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 18 Oct 2005 @ 09:49
You ask why I make my home in the mountain forest,
and I smile, and am silent,
and even my soul remains quiet:
it lives in the other world
which no one owns.
The peach trees blossom.
The water flows.
---Li Po
Within the waters is the entire world;
There is nothing in its depths but reflections of mountains and rivers.
A fish breaks the surface and then disappears again ---
What need is there to borrow the wind and thunder?
---Ingen
The longest journey is the journey inward....
The road to holiness necessarily passes through the world of action.
---Dag Hammarskjold
I'm not asking for sympathy, but I have to tell you I'm practically crazy after spending an hour and a half chasing the major newspapers around in their anticipation of Special Prosecutor Fitzgerald's announcement of possible indictments as early as tomorrow. So I complain if they don't cover these kinds of stories and now I complain if they all do. Google News is showing nearly 1100 entries at this hour, and nearly every one goes after a different angle. However this turns out, it has got to be among the most complicated cases the world ever has seen. Central to the complication, of course, is who's lying, who's mistaken, and who just can't remember. Having gone blank myself sometimes, either in a test or under scrutiny from a superior, I'm trying to empathize. What precisely did I intend with that behavior of mine, so casually performed, nearly 3 years ago? At what point does someone realize he has to shape up his act so that any moment of his life can withstand the public spotlight? My father always advised me to "live above suspicion," words that I've remembered but rebelliously rarely lived by.
It would be most simple to imagine Bush, Cheney and the Iraq Group huddled in a corner planning covert revenge upon Joe Wilson for blasting their WMD plot out of the water. "Of course we can get Karl and Scooter to do the job. Their specialty." Those guys are in the oil business, which clearly is a more comfortable life in these Final Days than any sort of "elected" public service job. (How well we in Ohio understand Iraqis currently wondering where all those Yes votes came from!) But who is there to testify to such a scenario? More and more Americans are finding it easy to imagine, but a case in court it does not make. Let me point out a few sites I thought were significant this morning. I think probably the best summary of where we are appears in today's Washington Post, written by Jim VandeHei and Walter Pincus. More >
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 18 Sep 2005 @ 10:52
The truth is where the truth is, and it's sometimes in the candy store.
---Bob Dylan
I played the wrong wrong notes.
---Thelonious Monk
The path up and down is one and the same.
---Heraclitus
Natures Bounty by Severin Roesen
There are some people in the United States whose faith is shaken in private initiatives to confront various challenges to continued life on this great globe. The news these last few days has been particularly daunting. We need to go through it, and I hope this entry will be helpful to establish your focus in the coming week at least.
Let's begin with the exhaustive chronicle of the Katrina disaster to the Gulf Coast assembled by FactCheck.org on Friday. The group already has edited the timeline twice as additions and corrections have been offered, including one from FEMA. They begin with warnings about the Lake Pontchartrain levees from FEMA itself in July of 2004. Bookmark this one for future reference~~~
[link] More >
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 30 Aug 2005 @ 09:03
just like everybody else in the marketplace reality!
Great faith, great doubt, great determination.
---Three prerequisites for Zen practice
Beyond a certain point there is no return. This point has to be reached.
---Franz Kafka
Nothing's worth noting that is not seen with fresh eyes.
---Basho
The EPA and other agencies have seen an influx of challenges to their scientific findings since the Data Quality Act went into effect in 2002. Logging interests, for example, have challenged several US Forest Service studies relating to habitat protection for the Northern goshawk. (AP Photo)
The Boston Globe
Interrogations
Thanks to a little-known piece of legislation, scientists at the EPA and other agencies find their work questioned not only by industry, but by their own government
By Chris Mooney | August 28, 2005
THE LONGSTANDING FAULT LINE in American life between politics and science has become increasingly unstable of late, drawing headlines on divisive issues ranging from stem cell research to evolution. But there's a subterranean aspect of this conflict that rarely makes the news: the fight over how science is used by government to protect us from health and environmental risks--in short, to regulate.
Some time early next year, a federal appeals court in Virginia is expected to decide a pivotal lawsuit concerning the uses of scientific information in the regulatory arena. Brought by the US Chamber of Commerce and the Salt Institute, an industry trade association, the suit challenges a National Institutes of Health study showing that reduced salt intake lowers blood pressure. But there's far more at stake here than government dietary advice or salt industry profits. At a time when science itself has increasingly become the battleground of choice for determining what regulatory actions the government will take, the case turns on whether such fights will ultimately find their resolution in the courtroom, at the hands of non-expert judges.
In the process, the suit will define the scope of the five-year-old Data Quality Act, a below-the-radar legislative device that defenders of industry have increasingly relied upon to attack all range of scientific studies whose results or implications they disagree with, from government global warming reports to cancer research using animal subjects. On its face, the act merely seeks to ensure the ''quality, objectivity, utility, and integrity" of government information. In practice, as interpreted by the Bush administration, it creates an unprecedented and cumbersome process that saddles agencies with a new workload while empowering businesses to challenge not just government regulations--something they could do anyway--but scientific information that could potentially lead to regulation somewhere down the road. The Data Quality Act, Chamber of Commerce vice president William Kovacs explained in an interview, allows industry to influence the regulatory process from ''the very beginning." More >
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 10 Jun 2005 @ 09:25
In the presence of eternity the mountains are as transient as the clouds.
---Robert Green Ingersoll
One bird sits still
Watching the work of God:
One turning leaf,
Two falling blossoms,
Ten circles upon the pond.
---Thomas Merton
Why, who makes much of a miracle?
As to me I know nothing else but miracles---
To me every hour of night and day is a miracle,
Every cubic inch of space is a miracle.
---Walt Whitman
Bush in Ohio again yesterday.
Photo by Kevin Lamarque/Reuters
My right wing friends may be surprised to learn that since "they dropped (the Downing Street Minutes) out in the middle of (Tony Blair's) race," as Bush angrily put it the other day, I have been replying to emails and message boards about them by urging great caution. I say "surprise" because we on the left always are characterized in panic and hysteria by the right. What I've been writing in reply is that the incriminating evidence in the memo seems to be fixed upon the single word "fix." I just have used the word in that very sentence in a way that gives rather a different meaning than "let's fix the horserace"---or let's do something that will assure we will win and the others lose. Or let's fix the election. Essentially in the UK I think writers of minutes and memos are more likely to use the word "fix" in the sense of "affix" than we are over here in the States. Therefore, I've felt the sense of the memo can be construed to urge its readers to concentrate on finding evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, rather than just make stuff up.
However, now that I've seen both Bush and Blair respond to the issue---and a couple more days have passed---I've decided to get a bit suspicious. Blair and his team did not go into what "fix" might mean in the UK, and Bush just got customarily pissed that anyone would question his tactics. It seems to me this president does not possess the character to entertain either criticism or objection. I think it is the main trait the left finds so dangerous about this guy. He sits there dumb and confused until he gets a message in his ear, and then starts talking, usually derogatorily about a person rather than an issue, eventually gets angry, and then lashes out. There are diagnoses for people like this...and I find it an unnerving kind of personality to be revealed in the most powerful person on earth.
Most of you reading this now subscribe online to Truthout. I hope you send them some money from time to time. (It's easy and you feel so much better.) Truthout sends so much stuff each day that I want to underline the article written yesterday by William Rivers Pitt about the Memo. You might have missed it or, like us, been very busy with daughter graduations and such. His essay is the best summary of the Downing Street Memo that I've seen...and even if you too are cautious about calling the memo the smoking gun or some kind of evidence of chicanery, I think it will do you good to read it...and save it to read again. Have a great weekend! More >
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 26 Feb 2005 @ 11:11
Right is not right; so is not so. If right were really right, it would differ so clearly from not right that there would be no need for argument. If so were really so, it would differ so clearly from not so that there would be no need for argument. Forget the years; forget distinctions. Leap into the boundless and make it your home.
---Chuang-Tzu
The only preparation I can make (for death) is by fulfilling my present duties. This is the everlasting life.
---Ralph Waldo Emerson
The spiritual life is, then, first of all a matter of keeping awake.
---Thomas Merton
La Révolution, 1896
Valentine Cameron Prinsep
I confess I was caught flat-footed yesterday afternoon when a TruthOut update hit my mailbox containing a bulletin William Pitt had sent out the evening before. I scarcely took time to read it all until this morning so even though I can find absolutely no mention of this in the media or even most of the sites and blogs still awake to the issue, it may be old news to some of you. This is about Election 2004 and the Ohio Recount which most of us thought was dead and gone...and I must say I haven't even visited many of the sites in a long time and my whole computer research system on this stuff is rusty and in disarray. But guess who still is awake and watching! Kerry-Edwards. More >
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