THE SHOE’S ON THE OTHER FOOT, BUT WHO CARES?

Recently, as everyone knows, four CBS staffers were canned for failing to adequately check out a story about Bush’s National Guard service before releasing it into the public air waves through Dan Rather. Lot’s of head was done rolled!!!!

Now we find out that a woman’s story about torture in Saddam’s prisons which Paul Wolfowitz prominently featured in his testimony before Congress while Bush’s neocons were beating the war drums was completely false. What! A falsehood about Iraq and Saddam by the neocons? Who coulda thunk it!

Will heads roll in Bush’s administration because of those lies and distortions and the poor fact checking which has killed and permanently injured nearly 12,000 American soldiers now? Will those heads roll like the heads at CBS?

Anybody think that Bush and friends are more objective and honest than newsmen? Did someone in the errorless White House actually make a mistake? Maybe it wasn’t a mistake, like CBS’s mistake; maybe it was a downright Bush-league lie! Will anyone admit to it?

Anybody wanna make a wager?


WAR ON DRUGS. WHO’S WINNING?

Just outside Matamoros, Mexico, six prison employees were intercepted and murdered as they left their prison work recently. Matamoros is just across the border from Brownsville Texas. Law enforcement is becoming very dangerous in Mexico just now because of drug lords being held in prison and issuing warnings and death knells from their cells. Here we have a case of drug lords acting like international terrorists.

And in Afghanistan poppy fields are madly blooming.

Here in America so many of us laugh at a government which criminalizes marijuana use while 17,000 Americans died in traffic accidents in which alcohol was a factor. It’s time to criminalize alcohol use...

...or decriminalize but regulate all drugs and time to make drug use a mental health problem (including drinking) rather than a criminal problem. If only we had the money to do something about expanding treatment options. Where has all the money gone? Where has all the money gone? What happened to our federal surpluses, our budgets in black? Who was so irresponsible as to squander America’s wealth?

VOLITIONAL EVOLUTION

“Volitional evolution” is the control of our genetic makeup through science. According to E.O. Wilson in CONSILIENCE we will soon be in control of our own evolutionary direction. “Stabilizing selection” is the historical process by which bad genes were weeded out of the system by the death of those who were not viable. We’re already interdicting some of those death processes. “Medical prosthesis” is the process by which we can, and do, put off the deaths of thousands who were once weeded out by stabilizing selection. This seemingly wonderful intervention could actually destabilize our worldwide gene pool with poor results for the human race as a whole.

However, Wilson believes that soon gene therapy will offer ways to improve the gene pool. “Sometime in the next century [twenty-first century] that trend [gene repair] will lead into the full volitional period of evolution.” Or, as he further surmises, “Homo sapiens, the first truly free species, is about to decommission natural selection, the force that made us.” (Page 276.)


TWO EXCELLENT FILMS FOR CINEMATOGRAPHY

Recently watched two great library films of poetic visual intensity. “Maborosi”, a Japanese film and “Eternity and a Day”, a Greek film. Both films were visually exciting. The thing about the Japanese film was the use of long range and medium range shots. Very few close-ups. We were never allowed in too close, but the shots of the city and then the shots of the town offered a feel of great tranquility for the story of a woman who had lost her grandmother and her husband and who is remarried by arrangement to a country man who lives by the sea.

The landscapes in both films are as much one of the characters as the characters themselves. The Greek film is also full of wonderful cinematography and is the story of man in the last days of his life who comes across an Albanian child, an illegal alien, escapee from the holocaust in Albania. Their interaction makes for both an emotional escape from loss and loneliness and alienation. Two great films, both masterpieces of cinematography. To view them is to be transported.
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"All jobs ought to be open to everybody, unless they actually require a penis or a vagina." —Florynce Kennedy