Insert a Trite Metaphor for a Corral #69

Posted on March 15, 2007 in Roundup

“We are now faced with the fact that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history there is such a thing as being too late.”
[[Martin Luther King]]

The stories of the alternative press of today will be the stories of the mainstream media tomorrow provided they prove politically correct to do so and can be spun in such a way that the perpetuation of the war is not threatened. Here and there a scapegoat will be found, but do not expect any genuine change. The people of Iraq will continue to eat, sleep, and work in an atmosphere tainted with spent uranium.

With the war the single biggest outlay of funds from our taxpayer dollars, why do days pass when there is no news from the front? Don’t the lives of Iraqis matter?

Or the lives of the rest of us who will be paying for the war and the bungled Pentagon accounting system for the rest of our lives with money that should have been used for our retirement?

• Medical Marijuana: Today’s decision which makes those who use it subject to prosecution fills me with mixed feelings. The woman who sued for her right to use it needs it: she has an inoperable brain tumor. On the other hand, its prescription has been loose. The grapevine is full of reports of people who have finagled a way to get a supply by finding a doctor who will prescribe it for anything ranging from bipolar disorder to sore knees. If the medical marijuana experiment is going to work, it must be handled like any other legal drug — approved and regulated by the FDA. The next step is Congress.
• Choice Website: Defense in the National Interest
• Choice Videos: Hang-glide over the surface of Mars
• Choice Articles: The Truth in Chains and Is it a man’s, man’s, man’s world?
• Privatisation Taken Too Far: A British scheme proposes that jails be set up in shopping malls. Talks are under way to open the first of these short-term holding cells in Selfridges department store on Oxford Street in London. The five purpose-built rooms would be smaller than normal cells and made of Perspex so that suspects are visible. The police will also gain sweeping extensions to their powers to take fingerprints and DNA samples from anyone they suspect of committing a crime. In addition, the proposals appear to lift the barriers that separate the police fingerprint and DNA databases from the new national identity register. I wonder if this will chase customers away or bring new ones to gawk at the accused? War criminals seem to be excepted.
• In the Blood: Blood donors in Los Angeles are testing positive for a parasite called Chagas which is spread by what The Los Angeles Times calls a blood-sucking insect that looks like a striped cockroach. The most likely victims: people who have traveled or lived in rural parts of Latin America.
• O.J.: The rights to that choice bit of violence pornography that he wrote will be auctioned off the steps of the Capitol building in Sacramento and the proceeds go to the family of his victim, Ronald Goldman.
• The End of Vatican 2: The Vatican plans to punish Father Jon Sobrino, an advocate for El Salvador’s poor, on grounds that he has been teaching [[Liberation Theology]]. Few want to talk about how the move appears to be orchestrated at the behest of Opus Dei, a right wing cult within the Church which downplays the social gospel in favor of mind control.

If you find any articles worthy of mention in these roundups, send the URL to gazissax at best dot com. And feel free to comment!

[tags]News[/tags]

Insert a Trite Metaphor for a Corral #68

Posted on March 12, 2007 in Roundup

I never liked Daylight Savings Time. Missing from the reports that celebrated the extra hour in the evening were the effects on human beings. No one ever asked if it was good for us to lose an hour of sleep.

Last year, the BBC ran a report on the costs of six a.m. becoming seven a.m.: Studies by the Sleep Research Laboratory at Loughborough University, have found that road traffic accidents increase slightly in the days after the clocks go forward. There is also an increase in accidents when clocks go back in the winter, which is thought to occur because people use the extra hour they gain to stay up later, making them more tired. The stock market also has a habit of falling when the clocks go forward, according to Investor Profit.com. The FTSE 100 has fallen 15 years out of the last 25, with an average loss of 0.77%. It says the likely reason for this is the spring clock change comes when the end of a trading quarter and the financial year is approaching, which has an effect on what is bought and sold. The stock market has risen in 17 of the last 25 years on the day after the clocks go back at the end of October.

Apparently though energy consumption decreases, the effect lasts for only a few days. Crime also drops — for a few days.

If [[Ben Franklin]] had known this, would he have suggested the idea? That we only think about energy consumption shows that our priorities have been messed up when it comes to changing our lives for the long, long season.

• Windy Ridge Fire: It’s 80% contained as of this writing. And I haven’t even gotten the slightest whiff of it.
• Stop Payment Order: Kevin Zeese says that resolutions are not enough. Democrats like [[Barbara Mikulski|Mikulski]] say they are opposed to the war but keep appropriating more money for the war. They need to realize that if they pay for it, it’s theirs.
• Nude and Unnatural: Israel recalled its ambassador to El Salvador, Tzuriel Refael, after he was found drunk, naked, and gagged with a rubber ball in his mouth.
• Choice Article: The Dark Side of TV
• Chemicals: Teenagers don’t deserve the blame for their tantrums, says a new report. It’s their chemistry! When the brain senses a stressful situation, it reacts by switching on receptors, using a range of chemicals, including a steroid called THP. In an adult or even a younger individual, THP would reduce anxiety. But in experiments on adolescent mice, THP increased anxiety. Tell that to Linda Damm. Another study tells us that women who are aggressive can write it off to genetics. God save us from the cure.
• Illusion of Unity: Has AHnold just become a Democrat?
• You Can’t Have Yellow Cake — Or Eat It: Frank Cafaro was just going through old stores. “We were in the warehouse and we pulled out this box of rocks from an estate sale,” Cafaro said. “Everything was individually labeled. [[Amethyst]]. [[Topaz]]. [[Uranium]]. The guy I’m working with says, ‘What’s that last one? Uranium? I think that’s illegal.’ “…Labeled with radioactive markings, the container protected a vial that held about an ounce of yellowcake uranium, a processed mineral that, in larger quantities, could be used to make fuel for nuclear reactors or enriched for weapons. The article goes on to talk about Saddam Hussein — a tenuous link but something to make an editor happy, I suppose.
• Bones of the Saints: A lot across the street from the World Trade Center site is the new focus for the search for bones from 9-11 attack victims. Since October, more than 400 bones have been unearthed from the debris of a service road that construction trucks used to get in and out of the site after the 2001 attacks. The city, which oversaw the original cleanup, is conducting a new search to find more remains of the 2,749 victims. About 40% of the victims have not had remains identified. Last week, two bones were recovered where St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church used to be and where new digging has begun, said an official who spoke on condition of anonymity. Debris from both towers collapsed onto the church and its parking lot. In the months after the attacks, some relics were returned to the St. Nicholas congregants. But the most precious one is still missing — a safe that contains church documents and a small enamel box containing three bone fragments less than a half-inch long. The bones are believed to be those of St. Nicholas, St. Sava and St. Katherine.
• Dirty River: After years of pummelling Ontario and Quebec with acid rain, what moral leverage does the U.S. State Department have in challenging a British Columbia coal mine?
• The Girls Are Lucky: The problem I have with a recent study that focuses on the academic performance of Palestinian girls and boys is that it asserts that success in school is “limiting opportunities”. I’d like to say that war and violence limit the choices for young men because all they have to turn to is war and violence. I don’t call that much in the way of a future, particularly when it involves a secretive life or a pack of explosives strapped to the chest.

If you find any articles worthy of mention in these roundups, send the URL to gazissax at best dot com. And feel free to comment!