It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
The Iraqis' failure to maintain the 320-megawatt Dora plant, considered an important source of power for electricity-starved Baghdad, is just one of the issues hindering attempts to rebuild the country, the latest audit report to Congress concludes.
This proves George Bush was right the U.S. is not capable of nation building. Or even maintaining infrastructure in Iraq or at home.
The Bush administration has shown little progress - and in some cases backtracked - on its pledge to do a better job in awarding contracts to small, Gulf Coast businesses for Hurricane Katrina work, a congressional analysis shows.
The review of federal contracts from five government agencies, conducted by the House Small Business Committee, is the latest to document missteps in the award of billions of dollars of lucrative government work since the 2005 storm.
"Not so long ago, these deep waters were thought to be barren, and what we're looking at and finding is that they're quite rich," said Ellen Kenchington, one of 20 scientists who participated in the research mission aboard the coast guard ship Hudson.
This was deep-water fauna, creatures of the inky blackness and the stuff of Jules Verne: The metre-long dumbo octopus (so named for its prominent fins); the xenophyphore, a single-celled organism better known as "the Green Blob"; and the long-nosed chimera.
Amidst the weird and wonderful are three types of coral key to understanding climate change: Primoa, Paragorgia, and Keratosis, also known as seacorn, bubblegum, and bamboo coral respectively.
The creatures were found after Canadian marine scientists fitted the coast guard ship Hudson with Canada's most powerful deep-sea diving robot, and sent it to explore water too deep for humans.
The octopus was spotted on the second dive at 2,500 metres. When the robot got close enough, the researchers could see the metre-long octopus had fins near its eyes.
"It looks like Dumbo the elephant," Kenchington said, showing off some of the more than 3,000 digital images, hundreds of hours of videos and dozens of live samples taken during the research trip.
It was a creature that had never been seen in the Atlantic before, but Kenchington later found out one had been spotted in the Pacific Ocean.
The robot picked up images of many other creatures, including orange scallops hanging from underwater cliffs, and yellow and pink bubblegum-coloured coral.
More than half of the dives were below the 1,000-metre threshold, and they discovered "at least a dozen" species not previously found in Canadian waters. Particularly striking, she said, was the discovery of a type of bubblegum coral far from the nearest known colony of that species. The largest sea-floor invertebrate, bubblegum coral can live hundreds of years and grow at least a metre off of the bottom.
"How did it get there?" Dr. Kenchington mused. "How are they connected to the nearest neighbours, which are hundreds of miles away?"
In post WWII America lead based paint was cheap and applied everywhere. It was banned in the seventies. Today in the Global Economy the same lead based culture is once again being revived, in China. And of course its all about making gold, that is cold hard cash.
And think of the workers who applied this paint to the toys, if the danger is there for the consumer it is even worse for the workers.
The worldwide recall being announced Thursday involves 967,000 plastic preschool toys made by a Chinese vendor and sold in the United States between May and August. It is the latest in a wave of recalls that has heightened global concern about the safety of Chinese-made products.
The recall is the first for Fisher-Price Inc. and parent company Mattel Inc. involving lead paint. It is the largest for Mattel since 1998 when Fisher-Price had to yank about 10 million Power Wheels from toy stores.
"The Chinese government pays great attention to addressing flaws in product quality, especially the quality of food products," Li Changjiang, minister in charge of the General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine, said at a specially convened press conference.
The government's acknowledgement of existing problems makes a remarkable departure for a bureaucratic system prone to cover-ups.
When a pet-food ingredient produced in China was linked to the deaths of cats and dogs in North America in April, Beijing's first reaction was to deny it. "The poisoning of American pets has nothing to do with China," claimed a report in the Communist Party's flagship newspaper, the People's Daily.
Export-control officials argued that food contamination occurred both within the United States and with US exports to China. "No food-inspection system is foolproof," Li Yuanping, director general of the Import and Export Food Safety Bureau, countered at the time.
But international worries about China's exports have continued to mount with more and more reports about substandard and fake products coming to light. Since April, a slew of exports - including toothpaste, tires, seafood and toys - have been recalled or rejected around the world. What is worse, mislabeled drug ingredients in Chinese exports have been blamed for killing and injuring people in Panama and Haiti.
As a result, China has come under political pressure from the US and the European Union, where politicians are demanding assurances about the quality and safety of Chinese exports.
Economist Rick Nevin has argued in a series of papers that the "New York miracle" was caused by local and federal efforts decades earlier to reduce exposure to lead poisoning.
Nevin has spent more than a decade researching and writing about the relationship between early childhood lead exposure and criminal behavior later in life. His theory offers a unifying new neurochemical explanation for fluctuations in the crime rate.
"It is stunning how strong the association is," Nevin told the Washington Post. "Sixty-five to ninety percent or more of the substantial variation in violent crime in all these countries was explained by lead."
Fewer Canadians are satisfied with their prime minister, according to a poll by Angus Reid Strategies. 29 per cent of respondents approve of Stephen Harper’s performance, and 28 per cent say their opinion of the head of government worsened over the past month.
Do you approve or disapprove of Stephen Harper’s performance as prime minister?
Jul. 16
Jun. 16
May 23
Approve
29%
31%
33%
Disapprove
47%
47%
47%
Not sure
23%
23%
20%
Of course when you do this don't expect to get any respect.
Wright said the government should rethink its strategy of tightly controlling its message, agenda, and delivery, which is almost exclusively done by Prime Minister Harper, who has been widely criticized for running a one-man show.
“It will really take the prime minister to decide whether he is going to stick by this style of leadership or if he is going to try something different,” said Wright.
One of my favorite Dylan songs for its William Burroughs like poetic imagery. And it still influences folks today, see here and here.
"Desolation Row" is the ninth and final song of Bob Dylan's sixth album, Highway 61 Revisited. This eleven minute song contains lyrics full of evocative imagery, poetry, and cultural references. It is the album's only purely acoustic track, in contrast to the thunderous electric rock and roll sound that Dylan was completely embracing for the first time with the album. It was recorded in New York City, New York on August 2, 1965; the take on the album was the second time Dylan had sung the song. Charlie McCoy plays the lyrical acoustic guitar passages throughout the song.
The songs of this period received wide critical acclaim. In the New Oxford Companion to Music, Gammond used Desolation as an example of Dylan's work of the mid-60s that achieved a "high level of poetical lyricism." In 1969, Dylan told ROLLING STONE he wrote this song in the back of a New York cab. Since it is 659 words and clocks in at more than eleven minutes, that's a long cab ride. It was spliced together from two consecutive takes during the last sessions for Highway 61.
They're selling postcards of the hanging They're painting the passports brown The beauty parlor is filled with sailors The circus is in town Here comes the blind commissioner They've got him in a trance One hand is tied to the tight-rope walker The other is in his pants And the riot squad they're restless They need somewhere to go As Lady and I look out tonight From Desolation Row
Cinderella, she seems so easy "It takes one to know one," she smiles And puts her hands in her back pockets Bette Davis style And in comes Romeo, he's moaning "You Belong to Me I Believe" And someone says," You're in the wrong place, my friend You better leave" And the only sound that's left After the ambulances go Is Cinderella sweeping up On Desolation Row
Now the moon is almost hidden The stars are beginning to hide The fortunetelling lady Has even taken all her things inside All except for Cain and Abel And the hunchback of Notre Dame Everybody is making love Or else expecting rain And the Good Samaritan, he's dressing He's getting ready for the show He's going to the carnival tonight On Desolation Row
Now Ophelia, she's 'neath the window For her I feel so afraid On her twenty-second birthday She already is an old maid
To her, death is quite romantic She wears an iron vest Her profession's her religion Her sin is her lifelessness And though her eyes are fixed upon Noah's great rainbow She spends her time peeking Into Desolation Row
Einstein, disguised as Robin Hood With his memories in a trunk Passed this way an hour ago With his friend, a jealous monk He looked so immaculately frightful As he bummed a cigarette Then he went off sniffing drainpipes And reciting the alphabet Now you would not think to look at him But he was famous long ago For playing the electric violin On Desolation Row
Dr. Filth, he keeps his world Inside of a leather cup But all his sexless patients They're trying to blow it up Now his nurse, some local loser She's in charge of the cyanide hole And she also keeps the cards that read "Have Mercy on His Soul" They all play on penny whistles You can hear them blow If you lean your head out far enough From Desolation Row
Across the street they've nailed the curtains They're getting ready for the feast The Phantom of the Opera A perfect image of a priest They're spoonfeeding Casanova To get him to feel more assured Then they'll kill him with self-confidence After poisoning him with words
And the Phantom's shouting to skinny girls "Get Outa Here If You Don't Know Casanova is just being punished for going To Desolation Row"
Now at midnight all the agents And the superhuman crew Come out and round up everyone That knows more than they do Then they bring them to the factory Where the heart-attack machine Is strapped across their shoulders And then the kerosene Is brought down from the castles By insurance men who go Check to see that nobody is escaping To Desolation Row
Praise be to Nero's Neptune The Titanic sails at dawn And everybody's shouting "Which Side Are You On?" And Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot Fighting in the captain's tower While calypso singers laugh at them And fishermen hold flowers Between the windows of the sea Where lovely mermaids flow And nobody has to think too much About Desolation Row
Yes, I received your letter yesterday (About the time the door knob broke) When you asked how I was doing Was that some kind of joke? All these people that you mention Yes, I know them, they're quite lame I had to rearrange their faces And give them all another name Right now I can't read too good Don't send me no more letters no Not unless you mail them From Desolation Row
In this song, Desolation Row, Dylan is warning people that society is heading for destruction, an apocalype, if it continues in its then direction. With the US locked in a deadly embrace with Russia, teetering on a knife-edge of mutually assured nuclear destruction, it was reasonable for people to be concerned (more like scared half to death), but governments of the time characterised anyone who spoke out against the Cold War as unpatriotic, even traitorous. When we read the history of the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, it is horrifying to realise just how close the world came to letting the generals on both sides unleash a nuclear holocaust that would have likely destroyed much of the world as we know it.
In this song, Desolation Row, Dylan uses cultural and religious stereotypes as metaphors to describe this lunacy of main stream 1960's American society. Desolation Row is the name he gives to the place where people have gone to opt out of the lunacy, and who are being punished by society for not wanting to participate in the lunacy. For example, the lines "They're spoonfeeding Casanova to get him to feel more assured. Then they'll kill him with self-confidence after poisoning him with words. And the Phantom's shouting to skinny girls "Get outa here if you don't know, Casanova is just being punished for going To Desolation Row"
Desolation Row is a counter-culture destination, though more a state of mind than an actual place. In this example he is referring to the average wage slave who is made to work long hours doing dehumanising work until they have a heart attack and die: Now at midnight all the agents, and the superhuman crew (the FBI and other covert agencies looking for un-American activists), come out and round up everyone that knows more than they do (and who are therefore dangerous). Then they bring them to the factory where the heart-attack machine is strapped across their shoulders (the yoke of dehumanising work) and then the kerosene (to burn the midnight oil, to work long hours) is brought down from the castles (capitalist corporations) by insurance men (Actuaries who calculate how long someone is likely to live under these circumstances) who go check to see that nobody is escaping to Desolation Row (no-one is opting out of the system)
The name Desolation Row may have been derived by combining the best of Desolation Angels (Kerouac) with Cannery Row (Steinbeck).
Jack Kerouac spent the summer of 1956 as a fire lookout on Desolation Peak, and wrote The Dharma Bums and Desolation Angels from his life transforming experiences on the peak. On the other hand, John Steinbeck'sCannery Row is a place where the outcasts of society found a home. Cannery Row is an actual place in Monterey California. It refers to the derelect sardine cannery whose close environs was occupied in the book by homeless men and the town brothel. The cannery was derelect because the sardines had disappeared through a combination of over-fishing, agricultural run-off and unspecified pollutants from a nearby army base. For Steinbeck, what happened to the sardines was symbolic of the ruthlessly exploit until exhausted attitude that society and the military-industrial complex had for the environment and ordinary people. Wring all the goodness out of something, then when it worthless, toss on the rubbish-heap and give it to the worthless people who are no use to us.
Another very good example of a CIA-organized regime change was a coup in 1963 that employed political assassination, mass imprisonment, torture and murder. This was the military coup that first brought Saddam Hussein's beloved Ba'ath Party to power in Iraq. At the time, Richard Helms was Director for Plans at the CIA. That is the top CIA position responsible for covert actions, like organizing coups. Helms served in that capacity until 1966, when he was made Director.
In the quotations collected below, the name of the leader who was assassinated is spelled variously as Qasim, Qassim and Kassem. But, however you spell his name, when he took power in a popularly-backed coup in 1958, he certainly got recognized in Washington. He carried out such anti-American and anti-corporatist policies as starting the process of nationalizing foreign oil companies in Iraq, withdrawing Iraq from the US-initiated right-wing Baghdad Pact (which included another military-run, US-puppet state, i.e., Pakistan) and decriminalizing the Iraqi Communist Party. Despite these actions, and more likely because of them, he was Iraq's most popular leader. He had to go!
In 1959, there was a failed assassination attempt on Qasim. The failed assassin was none other than a young Saddam Hussein. In 1963, a CIA-organized coup did successfully assassinate Qasim and Saddam's Ba'ath Party came to power for the first time. Saddam returned from exile in Egypt and took up the key post as head of Iraq's secret service. The CIA then provided the new pliant, Iraqi regime with the names of thousands of communists, and other leftist activists and organizers. Thousands of these supporters of Qasim and his policies were soon dead in a rampage of mass murder carried out by the CIA's close friends in Iraq.
Now this is an endorsement indeed. What can you say about the only Republican candidate for President endorsed by both Canadian Progressive Bloggers and Blogging Tories because he ain't a Reagan Republican but a Goldwater Republican. Come back Barry all is forgiven.
