RedNova:
US warns against Medicare kickbacks. “New guidance from the Health and Human Services inspector general said, however, that the companies must “ensure that payments are not being made improperly to influence pharmacies (directly or through their employees) to direct patients to a particular drug card.”
Women’s Enews:
Abortions Are Illegal and Common in Egypt. “Many women try to end their pregnancies by taking overdoses of aspirin or quinine, risking their own lives, as well as harm to the fetuses. Others take herbal douches, including concoctions of mashed onion leaves or moulikhiya, a local plant similar to spinach. They also use cotton stalks, palm fronds or goose feathers soaked in gasoline to dislodge the fetus from the uterine wall.”
Genocide.
I had run across a link about the 1915 Armenian genocide, and came cross this: The eight stages of genocide.
NY Times Magazine:
Diversity’s false solace. Good, this gives me an excuse to field an opinion I expressed in email over the weekend: “If the Republicans [Horowitz; I won’t tar all Republicans] who have fits over liberals in education would insist on a hard logics course and basics of law course as requirements for graduation from high school (guaranteeing the greatest saturation), they’d be doing everyone a greater benefit than playing to the stereotypes of the age. It’s the old ‘teach a man to fish, and you’ll feed him in perpetuity’ argument. Teach a kid to think, and everything else is secondary.” I will add, that doing so would inoculate against not just one or two extremist mentalities, but all. A better solution, to my mind.
The Nation:
Reviews of de Tocqueville’s two works. “The Constitution was indeed ambiguous on the secession issue, which just goes to show what Lincoln and his fellow Republicans were up against some two or three decades later. Rather than ‘prove’ that the states did not have a constitutional right to go their separate ways, the best they could come up with was to insist that the nation as a whole trumped any notion of states’ rights.” In spite of the review, you can see AdT still has a way of making interesting American subjects surface.
NY Times Editorial:
The Silent President. If the attacks were ‘not preventable,’ then why do we now have the Department of Homeland Security, the Patriot Act ... ? Further blockage of information only echoes the Nixon attempted blockage of the “Pentagon Papers.”
Blast from the past:
“But out of the gobbledygook, comes a very clear thing: [unclear] you can’t trust the government; you can’t believe what they say; and you can’t rely on their judgment; and the – the implicit infallibility of presidents, which has been an accepted thing in America, is badly hurt by this, because it shows that people do things the President wants to do even though it’s wrong, and the President can be wrong.”
—H.R. Haldeman to President Nixon, Monday, June 14, 1971.
A harsh example, maybe. But many of us lived through this, recall it well, and haven’t forgotten the lesson.
NY Times Letters to the Editor:
Frank Lautenberg takes a different tack on The Heritage Foundation’s article on how to count workers. Pretty much a slam-dunk, shooting both pro and con arguments in the foot. I would also remind, be aware of how many federal jobs are contained in the numbers. Reagan kept his numbers up by hiring bureaucrats, which Clinton swiftly shucked after taking office ... and still maintained a great jobs record.
NY Times:
What the world needs now is DDT. I’ve posted on this subject for a long time, diving into international health links ... and I’ve always been against. Over that time I’ve come to see, time and again, that topical spraying of DDT in homes goes a long way towards malaria prevention, saving many lives, with very minimal exposure to the occupants and the environment. My opinion has shifted, and I can accept this, when strictly controlled and alternative methods researched (when moral and practical). Longterm studies have not yet been extensively done, but I’m willing to give the benefit of the doubt, in order to save lives.
I offer rationalizations: Coumadin, ‘rat poison’, has health benefits when used for certain conditions. Controlled use. We use hydrochloric acid in our homes as a powerful acid cleaner, but we don’t spread it over fields because of its propensity to destroy and/or kill. Ethical use.
Surely we can find an ethical, controlled middle ground for DDT? I’m not totally sold, but I’m open.
NY Times:
Seeing near, seeing far. New tech for clear vision.
NY Times:
You will excuse me, if I dissolve in laughter at this: “Drought Worsens Across West and Threat of Wildfires Grows.” I’m still mopping up after this unprecedented amount of precip. Oh, big-picture we’re still in drought. But two years ago, we were so dry they closed the state forests, if you recall. We aren’t even close to that yet.
Junk.
Whenever I make a comment to one of my own weblog’s posts, Thunderbird classifies it as “junk.” Thunderbird is more right-wing than left?
Sunset last night:
Well, last night’s because I can’t see tonight’s. It’s snowing like crazy.
Spoke too soon.
Say goodbye to blue sky for a bit. Storms are coming from the west. This is looking east ...
It’s like
Santa Fe is sitting at the end of the barrel of a huge gun. I can see the thunderstorms lined up heading in that general direction. I’m outside of town, lounging in the sun (though not exactly warmly). The storms are largely missing me at the moment. I hear the thunder over the Sangres. I hear of snow falling, and more expected in the mountains.
Strange weather. But it’s precip, and the more the better. My fear now is, with a glut of moisture, we’ll get sloppy with our resources again. Privation is good for politicians, I think.
BBC:
Iraqi allies warn US over Fallujah. They have a right to self-determination ... no matter what the Bush Administration might want. I smell a theocracy on the horizon.
Boston Globe:
Oliphant, Ted’s take on Kerry’s VP. A “national unity” ticket would be explosive, no doubt.
Korea Times:
ENN:
Does the Great White North deserve its green reputation? “From Fort Nelson in northern British Columbia to Rocky Mountain House in central Alberta to the vast Tintina Trench region in the southern Yukon and over east to Yellowknife on Great Slave Lake in the Northwest Territories, the landscape is under siege. The extraction industries are running the show, tearing, blasting, sucking, and cutting every diamond, gold nugget, drop of oil, chunk of coal, and stick of timber they can access.”
BBC:
Familiarize yourself with Janjaweed. We may be hearing a lot about them. Fascinating that only a few thousand, “well armed with automatic weapons” can cause such mayhem.
Makes me point to this: Philly teen killed by assault weapon. An altered AK-47, with a 50-round magazine.
What about that assault-weapons ban?
LA Times:
A Belgian display says US is the worst perpetrator of genocide. Since Columbus, 15 million Native Americans killed, with no end date on the display. It might interest you to read the PDF of the Blackfoot Indictment of the United States and Canada, to get a different perspective.
FXStreet.com:
Weekly economic and financial commentary. A nice overview. I’ll have to watch for this each Friday.
Guardian.UK:
GM potato paper. In Sweden. What does potato starch do for paper, I wonder? Oh.
Correction:
My link to the “Complete Review” yesterday caused some personal angst, and a bit of sleeplessness. Some of you may find this needlessly melodramatic, but my nature requires I do this.
I’ve been very busy this week. When that happens, I don’t have the same time to spend double-checking my linkage. I may not do the deep read required, because I’m multitasking. So when I’m busy, often an uncontemplated link will slip through. I can be quite blinkered and clinical during busy moments.
The “Complete Review’, at the bottom of the page, made some really hideous insinuations about First Lady Laura Bush. I was focused on the AP news report ... this was an aspect of our First Lady that I was unaware of. I linked it and then went off in pursuit of other information about the First Lady. After all, I realized, I don’t know much about her. What else do I not know? Link it, and move on. Link forgotten. There was no malicious intent in my link, nor was there an intent to promote this view. If you’ve read here long, you’ll recognize how anomalous the link was.
Our weblog posts are not benign; we may have 1000 readers that day, but possibly a million over time through our archives. This is not a small matter. We sometimes say things in our weblogs that we would not contemplate saying to a group of friends, much less a crowd equalling our daily readership.
Once upon a time, this same behavior ... unreflective linking, uninformed theorizing, hopping on the bandwagon, accepting other interpretations without checking sources ... nearly destroyed my livelihood shortly after I started weblogging. Theorizing and interpretation, in a vacuum of real fact, can do significant harm ... indeed, it took stripes out of my own flesh at a time when I was on the ropes. I lost faith in humankind for a time. I would never wish to do that to another.
And for that reason, I offer this apology ... and this link, which will further explain my need to perform reparations [esp. info on page three]. I will leave my previous post up, as a case-in-point, a lesson for myself and for those who care to experience the same lesson.
I apologize for raising yesterday’s article further, Mrs. Bush, and I abhor the craven insinuations within. Mere idealogical differences should never stand in the way of simple human lovingkindness and faith in the good nature of fellow human beings.
And I apologize to my readership. I will practice ‘eloquent silence’ more often, when I’m busy. We’ll both be the better for it.
Off to more meetings. More links later as I have appropriate time.
CJR CampaignDesk:
Speed Kills. On the memo:
“There was no new threat information, and it did not, in fact, warn of any coming attacks inside the United States.”
“... Kerrey said it referred to ‘patterns of suspicious activity in the United States consistent with preparations for hijacking.’ Ms. Rice replied that the information was checked out and steps were taken in circulars from the Federal Aviation Authority to warn of hijackings.”
No new threat information, but new warnings were issued? Maybe a minor point, but one worthy of further exploration.
CJR:
Chasing the ghouls. On the Juarez serial murders. “She alleges that some of the murderers are young members of prominent Juarez families who have ties to the Juarez drug cartel and buy protection from the police. They are called Los Juniors.”
