My Thoughts on Changes

Simply amazing.
Harold Pinter – Nobel Lecture

Harold Pinter’s
Nobel Lecture was pre-recorded, and shown on video December 7, 2005,
in B

The sad part is that they’ll still cross the border and try to make a decent living, even if they are used and discarded like disposable gloves. Very, very few make it in a first generation try. It is though, the second and third generations the xenophobics are really afraid of. Yup, those are as Americans as they are and at some point they are going to demand equal “respect”…
Bush Pushes Guest-Worker Program

TUCSON, Nov. 28 — President Bush promoted his administration’s efforts to get a grip on illegal immigration, spotlighting a plan to tighten security along the southern border and calling for a guest-worker program that would allow about 11 million illegal immigrants to work legally in the country temporarily before forcing them to return home.

Well, talk about neat metaphors…
Pieces of marble fall from Court facade

WASHINGTON — A basketball-sized piece of marble molding fell from the facade over the entrance to the Supreme Court Monday, landing on the steps near visitors waiting to enter the building.

If this pans out, and it usually is the case with things I read at Debka, it will be the sad opening of yet another front in a war that will swallow the Mid-East… Sad day, indeed.
DEBKAfile, Political Analysis, Espionage, Terrorism Security

DEBKAfile Exclusive: US Marines are locked in battle with Syrian troops after crossing the border from Iraq into Syria at a point west of al QaimNovember 25, 2005, 12:27 AM (GMT 02:00)Both sides have suffered casualties. US soldiers crossed over after Damascus was given an ultimatum Thursday, Nov. 24, to hand over a group of senior commanders belonging to Abu Musab al Zarqawi%u2019s al Qaeda force. According to US intelligence, the group had fled to Syria to escape an American attack in Mosul. Syrian border guards opened fire on the American force.

…to deal with opposing opinions… It would have certainly helped revamp pro-American sentiment in the region… Yo,!! yes you, the other half of the country that voted for this “….” (fill in the blank), where did you find him? Are there more like him in that hole? (don’t answer that…)
ABC News: Report: Bush Talked of Bombing Al-Jazeera

LONDON Nov 22, 2005 — A civil servant has been charged under Britain’s Official Secrets Act for allegedly leaking a government memo that a newspaper said Tuesday suggested that Prime Minister Tony Blair persuaded President Bush not to bomb the Arab satellite station Al-Jazeera.
The Daily Mirror reported that Bush spoke of targeting Al-Jazeera’s headquarters in Doha, Qatar, when he met Blair at the White House on April 16, 2004. The Bush administration has regularly accused Al-Jazeera of being nothing more than a mouthpiece for anti-American sentiments.

Now, as a hypocrisy corollary of what I wrote below on mind-altering drugs, take a look at this “invention”… Huh?!?! So, you mean that a device that can make you a mindless, order-following-killing-machine drone is OK if it has, ahem!, “a practical use in a military application”?
Now, we file this under what? Sci-Fi B movie come to life? Reality, my friends, is stranger than you think…
New Scientist Breaking News – Invention: Soldiers obeying odours

These can be delivered silently, in the dark and when loud noise is drowning out speech. Furthermore, says the USC patent, the immediate reaction to a smell is emotional, rather than rational, so an odour trigger may encourage people to carry out orders without question.
Pictures filed with the patent show how the researchers used a collar, like a gun belt, which hangs round a soldier’s neck. The collar has a dozen cartridges, each containing a wick soaked in smelly liquid, a valve and a small propeller fan. Remote radio signals open selected valves and kick fans into life.

Is it a “Rock on!!” in good order? I think so, but, let me qualify that: I’m, completely, against drugs that create dependency. That’s misery for anybody who is hooked on them. However, there are many ethnobotanical substances that are mind altering that are not dependency causing. They have been used for thousands of years without the taboo modern society place on them. It is time some respect is returned.
More to the point, the “legal” drugs Prozac, Paxil, Welbutrin, Big-Pharma-Fill-in-the-Blank-with-drug-name, are just that: Mind Altering Drugs. At the time of “mistrust” I would ponder much longer about the ones who stand to make a hefty profit from said drugs.
Give Me Cognitive Liberty (News) Salim Muwakkil

The ranks of folks who believe that the war on drugs is an effort to control consciousness include a few bohemian types and “graying hippies” who may not be sober all the time. But a few straight-edge libertarians would agree with their basic argument: An individual should have the right to choose access to a variety of mental states, some of which can be achieved through the use of mind-altering drugs.