Eideard

Why am I going on the Freedom Flotilla II to Gaza? I ask myself this, even though the answer is: What else would I do? I am in my sixty-seventh year, having lived already a long and fruitful life, one with which I am content.

It seems to me that during this period of eldering it is good to reap the harvest of one’s understanding of what is important, and to share this, especially with the young. How are they to learn, otherwise?

Our boat, The Audacity of Hope, will be carrying letters to the people of Gaza. Letters expressing solidarity and love. That is all its cargo will consist of. If the Israeli military attacks us, it will be as if they attacked the mailman. This should go down hilariously in the annals of history. But if they insist on attacking us, wounding us, even murdering us, as they did some of the activists in the last flotilla, Freedom Flotilla I, what is to be done?

There is a scene in the movie “Gandhi” that is very moving to me: it is when the unarmed Indian protesters line up to confront the armed forces of the British Empire. The soldiers beat them unmercifully, but the Indians, their broken and dead lifted tenderly out of the fray, keep coming.

Alongside this image of brave followers of Gandhi there is for me an awareness of paying off a debt to the Jewish civil rights activists who faced death to come to the side of black people in the South in our time of need. I am especially indebted to Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman who heard our calls for help – our government then as now glacially slow in providing protection to non-violent protestors-and came to stand with us.

They got as far as the truncheons and bullets of a few “good ol’ boys’” of Neshoba County, Mississippi and were beaten and shot to death along with James Cheney, a young black man of formidable courage who died with them. So, even though our boat will be called The Audacity of Hope, it will fly the Goodman, Cheney, Schwerner flag in my own heart.

Bravo, Sister Walker. Glad to see you have the courage of your convictions.

You face a greater danger, I guess. At that time, in the beginning of my involvement in American civil rights struggles, racist mobs and their cohorts in uniform were only killing a few of those who challenged their evil. I fear the Israeli government truly doesn’t care about how many they maim and kill to defend the arrogance of ethnic superiority and their quest for lebensraum.

A 59-year-old man has been jailed in Gastonia, N.C., on charges of larceny after allegedly robbing an RBC Bank for $1 so he could get health care in prison. Richard James Verone handed a female teller a note demanding the money and claiming that he had a gun, according to the police report.

He then sat down and waited for police to arrive. “… I say, ‘I’ll be sitting right over here, on the chair, waiting for the police,’” Verone told reporters, recalling the June 9 robbery in an interview from Gaston County Jail.

And wait for the police, he did.

“He’s sitting on the sofa as you walk in the front door,” the bank teller said in a 911 call.

Police arrested Verone where he sat. He was unarmed.

Verone said he asked for $1 to show that his motives were medical, not monetary, according to news reports. With a growth in his chest, two ruptured disks and no job, Verone hoped a three-year stint in prison would afford him the health care he needed.

“I’m sort of a logical person and that was my logic, what I came up with,” Verone told reporters. “If it is called manipulation, then out of necessity because I need medical care, then I guess I am manipulating the courts to get medical care.”

Oh. No one else noticed we live in a nation that guarantees better health care for criminals than ordinary citizens?

Our fear-driven politicians will not notice the passing of a poor man like Richard James Verone through their banking system, jail system – anymore than any other small creature invading their palaces for a moment or two.

Thanks, Helen

 
Autonomous robotic devices are certainly capable of some impressive feats, but as is the case with people, sometimes large groups can accomplish what an individual or a small group can’t. Research projects such as BAE Systems’ MAST program recognize this potential, and are investigating ways in which entire swarms of small robots could work together.

The problem is, given how much time and money goes into the creation of a typical autonomous robot, it’s difficult to find a swarm of them to experiment upon – researchers often have to use computer simulations, or do their tests with a small group of robots, then scale up the results. That’s where Harvard University’s Kilobot project comes into play. It incorporates tiny swarming robots that take just five minutes to build, and that are worth about US$14 each.

Each Kilobot is powered by a rechargeable 3.4-volt lithium-ion battery, that can keep it running for at least three hours. It moves via three rigid legs that are vibrated by two motors, allowing it to move left, right or straight forward. A bottom-mounted wide-angle infrared transceiver shoots a light beam down at the smooth surfaces that the robot shimmies across, that beam reflecting up to be received by other nearby Kilobots. This lets them communicate with one another, and judge proximity to their neighbors. An onboard microcontroller allows them to act on the data they receive.

Swarms of potentially hundreds or even thousands of Kilobots can be controlled by an overhead infrared controller, that can program an unlimited number of robots simultaneously in under 40 seconds…

While the real world applications of such actions might seem limited, one has to remember that the Kilobots were designed as research tools, not as practical robots. Lessons learned with them, however, could lead to packs of robots that could explore and report on hostile environments, perform environmental monitoring, clean up hazardous materials, or various other functions.

I think William Gibson is writing copy for Harvard, nowadays.

I you may tire of this statement, I repeat myself. If I were starting out again, today, I would likely be working in computational analysis in one or another field of science. This would be a taste-tempting treat for my somewhat orderly brain.

Antonio Villaraigosa, Los Angeles & Elizabeth Kautz, Burnsville, MN

Acknowledging it is out of the ordinary for city mayors to take a stand on military policy, the U.S. Conference of Mayors passed a resolution Monday calling for an early end to the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq.

“This is not a war resolution,” said the newly elected president of the group, Democratic Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa.

“What we wanted to make clear,” he told reporters afterward, is that “the best way to support and honor those troops is to give them a job when they come back home…”

The Conference of Mayors last addressed American military policy when it called for an end to the U.S. war in Vietnam, and some mayors expressed concern that the current resolution could be taken badly by the troops now deployed…

Other mayors pushed ahead, saying there are economic problems in the United States with a more pressing priority than the massive spending on the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq…

Mayors then proposed and approved amendments changing the wording to express support for U.S. troops and acknowledging what was called the need for a strategic, stable pullout of American forces. With those changes, the mayors then approved their resolution with a call to “bring these U.S. war dollars home.”

Still – it ain’t too bad for local politicians some of whom probably were elected to bring change and aid to their cities – and expected [silly people] to be backed up by Congress.

Hillary applauds passage of the Resolution

In what the U.S. State Department is calling a “historic step,” the U.N. Human Rights Council has passed a resolution…supporting equal rights for all, regardless of sexual orientation.

The resolution, introduced by South Africa, is the first-ever U.N. resolution on the human rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered persons.

It passed with 23 votes in favor, 19 opposed and three abstentions amid strong criticism of South Africa by some African nations.

Suzanne Nossel, deputy assistant secretary of state for international organizations, told CNN, “It really is a key part in setting a new norm that gay rights are human rights and that that has to be accepted globally.”

“It talks about the violence and discrimination that people of LGBT persuasion experience around the world,” she said, “and that those issues … need to be taken seriously. It calls for reporting on what’s going on, where people are being discriminated against, the violence that is taking place, and it really puts the issue squarely on the U.N.’s agenda going forward…”

The State Department lobbied intensively for the resolution [sock it to 'em Hillary], and Nossel said the United States was pleased to see African leadership, from South Africa in particular, as well as strong support from South America, Colombia and Brazil.

The resolution also will commission the first-ever U.N. report on the challenges that lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered people face around the globe. Nossel said the Obama administration hopes it will “open a broader international discussion on how to best promote and protect the human rights of LGBT persons…”

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has made gay rights a key focus of the State Department’s human rights agenda, expressing her view that “gay rights are human rights and human rights are gay rights.”

Now, she just needs to get her boss on board, maybe a little backbone among fellow Democrats [phew!] and who knows, perhaps a Republican or two will admit that human rights are for all humans.

Still, this is a tremendous step forward given theocracies and the number of states which may as well be that backwards – getting a resolution on civil rights past nations with bigotry as official policy ain’t ever easy. Ask anyone from Texas.

Field expedient

A British medical company has had its erection-enhancing condom recommended for European approval.

Futura Medical said its CSD500 condom — licensed to pharmaceutical firm Reckitt Benckiser for sale under its Durex brand has gel in its tip that dilates the arteries and increases blood flow to the penis, resulting in a firmer and bigger erection…

In a double blind clinical study comparing CSD500 against a standard condom co-sponsored by Futura, of those who expressed a preference, a significant proportion of both men and women reported improvements in the firmness of the man’s erection during intercourse when using CSD500, compared against a standard condom, the company said.

Furthermore, of those who expressed a preference, a significant proportion of both men and women also felt that CSD500 increased the penis size and a significant proportion of women reported a longer lasting sexual experience.

There are just too many reasons why I consider this hilarious – including the fact that our culture considers this a target area for beneficial research in the first place. Coming from a dude who’s lived the admittedly non-conformist life that I have – that’s saying a great deal.

ROFLMFAO

Taxpayers have spent more than $4 billion on capital punishment in California since it was reinstated in 1978, or about $308 million for each of the 13 executions carried out since then, according to a comprehensive analysis of the death penalty’s costs.

The examination of state, federal and local expenditures for capital cases, conducted over three years by a senior federal judge and a law professor, estimated that the additional costs of capital trials, enhanced security on death row and legal representation for the condemned adds $184 million to the budget each year.

The study’s authors, U.S. 9th Circuit Judge Arthur L. Alarcon and Loyola Law School professor Paula M. Mitchell, also forecast that the tab for maintaining the death penalty will climb to $9 billion by 2030, when San Quentin’s death row will have swollen to well over 1,000…

Their report traces the legislative and initiative history of the death penalty in California, identifying costs imposed by the expansion of the types of crimes that can lead to a death sentence and the exhaustive appeals guaranteed condemned prisoners…

Alarcon four years ago issued an urgent appeal for overhaul of capital punishment in the state, noting that the average lag between conviction and execution was more than 17 years, twice the national figure. Now it is more than 25 years, with no executions since 2006 and none likely in the near future because of legal challenges to the state’s lethal injection procedures…

Unless profound reforms are made by lawmakers who have failed to adopt previous recommendations for rescuing the system, Alarcon and Mitchell say, capital punishment will continue to exist mostly in theory while exacting an untenable cost…

As with the recommendations in Alarcon’s 2007 report, none of the remedies outlined by the commission chaired by former Atty. Gen. John Van de Kamp has been adopted by lawmakers or put to the public for a vote.

As on so many issues, California leads the way to problems as often as solutions. Personally, I have no problem with economics overruling biblical morality. I may have strong feelings about the justice of execution on a case-by-case basis; but, securely warehousing some demented killer until he dies of old age at a savings of $1.1 million [as the report describes] makes fiscal, social and political sense.

Evangelist and revival leader Ernest Cadick passionately preached God’s word, according to pastors in Indiana and Kentucky. But salvation wasn’t the only thing he was selling.

Approaching potential investors in churches, the ordained minister solicited $719,150 over 15 years for oil and gas ventures, then spent the money on himself, according to a federal indictment.

Cadick also used the apocalyptic prophecies in the Book of Revelation to fleece additional churchgoers at Louisville’s Evangel World Prayer Center, according to another indictment returned in state court, allegedly telling them that when President Barack Obama was elected, the dollar’s value would plummet to 3 cents as it was replaced with a new currency.

If they gave him their saving, the indictment alleges, he would fly it to Switzerland, where it would earn double their investment back each month.

Now the 60-year-old traveling evangelist is facing two separate trials — one in state court and another in federal — on those allegations.

He will be tried July 11 in Jefferson Circuit Court on three counts of theft for allegedly taking $29,500 from elderly victims in the Swiss investment scheme.

And he is scheduled to be tried today in Louisville federal court on 16 counts of fraud for allegedly taking money for oil and gas ventures and foreign currency investments and spending the money on himself, according to his indictment…

Long detailed article. Another Christian hustler who would kneel down and pray with his victims to convince them to fork over their savings in return for God’s guarantee of salvation – and more profits.

Investors sometimes make dumb decisions. Investors who make decisions based on “revealed word” and scripture written by a King’s committee in the 17th Century are beyond dumb.

 
Keith’s show starts up tonight on Current TV – Al Gore’s TV station. I’d let it slip to the back of my mind since I’d already scheduled my DVR to start recording it – but, I didn’t think he and Current would be badass enough to advertise his return to nightly television by buying space and time – on MSNBC – the chickenhearts who bailed on him for doing unseemly things like donating money to Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords election campaign.

This is gonna be fun.

As an example…

Paul Hambleton didn’t know what to do. He was uninsured, hurting, and facing a $30,000 bill to fix his torn-up knee.

So after researching his options, the owner of a valet-parking firm in Henderson, Texas, came up with an inspired solution. He got treated at a luxury facility, by doctors trained at top institutions, and enjoyed a sunny getaway at the same time, all at a fraction of the cost.

Of course there was a hitch: He had to go abroad. After checking out a number of local hospitals in Texas, Hambleton ended up heading across the border, to a facility in Monterrey, Mexico. The entire cost, including airfare: under $6,000.

“I was treated like a billionaire,” says the 52-year-old, who even squeezed in a couple of rounds of golf during his trip. “I had a Baylor-trained surgeon, a personal nurse the entire time, stayed at a top hotel, and had the best chicken enchiladas I’ve ever had. If I had my choice, I’d never go to an American hospital again.”

More Americans than ever are following Hambleton’s logic, and forgoing their local General Hospital in order to travel to places like Thailand, India, or Costa Rica for medical tuneups. More than half a million Americans every year, in fact, who are seeking out everything from dental work to cosmetic surgery to heart stents and hip replacements. It’s called “medical tourism,” and it amounts to a $40-billion annual business…

“It’s a lunatic statement, to say that there’s no quality healthcare overseas,” says Josef Woodman, author of the book Patients Beyond Borders. “For baby boomers who are in financially challenging circumstances, there’s a lot of choice out there now.”

The savings can be significant. Angioplasty that can cost up to $43,000 in the U.S. costs $4,700 in India, or $7,300 in Malaysia, according to data compiled by patientsbeyondborders.com. And in terms of amenities, hospitals like the famed Bumrungrad in Bangkok put their cash-strapped American counterparts to shame…

RTFA for details, anecdotes. I have peers among the grayheads in my family whose regular doctor and dentist are in Mexico. If they can time things appropriately their annual escape via 5th-wheeler to America’s southern border for the winter includes time set aside for medical and dental work on the Mexican side of that border.

Cripes – at least one of our “family” dentists belongs to the American Dental Association and has the contract for dental work for schoolchildren – of the town on the US side of the border.