Last Day of July 2005

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this morning in the X

July 29, 2005
Desperately Painting the Plague
By HOLLAND COTTER
WORCESTER, Mass. — Some of us thought the end of a world had come when AIDS started picking off friends and lovers in the 1980's, and in a sense it had. A certain world really did end. Yet even that experience left us unequipped to imagine the kind of despair today blanketing parts of Africa, where the disease has spread monstrously, reducing whole communities to less than a memory, to nothing.
Pandemics of one kind or another have always terrorized human history. And where science has been helpless and politics mute, religion and art have responded. That response is the subject of "Hope and Healing: Painting in Italy in a Time of Plague, 1500-1800," at the Worcester Art Museum, a small, penumbral, single-minded exhibition that does at least one thing museum shows almost never do.
It presents mainstream Christian "high art," church art, in terms of function rather than form. The 35 paintings included are considered as devotional icons rather than as old master monuments. They are viewed from an existential rather than a doctrinal or sociopolitical perspective; through the eyes of a believer for whom a picture of the Virgin is a moral lesson and an emotional encounter before it is a Tiepolo or a Tintoretto.
Although Americans have relatively little trouble seeing African or Indian sculpture - art that isn't really "us" - in this light, Judeo-Christian religious art is another story. It's as if we are afraid of what it once was, or embarrassed by it, or simply unaware of its very specific power to answer, in the case of the paintings gathered here, a culture's cry of pain.
Pain in the form of pestilence is taken as a divine rebuke to human sin in the Old Testament, a directive telling us to shape up, now: admit our guilt, change our ways, humble ourselves. And sometimes contrition worked.
When a shattering plague struck Rome in 590, Pope Gregory the Great led the citizens in a penitential procession through the city streets, petitioning heaven for relief. Legend has it that as he approached the papal fortress that was once the tomb of the emperor Hadrian, he saw the archangel Michael perched on its summit, sheathing his sword. Soon afterward, the crisis lifted.
The image of the archangel was quickly adopted as a talisman against disease, to be appealed to when needed. And the need was frequent.
For centuries, one part of Europe or another was either recovering from a plague, embroiled in one or anticipating a recurrence. Cholera and typhus probably accounted for some of these calamities, but the most famous killer was the bubonic plague, the Black Death.
Transmitted by flea-infested rats, it probably arrived in Italy in the 14th century on trading ships from Asia. It spread fast in congested cities, and its primary symptoms were unmistakable and grotesque. They included agonizing swellings at the neck, under the arms and in the groin, and subcutaneous bleeding that turned parts of the body a bruiselike black.
The only sure cure was avoidance. The rich hightailed it to the countryside. Inside the towns, quarantine went into effect, with the sick isolated in prisonlike infirmaries called lazarettos. Named for the man Jesus raised from the dead in the Gospels, they were often hopeless places, crowded and filthy. Confinement could be a death sentence.
Or so say reports from the 16th century onward, by people who witnessed epidemics in Rome, Naples, Venice and elsewhere. In each city, holy images were marshaled as a first line of defense. Some were old and time-tested, others whipped up on the spot. Still others were produced as tokens of thanks once danger had passed, as was the case with Guido Reni's towering painting of St. Michael trouncing Satan, a copy of which, by Giovanni Andrea Sirani, is in the show.
Many saints in addition to Michael were enlisted in the cause. St. Sebastian was a standby. A young soldier sentenced to death in ancient Rome for his religious beliefs, he had been tied to a tree, shot with arrows, then nursed back to health by fellow Christians. Both the method of his punishment - the arrow was an ancient plague symbol - and the fact of his recovery made him a natural as a protector.
He appears several times in the exhibition. And in a deftly sketched oil painting by Jacopo Bassano, probably intended as a ceremonial banner, he is accompanied by a fellow disease-fighter, St. Roch. ( "Rocky" ...is our dog-pal !! I had no idea there was a Saint Roch ..a comforting thought, I guess )
Roch was actually a product of plague-panic. He first turns up in popular culture in the 14th century, with a reputation for having cared for and cured victims in Italy before catching the disease himself. Thanks to the miraculous ministrations of a pet dog, he regained his health. But he never forgot his ordeal: he is traditionally depicted pointing to a plague swelling or sore on his thigh.
Some hero-saints were historical near-contemporaries of artists who painted them. St. Charles Borromeo (1538-1584), the aristocratic archbishop of Milan, was one. He tended to the sick during the pestilence of 1576-77 and walked the streets barefoot, carrying a large cross. He is the subject of numerous pictures, including some, like one done by Antiveduto Grammatica around 1619, that have the immediacy of portraiture.
And then there are the icons, like Anthony Van Dyck's paintings of the Sicilian St. Rosalie, clearly spun from the air. Rosalie was an obscure figure even by provincial standards. But when her remains were fortuitously "discovered" near Palermo in 1624, the year the city was hit by plague, she was elevated to official intercessor on behalf of the city.
Van Dyck, who was in Palermo at the time, was asked to create an image of her, and he cooked up a shrewd all-purpose pastiche. He gave her a Franciscan-brown robe and the long, tangled hair of a Magdalene, but also a healthy peaches-and-cream complexion and a look of self-assured bliss as she soared heavenward.
The concept was a big hit. The enterprising artist spun out several variations on it, and two are in the show, which has been organized by an impressive quartet of scholars: Gauvin Alexander Bailey of Clark University; Pamela M. Jones of the University of Massachusetts, Boston; Franco Mormando of Boston College; and Thomas W. Worcester of the College of the Holy Cross.
Devotion alone, however, wasn't always enough. You said your prayers, and the plague raged on. So some people pursued the more proactive, practical option of pious deeds. And no deeds were more usefully humane than the so-called corporal acts of mercy.
The church defined seven such acts. They included feeding the hungry, caring for the sick and burying the dead, and art served as an instruction manual in how they should be handled. Burial was especially crucial during epidemics, when corpses might increase the spread of infection. And the Flemish painter Michael Sweerts contributes a sanitized, promotional image of charitable interment to the exhibition.
A few artists, though, went for something stronger, an in-the-trenches realism usually avoided by religious pictures, which were meant to inspire hope and soothe fear. Carlo Coppola's "Pestilence of 1656 in Naples" is a rare example of painting as reportage, documenting a grim scene of bodies being hauled off in hasty, unceremonious trips to what might well have been a common grave.
Giovanni Martinelli's "Memento Mori (Death Comes to the Dinner Table)" seems to be on an entirely different conceptual tack: it's an old-fashion allegory, as didactic as a medieval sermon. But it, too, carries a shock of real life. Three young dandies sitting down to a bounteous meal register alarmed distaste at the sight of a skeletal visitor. But a young woman in the center of the picture reacts right from the gut, gasping in horror. She knows this is the end.
In some other show, this painting might slip into ready art-historical categories: it's vaguely Caravaggiesque, it embodies period attitudes, and so on. But in "Hope and Healing," it has a peculiarly visceral impact, because a context has been set up that allows for that, one that accepts the idea of a religious image as, first and foremost, a trigger of feelings, an agent of interior change.
I am far from suggesting that this is the only valid approach to take to Renaissance and Baroque religious art. But it is an absorbing and instructive one, a way to establish direct connections to lives and experiences in the past that have links to the present.
This approach also prompts an encouraging thought. Maybe someday in the future, when we are not here, a few bright scholars will re-examine art produced in response to AIDS in the United States in the late 20th century, and in Africa at the beginning of the 21st century. And maybe those scholars will choose to focus not on the comparative quality of objects or styles, but on intangible elements that science tends to be shy of: how art provokes emotion and conveys belief, and how a certain kind of art, at a certain time, gave certain people who felt the earth had been swept away beneath them a place to stand.
Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
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why isn't robert novak in jail ?

Fighting Rove's Gang of Bullies
By Larry C. Johnson, AlterNetPosted on July 25, 2005, Printed on July 27, 2005http://www.alternet.org/story/23691/
Editor's Note: Below is testimony presented by former CIA analyst Larry C. Johnson on July 22, 2005 in hearings held by Senate and House Democrats on the national security implications of the Rove CIA leak.
I submit this statement to the Congress in an effort to correct a malicious and disingenuous smear campaign that has been executed against a friend and former colleague, Valerie (Plame) Wilson.
Neither Valerie, nor her husband, Ambassador Joseph Wilson, has asked me to do anything on their behalf. I am speaking up because I was raised to stop bullies. In the case of Valerie Plame she is facing a gang of bullies that is being directed by the Republican National Committee.
I entered on duty at the CIA in September 1985 as a member of the Career Trainee Program. Senator Orin Hatch had written a letter of recommendation on my behalf, and I believe that helped open the doors to me at the CIA. From the first day, all members of my training class were undercover. In other words, we had to lie to our family and friends about where we worked. We could only tell those who had an absolute need to know where we worked. In my case, I told my wife. Most of us were given official cover, which means that on paper we worked for some other U.S. Government agency. People with official cover enjoy the benefits of an official passport, usually a black passport -- i.e., a diplomatic passport. If we were caught overseas engaged in espionage activity, the black passport was a get-out-of-jail-free card. It accords the bearer the protections of the Geneva Convention.
Valerie Plame was a classmate of mine from the day she started with the CIA. At the time I knew her only as Valerie P. Even though all of us in the training class held Top Secret Clearances, we were asked to limit our knowledge of our other classmates to the first initial of their last name. So, Larry J. knew Val P. rather than Valerie Plame. Her name did not become a part of my consciousness until her cover was betrayed by the government officials who gave columnist Robert Novak her true name.
Although Val started off with official cover, she later joined a select group of intelligence officers a few years later when she became a NOC, i.e. a Non-Official Cover officer. That meant she agreed to operate overseas without the protection of a diplomatic passport. She was using cover, which we now know because of the leak to Robert Novak, of the consulting firm Brewster-Jennings & Associates. When she traveled overseas she did not use or have an official passport. If she had been caught engaged in espionage activities while traveling overseas without the black passport, she could have been executed.
We must put to bed the lie that she was not undercover. For starters, if she had not been undercover, then the CIA would not have referred the matter to the Justice Department. Some reports, such as one in the Washington Times that Valerie Plame's supervisor at the CIA, Fred Rustman, said she told friends and family she worked at the CIA and that her cover was light. These claims are not true. Rustman, who supervised Val in one of her earliest assignments, left the CIA in 1990 and did not stay in social contact with Valerie. His knowledge of Val's cover is dated. He does not know what she has done during the past 15 years.
Val only told those with a need to know about her status in order to safeguard her cover, not compromise it. Val has never been a flamboyant, insecure person who felt the need to tell people what her "real" job was. She was content with being known as an energy consultant married to Joe Wilson and the mother of twins. Despite the repeated claims of representatives for the Republican National Committee, the Wilson's neighbors did not know where Valerie really worked until Novak's op-ed appeared.
I would note that not a single member of our training class has come forward to denounce Valerie or question her bona fides. To the contrary, those we have talked to have endorsed what those of us who have left the CIA are doing to defend her reputation and honor.
As noted in the joint letter submitted to Congressional leaders earlier this week, the RNC is repeating the lie that Valerie was nothing more than a glorified desk jockey and could not possibly have any cover worth protecting. To those such as Victoria Toensing, Representative Peter King, P. J. O'Rourke, and Representative Roy Blunt, I can only say one thing: you are wrong. I am stunned that some political leaders have such ignorance about a matter so basic to the national security structure of this nation.
Robert Novak's compromise of Valerie caused even more damage. It subsequently led to scrutiny of her cover company. This not only compromised her "cover" company, but potentially every individual overseas who had been in contact with that company or with her.
Another false claim is that Valerie sent her husband on the mission to Niger. According to the Senate Intelligence Committee Report issued in July 2004, it is clear that the Vice President himself requested that the CIA provide its views on a Defense Intelligence Agency report that Iraq was trying to acquire uranium from Niger.
The Vice President's request was relayed through the CIA bureaucracy to the Director of the Counter Proliferation Division at the CIA. Valerie worked for a branch in that Division.
The Senate Intelligence Report is frequently cited by Republican partisans as "proof" that Valerie sent her husband to Niger because she sent a memo describing her husband's qualifications to the Deputy Division Chief. Several news personalities, such as Chris Matthews and Bill O'Reilly, continue to repeat this nonsense as proof. What the Senate Intelligence Committee does not include in the report is the fact that Valerie's boss had asked her to write a memo outlining her husband's qualifications for the job. She did what any good employee does: she gave her boss what he asked for.
The decision to send Joe Wilson on the mission to Niger was made by Valerie's bosses. She did not have the authority to sign travel vouchers, issue travel orders, or expend one dime of U.S. taxpayer dollars on her own. Yet she has been singled out by the Republican National Committee and its partisans as a legitimate target of attack. It was Karl Rove who told Chris Matthews, "Wilson's wife is fair game."
What makes the unjustified and inappropriate attacks on Valerie Plame and her reputation so unfair is that there was no Administration policy position stipulating that Iraq was trying to acquire uranium in February 2002. That issue was still up in the air and, as noted by SSCI, Vice President Cheney himself asked for more information.
At the end of the day we are left with these facts. We went to war in Iraq on the premise that Saddam was re-acquiring weapons of mass destruction. Joe Wilson was sent on a mission to Niger in response to a request initiated by the Vice President. Joe Wilson supplied information to the CIA that supported other reports debunking the claim that Saddam was trying to buy yellow cake uranium from Niger.
When Joe went public with his information, which had been corroborated by the CIA in April 2003, the response from the White House was to call him a liar and spread the name of his wife around.
We sit here more than two years later, and the storm of invective and smear against Ambassador Wilson and his wife, Valerie, continues. I voted for George Bush in November of 2000 because I wanted a President who knew what the meaning of "is" was. I was tired of political operatives who spent endless hours on cable news channels parsing words. I was promised a President who would bring a new tone and new ethical standards to Washington.
So where are we? The President has flip-flopped and backed away from his promise to fire anyone at the White House implicated in a leak. We now know from press reports that at least Karl Rove and Scooter Libby are implicated in these leaks. Instead of a President concerned first and foremost with protecting this country and the intelligence officers who serve it, we are confronted with a President who is willing to sit by while political operatives savage the reputations of good Americans like Valerie and Joe Wilson. This is wrong.
Without firm action by President Bush to return to those principles he promised to follow when he came to Washington, I fear our political debate in this country will degenerate into an argument about what the meaning of "leak" is. We deserve people who work in the White House who are committed to protecting classified information, telling the truth to the American people, and living by example the idea that a country at war with Islamic extremists cannot expend its efforts attacking other American citizens who simply tried to tell the truth.
Larry C. Johnson is a former CIA analyst.
© 2005 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/23691/

1953

ON THIS DAY
On July 27, 1953, the Korean War armistice was signed at Panmunjom, ending three years of fighting.

July 1953 - my sister had her fifth birthday-
our Uncle served in Korea and sent us beautiful souvenirs. The one I remember was a black lacquered jewelry box painted with shiny gold, pink birds and flowers.
and he wrote us letters...our Mom & Dad were so happy when a letter arrived.
Sam was 20 years old in '53....I don't think he served in Korea until later- so the fighting may have stopped - but we had troops there long after.....at the time it was called a "police action" that did, somehow make me think it was safer than a "war".....
it's all in the words, isn't it ?
I don't know if anyone else has noticed- but the News Hour on PBS has changed.
Now one of the presenters has interviews with Administration Officials- no back and forth on issues- only the party line coming through. Jim asks the tough questions- but of course they don't get answered.
I swear Gwen Ifill was ready to puke during a Q & A. This is of course a result of the change of appointments of the head of corporate public broadcasting.
So NOVA has been in repeats- which is good- 'cause I often miss the good stuff- & last night we learned about "most reputable scientists" declaring the fact of global warming- so someone at our local station is paying attention and realizing these things need to be repeated over and over and over- until it becomes "truth" - the same way the other side convinces people that criminal acts are part of Executive privilege. These are sad times.
.....................
yesterday I went to a little store in Plymouth called Michigan Made. I collected small souvenirs for packaging to send to SmW's host family in Belo Horizonte, Brazil.
I really like the Petoskey stone key rings- useful and pretty and a lovely reminder. The lady at the store questioned whether we could send food items to Brazil- had not considered that - had planned to find some cherry jam- so I decided to buy 2 packages of dried cherry bits- lightweight & hermetically sealed. We included a large michigan-map oven mitt- which was kind of pricey - 9.00 for a potholder! both upper and lower were included with names of cities. and 2 postcards- of the state and one pen drawing of Plymouth's City Hall. I kept thinking no one needs extra 'crap' around the house- so I hoped these would be useful & suffice. The family has been tre`s hospitable and maybe we can foster less hostility toward the u s of a in belo horizonte, brazil, anyway.
at first I wrapped the finished basket with red white and blue paper- and on 2nd thought - felt that might be countr-productive. I decided this was a personal exchange from one family to another. Now I must research the Portuguese for a correct "thank you" and I know "parabens" is "best wishes". When I call and listen to the family on the phone- it does sound like the Italian language and SmW says it is confusing knowing Spanish ..so it looks like Spanish and sounds like Italian. We know that Christopher Columbus, born in Genova, was literate in all three.
Then I stopped in at new jewelry store- well not new they have been in business for many years- but a new location- and had a repair done on a gift-clock. 7.00$
a stop at target to replace the remote control 8.00$ for our 9 year old perfectly good tv- and walked around looking at all the flat screen LCD 's- beginning to learn the differences HDTV/ plasma tv / LCD/ cable ready/HD ready/ etc The prices were not "wallet-ready"
oh dear- I have gone on and on this morning-
enjoy your day ~~

Sunday, minus the Sun

A closed mind is like a closed book: just a block of wood.
-Chinese Proverb

A truly refreshing light rain. Weather extremes do not sit well with me.
I am a fibromite.
Quite ready for 60 degree fall weather.
Our voice from Brazil tells us- it is end of winter in Belo Horizonte.
50-60 degrees and comfortable.
Last night someone got into the yard and left our garage door wide open. If Rocky was attentive I don't know, as I had taken 2 tylenol pm's to get to sleep around 2 am.
Nothing of value in the garage- cars were locked- side door was / had been? left open when I checked. Nothing seems missing. So what was the point ? Sometimes I think our next door neighbor, who admits to staying awake all night- tries to drive me crazy with these little things when he knows DH is out of town. He knows that by the absence of the car DH uses for work. He sits in his kitchen and watches everything from his front window.
I think he has even followed me on errands...I know it sounds like a mind gone 'off'-
but you would have to meet this guy: 'weird' doesn't cover it. He 'works' out of his home- and they never go anywhere-
On the other hand- there were 3 people here on Wednesday- cable co sent this very slow guy to install new outlet for the pc. He was so slow other operators were coming here to take the calls that he was not going to get to ( One of them said "Hi Honey" to me- which is always infuriating ) so- there was a ladder left out and you know how easy it is to 'case' a place if one intends to return. However- the easy access & the ladder sitting openly in garage did not result in any maliciousness- so what do I make of this ?
Conclusion: will talk DH into replacing gate with a locked closure. and will have to lock everything up at night, especially while he is gone.
Rocky is handy to have around- but I still go around locking all the ground floor windows ...our little town has its' share of break ins, etc this is not paradise.
Sweet summer nights are inviting. Located one house down from the corner makes us prime target. But I still think it was the weirdo next door.
..........birthdays : next week , Becky R, 31 and Jo S, 65
so- another bombing in Egypt- and a 27 y/o victim in Britain.....just on his way to work as an electrician. A Brazilian national- now significant to our family,
as we have a 28 y/o living in Brazil.......
going to continue reading today's X- all about who didn't know what, when- on anything..
enjoy your day-
~~

another expiration date.........

http://www.alternet.org/story/23641/

Theory

ON THIS DAY
On July 21, 1925, the so-called "Monkey Trial" ended in Dayton, Tenn., with John T. Scopes convicted of violating state law for teaching Darwin's theory of evolution. The conviction was later overturned.
......................................................................
what's new ? yesterday I pored over reams of lists, notes, phone numbers, organizational materials from my days of helping to spearhead the founding of a non profit-
ThyCa,inc ( www.thyca.org ) Found the entire IRS manual ...re: 501(c)(3)
Did not trash it- in case I want to start my own religion.
After Katie Couric got a week for colon cancer- I suggested to Ric Blake in NH we do the same. Ric was/is in the PR biz- and he got ThyCa Awareness in September put on several health-related calendars. Gosh those were heady days of accomplishment.
Now- thyca is a national org with international contacts & impressive panel of Medical Advisors from all over the country- Docs even refer patients to ThyCa,inc.
Yesterday, also, while sorting and tossing and filing, I flipped the remote over to channel 99 - with comcastthat is CBC Canadian TV. lo and behold- the book discussion was on an early work by James Joyce-
with R MacNiel ( of PBS fame) on the panel. Mary Walsh is the host, a well known Canadian comedienne. So I decided to put aside Ulys again -for awhile and read this -
I think I can get a better handle on Dublin & Joyce in the early 20th century before
attempting to get past the same 'chapters' I have already tried to assimilate-
Boring you am I ? I have noticed over the years in politics, literature,
culture- the one thing people enjoy reading and writing about is where a guy puts his dick.
All those fem lessons of raised consciousness taught us that was what it has all been about. I guess I thought the ladies were exaggerating- now I know- it's true.
Men define each other this way. A decent POTUS was nearly impeached for it.
Isn't that rather primitive ? for humans who have been around for how long ? depending to which theory one adheres. after apes or for only 6,000 years-
....after all Ulysses is about Leopold whining an entire day in June cause his sensual, chubby wife is going to have sex with another man. All of his other worries- being the only Jew in Dublin at the time ( it seems), trying to get an ad published, contempt for the catholic church etc- is landscape.......it's all about where a guy is going to put his dick at 3 or 4 that afternoon.
now we have Roman Polanski in the headlines- he can't return to the US cause he put his dick into a minor- RC priests - couldn't keep it in their pants: headlines.
Rove got his dick into the white house. Rove didn't know his dad and his mom committed suicide- according to article I read this morning in the Voice.
A best seller- the "the da vinci code" - alot of commotion on a "theory" of where Jesus may have put his dick.
So... what's a girl to do ? Penis envy- ? I doubt it, more like penispity...
the typical fem response is sympathy: maybe we should stop feeling sorry for dickheads of State or Corporations or countries or literary scenes or the NRA- guns don't....
got myself a gun....happiness is a warm ___
just another "theory"
........ to all you novitiates out there:
time for the purple dress and red hat ............
hugs for all and enjoy your day
~~

ON THIS DAY
On July 20, 1969, Apollo 11 astronaut Neil Armstrong became the first man to walk on the moon when he stepped out of the lunar module.

Numbers

http://www.alternet.org/blogs/themix/#23616

Severe Chronic Pain = jail time

July 19, 2005
Punishing Pain
By JOHN TIERNEY
Zephyrhills, Fla.
When I visited Richard Paey here, it quickly became clear that he posed no menace to society in his new home, a high-security Florida state prison near Tampa, where he was serving a 25-year sentence. The fences, topped with razor wire, were more than enough to keep him from escaping because Mr. Paey relies on a wheelchair to get around.
Mr. Paey, who is 46, suffers from multiple sclerosis and chronic pain from an automobile accident two decades ago. It damaged his spinal cord and left him with sharp pains in his legs that got worse after a botched operation. One night he woke up convinced that the room was on fire.
"It felt like my legs were in a vat of molten steel," he told me. "I couldn't move them, and they were burning."
His wife, Linda, an optometrist, supported him and their three children as he tried to find an alternative to opiates. "At first I was mad at him for not being able to get better without the medicines," she said. "But when he's tried every kind of therapy they suggested and he's still curled up in a ball at night crying from pain, what else can he do but take more medicine?"
The problem was getting the medicine from doctors who are afraid of the federal and local crusades against painkillers. Mr. Paey managed to find a doctor willing to give him some relief, but it was a "vegetative dose," in his wife's words.
"It was enough for him to lay in bed," Mrs. Paey said. "But if he tried to sit through dinner or use the computer or go to the kids' recital, it would set off a crisis, and we'd be in the emergency room. We kept going back for more medicine because he wasn't getting enough."
As he took more pills, Mr. Paey came under surveillance by police officers who had been monitoring the prescriptions. Although they found no evidence that he'd sold any of the drugs, they raided his home and arrested him.
What followed was a legal saga pitting Mr. Paey against his longtime doctor (and a former friend of the Paeys), who denied at the trial that he had given Mr. Paey some of the prescriptions. Mr. Paey maintains that the doctor did approve the disputed prescriptions, and several pharmacists backed him up at the trial. Mr. Paey was convicted of forging prescriptions.
He was subject to a 25-year minimum penalty because he illegally possessed Percocet and other pills weighing more than 28 grams, enough to classify him as a drug trafficker under Florida's draconian law (which treats even a few dozen pain pills as the equivalent of a large stash of cocaine).
Scott Andringa, the prosecutor in the case, acknowledged that the 25-year mandatory penalty was harsh, but he said Mr. Paey was to blame for refusing a plea bargain that would have kept him out of jail.
Mr. Paey said he had refused the deal partly out of principle - "I didn't want to plead guilty to something that I didn't do" - and partly because he feared he'd be in pain the rest of his life because doctors would be afraid to write prescriptions for anyone with a drug conviction.
If you think that sounds paranoid, you haven't talked to other chronic-pain patients who've become victims of the government campaigns against prescription drugs. Whether these efforts have done any good is debatable (and a topic for another column), but the harm is clear to the millions of patients who aren't getting enough medicine for their pain.
Mr. Paey is merely the most outrageous example of the problem as he contemplates spending the rest of his life on a three-inch foam mattress on a steel prison bed. He told me he tried not to do anything to aggravate his condition because going to the emergency room required an excruciating four-hour trip sitting in a wheelchair with his arms and legs in chains.
The odd thing, he said, is that he's actually getting better medication than he did at the time of his arrest because the State of Florida is now supplying him with a morphine pump, which gives him more pain relief than the pills that triggered so much suspicion. The illogic struck him as utterly normal.
"We've become mad in our pursuit of drug-law violations," he said. "Generations to come will look back and scarcely believe what we've done to sick people."
E-mail: tierney@nytimes.com

interview with Collapse author J Diamond

http://www.alternet.org/envirohealth/23413/

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, S. M. W. !!

ON THIS DAY
On July 18, 1936, the Spanish Civil War began as Gen. Francisco Franco led an uprising of army troops based in Spanish North Africa.
..............................................................................................

Happy Birthday to Sm W- in Belo Horizonte, Brazil.
S is on a student Grant studying Portuguese for one semester.
Travel from the midwest to this town took about 20 hours. A flight to Houston and then to Sao Paolo and another change to Belo Horizonte, located north west of Rio.
Leaving home around 2pm on the 12th and arriving around noon the 13th.
S is staying with a host family for 2 weeks and then on to the university.
Happy happy birthday to our Adventuress. oxox
.................................................................................
I am looking fwd to a good read- the latest Potter book.................
we also have on hand Collapse by Jared Diamond.
In the meantime I am re reading the first 300 pages of Ulysses. with cliff notes.
Hope to finish the entire work this time.
Enjoy your day ~~

fyi

Gene Healy is Senior Editor at the Cato Institute and editor of the new book Go Directly to Jail: the Criminalization of Almost Everything.

July 2005

TO THE INTERNATIONAL SMOKERS RIGHTS CONFERENCE.

My fellow countryman and friend, Arnold Schwarzenegger and I love cigars! He as governor and I as citizen of this great State of California abide by the strict rules, which I hope Arnold will soon change!

Enjoying the sun on the Malibu beach in California - topless! A cop approaches, says the bikini top must go back on. A young man returns with a six pack of beer, a cigarette hanging from his mouth. The cop tells him he can't drink beer or smoke on the beach! This was not me, but my friends from Germany visiting Los Angeles. They could not believe what was happening!

I told them I too came to America, not for a vacation but to live in the "Land of The Free." This is the impression one gets living abroad and like so many, yearning to come to this greatest country in the world because it stands for "Freedom”! Unfortunately I too made the sad discovery that it is not the "Old World" that is restrictive - it is actually becoming more freedom oriented while the greatest country in the world, the United States Of America is becoming a "Police State" with the kind of restrictions foreigners are attempting to escape!

In Europe where I am from, people eat, drink, and smoke with no problems. In my opinion, the problems in America for the SMOKING issue are the LOBBYISTS and ATTORNEYS!

Sybil Danning
President and COO of Adventuress Productions Inc.
http://sybildanning.net

"chewing the fat" / "raining cats & dogs"

LIFE IN THE 1500'S
Interesting!
The next time you are washing your hands and complain because the water temperature isn't just how you like it, think about how things used to be. Here are some facts about English speakers of the 1500's

Most people got married in June because they took their yearly bath in May, and still smelled pretty good by June. However, they were starting to smell, so brides carried a bouquet of flowers to hide the body odor. Hence the custom today of carrying a bouquet when getting married. Baths consisted of a big tub filled with hot water.
The man of the house had the privilege of the nice clean water, then all the other sons and men, then the women and finally the children Last of all the babies. By then the water was so dirty you could actually lose someone in it. Hence the saying, "Don't throw the baby out with the bath water.
"Houses had thatched roofs-thick straw-piled high, with no wood underneath. It was the only place for animals to get warm, so all the cats and other small animals (mice, bugs) lived in the roof. When it rained it became slippery and sometimes the animals would slip and fall off the roof. Hence the saying "It's raining cats and dogs."
There was nothing to stop things from falling into the house. This posed a real problem in the bedroom where bugs and other droppings could mess up your nice clean bed. Hence, a bed with big posts and a sheet hung over the top afforded some protection. That's how canopy beds came into existence.
The floor was dirt. Only the wealthy had something other than dirt. Hence the saying "dirt poor." The wealthy had slate floors that would get slippery in the winter when wet, so they spread thresh (straw) on the floor to help keep their footing. As the winter wore on, they added more thresh until when you opened the door it would all start slipping outside. A piece of wood was placed in the entranceway.Hence the phrase "thresh hold."
In those old days, they cooked in the kitchen with a big kettle that always hung over the fire. Every day they lit the fire and added things to the pot. They ate mostly vegetables and did not get much meat. They would eat the stew for dinner, leaving leftovers in the pot to get cold overnight and then start over the next day. Sometimes stew had food in it that had been there for quite a while.Hence the rhyme, "Peas porridge hot, peas porridge cold, peas porridge in the pot nine days old."
Sometimes they could obtain pork, which made them feel quite special. When visitors came over, they would hang up their bacon to show off. It was a sign of wealth that a man could "bring home the bacon." They would cut off a little to share with guests and would all sit around and "chew the fat."
Those with money had plates made of pewter. Food with high acid content caused some of the lead to leach onto the food, causing lead poisoning death. This happened most often with tomatoes, so for the next 400 years or so, tomatoes were considered poisonous.

Bread was divided according to status. Workers got the burnt bottom of the loaf, the family got the middle, and guests got the top, or "upper crust."Lead cups were used to drink ale or whisky. The combination would sometimes knock the imbibers out for a couple of days. Someone walking along the road would take them for dead and prepare them for burial. They were laid out on the kitchen table for a couple of days and the family would gather around and eat and drink and wait and see if they would wake up. Hence the custom of holding a "wake."
England is old and small and the local folks started running out of places to bury people. So they would dig up coffins and would take the bones to a "bone-house" and reuse the grave. When reopening these coffins, 1 out of 25 coffins were found to have scratch marks on the inside and they realized they had been burying people alive. So they would tie a string on the wrist of the corpse, lead it throughthe coffin and up through the ground and tie it to a bell. Someone would have to sit out in the graveyard all night (the "graveyard shift") to listen for the bell; thus, someone could be "saved by the bell" or was considered a "dead ringer."And that's the truth...

Freedom Starts...........

Freedom Starts at the Cookie Jar Why I'm going to pitch a new reality show called "The Deadliest Batch"
Bill Santiago June 30 , 2005
IT HAD GOTTEN TO THE POINT where I was taking Bikram yoga classes to cool off, so, yeah, I was glad to be getting the hell out of New York. Plus the great thing about watching the news on a plane is you've got the barf bag right there. Why I watch anymore, I don't know. I think it's just to keep track of the stories that don't get any traction.
A lot of people are still pulling for that Downing Street memo (about a guy who lives in a white house wanting a war no matter what), to finally make some big waves in the press, now that the question of sleepovers has been put to bed -- and by the way, even if Michael Jackson got off on everything, he still qualifies as an honorary Catholic priest, right?
But here's something you may have missed -- that to me is way more disturbing than anything else I’ve heard in a while. The Cookie Monster came out recently and said that, from now on, he's going to start calling cookies a "sometimes food." Mind you, I know about the craziness that erupted over whether or not to liberate PBS from government funding and all that, but I am not talking about anything so trivial. I'm talking about a Copernican shift in my reality that, frankly, I’m not ready to handle.
A sometimes food? But you are the Cookie Monster. What, are you watching your waist now? You don't even have a waist. You just slope down to a furry blue hemline, as far as I can tell. Ever since my childhood, I have related to that primal scream, "Cookie!" To this day I still confuse raison d'etre with oatmeal raisin. So please, don't futz with one of my fondest childhood archetypes to appease some misguided food-pyramid revisionism.
Kids know better than to trust a monster that counts calories. That's what I loved about the Cookie Monster; his message rang true. Sure, you can argue that a certain president was being true to himself when he gave the wrong definition for the word disassemble, which he mistook for the word dissemble, while he himself was in the act of dissembling, during a press conference. But to me it's not nearly as straightforward or charming.
For him, though, it works brilliantly, playing right into that mistake mystique that he's cultivated so cleverly over time. Every gaffe adds to his error aura. And no memo is any match for it. Of course, how he spends his grammatical capital is none of my business. But I would love to see a "Leave No President Behind" bill signed, just to reset the bar for the future.
I'll tell you, though, there's only one person I’d ever be interested in having as my future president. I think the country would agree with me unanimously -- and we can't afford her. It would be quite a pay cut for Oprah. What would she gain from stooping so low as to slum it in the Oval Office?
On the other hand, Pope... Now that would be a viable career move for her. There's some prestige in that. Pope Oprah. Poprah. She wouldn't even really have to change her name, just meld it into the title. And put on the hat.
I can so see it. After this current clash of civilizations shakes out, there's going to be a power vacuum. Who better to fill it than someone with that kind of money and ratings, a unifying real-life lovable bobble-head figure that preaches healing and closure and shows up at your house for surprise makeovers? She wouldn't just be a ceremonial stooge, either. She'd actually be in charge and control everything in the world, except her weight. And it wouldn't matter because under those robes, who cares?
Anyway, I noticed something on my way back from wrestling a flight attendant in the galley for another Oreo. Nobody on the plane was watching the news. Nearly everyone onboard had tuned their individual little chair-back TVs to one of those Discovery Channel-type reality shows, where these guys were risking their lives -- dying, literally -- to catch Alaskan king crab.
Every five seconds somebody's going overboard. Guys are biting it left and right, because it’s so dangerous. It’s a staggering death toll, and people are loving this show. Because it's for crab. If it's war, then everybody's getting upset, there's controversy, memos, it gets all personal, and families can't talk to each other anymore. As a nation we are much more unified about crustacean consumption than we are about foreign policy. You will never see a "no-blood for crab legs" bumper sticker.
Honestly, I had never stopped to even consider the human cost represented by the heap of crab legs piled up like firewood at an all-you-can-eat buffet. On the other hand, I am not about to start eating imitation crab just to save a few deck hands. Unfortunately, there's no such thing as imitation terrorists. So it's not like we could substitute, even if we wanted to make the sacrifice. Obviously we’re in need of distractions, and lots of melted butter.
Luckily, "War of the Worlds" is going to open any day now, and I can't wait. What better escapist retreat from a real war, started on a fudged pretext, than a fictional war, started by aliens from outer space, for no apparent reason whatsoever, except so Tom Cruise can go on every talk show possible and swear he's really really, really in love this time.
Sure, I wish I could just see it as a movie, a fun summer blockbuster, the way I would have when I was a kid. Especially 'cause, you know, summers and childhood, they go together, and the heat takes you back to a time you were naturally limber without practicing no damn downward dog pose.
I don't know, though, if any of those memories are gonna be spared. I mean, I can't even hear any of those lyrics anymore -- "do re mi, A B C, 1 2 3, baby you and me girl" -- without headlines popping into my head, like, "Culken Testifies." Kinda ruins it for me. And the monster whose dependable cry became my earliest personal mantra -- that cookies are to be eaten on sight and until they are all gone -- has suddenly and unforgivably flip-flopped on his position. They are now to be eaten in moderation, at unspecified intervals.
Who wants to live in a world where cookies are a sometimes food? Where's the outrage over this? Why isn't anybody digging up the Sesame Street memo?
I don't know what it's all coming to, exactly. But I have faith that we'll get through this. And when we do, I say, give unto Poprah what is Poprah's. And give unto the Cookie Monster the whole bag of double-chocolate-mint milanos.
Bill Santiago is the first born of at least four children. He became a standup comedian after narrowly escaping a career in journalism. He can be reached at billsant@earthlink.net
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© 2005 The Foundation for National Progress