No. So that we can get them cheap, that’s why.

Rove spoke with great confidence about beans and tomatoes and showed slides and got standing ovations in many places, but he didn’t get the crops in. Goodbye and good riddance. ++

Garrison Keillor is the host of The Prairie Home Companion

Bush Baby Einstein
Chris Kelly, HuffPo
August 10, 2007

“No, see this is a really shit idea. You know why? Because it’s really obviously a shit idea.”
~ 28 Days Later

According to the tabloids, Britney Spears puts Pepsi in her kids’ baby bottles. And I know that sounds bad, but 1) She used to endorse Pepsi, and you have to admire a celebrity spokesperson who actually uses the product, and 2) At least she’s not making them watch Baby Einstein.

Turns out, that crap’ll make you retarded.

According to a new report in the Journal of Pediatrics, for every hour a day that toddlers watch Baby Einstein, they learn six to eight fewer words than toddlers that don’t. Which may explain the company’s slogan, “E = M C-student,” but probably not, because that’s just a joke.

Wait? Now it’s bad to make babies watch television? Who knew?

(I mean, aside from the American Academy of Pediatrics, which has always said children under two shouldn’t watch TV, even if the DVD has “Einstein” written on the box. But what do they know? They’re just pediatricians. The American Academy of Physicists says you shouldn’t watch Baby Bruno Bettelheim. So there.)

Next you’re going to say I shouldn’t feed my kids all those McNuggets, even though I write the word “Bach” on each one with magic marker.

My own experiments with baby television ended when my eldest was still an only, and watched Barney the way Kathy Bates watches James Caan in Misery. Yes, we were letting a one-year-old walk the thin line between love and madness called obsession, but it was so nice to get that extra half hour’s sleep. Don’t look at me that way. You did it too. That all ended the morning I was actually reading her a book for once and when we got to the end she handed it back to me and said, “Rewind.”

The tapes had to go.

You know how we should have known it was a shit idea? Because it’s really obviously a shit idea.

I think we’re going to spend a lot of time, cleaning up after the Bush Years, correcting things that were glaringly wrong from the start. “Make your baby smart with TV.” “Let the extraction industries write their own laws.” “Merge the government and the church.” “Get the Arabs into democracy by murdering them.”

If you don’t have children — and you never conned yourself into thinking it was good for them to watch a video of a hand pushing a toy truck to a lousy version of the Fur Elise — the first place you may have heard of Baby Einstein was in this year’s State of the Union.

When the President said:

“After her daughter was born, Julie Aigner-Clark searched for ways to share her love of music and art with her child. So she borrowed some equipment, and began filming children’s videos in her basement. The Baby Einstein Company was born and in just five years her business grew to more than $20 million in sales. In November 2001, Julie sold Baby Einstein to the Walt Disney Company, and with her help Baby Einstein has grown into a $200 million business. Julie represents the great enterprising spirit of America. And she is using her success to help others producing child safety videos with John Walsh of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. Julie says of her new project: “I believe it’s the most important thing that Ive ever done. I believe that children have the right to live in a world that is safe.” We are pleased to welcome this talented business entrepreneur and generous social entrepreneur Julie Aigner-Clark.”

Of course she’s a con woman and her business hurts the people it’s supposed to help. She was sitting in the box with Laura. Another year, it was Ahmad Chalabi.

And of course “Baby Einstein” doesn’t work. Bush endorsed it. So it makes kids stupid? We’re lucky it doesn’t kill them.

By the way:

You know how I know running someone with Hillary Clinton’s negatives for President is a shit idea? Because it’s really obviously a shit idea. ++

In Church With Fannie Lou Hamer: August 24-27, 1964, Atlantic City
Joan Lester, CommonDreams
Wednesday, August 15, 2007

Our rag-tag group slept on the pews in our sleeping bags, jammed together, giddy, singing freedom songs half the night. “We shall overcome, some day.” My sleeping bag, borrowed from a friend, was damp with sweat while I lay in the hot, muggy church, fervent with hope.

Atlantic City, August 24, 1964. Who knew it would be historic? We were just mad. For years the Democratic Party in Mississippi had methodically excluded Negroes from voting. Whites used every terror tactic, from publishing the names and addresses of those who tried to register to bombing homes. Now they were on a rampage, barring blacks at gunpoint from state precinct meetings, with the Governor, Paul Johnson, leader of the state Democratic Party, publicly mocking the NAACP acronym as “Niggers, alligators, apes, coons and possums.”

In response, Fannie Lou Hamer and others had formed the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), open to all. Despite harassment, it registered over 50,000 voters in its parallel process, held precinct meetings, conducted county and state conventions, and elected fifty-eight delegates to the National Democratic Convention in Atlantic City, arguing that this delegation represented the legitimate party, the only one run in accordance with the Constitution and the national Party.

I was there when the MFDP rode into town, waiting on the boardwalk with a handful of demonstrators singing “Ain’t goinna let no beatings turn us aroundā€¦marching up to Freedom land.” I’d arrived with a busload from New York City, coming to cheer the MFDP on, ensuring the credentials committee would honor their legitimacy. “Hold your eyes on the prize, hold on!” we chanted, marching in a circle, certain that exposing such inequity would guarantee delegate status for the MFDP.

That first evening after the delegates arrived we went back to the church, chomping on our apples and sandwich crusts, to discover that Ms. Fannie Lou Hamer herself was with us, come to talk to our mostly-white group of supporters. We’d heard of her: a legendary sharecropper from Sunflower County, evicted from the land she and her husband had lived on for eighteen years because she insisted on going to town, trying to register to vote. Later, she said, “I guess if I had any sense, I’d have been scaredā€“but what was the point of being scared? The only thing they could do was kill me, and it seemed they’d been trying to do that a little at a time since I could remember.”

Ms. Hamer stood above us on the stage that night, placed herself in front of the lectern, and lifted up her skirt. Her legs were large, covered with dark bruises. The inside of her thighs were almost one continuous blotch. “This is what those Mississippi sheriffs did to me,” she said, tears rolling in transparent streams down her dark cheeks. “This is how they beat me.” She paused, then began to sing, still crying, “This little light of mine, I’m going to let it shineā€¦” She clapped to the beat and we all joined in.

I watched, transfixed. Never had I seen evidence of such brutality-or bravery. Her courage was like a tent flapping around her, one that extended to embrace us all. That night, when I lay on the hard pew in my sleeping bag, I vowed that I’d do whatever it took. “No more beatings,” I sang softly to myself, as tears trickled into my ears, “No more beatings, anymore.”

The next day as we picketed on the boardwalk again, Martin Luther King and Mrs. King swept by: beautiful, wrapped in glory, radiating royal status. Then a friend slipped me a pass to slide inside the Convention for an hour, while Ms. Hamer testified live on TV before the credentials committee. She recounted her beating in the Winona jail, where a State Highway Patrolman had ordered two Negro trustees to beat her with a blackjack for hours, until she was near death. Choking back tears, she asked, “Is this America, the land of the free and the home of the brave, where we have to sleep with our telephones off the hooks because our lives be threatened daily because we want to live as decent human beingsā€“in America?”

On the convention floor, I heard President Johnson call a hasty press conference midway through Ms. Hamer’s speech, cutting her off the air. Later, sitting in a bar sipping beer, we saw the networks run her speech on the evening news anyway, riveting the nation. Still, since Johnson didn’t want to alienate the South, with its powerful committee chairs, the MFDP wasn’t seated.

Crushed, I returned that night to my sodden sleeping bag, crawled in, and awoke downhearted to a general mood of disappointment. When I returned home stinky and bitter, smelling of three days of sweat, I told my Negro husband that I was fully “in the struggle,” as we said then, “by any means necessary.” Lying with him in our bed, I swore again: Whatever it took.

But our faith was broken. We’d discovered that playing by the rules was not enough. When Fannie Lou Hamer mourned, “We came with nothing, we’ll go home with nothing,” I felt the same, unsure where to turn. And I was not alone. Immediately, the civil rights movementā€“once so clearā€“fractured, with activists flying every which way. Some, their trust in white allies shattered, created the ideological rational for a self-reliant Black Power and soon, Black Panthers, Black Muslims. Others, equally disenchanted, embraced a broader self-sufficiency: Ms. Hamer herself created a pig farm for poor whites and blacks, before returning four years later as a full delegate to the Democratic National Convention. Some few, with the background and the heart for it, stepped directly into the corridors of white power, attempting to broker justice from the inside as Mayors or members of Congress.

Dispirited, I joined those who began to talk idly of “picking up the gun.” For what justice, after all, had our by-the-book protests gotten us? The glamour of an armed revolution acquired full-dress attire in that betrayal on the boardwalk. Our idea gained credence whenā€“after Watts burned for five days in LAā€“President Johnson suddenly called for massive spending in the ghettoes. So that’s what it took! Chants of “Burn, Baby, Burn” erupted in city after city. Then Bonnie and Clyde, the hot new movie, showed that violence was indeed the thing, if you wanted to help the poor.

Yet romantic talk of insurrection, a la Che Guevara, was one thing, the cold hard reality of a gun another. With no real weapons around, I merely thrilled to the talk, imagining a home-grown revolutionary moment, and cheered on the emergence, cross-country, of California’s Black Panthers. When my fantasy of leading an armed revolution failed, due to my inability to actually lay hands on a gun or locate troops, I fled to my bedroom, nestled into my husband, and began to churn out babies.

Working then as an urban researcher for $3 an hour, running back and forth from the apartment of a neighbor who gave cheap day-care, somehow I kept up my study-group reading of Marx, pouring through the 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte to learn how to make radical change. But my bitterness grew as I staggered under pressures of work and motherhoodā€“for my husband had gone South to foment revolution with his guitar; I heard he didn’t sleep alone. My resentment swelled until I threw over Marx to help start a new Women’s Liberation. Angered at even our civil rights leaders (one of whom declared that the best position for women in the movement was “prone”), a group of us met on lower Broadway to strategize. We decided to form small local clusters, so when neighborhood women filled my kitchen, recounting grievances, asking, “What can we do?” we started a group. My friend Ann Mari came down from East Harlem to join us, and soon women from all over the city piled into my living room every week to tell their stories.

My rage bloomed while the country burned, fueling my days and nights, in spite of the joy the babies brought. It’s fortunate that I didn’t have a gun then, because at one point, even pre-Thelma and Louise, I thought shooting the men who didn’t respect us was a pretty swift idea. Our group read a pamphlet that appeared, suggesting a plan: On the same evening, when men arrived home from work all over the country, they’d open the door and Bam! “One shot for every diaper you never changed.” Bam! “One toe for each infidelity.” Bam! “For the broom you’ve never picked up.” Brilliant, I thought, so coordinated, and sure to make an impact. Yet even in an era of burning cities this fantasy too soon faded, joining my earlier one, where I led Black Revolutionary Troops and waved my banner like Joan of Arc.

Instead, once again I borrowed a sleeping bag, this time traveling to Chicago in the cold of November, 1968, for our first national Women’s Liberation Conference. We met, two hundred women, out in the woods at some god-forsaken YWCA camp with no heat. Though I’d come to represent our neighborhood group, I was unsure whether I had the faith to hope again, to risk heart-break in another fight for justice. I shivered in my sleeping bag on a bunk bed the first night, feeling alone, discouraged, and embittered. Missing my babies, I questioned, Why am I here? What change can we make?

Yet while I lay there, four years after I’d seen Fannie Lou Hamer on that church stage and cried myself to sleep on the pew, the image of her shining round face, hair pulled back, singing through her tears, came to me. If she could raise her voice to This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine after all she’d been through, so, surely, could I. At that moment, with the picture of Ms. Hamer standing on stage lifting her skirt to show her bruises, I rejoined the caravan of hope. And snuggled deep into my sleeping bag, which suddenly felt like a warm, portable nest to incubate my dreams. ++

Jesus Loves Your Crappy Videos
Behold GodTube.com, the place where sex, humor and warm spiritual inclusiveness go to die
Mark Morford, SF Gate
Wednesday, August 15, 2007

The Internets, they’re just so chock-full of gul-dang liberals, aren’t they?

This is, after all, the big conservative lament. It’s like you can’t hit your Gizmodo or your Fleshbot or your Savage Love without running smack into some well-read, free-thinking pseudo-hipster gleefully expounding on the joys of anal sex or a recent hilarious Jon Stewart/”Daily Show” riff or offering up a link to some dark, brilliant Polish anti-war animation. Horrible!

Or maybe it’s a hot sex blogger slapping Fox News for being such an obvious bastion of hateful sexist homophobic right-wing moronism, or some hip design blog talking about the sad homogeneity of conservative fashion sense, maybe you’re innocently cruising MySpace personals with your Bible and your GOP handbook and you just can’t escape all the neo-pagan urban lefties who absolutely refuse to be appropriately terrified by, say, gay marriage, or foreign people, or, you know, God.

Oh, it gets worse. Hell, as any good Christian will tell you, the Net is packed like a perky Vegas whorehouse with godless heathens, too: perverts and nonbelievers and hyper-intelligent Buddhists and smart-ass Wiccans, yoga lovers and kinky reformed Catholics and delightful “spiritual cowgirls” who would no more kneel at the altar of wholesome Christian values than they’d eat a stack of greasy McDonald’s Filet-O-Fishes and eight pounds of deep-fried Snickers bars and move to Alabama and get diabetes and call themselves a patriot.

But if there’s one site in particular that offers the ultimate proof of godless Internet evil, the one e-joint that encapsulates all that’s wrong with the perverted Net world, it is, of course, YouTube.

Oh my God, yes. See, the problem is, millions of heathen perverts like you seem to believe YT is one of the great creative wonderlands/pop culture wastelands of our time, an uber-egalitarian repository for all things trite and wonderful and cheesy and amateur and sublime and stupid and viral and interesting and boring and silly and wonderful and righteous and fascinating and delicious and kaleidoscopic and inclusive and wow. You know, just like the Internet was originally intended. Well, sort of.

Hence, many ideological culture sluts reading these very words might argue that YT is one of the Net’s finest creative equalizers, the most level of multimedia playing fields, a grand sociocultural melting pot that’s open like a 24-hour lube dispensary to all beliefs and talent levels and perspectives and beholden to none (well, save copyright infringement. And porn. But that’s why god invented Bitorrent. And PornoTube. Praise!)

Ah, but therein lies the true proof of Satan’s dark plan, right? From the Christian perspective, YouTube is, apparently, far too inclusive, far too tolerant and messy and scary and depraved and unpredictable and wonderfully, blindly all-encompassing — and baby, if we’ve learned anything about God and America during this miserable pile of Bush years, it’s that the God-fearing of this nation want nothing more than to instill and perpetuate a deep, abiding fear of the Other, to stigmatize, to restrict, to polarize to the point of total spiritual and intellectual paralysis.

But wait! Salvation is, apparently, finally at hand. Witness, won’t you, the stillbirth of GodTube.com, the place where good, Net-fearing Christians can go to see awful Christian rap videos and grainy evangelical sermons and 101 flavors of all-American sanctimony with, quite naturally, not a hint of sex or deep humor or true spiritual exploration or religious tolerance. Praise!

Witness, in other words, the thing that modern Christianity seems to do best, and I don’t mean help justify brutal unwinnable wars or slam gay people or bash women’s rights or promote ignorance of stem cell research or science or music. Because oh hell yes, that’s there for you, in heaps and droves and mounds. I mean the other thing: to fracture. To splinter and divide and segregate. You know, to exclude.

That’s right. GodTube is billed, quite naturally, as the place where people can go to, uh, “Broadcast Him.” Which is a nice mutation of YouTube’s own slogan, “Broadcast Yourself.” That pretty much sums it all up right there. See, it ain’t about you or your creativity or your perspective or your sexuality or your happy self-defined sense of pop culture blasphemy. And it certainly isn’t some deeply sacrilegious idea that you yourself might very well be the divine creative spark you seek — that God is, in other words, right there in the mirror. Oh my heavens, no.

As GodTube will happily slap you upside your deviant head, it’s all about, well, something else, something outside of you and beyond your meager ability to understand, and of course that thing is male and probably very, very angry and you can’t possibly comprehend it, so please just quit asking questions and smash your Quan Yin statue and burn your yoga mat and your Philip Pullman books and watch this nice little clip of a perky blonde toddler reciting Psalm 23 like a cute robot doll and then watch GodTube founder Chris Wyatt get stroked on Fox News or Kirk Cameron lose what’s left of his mind, over and over and over again. You know, just like Jesus intended.

To be fair, it’s not only Christian conservatives who feel a deep need to parse the Internet for rabid special-interest subgroups. Almost every successful Web 2.0 megasite has its random spinoffs, sites that take one great idea and fracture it and partition it so as to target it more specifically (to wit: the endless array of dating subsites aimed at every oddball demographic imaginable). In fact, you could even say that this is the Net’s real makeup, a mad, delirious hodgepodge of a billion little communities all holding digital hands, tentatively, awkwardly, wonderfully.

But then again, no. Joints like GodTube (and other slightly scary conservative spinoff sites like, say Conservpedia, with its implied slogan, “When Wikipedia’s global liberal bias toward truth and fact and collective wisdom makes you feel all weird and confused”), these sites actually go a step further, deeper, sadder.

They appear to wish to, quite simply, restrict understanding. Limit knowledge. Prevent exploration. Discourage the egalitarian global community aspect of the Net itself in favor of, well, the same old dogma that got us into so much trouble in the first place, a sadly myopic ideology that’s crippled school textbooks and smashed scientific study and drained the juice from the human sexual impulse and essentially elected the worst and most debilitating, morally dangerous president in modern American history.

But then again, maybe it’s just a cute, silly collection of nutball preachers, bad Christian rock and rabid Christian youth and lots of little kids blindly reciting Bible verse. Yes, maybe that’s all it is. You think? ++

“So keep fightin’ for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don’t you forget to have fun doin’ it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin’ ass and celebratin’ the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was.”
~ Molly Ivins, 1944 - 2007

In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.

Add comment August 15th, 2007

TW3

That Was The Week That Was … mayhem. Tornados and monsoons, hurricanes and earthquakes, economic rattle and roll, stories of torture and repression — ain’t we got fun? Not mentioned here is a long list of “home town” stories that are popping up like weeds; the shooting at a sleepy little local church, here, is typical. And this one — Lord LOVE us, where did our common sense go?

Jude

HARPER’S WEEKLY REVIEW
August 14, 2007

In the midst of a brief thunderstorm that transfixed the
New York City subway system and killed one motorist, a
tornado formed over the Atlantic Ocean, grazed the north
coast of Staten Island, and blew into Brooklyn, felling
292 trees, ripping roofs off dozens of buildings, and
displacing 200 people from their homes. Losses among
lenders to American debtors led to a one-day plunge of 387
points in the Dow Industrial Average. The Federal Reserve
injected $62 billion into the market–its largest
intervention since September 19, 2001–and its
international counterparts followed suit. Hedge funds were
in the red. “You have a better chance at making money on
the craps table than in this market,” remarked one
analyst. Germany’s leading regulator warned that the
country risked tumbling into its worst financial crisis
since the 1930s, and the public disclosure of Adolf
Hitler’s private record collection indicated that the
Fuehrer enjoyed listening to Jewish musicians play
Tchaikovsky. The discovery of a 1973 document proved that
it was Stasi policy to “stop or liquidate” defectors
attempting to escape East Germany over the Berlin Wall,
especially those accompanied by women and children. China
Public Security, a U.S.-financed company contracted by the
People’s Republic, was outfitting the city of Shenzen with
20,000 surveillance cameras and issuing identity cards to
record each citizen’s name, address, employment status,
education, religion, ethnicity, police record,
medical-insurance status, reproductive history, and
landlord’s phone number. “If they do not get the permanent
card,” said a China Public Security executive, “they
cannot live here, they cannot get government benefits, and
that is a way for the government to control the population
in the future.” It was reported that Rudolph Giuliani’s
daughter, Caroline, a member of the Harvard class of 2011,
was affiliated with the Facebook.com group “Barack Obama
(One Million Strong for Barack)”; she had recently left
the group, but her page maintained that her political
views are “Liberal” and that she is single, interested in
men, and looking for “Friendship,” “Random play,” or
“Whatever I can get.”

Seif al-Islam Qaddafi, son of Muammar Qaddafi, affirmed
that recently released Bulgarian and Palestinian medical
workers accused of spreading HIV to Libyan babies were
tortured while in custody. “Yes,” he said, “they were
tortured by electricity, and they were threatened that
their family members would be targeted.” Anonymous sources
told a reporter that purported Al Qaeda mastermind Khalid
Sheikh Mohammed was told by his American captors, “We’re
not going to kill you. But we’re going to take you to the
very brink of your death and back.” Sources also said
Mohammed was kept naked in his cell, hung by his arms from
the ceiling, and flung against the walls by a leash around
his neck. Daniel Pearl’s widow and father expressed doubts
about the egomaniacal detainee’s claim that he beheaded
the Wall Street Journal reporter. The United States denied
approving the Iraqi Interior Ministry’s $39.7 million
purchase of 105,000 Russian-made assault rifles from the
Italian Mafia. A senior official of the Iraqi Interior
Ministry, which has backed Shiite death squads in the
Shiite-Sunni civil war, said “most” of the Russian guns
were meant for its police in the Sunni-majority Anbar
province; Iraqi officials also complained that U.S. gun
deliveries are slow. Nominally antiwar Democrats Barack
Obama, Hillary Clinton, and John Edwards admitted that if
elected to the White House they would worry about
terrorism launched from a failed Iraqi state, threats to
the Kurds, and the prospect of Shiite-on-Sunni genocide,
and because of these fears they would continue the
occupation of Iraq for a long time.

A rocket launched from Gaza struck a ranch owned by
comatose former Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon, Hank
Aaron’s home run record was broken, and three college
students were murdered execution-style in a New Jersey
playground. An eight-foot-five-inch Ukrainian, Leonid
Stadnyk, was declared the world’s tallest man; locals
attributed his size to a brain operation in adolescence,
and the penurious Stadnyk lamented that his continuous
growth had ended his career as a veterinarian when he
became too large to fit into a car and his fingers grew
too big for him to press buttons. “Doctors tell me I will
live a long life,” he said. “I hope it will be in
happiness.” In India police killed a protester at a riot
of flood victims, and the monsoon death toll climbed above
2,000, with many of the fatalities blamed on
snakebites. “Everyone is crammed in together,” said an
expert, “and the chances of running into snakes, stepping
on them, grabbing them, and sleeping on them is much, much
more.” Karl Rove announced his resignation. A straw poll
of Iowa Republicans lent an aura of viability to the
presidential candidacies of Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee
but caused Tommy Thompson to drop out of the race. Teacher
Barbara Morgan, Christa McAuliffe’s backup on the
ill-fated 1986 Challenger mission, blasted into orbit on
board the space shuttle Endeavour, which suffered damage
to its heat shield. Five billion light years from earth,
four galaxies violently converged; astronomers predicted
that over the next 100 million years they will fuse into a
single galaxy ten times larger than the Milky Way. A
celestial plume of billions of expelled stars bloomed from
the collision. Half of these stars will resettle in the
new giant galaxy; the rest are lost in space.

– Christian Lorentzen

http://harpers.org/archive/2007/08/WeeklyReview2007-08-14

“So keep fightin’ for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don’t you forget to have fun doin’ it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin’ ass and celebratin’ the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was.”
~ Molly Ivins, 1944 - 2007

In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.

Add comment August 15th, 2007