The Porn Star and the Politician

http://www.marieclaire.com/world-reports/news/latest/stormy-daniels-louisiana-senate

The Porn Star and the Politician
By Christy Smith

STORMY DANIELS, a 30-year-old adult film star with more than 150 steamy flicks to her name, is getting set to heat up Louisiana's 2010 Senate race. Daniels, the star of Operation Desert Stormy—in which she plays a CIA agent who fights terrorists while wearing Army-fatigue booty shorts—says she plans to toss her G-string in the ring (although she hadn't officially announced her candidacy as of press time). We asked the Baton Rouge native why she wants to forgo porn for politics.

Q: Why shoot for the Senate?

A: I was drafted by a group called Draft Stormy, a grassroots movement in Louisiana that wanted someone who was the polar opposite of current senator David Vitter. They figured I would be perfect because I am open and honest about my sexuality, unlike Vitter. I realized that this is my chance to make a difference, to do something unselfish, noble, and to help a lot of people.

Q: You're referring to Senator Vitter's link to a Washington, D.C. escort service . . .

A: I'm not one to judge someone's sexual activity, but what annoys me is that he's so hard-core "family values," and he puts his wife and kids out there, saying he's a Christian family man. Then he's caught up in a prostitution scandal. He's a hypocrite.

Q: How much will your résumé be a factor?

A: It's actually starting to work in my favor—I have nothing to hide. A sex tape of me isn't going to pop up and shame me; there are 150 of them at the video store.

Q: Do you think you're more qualified than Senator Vitter?

A: Absolutely not. But in one movie, I did play a Secret Service agent marooned on an island controlled by North Korea. I butt heads with dictator Kim Jong-il and come out on top.

Q: What's the most important issue facing Louisiana today?

A: The biggest issue in Louisiana is the economy. In New Orleans, tourism is down, and the crime rate is up. I want to make Louisiana a better place to live—create jobs, rebuild the Gulf Coast, and make health care affordable.

Q: What's your party affiliation?

A: As far as the two-party political system goes, I swing both ways. But I'm leaning toward the Libertarian Party.

Q: Sarah Palin or Hillary Clinton?

A: Hillary Clinton. She's a well-rounded woman, extremely knowledgeable on a wide range of subjects, and carries herself with dignity.

Q: Your campaign adviser's car was bombed in July, although he wasn't in the car. Was this politically motivated?

A: I hope so. I hope someone is that afraid or interested in what I'm doing that they would try to scare me out of the race.

Q: If you're elected, will you quit porn?

A: Probably, but only because of HD...and gravity.

Quote of the Month: Dennis Kucinich

Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) made the following statement on the House Floor about H. Res 867, which condemns the ‘Goldstone Report’ or the Report of the United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict:

“Today we journey from Operation Cast Lead to Operation Cast Doubt. Almost as serious as committing war crimes is covering up war crimes, pretending that war crimes were never committed and did not exist.

“Because behind every such deception is the nullification of humanity, the destruction of human dignity, the annihilation of the human spirit, the triumph of Orwellian thinking, the eternal prison of the dark heart of the totalitarian.

“The resolution before us today, which would reject all attempts of the Goldstone Report to fix responsibility of all parties to war crimes, including both Hamas and Israel, may as well be called the 'Down is Up, Night is Day, Wrong is Right' resolution.

“Because if this Congress votes to condemn a report it has not read, concerning events it has totally ignored, about violations of law of which it is unaware, it will have brought shame to this great institution.

“How can we ever expect there to be peace in the Middle East if we tacitly approve of violations of international law and international human rights, if we look the other way, or if we close our eyes to the heartbreak of people on both sides by white-washing a legitimate investigation?

“How can we protect the people of Israel from existential threats if we hold no concern for the protection of the Palestinians, for their physical security, their right to land, their right to their own homes, their right to water, their right to sustenance, their right to freedom of movement, their right to the human security of jobs, education and health care?

“We will have peace only when the plight of both Palestinians and Israelis is brought before this House and given equal consideration in recognition of that principle that all people on this planet have a right to survive and thrive, and it is our responsibility, our duty to see that no individual, no group, no people are barred from this humble human claim.”

Source:

http://warincontext.org/2009/11/04/us-house-rejects-goldstone-report/

What recovery?

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5gNiyJ905Ho0Ur96V2TQhsBX19lGwD9BQB7CG0

What recovery? Unemployment shoots past 10 percent
By JEANNINE AVERSA and CHRISTOPHER S. RUGABER (AP)
Nov 6, 2009

WASHINGTON — Just when it was beginning to look a little better, the economy relapsed Friday with a return to double-digit unemployment for only the second time since World War II and warnings that next year will be even worse than previously thought.

The jobless rate rocketed to 10.2 percent in October, the highest since early 1983, dealing a psychological blow to Americans as they prepare holiday shopping lists. It was another worse-than-expected report casting a shadow over the struggling recovery.

President Barack Obama called it "a sobering number that underscores the economic challenges that lie ahead." He signed a measure to extend unemployment benefits and to expand a tax credit for homebuyers.

Economists had not expected the 10 percent mark to come so quickly and immediately darkened their forecasts. Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody's Economy.com, and Joshua Shapiro, chief U.S. economist at MFR Inc., predicted the rate will peak at 11 percent by mid-2010. They earlier had projected 10.5 percent.

Unemployment at 11 percent would be a post-World War II record. Only once since then has joblessness hit double digits in the United States — from September 1982 to July 1983, topping out at 10.8 percent.

"It's not a good report," said Dan Greenhaus, chief economic strategist for New York-based investment firm Miller Tabak & Co. "What we're seeing is a validation of the idea that a jobless recovery is perfectly on track."

The Labor Department, using a survey of company payrolls, said the economy shed 190,000 jobs in October. A separate survey of households found 558,000 more people were unemployed last month than in September. Some 15.7 million Americans are out of work.

The survey of companies doesn't count the self-employed and undercounts employees of small businesses. So the economic picture could be even more dire.

One struggling small business, homebuilder Miller and Smith Inc. of McLean, Va., has trimmed its work force to about 100 from 350 at the height of the housing market in 2005. The company has been hurt by a slowdown in building and surging health care costs.

Troubles for small businesses could have a disproportionate effect on the economy, because they account for about 60 percent of the nation's jobs. They tend to rely on credit cards and home equity lines — both of which banks have tightened — for cash flow.

And the unemployment rate doesn't include people without jobs who have stopped looking, or those who have settled for part-time jobs. Counting those people, the unemployment rate would be 17.5 percent, the highest since at least 1994.

Economists had expected unemployment to rise to no more than 9.9 percent, up just a tick from September's 9.8 percent, and the surprising jump added to fears that the recovery could fizzle if Americans don't spend.

Already, consumer confidence for October came in well below what analysts were expecting. Shoppers' sentiments about the state of the economy are the gloomiest in nearly three decades.

Stores, always with an eye on holiday sales, are especially worried this year.

"This is a situation where the recovery balloon is getting off the ground but might not have enough power to keep rising," said Brian Bethune, economist at IHS Global Insight.

Sitting at a St. Louis unemployment center, Paul Branyon, who was laid off in July from a Williams-Sonoma factory in Tennessee and now lives with relatives, shook his head and laughed at the notion that the recession is over.

"It's getting actually harder right now," the 26-year-old said. "It seems like everywhere you go, people are losing jobs. People are cutting back. So it's going to get harder before it gets easier."

The economy actually grew from July to September for the first time in a year, but that's no consolation for people like Jose Betancourt, 57, who goes to a Miami-area career center twice a week to take computer education classes.

Betancourt has been out of work since July, when he was laid off from his supermarket maintenance job. He lives on about $600 a month in unemployment benefits, barely enough for the rent for his efficiency apartment, food and utilities.

He has trouble believing the recession is over. In his neighborhood, he sees other jobless people and empty stores.

"It's as if they just gave the economy a nice coat of varnish to make everyone feel better," he said. "I'm in a state of anxiety, and I see it all around Miami."

The worst recession since the 1930s may be over, but the recovery isn't expected to be strong enough to stem job losses and get businesses hiring again. And the unemployed are staying out of work longer. The count of people jobless for six months or longer stands at a record 5.6 million.

As for employers, few are confident enough in the recovery to hire. Art McKeen, plant manager of the Baldor Electric Co. factory in suburban St. Louis, says the plant has no plans add workers any time soon.

Baldor cut back production last year and put workers on part-time hours rather than lay them off. Orders have picked up again, but not enough to justify hiring. "We don't have the need for them right now," McKeen said.

Prospects that the government might pass a second stimulus bill appear dim. Congress is already grappling with sweeping health care legislation, raising concerns about further swelling the federal deficit.

"More debt, more spending ... clearly has not worked — particularly in a time of double-digit unemployment," said Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky. Democrats said the economy would have been in worse shape without the first stimulus.

October was the 22nd straight month the U.S. economy has lost jobs, the longest on record dating back 70 years. Losses at factories, construction companies, retailers and financial services companies far outweighed gains in education and health care, professional and business services and elsewhere. Government payrolls were flat.

One faint sign of hope: Temporary employment grew by 33,700 jobs, its third straight month of gains after steep losses earlier this year. Employers are likely to add temporary workers before hiring permanent ones.

Chris Rupkey, an economist at the Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi, called the big jump in the jobless rate "a kick in the stomach" and predicted a slog ahead. It could take at least four years for the jobless rate to drop to more normal levels of 5 or 6 percent.

"The last two recoveries from recession in the '90s and 2001 were jobless, and this one is clearly headed down the same road," he said.

Associated Press Writers Jim Kuhnhenn and Anne Flaherty in Washington, Emily Fredrix in Milwaukee, Christopher Leonard in St. Louis, Adrian Sainz in Miami, Andrew Vanacore in New York and Tom Murphy in Indianapolis contributed to this report.

Dogshit Park & other atrocities

Remember Todd Fahey and Wisdom's Maw? Err... well, even if you don't, there's a collection of supremely twisted short stories that are coming online as "a book" close to Christmas. Here's some photos from the upcoming collection...

Health "Reform" Fact of the Week

"The public-option debate is frustrating some Democrats, who have come to believe that a government-run plan is neither as radical as its conservative critics have portrayed, nor as important as its liberal supporters contend. Any public plan is likely to have a relatively narrow scope, as it would be offered only to people who don't have access to coverage through an employer. The public option would effectively be just another insurance plan offered on the open market. It would likely be administered by a private insurance provider, charging premiums and copayments like any other policy. In an early estimate of the House bill, the Congressional Budget Office forecast that fewer than 12 million people would buy insurance through the government plan."

So, as I've been warning, even the "public option" debate is a fraud, as the Democrats have no interest in providing an honest alternative to the insurance oligopoly...

Source: Washington Post

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/10/23/AR2009102304081.html

If Democrats Don't Pass Health Insurance Reform...

http://blackagendareport.com/?q=content/if-democrats-dont-pass-health-insurance-reform-year-what-do-we-lose-and-what-do-we-gain

If Democrats Don't Pass Health Insurance Reform This Year, What Do We Lose? And What Do We Gain?
Wed, 11/04/2009
By BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon

The version of health care reform championed by the White House and Congressional Democrats will force millions to buy crappy insurance from private providers with no interest in health care but plenty of interest in profits. Its pubic option is a cruel hoax that will not take effect till 2013 and even then will leave tens of millions uninsured. Now Democratic leaders in Congress say it might not pass this year anyway. Is that really so bad?

The “public option” in the president's health care bill is like the “clean” in clean coal. One harnesses the awesome power of the word clean and attaches it to coal, which is anything but. Likewise Democrats deploy the rhetorical power of the words “public” as in “everybody in, nobody out” and “option” as in choice to describe an arrangement will be neither public or for most, an available option.

The president said it himself in early September. His public option will be neither public nor optional for any more than a tiny percentage of Americans, and unlike his wars and bank bailouts, has to be “deficit neutral.” It will force millions under penalty of law to buy the deceptive and defective products of greedy private insurers.

Most alarmingly, the Democratic version of the public option will be rigidly means-tested to ensure that only the poorest get in, and financed with a John McCain style tax on those who receive nearly adequate benefits from their employers. This is a patented recipe for ghettoizing and socially stigmatizing those who do avail themselves of the public option, setting one segment of society against another poorer one, the exact reverse of the everybody in, nobody out spirit of social security and Medicare.

And though we are told that insurers will not be able to deny policies on the basis of pre-existing conditions, there is mounting evidence that insurers intend to enforce the same discriminatory requirements by claiming that conditions such as diabetes, overweight, smoking and more are the result of patient behaviors and “lifestyle choices” for which the insurance company cannot be liable unless it is able to charge more. The president has even deceitfully lowered the number of uninsured referred to in all the Democrats' pronouncements by subtracting the 12 or 15 million undocumented from all its numbers, as though they are expected to live in our midst as an underclass with no access to health services.

In the year since the last election the president has made concession after concession to drug and insurance companies, to private health care providers and their lobbyists. The White House, establishment Democrats and their echo chambers in the corporate media and even on the internet have worked hard to suppress voices advocating the simple, practical and elegant solution of single payer Medicare For All, which is still favored in polls by a substantial majority of Americans.

The longer the health care reform drama takes to unfold, the shabbier the president and his party are looking. With overwhelming majorities in both Houses of Congress, the Republicans can no longer be blamed for anything, and Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi are sending signals that they may not be able to pass the president's health insurance reform this year. They can't blame Republicans for this because there are not enough Republicans to stop legislation in either chamber. The Republican talking point on health care now is that the president is spending too much time on it, and needs to concentrate on something, anything else, like sending another 40 or 50 thousand troops to Iraq.

Ever men and women of their word, Democratic leaders in Congress have stripped out of the president's bills any chance for states to pursue their own single payer regimes, and backtracked on promises to allow a floor vote on the Medicare For All measure, HR 676.

Deceit has its price. The initiative has passed to the forces of single payer, the solution championed by Barack Obama up until his 2004 election to the US Senate.

In dozens of cities and towns across the nation Americans are seizing that initiative. The wave of demonstrations and sit-ins at the offices of insurance companies continues to grow. At the beginning of October, www.mobilizeforheathcare.org initiated actions in New York and DC. A month later more than a thousand people have volunteered to be arrested to put single payer back on the table in cities and towns across the country. Sit-ins are planned for more than two dozen cities today, and by year's end at this rate, will be occurring in more than sixty cities by the end of the year.

What Single Payer Health Care Will Do For Ordinary Families

The principal fact of economic life in America these days is profound insecurity. Tens of millions cannot find work, and tens of millions more who have found it live with the everyday question of what will happen if one of them gets sick or injured. People take jobs they don't want and put up with treatment from employers they would not otherwise take because of this insecurity. Wal-Mart is just the biggest of many employers who enforce a high turnover policy on their workforces, so that people will view their oppressive and dictatorial work environments as something to be endured because they are only passing phases on the way to some other station in life.

In fact, the next job for most Wal-Mart workers will be very like the last, and the next after that one too. But if workers in dead-end jobs had the security of guaranteed health care, they'd be much more inclined to stay where they are and organize and fight for better working conditions. Service workers are underpaid not because of the nature of the work, any more than west coast dockworkers seventy years ago were underpaid because they were drunkards and thieves. They are underpaid because they have not succeeded in organizing and fighting for their rights. This is why elite bodies like the US Chamber of Commerce are stubbornly resisting anything like Medicare For All. The economy, and the present health insurance regime serve them well, and they want to preserve it.

Medicare For All, single payer will enable the working poor to make a stand where they are, and lift themselves out of poverty by organizing for and demanding a greater share of the wealth they produce every day. By removing the dread of financial ruin due to illness or injury, single payer will enable working people to fight for their own collective economic uplift. That's why the struggle for guaranteed and universal single payer, Medicare For All is the real deal right now, the key to unlocking a better life for millions in the near future, a concrete focus of the civil and human rights movements of our time.

It's time to mobilize for Medicare For All, now. Go to www.mobilizeforhealthcare.org and take your future, your family's future into your hands. Donate to provide legal assistance and bail money and other expenses. Volunteer to be present at a legal demonstration, or to put your body on the line in a nonviolent demonstration for health care now at the offices of an insurance company near you.

Bruce Dixon is based in Atlanta, and is managing editor at Black Agenda Report. He can be reached at bruce.dixon@blackagendareport.com.

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Walmart, Neighborhood Market...

I was driving past a Walmart yesterday and discovered it was branding itself as a "Neighborhood Market" now. I guess that's true, if by "Neighborhood Market" you mean "Evil multinational corporation that destroys local businesses with predatory practices, engages in massive labor law fraud, squashes unions, and exploits virtual slave labor in the Third World and China."

UFOs As Agents Of Deconstruction

http://www.ufomystic.com/wake-up-down-there/ufos-as-agents-of-deconstruction/

Oct 07 2009
UFOs As Agents Of Deconstruction
Greg Bishop

In the Archaeus Project’s 1989 journal Cyberbiological Studies of the Imaginal Component In The UFO Contact Experience Carl Raschke wrote an essay entitled “UFOs: Ultraterrestrial Agents of Cultural Deconstruction.” Raschke offered the idea that the search for meaning behind the UFO enigma was caught up in cultural ideas about aliens coming from other planets in structured craft. He also proposed that whatever was behind the UFO problem was acting as a catalyst for change in cultural ideas about what was possible and even acceptable.

Raschke noted that,”…the UFO puzzle for both investigators and the public unfolds along a trajectory that Jacques Vallee terms that of ‘recursive unsolvability.’ In mathematics a recursive function is one in which the solution cannot be reached by a simple set of successive, linear operations, but is gained only by successive, partial tallies, each of which incrementally redefines the problem itself.”

The UFO debate appears to surround a concept that is continually redefined by a set of partial answers that redefine the question. The end result is that the solution bears less relevance to the original query.

Most can agree that the UFO question has not been solved conclusively by anyone, and the introduction of new concepts like the abduction engima, FOIA document searches and the recent rise of the disclosure movement have changed the focus and character of UFO study over the last 20-30 years. In the 1950s and ’60s, “occupant” cases were dismissed by the mainstream research community as embarrassing and a distraction to the important issue of popularizing the idea that sightings of UFOs were enough to make the subject worthy of respectability and serious study.

With the 1967 publication of Flying Saucer Occupants by Coral and Jim Lorenzen, the idea of “piloted” UFOs was taken more seriously. The idea of abductions was virtually ignored from 1966 (when Interrupted Journey told the strange story of Betty and Barney Hill) until 1981, when Budd Hopkins’ Missing Time was published, and got a real boost in 1987 with Whitley Strieber’s Communion.

Each time a new concept was introduced, the UFO question was redefined. Are we are simply discovering heretofore unrecognized aspects of the phenomenon, or does some symbiosis of reported observations occur, working subrosa in concert with expectations? I would argue that since we are dealing with something that is not amenable to controlled testing and repeatability at will, that expectations very likely play a role in defining the questions and any ultimate answer.

If there is an intelligence or intelligences behind the phenomenon, what it has been doing (probably for millenia) either looks like nonsense or some inscrutable attempt to change human thinking and perception. The very exposure to a UFO or occupant sighting is enough to rearrange one’s concepts of what is real, or even acceptable to our minds and senses. The issue of lasting physical or psychological changes was addressed by Jacques Vallee in his anomalies classification matrix published in his 1990 Book Confrontations.

An article by Benedict Carey from the New York Times reports on research into seemingly nonsensical events and how they are useful in deconstructing our endless search for structure and meaning, injecting helpful doses of depatterning. Participants in a study were asked to read an absurdist short story by Franz Kafka and then given a test that analyzed their ability to find hidden patterns in strings of letters:

The test is a standard measure of what researchers call implicit learning: knowledge gained without awareness. The students had no idea what patterns their brain was sensing or how well they were performing.

But perform they did. They chose about 30 percent more of the letter strings, and were almost twice as accurate in their choices, than a comparison group of 20 students who had read a different short story, a coherent one.

What this may indicate is that UFOs may exist as a mega-experiment in deconstructing our ideas of what is possible, our place in the universe, our ways of accepting what is real and even our methods of cataloging sensory input. The question remains as to who is conducting the experiment, and how much we are either subjects, equal partners, or almost wholly responsible for the experiments and the results.

Ostensibly, the UFO question is whether a non-human source is causing sightings, abductions, radar returns and flying saucer religions, but the intricacies of the problem impinge on so many other areas that we redefine them as well. Examples include reported physics of UFO movement, the question of cultural antecedents and perhaps how our society decides what is acceptable as serious study. That last one may be the most deconstructive effect of all. Changes in our mindset, and not any so-called “answers” may be the real reason behind the whole thing, or at least the most meaningful. There may indeed be “knowledge gained without awareness.”

In the end, this may all be a metaphor for something so inscrutable as to be inexplicable in language or thoughts of which we are currently capable.

Moon crash: the search for water

http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/news/2009/10/091009_mooncrash_nh_sl.shtml

9 october, 2009
Moon crash: the search for water

The American space agency, Nasa, says two unmanned spacecraft have crashed into the moon as planned in an experiment seeking evidence of water.

However, live pictures of an expected plume of debris failed to materialise.

A rocket was steered into a crater near the lunar south pole at a speed of 8,000km/h, followed by a satellite probe equipped with cameras and other instruments.

The probe was designed to analyse debris thrown up by the impact, and send the results back to Earth, before it too crashed into the moon.

Doomed Dome: The Future That Never Was

http://hplusmagazine.com/articles/politics/doomed-dome-future-never-was

Doomed Dome: The Future That Never Was
David Appell
September 30, 2009

In the bright and shiny future, we all live in green, gleaming communities, monorailed shuttles at the ready, climate-controlled at all times -- a sort of Logan’s Run, but without the forced euthanasia. It almost happened in, of all places, an old mill town in northern Vermont.

Winooski and its 7,000 people lie just north of Burlington, Vermont and next to Lake Champlain. The name means “wild onion” in the language of the Abenaki Indians, for the plants that grew along the river of the same name, whose rapids powered the mills that sustained the town for decades. But by the 1960s the mills had lost to modern technologies, and Winooski became a kind of poor and overshadowed cousin to its progressive (some said socialist) neighbor.

Vermont, the saying goes, is nine months of winter and three months of bad skiing. Winooski’s January lows are -20 Fahrenheit or lower, and winters see 75 or more inches of snow. Residents shovel the stuff for months, and then unshovel it in the spring, spreading the high piles across their driveways to encourage melting. Getting from your car to the store can at times feel like the Iditarod.

In the late 1970s the U.S was in its second energy crisis of the decade and roiled by double-digit inflation. Oil was at a then-shocking $38 a barrel ($107 in today’s dollars), having risen eightfold in the previous ten years, and Jimmy Carter went on television in a Cardigan sweater to urge Americans to turn down their thermostats. Few towns were hurting more than frigid Winooski, whose residents spent about $4 million a year to stay thawed.

One night in 1979 a group of its creative young city planners went to dinner and Mark Tigan, then the city’s 32-year-old director of community development and planning, decided that not enough attention was being paid to energy conservation. Then, in the way that only a few glasses of wine can facilitate brainstorming, someone said, half tongue-in-cheek, they should put a dome over the city.

The next morning it still seemed like a good idea -- or, at least, not necessarily completely absurd.

At the time, Winooski was second in the amount of federal money received per capita, and was favored by the Department of Housing and Urban Development as a place to pilot new ideas. Tigan had his staff prepare a white paper on the dome. They wrote that a one square mile dome would reduce resident’s heating bills by up to 90 percent. Tigan presented the idea to the city council.

Clem Bissonette, then on Winnoski’s city council and now its ex-mayor, asked Tigan, “Are you nuts?” But when Tigan explained it could mean millions in HUD money, Bissonette and the rest of the city council quickly signed on, and a young reporter named Jodie Peck who was covering the meeting wrote about it for the next day’s Burlington paper.

The following morning, Tigan recalls, three satellite trucks were parked in front of city hall, and within days the town was receiving 20 bags of mail a day from enthusiasts all around the world. Companies were calling, wanting to build the Winooski Dome.

The city’s request for $55,000 for a feasibility study went to Washington, and enthusiasts pushed it up through channels. A deputy assistant secretary at HUD named Bob Embrey said he would fund it.

“I didn’t hear one organized voice against it,” said Tigan. “The Woodchucks loved it,” he said, referring to the city’s long-time French-Canadian residents, “since it meant that they’d never have to shovel snow again. They thought of it as their little piece of Tampa Bay.”

Naturally the media was full of questions, and Tigan and his staff had few real answers. Basically, he says, they made it up on the fly. “They asked how high it would be, and we said 250 feet, so it wouldn’t block planes but clear the town’s highest building (eleven stories). Would it be clear or opaque? ‘Of course you’ll be able to see through it,’ we said. What about automobile exhaust? ‘Oh, we’ll have electric cars or monorails inside.' By the time the media was done constructing it, we had a picture in place.”

Naturally, the media was full of questions, and Tigan had few real answers. Basically, he says, they made it up on the fly.

Tigan contracted with John Anderson, a Vermont conceptual architect, to produce drawings of the Dome. Anderson’s vision was not a hemispheric shape, but more like the top half of a hamburger bun. He colored it whiteish yellow and eschewed any inside support structures.

Anderson’s picture was the first tangible view of the Dome. Thinking ahead, he envisioned a vinyl-like material attached over a network of metal cables, ranging from transparent (on the southern side, to allow in sunlight) to opaque on the northern side. Air would be brought inside by large fans and heated or cooled as necessary. The Dome would be held up by air pressure just slightly above atmospheric pressure. Entrances and exits would consist of double doors, akin to an airlock. The homes inside would require no individual heating or cooling -- “you could grow tomatoes all year-round” he said. If the Dome were punctured it would come down slowly, allowing for ample warning. Anderson now recalls it as a “totally fun” project, though he did occasionally get insulted in restaurants by some local residents. “What will happen to our children?” they asked.

Enthusiasts organized an International Dome Symposium, held in March 1980. Buckminster Fuller, then busy assisting in Brasilia, the planned capital city in Brazil that had been hacked out wholesale from the Amazonian jungle, flew in to express his enthusiasm. Fuller (naturally) proposed a structure of multiple geodesic domes, but in any case declared the engineering “not terribly difficult,” and pointed to already existing structures like large airport terminals in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Fuller had built the “US Pavilion” at Expo Montreal in 1976 -- three-fourths of a sphere consisting of 1900 molded, transparent Plexiglas panels, 200 feet high and 250 feet in diameter, covering 1.1 acres. Winooski’s dome would cover nearly the entire town, 800 times that area. He stressed that the biggest challenge was not keeping the dome up, but holding it down against the force of rising warm air.

Tigan and his staff waded deeper into the idea. Someone calculated that it would make economic sense if heating oil rose above $1.25 a gallon -- it was then at $0.99 per gallon. (Today it sells for about twice that, in current dollars.) And then there was the money saved on snowplowing. They applied for HUD money, not so much to study the feasibility of the engineering, but to learn how people might react to such a unique living situation, and to refine the economics and the environment.

Everyone had an opinion. The New York Times editorialized against the Dome, saying it would ruin the view. The financial pages of Saudi Arabian newspapers feared it for the precedent it might set. Tigan appeared on the Letterman show, McNeil and Lehrer, and others. Then, Senator William Proxmire from Wisconsin, famous (and some said, short-sighted) for his “Golden Fleece Awards,” given monthly to a project he deemed a waste of federal funds, got wind of the idea. President Carter, struggling for reelection in a terrible economy with Americans being held hostage in Iran, personally called up Embrey -- the project backer at HUD. In May, 1980, HUD turned down Winooski’s request for funds.

After Ronald Reagan won the autumn election, money for such projects dried up very quickly. Peck, the reporter who broke the story and who is now a realtor in Vermont, called it “wonderful publicity for the town, but it was a great idea that would never work.”

Tigan, now an associate professor of Community Development at the Clark University, disagrees. “Economically it’s a slam dunk,” he said. The biggest issue, he believes, would be the public taking of land via eminent domain to secure the area around the edges, illustrated by the 2005 controversial Supreme Court decision in Kelo vs. City of New London. Such issues, Tigan expects, will become more common in the future as environmental sustainability and even survival become economic issues.

“You could have had year-round fly-fishing,” he says with a bit of a sigh. “If I had stayed in Winooski, it would be under a dome now.”

David Appell is a freelance science journalist living in St. Helens, Oregon.

LA Co. DA to prosecute OTC medical marijuana

http://www.mercurynews.com/california/ci_13518094

LA Co. DA to prosecute OTC medical marijuana
10/08/2009

MONTEBELLO, Calif.—The Los Angeles County district attorney says medical marijuana dispensaries in the county are operating illegally and will be prosecuted.

Steve Cooley said Thursday at a narcotics officers training session in Montebello that he and City Attorney Carmen Trutanich believe over-the-counter sales are illegal, based on a state Supreme Court decision last year.

Cooley says his office is already preparing to prosecute a Culver City dispensary called Organica.

The city attorney's office says there are hundreds of dispensaries in the county operating under a 1996 voter initiative that allowed medical marijuana use, and a state law that allows for collective growing of marijuana.

Outside the training session, about 100 medical marijuana advocates protested.
———
Information from: Los Angeles Times, http://www.latimes.com/

The Perils of FDS: Fun Deficiency Syndrome

http://hplusmagazine.com/articles/neuro/perils-fds-fun-deficiency-syndrome

The Perils of FDS: Fun Deficiency Syndrome
James Kent
October 7, 2009

Modern cosmetic pharmacology focuses so heavily on eliminating depression that it entirely misses one essential point: depressed people are suffering from a lack of fun. Nobody ever describes depression as a “Fun Deficiency Syndrome,” but lack of fun is clearly the root cause of all depression. It is impossible to be depressed when you are having fun, yet modern therapies for depression seek only to minimize depressive symptoms while doing nothing to maximize the daily intake of fun. This backwards approach to treating fun deficiency syndrome — or FDS — is not only dangerously ineffective, it will be viewed by future generations as one of the greatest failures of medicine.

While depression has been studied under a microscope, science has barely scratched the surface on fun. The scientific study of fun is considered to be a frivolous exercise, and this assumption would be correct because fun is frivolous. The mistake made by science and academia is in underestimating the value of fun, treating fun as a non-serious diversion instead of a rational goal worthy of scientific examination. This oversight is unfortunate because fun is arguably the greatest thing a human can have. Everyone likes to have fun... no, we love to have fun. When we are having fun we forget ourselves and become one with our actions in a moment of pure playful enjoyment. Having fun goes beyond being happy. Happiness implies a baseline level of contentment and good feelings but it does not include the amusement, exhilaration, laughter and joy associated with fun. If depression is the illness of our age, fun is the cure.

The roots of FDS can be traced through human developmental stages. Most people have plenty of fun as children, but the onset of adolescence and high school creates a perfect storm of jaded anxiety that dampens the levels of fun easily found in childhood. The onset of FDS in adolescence leads teenagers to naturally seek extremes of fun behavior to counteract their social anxiety. These extremes include partying, fighting, competitive sports and mating behaviors where risk is maximized to produce the most fun. Most people do not consider this adolescent fun-seeking activity to be a neurologically-wired behavior to cope with developmental anxiety and depression, but it obviously is. This fun-seeking stage lasts well into early adulthood when chronic FDS becomes more problematic. By middle age, most people are chronically low on fun and this is when depression becomes most acute. If lack of fun is constant and goes untreated it can lead directly to mid-life crisis and, eventually, grumpy-old-fart syndrome.

Fun can be scientifically reduced to two distinct variables: risk and reward. It is easy to understand why reward is fun, but risk is the key to maximizing the impact of reward to produce fun. The most extreme examples of this dynamic can be found in compulsive behaviors that can become highly addictive, like sex and gambling. Sex and gambling are both fun and risky, and the higher the risk the more satisfying and more fun the reward. Also, consider horror movies or amusement park rides where a constant level of fear and anxiety is sustained throughout the experience until the resolution brings a safe and satisfying reward. Fun is thus the science of using risk to build tension, and then strategically releasing that tension with a pleasurable reward to maximize enjoyment. Fun is therapeutic because it reduces anxiety and produces neurochemicals that combat depression. Fun is one of nature’s best and most powerful medicines. If you could put fun in a pill it would almost certainly be illegal.

The major pharmacological variables of the risk/reward fun dynamic are adrenaline and dopamine, the key catecholamines produced in response to stress. By now we should all be familiar with the manic exhilaration of an adrenaline rush and the self-satisfied clarity of a dopamine high. Of all the drugs in the world, amphetamines may be the best at stimulating this specific chemical cocktail. It is no mystery why amphetamines lead to risky behaviors. Risky behaviors are even more rewarding under the influence of amphetamines and thus more fun. One side of the dopamine cycle leads the subject to seek out new and fun activities; the other side stimulates the satisfying feeling of reward in response to new experiences. Increasing the levels of risk in these fun-seeking behaviors increases the adrenaline rush and thus increases the sensual intensity of the reward and emotional impact of the resulting memory. The experience of intense fun is therefore more than a trivial diversion: it is a pivotal psychological landmark in the lifetime of an individual which can create long-term changes in selfimage, mood, and behavior.

If we follow a simple clinical spectrum for FDS, it can be assumed that the longer individuals go without fun, the more depressed they will become. Chronic lack of fun over time will always result in low self-esteem and the inability to enjoy activities that were once fun when they were new but have now become mundane. People suffering from chronic FDS will claim to lack the time or motivation to seek out new activities, and at the extreme end of the disorder, subjects will claim that seeking fun is a complete waste of time. This is a chronic lack of dopamine talking, and the only cure for people with FDS is to force them to go out and have fun. Unfortunately subjects with undiagnosed FDS may actually think they don’t deserve to have fun, and that they don’t even deserve to have friends, so snapping someone with chronic FDS out of their cycle is not always easy. In extreme cases the only solution may be dancing, a surprise party, or a spontaneous and poorly-planned road trip. Bring beer.

People are the final component in fun... other people. Fun is always more fun when it is shared with other people. This is why partying is an essential human behavior for regulating feelings of self-esteem and social worth. Having fun with other humans in a social setting stimulates serotonin and oxcytocin, two neurochemicals essential to feelings of security and being loved. So if you’re feeling depressed and nothing seems to be working, the only solution is to call some friends and go out and have some fun. It is clinically proven to make you feel better.

James Kent is the former publisher of Psychedelic Illuminations and Trip Magazine. He currently edits DoseNation.com, a drug blog featuring news, humor and commentary.

The Perils of CFSS (Compulsive Fun-Seeking Syndrome)

On the flip-side of FDS, we find people who suffer from Compulsive Fun-Seeking syndrome (CFSS). People with CFSS are commonly referred to as adrenaline junkies, thrill seekers, compulsive risk takers and teenagers. While this syndrome is viewed as valuable by the gambling, prostitution, dope, and extreme sports industries, it should be noted that CFSS is a legitimate pathology with a distinct pharmacological profile. CFSS can be artificially simulated by dopamine agonists, including amphetamines, pot, caffeine and alcohol. More oddly, dopamine agonists used to treat Parkinson’s Disease or Restless Leg Syndrome (RLS), which selectively stimulate motor pathways and selectively avoid the reward pathways, can also cause compulsive behaviors such as gambling or financial risktaking. As the result of CFSS, we find people who chronically seek risky behaviors in the hopes of finding fun, but who fail to feel any long-term satisfaction from the rewards they receive. This syndrome is also called attention-deficit disorder (ADD), or it may be categorized by particular compulsions or addictions, but in actuality these are all symptoms of an underlying CFSS disorder. People with CFSS will become depressed in the absence of fun faster than people who do not have this syndrome.

Cancer Cure Genius Silenced by Medical Mafia

http://www.naturalnews.com/027104_cancer_Chi_cancer_cure.html

Royal Rife: Cancer Cure Genius Silenced by Medical Mafia
Saturday, September 26, 2009
Paul Fassa, citizen journalist

(NaturalNews) What if someone invented an electronic device that would destroy pathogens, bacteria, and even viruses with no toxic side effects? What if that same device could wipe out cancer by altering the cancer's cellular environment or by killing cancer viruses with an electronic or ultra sonic beam? That was accomplished years ago. The researcher who invented and perfected this device had an odd name, Royal Raymond Rife. But his associates and colleagues knew him as Roy Rife.

The original Rife machine, based on a naval radio frequency oscillator, evolved to the Rife Ray Tube. It is the basis of Rife technology that underwent successful trials and experiments as it was developed in the 1930's. You'd think that further research into Rife's findings would have been supported and propagated further for the welfare of all. And at first it was. But guess what, Rife's technology was suppressed by the medical mafia, and very little has come of it. Nothing new here.

How It Works (Basically)

Have you ever seen or heard of singers who could shatter wine glasses by hitting and sustaining the right note? How about striking a tuning fork held next to another of the same pitch that is not struck, but vibrates and makes a tone anyway? These are visible examples of vibrational reciprocity in the sonic range. From this basic understanding, Rife developed what he called resonance therapy.

Imagine if minuscule pathogens had energy frequencies beyond the sonic range that, if induced, would cause the pathogen to implode or explode. This Rife called the Mortal Oscillatory Resonance or MOR. It is technology within the arena of energetic healing, but more in the western mode of challenging pathogens with technological machinery from outside. With a special microscope of his own making, Rife was able to observe and record the MOR of many pathogens.

Instead of dealing with the vibrational field of the patient, or the patient's chi energy, Rife used high frequency energies created by electronic machinery to alter both pathogens and their environments. The difference between Rife's Ray Beam and common radiation therapy was that only those specific MOR frequencies of targeted microorganisms had negative responses. All other cells were left unharmed. This is the essence of Rife's technology.

Also included in his research was observing morphing pathogenic bacteria and viruses into different less destructive forms. He was among a growing number of microbiologists and researchers who had adopted Pleomorphism as an explanation of microorganism life. Pleomorphism posits that the life form of a pathogenic microbe alters, possibly many times.

Rife also noticed corresponding changes in the tissue or blood environment of these morphing microorganisms. This led to the theory that the condition of the germs' medium, i.e. the blood or tissue, was the cause of disease and not the germ. Rife did observe the pH changes in what is now called the field or terrain in the microorganism's host environment as well as its association with bacterial/viral morphing.

He considered that the field pH changes influenced the microorganisms morphing, causing them to become more pathogenic or more benign depending on the pH factor. This was the precursor to the field or terrain theory as a source of disease that many holistic healers now embrace over the germ theory. Rife was beginning to realize this in spite of being able to kill the germs of many diseases with his ray tube.

Monomorphismwas the accepted theory at that time since microscopy was not able to observe the mutable morphing of microorganisms. This re-enforced the old germ theory and made a lot of people in western medicine happy to be in their profession. What was usually observed with the microscopes of that time were simply shells of dead viruses and bacteria.

Because the electronics of electronic microscopes killed the tiny microbes, electronic microscopes were unable to observe pleomorphic alterations or the result of the correct resonance (MOR) applied for its destruction while alive. As is the nature for accepted doctrine, especially when there are significant monetary interests, monomorphism was in and pleomorphism was out!

This despite the fact that to pleomorphism advocates' glee, Rife's Universal Microscope made observing microbes changing form a reality. Photos and films were provided to scientists who were open to this, and eventually a couple of prominent scientists gained access to Rife's Universal Microscope to observe the previously unseen phenomena first hand.

Rife's Early Achievements

Royal Raymond Rife left the United States after his medical education and trained for six years at the Carl Zeis Optical Company in Germany. The unique and complex microscope he created used different mediums for bending light than normal optics used prior to his ultimate invention, which he called the Universal Microscope. That achievement alone brought him fame in the inner circles of the scientific community.

However, the mother for this invention was his desire to see the tiniest microorganisms alive for as long as desired, enabling him to notice when they disintegrated or changed form from a focused ultra sonic frequency. The Universal Microscope enabled Rife to painstakingly record the exact frequencies, or MOR (mortal oscillatory resonance) to destroy different pathogens, even viruses, that were commonly found in the blood and tissues from many of the diseases.

During Rife's time, a virus was defined simply as a living microorganism too small to be seen with a microscope. Of course, his unique microscope changed that. With its astounding 31,000X magnifying power, which some say could be boosted to twice that power with special UV lighting, Rife was able to observe microorganisms morph into different forms, sometimes as many as 16, and disintegrate with the corresponding mortal oscillatory resonance (MOR) frequencies.

For his scientific genius, Rife was nominated for the Alternative Nobel Prize, Europe's arrangement to award more risk taking ventures passed over by the Swedish Noble Prize. Rife's genius was boundless, he excelled in microbiology, optics, and other mechanical and electronic applications.

Henry Timken, Jr., the wealthy owner of Timken Roller Bearing Company became Rife's patron, enabling Roy Rife to maintain independent research without interruption. Out of gratitude for a Rife invention that had reduced his production costs, Timken established a laboratory on his estate in San Diego, CA for Rife to research as he desired with the best equipment available. It was a state of the art lab.

Rife was also introduced to Dr. Milbank Johnson, who was the head of a regional medical board and affiliated with the University of Southern California (USC) medical department. Dr. Johnson admired and respected Rife's ideas and ingenuity. As the head of a regional medical institution, he had political clout in the medical community throughout the nation. Dr. Johnson's support of Rife's work enabled Rife to continue his research unabated by medical authority throughout the 1930's.

Dr. Johnson helped Rife network with a couple of eminent bacteriologists who were interested in pleomorphism research, Dr. Arthur Kendall of Northwestern University in Chicago and Dr. E. C. Rosenow of the Rochester, Minnesota Mayo Clinic. Those two participated with Rife by using his Universal Microscope to see what Roy Rife was seeing to confirm their theories.

After experimenting by infecting lab animals and curing them, Rife was confident that his research could now extend to real life human cancer victims. Dr. Johnson set up clinical trials out of USC's medical school. The clinical trail results were monitored by a team of physicians headed by pathologist Alvin Ford, MD.

Rife was presented with 16 terminal cancer victims afflicted by a variety of malignancies. The USC team of physicians declared 14 of those 16 were clinically cured within 70 days. The other 2 took 20 days longer. The treatments included short breaks with nutrients to promote lymphatic elimination of the destroyed microbes.

In 1940, Dr. Arthur W. Yale announced that Rife had discovered a technique for curing cancer so unique and amazing that medicine was on the verge of completely eliminating the second highest cause of disease death in America. Unfortunately, Dr. Yale did not have the last word.

The Beginning of Betrayal and Suppression

Any threat to the medical mafia with a cancer cure that was not dependent on AMA surgery or Big Pharma drugs needed to be openly challenged by the monomorphic crowd, whose theory supported curing by surgical removal, dangerous radiation, or poisonous drugs. And Rife's Ray Beam therapy was not just for curing cancer, but for curing any and all diseases without the use of surgery or drugs!

For every Rifean there were many others whose careers were threatened by anything outside of their cash flow boxes. Dr. Thomas Rivers was among the first to attack, and he was right out of the Rockefeller Institute. He was joined by Dr. Hans Zinser, a Harvard Medical School microbiologist. They declared Rife's theories and techniques as worthless. Naturally, many others in the habit of obedience to authority joined in.

But this was just the beginning of Rife's descent into doom. Around 1936, Rife realized he needed to form an independent company producing more manageable machines than the monstrosity in his lab. Rife contracted an individual who understood his invention, and who demonstrated the ability to package Rife's devices more compactly while maintaining their efficiency. That man was Philip Hoyland, an electronic/electrical engineer.

Rife, Hoyland, and two other associates formed the Beam Ray Corporation with the idea of making and distributing the machines to clinicians and physicians. Soon, along came the doctor who had never practiced medicine, Morris Fishbein, the notorious alternative cancer cure hit man and head of the AMA. Just as he has done with others who had come up with cancer cures outside the cut, burn, and poison mode, Fishbein made a move to possess and control Rife's technology at first.

He bribed Hoyland with $10,000 to file a suit against Rife in order to obtain the company and include a Fishbein agent on the board of directors while excluding Rife. Ten grand was quite a lot in those days. Rife counter sued and won in 1939. The litigation and betrayal took an emotional and financial toll on the normally reclusive scientist, and he began drinking.

Then the big bad Fishbein decided if he couldn't have the Rife operation, he'd destroy it. This was Morris Fishbein's MO with others who had come up with alternative cancer cures, but would not allow him to virtually steal them away and possibly hide them. He used his Machiavellian clout to ban doctors from using Rife technology and even confiscated equipment.

A small circle of doctors in California continued despite the national pressure, thanks to the protection of a politically powerful medical person, the same Dr. Milbank Johnson who was always in Rife's corner. However, Dr. Johnson passed away in 1944, and the AMA had its way as medical mafia terrorists!

Suspiciously, upon Dr. Johnson's death, many of the documents from the USC clinical trails he had held completely disappeared. Not long after, investigators suspected that he was poisoned just prior to announcing Rife's successes publicly.

Equipment was confiscated, laboratories were destroyed, one doctor was harassed to the point of quitting the profession, and another was reported as having committed suicide! The wife of another doctor had a nervous breakdown, forcing her to receive shock therapy during her two months in a mental hospital. Medical mafia is an appropriate term after all!

Rife MOR Therapy on Life Support

Again, Roy Rife made another attempt at manufacturing and distributing his Rife Ray Beam devices with the technology for using them correctly. He partnered with an engineer named John Crane, who had encouraged Rife to continue. They made a bit of a stir with even better designs that were easier to use around 1960.

But even without Fishbein, who was forced to retire in 1954 because of the AMA scandals discovered by the 1953 Fitzgerald congressional committee, the FDA took over harassment activities and seized Rife and Crane's latest equipment.

All this plus the death of his beloved wife of over 30 years left Rife a broken man. In 1961, at the age of 73, Roy Rife fled the country to nearby Mexico. Rife had added Valium to his drinking habit, yet he managed to live until 1971, when he died in Mexico at the age of 83. John Crane later explained that Rife was a great researcher, but was not cut out to be a fighter. However, John Crane was a knowledgeable and outspoken fighter.

After Rife's exodus to Mexico, John Crane still attempted to bring Rife's technology to public awareness while railing against the medical establishment's suppression of his constitutional rights. He was criminally indicted and tried on charges involving practicing medicine without a license. The trail jury was screened to eliminate all those with any medical knowledge, especially alternative healing, while retaining an AMA doctor as the jury foreman!

Rife submitted a deposition from Mexico to support Crane's defense, but it was not even admitted. Talk about getting railroaded! Crane was convicted and sentenced to 10 years imprisonment. Two of the three counts against Crane were overturned later, and he was released from prison after serving 3 years and 1 month.

Yet even after his release from prison, Crane continued his work underground and compiled and produced a 1000 page manual on the Rife machine's design and use, which has survived after his death in 1995. Thanks to John Crane's persistent work, Rife's ray beam technology managed to stay alive, but only on life support.

In 1986, Barry Lynes, author of The Cancer Cure That Worked: 50 Years of Suppression, a book that chronicles Royal Raymond Rife's life and work, submitted an article to every member of the U.S. Congress and the staff and students of George Washington University's medical school as a last gasp effort to openly investigate Rife's work without bias. Nothing, not even one response, came of it.

Currently, the life support system for Rife's work is a scattered group of technically oriented individuals and holistic and allopathic doctors, connecting by Internet throughout the world, especially from Europe. They are holding Rife's technology together, some even using it, in the hopes that someday it will see the light of day for all of humanity.

About the author

Paul Fassa has managed to survive the Standard American Diet (SAD) and his youthful folly by deprogramming gradually from mainstream health ideology and studying holistic health matters informally with his wife while incorporating them into his lifestyle as a vegetarian.

He also practices Chi-Lel Chi Gong, and he is trained as a polarity therapy practitioner. He is dedicated to warning others of the corruption of food and medicine in our time, and guiding others toward a better direction for health. You can visit his blog at http://healthmaven.blogspot.com

War Criminal Obama Deserves An Oscar

http://www.prisonplanet.com/war-criminal-obama-deserves-an-oscar-but-not-a-nobel-peace-prize.html

War Criminal Obama Deserves An Oscar, But Not A Nobel Peace Prize
Barack is good at propagandizing for an attack on Iran, and he has dutifully expanded the illegal wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan, but a peacenik he is not
Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Friday, October 9, 2009

In a world where war criminals like Tony Blair are rewarded and those that oppose war criminals, like the Iraqi shoe thrower Muntadhar al-Zeidi, are imprisoned and tortured, it comes as no surprise that another war criminal – Barack H. Obama – has been rewarded for his stoic service to imperial bloodletting with the Nobel Peace Prize.

The man who gallantly promised “change” from the Bush regime’s illegal wars and a return to diplomacy over belligerency in dealing with Iran, has perpetuated the illegal wars in Afghanistan and Iraq while expanding another in Pakistan and becoming belligerent towards Iran.

How in anyone’s mind can such behavior constitute a move towards peace?

Obama has done nothing to dismantle the sprawling network of well over 700 U.S. military bases all over the world.

Instead of coming to an understanding with Iran over their nuclear power program, Obama gleefully read from his trusty teleprompter and crafted the hoax that the Iranian nuclear facility at Qom was an evil secret that the Iranians had kept hidden from America as part of a clandestine agenda to build nuclear weapons. In reality, Iran had followed precisely the guidelines set out by the IAEA on when to report the facility and the U.S. had known about it for several years anyway.

Obama’s slick propaganda in expressing his shock at the “discovery” of the plant was worthy of an Oscar but not a Nobel Peace Prize, since the scam has increased the likelihood of sanctions on Iran that will only accelerate the path to war.

By dutifully playing his part in this contrived hoax, Obama was mimicking the tactics of how George W. Bush sold the attack on Iraq.

As Paul Craig Roberts wrote, “By accusing Iran of having a secret “nuclear weapons program” and demanding that Iran “come clean” about the nonexistent program, adding that he does not rule out a military attack on Iran, Obama mimics the discredited Bush regime’s use of nonexistent Iraqi “weapons of mass destruction” to set up Iraq for invasion.”

The fact that Obama launched himself into the role of war hawk in an effort to propagandize for belligerency towards Iran completely discredits the claim by Nobel Committee chairman Thorbjoern Jagland that Obama “Has been a key person for important initiatives in the U.N. for nuclear disarmament and to set a completely new agenda for the Muslim world and East-West relations.”

Obama’s acting skills in front of a teleprompter and his slick rhetoric about peace and diplomacy may look good on the surface, but the reality of what he has actually done to further the PNAC agenda for endless war underlines why the award of the Peace Prize is a sick joke.

If Obama intended to bring peace to the world, then why were his early appointments mostly neo-liberal war hawks who have a history of backing military adventurism?

If Obama is such a huge peacenik, then why has he sent 21,000 more troops to Afghanistan already, with tens of thousands more at least on the way?

If Obama plans to pull U.S. troops out of Iraq and bring peace to the region, then why has he gone back on his promise and ensured that tens of thousands of U.S. troops will remain in the country?

If Obama is so deserving of being recognized for his efforts towards peace, then why has he intensified the Bush-era missile drone attacks in Afghanistan and Pakistan that have killed and injured countless innocent civilians?

If Obama is so interested in promoting peace, then why does he protect war criminals who have violated the Geneva Conventions from prosecution?

Beyond the meaningless platitudes served up by his fellow elitist snobs, the true hilarity of Obama receiving the prize was illustrated by just a couple of individuals who the corporate media dared to quote.

Issam al-Khazraji, a day laborer in Baghdad, told Reuters: “He doesn’t deserve this prize. All these problems — Iraq, Afghanistan — have not been solved…The man of ‘change’ hasn’t changed anything yet.”

“Liaqat Baluch, a senior leader of the Jamaat-e-Islami, a conservative religious party in Pakistan, called the award an embarrassing “joke.”

“By implementing his war continuation plan, Obama will complete the work of Bush and his militarist clique,” writes author Chris Floyd, and in doing so send, “an apparently endless stream of American troops to die — and, in even greater numbers, to kill — in a criminal action that has helped bankrupt our own country while sending waves of violent instability and extremism around the world. It will further enfilth a cesspool of corruption and war profiteering that has already reached staggering, world-historical proportions.”

Floyd encapsulates perfectly why Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize award is a disgusting farce, an insult to those who really are fighting for peace in the world, and just another reminder that the Nobel Peace Prize represents little more than a gaggle of back-slapping elitists who bestow awards upon each other so that they can pose as global saviors to the public when in reality they are mostly a bunch of crooks, con-artists and deceivers.

Prize fools

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/leading_article/article6868838.ece

From The Times
October 10, 2009
Prize fools
The Nobel committee’s award to President Obama demeans the peace prize, appears politically partisan and should embarrass the White House

When Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973, the satirist Tom Lehrer remarked that he saw no further need to perform as the award had made satire obsolete. By offering the world’s most prestigious political accolade to Barack Obama, a man who has held office for barely nine months, the Norwegian Nobel Committee is in danger of putting the entire comedy industry out of business.

The committee has put hope above results, promise above achievement. The prize undermines the selfless triumphs of earlier winners. Indeed, the award’s obvious political intent looks partisan, a signal of European relief at the end of the Bush presidency.

The pretext for the prize was Mr Obama’s action in “strengthening international co-operation between peoples”. That is a worthy aim and America’s re-engagement in multilateral diplomacy has been warmly welcomed by its allies. But it is hard to point to any substantive results yet. Much was promised to the Muslim world in the President’s speech in Cairo; on the ground, the failure still to achieve any tangible progress towards a peace settlement between Israel and the Palestinians has left all sides disillusioned. In Moscow, the talk of pressing the reset button in relations was welcome, as was Mr Obama’s abandonment of the US missile shield in Europe. But so far none of this has led to the scrapping of any more nuclear warheads.

The nomination of Mr Obama, among more than 200 other contenders, had to be made within weeks of his inauguration. Was this a message of support for the election of America’s first black president? Or was it a self-defeating way of trying to align the peace committee with the excitement that marked his first few weeks in office? Mr Obama yesterday responded with characteristic eloquence and modesty in announcing his acceptance. He would, however, have done better to have let it be known to those sounding out the White House beforehand that he saw the prize as premature, ill judged and embarrassing at a time when he is preoccupied with fighting a war in Afghanistan.

There have, of course, been previous awards that have been widely condemned as undeserved. The most contentious was probably the 1973 prize to Dr Kissinger and Le Duc Tho for their talks on an end to the Vietnam War. Dr Kissinger had just backed the US bombing of Cambodia, and Le Duc Tho — the only nominee to reject the prize — negotiated in bad faith while the Communists prepared plans to invade South Vietnam. Some awards, especially those to Arabs and Israelis, have proved overoptimistic; others, such as the 2005 prize to Mohamed ElBaradei, have been politically partisan.

This year there was no shortage of qualified contenders, men and women who may not have the glamour of Mr Obama but who have easily fulfilled the criteria of individuals who have done their utmost, often at great personal cost, to promote peace, reconciliation and human rights.

Morgan Tsvangirai, the Zimbabwean Prime Minister, may seem naive in his faith in sharing power with President Mugabe. But no one can doubt the courage of a man who has been tortured and imprisoned for his actions in defence of democracy. Denis Muwege is a physician in war-torn Congo who has opened a clinic to help the many victims of rape. Senator Piedad Córdoba has mediated in Colombia’s civil war. Greg Mortenson is an American former US army medic who has made it his mission to build schools for Afghan girls in places where warlords and drug dealers kill people for trying. All would have been worthy peace prize winners.

This year, however, no prize has been given for peace. Instead, this is a Nobel prize for politics.

Obama makes a mockery of the Nobel peace prize

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article6867711.ece

October 9, 2009
Comment: absurd decision on Obama makes a mockery of the Nobel peace prize
Michael Binyon

The award of this year’s Nobel peace prize to President Obama will be met with widespread incredulity, consternation in many capitals and probably deep embarrassment by the President himself.

Rarely has an award had such an obvious political and partisan intent. It was clearly seen by the Norwegian Nobel committee as a way of expressing European gratitude for an end to the Bush Administration, approval for the election of America’s first black president and hope that Washington will honour its promise to re-engage with the world.

Instead, the prize risks looking preposterous in its claims, patronising in its intentions and demeaning in its attempt to build up a man who has barely begun his period in office, let alone achieved any tangible outcome for peace.

The pretext for the prize was Mr Obama’s decision to “strengthen international diplomacy and co-operation between peoples”. Many people will point out that, while the President has indeed promised to “reset” relations with Russia and offer a fresh start to relations with the Muslim world, there is little so far to show for his fine words.

East-West relations are little better than they were six months ago, and any change is probably due largely to the global economic downturn; and America’s vaunted determination to re-engage with the Muslim world has failed to make any concrete progress towards ending the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians.

There is a further irony in offering a peace prize to a president whose principal preoccupation at the moment is when and how to expand the war in Afghanistan.

The spectacle of Mr Obama mounting the podium in Oslo to accept a prize that once went to Nelson Mandela, Aung San Suu Kyi and Mother Theresa would be all the more absurd if it follows a White House decision to send up to 40,000 more US troops to Afghanistan. However just such a war may be deemed in Western eyes, Muslims would not be the only group to complain that peace is hardly compatible with an escalation in hostilities.

The Nobel committee has made controversial awards before. Some have appeared to reward hope rather than achievement: the 1976 prize for the two peace campaigners in Northern Ireland, Betty Williams and Mairead Corrigan, was clearly intended to send a signal to the two battling communities in Ulster. But the political influence of the two winners turned out, sadly, to be negligible.

In the Middle East, the award to Menachem Begin of Israel and Anwar Sadat of Egypt in 1978 also looks, in retrospect, as naive as the later award to Yassir Arafat, Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin — although it could be argued that both the Camp David and Oslo accords, while not bringing peace, were at least attempts to break the deadlock.

Mr Obama’s prize is more likely, however, to be compared with the most contentious prize of all: the 1973 prize to Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho for their negotiations to end the Vietnam war. Dr Kissinger was branded a warmonger for his support for the bombing campaign in Cambodia; and the Vietnamese negotiator was subsequently seen as a liar whose government never intended to honour a peace deal but was waiting for the moment to attack South Vietnam.

Mr Obama becomes the third sitting US President to receive the prize. The committee said today that he had “captured the world’s attention”. It is certainly true that his energy and aspirations have dazzled many of his supporters. Sadly, it seems they have so bedazzled the Norwegians that they can no longer separate hopes from achievement. The achievements of all previous winners have been diminished.

All hail king Obama...

http://www.examiner.com/x-18061-San-Antonio-Civil-Rights-Examiner~y2009m10d9-All-hail-king-Obama-Nobel-Peace-Prize-winner--2009

All hail king Obama... Nobel Peace Prize winner - 2009
October 9, 2009
San Antonio Civil Rights Examiner
Ramiro Escamilla

"And the award goes to..."

If there was any doubt about who runs the world before, it is no longer in question. Barack Obama has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for 2009. Along with becoming the first president to chair the UN Security Council (largely because it is in direct violation of Section 9 of the United States Constitution), never producing an official "Birth Certificate" to squash the claims of his Kenyan birth which even his grandmother admitted to being fact (A "Certification of Live Birth" was produced but is not an official record with witnesses and can be issued at any time in a persons life--That document has been looked over by professionals and said to have irregularities in it as well) and having pushed for (even starring in commercials in support of) the "banker bailouts" that have now reached a total of over 23 trillion -- yes with a "T"-- dollars, Obama has extended troop levels and withdrawal dates in Iraq, & Afghanistan. Also remember that in his first days in office he signed off on aerial drone attacks on Pakistani territories that killed innocent civilians. Let's list his great accomplishments and compare them to George Bush, shall we?

Patriot Act renewal? - Check

Stance on FISA? (warrantless wire-tapping started by Bush) and the legal immunity with it - Check

Rendition? (the act of sending suspects to countries that specialize in torture for help with "enhanced interrogation techniques" - Check

Keeping GITMO Open? - Check

Secret prisons? (Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan) - Check

Indefinite detention? (held with no chance of being released if charged terrorism) - Check

Stance on Iran? - Check

Stance on Palestine? - Check

Stance on Russia? - Check

Aid to China with all its humane treatment of its citizens? - Check

Iraq troop levels the same and a reevaluation in 2011?(right before the next election) - Check

Afghanistan troop levels increased? (with no withdrawal date) - Check

Drone attacks on any nation we aren't officially at war with? - Check

Hiring lobbyists to run his presidency? (which he said he wouldn't do in his campaign) - Check

Pushing bills through Congress without more than a few hours to read them? (some being over 1,000 pages long) - Check

And on and on... It seems that the only thing that changed in the last election was our President's ability to read a teleprompter without the errors worthy of comedic jabs from the late night talk show hosts and a keen ability to create the illusion of change through an unprecedented daily media blitz without actually giving us any at all. So, while we hear new words, we see old actions... or perhaps that's just it, we don't see them. Perhaps good intentions and mission statements are all we care about now? Perhaps we should only judge a President on his words and never his actions? If that is the case, then yes... we have a fantastic, peace-pushing, progressive president... Glad we don't have that warmongering, legislative pork-loving, financially inept, imperialistic, lying George Bush anymore! Oh, wait...

As my favorite athlete says: Talk is Cheap.

Sarah Palin & The Nobel Prize...

Sarah Palin has just won the Nobel Prize for literature thanks to her inspiring promise that she may one day actually read a book...

Obama awarded 2009 Nobel Peace Prize

http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/europe/10/09/nobel.peace.prize/index.html

Obama awarded 2009 Nobel Peace Prize
Story Highlights
NEW: President Obama awarded 2009 Nobel Peace Prize
Nobel committee praised Obama for efforts to "strengthen international diplomacy"
Obama is third sitting U.S. president, fourth overall to receive award
10-9-9

(CNN) -- President Barack Obama won the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize on Friday, a stunning decision that comes just eight months into his presidency.

Less than nine months into his presidency, Barack Obama has been awarded the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize.

The Norwegian Nobel Committee said it honored Obama for his "extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples."

The president had not been mentioned as among front-runners for the prize, and the roomful of reporters gasped when Thorbjorn Jagland, chairman of the Nobel committee, uttered Obama's name.

The president, who was awakened to be told he had won, said he was humbled to be selected, according to an administration official.

The Nobel committee recognized Obama's efforts to solve complex global problems including working toward a world free of nuclear weapons.

"Only very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world's attention and given its people hope for a better future," the committee said.

Jagland said the decision was "unanimous" and came with ease.

He rejected the notion that Obama had been recognized prematurely for his efforts and said the committee wanted to promote the president just it had Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990 in his efforts to open up the Soviet Union.

"His diplomacy is founded in the concept that those who are to lead the world must do so on the basis of values and attitudes that are shared by the majority of the world's population," it said.

Obama's recognition comes less than a year after he became the first African-American to win the White House. He is the fourth U.S. president to win the prestigious prize and the third sitting president to do so.

Jagland said he hoped the prize would help Obama resolve the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Former Finnish President Martti Ahtisaari, last year's laureate, said it was clear the Nobel committee wanted to encourage Obama on the issues he has been discussing on the world stage.

"I see this as an important encouragement," Ahtisaari said.

The committee wanted to be "far more daring" than in recent times and make an impact on global politics, said Kristian Berg Harpviken, director of the International Peace Research Institute.

And Wangari Muta Maathai, the Kenyan environmentalist who won the 2004 Peace Prize, said the win for Obama, whose father was Kenyan, would help Africa move forward.

"I think it is extraordinary," she said. "It will be even greater inspiration for the world. He has shown how we can probably come together, work together in a cooperative way."

The award comes at a crucial time for Obama, who has initiated peace missions to key parts of the globe.

Obama's envoy to the Middle East, George Mitchell, has returned to the region to advocate for peace negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians. Mitchell met Thursday with Israeli President Shimon Peres. He plans to meet Friday with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu before talking with Palestinian leaders in the West Bank.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton starts a six-day trip to Europe and Russia on Friday. On the trip, the secretary will discuss the next steps on Iran and North Korea, and international efforts to have the two countries end their nuclear programs.

The centerpiece of the trip will be her visit to Moscow, where she will work toward an agreement to take the place of the Start II arms control pact, which expires December 5. She also will address the new bilateral presidential commission that is working on a broad range of issues, from arms control to health.

Mohamed ElBaradei, who won the 2005 peace prize for his efforts to prevent nuclear energy being used for military means, said Obama deserved to win for his efforts to bring Iran to the table for direct nuclear talks with the United States.

"I could not think of anybody who is more deserving," said ElBaradei, the chief of the International Atomic Energy Agency.

As the news of Obama's win broke online, postings on social network sites Twitter and Facebook expressed surprise. Many started with the word: Wow.

The last sitting U.S. president to win the peace prize was Woodrow Wilson in 1919. The other was Theodore Roosevelt in 1906. Jimmy Carter had been out of office for more than two decades when he won in 2002.

This year's Peace Prize nominees included 172 people -- among them three Chinese dissidents, an Afghan activist and a controversial Colombian lawmaker -- and 33 organizations, the highest number of nominations ever.

The deadline for nominations must be postmarked by February 1 each year. Obama was inaugurated on January 20.

The Nobel recipient receives a prize of about $1.4 million.

Barack "Pia Zadora" Obama

Robert Sterling, Konformist.com

When I first heard it this morning, I thought it was a joke. I could see him winning American Idol, but the Nobel Peace Prize? Maybe this isn't Henry Kissinger winning the Nobel Peace Prize evil, but seriously, what the fuck has he done? They're giving a Nobel Peace Prize because a guy can speak without sounding like a retard?

Here's my prediction: As Barack Obama begins his acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize, Kanye West rushes on stage and shouts: “Yo Obama, I’m really happy for you, I’ll let you finish, but Beyoncé has one of the best videos of all time. One of the best videos of all time!” Which is actually a better argument than the justification for giving it to Obama.

But seriously, if I was Obama, I'd be looking for a bucket of pig's blood in the rafters above him, because this whole thing still makes absolutely no sense...

Kate Beckinsale Is the Sexiest Woman Alive

http://www.esquire.com/women/women-we-love/kate-beckinsale-pictures-1109

October 2, 2009

Kate Beckinsale Is the Sexiest Woman Alive

For a decade, we've loved her — beautiful, crisp, smart, tough. Isn't it time to pay more attention to Kate Beckinsale?

By Tom Chiarella

She wants to meet in one of those places where women meet other women for lunch, to talk forever, to eat salads and split entrées, where the sweaters are stretchy, the jewelry outsized, the purses massive and sexless, where fruity tea is served in ceramic pots. From the bench across the street, I can see this much. In the hour before we meet, twenty-three women and nary a man cross the threshold.

Then up the sidewalk here she comes, the acrobatic, rubber-suited ass-kicking vampire of the Underworld movies, the corseted vampire hunter of the underappreciated action lark Van Helsing, the willowy, repressed Ph.D. candidate of the widely overlooked Laurel Canyon. She's got her shoulder into the shank of the wind, elbows clamped around a head-to-calf sweater, a big black purse netted to her side, and face covered by the thick black gusts of her own hair. She knows the friendly, undersexed dress code, the mousy habit of this kind of establishment.

After she's delivered her grrrl hugs to the management, I introduce myself. In the dark portico, she looks a little moonless, unilluminated behind the sunglasses. But in the solarium on the second floor, when we're left alone behind French doors, she drops the sweater from her shoulders with a shrug. She's wearing hot pants, a trim white blouse over a tank top, black boots with heels. If there is a difference between femininity and sexiness, this may be it. She is sexy, boot to temple. The wrought-iron furniture? Feminine in every curlicue.

"Fuck, it's hot in here," is the first thing she says, jangling me out of the ungovernable vibe of the room. There's a tiny window behind me that opens onto some indefinite interior space that somehow provides a little breeze, and I crack it. "Oh, better," she says. "It's very windy out there today. It's a bit Wizard of Oz or something."

On her finger: skull ring. Huge. This rose-gold skull staring from the crook of her knuckle. Biggest ring I've ever seen. Pearls in the eyeholes and everything. Cool. And definitely not sexless.

"Is this all right?" she says. She means the room. It is, I tell her, though I admit I had my doubts from across the street, when it looked as if we were meeting in the estrogen lounge. Kate laughs. A big, rooted, unstagey laugh. Not loud. Ample. Bigger than the room, not as big as the ring. "Were you worried that there would be a G-spot orgasm class in the corner?"

She eases herself behind the table, sits as if she's falling. Then she snorts, taking a glance at my pad when I lay it on the table. I tell her I'm happy to show it to her. There's a question about her American accent, which I first heard eleven years ago in The Last Days of Disco. And a quote from a guy on the plane who watched her most recent movie with me on the flight over. It's a little drama called Nothing But the Truth, in which Kate plays a journalist jailed for not revealing her sources — a dainty reporter/soccer mom who transforms into a hard-ass prison convict. You never heard of it, neither had he, neither had I, because a last-minute bankruptcy last December sent it into the pit of straight-to-DVD despair rather than onto the Oscar short list. The guy on the plane loved it. We both did. I wrote down what he said. "Who knew the woman would have all the balls," the quote reads, "in the best movie you never heard of?"

After that, I have a question about all the fighting she does in movies — does it feel good to punch a man? — followed by a list of the things that make a woman sexy, doodled as I sat on a bench across the street, which is really just a description of my girlfriend. Like this: I like a woman who smokes, drinks shots, eats meat, plays a little tennis, thinks she can speak French, and so on. There were other pages, other questions, below that.

I read to her a bit of my list, and she checks herself off with a laugh. "I do eat meat, I don't smoke, I don't really drink, I do sing," she says. "I don't sing well, however." She seems to think this disqualifies her. She goes on: "Given that I can't sing like Freddie Mercury, obviously I'm not going to pursue it as a career. What would be the point?" Freddie Mercury? I admit to holding a fairly unadulterated, semi-sexual affection for the seventies icon, the mystic Indian rock-balladeer, lead singer of Queen. Kate is the first person I've known since Andi Koller, my girlfriend the summer after senior year at good old McQuaid Jesuit High School, to share with me the opinion that Freddie Mercury may be the gold-standard pop-singing voice. Fuck Michael Jackson, we had said back then. But this is the effect of this restaurant — the twist of wicker, the paroxysm of houseplants — making me act strangely like a girl, while Kate Beckinsale acts like she's got a set. Maybe we're both overcompensating — she's talking to the guy from the magazine that named her the Sexiest Woman Alive, and I'm trying to look natural eating a frisée salad. Freddie Mercury. Christ.

Sometimes Kate leans into the table — over it, really, getting very close. To anyone who's watching, it would look as if we're hatching a plan. I'm going down my list of questions, and Kate, in close like this, growls a little, her smile ever curled, and rattles off her memories like a Gatling gun, talking about growing up in West London in the eighties: "I got flashed a lot. Ten or eleven incidents in one period. I'd be flagged down, someone would ask me for directions, and I have terrible eyesight, so I'd lean into the car to look at the map, and there it was, propped up inside the road atlas."

Her younger self seems to be a character in her narrative now, someone Kate looks at as a kind of favorite niece, worthy of a few laughs in her adolescent clunkings. "I was on the cover of Elegant Bride magazine when I think I actually cried. I was looking sort of misty, bridey eyed. It was mortifying. There I was, in my riot-grrrl feminist stage, with a puppy."

She runs a finger around the neck of her water glass and listens, a kind of winsome retreat. She's more easily seen in these moments: long, not tall particularly, just lengthy — arms, fingers, legs. Strong, too. Not straight-from-the-gym, pumped-up strong. Strong like a lever.

"This whole notion of being named Sexiest Woman Alive is going to earn me quite a beating," she says. "You can't have that title with four brothers. I'll get wedgies. Headlocks. Noogies."

Seems fair, I allow. They are your brothers.

"If you're any kind of a human," she says, "you know the title is utterly ludicrous." Then she gives an on-the-other-hand nod. "But I like the idea of it, too. I do. I'm feeling that I must earn this. I need to go out and become much better at pole dancing or something."

The food comes. We eat. We offer each other bites, the way women do. She wants none of the grilled sardines in front of me. "I'm squeamish about fish," she says. "Not all fish. Just if it resembles a whole fish. Then I'm fucked."

I look down at the two sardines staring up at her from my plate and offer to send them back. She refuses. I cover their oily eyes in arugula, which just makes her laugh. "It's very visceral of you to worry," she says. "But I think it's weird if what someone else is eating bothers me. I think that's extra fussy."

I do take a spear of her asparagus. It's quite good. But as I'm eating it, it occurs to me that I'm giving in to the momentum of the venue, that I may have left my testicles in my hotel room in Mayfair. So I let myself take a long glance at Kate as she talks more about her friendships as a young woman. "I worked with Emma Thompson when I was starting out," she says. "We went out to Italy and lived together during the production of Much Ado About Nothing. And she was fairly feminist at that time, and she'd say, 'Let's not shave our armpits, because they wouldn't have done that in Shakespeare's time!' And I'd say, 'Okay!' I don't know what my boyfriend at college made of that one. Luckily he wasn't an American."

At this juncture I think she's waiting for me to giggle in agreement that American men are boors for not appreciating a woman's hairy armpit. Never mind what I am or am not, I have to put an end to this. So I act a little like a boor. I dip my head and try to get a look at her armpit right then and there. "I do now," she says, maybe slightly taken aback. Sometimes she gives the impression of pent-up energy, as if every soft part of her conceals a wire spring. She does seem as if she could pick you off from a water tower with a crossbow, then kid you about the way you landed. Yet in the very next breath, she might be a bit stricken by the sight of bones in her chicken. Capable and vulnerable.

I give her the story about the guy on the airplane, how he noticed Nothing But the Truth from one seat over, then asked to watch it, too, and how much he'd liked Kate as the hero. The fact that this movie never saw the light of day must have been the worst kind of anticlimax. Heartbreaking, even.

"It was. It's an odd thing to have this sort of spread of incredible reviews and then nobody sees it," she says. "I have prayed — prayed — for film companies to go bankrupt on films I've made, and then this happens on the one I love. Usually it's the ones you're most embarrassed about that are on the side of every bus."

She was back this fall with one she might have hoped stayed off the buses, a same-old Antarctic detective story called Whiteout, and again this winter with an arresting drama built on great performances (including hers), Everybody's Fine, with Robert De Niro. She has always worked steadily, but this may be one of the movies that stands out for her and reminds the world of her skill — like Brokedown Palace, like the otherwise lifeless Pearl Harbor, even The Aviator, in which she played a stunning Ava Gardner.

"After Nothing But the Truth, I just woke up not being able to get a hard-on for being an actor," she says, speaking from the shadow of her mane. "Now I have to surrender a little. It's over. I think my sabbatical has to be over." As she eats, small details become apparent. Her fingernails are pretty chipped up, for one thing. She makes a fist on the flat of the tablecloth, tucking her lousy manicure out of sight. I get caught looking.

"I have big hands," she says. True. Her hands are large, outsized, but lithe. Big enough that they arouse simple verbs: to wrap, to grip, to hold, to crush. It seems a natural point to ask her the punching question. Does it feel good to punch a man?

"What's dangerous about doing action movies is that I'm used to men on wires. I punch a guy and he flies over a wall. So I tend to feel like that's me that did that," she says. "Which leads me to the fact that yes, I do think I could kick your ass." Further attempted neutering from the heart of the Notting Hill Womyn's Lunch Cotillion. That's when I invite her to punch me.

"Please," I say. "As hard as you can." I ask twice.

"I could crush you like a bug," she says. It amuses her to say this. A single lock of out-of-place hair hangs over her face, bobbing in front of her mouth as she speaks. Her breath keeps it moving. Then she dips her napkin in her drinking water and presses it to her neck. And finally it is just too hot for her. She stands, unfolds to her tiptoes, slides her thighs between the tables, and eases herself through toward me. She sits down, shoulder to shoulder, out of the heat.

"I know I can't, though," she says. "Sometimes, I'll get going with my brother, we'll wrestle, and he'll hold me down. Once you're pinned by someone who weighs twice as much as you do, there really isn't much you can do except flail at the testicles with your toe. I do tend to walk around like a Chihuahua in my house. You know, one of those little dogs that sees the big dogs and starts giving them attitude? I'm a Chihuahua with the soul of a lion."

She turns her head, then does a little double take, drawing in very close to my face. Something is amiss.

"You know that gray in your eyebrow?" she says, breathing on my cheek. "If I had a Sharpie, I could take that right out for you."

The tinny revival of Steel Magnolias parades onward, and I feel increasingly like Zooey Deschanel, always the girl's best girlfriend. Even so, I can't help but blurt out, "What about my beard? It's so gray. Can you help me with that?"

She sits back and assesses the situation. Why would I ask her about this stuff? What's with all the sisterly camaraderie? "I think that's quite beyond saving," she declares. "But the eyebrow I could fix quite nicely."

I do hate the gray in my eyebrow, and I do have a Sharpie in my bag. I hand it over, so she can drag the tint along the gray hairs in my left eyebrow. "Sit still," she chides. Then she actually kneels on my chair, her knee between my legs, bites her lip, and begins working. "You're getting a woman's trade secret here," she tells me, resting her elbow on my shoulder. As she works, she asks me what I'm doing after this. I sigh and tell her that I have to buy a present for my boss's baby while I'm overseas. The girliest of errands.

"Oh, fabulous!" she says, dropping an exclamation point almost directly into my ear, since she's basically sharing the rattan chair with me now, knee to crotch, her breath on my face, her massive palm hinged on my cheekbone, a pose suggesting a lap dance by a dental hygienist. "Can I come with you then?" she says.

I give up the fight. Sometimes you have to surrender to the place you're in. That could be a thing only women know. I could use an extra pair of eyes, I tell her. I'd be pleased if she came along. And since we both noticed the cutest little baby store on that very block, we decide there's no rush. There is comfort in lingering. We order tea. Chamomile for Kate. Himalayan pear for me. We talk forever. It's delightful.