@Monolycus
I tend to agree. Excrement is the main human contribution.
I am amazed at the people’s appetite for pain and horror. Their movies, books, television shows, daily lives are drenched with it. Screams of agony make their heads snap to attention, while soft and pleasant sounds are so often overlooked. Blood is riveting. Bombs are adored. Hateful dialogues send shivers of excitement through their bodies. The soundtrack of so called musicians sounds like they are in surgery without anaesthetic. The collective scream of agony is obvious and drowns out the gentle and graceful, as though too sentimental and weak.
Television is shocking in its constant alarm and brutalization, with products being violently thrown at the viewer in between bloodbaths and hideous forced laughter. Dogs bark and shriek continually for no reason. It’s like the psycho ward to me.
As long as we point the finger of accusation at our so called leaders and don’t see the same behavior in ourselves in some form, we will continue to be doomed.
I am an optimist, nonetheless, as I have extracted some joy out of life, so I know it’s possible. And I see grace in between the lines.

Posted by: jm | Aug 14 2005 12:15 utc | 3

b: Ah, my mother’s family is from Hamburg, on her mother’s side. I’ve been, but only twice for short visits, and hope (of course!) to visit again someday.

Posted by: Jape | Aug 14 2005 12:51 utc | 5

Rich is dreaming.
Bush did his cowardly driveby on the way to his $10,000-a-plate barbecue. Sheehan did her soul appeal, although like Saddam, we only see her lips moving, not hear her speech, and only find her words if we Google for ’em. Oops, 404!
It’s Waco all over again. They’re gonna wait her out, then declare a security or sanitary threat, local deputies will show up yuk-yuk with their batons at midnight, media will look the other way as they always do, and Sheehan’s Show will be over. Maybe five minutes of fame on Oprah?
I doubt it. Oprah likes wearing Red too much. Maybe Sheehan can hire Cruise to jump on a couch for US veterans!? Oops! Tommy’s an R-head too.
Had a moment of clarity the other day, imagining if America’d missed the solid-state electronics revolution in favor of tube TV’s, while Japan and ASEAN had gone on to reap the great wealth our elites enjoy today. We’d still be sitting there in our living rooms, fixing fried chicken, mashed potatoes and succotash, watching Brady Bunch on the B&W 13″, braiding Barbara’s hair for trade-school the next day, Billy still out working lawn care, meanwhile outside, hordes of Asian tourists would be trampling our flower beds, crowding in at our windows, taking flash pictures of this Wyeth-American tryptic, just as hordes of elite Americans do today, world-wide, trashing 3rd-world cultures in their own homes.
I have a friend who lives on an island in the Caribbean, he tells me when the cruise ships loom on the horizon, everyone throws down their chores, dons their festival clothes, a farmers market is quickly thrown together in the plaza, and for a few hours, in the hot sun, they play calypso music for beet-faced sweating anglos, who paw the girls and haggle for gew-gahs, and then get back on their lighters and head back to the ship, which, obligingly, dumps a huge turd of sewage and siwash in their harbor, and then steams off to the next tropical destination.
That’s how BushCo views US. Capiche? SCOTUS will overturn Roe v. Wade, so the rich f–ks can have their unaborted-so-orphaned maids and boy toys on the cheap, without worrying about immigration hassles, sex tour spies or minimum wage laws, and so DoD can have a quota of cannon fodder.
And if that sounds too harsh, you haven’t been paying attention to what’s been going down G8.
Maybe the only task before US is chronicle it? Sort of a Ray Bradbury thing, how this American society of ours gradually morphed into Martian,
how Earth turned into a flaming ball of spumoni.
Speaking of spumoni…
Here honey, would you like a slice of apple pie?
There’s a good lad, are you feeling better now?
Can you imagine Bush with ska dreads, rastafar?
Ha, is that a smile I see? Life is but a dream.

Posted by: tante aime | Aug 14 2005 17:33 utc | 7

@ b
I didn’t realize Hamburg was home to the Reeperbahn, which Tom Waits sings about on his lovely album Alice.

Posted by: catlady | Aug 14 2005 20:41 utc | 9

I know August is peak vacation time, but can’t help but wonder if the Radio address piece got Billmon a visit from a couple guys in dark glasses.

Posted by: mats | Aug 14 2005 20:56 utc | 11

@ jm
This item from your Google search is an intriguing little OT window on the global market. Raw vits, anyone?

Posted by: catlady | Aug 14 2005 22:08 utc | 13

Was Billmon captured by wingnuts?

Posted by: The Liberal Avenger | Aug 15 2005 1:49 utc | 15

Billmon,
Ok, maybe I said some things a couple of months ago about you just maybe should not blog anymore-well you just seemed so uptight-out there some where-I mean you have got to admit you ARE moody-but guy-this coming and going thing-it’s just so, so frigging CELEBRITY-you have a sort of OBLIGATION TO THOSE OF US WHO HAVE BEEN THERE SINCE THE BEGINNING FOR CHRISTSAKES!!!!
Just saying is all.

Posted by: Mary | Aug 15 2005 3:03 utc | 17

Could be, jj. But I think in the end it’s a losing battle for the pharmaceuticals and that’s why they are desperate. Why would they try to make them illegal if they didn’t perceive the threat? I still say the insurance compamies are a tell tale sign. When the wave comes in, they will be in trouble. There is only so much people can do to stop change.
And I don’t fully understand. Nutraceuticals don’t have to to be administered in pharmaceutical dosages. You can take as much as you want in the way it’s available. It would probably be completely cost ineffective to try and regulate the natural remedy business. It would make more sense to try and capitalize on it.

Posted by: jm | Aug 15 2005 3:38 utc | 19

And pharmaceuticals are becoming unaffordable, so where does that put them? If people die they can’t make money on their drugs. And as health care is dropped by more and more people, the insurance companies lose. I see a crisis .

Posted by: jm | Aug 15 2005 3:48 utc | 21

I’m just talking about the laws..who knows what reality will bring. But a major objective of the Century is to radically reduce the global population. And as someone noted earlier, Brzyzenski(sp??) said only 20% of the population is needed to produce….
Right now we’re under the pincer of both CAFTA & the WHO Commission ruling from Rome this summer – that Fran & I discussed in early July before the meeting July 5-8.
Most people don’t even know it’s in CAFTA, and Big Pharma is amplifying the bullshit about jocks testing positive for banned substances ‘cuz they’re in food supplements. I’ve heard legislators, who should know better, say things like they should be outlawed.
jm, from the point of view of a sane society, of course it makes zero sense. But no one in command gives a flying eff about us. The cheapest most effective system for healing & staying healthy is by independent practitioners using nutraceuticals. (Not to mention that this is the only way to deal w/drug addiction – except in cases of severe psychological probs. or genetic errors requiring pharmaceutical repair.) But the wrong people make the money, so screw it. It’s totally unreal. Health will disintegrate.
One of the hopes of Big Pharma, is at least to take supplements off the market long enough, to drive the small producers into bankruptcy, or force them to turn to Big Pharma to bail them out. Then, perhaps they allow them to continue to be sold w/out prescription. But god knows if they’d still be affordable. $50 for a bottle of Vitamin C – might as well take it off the market.
If people wage a huge battle here, maybe…I think that we can get garbage that’s part of those so-called trade bills thrown out if enough people object. It’s uncharted, but shark-filled waters. Even though CAFTA passed, nothing has disappeared from the shelves yet, so I don’t know how this stuff translates into reality…I just know that legally we’re in serious trouble thanks to the combined power of xAm. & German Pharmaceutical Cos.
As far as official medicine is concerned the plans are to kill people off earlier as well. Robt. Reich is working w/the Pirates to devise a 2 tier medical system, so that the Pirates won’t have to pay to provide medical coverage for employees anymore. A totally garbage system for the masses & an excellent one for the elite. In Reich’s words – develop a basic system. >I mean really basic.
Consider this through the prism of Jared Diamond’s comments -on booktv last wkend – that a hallmark of societies decaying is when the elite are insulated from the consequences of their actions. This is the most helpful frame of reference I’ve heard in ages – always look to see if they’re building a separate system for us. Then we see, that medicine, joins education, housing, increasingly transportation & pensions, as another sector in which that available to the 99% of us can be left to rot w/out bothering them in the least. Now it has to be tended to ‘cuz they’re part of the same system. Every change they make is to intensify the war on us & accelerate the decay. Meanwhile the xDems. can feel so enlightened ‘cuz after all they’re providing National Medical Care!!! (Why not to vote for them – Reason 999.)
Incidentally, part of the reason they’re doing this is to facilitate merger Canada – hence their medical system is being gutted & revamped as a 2 tier system, but working in the reverse. They’re starting to offer ‘private clinics etc’, and then they’ll increasingly starve the currently outstanding national system. At least, they’ve started to implement this – could take a decade to realize.

Posted by: jj | Aug 15 2005 5:07 utc | 23

Faux,
The Robt. Reich statement was made in a Radio interview. I’ll see if I can find any references this week, if he’s written anything about it. The context was the problem of car manufacturers competing globally. He mentioned how much of an am. cars’ cost was attributable to medical costs…and then went on to discuss the new plan he was working w/them on to eliminate these costs…how there was consensus w/in world of Oligarchs that they needed to eliminate this fixed overhead for xAm. to “compete globally”. The phrase I quoted could only be spoken – you had to hear him reiterate his phrase “basic health care” w/a tone that made my blood run cold, to get it. He mentioned it, then looped back, obviously concerned lest anyone think he was throwing out some hideously expensive undertaking – ie. rest assured this will be very basic stuff. Anything he writes will make it sound much better, of course. But I’ll see what I can find.
(I’m not at home w/my links handy, so I can’t source the info. on the 2 converging mechanisms working to make xAm. & Western Europe all Codex countries. I can do that next wkend if anyone needs references.)
On population, I was referring to someone else’s post today in which Brz. was quoted as saying that only 20% of the population was now needed to produce. No PNAC reference – just putting that in the context of frequent discussions around here that it was cheap oil that allowed the planet to support such a huge population. There was no tinfoil hat implication about elite actively planning to wipe us out. But when people become superfluous to elite planners, one does not expect that they will worry about maintaining institutions that insure their longevity & welfare. If you’re planning to wipe out public & private pensions, reducing life span makes sense, so it becomes unnecessary to spend as much on their medical care. If they get cancer @45, well they are replaceable. Provide so-called preventative plans & if those don’t work, or the masses don’t follow them, well too bad. Note also that Laurie Garrett, ex-leftist, is now working w/the pivotal planning body that bridges Capital & Foreign Policy, the CFR. She wrote a bk during Clinton’s presidency that he read & liked, in which she advocated that rather than spend money to care for individuals the state should spend it to protect the public health against plagues, etc.
It’s the CFR that wrote the governmental planning documents for merging xUS w/Canada & Mexico. Best site for that is Maude Barlow’s Canadian site – Council of Canadians. She was leaked a copy, either in toto, or the summary. canadians.org. Planning is proceeding apace. That’s why wrt Mexico, there is no attempt to limit their influx into xAm. They’ll handle that just letting them flood in. That I expect is another reason for destroying Social Security, since Mexico probably doesn’t have it.
Of course, none of us want this. I presume this is one of the reasons they’re pulling this “war on terra” horseshit, so they can do it after creating a pretext for a police state, so all of us who oppose it will be thrown into the Gulag in some part of the planet. (I’m not sure it stops w/North America. I think that’s just the beginning, if they get their way. There was a squiblet in WSJ w/in last few yrs. about working towards a single currency thruout the Hemisphere. That’s probably a wet dream at this point.)

Posted by: jj | Aug 15 2005 7:59 utc | 25

TYRANNY OF TIME A letter to our European friends

Posted by: Uncle $cam | Aug 15 2005 8:19 utc | 27

Hey Uncle , great link — and answers the question of why a serious, in the streets anti- war movement has failed to materialize. People are just worn out and too mesmerized by the capitaist end game consciousness, and this is important, to do anything but to lose faith in it to bring anything with a semblence of satisfaction. So they lose faith, not unlike Cindy Sheenan, camped longside a ditch in the heat in Texas, asking a singular question of why? The myth of exceptionalism, has run its course, in large part, by sucking all the oxygen from the belief that our government acts in our own mutual interests. Maybe the American people are begining to realize that like Cindy, they have been used, and left in a ditch. As a motorcade with the president drove by to yet another party. I think its sinking in, ever so slowly, ever so rabidly.

Posted by: anna missed | Aug 15 2005 9:19 utc | 29

Sparked by your comments, jj.
I just came up questions for the 20 year old nephew who favors private clinics as a solution to an inadequate public healthcare system.
First, do you think everyone is entitled to equal healthcare, or do you consider yourself a member of a group that has a natural right to better treatment.
If the latter, how are you preparing to deal with looking others in the face who are, with respect to healthcare, your inferiors.

Posted by: jonku | Aug 15 2005 13:09 utc | 31

@ anna missed: “And, I think she personifies that with a pristine elegance rarely seen.”
pristine elegance and a way with words…

But I don’t care, I’m goin’. And I’m gonna tell them, “You get that evil maniac out here, cuz a Gold Star Mother, somebody whose blood is on his hands, has some questions for him.”

more good stuff here.

Posted by: beq | Aug 15 2005 13:53 utc | 33

Just for the fun of it – another Zarqawi “aid” was killed and now all will be well in Iraq:

A top aide to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, head of the al-Qaida operation in Iraq and accused of masterminding high-profile bombings in the country, has been killed by Iraqi security forces, US defence officials said.
..
Abu Zubair, also known as Muhammad Salah Sultan, was shot and killed in the northern city of Mosul on Friday, when he got caught in an ambush set up by Iraqi security forces, the officials said, confirming a report by Mosul police.
No other details of the operation were provided. But officials pointed out Abu Zubair was wearing a bomb belt filled with metal pellets when he was killed.
…
“Abu Zubair’s death, as well as recent captures of terrorists in northern Iraq, is making a difference in coalition and Iraqi security forces’ efforts to disrupt terrorists operating in this part of the country,” Colonel Bill Buckner, a spokesman for the multinational force, told reporters.

It´s hard to write satire when they follow those writings.

Posted by: b | Aug 15 2005 18:56 utc | 35

Jonku, we can see those questions as dragged in from other spheres that don’t relate to medicine if we consider the following:
– ~80% of medical expenses are incurred toward the end. A good chunk of this could be saved if we could face death more easily.
– another huge chunk is wasted on profit, advertising & related superfluous (sp?) horseshit.
If we take those out, we’re way ahead of the game. Then we have to acknowledge that Canada & perhaps France have the best medical systems in the world. If the Pirates hadn’t declared war on us, we’d do the sane thing & study & emulate those systems.
Your questions themselves are symtoms of the hold the Pirates have over us. As in, well the Pirates & the Elite obviously Deserve The Best; if you’re not one of them, why would you deserve such good care? The first answer to that is that we’re all entitled to “life, liberty & the pursuit of Happiness”. Everyone agree that good health is the foundation of happiness, so let’s start there.
I went uninsured for awhile, which was a gift from the Goddess. It gave me the opportunity to explore the horizons beyond conventional Newtonian medicine. It turns out that’s where all the really great important work is happening. That’s how you stay healthy. If you have a really wonderful Naturopath & good genes, you can stay healthy for a long time for very little money, using the conventional medical system yearly to monitor things & get the info. for fine tuning. But these people have no status, certification etc. The Underground is Flourishing. This is really the Golden Age of medicine in America. The problem is that it works so well, that once the word gets out, the Pirates move to destroy it as they cannot stand the fact that they do not control & profit from absolutely everything.
Incidentally, it’s not now the case that the Elite get the best of Everything. They get the highest Status medical care. However, when the paradigm is changing as it is now, status & quality are not synonymous.
Take for example alcoholism/drug addiction. The elite go to places like Betty Ford & even pricier places w/more “bells & whistles” – silver tray service, horses…But they’re using an obsolete model. While people may have luxurious vacations if you will, the long term prognosis is grim, showing ~20% still off drugs/alc. after 5-10 yrs. (I don’t have my book for reference on exact numbers handy.) The new model, which has no status & has been built by women, uses the state of the art information from nutrition & neuro-chemistry, is run by people w/MA’s from nowhereville in Psych., if that, & finds that 80% are still free from the stuff in 5 yrs.
The problem is that medicine is controlled by the AMA in bed w/Big Pharma which depends on Am. market for 50% of its obscenely high profits. Whereas in a healthy cost & results effective medical system, they would only have a peripheral role to play. They are the best in the world dealing w/crisis situations, esp. accidents/injuries, acute medical situations & genetic problems. But that’s a small part of the elephant. So, how do you marginalize the powerful??
To build a great medical system, we’d shove them to one side & build a health maintenance system beside them consisting of Naturopaths, Chiropractors, Nutritionists, psychologists & neuro-chemists. We’d start by replacing conventional medical schools w/many many more Bastyr Colleges of Naturopathic medicine. Those are the people who learn how to keep us healthy. Then we’d give people $500/mon. tax writeoffs for the Nutraceuticals, gym memberships, yoga classes, etc. they need to maintain their health. (Of course, we’d dump energy intensive poisonous Agribusiness for de-industrialized organic agriculture, so people have healthy food grown in nutrient rich living soils. As quality food appropriate to each individuals biochemistry is the foundation of all health. And we’d outlaw things like DU that destroy health & follow the precautionary principle in allowing new substances in. And end nuclear weapons…)
This approach would Maximize health while minimizing costs. The only thing it would definitely not do is maximize the plunder of the powerful, hence…
In this context, your question has meaning. What do we do about the cogs in the machine. People who have meaningless jobs & lives & who depend on sugar, fat, alcohol etc. to give them any feel good moments. Frankly, I don’t know. They don’t much care, largely sleep walk through their lives, and would generate the lions share of medical costs in a functional system. Of course, we’re so far from a functional system now & are moving in totally the opposite direction, so that’s merely academic.

Posted by: jj | Aug 15 2005 20:34 utc | 37

gmac, I couldn’t agree more. There’s ever so much bullshit. I’ve never tried homeopathy. While I know people for whom it’s worked, I’ve steered clear.
Further this stuff is very complicated. A scattershot approach as mentioned by gmac above, doesn’t work. I’ve read books written by practitioners who’ve cleaned up my biochemical mess & could never have done it on my own. (Just because the remedies are available over the counter, so that anyone can obtain them, doesn’t mean that anyone knows how to utilize them properly.)
Succintly, to inexpensively maintain a healthy populace:
1)Optimize people’s immune system, so they can fend off most illnesses.
2) Optimize their neuro-chemistry so they feel great. (There are only a handful of places in the country that can do this, though they’re growing.)
3) Build a scientific agriculture system providing people w/quality food to feed their bodies.
4) Minimize the toxins you dump in the environment.
5) Develop a body of knowledgeable practitioners. There are but a handful now.
6) Do what you can as a society to foster the raising of children by loving capable parents – abused children grow into sick adults. (In a longitudinal study of incoming students done by Harvard Med. School, they found that children who weren’t close to either parent almost always had at least one Major, if not lethal, disease by middle age. Those close to one parent had better health; but those close to both parents had far & away the best health.)

Posted by: jj | Aug 16 2005 0:34 utc | 39

Worse than Saddam !

While Saddam’s regime visited death by official execution upon its opponents, the scale of anarchy now existing in Baghdad, Mosul, Basra and other cities is unprecedented. “The July figures are the largest ever recorded in the history of the Baghdad Medical Institute,” a senior member of the management told The Independent.
It is clear that death squads are roaming the streets of a city which is supposed to be under the control of the US military and the American-supported, elected government of Ibrahim al-Jaafari. Never in recent history has such anarchy been let loose on the civilians of this city – yet the Western and Iraqi authorities show no interest in disclosing the details. The writing of the new constitution – or the failure to complete it – now occupies the time of Western diplomats and journalists. The dead, it seems, do not count.

Posted by: DM | Aug 17 2005 2:57 utc | 41

Links help

Posted by: biklett | Aug 17 2005 4:22 utc | 43