She was definitely one of my favorite authors. I haven’t felt this sad since I was in junior high and E. B. White died.

Andrew Leonard writes in Salon that global stockpiles of grain are plunging. A fascinating article that dovetails quite nicely with the documentary “The End of Suburbia.” Here’s a link to an article about sugar cane-derived biofuel.

The below was received from someone who wishes to remain anonymous.  As I understand it, this essay was part of an ongoing dialog with someone else.

A response that I typed up to a certain miscreant using the handle “qrsi” got a mention by one of the WaPo bloggers!  And to top it off, said miscreant’s offensive posting was removed from the discussion page!

Senior Diplomats Retaking Foreign Policy

Senior career diplomats are retaking control of key elements of U.S. foreign policy and have begun to assert significant influence as the Bush administration enters its waning months eager to salvage a legacy marred by the Iraq war.Since assuming the helm at the State Department in 2005, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has installed veteran foreign service officers with more than 200 years of collective diplomatic experience in seven critical posts from the Middle East to South Asia and the Far East.

By contrast, their immediate predecessors had just 72 years of combined experience and five of them were Republican political operatives with limited or no background in diplomacy, according to an Associated Press survey of senior agency appointees.

What is curious about this article is its implicit criticism of Colin Powell and his top aide, Lawrence Wilkerson. This criticism is implicit because it refers to appointees of Powell’s as having quite limited foreign policy experience as compared to Condoleeza Rice’s appointees. Furthermore, the article implies that Powell’s appointees were more sympathetic to the neocons than Rice’s appointees are. This is damned strange, because Wilkerson has long articulated his opposition to the neocon agenda, while Rice as National Security Advisor implemented the neocons’s agenda. The State Department under Powell has been (for the most part, at least) widely considered to have been recalcitrant towards the neocons’s agenda. Rice, meanwhile, has (again, for the most part) has been seen as Bush II’s agent dispatched to wrest more control over a bureaucracy that is (again, for the most part) seen as hostile (or, at the very least, dubious) to the neocons’s agenda.

Oscar the cat seems to have an uncanny knack for predicting when nursing home patients are going to die, by curling up next to them during their final hours. His accuracy, observed in 25 cases, has led the staff to call family members once he has chosen someone. It usually means they have less than four hours to live.”He doesn’t make too many mistakes. He seems to understand when patients are about to die,” said Dr. David Dosa in an interview. He describes the phenomenon in a poignant essay in Thursday’s issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/25/AR2007072501753.html?nav=hcmodule

Okla. Senator Vows Block, Saying Author Stigmatized Insecticides

Oklahoma Sen. Tom Coburn has effectively blocked a resolution to honor environmental author Rachel Carson on the 100th anniversary of her birth, saying that her warnings about environmental damage have put a stigma on potentially lifesaving pesticides, congressional staffers said yesterday.

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In a statement on his Web site yesterday, Coburn (R) confirmed that he is holding up the bill. In the statement, he blames Carson for using “junk science” to turn public opinion against chemicals, including DDT, that could prevent the spread of insect-borne diseases such as malaria, which is spread by mosquitoes.

The male bovine fecal material that this S.O.B. is spouting reminds me of the right wing revisionist claims of the Vietnam War. Here he is negatively spinning the work of Carson. (Click here to see his claims debunked.) Tom Coburn is truly an S.O.B. to denigrate a woman who gave so much even as she was dying from breast cancer; a woman who hid her desperate plight because she knew in her bones that if the chemical lobby found out about her cancer, then they would distort that fact to claim that her work was biased. Coburn is an absolute slimeball.

Click here to see a very short retrospective of Carson’s life.

Happy birthday, Ms. Carson.

This just goes to show yet again that you cannot trust the mainstream media to tell the full story if it conflicts or undermines the U.S. elite’s policy goals.

I received the following from Steven L. Robinson via Green Alliance’s Green All Views Listserve.

by Joshua Holland & Raed Jarrar

AlterNet

http://www.alternet.org/story/52135/

May 21, 2007.

Iraq’s resistance groups have offered a series of peace plans that might put an end to the country’s sectarian violence, but they’ve been ignored by the U.S.-led coalition because [the resistance groups are] opposed to foreign occupation and privatization of oil.

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An online search shows that the peace plan was largely ignored by the Western commercial media.

That’s par for the course. While every nuance of every spending bill that passes the U.S. Congress is analyzed in minute detail, the Iraqis — remember them? — have proposed a series of comprehensive peace deals that might unite the country’s ethnic and sectarian groups and result in an outcome American officials of all stripes say they want to achieve: a stable, self-governing Iraq that is strong enough to keep groups like al Qaeda from establishing training camps and other infrastructure within its borders.

Al Fadhila’s peace plan was not the first one offered by Iraqi actors, nor the first to be ignored by the Anglo-American Coalition.

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But these plans are unacceptable to the Coalition because they A) affirm the legitimacy of Iraq’s armed resistance groups and acknowledge that the U.S.-led coalition is, in fact, an occupying army, and B) return Iraq to the Iraqis, which means no permanent bases, no oil law that gives foreign firms super-sweet deals and no radical restructuring of the Iraqi economy. U.S. lawmakers have been and continue to be faced with a choice between Iraqi stability and American Empire, and continue to choose the latter, even as the results of those choices are splashed in bloody Technicolor across our TV screens every evening.

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As early as 2005, the University of Michigan’s Juan Cole reported that the Sadrist movement — named after the father of the nationalist cleric Muqtada al-Sadr — had gathered a million signatures on a petition demanding a timetable for occupation forces to withdraw. More recently, the Arabic press reported that as many as a million Iraqis — a million Shia and Sunni working together — had protested the continuing occupation in Najaf on the fourth anniversary of the fall of Baghdad last month.

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One of the few laws left on the books from the Saddam Hussein era is one that severely limits the rights of Iraqi workers to organize. As journalist
David Bacon reported in the winter of 2003, coalition forces “escalated their efforts to paralyze Iraq’s new labor unions with a series of arrests”
that left one of the few surviving segments of Iraq’s once-vibrant secular civil society toothless.

Paramilitary Ties to Elite In Colombia Are Detailed

Commanders Cite State Complicity in Violent Movement

Top paramilitary commanders have in recent days confirmed what human rights groups and others have long alleged: Some of Colombia’s most influential political, military and business figures helped build a powerful anti-guerrilla movement that operated with impunity, killed civilians and shipped cocaine to U.S. cities.The commanders have named army generals, entrepreneurs, foreign companies and politicians who not only bankrolled paramilitary operations but also worked hand in hand with fighters to carry them out. In accounts that are at odds with those of the government, the commanders have said their organization, rather than simply sprouting up to fill a void in lawless regions of the country, had been systematically built with the help of bigger forces.

Is it any wonder that Columbia is a poor country?  (click here for article)  These elites find it second nature to rape the country’s natural resources and to ignore the plight of the poor.

Doctors, Legislators Resist Drugmakers’ Prying Eyes

In the letter, the salesperson wrote that Thakkar was causing his patients to miss more days of school than they would if he put them on Vigamox, a more expensive brand-name medicine made by Alcon Laboratories.

Talk about gall! Telling a physician what he should be subscribing to his patients!

Now the issue is bubbling up in the political arena. Last year, New Hampshire became the first state to try to curtail the practice, but a federal district judge three weeks ago ruled the law unconstitutional.

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“In this case commercial interests took precedence over the interests of the private citizens of New Hampshire,” Rosenwald said. “This is like letting a drug rep into an exam room and having them eavesdrop on a private conversation between a physician and a patient.”

The April 30 ruling by U.S. District Judge Paul Barbadoro, nominated to the federal bench in 1992 by President George H. W. Bush, called the state’s pioneering law an unconstitutional restriction on commercial speech.

How typical of a REPUGNican judge! To place the interests of Big Pharma over the interests of the patients! This is an unequal contest — Big Pharma has more resources to lobby physicians than states do.

A drug company might use the database to help determine whether physicians prescribing a particular high-risk drug have undergone required training about the medicine, said Marjorie E. Powell, senior assistant general counsel for the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, a trade association.

“If you don’t have that information, then you are in a very difficult situation,” Powell said. “There is no way you can implement the risk-management plan that the FDA [Food and Drug Administration] is requiring you to implement in order to allow the drug to be on the market.”

To me, this sounds like a threat; but judge for yourself — here’s the link to the article.