Which is FKED UP — major corporate pharma products can be used just as irresponsibly as herbs, and since they are more potent, can cause greater damage.

More info at
http://www.democracyinaction.org/healthfreedomusa/campaign.jsp?campaign_KEY=7185&t=

And the announcement from that site:
There is a crisis in health freedom. On April 30, 2007 the FDA will close the public comment period on a “Guidance” which will classify every alternative practice as “medicine” so that only licensed physicians can carry out the procedure AND vitamins, minerals, herbs, etc., will suddenly become “untested drugs” which will be forbidden.

Bad? Real Bad! But public outcry can stop this assault on your health and your freedom.

Spread the word! Tell everyone in your Circle of Influence, professionals, alternative practitioners, nutrient and herb companies, everyone! Let them know how important their participation is to make sure the FDA backs off from this repressive course.

Please share this link with them and urge them to take action: http://…com/2u7ghc

Yours in health and freedom,

Rima E. Laibow, MD
Medical Director
Natural Solutions Foundation
www.HealthFreedomUSA.org

Take action now at http://www.democracyinaction.org/healthfreedomusa/campaign.jsp?campaign_KEY=7185&t=

American politic rhetoric too often centers around what messages are sent by a policy, rather than reporting the real effects of a policy put in place for cosmetic purposes. But I have been trying to figure out why Iran would grab a boatload of British sailors, knowing the stink that would make, and then apparently treat them humanely. That’s what a sovereign nation is expected to do with prisoners, after all. Maybe it was an exercise in demonstrating how prisoners of war — or disagreement — should be treated?

UPDATE – more unfounded speculation

Thought about this a little more, and I think there’s sometimes validity to the right-wing accusation that liberals are suckers who think everyone is good guys except America. So, another possibility, just for balance: that Iran snatched those sailors with the intention of using them as some kind of pawns, but was surprised to find a woman among them. And since women are delicate flowers to be protected, not sent into war zones, then including Faye Turney in diplo-military games would have made Iran look bad to the Muslim world.

Again, I base this on nothing except what the back of my mind tosses up during a long drive.

Shaybani Habibi

Can you believe it only took the combined smarts of five people to write them words? Now accepting consultation fees for YOUR wedding-reception talent show.

Chuckles said he’d never much liked Carlson awful show and personality, mentioned that his tan was kinda orange, and assured his readers there was no chance he’d give out the new customer’s address. Next thing you know, Carlson has come in and threatened to “f*king destroy” the guy, and he did get him fired, as well as sending a suit/goon to try to get Chuckles’ personal information. What a skunk. Carlson is famous enough to recognize, and to think he’s all-powerful and can treat people like that FOR WHY?, but he ain’t powerful enough to squash internets gossips. Enjoy.

Oh, and just for good measure, here’s that episode of Crossfire.

I have just been watching this over and over…

Then there’s the tone of communication between two minds that want to … broadly, truly do want to Make Things Better. But both minds also look at Sri Lankan schools thru the lens of their own educational experience, aNd with different associative connections to the World Bank and development/inequalities generally. And class issues get bitter fast – just as Morquendi says,

> Indi, I don’t expect you to understand how kids with rich parents help schools, and what a key element they are in a school’s development in Sri Lanka. If you’d’ve been through the mill here you’d know what I’m talking about.

He sounds pretty angry, and Indi is addressed as an aggressive idiot. But what happens if…

> kids with rich parents help schools, and [are] a key element … in a school’s development in Sri Lanka.[I]‘ve been through the mill here …

I’ve changed the order of some words to remove the blaming voice, just as an experiment. This goes back to the amazing achievement of “Checkpoint” in bringing the con+structive tone of blog conversations onto a live stage, and some of my own previous thoughts on how screen-talking is kinda like telepathy. Adding to that, I think the absence of physicality allows people to be both nastier in reacting to a perceived threat or insult (plus the problem of punctuation’s inadequacy for real tone-of-”voice”), and conversely to feel safer in disagreeing.

But they sort it out with grace and humor:

—
Morquendi
2005-04-25 12:13:05
… Next time I’m going to Capitalist U. Maybe that’ll bring me up to speed with Indi.

Dammit! Capitalism U also taught him Character Assassination better than Commie U where I went. Want to do a few classes for me? Clearly my character assassination skills are nothing when compared to what Indi had displayed in this post. Simply masterful. Want to be my guru?

indi
2005-04-25 12:32:08

thank you. I can give you World Bank rates.
—

They identified and clarified all kinds of problems and reasons for those problems in the Sri Lankan educational “ecosystem”, then slid off into wild poo-flinging for a while, until reminded by the estimable Electra that this was annoying as well as unproductive.

Theorizing: I think that indi and morquendi’s discussion was derailed from the Facts by the tension between structural awareness and individual experience.

Left Turn Here

This year and all the SIT discussions, especially since returning to Vermont, have really got me thinking about responsibility: I got my race, my nationality, my socioeconomic class, even my regional accent, and so on that make the going easier for me. How can I use my access and power to balance life more? And where’s the line between offering help, and smothering with contributions that really serve my own needs?

This is an urgent question in the field of development as well. I only know the view from a position of privilege and choices, and it looks to me like we’re stuck between awareness and positive action. Morquendi is plenty educated, as is Indi, and both are well articulate, but all the brain-percolation of ideas hasn’t yet resulted in implementation of a system that works better. It’s wicked frustrating.

The anger of teh Poor is valid, and the liberal privileged who try to make amends often don’t live the effects of strategic planning and structural adjustment. Looks good on paper…

This is all a bit loosely stitched, but thass how my mind works: analogy analysis; chasing patterns that look even a little bit the same.

One Simplistic Suggestion

Right, so university grads in SL are having trouble finding jobs. And there aren’t enough teachers to look after all the young ‘uns, so some schools have to be shut down. Er, perhaps someone clever at the Ministry of Education could figure out a plan of compulsory teaching for all (?) students, similar to army service in other places. Or extend university (or stuff it in the schedule somewhere) to include a school-year of community service, where the student in some way helps now-disadvantaged kids increase their likelihood of success.

I would love to have the time to go into each of these ideas more thoroughly, like maybe by next summer… Meanwhile, a meandering sketch.

So.

From living next door to, or in the yard of, the leisure-hungry majority in a couple different places (two continents, total five years over a decade n a half), I think that might not be true, as phrased.

A friend over there (23 years old, 4 children, and a no-goodnik gambling husband) who starched and ironed her one good outfit to go visiting simply did not accept “the chain gives me a rash” as any kind of a decent explanation for why I refused to deck out in “gold” as was proper to my role as a foreign expert. (And “expert” is – hooboy – a whole nother conversation.)

She only wore her jewelry for celebrations. And all the women we knew dressed and acted and wived and mothered along patterns that they would likely share with other women.

We Lucky White Girls get to celebrate every day as we stride into a classroom or an office, right through the door, click clack … the problem being that with infinite decisions, there’s no way you can look that’s right, that’s okay, to everyone around you. Hence we’re always negotiating our identity, checking if someone “gets” us, cause we’re alone with our purchases – clothes, job via education, books, TV – most of the time.

Whoops, veered off into talking about Ourselves again. Let me note, though, that I obviously don’t “speak for the poor women” — I don’t hope to do that. I am not imputing Truth to my reporting of a friend’s experience, a friend with even more unfamiliar context in her memory than most of my friends. Duly acknowledged.

So, the point is, I guess, that when women are goddam busy, we know who we are, because we don’t have time to make up a whole “look” every time we get to dress up and prance a little. With scarce resources, you get your pattern together, your version of what the women you know wear to “look nice,” whatever that means to you, and stick with it until that dress falls apart.

I think the desexualization of inter-gender contact in the white-collar workplace is a function of transmuting sexual energy into money energy, but thass a topic for another day.

the Eaten Ones:

A couple weeks ago, went over to Keene, New Hampshire to see the annual Pumpkin Festival. A lot of pumpkins, a LOT of people – I believe they have a world record for most toes trodden on, something like that. So of course I was wondering what IS this? why are we all still happy to be here, looking at pumpkins and bumping into strangers on an icy night?

Well… pumpkins come in from the last and latest harvests. They’re big and warm-colored and rampantly alive, and I think we’re paying tribute, with fire and fruit, to the sun before it goes down for the winter and the sky goes gray.

So it was good to take part in that. And it’s good to be back home-ish. I often thought that the dry season in Panama village was a bit like fall here in New England — not the temperature of course, but certainly the satisfying “chch!” of yellowed leaves under a bicycle tire. I’ve been writing and thinking and looking around a lot.

What is it like to be here… I believe writing this now falls under schoolwork rather than procrastinating, because among many other fun things I’m working on my 2nd / final field report. And “what is it like” is the central question of phenomenological rhetoric, which has recently become fascinating. This kind of analysis – “OB1 stuff” in the parlance of our times - is currently the SLMA side-effect that I’m most conscious of.

So! I have an interesting idea that I’m looking to talk over, especially with some of the SIT lifers. since it’s the school for Int!er!nationaaaaaal! training, I wonder if there are ways they can include understandings derived from / presented through non-Western theoretical frameworks (WTF) of experience.

Where this came from: We got talking about psychologies of violence in Conflict Transformation class the other day, and the Cote d’Ivoirean student next to me was astonished at Freudian/Jungian dissections of dream function. His grandmother, he said, got a lot of her herbs-and-healng knowledge in dreams. Sometimes people who had died were known to visit people’s dreams, and this was very powerful: dangerous, because of the blurring of the life border, but dead people knew much more than the living, so valuable awareness could also come from them.

By that I mean the multisyllabic precision of the scientific voice in WTF, and the assumption that objectivity is both desirable and possible – like anybody can judge things on “pure fact”, with no difference in their reality according to what they want or don’t want to see. This dissection, meaning pinned to a board and not allowed to flow, may be a function of the current global valuing of writing above spoken and experiential communication. It inflates the Truth of a statement with respectable, precise, stuffy wordiage. It is a territorial passcode that signifies certain kinds of privilege, like the leisure and liberty to stalk abstract meaning. It is also a bridge, but tends to use only the dead words, in the hopes that they haven’t been too reshaped by an intended audience’s variant use and understanding.

The last high school history textbook I saw was Jon Stewart’s book America, so I dunno what they’re teaching in the schools today. It may be better than the Dead White Man paradigm by now. There’s been progress in saying “we” and “people” instead of discoursing about Man and meaning Everyone, I’ve noticed, and that’s heartening for everyone being in on the existential conversation. So that’s one success in the story.

But I don’t know how content delivery (er, teaching) of this non-WTF would happen izzackly. What else is there but the much-maligned scientific method of presenting a hypothesis and backing it up with observed evidence?

Some insights might come from the nature and function of blogging as a specific type of communication. If anonymity is preserved then blogging is kind of a way of putting the thoughts outside our head. Science fiction has been wondering about what telepathy would be like and mean for people for decades (mwa ha hahaha, science fiction is right again!). And meditative religion has often tried to teach the skill of detaching emotion from thought, of facing your thoughts honestly and accepting their existence, and choosing freely how to live, instead of being swamped in associative reaction.

There’s a lot to say, and I’m working on it. Meanwhile, this here is from August. It’s a quick reaction to a movie, which then wanders off into trying to find the One Big Answer again, and some comments on that.

The Work is an Excuse
(work in progress)

I just finished watching “the Killing Fields“, a walk through the Khmer Rouge’s loudspeaker-and-gunshot-punctuated agro-communist revolution via a heartwarming story of enduring friendship between Syd Schanberg and Dith Tran, an American and a Cambodian journalist.

It’s brought up some thoughts about 1) American imagery and storytelling and 2) colonialism on the ground. And maybe 3) “white man’s burden” and survivor guilt.

So, Cambodia 1973. What France and then America were perpetrating in Vietnam spilled over the border, but America may as well not have had any military advisors in Cambodia, as they claimed: the Khmer Rouge won. Helicopters ferried out diplomats fleeing Phnom Penh with suitcases full of sausages, and the remaining embassies quickly became refuge for the hardcore journalists and their local partners. Stern, excitable teenage KR cadres waited outside the embassy fence with trucks and tanks to take away those Cambodians whom the French embassy “simply could not” protect. Tran was heading out the back with an escape convoy aiming for Thailand, when Schanberg’s photographer gave him the thread of an excuse to stay: they could make him a new non-Cambodian passport!

And of course it didn’t work. And Tran hugged everyone goodbye and was taken away to hack rice fields and try to stay alive by hiding his bourgeois past. Poor Sydney meanwhile was just distraught back in New York – the movie shows him blasting opera and watching the hellish news and thinking about Tran. Rather like the big Lebowski secluding himself in the west wing. Tran thinks about Sydney, writes him letters in his head, and finally makes it to a Red Cross refugee camp on the Thai border, where he is working as a doctor when Sydney arrives on a white horse, I mean a white station wagon, to ask forgiveness. They hug and hug.

Given that America is a country founded by criminals, misfits, and idealists, it’s not surprising that our greatest distinguishing feature is our thirst for independence. And I’m not talking your gallant-hero independence, although that’s one of the central images. I’m talking freedom to do as we please, to make an independent judgment of our own competence. We skitter around like molecules in Brownian motion, a tangle of different histories, none of them “right” anymore. We are descended from people who fled the rules or strictures of their home cultures, or were dragged from them. You can do whatever you want, but someone’s going to tell you it’s wrong, so you might as well, if you think it’s right.

It was Tran’s independent choice as a journalist in his own right not to join his family on the flight that Schanberg got them on, and again not to grab the back of a truck leaving for Thailand. Those two guys must have had a hell of a friendship, and hella commitment to getting the story. But Schanberg COULD leave. He COULD go home and be sad in clean clothes, on a soft couch, with his sister bringing in tea. And that’s the part a Hollywood movie glorifies.

It’s a sensitive issue for me in Sri Lanka; enough bombs in the capital means that the foreigners, free to leave, do. [See previous post...] It just happened in Jordan. Crisis Corps pulled out of SL this week. We run around and ask each other, “Is it war? Should we pack?”

Sri Lanka’s battle is very different from the Cambodian revolution, although there are factions that would favor a peasant revolution, but the commonality is a legacy of colonization that has split and radicalized societies that worked, by their own standards, before they were invaded, torn apart, gutted, insulted, sold, devoured, and abandoned by “expanding European sea trade” from the 16th century on.

(TANGENT: Abuse has a way of surfacing again. The Green Lines and White Papers that define the Middle East have nothing to do with who the people inside those lines are. They are strategy. The Jews, a group others have long tried to erase, seek safety. But we’re crazy with fear and are doing it by trying to erase other people. The Congo wasn’t big enough, as an entity, to have civil war across a million square miles of resource-infested jungle before Belgium and co. divvied up the Gold and Slave and Ivory Coasts.)

But what to do neh? It’s more a way of thinking than a set of rules of what to do. The warning of Laos’ experience is that it’s easy to be blinded by a way of thinking. When things start to work properly, people get lazy and think it’s because of the new this-one’s-foolproof system – rather than the process of working together to decide what to do about things, every day. I guess this brings me back to functional anarchy.

People will mess up any system, even if they make it themselves, if it becomes static and monolithic and multisyllabic. We can’t all do the same thing. Or at least, if someone’s telling us to do it, and shooting us if we don’t fit the rules or the rules stop fitting the people.

So I don’t know what all that adds up to. But then, that’s gut reaction for ya.