Dowbrigade

WORCESTER, Mass. (AP) The inmate who strangled child-molesting
priest John Geoghan was convicted of murder Wednesday after failing to
convince a jury he was delusional when he killed one of the central figures
in the Boston Archdiocese sex scandal.

Joseph Druce, 40, was given a mandatory sentence of life in prison without parole.

After hearing the verdict, he looked at the jury that rejected his insanity
defense
and said, "It’s all right. Good job." As the jurors filed out of the
courtroom, he said: "No hard feelings. Have a good night."

Have the book/screenplay rights to this story been sold yet? The book
would write itself. How did these two extraordinary individuals come
to that final fatal jail cell that August night in 2003, when Druce talked
his way into Geogan’s cell (with jail personnel complicity, he claims),
somehow jimmied the cell door and lock so it couldn’t be opened, and
the savagely beat the pedophile, jumped off the bunk onto his chest,
and strangled him with stretched out socks.

The book would flash back and forth from chapter
to chapter with the back stories of these two iconic figures. Druce,
savagely beaten on a regular basis by his sadistic father and sexually
molested
by a family friend as
a child,
grew into
a violent
schizophrenic with a pathological hatred of gays and child abusers.
Geogan, the sick poster boy of pedophile Priests was allowed by the church
to scar hundreds of lives as he was shuffled from parish to parish
and covered
for
by
Catholic authorities.

As a young adult Druce drifted into White Supremacy
groups and repeated incarceration. At the time he killed Geogan he
was already serving life without parole for beating to death a gay man
he claimed had made sexual advances towards him. In a state without a
death penalty, he must have figured he had little to lose and something
to gain.

As a young priest, Geogan was successively assigned to Blessed Sacrament
parish in Saugus; St. Bernard’s parish in Concord; St. Paul’s parish
in Hingham; St. Andrew’s parish in Jamaica Plain; St. Brendan’s parish
in Dorchester; and finally St. Julia’s parish in Weston and got Church-sponsored
therapy from a variety of private psychoanalysts and psychotherapists,
as well as at St. Lukes Institute in Maryland; the Institute of Living
in Hartford and Southdown Institute in Ontario. In all, he was accused
of molesting over 130 kids, although he was only convicted on one count.

And then fate brought them together at the Souza-Baranowski Correctional
Center in Shirley, Massachusetts, and one man’s sick compulsion put an
end to another’s. All sorts of questions of justice, karma and gruesome
fate are raised but few are answered. What forces brought these two men
together? What forces made them what they were? Was the outcome inevitable?
Were one or both of them insane? Are the authorities complicit?

Coming soon to a bookstore near you, or at least to Court TV………

from the Boston Globe

The back pain has been with 32-year-old Laura Tibbitts ever since
she was thrown from a horse eight years ago sometimes a dull ache, sometimes
a sharp stab, yet always there.

But recently, she found some relief using what may be the highest-tech
pain treatment there is: Strapped into an MRI scanner, she was able to
watch the activity levels in a part of her brain that helps control the
perception of pain. By watching that direct feedback from her brain, she
trained herself to moderate the pain.

Tibbitts, a conference coordinator at Stanford University, was participating
in a new study that found that when people could see their own brains at
work, they gained new control over their pain.

Though still highly experimental and not likely to become available for
several years, the method offers hope of a new option for the estimated
50 million Americans who suffer chronic pain.

The brain-watching method, now being explored in the Boston area and elsewhere,
could also offer a variety of other benefits for stroke patients, dyslexics,
and others, said imaging scientists.

The brain-watching method, which used to be called
bio-feedback, was being practiced in the Boston area by the Dowbrigade
and others 30 years ago. In an undergraduate
course in the then recently invented field of Psychophysiology – the relationship
and interface between mind and body – we actually built a bio-feedback rig
of our own out of parts we bought at Radio Shack and lifted from Stillman
Infirmary, and which we used to run a number of interesting experiments.
At the time, however, we were
more interested in studying pleasure than pain. Some things just keep getting
discovered, again and again, like the 10th planet in the solar system.

from the Boston Globe

Adding
insult to injury, not only did the Dowbrigade nearly die during our latest
Latin American expedition, but our iBook
AND our iPod DID die, at most inopertune moments, and we miss them both.

The iBook, which is now on its third logic board under
the Apple extended warranty, started experiencing video problems in Peru, spontaneously
exhibiting psychedelic colored bar codes and screen static. followed
by freezes.  It
got to the point where the machine started up, but the screen stayed
blank. We
managed to mount it as an external drive on another Mac and transfer
all our essential files, including the photos and videos from the first
two weeks
of our
trip, and upon our release from the hospital turned it in to our neighborhood
Apple service center. It has since been sent on to Apple, so who knows
how or when
it will
return.

The iPod’s passing is even more tragic. At 13 months,
our 4th generation 20GB clickwheel model is 30 days out of warranty.  During
our recent illness and hospitalization, it was buried in our suitcase. When
we tried to turn it on after 3 weeks, it just gave us the
sad pod screen. We tried USB, Firewire, direct current charge, resetting
and restoring, but all we get is the sad pod. Indeed.

Apple seems to have a battery replacement program
for $66. There are third parties who offer either a battery replacement
kit or a "send us your iPod and in one week we’ll send it back
with a new battery" offer for about half of that. They claim
their batteries are 25-30% stronger than the Apple batteries. The only
disadvantage we can see of the third party solution is that it
voids
the Apple warranty, which has expired anyway.

We are investigating. Unfortunately, it is
probably too late to get anything done before we go in for our surgery
in two weeks. With any luck, however, the laptop will be back by then
.

Actors having real sex in art-house movies.
Erstwhile child star Lindsay Lohan appearing barely clad on the cover
of her new album. Teenage girls strolling down Main Street USA attired
in ”Porn Star" T-shirts. A bikini-wearing Jessica Simpson bumping
and grinding in the music video for ”These Boots Are Made for Walkin.’
" College-age women flashing for the ”Girls Gone Wild" video
series with nonchalant exhibitionism.

from the Boston
Globe

What’s not to like? Obviously, this is a good start,
but there’s lots more work to do. More offices need to adopt "Clothing
Optional" workplace rules. Maybe "underwear only" Fridays.
Trystiing nooks in parks and public spaces for impulsive coupling. Reserved
space on cable systems for The S & M Channel, The Transgender Channel
and The Bukaki Channel. Naked reality shows and a Sex Toys Home Shopping
Channel. Animal Sex Orientations down at Angel Memorial. a Vibrator Aisle at Target, Kama Sutra Barbie
Doll sets. Tantric Sex programs included in our HMO coverage. Alternative
payment plans for goods and services in mutually amenable sex acts.

Oh my, don’t get us started. We’ll be thinking of
the possibilities all day……

A
military jury recommended a simple reprimand Monday for an Army officer
who killed an Iraqi general by stuffing him headfirst into a sleeping
bag and sitting on his chest during an interrogation.

As soldiers applauded in the courtroom, Chief Warrant Officer Lewis Welshofer
Jr. hugged his wife after hearing the surprisingly light sentence, which
will be reviewed by Fort Carson’s commander, Maj. Gen. Robert W. Mixon.

Welshofer, 43, was charged with murder, but was convicted over the weekend
of negligent homicide and negligent dereliction of duty that carried a
penalty of up to three years and three months in prison, a dishonorable
discharge, loss of pension and other penalties. The murder charge carried
a potential sentence of life in prison. Instead, Welshofer faces no jail
time, the forfeiture of $6,000 in salary and what amounts largely to a
restriction to his barracks for 60 days.

Wait a minute, didn’t a bunch of religious fanatics just get life
for doing the same thing to an 11-year-old girl who was possessed by the
devil? Guess they should have claimed the girl was possessed by the spirit
of an Iraqi general….

from the AP

MOSCOW – Russia’s main intelligence agency on Monday
accused four British diplomats of spying _ using electronic equipment
hidden inside a fake rock in
a park _ as well as funneling funds to non-governmental organizations.

The announcement came a day after state television channel Rossiya broadcast
footage purportedly showing four British Embassy staff using electronic
equipment concealed in the rock in Moscow to receive intelligence from
Russian agents.Rossiya said the diplomats had downloaded information
onto handheld computers from the electronic gadget hidden in the rock,
a process that worked at a distance of up to 65 feet and took only one
or two seconds.

Among the diplomats named in the television broadcast were Marc Doe and
Paul Crompton. Both are listed in British Embassy directories provided
to the media as working in the embassy’s political section. Interfax identified
the two others as Andrew Fleming and Christopher Pirt, but they weren’t
in the directories.

Doe, Crompton, Fleming and Pirt! John LeCarre couldn’t
have come up with more perfect spy guy names. And rocks with ears! "Q"
would be proud. Or maybe not, considering the ensuing scandal. It’s
nice to see that Her Majesty’s Secret Service, like its American cousins,
is continuing the post-WWII tradition of labyrinthine bungling and lack,
not so much of intelligence, but rather of common sense. We hear the
CIA uses extremely realistic dog turds, with DuPont-developed pheromones
designed
to discourage
investigation. Inadvertent disposal, however, can be a problem.

As to the "Fake Rock", the Dowbrigade had exactly
the same model 25 years ago, except it cost $7.95 and was called "Super
Secure Stash"….

from AP

TUCSON, ARIZ. — The world’s first face-transplant
recipient is using her new lips to take up smoking again, which doctors
fear could interfere with healing and raise the risk of tissue rejection.

"It is a problem," acknowledged Dr. Jean-Michel Dubernard, who
led the team that performed the pioneering transplant in France on Nov.
27.

from AP

Creepy Question of the Day: Did the donor smoke?

Any kind of a life crisis – medical, emotional, financial
or existential – imbues one with a renewed appreciation of life’s
simple pleasures.  Like the morning newspaper. It may be sacrilegious
for a "new media" guy to say, but there is no electronic pleasure comparable
to crawling out of bed in a dim dewy dawn light, stumbling bleary-eyed
to the front door, and finding there, waiting every single morning, the
feast for the senses that is the Our Daily Paper. Not our ONLY daily
paper, of course, but our first-borne.

A feast for all the senses, in a sense electronic media
will never be. The sight of the rolled up compilation of the newsworthy
essence of the day, wrapped in one or more layers of translucent blue
protective plastic (depending on the weather), festooned with fonts,
figures, line drawings and full-color photos from front to back, oozing
with information, advertising, and multiple nuggets of knowledge, humor
and occasional wisdom is what convinces us we’ve survived to see another
day..  We drink in the
smell of fresh newsprint, mere hours from the house-sized
monster presses, and the biodegradable vegetable dye ink. We luxurate
in the tactile feel of those 80 or 100 pages, foldable, clipable, wrapable,
portable
material,
which in addition to being readable can be wrapped around boxes, fish
or kitty boxes, used to cushion china, clean glass, house train pets,
protect things from paint, construct poppers and airplanes and paper
trees and paper mache, create confetti, and start a fire. Try doing
any of those things with your flat-screen monitor.

Sometimes we shiver as we hold closed our bathroom and
glance immediately at the mini-weather report at the top of page one
to figure out what we should wear.

Then we settle back into bed with our super-sized mug
of "Flor de Manabi" Ecuadorian coffee (with chemicals) and
the magic hour before we go to work, when we can muse and ruminate, laugh
and cry, be amused and amazed and indignant, make connections, jot down
ideas, mentally compose blog postings, root for and rue our sports surrogates,
and note which stories to keep an eye on as the day develops.

We usually start with the front page, just to make sure
the world hasn’t ended, or radically changed, since we went to bed.
We know this is ridiculous, because the paper in our hands came off
the presses at about the same time we were watching the 11:00 news before
falling asleep, but it is reassuring somehow, anyway. Then Sports,
International,
Local, Business and Arts. We finish with the crossword puzzle, often
over lunch.

Perhaps we are representative of the last generation
of news addicts with this ingrained predilection for a paper paper, and
by the time our grandkids are serious readers paper newspapers will take
their place alongside telegrams and afternoon editions in the museum
of antiquated media.

In the interest of full disclosure, we once
worked for a paper paper. The 17-year-old Dowbrigade was a copy boy on
the Democrat
and Chronicle, flagship rag of the Gannett empire long before
USA Today sullied Newspaper Row from coast to coast.

One of our jobs, along with fetching, retrieving, delivering
and writing the pity six-word-maximum description of the weather that
appears with the temp and precip forecasts at the top of page one, was
to drive a couple of the first papers off of the presses (at around 6:30
pm) out to Paul Miller and. Al Neuharth, the head honchos of the organization,
who lived in ritizy suburbs about 37 and-a-half miles due south on a
series of connected interstates and local roads.

We were told speed was of the essence, supposedly so
the top dogs could do a final, personal edit and deliver the classics
"Stop the presses!" and "Replate!" telephonically. We don’t know if that
ever happened, but we do know that if we kept the petal to the metal
in the police stock Olds 88 that they assigned us for the drive we could
make it, downtown parking lot to suburban driveway, in 30 minutes.

Inevitably, we got clocked by the cops. The Dowbrigade
had long hair and an attitude in those days (imagine that!); it was a
miracle we didn’t get stopped more often. We were going 22 miles over
the speed limit, which was 65 in those days. In an important lesson in
civics and government’s relations with the press, the paper had the ticket
fixed.

What can we say? The smell of fresh newsprint still
gets us high.

Cy, short for Cyclopes, a kitten born with only one
eye and no nose, is shown in this photo provided by its owner in Redmond,
Oregon, on Wednesday, Dec. 28, 2005. The kitten, a ragdoll breed, which
died after living for one day, was one of two in the litter. Its sibling
was born normal and healthy. (AP Photo/Traci Allen)

Cute little abomination, eh?

from AP

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Oil prices surged on Friday to
the highest level since September’s hurricanes crippled oil output from
the Gulf of Mexico, as tensions mounted over OPEC-member Iran’s nuclear
ambitions.

U.S. crude oil gained $1.52 to $68.35 a barrel after hitting a peak of
$68.80 – the highest level since September 2, while London Brent crude
rose $1.20 to $66.43.

Crude prices have jumped more than 8 percent so far this year, bringing
them within striking distance of the record $70.85 hit August 30 after
Hurricane Katrina toppled rigs and slashed output from the Gulf of Mexico.

"The market is so delicately balanced," said Mark Keenan of MPC
commodity fund. "It faces a convergence of bullish factors."

from Reuters

Love those financial euphuisms, Mark. Regular Dowbrigade readers
will recognize a familiar
theme here. In
what we consider the History of the Species all-time #1 business scam,
the Energy Sector has taken effective control of the world economy and
is siphoning an appreciable and unprecedented percentage of the Global Gross
Planetary Product (GPP) into its visible and invisible financial conduits.

Along the way they have taken effective control of the world’s #1 military
and economic power, but this is almost incidental and certainly transitory.
It won’t really matter in 2008, when the Dems (unlikely) or the Republicants
(moderate Republicans funded by banking, insurance, pharmaceutical and
technology money, not oil) unseat the neo-con cabal. The oil industry
has the world by the balls, and they aren’t letting go until the last
barrel is burned.

The betting here is that they are already planning a "peaceful
transition" to "next-generation power generation." This will mean a
runup to $300
a barrel oil and over $10 a gallon for gas, followed by a panicked government
sponsored (taxpayer funded) initiative to a) save fuel, so what they
got lasts longer, and spend a shitload of money on some non-fossil
fuel energy source.

Obviously, they will go for some technology with a centralized distribution
model so that our energy can be metered and paid for, thus preserving
the supremacy of the "Energy Sector" beyond the twilight of the petrochemical
period.

Meanwhile, secondary beneficiaries include the countries that actually
have the oil and gas, as long as they mind their p’s and q’s. Expect
regular examples to be made of countries who deny or condition access
to their resources by the Sector. See Iraq, Venezuela. On the other hand,
the current supply/demand situation is in such "delicate balance" that
these periodic slapdowns also play into the hands of the Sector. Brilliant,
no?

Desperate China is casting acquisitive glances far and wide. Expect
Bolivia to open up as a Latin-Chinese franchise operation as their
huge natural
gas resources are sucked into the yawning Asian maw.

Welcome to the future. Energy. Water. Information. People. Mix well
and stand back.

The Washington Post shut down one of its blogs Thursday
after the newspaper’s ombudsman raised the ire of readers by writing
that lobbyist Jack Abramoff gave money to the Democrats as well as to
Republicans.

At the center of a congressional bribery investigation, Abramoff gave money
to Republicans while he had his clients donate to both parties, though
mostly to Republicans.

In her Sunday column, ombudsman Deborah Howell wrote that Abramoff "had
made substantial campaign contributions to both major parties," prompting
a wave of nasty reader postings on post.blog.

There were so many personal attacks that the newspaper’s staff could
not "keep the board clean, there was some pretty filthy stuff," and
so the Post shut down comments on the blog, or Web log, said Jim Brady,
executive editor of washingtonpost.com.

"We’re not giving up on the concept of having a healthy public dialogue
with our readers, but this experience shows that we need to think more
carefully about how we do it," Brady wrote on the newspaper’s Web
site. "There are things that we said we would not allow, including
personal attacks, the use of profanity and hate speech.

from AP

What’s the point here? That print media should stick to print? That
the real people behind the marketing of major media news cannot expose
themselves, evan a little bit, without facing the full wrath of the insultocracy
of the blogosphere? That the pathological viciousness of flamers inevitably
exceeds community standards
of decency, whatever the community?
That we
need
an intelligent
software
solution to
block "personal attacks, the use of profanity and hate speech"?

Certainly, saying that Abramoff "had made substantial campaign
contributions to both major parties," can be parsed in various ways,
but however one interprets it it hardly seems to merit such vituperative
invective. This kind of petty demeaning of public discourse is the second
most disturbing disorder affecting blogging, after comment spam.

Are we working on these problems? Don’t forget, 90% of cognition
is filtering….

A recent visitor to the Dowbrigade household remarked
on a carved wooden light-pull which spells out the name "Jesus" in the
form of a fish. Perhaps, being aware at least of our traditionally Jewish
surname, he wondered if we were covering all our bets as we awaited surgery.
Nothing could be further from the truth, but it did get us thinking about
our opinion of Mr. Jesus H. Christ.

Despite the fact that Christianity comes in a poor fourth
in the rank order of personal religious influences on the Dowbrigade,
behind our formative Judaism, our lifelong attraction to Buddhism,
and our experiences with a variety of Native American animistic spiritualistic
traditions, we hold the figure of Jesus in utmost respect within our
personal pantheon of heroes and holy men.

Basically, we believe Jesus was one of us, a charter
member of the Chosen People, who was heinously betrayed by the Romans
not once but three separate times, on the way to having his legacy so
distorted and corrupted as to be unrecognizable.

The record seems to indicate that Jesus was a sizzling
hot young rabbi out of Galelei, oozing charisma and brilliant light,
a volatile sort of mix of mystical inspirational religious leader, and
a dangerous political catalyst for resistance to the Imperialistic Roman
Empire.

The Romans, 2000 years ago, had the world by the balls.
They were making the first great stab at Globalization, dominating the
known world militarily, culturally and economically. They, like their
spiritual descendants currently pushing the Pax Americana, realized that
controlling the world was impossible without controlling the Middle East,
the axis
between Europe, Asia and Africa. The Middle East, then like now, was
full of fierce warrior tribes who refused to be controlled and weren’t
afraid to take on the most powerful forces on the Earth at that time.

In short, Jesus and his followers represented one of
the most serious challenge to Roman power for 500 years in either direction.
As a result, they hunted him down like a rabid dog, and eviscerated him
three times in person and in posterity.

First, in a pathological display of torture and cruelty,
beautifully captured in Mel Gibson’s Agony of Christ, they humiliated
and exterminated him in the most savage and public manner possible.

Next, they hunted down and exterminated his followers
like vermin, crucifying them, feeding them to the lions, using them for
Gladiator fodder.

Finally, and most perversely, they co-opted his legacy,
deformed and distorted and grafted it onto the diseased stump of empire
which morphed into the Holy Roman Empire and later the Roman Catholic
Church. They used the memory and legacy of a great Jewish holy man for
crude,
venal political and economic ends, in the process sparking religious
wars responsible for millions of innocent deaths. In our humble opinion,
one of the most egregious crimes in human history.

Unfortunately, due to this final betrayal, multiple
translations and re-interpretation of the original texts, twisted and
tangled interpretations by linguists and political masterminds, and a
complete loss of the original moral and philosophical context, it is
today impossible to parse out the original Christian message from the
manipulative claptrap and psycho- babble which constitute modern "Christian"
theology.

But there is one thing to which we can testify unequivocally:
Jesus can get you high. We have seen too many people authentically high on Jesus to believe its just the placebo effect.  Somehow, through all the centuries of corruption
and abuse, all the commercialization and cooption, all the false Crusades
and sleazy Televangelists. the Jesus brand has maintained some of its
transcendent power.

Jesus can still touch people, change their lives and
behavior, make them see the world in a different way. It is the message
of Love, Redemption and surrender to a higher power. A potent and potentially
world-changing mixture, capable of being used for good or ill.

Lately, most of the mentions of the Rabbi Christ
we have been hearing sound to us like a soaring Jimi Hendrix guitar solo
in the background of a commercial for a Japanese SUV. It’s like
Johnny Damon died, was reanimated, reoriented and reconstituted by George
Stienbrenner as a member of the Evil Empire.

We like the fish thing, though…