Dowbrigade

KATHMANDU (Reuters) – The head of the
Nepal Mountaineering Association urged the government Saturday to take
action against a sherpa who reportedly stripped on top of Mount Everest.

The Himalayan Times had reported Friday that the Nepali climbing guide,
whose name it gave as Lakpa Tharke, stood naked for three minutes in freezing
conditions on the 29,035-foot summit of the world’s highest peak.

If confirmed, he would be the first person known to have stripped atop
Everest, considered by Nepali Buddhists as a god.

Ang Tshering Sherpa, head of Nepal’s top mountaineering body, said he could
not confirm that the incident had happened."But if he did it, it is
very shocking because Sagarmatha is the goddess mother," he said,
using the mountain’s Nepali name.

"The government must enforce strict ethics for climbing." Authorities
have yet to comment.

But the climb’s organizers seemed happy enough with Lakpa Thaeke’s strip.

"We are planning to file his extraordinary feat for the Guinness Book
of World Records," the paper quoted an official of the hiking group
that employs Tharke as saying.

from
Reuters

As far as we know, the Guinness people don’t  have
a separate chapter for greatest naked accomplishments. Gosh, you would
need highest naked pole vault, most naked people in a phone booth, most
naked piano player on stage at one time…..Maybe the folks at Hustler would be interested.

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) – An Iraqi tennis coach and two
of his players were shot to death this week in Baghdad because they were
wearing shorts, authorities said Saturday, reporting the latest in a
series of recent attacks attributed to Islamic extremists.

In the Baghdad incident, gunmen stopped a car carrying the Sunni Arab coach
and two Shiite players, asked them to step out and then shot them, said
Manham Kubba secretary-general of the Iraqi Tennis Union.

Extremists had distributed leaflets warning people in the mostly Sunni
neighborhoods of Saidiyah and Ghazaliyah warning people not to wear shorts,
police said.

from
AP

It is certain, were we to somehow find ourself in Iraq, that we would
want to play tennis. After reading the above article, however, we
would be sure to dress appropriately….

Although we recognize the centrality of Economics
in any understanding of the modern world we live in, and have in fact
taken several courses in the material,many of the economic phenomena
we observe first hand remain absolute mysteries until explained by
someone with a stronger knowledge background and a knack for explaining
things to knuckleheads like the Dowbrigade.

We had such an enlightenment today reading Robert
Kuttener’s column in the Boston Globe about the millions of jobs immigrants
are taking because supposedly Americans aren’t interested in them.
He maintains that the reason they aren’t interested is that the jobs
suck unnecessarily:

Raise wages, improve working conditions, and Americans
will materialize. But won’t that be inflationary? Here are some statistics
that suggest it needn’t.

Last September, Robert Gordon and Ian Dew-Becker, economists from Northwestern
University, observed that productivity and per-capita GDP had roughly
doubled in three decades, while median wages had hardly budged. So they
conducted a study titled “Where Did All the Productivity Go?"

They found that nearly all of it had gone to the richest 10 percent of
the population, and the most extreme gains to the richest 1 percent,
who now have a share of national income equal to the bottom 50 percent.
The people who really made out were the top one- 10th of 1 percent –
one American in 1,000.

So if we had a distribution of income more like the one that prevailed
in 1966, when chief executives made "only" 60 times what a
normal worker made instead of 600 times, we could raise the wages of
ordinary
people without adding to the nation’s overall wage bill.

from Boston Globe Op-ed page

So that’s how come real wages have been stagnant
for the last 30 years and families now have to work 50% more hours
to stay
in the middle class! Productivity has DOUBLED, meaning a worker nearing
retirement is producing twice as much as he or she was when they started,
but still getting paid the same crummy wage.

Where did all of that increased productivity
go? During the past three decades, as the worker’s slice of the pie stayed
the same, 100% of the benefits of the growth in productivity went to
owners, investors and top managers.

The fact that American business as a whole has been
able to get away with this boondoggle is directly related to the decline
of the American labor movement. Organized labor is the only practical
counterbalance to the greed of Ivy league executives and their legions
of highly educated lackeys, but because of scandal, corruption and disinterest
American labor as currently constituted has largely betrayed and abandoned
those it should be representing.

Meanwhile, big business has just abut bought or
co-opted every important politician in all three branches of government,
facilitating
the rip off of America’s workers and the concentration of the resulting
concentration of profits in the bank accounts of the richest fraction
of a percent of Americans.

This devaluation of honest working class jobs, leads
to the twin cancers of a large, non-productive underclass of
poor minority
citizens,
and
an
indigestible army of alienated illegal immigrants working in illegal
conditions for illegal wages. It does a tremendous disservice to the
millions of ordinary men and women who keep this country going, and represent
everything that is worth saving about this poor beleaguered land.

The
entire Miami Heat basketball team was suspended from league play today
by NBA Commissioner David Stern. The suspensions
were announced simultaneously with the launch of an investigation of
players and some coaching staff for "inappropriate touching, hugging,
butt-patting and jumping on top of each other with open legs."

Until the investigation is complete, none of the players
will be allowed to appear in a game, creating difficulties for the Heat
in their playoff series with the Detroit Pistons, currently tied at a
game apiece.

According to anonymous sources in the league office,
an unnamed player filed a complaint with the Commissioner’s Office to
the effect that he, "felt sexually intimidated" and was subjected to
"unwanted intimate touching and groping."

According to Dr. Pat Franahan, an expert in sexual harassment
in the workplace who serves on the board of the Massachusetts Association
to Control Hostile Actions (MACHA), "Although sexually charged touching
is common in all professional sports, the problem is particularly acute
in basketball because of the skimpy uniforms and silk shorts. In addition,
their official uniform shirts are what are commonly referred to as ‘wife
beaters’."

Another unnamed sources close to the investigation said
that league officials are pouring over Heat game tapes, looking for "patterns
of excessive or uncalled for physical contact with possible sexual connotations."
They are especially interested manual-gluteus contact, and according
to the source are electronically timing the duration of all such contact.

Sources say Commissioner Stern has yet to rule on how
many seconds of manual-gluteus contact are legal before the touching
becomes possible sexual harassment.

The suspensions come a week after the Dallas Maverick’s Jason Terry was suspended for grabbing Michael Finley of The San Antonio Spurs by the groin.

In
addition to specific actions by particular players, the investigation
reportedly includes team officials and Miami Heat as a corporate entity,
for "engendering an atmosphere conducive to and tolerant of physical
sexual harassment" and maintaining facilities, including the playing
court at American Airlines Arena, locker
areas, whirlpool and physical therapy areas, where unwarranted and unwanted
hugs and other touching took place.

Coach Pat Riley stands by his players. "I really don’t
think there was anything sexual involved. Antoine Walker is just a very
emotional guy. He was doing the same stuff in Boston, plus the Wiggle!
And Shaq, he’s just a big teddy bear. He tries to hug everyone!"

As to the identity of the complaining player, Riley quipped, “I don’t know who she is and for her sake I hope I never find out.”

Results of the investigation are expected by the end
of the week, although if this target is not met or the results lead
to charges being filed, the outcome of the Miami-Detroit series would
be in the
hands of the Commissioner. Let’s keep those hands in plain sight at
all times.

By studying chimpanzee droppings in remote African
jungles, scientists reported yesterday, they have found direct evidence
of a missing link between a chimpanzee virus and the one that causes
human AIDS.

Scientists have long suspected that chimpanzees are the source of the human
AIDS pandemic because at least one subspecies carries a simian immune deficiency
virus closely related to H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS.

But because the simian virus, known as S.I.V.cpz, was identified in chimpanzees
in captivity, researchers could not be sure that the same simian virus
existed among these apes in the wild.

It does, the team of American, European and Cameroonian
scientists reported in the journal Science. They found it by testing
hundreds of chimpanzee droppings collected in Cameroon.

The genetic and immunologic tests were developed in stages over the past
seven years to help trace the evolution of H.I.V. and solve the mysterious
origins of AIDS, said Dr. Beatrice H. Hahn, a virologist at the University
of Alabama in Birmingham.

The new findings, she said in a telephone interview, do not explain
the entire chain of events that led from the first human H.I.V. infection
to the infection of 65 million people around the world.

from the New York Times

Rationalists will say this shows that overcrowding,
poverty and intimate contact between humans and various other animal
species means we will see an increasing number of diseases and plagues
jumping species, interspecies mutations destined to eventually cull the
overpopulation of the planet in a Malthusian nightmare.

Those of a truly conspiratorial bent will note that
were one determined to create a deadly plague, a good space to start
would be the genetic blueprint of a virus affecting our closest biological
relatives, the chimpanzees.

Either way, by God’s hand or man’s, infectious diseases
seem destined to proliferate in the future, further informing the Dowbrigade’s
dark vision of what lies ahead for us all. We see increasingly common
and extreme germ phobias breaking out in the general populations, millions
of middle-class Howard Hughes spending billions to seal themselves off
in hermetically controlled environments.

Most people will never go out. Food will be
delivered by robot cars or guest workers from whatever national cuisine
provides
the meal, and irradiated before allowed into the home. All informational
and sensorial information about the outside world will come through the
eventual successor to fiber optic cable – phone, interactive TV, games,
Internet, first-run movies, work, payment for work, etc.

No one will actually take traveling vacations anymore,
unless they have a very strong deathwish. Besides, with gasoline and
jet fuel at $135 a gallon, it’ll too expensive to go far. Instead, VR
travelogues, media immersion rooms and designer pharmaceuticals will
assuage the seemingly universal human need for vacations.

Education will be solely on-line, as will art galleries,
sporting events, musical performances, political rallies and private
parties. Disease and terrorist attacks will make it too dangerous to
gather large groups of people anywhere without a secure military perimeter
and health screenings for all participants.

Actual physical proximity will become the ultimate sign
of trust and intimacy. Letting another person into the same room with
one would have many of the same implications that sleeping with someone
does today.

Of course, not everyone will be able to afford this
new hermetic lifestyle. Which is why while life expectancy for bubble
people should rise towards 110 or 120, in the less fortunate corners
of the world, with plague, famine and resource warfare rampant, it should
fall to 25 or 30. Maybe it will balance out, and the world’s average
life expectancy would stay the same, but we doubt it.

What does all this mean to normal, average Joes
in today’s America? Try buying stock in drug companies, and make sure
your medical
insurance is paid up…

Haider
Hamid was arrested in Baghdad on April 15 by officers wearing Interior
Ministry uniforms, according to Mr. Hamid’s brother, Majid. Majid Hamid
found his brother’s body, above, showing signs of torture, five days
later in the city morgue. He said he received no explanation for what
happened.

Despite promises to eschew nation building, the
Bushistas feel they have found
the recipe
for Democracy:
"Send Lawyers,
Guns and
Money".
How’s
that working out for them? An article on the front page of today’s New
York Times exposes how the massive injection of billions of dollars and
millions
of weapons into Iraq has created an era of "freelance government
violence."

BAGHDAD, Iraq, May 23 – Even in a country beset by murder
and death, the 16th Brigade represented a new frontier.

The brigade, a 1,000-man force set up by Iraq’s Ministry of Defense in
early 2005, was charged with guarding a stretch of oil pipeline that
ran through the southern Baghdad neighborhood of Dawra. Heavily armed
and lightly supervised, some members of the largely Sunni brigade transformed
themselves into a death squad, cooperating with insurgents and executing
government collaborators, Iraqi officials say.

Such is the country that the new Iraqi leaders who took
office Saturday are inheriting. The headlong, American-backed effort
to arm tens of thousands of Iraqi soldiers and officers, coupled with
a failure to curb a nearly equal number of militia gunmen, has created
a galaxy of armed groups, each with its own loyalty and agenda, which
are accelerating the country’s slide in

from the
New York Times

It started as a simple idea. What the world needs
now, agreed idealists at both ends of the political spectrum, is more
Democracy.
But what the gung-ho gang of giddy neo-cons who tried to act on the idea
didn’t realize is that Democracy is a delicate bloom, which needs to
be nurtured gently over time, adapted to the native soil, protected from
frost and parasites and assorted worms, roaches and other vermin. Land mines, improvised explosive devices, carpet bombing and death squads are not condusive to its growth.

The neo-con cowboys thought Democracy could be exported and imposed,
and if it doesn’t take right away, well astute application of arms, technology,
dollars and good old American know-how can smooth the way. After all,
if the British Empire, even as it ebbed into the sunset, could create
in India the largest Democracy in the world, why then converting our
little Iraqi buddies should be no problem.

They thought that if they threw enough lawyers, guns and money at a country, they could buy a Democracy. But Democracy can’t be bought, and it can’t be imposed at the point of a gun.

In fact, the world today is a very different place than
it was 100 years ago, Iraq is no India, and Nouri al-Malik is no Mahatma
Gandhi. The axiomatic mistake of those who envisioned Iraq as a beacon
of progress and democracy illuminating the entire Middle East was the
believe that any population, oppressed long enough and brutally enough,
will, upon being liberated, embrace Democracy like a drowning man grabbing
an inner tube.

The difference is that India had been oppressed
by an enlightened Democratic Empire, and once freed, desired, in a
sort
of
national Stockholm Syndrome, to emulate that oppressor’s political system. 

The
Iraqi’s have spent 30 years being ground under the heels of a series
of despotic sadists bereft of any political philosophy beyond how many
fingers on how many triggers they can put on the street. Naturally, once
the chains and fetters come off, the survivors instinctively grope to emulate,
nay, outdo their oppressors.

99.9% of Iraqis have never spent one hour in a democracy
and wouldn’t recognize one if it dropped out of the sky and flattened
their houses like pancakes. Which, come to think about it, is
pretty much what happened.

Take a country like this, a patchwork of open wounds,
blood feuds, generation-old clan warfare, revenge starved widows and
orphans, violent and unrestrained murderers and torturers, flood it with
easy money and a million automatic weapons, and what do you expect?

Welcome to Iraq. Please send more Lawyers, Guns and
Money.

NEW YORK (Reuters) – At 73, country music legend Willie
Nelson is still doing headstands and smoking joints in the back of a
tour bus at hundreds of concerts and, far from slowing down, he’d like
to tour with the Rolling Stones.

"They like country music, we get along fine and Keith (Richards) is
a good buddy of mine, so that would be good," Nelson said, adding
that he’s not much of a dancer compared to Stones front man Mick Jagger
but he might
give it a try.

"I’m sure I made a lot of mistakes," Nelson
said with a smile, sitting in a luxury suite at New York’s Carlyle Hotel,
a whiff of marijuana drifting down the corridor.

Nelson admits he’s had a few run-ins with the law over his pot smoking
habits. "If you’re going to be out there with it, somebody’s going
to pull you over, just because they can. … I talk about it a lot, but
I’m not going to walk into some police station burning one down and say,
‘How are you all doing?"

He says the pot smoking hasn’t hindered his songwriting. On the contrary,
it may have helped filter out the duds.

"I figured if it wasn’t worth remembering it probably wasn’t a very good
song, so that would be the test, to see if I remembered it until I got
back to a guitar or a piano," he said. "That was usually a
pretty good measuring stick, but I’m sure I forgot a few that might have
been OK."

Much of his advice in his book is as simple as urging
people to breathe deeply and drink plenty of water, and he draws examples
from his past to show the importance, for example, of not getting angry
for the wrong reasons.

"I could have gotten all pissed off thirty-something years ago when
my wife Shirley tied my drunk ass to the bed with a clothesline and woke
me up by beating me with a mop handle, but instead I figured I probably
had it coming," he writes.

He just can’t exactly remember for what…

from Reuters

These
stories seem to run in bunches….

NEW YORK — People who smoke marijuana may be at less
risk of developing lung cancer than tobacco smokers, according to a study
presented yesterday.

The study of 2,200 people in Los Angeles found that even heavy marijuana
smokers were no more likely to develop lung, head, or neck cancer than
nonusers, in contrast with tobacco users, whose risk increases the more
they smoke.

The findings seemed to be a surprise; marijuana smoke has some of the
same cancer-causing substances as tobacco smoke, often in higher concentrations,
said the senior researcher, Donald Tashkin, a professor at the David
Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles.
One possible explanation is that THC, or tetrahydrocannabinol, a key
ingredient in marijuana not present in tobacco, may inhibit tumor growth,
he said.

from Reuters

Which must mean that if Bob Marley HADN’T smoked a quarter-kilo
of Ganga a day, he never would have lived long enough to write all those
great Reggae songs…

Now, if we can just find that Willie Nelson story,
we’ll go for the Mary Jane Trifecta after we get back from the Summer
Semester
Startup Meeting….

MEXICO
CITY – Demonstrators pretend to smoke fake marijuana cigarettes during
a protest for the decriminalization of marijuana
in La Alameda park, in this May 4, 2002 file photo in Mexico City. Police
and business owners from Mexico’s beaches to border cities worried that
a measure just passed to decriminalize possession of cocaine, heroin
and other drugs could attract droves of tourists solely looking to get
high. (05/01/06 AP
photo)

Yep, that’s pretty much how we remember Mexican weed
from back in the day: cheap and plentiful, but you had to roll huge fucking
joints to get a decent buzz.

This whole Mexican drug fiasco seems to be another
example of the primacy of spin over substance. As we understand it,
the original
measure was designed to strengthen prosecution by the Federal Drug Police
of dealers, narcotraficantes and major miscreants, while leaving the
nickel and dime trade (including foreign tourists) to the discretion
of the local cops.

Meaning that drugs wouldn’t be legal, exactly, just that the local gendarmes would have the choice of extracting reasonable
fines and
administrative costs for processing stoners caught possessing or consuming
drugs in public. Getting caught would cost 2 or 3 hours in some crummy
police station and 2 or 3 hundred bucks in "fines", without the necessity
of clogging the Mexican jails with idiot Gringo wastrels. Basically,
a more formal and efficient version of the time-honored payoff system
in place for generations.

Meanwhile, the Feds will go for the really big bribes
and payoffs concordant with prosecutions of the big fish, and everybody
will get a slice of the drug pie. So the whole thing was just a novel
and efficient distribution of law enforcement graft.

But once the US press got hold of the story, and miscast
it as a nefarious Drug Legalization aiming harpoons at the soft underbelly
of American indolence, the plan was doomed.

Too bad. Even if the reefer sucks, we’ve heard the mushrooms
kick ass.

from the AP

In tiny, tiny bits, gold makes exquisite geometry.

Clusters of 20 gold atoms, for example, always come in the shape of a
pyramid, perfect for a subatomic King Tut.

Now scientists have found a new, unexpected configuration: a cage consisting
of just 16 atoms, the smallest hollow piece of 24-karat gold possible.

"The cage structures were not expected, because metal clusters tend
to be more compact," said Lai-Sheng Wang, who is a physicist at
Washington State University and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.

The gold cage, with gemlike triangular facets, is the metallic equivalent
of buckyballs, molecules consisting of 60 carbon atoms in the shape of
soccer balls that were discovered in 1995. Buckyballs made a splash in
the scientific world and beyond with their novel, but easy to describe
shape. The catchy name helped, too.

Until now, no one has made similar hollow structures out of metals.

Nano-size gold has unusual, useful properties; for one, it acts as a
catalyst for speeding up certain chemical reactions. Dr. Wang was interested
in the way the properties of gold change with size and shape.

The findings will appear in the May 30 issue of The Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences.

Next on the agenda, Dr. Wang said, is a ship-in-a-bottle trick. He says
he wants to place some other atom inside the gold cage, which might endow
the cluster with new and different characteristics.

But the golden cages seem unlikely to achieve the fame of buckyballs.
For one thing, Dr. Wang has not thought of a catchy name.

"No, not for this one," he said.

from the New York Times

Empty golden cages? Wedding rings?