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Wednesday, March 26, 2008 |
Iraqi Doctors Name New Disease That Threatens Thousands "Blackwater". Iraqi doctors in al-Anbar province warn of a new disease they call "Blackwater" that threatens the lives of thousands. The disease is named after Blackwater Worldwide, the U.S. mercenary company operating in Iraq.
"This disease is a severe form of malarial infection caused by the parasite plasmodium falciparum, which is considered the worst type of malarial infection," Dr. Ali Hakki from Fallujah told IPS. "It is one of the complications of that infection, and not the ordinary picture of the disease. Because of its frequent and severe complications, such as Blackwater fever, and its resistance to treatment, P. falciparum can cause death within 24 hours."
What Iraqis now call Blackwater fever is really a well-known medical condition, and while it has nothing to do with Blackwater Worldwide, Iraqis in al-Anbar province have decided to make the connection between the disease and the lethal U.S.-based company which has been responsible for the death of countless Iraqis.
The disease is most prevalent in Africa and Asia. The patient suffers severe intravascular haemolysis -- the destruction of red blood cells leading to kidney and liver failure. It also leads to black or red urination, and hence perhaps the new name 'Blackwater'.
 [The Full Feed from HuffingtonPost.com]
6:53:58 PM 
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Massive Chunk of Antarctic Ice Shelf Collapses. Seth Borenstein of The Associated Press reports: "A chunk of Antarctic ice bigger than the city of Montreal has suddenly collapsed, putting an even greater portion of glacial ice at risk." In a related article, Steve Connor of The Independent UK says that "for the past century, the massive Wilkins ice shelf appeared to have escaped the ravages of global warming. But now, enormous cracks have appeared in this floating ice platform the size of Northern Ireland. Scientists say it is breaking apart at an unprecedented rate after warmer temperatures weakened it." [t r u t h o u t]
5:05:45 PM
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Blue Collar, Bare Cupboards. Sasha Abramsky, reporting for In These Times, writes: "Across America, close to 40 million people are listed as being 'food insecure,' according to the USDA. That means that even if they don't actually go hungry, they constantly worry about how to put food on the table." [t r u t h o u t]
4:07:05 PM
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Kenny Ausubel: This Is Your President on Drugs.
In a recent column titled "Soft Shoe in Hard Times," byline Washington DC, Maureen Dowd observed, "Everyone here is flummoxed about why the president is in such a fine mood... Boy George crashed the family station wagon into the globe and now the global economy." Yet he seems "goofily happy."
I have a hypothesis.
This is your President on drugs.
I first became suspicious after the famed pretzel incident. When Bush showed up in front of the cameras with the nasty scrape on his face, which he attributed to choking on a pretzel and falling off the couch while watching a ball game, there was wide speculation he'd started drinking again. At the time (pre-911), his ratings were in the dumps and Enron was crawling up his neck. Maybe the pressure was just too much for this known rage-aholic with an attention span of 15 minutes.
I soon noticed a distinct change in his voice and timbre. His speech had a flatline quality, a compression of peaks and valleys. His temper seemed tempered. He slurred a lot of words. His voice rasped with the gravelly sound of a permanent hangover.
I became convinced the President was on Prozac.
At lunch with a doctor friend last summer, for no particular reason I mentioned all this. He leaned in quizzically and looked me deep in the eye. He'd recently been chatting with a doctor friend of his who had been involved with Bush's European trip, and who wondered aloud about a strange practice he witnessed. Throughout the trip, the Secret Service bagged all the President's poop and pee.
Why would they do that, except to avoid drug testing?
The situation is more serious than it may sound. Jim Cramer, the MSNBC financial pundit and former hedge fund manager, was in the game during the 1999 bubble. He acknowledged that he and a whole lot of Wall Street traders were playing the market through anti-depressant lenses. Here's what he wrote about the irrational exuberance ramping up to the crash:
"Prozac and all those other drugs banish the 'This is the end of the world' thoughts. Which means you are not as anxious as you should be about an obvious downside."
Think about it. A willfully blue-sky President already disinclined to think about the downside, jacked up on antidepressants that banish the downside. Scratch those pesky "This is the end of the world" thoughts.
We need to demand the poop on the President.
Kenny Ausubel, Founder and CEO, Bioneers
 [The Full Feed from HuffingtonPost.com]
3:55:40 PM
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Man Who Inspired Wright Sermon: I Would Have Walked Out Of His Church The man who inspired Reverend Jeremiah Wright's controversial "America's chicken coming home to roost" remarks says that, like Sen. Hillary Clinton, he would have left the church had he been sitting in on that particular sermon.
Ambassador Ed Peck, a retired 32-year diplomat, <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/03/21/meet-the-white-man-who-_n_92793.html";>served as the intellectual basis of a segment of Wright's post 9/11 sermon. (Wright said he saw Peck discussing the backlash of U.S. foreign policy during a Fox News segment.)
But while Peck acknowledges that he still believes that U.S. foreign policy was in many ways responsible for triggering the terrorist attacks, he also insists that he would not have tolerated the incendiary language that Sen. Barack Obama's former pastor employed.
"I probably would have walked out, because you cannot, to me, paint my nation as nothing more than a needless mindless monster. I would say, yes, we have made mistakes. Other nations make mistakes as well, and they haven't been as involved in Middle East," said Peck. "But Reverend Wright was drastically overstating the case... I would not sign on to that procedure and I would never have returned to a place where a man spouted such language, because my perception is that that is not the way to do it. My perception is that you do it my way, with thoughtful efforts to get people to understand what you are talking about."
Peck said that he had not had the chance to view Wright's clips in their entirety. He just returned from a long break only to find out that he had become something of a mini-political celebrity due to his connection to the sermon. He also said that it was unfair to truly judge Wright strictly on these five-second clips, that there were "seeds of truth" to what the Reverend had to say, "but he blasted them out of proportion."
Peck, who has offered controversial criticism of Israeli policy in the West Bank but also warned early against the Iraq Wwar, pointed to several U.S. foreign policy anecdotes that he believed validated his and Wright's premise. Those included testimony, overseen by former Sen. Lee Hamilton, in which intelligence agents testified that the Israel-Palestine conflict had been a main contributor to the proliferation of radical Islamic terrorism. In addition, there was a 60 Minutes <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lK_QshS2EW8";>interview of Madeline Albright, in which the former Secretary of State said U.S. sanctions on Iraq were worth it despite the deaths of hundreds of thousands of children.
"This is not in any way intended to be a denigration of Dr. Albright, she had a job in explaining and defending American policies," said Peck. "[But] it was probably the coldest thing you will ever see on television. It was run once on 60 Minutes, but it was shown a thousand times overseas."
In his now notorious sermon, Wright highlighted issues analogous to these, as evidence that America had helped aggravate the very terrorists who were striking out. "We bombed Hiroshima, we bombed Nagasaki and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon and we never batted an eye," he said.
What has not been shown in those clips is that Wright prefaced and concluded that remark by saying he was paraphrasing Peck.
"A white ambassador said that y'all, not a black militant," he said, "not a reverend who preaches about racism, an ambassador whose eyes are wide open and is trying to get us to wake up and move away from this dangerous precipice..."
Peck said that while he never utter the phrase "chickens coming home to roost," he was aware that Wright had taken his words and ideas for his own sermon. Nevertheless, he didn't think the right message had been preached.
"I would not endorse it and I wouldn't sign on to it," he said. "There were seeds of truth to what he said but he blasted them out of proportion from the clips I have seen." - Sam Stein [huffpolitics on The Huffington Post]
3:25:09 PM
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Joyce McFadden: The Reality Index: If Men Got Pregnant.
I had to riff on "The First Pregnant Man" article, because, well, I just couldn't help myself.
Here's what veterans from the front lines had to say in my study in response to the question: If men got pregnant instead of women, how do you imagine things would be different?
"The morning after pill would have been invented by the Ancient Greeks..."
"I think our species would become extinct! I don't think men, in their current state, could handle all that comes with being pregnant!"
"Morning sickness would become a disability!"
"We'd have government paid maternity leave (more like Europe), breast feeding would not be a taboo thing since men like to brag about size. I bet men would be showing their goods to the world all the time."
"There would be tons of research to find ways to make pregnancy painless, shorter, responsive to the needs of men. I think there would be a lot of surrogate fatherhood (paying someone else to do it), as men generally have more money than women."
"There would be no pain. Poor babies would have to go to bed for nine months. I think the father should be hooked up to a machine and every time the mother had a labor pain, he would have one also. Or fill them full of laxatives and let them have cramps."
"I think they would have designed an incubator to do things more efficiently. Which would be too bad, because pregnancy may not be entirely efficient, but it is powerful, beautiful and transforming."
And to the question:
If men gave birth instead of women, how do you think things would be different?
"Better insurance. More screaming."
"I think doctors wouldn't be saying 'it will not matter a year from now how your labor went.' They would accept and believe that how you birth DOES matter."
"Men would have more to say about what happened while they gave birth. They would tell the doctors and nurses in no uncertain terms how things were going to be done."
"It would be the end of the human race."
"There would be better maternity leave policies, more flexible work options, and tampax and contraception would be government subsidized."
"No pain. Praise instead of insults. Information. Choices."
"Birth would be valued and celebrated, and the pain of the event would have long been eliminated."
"The power of creating life and the ability to give birth would not be hidden and undermined in societies. It would be completely revered and celebrated."
"I think they would actually do a good job. I think it would become a sport. They would make it competitive and use it as a badge of honor. We would have much more favorable laws, too, regarding maternal health care."
"It's a pretty powerful experience to bring life into the world. I think men would value life more if they experienced it in their womb."
(Women ranged in age from 24-66.)
 [The Full Feed from HuffingtonPost.com]
3:22:02 PM
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Peggy Drexler: It's Not Just What You Say....
It's been a very long eight years. I was reminded of that as I listened to Barack Obama's amazing speech on race in America.
Just as you eventually get used to the annoying buzz from a failing light fixture, we have become accustomed to the snarling dismissiveness of Dick Cheney, the monotonic state-speak of Condoleezza Rice, the squinty-eyed arrogance of Donald Rumsfeld, and the whiney weaseling of Karl Rove.
There is, of course, a special place in linguistic hell for the Commander-in-Chief - the "decider", the man "misunderestimated," the fighter of "nucular" ambitions. The man whose philosophy of communication is this: "See in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the agenda." The man whose instinct for connection runs so true that he said to a divorced mother of three: "You work three jobs? ... Uniquely American, isn't it? ... it is fantastic that you're doing that." There are, of course, the classics: "Rarely is the question asked: Is our children learning?" and "... fool me once, shame on you. Fool me -- you can't get fooled again."
Enough. Some targets are too easy.
And not to pick on the Republicans. We've listened to the precisely scripted tears and laughter of Hillary Clinton - not to mention the "misspoken" memories of dodging snipers. We have endured the old-school bombast of Ted Kennedy; the Foghorn Leghorn oratory of John Kerry; the hall-monitor petulance of Harry Reed.
If, by chance, our political leaders say what they believe, do they have even the rudimentary skills to communicate that belief clearly, logically and with power?
As I listen to the those whose job descriptions begin with communicating to constituencies, I can't help thinking about the words of Yankee great Casey Stengel when he managed the then lowly Mets: "Can't anybody play this here game?"
And then comes Obama and his thoughts on "A More Perfect Union." By all accounts, it was written in the early hours of the night before, without adjoining rooms full of handlers and wordsmiths furiously trading drafts and arguing conjunctions.
No doubt, Obama was dragged to the Philadelphia podium by the ravings of his pastor. But once there, he could have done a hundred things wrong.
He could have issued an unconditional denunciation of a friend who had been a great influence in his life. He could have pulled out the tested racial platitudes that would have let him to address the issue without actually dealing with it. He could have gone after the media for putting the selected inflammations of a long sermon on an endless loop. He could have tried to squirm his way out of it all together, the default setting for American politics.
But instead of all he could have done wrong, he did everything right. And nothing was more right than making his message real.
One of the Clinton campaign talking points recently is that you can't select a leader because he gives a good speech. But after all these years of mangled messages and cynical misdirection, I believe it's a very good place to start.
The ability to put your hand on the shoulder of the American public, look us in the eye, and say "this is who I am" matters. It matters in ways and with stakes that are more critical than any time in any other generation.
Like a lot of us, I still don't know who is going to get my vote. But after listening to one of the great speeches of this or any other political year, I know who has my attention.
 [The Full Feed from HuffingtonPost.com]
3:16:54 PM
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What a pity ... a great preacher, a man who dared to speak truth, now a pariah.
Rev. Wright CanÂ[base ']t Catch a Break. Lost in the discussion of the Rev. Wright controversy and its impact on the Obama campaign is the fallout for the reverend himself. Wright’s first public events since his sermons went YouTube, a revival in Tampa and a series of sermons in Houston, have been cancelled. A third event, where he is supposed to be honored, has been downgraded to “pending.”
Time / The Page:
Was scheduled to preach three guest sermons at Houston’s Wheeler Avenue Baptist Church, where he’s a regular.
Canceled citing security concerns for himself, his family and the church due to flap over controversial statements.
Plus: Dallas Morning News says Saturday events where he is to speak and be honored by Texas Christian University are “pending.”
Read more READ THE WHOLE ITEM Related Entries
[Truthdig: Drilling Beneath the Headlines]
12:31:35 PM
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Cheney Contradicts Facts and Findings Concerning Iran’s Nuclear Goals. BEIRUT — Vice President Dick Cheney charged in an interview released Tuesday that Iran is trying to develop weapons-grade uranium, though international inspectors and U.S. intelligence services have not found evidence of such an effort.
“Obviously, they’re also heavily involved in trying to develop nuclear weapons enrichment, the enrichment of uranium to weapons-grade levels,” Cheney said, [...] [CommonDreams.org » Headlines07]
9:15:52 AM
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Afghans Lack $10 Billion in Aid, Report Says. Carlotta Gall reports for The New York Times, "Western countries have failed to deliver $10 billion of nonmilitary assistance pledged to Afghanistan over the last six years and the United States, by far the biggest donor, is responsible for half of the shortfall, a new report published here on Tuesday said." [t r u t h o u t]
8:27:18 AM
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War of the Word. Would God ever damn America? Is there anything we have done or could do as a nation that might court such severe judgment from an almighty, or is there a peculiar American exemption from God’s wrath? The prediction of God’s damnation for bad behavior is made in both black and white churches.
READ THE WHOLE ITEM Related Entries
[Truthdig: Drilling Beneath the Headlines]
8:06:40 AM
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© Copyright 2008 Patricia Thurston.
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