Dowbrigade

CAPE
CANAVERAL, Fla. – A riskier-than-usual space walk outside the International
Space Station was cut short last night because of a malfunction that
left one of the two crewmen with a warm, damp space suit.

Russian cosmonaut Alexander Kaleri made it safely back inside despite the problem.

from Newsday

A security screener at Denver International Airport was reprimanded for
sending his body through an X-ray machine.

"The screener went through the X-ray machine voluntarily," Fierberg
said. "I cannot ascribe any sort of motive to why anyone would do this."

The screener, who was working at a passenger checkpoint, was disciplined, he
said. Fierberg wouldn’t release the screener’s name or the exact nature of the
discipline.

"The screener in question did not jeopardize the safety of any passengers
or aircraft," he
said. "But it was clearly behavior that is not acceptable.

"We expect more from our screeners and, by and large, they are a highly
trained
work force."

from the
Rocky Mountain News

Hopefully
this will not catch on in the United States, at least at the Presidential
level. Actually, at the state and local level it might provide
revealing insights into some candidates. With this kind of exposure,
perhaps more young people can be turned on to politics. Maybe this is
something we should look at more closely…

BUDAPEST (Reuters) – A Hungarian TV hostess sat naked Wednesday to announce she
is running for a seat in the European Parliament as candidate of the upstart
Union Party.

Anettka Feher, with close-cropped black hair, sat atop a table, legs crossed,
displaying her petite and muscular body wearing nothing but a shy smile and some
jewelry.

She believes disappointment with the political establishment will give her enough
votes to secure a Brussels seat in the June elections.

Hungary joins the EU on May 1 and has been allotted 24 seats in the European
Parliament.
Anettka, who does not give her age but who media have estimated is about 30,
rejects comparisons with Ilona Staller, a former Italian pornstar of Hungarian
extraction, better known as Cicciolina, who was famed for baring her breasts
during a successful campaign for a seat in the Italian parliament with the Radical
Party in 1987.

"If they (Hungarian mainstream politicians) think I am just another Cicciolina,
they are in for a big surprise: I am smart, and I have a daily four-hour presence
on a national television channel," Anettka said.

from Reuters

A New York priest arrested after allegedly harassing a
Brooklyn bishop has confessed to stealing $50,000 from a church.

Detectives recovered a bag filled with $88,000 in cash during a search
of John Johnston’s apartment in Queens.

They also found an assortment of Second World War uniforms and backpacks,
busts of Nazi leaders, a collection of both gay and straight pornography
and an illegal handgun.

As part of a deal with prosecutors, Johnston pleaded guilty to criminal
possession of stolen property and will be sentenced to five years’ probation
when he returns to court April 16.

The 64-year-old priest has also agreed to pay $50,000 in restitution
to St Martin of Tours church on Long Island – where he had served for
25 years.

from Ananova

What
would motivate a baseball announcer turned restaurant to pay $113,842
for a baseball that represented one of the most painful and frustrating
sports moments of his career? And, after paying all that money, what
could motivate him to atomize that investment by subjecting it to intense
pressure, fire and explosives in a bulletproof tank on live television?

If the Restaurateur is the cross-culturally named Harry Carey, and
the baseball in question is the infamous Bartman Ball (for any foreign
readers not familiar with our national pastime, we are not making
up these names), the motivation is at least understandable.

Together with the Red Sox (there, we finally typed those six fateful
letters, and our computer didn’t crash) the Cubs are suffering from a
Baseball Curse which has kept them from the World Series since 1945.  This
year they came within one out of the Big Prize, failing due to fan Steve
Bartman reaching into the field of play and deflecting the baseball in
question.
According to Cubs fans, the baseball itself is cursed, and must be destroyed
to dissolve the curse. 

What ridiculousness! Who, in this modern age of digital enlightenment,
believes in such a thing as curses? Rumors to the contrary, the fact
that the Dowbrigade is taking a Babe Ruth Red Sox jersey down to Ecuador
next month, and into the territory
of the Huaorani indians, to attend a rarely performed ceremony with
a powerful blind Shaman featuring spiritual defenestration by powerful
psychic purgatives is purely part of our amateur anthropological research.

The cursed ball was pampered in its final hours.  It was feted
in a luxury hotel suite, featured this morning on the Today Show, and
presented
with a sumptuous last meal. Tonight, on live TV in Chicago, it will be
atomized. Hey, whatever works.

from CNN

Haiti
has long seemed an abandoned outpost of the Dark Continent encrusted
on the bucolic blue Caribbean. From our studies we know it to be, together
with indigenous Bolivia, the poorest countries in the Western Hemisphere,
with all of the attendant ills that accompany extreme poverty; disease,
malnutrition, retardation, chronic mismanagement…the list goes depressingly
on and on.

On the brighter side Haiti has always had a special place in the
heart of Anthropologists and Ethnobotanists for its role at the heart
of one of the great emergent religions, Voudou, and its unique tradition
of Shamanism mind control (Zombieism). Some landmark ethnographic
works have some out of that mysterious isle.

Be that as it may, currently a bloody new chapter is being written
to the Haitian tragedy  In a completely uninformed but intuitive
way, we are getting the feeling that the major media coverage of what
is going on leaves MUCH to be desired.  Like, who are really the
good guys? Which side to the remains of the Duvalier gang support?
What do ordinary people like us, teachers, writers, flower shop owners,
think of what is going on?  What do the Haitian Bloggers have
to say? Are there any Haitian bloggers? Anyone knowing of an authentic
voice from INSIDE Haiti please post a comment, and we will pass it
on.

We have not been able to find any , so far. What we DID come
across, which the major media had not mentioned so far as we know,
was a number of accusations that the US, in the form of the CIA, was
supporting, training and arming the rebels aiming to bring down President
Aristide.

Wait a minute!  Didn’t we INVADE  Haiti specifically to
put Aristide INTO power. Yes, well, it wouldn’t be the first
time we have turned on one of our pawns or puppets, as the situation
changes and our priorities switch. After all, that was a different
government altogether – the Clinton regime. And it wouldn’t be the
first time we participated in a coup d’etad in Haiti, either. More
like the eighth, at least.  As far as we know. Up until now.

Meanwhile,
in some sort of perverse game of life-or-death tag, we keep retuning
desperate boat people to a fate worse than death on that Devil’s
Island, while friendly freedom fighters from nearby Cuba are free to
stay,
as long as they can get one foot inbounds, on dry land, before they
get flagged by the Coast Guard. Is it any wonder most Cuban Americans are Republicans. What a great country!

One independent news source covering this story from outside the lines
is called Democracy
Now. We haven’t had time yet to evaluate their track
record on the issues and the truth, so take the following with at least
as much skepticism as you reserve for Dan Rather.

The US lawyer representing the government of Haiti charged today that
the US government is directly involved in a military coup attempt against
the country’s democratically elected President, Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

Ira Kurzban, the Miami-based attorney who has served as General Counsel
to the Haitian government since 1991, said that the paramilitaries fighting
to overthrow Aristide are being backed by Washington.

from DemocracyNow

On
Valentine’s Day, nothing says "I love you" like oral sex.
It’s a great way to express your appreciation or love for someone.

First off, pick a place and a position.

Thus begins a graphic "how
to" guide on performing a sex
act, published by the student newspaper at Northern Arizona University,
appropriately named "The
Lumberjack". University administrators are flummoxed,
and stalling for time, with a meeting to deal with the scandal set
for next week.

The article is actually quite entertaining if a bit clinical, and includes
culturally obscure gems like " And as Stifler showed us in "American
Pie II," the prostate is very sensitive."

Many questions spring
to mind. Is Northern Arizona a public univeristy or private? How much
is in-state tuition? (After reading this our interested-in-nothing
son may come around) Is this the sort of thing the "H-Bomb" wants
to publish at Harvard? Are lumberjacks and jackettes any good at oral
sex? Are they expecting a rise in their applicants as a result of all this exposure?

Article from AP

Complete
Oral Sex article from "The
Lumberjack"

The Dowbrigade has long maintained that the George Bush Fairy Tale Presidency
was just that, and that after George’s bedtime the grownups come over
the house and truly do the nation’s bidness.

It is clear to us that Dick Cheney,
the putative VP normally found hanging by his heels at an "undisclosed
location" and as hard to pin down as a blob of mercury on a teflon trampoline,
is the
principal
power behind the throne, although it is conceivably true that he in turn
is merely fronting for a further ring of powers so shadowy that their
real names have never passed the lips of a single member of the press
or public.

On the other hand, until recently we believed that holding these opinions
thrust up onto the outer fringes of American political discourse, with
the Area 51 Troopers and the Larouche Loonies. Well, check out Robert
Kutter’s featured editorial in today’s Boston Globe.

DICK CHENEY is the most powerful vice president in US history. Indeed, there
is a fair amount of circumstantial evidence that Cheney, not Bush, is the real
power at the White House and Bush the figurehead.

Though Bush is already on record that he wants to keep Cheney as his
running mate this November, I would not be at all surprised if Cheney
were dropped from the Republican ticket. For one thing, Cheney could
become a real liability.

from the Boston Globe

When the Dowbrigade was a kid, one of his fascinations was for medieval
warfare; suits of armor, the evolution of broadswords,halberds and crossbows,
and of course, the WMD’s of the age, the catapult.  Awesome weapons.  In
an era when the dominant technology for thousands of years had favored
the evolution of ever more massive fortresses, defenses based on unscalable
walls and uncrossable moats, catapults offered a way to attack from
the air, terrible pestilent rain that presaged all of terrible tools
of modern warfare.

The New York Times has a pretty cool article concerning an aspect of
the catapult phenomena we had never really considered; as a manifestation
of the intersection between science and politics….

In
wars of antiquity, no weapon struck greater terror than the catapult.
It was the heavy artillery of that day, the sturdy springboard that shot
menacing payloads over fortress walls and into enemy camps – flaming
missiles, diseased corpses, lethal arrows and stony projectiles.

For centuries on end, at least until the proliferation of gunpowder in the 15th-century
West, catapults saw action as the early weapons of mass destruction. They were
prized assets in an arms race and had profound effects on affairs of state. Sound
familiar?

Perhaps that is why a small but growing number of historians and classics scholars
are taking a closer look at the role of catapults not only in warfare, but also
the politics of antiquity. Out of their careful re-reading of old texts, combined
with archaeological finds, has emerged a revised view of the convergence of science
and political power in earlier times.

from the New
York Times

Anyone with a more than passing knowledge of the US tax system and
the Federal budget realizes that the far majority of government spending
comes directly from the paychecks of US workers. In fact, businesses
and corporations, whose total incomes actually exceed the total incomes
of all of America’s workers, account for LESS THAN 10% of total US taxes
collected. This is down from about a quarter of all tax receipts 50 years
ago.

If the business of America is Business, how come the businesses pay
so little of the operating costs for the ongoing operation of our national
enterprise? Could it have anything to do with corporate sponsorship of
the political system, soft-money funding of lawmakers campaigns, constant
and concerted lobbying to reduce the tax load on companies or the efforts
of legions of lawyers and MBAs to create, discover and exploit loopholes,
shelters and technically legal scams to save big bucks for business?

An informative article in today’s Boston
Globe details how globalization,
outsourcing and job migration are further degrading the government’s
ability to collect a fair share of taxes from businesses and corporations.

When a company moves part of their operation off-shore, be it manufacturing,
assembly, distribution or services, the resulting production is still
part of the Gross National Product, as it has been created by a US entity.  However,
it is usually subject to the local, non-US tax system, and unless the
final profits are repatriated the US government can’t get their hands
on any of the resulting cash flow. 

For this reason, not only is Bermuda, with its 3% effective corporate
tax rate, an attractive haven, but seemingly reputable countries like
Holland (8.9%), Luxembourg (0.9%) and Ireland (7.5%) can represent billions
in savings for companies which manage to locate some of their profit
centers there.

There are several "legal" techniques for relocating profit centers to
countries with lower tax rates. An American company can transfer a trademark
or copyright to a foreign affiliate
so that all of the profit generated by that intellectual property is
taxed at a low rate.  The American mother company can sell its products
at low or no profit to a foreign subsidiary which then sells them on
the local market or re-exports them to a third country at a hefty markup,
leaving the resulting profit to be taxed at the lower foreign rate.

As further evidence of the sacrifice of patriotism to profits, the Globe
reports that nearly half of the $233 billion US corporations earned abroad
in 2001 were never brought back to the US where they could be taxed,
but instead were held in foreign tax havens.

Commerce Department data from December illustrate the challenge facing
tax officials. The figures show that corporate earnings held in offshore
tax havens like Luxembourg or the Cayman Islands have doubled over the
last 15 years. Those two countries have tax rates of 0.9 percent and
5.2 percent, respectively, compared with 28 to 35 percent in the United
States.

from the Boston Globe