Tourists everywhere. Crossing the local highway is risky, and often entails waits of several minutes for a clearing in the traffic. In the winter, a blind snail with bipolar disorder can get across that road safely, but now, it’s taking your life in your hands to try it.

Not visible in the picture is the reality of post-war London. Many of the city’s landmarks still have scaffolding around them as repairs from Werner von Braun’s efforts to touch the stars are made. Thousands upon thousands of new buildings have arisen from the rubble of the Blitz. The picture doesn’t show that rickets, caused by malnutrition, is still common, especially among the older kids born during the war and in the years immediately after. The tens of thousands killed and hundreds of thousands injured aren’t in sight, but are remembered. Just a scared-looking kid and a descendent of pigeons that even Hitler couldn’t kill.

Here are some of the things about liberty that the papers won’t mention.

He mentioned, too, the fact that infection rates in British hospitals were up by huge amounts, the result of turning the task of cleaning and disinfecting in the public hospitals over to the private sector. He claimed that an extra 10,000 Britons a year were dying as a result.

Anyway, it’s the Glaswegian accent. To American ears it sounded posh, tony. People thought of Scotty, or the stereotype of the Scotsman of fierce integrity, with bristling eyebrows and blazing blue eyes. William Rivers Pitt remarked that the Senate committee must have felt like they were being lectured by Sean Connery. The video is here. 

In the novel, which takes place in a small Alabama town in the 1930s, Ewell, a drunk and a ne’er-do-well, makes a spectacular charge of raping his daughter against one of the local black men, a cripple named Tom Robinson, and the lawyer Atticus Finch is appointed by the court to defend Robinson. To the unease of the town, Atticus proceeds to do so, demonstrating that Robinson could not have raped the daughter and leaving the strong impression that she was raped by her father instead. This being Alabama in the 1930s, the jury elects not to take the word of a black man over the word of a white man and convicts Robinson, who is subsequently shot while trying to escape. The town at large figures Robinson’s behavior was "Typical" and assumes it shows he really was guilty, but among others who know better is Bob Ewell, who begins a mounting vendetta against the people who caused his humiliation in court, including Atticus Finch.

Until I took the class, my only exposure to the idea of extended marriages came from Robert Heinlein’s then recently released novel, "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" I had assumed the extended marriages described in Heinlein’s book were the product of his imagination, and didn’t know that it, like most of the more fascinating and "alien" elements of good science fiction, was grounded in nothing more than the incredible variety of earth’s life and human customs and cultures. Manny’s family would have been right at home in Polynesia.

It turned out to be a correct prediction. One after another, the courts struck down the law as unconstitutional and ruled that as Schiavo’s husband, Michael Schiavo was within his rights to request that care be discontinued, in a case where there is no hope.

Fortunately, the reason for the gust of publicity came from Governor Arnie’s decision to sign legislation banning the sale of such weapons in California, making California the only state in America with such a law. ‘60 Minutes’ subsequently did a piece on the weapons. Needless to say, the type of people who need such weapons in order to feel comfortable dealing with their friends, family, neighbors and boss are flabbergasted. How DARE Arnie, a man best known for carelessly slinging around weapons that no other mortal can even lift, that can shoot skyscrapers in half, do something like this? Hunters NEED a gun with enough firepower to stop a gopher without leaving enough for DNA analysis to tell what species it was!

I grinned. "I’ll probably call him an Uncle Tom."

Word of the pending confrontation spread to Capitol Hill. As evening approached, people left their offices in the Capitol and the EOB and other storied marble edifices, and came down and formed a crowd between the police and the vets. These weren’t just average people taking a stand on principle; these were secretaries and other staffers from Congressional offices, Republican and Democrat alike. It was over one hundred members of the House of Representatives, and over a dozen Senators. These were some of the most powerful and most politically vulnerable people in America, risking everything they had to come down and prevent the police from hassling a bunch of scruffy looking demonstrators in the park.

It’s not exactly something new. It’s a mini-series continuation of a television series that was cancelled in early 2003. The series wrapped up a battle between the good guys, and some truly ugly bad guys called Scarrans, and then the hero (Ben Browder) and his love interest (Claudia Black) end up in a rowboat in the middle of a placid lake, where he pulls out a diamond ring and proposes to her, and she accepts. Just then, an alien space craft appears out of nowhere and blows them to bits. Series end, finale.

The authorities in New York are in paroxysms of fear and paranoia over all this, and have decided that there is going to be a huge terror attack unless they weld the entire Island of Manhattan shut.

So when a buddy of mine showed up today, fresh from a week long sojourn up Vancouver Island and then on the inward passage ferry to Prince Rupert, the first thing I asked him was if he got a red maple leaf tattooed on his butt. He was effusive. Note to BC Tourism Board: you got another one.

Sometimes the lyrically paranoid and obsessive theories turn out to be true. Yes, the CIA really did conduct mind-control experiments. Yes, the government paid for experiments releasing gas in the New York subways and in Havana (pre-Castro) in order to test propagation of poison gases. Yes, the FBI did run infiltration and disruption activities against the anti-war movement (CointelPro) during Vietnam.

First, it’s the most successful documentary of all time. It’s grossed $103 million domestically, and very incomplete overseas figures show it having grossed $13 million. So not only has it shattered the all time gross for a documentary ($21 million, Bowling for Columbine), but it’s at or past the adjusted-for-inflation gross of Birth of a Nation, which is estimated at $125 million. Of course, Birth of a Nation got an eighty year head start, too.

Three of the hijackers even set off the metal detectors and were subsequently wanded. You’ve all seen the wands. Bored security guards wave them around, the wands make a continuous stream of squeals and moans, and basically tell the security guard that he is, in fact, wearing a wrist watch on his own left wrist.

I started to say no, and on a whim, told her to get me a Big Mac. I hadn’t had one since about 1978, and from what I could see on the TV ads, it looked like they had sharply improved them since then. Bigger, juicier, and of course, now the patties were "all-beef." In 1978, Big Macs were dry, tasteless, and not very good for you. The meat was grey and thin, and the vegetables were wilted and zestless. About the only good thing about them, in my opinion, was the condiments. Surely in nearly 24 years, progress had been made.

TV Nation was putatively an investigative journalism show, but this was Michael Moore undiluted, and the end result was something like 60 Minutes on acid. He was confrontational as all get out, leavened by a truly twisted sense of humor, with the result that he had such phenomena as "Crackers the Corporate Crime Fighting Chicken," who was a guy in a chicken suit who ran around investigating crimes corporations pulled against the public. One week, they put up a phone number and asked people to call in with crimes for Crackers to investigate, and in the next 24 hours, got over 20,000 calls. Moore sent a black church choir to serenade a gathering of the Aryan Nation. He provided transportation for Bowery locals to a posh public beach in Delaware – a "public beach" for residents only.

So I’ve been picking at it for a while, trying to figure out what bothered me so deeply but at the same time seemed so hard to face.

If you are wondering why the greatest crime committed against Americans since 1941 has gone so long with little or no examination by the government or the media (even Pearl Harbor had four different congressional investigations going in the year following), you are not alone. Millions of people are wondering the same thing. Conspiracy theories proliferate, and while many are as loony-sounding as one expects, there’s dozens of very pertinent questions that have never been answered satisfactorily, or even properly asked. Why didn’t NORAD scramble that morning? Why did Putsch behave so oddly (imagine FDR going on the air, as he sometimes did on Sunday mornings, to read comics, after hearing about Pearl Harbor and before meeting with advisors to consider options) that morning? Why, exactly, did the Towers collapse? Why did the relatively unscathed building seven collapse hours later? Why do the photos from the Pentagon wreck show absolutely no evidence that a large commercial airliner struck the building? If that flight didn’t hit the Pentagon, where did it go? Why did the bin Ladens get government provided flights out of America when every other private plane in the country was grounded?

He recently tackled the subject of the "credibility crisis" in journalism. The public, for a wide variety of reasons, don’t trust the media any more, and at least some of that blame lies with the media itself.

The real reason I’ve been slacking off is because the weather has been so nice. I live in California, a place synonymous with nice weather (except for floods, earthquakes, wildfires, drought, and temperatures above 110. Details, details). But that’s the 95% of California that doesn’t contain Siskiyou County. This is a sturdier California here, one where the pine trees don’t have to be watered and they outnumber the people, and snow sometimes reaches the eaves of the houses.

[Voice Over]: "On days like that, sometimes good dental care has to take a back seat. You don’t want to do that, but sometimes things just happen, you know?"

In other words, the commission is a complete joke, and there isn’t a member of the press who doesn’t realize that. Including Tim Russert.

Nine months later, not much has changed.

So what’s the message for the summer solstice? "It’s all downhill from here!" This is your brief moment of glory, folks. From now on, sunsets are earlier, and all too soon, the leaves will fall, followed by the snow, and it will be dark and cold. All summer solstice does is remind you that you are "shorter of breath, and one day closer to death."

Fortunately, this was 1974, and we just happened to have one of those in stock. 

The type of speech is controlled by different parts of the brain, and the results can be stunning. Speech therapists learned some time back that people with profound aphasia, who have lost the ability to utter a single word of regular speech, can sometimes be taught to communicate quite well either through sign language, song, or poetry. Different parts of the brain control the respective vocabularies of each, and an aphasic who still has the sense and meaning behind the words can often use these detours. Some aphasics can learn to speak quite fluently in a foreign language. But their own language is gone, usually for good.

Bustamante self-destructed with his fund-raising games. Republicans used the fact that he was taking donations from the gaming tribes to appeal to people’s latent racism, but he lost ground in his own Democratic base because a majority of Democrats are appalled and sickened by our corrupt and anti-democratic methods of campaign fund-raising. Even worse, when he said he would return the money and then only returned $71,000 of the $3.1 million, he sealed his fate.

$20.3 billion to rebuild a country doesn’t sound like much. Iraq has about as many people as Texas, and Texas spends more than that every year on the state budget. And this is a state that believes "the Government ain’t got no business spending no money on nobody, no how, no way." I think they even have that on their state flag or something.

The other storms are those seen much more frequently in the DC area, political storms. Although like Isabel at her peak last week, they stand to reach higher levels of intensity than what we usually see.

Tourist season is over until the ski park opens in mid-November. Which means that when I walk past the malt shop with my dogs early in the morning to get the paper, I usually swap waves with the owner and one "employee" – usually a family member volunteering – who are waiting for the grumpy and tight fisted locals to show up and complain about the price of coffee. It’s a pretty discouraging time of year.

A lot of people, badly frightened by the grim forecasts that Carson and Ehrlich had made (Ehrlich predicted a vast die off of some 65 million people in the United States alone by the end of the 1970s) read the story with a certain amount of wistfulness. The only other options were the Malthusian nightmares of famine, plague and war. Farmer’s scenario seemed an easy way out.

In fact, Americans can take pride in how well easterners reacted. Crime actually DROPPED during the blackout, and the only serious criminal occurrence was, oddly enough, in the Canadian capital of Ottawa, where four gunmen robbed a Sparks Street Mall jewelry store and fired shots at the crowd (nobody hurt, fortunately).

The Republicans had a booth at the other end of the exposition hall (the hall adjoining our end has the science exhibits and the book sale booths, and their end opens out into pens featuring cattle and their products, which we think is apropos). They had a life-size cut cardboard cut-out of Putsch which they still use despite the actions of some miscreant who I will not name on fifth amendment grounds who once hung a sign around its neck reading "The real thing, or a cardboard cutout phoney? You decide!"

The deaths of Udai and Qusai Hussein in a barrage by American forces were of no particular benefit to Americans 

In fact, most people don’t realize just how lucky the colonies were. Nearly all revolutions make life worse, not better, and often involve pogroms, starvation, bloodbaths and widespread starvation. America managed to avoid much of that.

There was a case in point a couple of weeks ago, when the American Film Institute came out with another one of their "best movies of all times" polls. You’ve probably seen those polls around. They had "best 100 movies of all time" (And it was either "Casablanca" or "Citizen Kane" that won) and "Best 100 comedies of all time" ("Some Like It Hot"). AFI, pleased with the attention and controversy the lists engendered, produced more lists, a cycle of attainments that can only get more dubious as time goes on. ("Best 100 black and white Bulgarian films directed by a left-handed albino director addressing the social problem of scurvy" for example. I can’t think of more than ten such that are worth seeing...)