Straight From The Hip
5.27.02
Crichton Speaks
"...all history is contemporary history. That is, every generation remakes the past into some form that suits the present time.
But this means that all our understanding of history, like all our understanding of science, is provisional. It's likely to change. It does change."
--- Michael Crichton (interview) "Timeline"
A powerful quote.
Is it imprudent (or lazy) to routinely take historical or scientific summations or pronouncements at face value?
Data is often well-tempered by additional inquiry that is sparked by experience, instinct and/or intuition.
Minor Example: Jefferson's Legacy?
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5.20.02
Call CultBusters
The Church has taken a bizarre, extraordinarily hardline stance in the wake of vast charges of sexual abuses by its priests:
"Vatican Lawyer Says Bishops Should Not Reveal Abuse Claims"
"...the bishop and the superior are neither morally nor judicially responsible for the acts committed by one of their clergy..."
--- Rev. Gianfranco Ghirlanda, Rome
[ "Ghirlanda also said priests should not be forced to take psychological tests to assess the likelihood of their commtting abuse."
"Roman Catholic Church Shifts Legal Strategy"
A response by DAs:
"They've used papal imunity to conceal documents, and that evidence leads to the Vatican. If they're going to act like mobsters, we'll go after them like mafia."
( I said it before: too many Church officials have too much to lose by (properly) turning over abuse files en masse )
One aspect of church abuse has been neglected: how far in scope (and time) does its impact extend into the secular world? Some priests set up "clubs" where children were both abused and sworn to secrecy:
"He also assumed a darker role: founder and leader of a club called the Hole, based in the church basement.
It had several dozen members — all teenage boys, some with strained relations with parents, others from broken homes. The priest said in his deposition that he based the Hole on the 'philosophy of having someone who would be there all the time, a place that one could go to share their thoughts and feeling and not ending up in some bar talking to some strange bartender.'
Yet, he said he gave the boys beer and liquor and showed them pornographic videos. Father Pipala created an initiation ceremony in which the teenagers, sworn to secrecy, joined him in masturbating into a red cloth, an act he would later compare to an ancient "tribal" ritual. Each boy was given a small square of the cloth, and a T-shirt with his number on the back.
By the time of his arrest in 1993, prosecutors said his abuse had extended to oral and anal sex. They said dozens of minors were initiated into his club and that he molested boys in rectories, at a Jersey Shore condominium and during a vacation in Massachusetts."
--- "Church Files Show Missteps as Priest's Abuses Continue"
As the "club members" assume their places in society, it is not a given that those compromised have opted out of allegiance to the abusing priest.
This possibility poses a (largely economic) danger to whistleblowers and others who seek to disrupt the maintenance of church malfeseance.
[ Here's a very interesting (albeit highly charged) Catholic Convert message board exchange covering baptism, Ash Wednesday, and the Mark of the Beast ]
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5.16.02
Open Letter: "Biography"
Dear Programmers:
I was recently watching a "Twilight Zone" episode ("In His Image"), and couldn't take my eyes off the lead actress (who seemed strangely familiar), due in large part to her economy of motion / screen impact.
She's Gail Kobe , and the breadth and quality of her work on television is highly impressive if not staggering (largely '60's - Rerun City - which explains why she seems so familiar):
The Untouchables, Mission:Impossible, Gunsmoke, Rawhide, Hogan's Heroes, Outer Limits, Twilight Zone, Perry Mason, Combat!, The Fugitive, Alfred Hitchcock Hour...the list just keeps going. [ Ms. Kobe also worked for the soap opera "Guiding Light": producer in 1952 and 1978, and an executive producer from 1983-1987. ]
What were the life circumstances, forces and personal decisions that combined to produce such a skilled, "workhorse"-type performer?
I believe a "Biography" profile of Gail Kobe (and other strong, unheralded character actresses of the 60s such as Geraldine Brooks, etc.) is warranted.
Sincerely,
blah, blah, blah
--------------------------
Small Kobe work list; two photos
Photo from her hometown
(one of the amazing qualities about Kobe was (imo) her ability to change her looks)
Hometown Page
Tribute Page
Geraldine Brooks: bio1 /// bio2
"Biography"
feedback page
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5.10.02
Uh-oh.
"Using the 1930's as a model, when the world cried 'NO!' (to Hitler) in 1939, it was already too late.
Recognition of the oncoming evil in 1933 would have been far more effective." [ blog
"We must avoid the distortions of hindsight and try to comprehend how the world looked at the Nazis without the benefit of knowing the outcome."
On Friday, May 10, 2002, eight people in Florida were injected with silicon chips ("VeriChips" by Applied Digital Solutions) which will enable medical personnel (and obviously, others) with "scanners" to obtain potentially limitless, personal information about them.
These early implants will soon be followed by more sophisticated ones capable of receiving signals from Global Positioning System satellites.
[ Chgo. Tribune ] /// [ LA Times ]
[ 4.8.02 --- "ID Implantation" ]
The 5.10.02 group undergoing the procedure contained Alzheimers and Hodgkin's disease patients. Some stats:
* Hodgkin's is a lymphoma; 109,500 in the US will be diagnosed with leukemia, lymphoma or myeloma this year
* every five minutes, someone in the US learns they have one of the related cancers
* 640,000 Americans are presently living with leukemia, lymphoma or myeloma
[ MedLine Plus ]
-----
* four million people have Alzheimer's
* 19 million say they have a family member with Alzheimer's
* 14 million will have Alzheimer's by the middle of the next century unless a cure or prevention is found
General Stats / Demographics
2000 Population and Alzhemer's Disease Prevalence Projections (by state)
Why people with Alzheimers become lost so easily Links
Applied Digital Solutions is currently charging $200 for the chipping procedure, plus a $10 monthly fee; thousands of dollars for the scanners. The chronically-ill as a first implant group represent staggering amounts of revenue for ADS.
Marc Rotenberg, exec. director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, once asked a simple but profound question: "Who gets to decide who gets chipped?"
Emergency Health Powers legislation being enacted provides a chilling answer:
"After the results of Dark Winter, and particularly after the September 11th attacks, federal policymakers decided that it was time to overcome (these) legal hurdles. A panel composed of law professors from Georgetown University and medical professors from Johns Hopkins University worked together to create a law to address the problems. After only 18 days of discussion, the Model Emergency Health Powers Act (MEHPA) was finished.
The act has since been introduced in every state legislature, where "Model" is replaced with the state's name.
In Tennessee, TEHPA (House Bill 2271/Senate Bill 2392) is currently being reviewed in committee. However, nationwide left- and right-wingers alike are sounding off on MEHPA-based laws in Web chat rooms and bulletin boards. At issue are the vast and truly frightening powers the laws bestow upon state governors and their appointees. Under MEHPA, and Tennessee's TEHPA, a governor or his appointee, after declaring a "public health emergency," has the power to take a number of actions. In the event of such an emergency, MEHPA allows each state to transform into something that would shock even George Orwell. The Model Emergency Health Powers Act allows officials to require an individual to be vaccinated.
Anyone who refuses vaccination could be charged with a felony and forcibly quarantined.
Likewise, it allows officials to require individuals to receive specific medical treatment or also be charged with a felony and quarantined. The state would also be allowed to seize any property, including real estate, deemed necessary to handle the emergency, and the property could be destroyed or retained without any compensation for the owner. During a "public health emergency," officials would be able to draft a person or business into state service and to impose rationing, price controls, quotas, and transportation controls. Any preexisting law thought to interfere with handling the emergency would be suspended. State governments would also be able to control the availability and distribution of medicines and vaccines and would be permitted to collect specimens from and perform tests on living persons.
The phrase "receive specific medical treatment (or be charged with a felony and quarrantined)" would readily translate to mandatory (forced) implantation of chips w/GPS capability: no better way to keep track of infected citizens. (!)
Note that the mere declaration of a "public health emergency" can activate MEHPA laws; the implication is that a real threat need not exist (!).
Reason, the promise of security, "good" intentions, media spin, sweeping laws...together, masking monstrous possibilities. This is how it happens.
---------
Holocaust transcript - Dennis Wile
"How did this happen?"
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5.8.02
Office Politics for Dummies?
Prison Survival Guide .
"Down the hole"-type pragmatism, merged with common sense and paragraphs that parallel "Mr. Flow" himself, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi :
PSG:
"Thoughts are powerful. They create and give new life and can cause death. Never allow fear, anxiety, anger and doubt to run riot in your life and exert rulership over you. Negative thinking will defeat you.
"Be filled with confidence and optimism that problems will be resolved to your benefit. Have thoughts of patience and fortitude. Clear thinking is the best thinking there is."
"Worry is the most senseless use of mental energy. I have seen others worry themselves until they become so overwhelmed that they give up all hope. We should not worry over things we have no control over."
Csikszentmihalyi quotes
On Flow
On Creativity
Problem Finding and the Creative Process
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5.3.02
Is Autism A Societal Threat?
Every two or three years, the media covers medical reports of sharp spikes in autism cases. Most recently, Time Magazine devoted a cover story to the problem ("The Secrets of Autism"):
"...in Calfornia, the number of autistic children seeking social services has quadrupled in the past 15 years...from greater than 4,000 in 1987 to more than 18,000 today...
...1 in 100 kids age 10 and younger are affected by autism or a related disorder, 300,000 in the U.S. alone - if you include adults, > a million...
...autism is 5x as common as Down syndrome and 3x as common as juvenile diabetes..."
Cursory study of data I've been collecting on autism and related areas, leads me to believe that the relatively recent increases in frequency and extremely violent types of teen aggression are driven by a non-classical form of autism.
Further, that neo-natal and juvenile exposure to environmental toxins (pesticides/estrogen disrupters) is a co-factor (impacting genetic predisposition) in the autistic process. [ autistic boys outnumber autistic girls by at least a 4-1 ratio; the number of male births is down "significantly" in the U.S.; "males tend to be extremely sensitive to environmental exposure or hormonal disruption in the womb" ]
"...autism appears to be brought on by unknown environmental influences coupled with a dimly understood combination of genes that makes people vulnerable."
--- fr. 'Scientists optimistic about hunt for autism genes' / AP /
Malcolm Ritter / 1.27.01
"Several scientists who reviewed (a 1998 AMA report) said the proportional decline in male births raises serious concerns.
'This may be another flag that tells us that exposure to chemicals has occurred in a widespread way, and we need to pay attention to that', said Richard Clapp of Boston U.'s School of Public Health"
--- "Ratio of male births falling - scientists cite possible impact of pollutants" / Chicago Sun-Times, pg.34 / by Curt Suplee
"At what point do you say there are enough red flags?"
--- U. of Missouri biology prof. Frederick vom Saal
"We are flying blind, except the laboratory mice in this vast chemical experiment are the children. They have no idea what's happening to them. And neither do we."
--- Bill Moyers / 'The Chemical Industry'
"...it seems clear that there is a relationship between toxic chemical exposures and autism..."
--- 'Neurotoxic Chemical Exposures and Autism'
"The critical question involves whether society prefers a policy that emphasizes prevention in the face of scientific uncertainty, or a policy that requires substantial evidence of adverse impacts before taking action against commercially valuable compounds."
--- fr. Conclusion, studies on pesticide use by the Enviromental Health Policy Program at the U. of California/Berkeley
The spate of school shootings and other teen violence only represents the "tip of the iceberg" as far as society is concerned.
At one extreme is an overtly murderous personality where "some basic instincts seem to be missing...". The other end may be represented by a massively growing number of young adults who appear socially benign, but harbor emptiness and amorality where empathy and altruism would normally dwell.
Most will assume places in the professions, in a world where, post 9-11, issues of surveillance, DNA sampling, cloning, national IDs and general personal freedoms, etc., as well as legal definitions regarding life and death (such as euthanasia) are being redefined. You do the math.
State of the Science in Autism (NIH)
Sharp Rise in Autism (The Scientist)
"In Harm's Way: Toxic Threats to Child Development" --- Greater Boston Physicians for Social Responsibility
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