Dowbrigade

Only people with top-secret security clearances could read her musings,
which were posted on Intelink, the intelligence community’s classified
intranet. Writing as Covert Communications, CC for short, she opined
in her online journal on such national security conundrums as stagflation,
the war of ideas in the Middle East and — in her most popular post
— bad food in the CIA cafeteria.Buy This PhotoChristine Axsmith,
with her husband, Justin Benedict, says she was fired by BAE Systems
after she took a stand on the Geneva

But the hundreds of blog readers who responded to her irreverent entries
with titles such as "Morale Equals Food" won’t be joining
her ever again.

On July 13, after she posted her views on torture and the Geneva Conventions,
her blog was taken down and her security badge was revoked. On Monday,
Axsmith was terminated by her employer, BAE Systems, which was helping
the CIA test software.

She said she apologized
right away and figured she would get reprimanded and her blog would
be eliminated. She never dreamed she would be fired. Now, Axsmith said, "I’m
scared, terrified really" of being criminally prosecuted for unauthorized
use of a government computer system, something one of the security
officers mentioned to her.

from the Washington Post

This is an increasingly sticky wicket in which many
bloggers are getting stuck – and screwed. After almost losing his own
precious job, the Dowbrigade voluntarily and of his own free will,
took a blood oath to never blog about his work, his employer, his colleagues,
o rhis students past, present or future.

And this on top of losing our second job as Webmaster
of a small media company for blogging a little known fact about a physical
disability of a certain South American dictator, which turned out to
be a leak of highly classified information which could have been traced
back to my ex-employer.

On the one hand, we feel more than justified, as we
were never told the information was classified or embargoed, the person
who divulged it to us regularly fed us juicy items to blog about, and
after all, it seems ingenious to tell a juicy secret to a blogger and
then be shocked when it appears in a blog.

On the other hand, in retrospect, not such a sharp career
move.

We wish Ms. Axsmith all the luck in the world in finding
a non-classified job.

It seems that each decade these days can
be associated with a particular kind of crime. The 80′s was rife with
muggings, in the 90′s carjacking was all the rage, and now, in the brave
new millennial decade of the aughts it is identity theft that is running
rampant across the country.

Of course, some will argue that the
signature crime of the current decade is more appropriately corporate
malfeasance,
or
illegal
immigration,
or even high crimes and misdemeanors.  And, it should ne noted,
the decade still has four years to run. But in terms of sheer numbers
(at current rates by the end of the decade over 20% of Americans will
have
been victims), identity theft is a clear favorite.

Lately, we have been not so much wondering if it will
ever happen to us as much as wondering when.  Perhaps most oddly,
rather than paranoia or trepidation (the typical Dowbrigade reaction
to threats) we find ourself almost looking forward to having our identity
stolen.

After all, what is our identity, really, and what good
had it done us?

An identity is not the same as a self. Rather, it is
the accumulation of attributes, traits, habits, preferences and idiosyncratic
behavior that allows others to identify us, and forms the immediate basis
of our superficial self-image.  However, more often than not it
is used by others not to identify us, but to stereotype us, and used
by ourself to massage our ego, deceive ourself by combing over faults,
and nurture our spoiled inner child.

Seen impartially, and speaking only for ourself, our
identity is not a particularly valuable or endearing collection of traits. One can
only assume
that
if a cyber-thief
was to steal our identity they would end up with a boatload of vanity,
unsightly egotism, attacks of idiocy, laziness, sloppy thinking and a
penchant for easy solutions. Let him have all trace of our weakness, cowardice, wimpiness, incipient sexism, supressed racism and questionable taste.

Hopefully, along with our identity, the thief would
inherit our 25-year-old guaranteed student loan, our accumulated credit
card debt, our unpaid taxes, our endless dental treatment plan payments,
our collection of parking tickets, our recently overdrawn (bank error)
checking account, our MBNA account, and the regular desperate cries for
financial salvation from our progeny.

We certainly look forward to the new owner of our identity
having to sort through the constant onslaught of retro snail mail from
credit card companies, the AARP, and most malignantly, the scorched earth
tactics of the Harvard University Alumni Fundrazing Drive.

While they are at it, the thieves are welcome to the
more material accoutrements of our identity as well: the obsolete computer,  jelly
stains on the keyboard and godknowswhat on the screen; the crappy old
car, now tumbling into the terminal phase in which it’s just
one
thing
after
another,
rust and rot and planned obsolescence eating out one part or system after
another; our creaky, cranky body, more or less in the same state; high
blood pressure, raised cholesterol, hiatal hernia, stomach saroma, failing
eyesight, fading hearing, falling follicles; the whole sorry package.

The identity thieves are also welcome to the damning
paper trail chasing us around as we wandered across the planet
this past half-century; the sealed cases, expired probations, disciplinary
hearings, defaults and foreclosures, the evictions, expulsions, deportations
and banishments from bars, educational institutions, commercial establishments
and private homes, the extensive but secret files buried in basements
at the Cambridge Police Department, FBI, CIA, NSA, Interpol, the Mossad,
Department of Homeland Security, ETS, PETA and who knows where else.

Take it, please! Take it all! Leave me blank, an unwritten slate,
pure potential, a tabla rasa. Let us shed our old identity like a snake
sheds a worn-out skin. Leave us floating free, egoless, anonymous. We
would still be uniquely us, we are sure. Identities, after all, are a
dime a dozen. Some people we know have several spares.

So go ahead. Take our identity, please.  You’d
be doing us a favor.

So this morning we were en route to Russo’s, the
super fresh produce market in Watertown, rolling through Watertown
Square in the White Whale, when we saw something we couldn’t believe.
A quietly dignified although definitely shabby  elderly woman
was pushing a grocery cart full of plastic bags down the sidewalk in
front of the storefront bakeries, travel agencies and barber shops.
So far,
not
so unusual
in modern urban America.

But perched in the Fragile Foods protector at
the back of the cart, propped up on pillows and folded swaths of
fabric, was the cutest little dog, dressed in a yellow T-shirt and red
sun visor, with a matching yellow tennis ball in his mouth.

Immediately distracted, we detoured from our destination
and doubled back to try to find this fabulous couple,  And find
then we did, a few blocks away.  The dog is named Max. We never
got the lady’s name.

Some wireless users sneak in their own food with
their laptops. Others buy one cup of coffee at 9 a.m. and surf the
Net until closing time. And the truly audacious sit for hours without
making any pretense of a purchase.

In and around Boston, cafe owners who installed wireless signals to draw customers
say they also are drawing Internet users who tie up seats for hours, buy little
or nothing, and make coffee shops feel like the office as they tap away at their
laptops. Now some owners are fighting back by charging for wireless access, shutting
off their signal at peak business hours, or telling loitering laptoppers to shell
out or ship out.

from the Boston Globe

We have been reading more and more articles and seeing
more and more video tout this kind of coffee shop as itinerant
office life-style as a way to a) save on rent, b) run a small business
with no overhead, c) work in a congenial environment or d) put it to
The Man. Quite frankly, we fail to see the charm.

A Starbucks or similar establishment seems like a
piss-poor locale for getting anything done. For one, the seats are
instruments of medieval torture. Designed to keep the trade moving,
more than 30 minutes in one of these bloody wooden ass alters and we
lose all sensation in our legs. Then, when we try to stand up, we end
up lurching across the Cafe like a drunken peg-leg sailor in a typhoon.

What else does the corner coffee shop have to offer
in the way of office amenities? Overpriced generic caffeine-flavored
beverages, sugary pastries and other sources of empty calories, and
a mangy menagerie of bums, autistic auteurs, displaced persons, traveling
salesmen, desperate, hard-edged scammers and walking borderline personality
disorders. Someone is always whining, crying or snorting
into a cell
phone nearby.

Meanwhile, one is inhibited and prohibited from engaging
in such normal private office behavior as nose-picking, ass-scratching
and passing fits of madness. Plus, the complete absence of privacy
would work our paranoia up something wicked, and before lone we would
be huddled over our screen, blocking peripheral views with old New
York Times, convinced the WinBook wielding nun in the corner was an
operative for Opus Dei.

What we don’t understand, why don’t they just work
out of their homes, like the Dowbrigade does when he is "between classes"?
Are they homeless? Do they have 17 nosy roommates who are always at home during
the day? Or are things so interesting, temptations so abundant at
home that they cannot muster the discipline to get anything done? Can
they not afford an internet connection? Are they unable to use a coffee
machine?

As a card-carrying member of the pajama-hadin, we
are much more comfortable sprawled in our underwear in front of a nice
big screen, with all of our books and periodicals within reach and
a refrigerator full of power snacks. We haven’t found a cafe yet that
serves Flor de Manabi Ecuadorian coffee, and until we do, we’ll work
from home.

As far as the WiFi moochers, it would seem elemental,
my dear Watsons, to design software which would keep track of both
wifi usage and consumption at each table, and enforce a minimum of,
say $2.00 of consumption per hour, and if they go over, after humorous
and politically correct warnings, interrupt the wi-fi until they
buy something else. We would wager there are
some
smart programmers out there working on it now….

GUBEN, Germany — Dr. Gunther von Hagens, the German
inventor of a body-preserving process called plastination, is always
eager for volunteers, people willing to donate their corpses for his
public anatomical displays. He says 6,800 individuals have pledged
their mortal coils so far .

He hopes to add to that list when his traveling show reaches Boston later this
month. Body Worlds 2, which opens July 30 at the Museum of Science in Boston.

"Think of it as an alternative to being eaten by worms or going up in smoke," von
Hagens said by phone from his Institute for Plastination in Heidelberg, Germany.

from the Boston Globe

This is how we envision ourself ending up some
day, edifying the scientific and sensationalist curiosity of generations
of jaded youth, preserved for posterity with a fat joint still in our
hand and another between our
legs…..

GUBEN, Germany — Dr. Gunther von Hagens, the German
inventor of a body-preserving process called plastination, is always
eager for volunteers, people willing to donate their corpses for his
public anatomical displays. He says 6,800 individuals have pledged
their mortal coils so far .

He hopes to add to that list when his traveling show reaches Boston later this
month. Body Worlds 2, which opens July 30 at the Museum of Science in Boston.

"Think of it as an alternative to being eaten by worms or going up in smoke," von
Hagens said by phone from his Institute for Plastination in Heidelberg, Germany.

from the Boston Globe

This is how we envision ourself ending up some
day, edifying the scientific and sensationalist curiosity of generations
of jaded youth, preserved for posterity with a fat joint still in our
hand and another between our
legs…..

Feelings of empathy lead to actions of helping -
but only between members of the same group – according to a recent
study in the July issue of Personality
and Social Psychology Bulletin,
an official publication of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology,
published by SAGE Publications.

The research, led by Stefan Stormer of the University of Kiel, is presented
in the article "Empathy-Motivated Helping: The Moderating Role of
Group Membership." The article discusses two different studies,
one using a real-world, intercultural scenario and the other using a
mixture of people with no obvious differences besides gender. Researchers
concluded that, while all the people felt empathy for someone in distress,
they only tended to assist if the needy person was viewed as a member
of their own "in-group."

from Eureka Alert

Ah, the classic "who would you help" conundrum.
It brings to mind a pivotal event in the Dowbrigade’s formative past
– our first and last chance to truly rank among the Chosen Ones.

We were 16 or 17 at the time, in a desperate race
to see if we would ride out of town on a wave of awards and accolades
into
an elysian Ivy future, or be kicked out of high school first, into
a future of disgrace and vagrancy.

The smart money was on disgrace, but a rich Draconian
aunt with shadowy connections deep and high in the Zionist power
structure of the day got it in her mind that we could be saved by
a stiff dose of discipline and a righteous return to our religious
roots. Accordingly, she arranged to ship us off, shortly after our 17th birthday,
to a border Kibbutz a few kilometers from the West Bank area of Israel/Palestine.

But before we could leave on what would be the
first of a lifelong series of epic adventures, missions, misadventures,
foreign jobs, narrow escapes, picaresque escapades and extended stints
as an expatriot, we were summoned into the presence of Rabbi Philip
Silverstein, the closest thing in upstate New York to a Cardinal
in the Jewish Church.

We only realized years later that this interview
was our first and last call audition for membership in the storied International
Jewish Conspiracy.

We met in the Rabbi’s office, a sunny book-lined
room cluttered with thousands of objects like some sort of eclectic museum
of Hebraica: religious relics, framed photographs of the Rabbi with
Presidents, Prime Ministers
and
the
giants of Israel’s
creation,
Zionist memorabilia, menorahs, Mogen Davids, mezuzahs, Israeli archeological
artifacts, arcane and possibly Kabalistic knickknacks.

The audition
consisted of a single question. After some ice-breaking small talk
about our upcoming trip to the Holy Land, the rabbi looked me in
the eye and his voice took on the timbre and gravitas we had previously
heard only from the pulpit on the High Holy Days.

"Now I’m going to ask you a question, and I want
you to think before you answer. You are in a situation where
two people are in grave danger, but you might be able to same one of them. One of the people is Jewish and the other
is not. There is probably not time to save them both. What would
you do?"

We thought about it. At this point in our impetuous
youth, we were a big fan of telling the truth at all cost and of saying the first
thing that popped into our head.  When these sometimes conflicting
tendencies coincided, they were almost impossible to resist.

"Well, Rabbi, it’s hard to really know, sitting
here in your office, what one would actually do in a crisis. But my
instinct is that, if the chances of saving the two people were exactly
the same, I would save the Jew. But if I had a better chance of saving
the non-Jew, or if there was a chance to save both if I went after
the non-Jew first, that is what I would do."

What an idiot! If we had a dollar for every time
we’ve kicked ourself for blowing this chance, we wouldn’t NEED to
be a member of the IJC. Of course, the right answer was, "Under any
circumstances I would save the Jew.  Even if I had hand only
a 1 % chance of saving the Jew and a 99% chance of saving the gentile,
I would go for the Jew first."

Had we known that then, and not revealed ourself
as a dastardly secular humanist who believes in situational ethics,
the rest of our life might have been very different.

However, given
that within a year of our rabbinical interview we were to be the
subject of a nationwide manhunt by Israeli security forces following
which
we were summarily deported from the motherland and told never to
come back, and that in the 36 years since Blogging is the closest
we have gotten to fame or influence, the Rabbi’s judgment is looking
pretty good.

Still, it’s never too late to dream

Older farmers are at high risk for injury when they
stop taking prescribed pain medications, shows a study done in part
by the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada.

A case review of farmers aged 66 and older in Alberta, Canada, revealed
some previously unknown relationships may exist between the use of pain
medications and subsequent injury. For instance, when farmers stopped
taking prescribed pain or anti-inflammatory medications within the 30
days prior to the date of injury, there was a higher risk of getting
hurt while working on the farm. The injuries included falls, being struck
by an object, or wounds inflicted while working with farm machinery or
livestock

Researchers were able to identify several possible reasons for this,
said Dr. Don Voaklander, one of the study’s authors and a professor of
Public Health Sciences at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada.
Queens University also worked on the study.

"The first is that pain, unmasked when they stop using medication,
distracts the farmer when he’s doing his work. This means less attention
to the
task at hand. A second possibility involves limitations on mobility for
farmers who are in pain or who are guarding their movements as a result
of pain." Third, those who use pain medication may be experiencing
withdrawal symptoms that again may be distracting in a dynamic work environment.

from the University
of Alberta via Eureka

Fourth,
they have been junkified by previous exposures to the point that they
are, consciously or subconsciously, engaging in behavior likely to
result in injury leading to renewed access to narcotics. A typical
junkie scam,
no doubt related to the explosion of Oxycontin abuse in rural America.
Only a lack of rigorous control of Agro-pharmaceuticals has prevented
the exposure of related widespread rural abuse of bovine tranquilizers.
America’s farms are a festering focus of drug abuse…..

The hip-hop hottie who bears the moniker Notorious
K.I.M. looked more like her rap mentor, the Notorious B.I.G., when
she was released from a federal prison in Philadelphia yesterday after
serving a 10-month stint for lying about a shooting outside a lower-Manhattan
radio station.

Sources told The Post the rapper’s cellmates regularly brought her breakfast
in bed, and also tailored her clothes.

Lil’ Kim’s publicist, Tracy Nguyen, said the Queen
Bee yesterday was celebrating her newfound freedom with family and
friends in her New Jersey home, where she enjoyed a catered feast that
included macaroni and cheese, barbecued chicken, a salmon pasta salad,
rice and peas and a fruit plate.

She was looking forward to a red velvet cake from Sean "Diddy" Combs’
restaurant, Justin’s, in Chelsea.

But Nguyen said the Queen Bee didn’t want to rap about her weight gain.

"She didn’t really get into that," Nguyen said. "Imagine
if you were locked up for 10 months. She’s gotta get back to work."

from the New York Post

That, and get back on the vitimin C…