Monday, June 07, 2004

Posted here Monday, June 07, 2004 at 6:30:40 PM     Glad to see that the total press picture on Reagan is not just simple minded. Some is quite penetrating. More good first hand reporting from Iraq http://www.back-to-iraq.com/archives/000778.php ********

Posted here Monday, June 07, 2004 at 12:05:46 PM     On the cold war George F. Kennan agrees. The former US ambassador to the Soviet Union, and father of the theory of "containment" of the same country, asserts that "the suggestion that any United States administration had the power to influence decisively the course of a tremendous domestic political upheaval in another great country on another side of the globe is simply childish." He contends that the extreme militarization of American policy strengthened hard-liners in the Soviet Union. "Thus the general effect of Cold War extremism was to delay rather than hasten the great change that overtook the Soviet Union." from today's  www.counterpunch.org ********

Posted here Monday, June 07, 2004 at 11:59:18 AM     Here is the media problem - a very good example. from today's Campaign Desk http://www.campaigndesk.org/ The day after Earth Day 2004, the Republican National Committee rolled out SUV-gate. "DON"T BLAME ME FOR SUV," blared the headline on an April 23 "Research Briefing" available on the RNC website and emailed to supporters and reporters alike. In the briefing, John Kerry was quoted saying one day earlier that he didn't own a sport utility vehicle and then, under reporters' questioning, conceding that his wife owned a Suburban, adding, 'The family has it, I don't have it.'" The quotation was diligently attributed to an April 22 Associated Press story. "Just two months ago," the RNC briefing continued, "Kerry said he owned 'some SUVs'" at an appearance in Detroit. A February 5 Detroit News article was cited as back up. Moreover, two years prior, Kerry stated that both his stepson and his daughter drive SUVs, something the RNC proudly attributed to p. S1758 of the Congressional Record, March 12, 2002. Does anyone care? Apparently, yes. Some ten days after Earth Day, in the May 10 issue of Time magazine, this headline appeared: "What Kerry Means to Say ..." Kerry, readers were told, "gives plenty of ammunition to those who say he considers no hair too fine to split and who charge that he tailors the cut of what he says to meet the tastes of the audience and the moment." The "ammunition" Time cited included the same AP and Detroit News quotes provided in the RNC-SUV research briefing. Next, these same quotes popped up in newspapers from the Washington Post to the Cleveland Plain-Dealer. RNC chairman Ed Gillespie and President Bush each got additional mileage out of SUV-gate in various speeches -- sounding an only John Kerry could take both sides on whether he owns an SUV theme. Those speeches, in turn, generated yet more .... ********

Posted here Monday, June 07, 2004 at 11:50:53 AM     Diet presasures, not unlike energy pressures. This from Mexico in the period about 1100 AD. http://antiquity.ac.uk/ProjGall/leach/index.html The addition of more costly under-used foods - that require prolonged cooking in cook stone earth ovens - to the diet during the Classic Mimbres period is a variable of increasing diet breadth not well understood. As an element of land-use intensification, the presence of large, cook stone earth ovens marks a new avenue of subsistence and residential mobility research for the region. Further survey and subsequent excavation will provide important data for developing models (see Thoms 2003) of the spatio-temporal distribution of these cooking facilities and the evolving role of cook-stone technology and overall developmental trends in cooking techniques during the Holocene. How could a society under pressure refrain from expaning the spectrum of foods, which in turn requires more energy (longer cooking) which further denudes the landsacpe? ********

Posted here Monday, June 07, 2004 at 7:21:26 AM     My own vie of Reagan is that he and thatcher took advantage of the coming economic boom in hyper capitalism, and was continued right through Clinton. But the deficits piled up on Carter, and swamped him, just as whoever wins in November will face a debt load that will probably be destructive. He also was a no detail president and that let the neocons and other creeps in at lower levels to do policy by thuggery. The whole Reagan Latin American policy was terrible, working with economic elites to dominate local economies and support multinationals, when ordinary people -mostly peasant farmers, were suffering economically, and in terms of local justice,  quite terribly. Reagan was also the first idiot president. Not much reading, few friends - or none - and no conversation. Just an ideology of anti-communism and a reality of supporting money. No social thought. The use of the Funeral to avoid serious issues is mostly the responsibility of the press to prevent. The Gorbachev era was driven much more by internal society dynamics (complexification of the Soviet economy being unmanageable by state planning with greedy elites in control) than by any US policy, despite US perceptions. The sentimentality around Reagan does not fit the reality I was witness to during those years. ********