Dowbrigade

A major research institution has just announced the
discovery of the heaviest element yet known to science. The new element
has been named "Governmentium." Governmentium has one neutron,
12 assistant neutrons, 75 deputy neutrons, and 224 deputy assistant neutrons,
giving it an atomic mass of 311. These 311 particles are held together
by forces called morons, which are surrounded by vast quantities of lepton-like
particles called peons. Because Governmentium has no electrons, it is
inert. However, it can be detected as it impedes every reaction with
which it comes into contact. A minute amount of Governmentium causes
one reaction to take over 4 days to complete when it would normally take
less than a second. Governmentium has a normal half-life of 4 years;
it does not decay, but instead undergoes a reorganization in which a
portion of the assistant neutrons and deputy neutrons exchange places.
In fact, Governmentium’s mass will actually increase over time because
each reorganization will cause more morons to become neutrons, forming
isodopes. This characteristic of moron-promotion leads some scientists
to believe that Governmentium is formed whenever morons reach a certain
quantity in concentration. This hypothetical quantity is referred to
as "Critical Morass." When catalyzed with money, Governmentium
becomes Administratium, an element that radiates just as much energy
because it has 1/2 as many peons but twice as many morons.

Robert Kraft (L) and Rupert Murdoch watched President
Vladimir Putin try on the Patriots ring before he pocketed it. (Kommersant
Photo / Dmitry Azarov

Slick move, Vlad…

The owner of the New England Patriots, Robert Kraft,
is missing his 2005 Super Bowl ring, and the bauble appears to have been
pocketed by President Putin of Russia.

That is the story that was being pieced together yesterday evening following
a report in the Russian press and buzz from an e-mail. In that message,
a consultant related details from a businessman who was present at a
meeting last weekend between a group of American executives and the steely
ex-KGB agent to talk about investment in Russia. According to the account
contained in the e-mail and elaborated on to The New York Sun by several
sources, Mr. Kraft made the mistake of pulling the diamond-encrusted,
14-karat, white-gold Super Bowl ring off his hand to give his host a
closer look.

It was the last time, according to these sources, that the owner of the
New England Patriots football team saw the ring, a gaudy piece of jewelry
that could easily be sold on eBay at the cost of a small yacht and that
its proud owner may not have wished to part with permanently at any price.

from the New York Sun

As
the debacles mount and desperation begins to spread in the administration,
the Dowbrigade is growing increasingly nervous
over the lengths to which the Bush junta is willing to go to perpetuate
their endangered vision of the the future of this country. After a brief
triumphant idyll following the November elections, the state of the nation
and the all-important public image of the administration have deteriorated
far faster than even the gloom-meisters of the left could have predicted.

The American people are growing rapidly weary of the
spirit-sapping shooting gallery to which we are subjecting our best and
bravest young men and women. The US military exists and is trained to
attack and obliterate America’s enemies, not to subjugate and police
a hostile and resentful foreign population. To force them to do so, as
a tool to prevail in a family feud and protect the interests of the energy
industry, is a crass, treasonous perfidy, and a grave disservice to the
millions of Americans who have served their country in honorable wars
over the last 240 years.  This is especially true at a time when
we have numerous true enemies, stated and stateless, plotting to destroy
us and our way of life. In a sick and deadly symmetry, many of these
enemies are safely ensconced within countries which are nominally our
allies.

Meanwhile, at home the searing, instinctual patriotism
which broke out from sea to shining sea after 9/11 is showing signs of
fraying, fading, and falling into disrepute. Americans, so recently shocked
into unfocused rage and ready for sacrifice, have lost the thread and
slipped back to somnambulance, more emotionally invested in the latest
missing person case or celebrity trial than the survival of our way of
life.

This has made increasingly difficult the profound transformation
of American society planned and put into motion by the neo-con cabal
which has taken over the executive branch.  Their bold initiatives
to exert control over public and private education, privatize social
security and other social net programs, keep track of where we go, what
we buy,
what
we
read, who we communicate with and what we publish, to outlaw gay marriage
and abortion, and to install Christian fundamentalism as the national
religion of the United States is starting to stutter and stall as more
and more Americans are reminded of the values that made this country
great; private prerogative, rugged individualism, personal freedom, separation
of church and state, and government non-intervention in the private
lives of its citizens.

What must George Bush be thinking as he watches his
grand schemes unravel? Is he looking for a master stroke, a game-saving
play, a trick to turn the tide of history? Unfortunately, the only thing
we can imagine which could quickly alter each of these situation in
his favor would be another catastrophic terrorist strike within the American
homeland.

Another terrorist strike would instantly divert national
media attention away from Iraq and back onto the battle at home.  Especially
if it was some kind of slow-developing threat, more like the anthrax
attacks than the WTC, it would grip the country round the clock and from
Alaska
to Key West. Although it would not in fact do so, it would in the public
mind make a connection between the terrorists and the Bush war in the
Middle East. The administration would spin it as proof that we are in
a life and death struggle with an international terrorist network, the
same people who are attacking our soldiers in Iraq.

At home, the fear-fueled panic that our cherished and
privileged life style is in danger will again awaken blind patriotism
and support for the President. People will be scared, insecure and react
with anger and aggression against anyone in a turban.

As a result, the Bush program will go forward, with
a vengeance. Patriot Act II will make the first version look like a regulation
against loitering
at the mall. The administration will be able to move against its real
enemies; domestic defenders of outdated concepts like privacy and governmental
transparency. Due to its penetration by agents of the enemy, the government
will be forced to regulate and police the blogosphere.

How long will the administration be able to wait for
the next terrorist attack? Given the proven perfidy and absolute conviction
of the righteousness of their plan and their right to impose it on the
rest of us, is it such a stretch to imagine that some dark conspiracy
within a cabal behind a curtain has had percolating, for years now, a
desperate contingency to produce an untraceable but attributable attack
on America at a crucial moment, for the good of the country?

We firmly believe that somewhere in a basement room
or an out-of -the-way storage space, there are dastardly, perhaps unwitting
agents of the powers that be, waiting for a whispered word from a friend
of a friend of an aide to some sub-secretary in some obscure branch of
the swelling security apparatus, that the time has come to save America
from herself. The darker things look for the Bush war abroad, the more
nervous we should be about a catastrophic breach of security here at
home.

ALBANY – A 45-year-old Gardiner, Maine, man was arrested
Sunday on criminal trespass charges after a teenage girl found him staring
at her from below an outhouse seat, police said.

Police pulled Gary Moody from the waste tank under a log cabin outhouse
off the Kancamagus Highway at about 12:30 p.m. Sunday.

"We had to decontaminate him," said Capt. Jon Hebert of the Carroll
County Sheriff’s Department, adding that firefighters hosed the man down
before police handcuffed him.

"We treated him as if he were hazardous material," Hebert said.

Moody, 45, of Nash Road in Gardiner, was arrested Sunday in the area of
the Lower Falls off the Kancamagus Highway in the White Mountain National
Forest, a popular swimming hole. He was charged with criminal trespass.
Police said he may face additional charges.

Carroll County Sheriff’s Department investigating officer Jon Hebert could
not be reached immediately yesterday for comment.

Moody is free on $250 personal recognizance bail and is scheduled to answer
the criminal trespass charge at 8:30 a.m. on July 19 in the District Court
of Northern Carroll County.

According to papers on file at the court, Moody has owned the Winsor Convenience
Store in Winsor, Maine, for the past four years and has a previous drunk
driving conviction.

We guess this guy likes it down and dirty….

from the New Hampshire Union Leader

”You will hear people more foolish than wicked say
‘Our country, right or wrong,’ but that is a false patriotism and bad
Americanism. When our country is wrong she is worse than other countries
when they are wrong, for she has more light than other countries, and
we somehow ought to make her feel that we are sorry and ashamed for her."

American literary lion William Dean Howells,
in 1912

******

”They’ve never been treated better and they’ve never
been more comfortable in their lives."

Duncan
Hunter, Republican
of California, to a group of journalists two weeks ago, offering
as a prop a plate of oven-fried chicken, one
of the entrees served to inmates at Guantanamo.

******

”You self-medicate, and you try not to get sick. Somebody’s
got some old medicine hanging around? Give it to me! That’s how you do
it."

Kathryn
Cunningham, unemployed case manager

The Dowbrigade votes for Kathryn.  She’s got
it right, and in the right order….

all quotes from the Boston Globe

Our
old college buddy and ethnobotanist Wade
Davis wrote the book on Haitian Zombie Powder (The
Serpent and the Rainbow). Now, scientists in Pittsburg, of all places,
have peeled back the veil of death and refused to let dead dogs lie. They
predict that human resusitation is just around the corner. Jesus may soon
lose his monopoly on this rising from the dead stuff…

SCIENTISTS have created eerie zombie dogs, reanimating the canines after
several hours of clinical death in attempts to develop suspended animation
for humans.

US scientists have succeeded in reviving the dogs after three hours of
clinical death, paving the way for trials on humans within years.

Pittsburgh’s Safar Centre for Resuscitation Research has developed a technique
in which subject’s veins are drained of blood and filled with an ice-cold
salt solution.

The animals are considered scientifically dead, as they stop breathing
and have no heartbeat or brain activity.

But three hours later, their blood is replaced and the zombie dogs are
brought back to life with an electric shock.

Plans to test the technique on humans should be realised within a year,
according to the Safar Centre.

from News.com.au

In
the 1960′s John C. Lilly pioneered
the concept of the human brain as an organic computer, executing set
behavioral progrrams when presented
with certain situations. In his seminal paper, "Programming
and Metaprogramming in the Human Biocomputer", he asserted that an individual
can gain control of the "meta-programs" which determine which behavioral
routines are called up in distinct situations.

Now researchers at Cornel University are claiming to
have gone beyond the cybernetic model in which comprehension takes place
in steps or stages, and have determined that "Instead, the mind should
be thought of more as
working
the way
biological
organisms
do: as a dynamic continuum, cascading through shades of grey."

In a new study published online this week in Proceedings
of the National Academy of Sciences (June 27-July 1), Michael Spivey,
a psycholinguist and associate professor of psychology at Cornell, tracked
the mouse movements of undergraduate students while working at a computer.
The findings provide compelling evidence that language comprehension
is a continuous process.

"For decades, the cognitive and neural sciences have treated mental processes
as though they involved passing discrete packets of information in
a strictly feed-forward fashion from one cognitive module to the next or
in a string of individuated binary symbols — like a digital computer," said
Spivey. "More recently, however, a growing number of studies,
such as ours, support dynamical-systems approaches to the mind. In
this model,
perception and cognition are mathematically described as a continuous
trajectory through a high-dimensional mental space; the neural activation
patterns flow back and forth to produce nonlinear, self-organized,
emergent properties — like a biological organism."

How does this relate to Continuous
Partial Attention?

From Cornell
University News Services

Skirting
that fine line between inspirational and sick….

VALENCIA CA – It is a story
of strength, courage and determination in Valencia. A
15-year-old boy overcomes incredible odds, to play football.

Like other athletic 15-year-olds, Chris Gonzalez is getting himself ready
for football glory at Valencia High School. But unlike other student
athletes, Chris
is a defensive lineman with no legs.

ABC7 Eyewitness News talked with Chris today and learned that when he was three
his legs were amputated above the knees because of severe complications from
chickenpox.

We watched as Chris practiced balancing on his foot-long stumps and using his
arms to race across the field. Amazingly, his determination enables him to keep
up with the other players.

Chris told Eyewitness News’ reporter Leo Stallworth that at first his mom didn’t
want him to play football. He said, "She was worried I’d get hurt."

The young teen does not want to be treated like a special person. He says he
just wants to play football and be part of the team.

According to the
video report, Chris also plays varsity
basketball, and has a dynamite three-point shot.

from Channel
7 ABC Los Angeles

Giant
Red Erection Wilts in Big Apple Sun

"What
was unsettling was that the fluid just kept coming," Stuart Claxton
of the Guinness Book of World Records told the Daily News.

A
25-foot, 17-ton ice pop made of the supposed "best stuff on Earth" melted
in the New York sun yesterday – turning Union Square into a river of
Kiwi-Strawberry Snapple.

Bicyclists wiped out in the stream of goo. Pedestrians slipped. Traffic
was, well, frozen.

Snapple officials had hoped to get in the Guinness Book of World Records
and promote their new line of ice treats.

Instead, New Yorkers got a first-of-its-kind, first-day-of-summer mess.

"It was a big boo-boo," said Kizzy Vazquez, 28, of Manhattan,
as she watched the mammoth pink pop ooze while someone with a sick
sense
of humor blasted "Cruel Summer" over a sound system. "They
should have had that [up] before the sun came out."

from the
Daily News

PASADENA, California — The Cosmos solar sail is missing
shortly after its launch from a Russian nuclear submarine.

The $4 million Cosmos 1 spacecraft blasted off atop a converted Russian
missile at approximately 12:46 p.m. Pacific Time on Tuesday, but ground
tracking stations failed to pick up its signal after an initial burst of
data, according to mission controllers.

The U.S. Strategic Command, which monitors launches, also could not detect the
spacecraft at its expected position in orbit.

"The news is not good," said Cosmos 1 project operations manager Jim
Cantrell. "On
the other hand, we do not have direct evidence of a failure" It’s worrisome
and it’s not what we hoped to have happen."

One wonders exactly why they decided to launch the thing
from a Russian missle submarine. It was probably on special…

from Wired News

From top left: Jim Stubchaer (1949); Bill Volkmer (1955);
Martin Schall (2000); Graffiti V?rit? (2002); Ladytribe (2003); Amy McKenzie
(March 2004, May 2004); Aaron Bocanegra (July 2004); Cassidy Curtis (August
2004).

A Tunnel’s Tale A historical photo of the Belmont Tunnel
in Los Angeles, 1949, top left. The award-winning Web site Graffiti
Archaeology traces the tunnel’s evolution from 1955, top center. From
top right:
the shifting look from 2000 through August 2004, bottom right.

The creator of the site, Cassidy Curtis, a San Francisco
animator in his 30′s, isn’t just being cute when he calls it "graffiti
archaeology." It really is archaeology. You start at the surface
and then peel away layers to look into the past. When you choose one
of the locales and pick which wall you want to see, you are shown a recent
photograph first. Then you can move backward in time or hop around, using
a timeline at the bottom of the page. You can also zoom in to see details
and navigate around the surface of the walls.

from the New
York Times

Graffiti
Archeology web site

Note and use the zoom and pan controls on the lower left. Access may be difficult due to heavy traffic.