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Miscellaneous Good News, July, 2003
[Commentary] ©2003 Phil Hyde, The Timesizing Wire, Box 622, Cambridge MA 02140 USA (617) 623-8080

7/29/2003   headlines from heaven - alias glimmers of random hope/intelligence -

• [1 UPsizing]
  China: Pipelines to be developed, Bloomberg via NYT, W1.
  CNOOC Ltd. will spend as much as $700m building pipelines and developing gas fields in the South China Sea to supply Macau and the southern city of Zhuhai by 2006, competing with the PetroChina Co. to meet the country's gas demand. CNOOC, China's No. 3 oil and gas producer, plans to link three fields to supply Zhuhai and Macau with about 1B cu.meters of gas, about 1/10 of planned sales next year. The project may be linked to a 1,250-mile gas pipeline CNOOC's parent plans to build along China's southern and eastern coastal provinces, analysts said....
  [Unspecified new jobs.]

• Doonesbury, by Garry Trudeau, Boston Globe, cartoons 1.
  [Scene - man and woman lying in bed listening/watching TV - 6 frames -]
  
  1. Fox News - real reporting, fair and balanced.
  2. So why are we so obsessed with being fair and balanced? Well, there are two kinds of news, my friends...
  3. First there's good news - news that makes you proud, like stories on our quick, decisive invasions of other countries.
  4. Then there's liberal news - stories about massive deficits, high unemployment, tax cuts for the wealthy, environmental degradation, the lies justifying the war, and the chaos in Iraq and Afghanistan.
  5. As liberal news, these stories are biased and unpatriotic - exactly the kind of reporting we know you resent most!
  6. Fox News - we decide, you concur.

• Washington Wire...- By George, by Jackie Calmes, WSJ, A4.
  Financier George Soros buys full-page ad in Sunday's New York Times [7/27/2003 NYT, 4:14] urging Americans to demand Congress "get the truth" about the administration's case for Iraq war. It follows today's similar ad from the Democratic National Committee [NYT, A11]. Under pressure - and undercut by White House misstatements - resistant Republican leaders may hold open hearings of the Senate Intelligence Committee in September.

1. In blow to FCC, House votes [400-21] to reverse media deregulation, by Dreazen & Flint, WSJ, front page.
   [i.e., against even tighter media consolidation.]

2. U.S. approves duties on [computer] chips and catfish, Reuters via NYT, C11.
   [Added to steel tariffs and agrobiz protection? So much for "free" trade. Now if we can cut the cant and sideline NAFTA....]

3. [here's some arrogant American finger-shaking at Japan, who's doing this particular issue better than the U.S. -]
   Insular Japan needs, but resists, immigration, 2nd of 3 articles in series "Can Japan change," by Howard French, NYT, front page.
   ...Japan is at the leading edge of a phenomenon that is beginning to striked many advanced countries: rapidly aging populations and dwindling fertility.
   [So now the NYT is advocating immigration to cure the disease of rapidly aging populations and dwindling fertility? Don't they remember our risk of overpopulation all over the world and Japan's being one of the most densely populated nations in the world?!]
   The size of this country's workforce peaked in 1998 and has since entered a decline that experts to accelerate.
   [That's a different issue from population, and largely a function of Japan's switch in the 1990s to the west's suicidal downsizing response to technology.]
   By midcentury, demographers say, Japan will have 30% fewer people, and one million 100-year-olds. By then, 800,000 more people will die each year than are born. By century's end, the UN estimates, the present population of 120 million will be cut in half....
   [Sounds great! Sounds exactly what we Americans should be aiming for. We think regular binding public referendums are the only way to go in dealing with these more-heat-than-light population issues.]

• Michigan: Detroit Medical Center cancels layoffs, AP via NYT, A15.
  ...1,000 layoff notices after state and local governments announced a multimillion-dollar aid agreement. The center, which owns 10 hospitals, including Detroit Receiving and Hutzel Women's, has lost $360m over the past 5 years. A major part of the nonprofit corporation's struggle to cut costs was laying off 1,000 employees.
  [We never saw - or counted - the downsizing, so we can note but not count their rescinding as an upsizing.]
  But under the aid plan announced by Gov. Jennifer Granholm, Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick of Detroit and Robert Ficano, the Wayne County executive, Detroit Receiving and Hutzel will receive $50m.

• Crisis of faith, pointer blurb (to A2), WSJ, front page.
  At the World Bank, privatizing money-losing utilities of developing nations used to be a no-brainer.
  [It was a no-brainer, but not in the way they thought. You had to have NO BRAINS to waste time&money doing it.]
  Now, the institution's privatization enthusiasts are wondering what went wrong.
  [They want a one-size-fits-all remedy, the closest thing there is to a panacea, a cure-all? Try Timesizing! - and cut out this other silly crap. The indicated article -]
  The World Bank as privatization agnostic - World Bank wonders about privatizations after spotty record, by Michael Phillips, WSJ, A2 & A6.
  ...Investors...pulling back [in] ...Brazil ...Africa ...Eastern Bloc nations.
  ...Widespread disappointment...across Africa, Latin America and Asia....
  [As The Economist admitted in a rare moment of honesty, in privatizing or nationalizing, much of your success depends on whether there happen to be better managers in the sector you're moving to at the time. Mutatis mutandis, you're just spinning your wheels. Get a life, er, strategy! We suggest Timesizing your Utilities. Check out the corporations on our working models page.]

1. [finally, Dems are mentioning the I-word -]
   Democrats see a crack in the Bush armor - Postwar woes heating up for Bush, by Anne Kornblut, Boston Globe, front page & A21.
   ...Several senior Bush officials have parsed the State of the Union speech and said it is "technically accurate" because it attributes the unfounded intelligence [on which the unprovoked invasion of Iraq was based] to British sources - a tactic that has prompted Democrats to draw parallels between Bush and Pres. Clinton, even raising the specter of impeachment.
   [More of a long overdue relief than a specter by now, surely.]
   Sen. Bob Graham, Democrat of Florida, said yesterday there were grounds to impeach Bush if he was found to have led America to war under false pretenses.
   ["If"???]
   "If the standard of impeachment is the one the House Republicans used against Bill Clinton, this clearly comes within that standard," he said.
   [Of course, Ralph Nader had to say it first, a whole week ago (see 7/11/2003 below). So is Bob Graham gonna be the gutsy banner-bearer here, the Bright Side's answer to the Dark Side's Gingrich & all his imps? Don't count on it -]
   After an appearance in New Hampshire, Graham issued a statement saying he was not calling for Bush's impeachment and saw the issue as a largely academic one, adding that if Bush had misled the American public he would pay the price for it in the 2004 presidential election....
   [An "academic issue"?!? Could Satan possibly have favored the Black oops 'White' House with a more supine "opposition"? This country is gone.]

2. [Or maybe Bill Moyers' startling revelation on Friday eve will give the Dems some spine -]
   Now, TV program by Bill Moyers, PBS Boston Channel 2, 9-10 pm.
   Moyers: "Before we take our leave tonight, we have a new development on a story we've been following for quite awhile. Last week, Larry Clayman was here to talk about efforts by his public interest group, Judicial Watch, to gain access to the records of those secret meetings back in 2001 when VP Cheney asked executives from big energy companies to help him write the administration's energy plan."
   Clayman: "There was something that's being hidden. Were there energy executives behind closed doors offering up contributions for special deals?"
   Moyers: "Judicial Watch is a conservative organization that investigates and prosecutes government corruption and abuse, and two years ago Clayman filed a freedom-of-information request to find out who came to the VP's meetings and what they gave. When the administration failed to comply, Clayman went to court. Well, this week in response to that lawsuit, the government released several energy taskforce documents. Now keep in mind this all dated from the spring of 2001 [actually late winter in early March], some six months before 9/11 [irrelevant anyway], two years before the war with Iraq [oh c'mon Bill, not so passive - "our invasion of Iraq" please!]. Among them are a map of Iraq's oilfields and pipelines and lists of foreign companies - the documents [dated Mar. 5, 2001] called them 'suitors' - interested in developing Iraq's oil industry. These documents raise more questions that they answer. They don't tell us, for example, why the VP and private energy executives would be so curious at that time about those Iraq oilfields, and why they would fight so hard in the meantime to keep their curiosity secret. Larry Clayman told us today he's determined to find out why. What he finds, we'll report."
   [That's all right, Bill. We're not completely stupid or naive. We can connect the dots. But why can't the two-guy-owned media and/or the big-money Democrats?! ... Oh.]

1. A front-running insurgent [- Howard Dean], op ed by Albert Hunt, WSJ, A17.
   [We think he means 'challenging outsider' - sort of like Lincoln or TR, Al? Al is more interested in subtly weakening Dean with innuendo and insinuations. Guess he's getting a little concerned. He introduces a series of comparative 'insurgents' - only one of whom won (Carter) - with the following slice of solid hypocrisy -]
   More relevant [ha] that whether the Howard Dean phenomenon is ideologically driven [neo-con(artist)s should talk!] by his opposition to the Iraq war [dba chaos, killing and costs] and support for civil unions [ie: gay marriages] are these bits of history:...[blah blah blah]
   [The good news -]
   He [Dean] has more than three times as many donors as any other Democrat....
   [What a surprise. One of the only two Dem cands with the guts to stand for something, e.g., peace and order, vs. war and chaos. The other one is Dennis Kucinich. And meanwhile, spineless Dems, IMPEACH this closet of morons in the White House before they drag the nation down further and faster! How much blatant damage in how many different dimensions do you need? Compare -]
   Blair arrives in U.S. today, trailing controversy over Iraq, by Warren Hoge & Don van Natta Jr., NYT, A8.
   ...In a rowdy House of Commons session [yester]day, the Conservative [they have true conservatives in Britain] leader, Iain Duncan Smith, told Mr. Blair, "You are rapidly becoming a stranger to the truth," as lawmakers bellowed disapproval [of Blair], waved their papers in the air and accused him [Blair] of having duped them into going to war.
   [Gee, just like Bush and Cheney did to Americans!]
   "You have created a culture of deceit and spin at the heart of government," Mr. Duncan said, exploiting the government's most vulnerable aspect as portrayed in new polls showing public trust of Mr. Blair at the lowest point of his six years in power....
   [Well, as the high-pitched bitch on 'Will & Grace' would say, "Cut the chit-chat and call a Vote of No Confidence, you dawdlers! You're all talk and no action!" Truly, Blare and his parliament of gulls made Canadians ashamed of their motherland. For real nausea, check out the Journal's editorial page cartoon comparing Blair to Churchill (WSJ, A16). Any editorial on him should be titled, not "Bulldog Blair" per WSJ, but "Downs Syndrome in Downing Street," and that's a huge slander to the gentle folks with Downs Syndrome.]

2. House panel adds voice to opponents of media rule, by Jacques Steinberg, NYT, C1.
   ...The House Appropriations Committee...approved a budget amendment that would make it harder for big broadcasting companies to acquire more TV stations....

3. EU proposes French tax break, WSJ, B2.
   BRUSSELS - The EU Commission proposed giving French haute cuisine chefs a Big Mac-size tax break. The plans allow France to slash the Value Added Tax on restaurant meals to 5.5% from 19.6%[! worse than Canada's notorious Goods&Services Tax (GST)!] as part of a proposal to revamp VAT rules.
   [Strange how governments who claim to want more business, that is, more SALES, slap on sales taxes to burden and discourage what they want, and dismantle graduated income taxes that burden and discourage what they don't want = vast pools of relatively inactive income that transforms from dynamic spending power into sluggish investing power as it accrues higher and higher up the income brackets. At current worldwide levels of concentration, not only does it vacuum the markets away from the productivity itself desires to invest in, but repeatedly transforms the financial markets into foundationless liquidity-driven pyramid schemes - Double, double, toil and trouble, Principal burn as markets bubble....]
   The French want white-tablecloth restaurants to be taxed the same as fast-food outlets such as McDonald's Corp., which already enjoy the lower 5.5% rate....
   [Abolish sales taxes of all kinds (VATs, GSTs, etc., etc.) and move toward fees for government services - which the wealthy 'consume' and depend on far far more than anyone else - though they up-and-down deny it. And while we're realizing and calculating how many government services the wealthy consume and depend on, cut all the nickle-and-dime taxes and go back to steeply graduated income taxes to get that wasted super-excess top-heavy investing power transformed back into active spending power.]

• [1 UPsizing]
  Toyoto Motor Corp., Dow Jones via WSJ, C10.
  ...will more than double its output capacity at a US engine-making unit...from mid-2005...raising its capacity to 250,000 units a year from 120,000 units a year, Toyota said. The Alabama unit, set up in June 2001, began production...with a workforce of 350 people. The planned output expansion will...create 150 jobs....
  [Here's a relatively mild but specific demonstration of the power of technology and its potential for "technological displacement" of human employees, alias unemployment creation, alias consumer-base destruction, meaning destruction of its own markets when responded to by downsizing instead of timesizing. The output DOUBLES, meaning it goes up 250/120x100%= 208%, while the workforce only goes up 150/350x100%= 43%. And in another case today, the workforce doesn't go up at all -]
  Ford to overhaul Ohio plant for new engine, Reuters via NYT, C4.
  ...to compete better with engines made by its Japanese competitors....Ford employs about 1,800 workers \at\ the plant in Lima OH...and said it would not add jobs to build the new engine.
  [Just as well since it already has 1800/(350+150)x100%= 360% more employees than Toyota's engine plant in Alabama. So much for the standard economist's myth that "technology creates more jobs than it destroys."]

1. The price of tariffs, editorial, WSJ, A14.
   ...Apples, pears...rice, T-shirts, trousers...blankets, stainless steel products...suits, windows...cans and inkjet printers...are all part of a much longer list of US products that currently sell well in Europe but won't in the future if they are strapped with 100% tariffs. And that is precisely what the EU is promising to do in retaliation for the steel tariffs that the Bush Administration imposed in March 2002 to last until 2005.... The retaliation list deliberately targets products made in states that pResident Bush can't afford to lose if he wants to be re-elected in 2004....
   [Thank God for the European Union!]

2. [and a little feedback is getting through -]
   CEOs see own health suffer with companies' in a troubled economy, by Carol Hymowitz, WSJ, B1.

3. [two little environmental victories -]
   
   • Maryland: Effort to save eagles, AP via NYT, A16.
     Officials at Aberdeen Proving Ground are trying to find a way to protect the growing number of bald eagles at the installation....
   • Expanding conservation program, NYT, A16.
     The Dept. of the Interior said it would provide $70.4m to 29 states for endangered species conservation projects....
   [but one defeat -]
   Forest road-building ban, AP via NYT, A16.
   A federal judge struck down a ban on road building in a third of the US national forests, saying the Clinton administration rule illegally designated wilderness areas....

1. [1 UPsizing]
   7/12 India: Oracle adding jobs, Bloomberg via NYT, B3.
   ...in its Indian unit in the near term.... The unit will increase jobs to 6,000 from 3,200.... Oracle is also building a new campus on 7 acres in the southern city of Hyderabad...to open by early 2005....
   [So, 6000-3200= 2,800 new jobs.]

2. ['better late than never' #1 -]
   7/12 Tyco adopts limits on executive [severance] pay, AP via NYT, B4.

3. ['better late than never' #2 -]
   7/14 Democrats say Bush's credibility has been damaged - Candidates quickly[??] shift the tone of the war debate, by Adam Nagourney, NYT, A15.
   [Enfin! (= 'at last!' in French)]

4. [while the once-great USA sleepily begins to deal with the wipe-out in the White House, the vast invisible land to the north 'mushes' ahead -]
   7/13 Canadian rhapsody - The Great White North's unlikely progressivism, by Jeet Heer, Boston Globe, H1.
   ...The truth is, for most of its history, Canada has been a much more conservative nation than the United States - if conservatism is associated with the maintenance of social order and moderation.
   [A big "if" in the Orwellian word-world we live in.]
   What's more, in adopting liberal laws in recent years, many Canadians thought they were simply following a path pioneered by their Yankee neighbours, only to find their country denounced as anti-American.
   [But in the ironies of advancing social evolution, Canada is now becoming the true America, and the (United) States, if it doesn't clean house (White House, that is) in the next election, will find itself a big has-been, slowed to a standstill by increasingly bitter partisanship, dragged fear-mongeringly backward into the kneejerk creationism and witch-hunting of the 17th century by spreading fundamentalism, and its contributions to human progress thinning, pitied and very politely isolated as the rest of the advanced world stumbles erratically forward into the new millennium.]
   
   • ..\..two-thirds of Canadians supported...Chretien's decision to sit out the Iraq [invasion].
   • ...55-60% are lining up behind the...push to pass federal laws legalizing same-sex marriage
   • and relaxing marijuana restrictions.... Vancouver...plans to open up North America's first police-free "safe injection sites"...using free, clean needles under the supervision of a nurse....
   • The superiority [alias European-ness] of Canada, with its generous social welfare programs
   • and comparatively low rate of gun violence (despite widespread gun ownership), formed the subtext of Michael Moore's Oscar-winning film "Bowling for Columbine."
   • Ralph Nader, in a mildly goofy 1992 book called "Canada Firsts" [but Canucks aren't afraid of "mildly goofy"], extolled worthy achievements from universal healthcare
   • to the "first rotary snowplow and snowblower."
   ..\..To American conservatives, Canada is
   • going to pot in more ways than one.
   • The right-wing political columnist Pat Buchanan denounced America's largest trading partner as "Soviet Canuckistan."
     [Name-call your tonsils out, Pat. The truth is, your non-top-two party would have a much better chance in Canada, where we have 4-5 viable political parties a la Europe instead of the stifling stranglehold of the Demublican/Republic-rats that has hurt you so oft so bad.]
   ...In their founding documents...Canadian politicians deliberately avoided the eloquence found in the Declaration of Independence, which ringingly celebrates "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." Instead...the British North America (BNA) Act of 1867 promises "peace, order, and good government."
   [Incredible to Canadians, many American political consultants sneer at people who advocate for good government, pejoratively calling them "goo-goos" as if only babies would be sooo naive. Ralph Nader, for example, is definitely to be dismissed as a "goo-goo." Basically, American political consultants have gotten waaay too sophisticated for democracy.]
   ...The phrase "Red Tory," devised by political scientists in the 1960s [or does it trace back to the early '20s?], captured the curious fact that members of Canada's [right-of-center] party (the Progressive Conservatives) were sometimes willing to borrow ideas and policies from the left.... This Red Tory tendency has no real parallels in the U.S., although a few [individualists] such as the diplomat George Kennan and the novelist Norman Mailer have flirted with such ideas.
   [And Phil Hyde's mascot against ten (10) Democratic candidates during the last six weeks of his Republican (elephant logo) campaign for Joe Kennedy's open seat in 1998 was a little stuffed animal in the form of a pink elephant (named Pinky).]
   Despite [or because of!] its stronger social safety net, midcentury Canada remained culturally a much more conservative country than its neighbor to the south.... But Pierre Trudeau, the hip prime minister who governed from 1968 to 1984 embodied the new libertarianism of his era. Trudeau rescinded sodomy laws in the late 1960s and eased rules governing access to abortion, but his most far-reaching achievement was enshrining a Charter of Rights and Freedoms within the Canadian Constitution of 1982, [which resulted when he "brought the BNA Act home" to Canada from Britain]. Deferential Canadians now began challenging laws that had been based on traditional morality.
   In his recent Canadian bestseller "Fire and Ice...", Michael Adams...notes that just as Canadians were adopting a progressive, American-style "rights" consciousness, the U.S. was putting its own rights revolution on ice. He certainly cites some eye-opening statistics. In a 2000 poll, 24% of Canadians believe men are naturally superior to women, as against 38% of Americans - a gap that has been increasing over the last few decades. ...According to census data, evangelical Protestantism [ie: fundamentalism]...is the religion of more than 40% of the American population (including the pResident) but only 11% of Canadians. Canadians are only half as likely to go to church, and when they do they worship as Roman Catholics (...half of all Can. Christians) or as members of mainline Protestant denominations such as the Anglicans [or Uniteds from the United Church of Canada]. ...Adams characterizes [Canada] as "one huge Massachusetts" [thankfully without Finneran!]. ...Canada's current wave of progressive law-making is built on a conservative worldview - albeit a type of sober-minded conservatism that has few parallels in an ever more radically right-wing America.
   [Now we're gonna get a reverse braindrain unless we rename the country Frigidia, as Iceland did, unless - (Phil passes his hand ObiWan-like before his US readers faces and croons...) "you...don't...need...to...move...north.... There's...nothing...up...there.... It's...invisible.... Just...white...snow." The truth is, if this keeps up, Canada's going to get the cream of the US crop, as northern Europe did when it moved on to Protestantism while southern Europe stayed under the thumb of the Vatican. Descartes was one of the most famous who moved north, and Galileo would have if he could.]

• [a real leader speaks -]
  Will Nader run? It depends in part, he says, on 2 others, by Michael Janofsky, NYT, A10.
  WASHINGTON...- Ralph Nader, whom [some] Democrats blame for Al Gore's defeat in the last presidential election [though Gore didn't even win his home state], said [yester]day that he would decide later this year whether to seek the White House again, as a Green Party candidate or an independent.
  Mr. Nader has run 3 times for president. He fared best [the 3rd time] in 2000, winning 2.7% of the vote nationally and 1.6% in Florida, where George W. Bush's [supposed] 537-vote margin over Mr. Gore swung the election.
  [That's funny. We thought it was the Supreme Court's intervention before the counting process was completed.]
  Speaking to reporters at a breakfast [yester]day morning, ...Mr. Nader said his decision would depend in some measure on the fortunes of the two current Democratic contenders whose politics appear to most closely resemble his own: Rep. Dennis Kucinich of Ohio and former Gov. Howard Dean of Vermont.
  [Gee, our faves too - the only two to speak out against that irreponsible, wasteful, and national-security-destroying first-strike invasion based on trumped-up evidence.]
  
  • Mr. Nader said any growth in support for Mr. Kucinich, among the most liberal [whatever that means here] members of Congress, would give him "less reason to go into the election - not no, just less."
  • As for Mr. Dean, Mr. Nader said he liked what the former governor said in speeches but feared that he would ultimately move toward the center [ie: the religious right] to broaden his appeal.
  Mr. Nader hammered away at what he described as corporate greed, unfair treatment of 3rd-party candidates by the Federal Election Commission [FEC] and the indistinguishable differences between Democrats and Republicans.
  [Nader is Lincoln and TR rolled into one. He even occasionally talks about shortening the workweek, as one item on a list (when you and we know it's the ink and paper the list's written on) - but the others never ever mention it. He's been far and away the highest-quality candidate in every race he's ever entered. And a propos of the FEC, there's a NY Times editorial today against the FEC, "Cleaning up a rigged game," p.A18, which begins, "Across too many years of campaign abuse, the FEC has evolved into one of Washington's sicker political jokes: a watchdog agency snoozing protectively at the feet of well-financed incumbents, rarely roused except to fetch a new loophole in the law at the bidding of party masters." Yeah!]
  He also said Mr. Bush was not only "beatable but impeachable," for "deceptions and prevarications" on national security matters, like insisting that Saddam Hussein had ties with Al Qaeda.
  [No Democratic candidate has come out and talked IMPEACHMENT - unless Kucinich has but the prostrate media haven't reported it. The passivity is so widespread, it's like America has suddenly developed a death wish.]
  He chided the Democrats for their unwillingness to stop treating Mr. Bush as "a wartime president," and implored them to attack him on his positions on the environment [Halliburton's to rape!], corporate malfeasance [can't attack his own buds!], and "the growing quagmire in Iraq."
  [Even the "Heil Busch!" Wall Street Journal has finally come out and used the Q-word about Bush/Cheney's war in Iraq - see 7/05-07/2003 #3.]

1. Using eugenics wisely, letter to editor by Daniel Burfoot of New London CT, NYT, A22.
   Re "The new eugenics," by Nicholas Kristof (column, July 4): The word "eugenics" has been tarnished by its long association with racism and the abrogation of civil liberties. These connections are reprehensible, but not essential.
   The motivating concept of eugenics is that certain traits, particularly intelligence, are hereditary and of tremendous importance to the well-being of both the individual and the community. There is abundant evidence to support this premise.
   In a country with a grievously ignorant citizenry and a host of deep problems, it is not unthinkable to imagine that we could do better with a little more intelligence. If genetic engineering holds the key to this goal, we should consider using it. The new eugenics need not be racist or state-mandated and, if used wisely, could work wonders.
   [Well said, and then all we'd need to do would be to solve the problem that you can be very intelligent and still be ignorant or even suicidal. In other words, nurture is still more important than nature, and if we have bio-engineered super-brains growing up in homes where there's no reading or conversation or beautiful music, we're still in deep kimchee (= smelly Korean coleslaw).]

2. Canada set to dispense marijuana as medicine, by Colin Nickerson, Boston Globe, front page.
   ...becoming the first country in the world to supply so-called "medical marijuana" directly to patients. ...Health Canada - the federal ministry of health - said 1,650 baggies of marijuana are already packed and ready for sale to patients suffering from pain or nausea as the result of
   • disease,
   • chemotherapy used to treat cancer,
   • AIDS,
   • and other serious sickknesses.
   • ...Also...people not expected to live more than a year.
   The price is..\..cheap...and the marijuana grown under government contract will be more reliably potent than anything peddled on the street, officials said....
   [Canada forges forward while the once-great USA, fragged by a club of fanatics in the White House, blunders backward. Check lead headline above this article, "Bush unbowed on Iraq - Queries follow admission of false evidence," by John Donnelly, Boston Globe, front page. Now stay tuned while this gutless moron blames the CIA. No Trumanesque "the buck stops here" for him!]

3. [but, a glimmer of hope from the US, albeit repressing a negative rather than supporting a positive -]
   F.D.A. announces label requirement for artery clogger, by Marian Burros, NYT, front page.
   After more than a decade of debate, the FDA announced yesterday that it would require food processors to include the amount of artery-clogging trans fatty acids on nutrition labels. The new requirement does not go into effect until 2006. But it is expected to push manufacturers into reducing the levels of trans fats, which they began using in the 1980s to avoid another health risk, saturated fats....
   [As Grannie would say, "Out of the frying pan, into the fire."]

1. [UPsizing 1]
   Korean firm sees strong sales from Slovakia monitor plant, Dow Jones via WSJ, B4.
   Samsung Electronics Co. expects sales of about $1.36B by 2005 from its recently completed computer&TVmonitor production plant...in Galanta City....
   [Ah, shouldn't that be Galanta Gorod or Galatograd or something, or are the Slovakians really sucking up?]
   Samsung expects the plant to create about 3,000 jobs.

2. [UPsizing 2]
   U.S. pact lifts South Africa car exports - Multinationals benefited the most..., by Nicole Itano, NYT, W1, W7.
   ...The expansion has led [BMW] to add a second shift at its [Rosslyn] factory and hire 900 new employees....
   [Somebody tell Bush South Africa isn't the part of Africa that needs help (at Detroit's expense).]

3. [Federal appeals] court blocks effort to protect secret Cheney files, by Neil Lewis, NYT, A9.

4. Oracle and other database firms, pointer blurb (to B1), WSJ, front page.
   ...face a growing threat from "open source" databases, which offer free or low-cost alternatives.

5. NASA launched, news blurb, WSJ, front page.
   ...a second Mars rover late Monday following a series of delays that almost cost it the advantage of rare planetary proximity.
   [Compare -]
   Search for life out there [ie: SETI project] gains respect, bit by bit, by Dennis Overbye, NYT, D1.

1. Redistributing income via taxes, letter to editor by Janet Watson of Norwell MA, Boston Globe, A18.
   Richard Freedman's letter (July 3) objected to the concept of taxes to redistribute income. Like many others, he believes that everyone's money is his to do with as he pleases, as though the social, educational, and legal institutions, the infrastructure paid for by everyone's taxes, and the labor of others had nothing to do with the ability to obtain the money he now holds sacred.
   If everyone truly earned his money without any support from the government or others, I might agree that [Freedman's] idea was fair.
   • But should the people who accumulated great wealth speculating in the stock market or cashing in on the dot-com boom get to keep everything they "earned" even though the economy is still suffering from the aftereffects?
     
   • Should the businessmen who will make a fortune rebuilding Iraq after the expenditure of billions of American dollars in the war get to keep all the profits?
   • Should CEOs whose salaries are so disproportionate to the employees who actually create the wealth of the companies get to decide where all their money should go - perhaps contributing all of it to the opera rather than supporting their local schools?
   [An appeal to the violation of a basic essential of human society - continuity.]

2. What troops want and what they need, letter to editor by Charles Lawrence of Johnston RI, Boston Globe, A18.
   I was a member of the US Air Force for four years during the Vietnam era and think I can speak for others when I say that
   • what military people want is respect and gratitude for the sacrifices they have made. They appreciate the letters, speeches, flags, and expressions of support when they are far from home in a strange and hostile land. What they want, however, is not what they really need.
   • ..\..What they really need...would be a public that openly and thoroughly debates the decision to send them into harm's way with all the facts on the table and without the use of the words "traitor," "communist," "coward," or "liberal" to stifle that discussion. What they need is a public that demands total accountability on the part of our leaders from the top down should the decision to send them into battle prove faulty.
   Sadly, that was [the case] in Vietnam and it's [the case] today that the American public, particularly 'conservatives' [our quotes], are perfectly willing to give the troops what they want but are unwilling to give them what they need.

3. A new choice for birth control, by Robert Davis with John Gunn, WSJ, D3.
   Until recently, women who wanted permanent birth control had one choice: getting their "tubes tied"...through...tubal litigation....the most common form of birth control, according to the Centers for Disease Prevention. Every year, about 650,000 procedures are performed in the U.S..\..
   Now, a growing number of doctors are offering a...much easier alternative. Known as Essure, it involves no cutting and virtually no recovery time.... The physician inserts a tiny metal implant into the fallopian tube using a catheter that passes through the vagina. Once the catheter is removed, the implant expands [but how can a metal implant expand?], and scar tissue grows around it, completely blocking the tube.... The cost for Essure runs from $1500-2500, a bit less than the $2500-4000 for tubal litigation....
   E-mail questions to aches@wsj.com .

1. [1 UPsizing]
   7/05 Boston Scientific Corp., Dow Jones via WSJ, C11.
   ...facing stiff competition in the artery-widening stent business...plans to increase spending to launch a new product aimed at that market.... The Natick MA medical device maker said...it is hiring 1,200 new employees in anticipation of the introduction of its new Taxus drug-coated stent in the U.S....

2. 7/06 A convincing case for keeping 'death tax' alive, by Rich Barlow, Boston Globe, D2.
   For sheer [gall], Lynn Cornwell is hard to beat. The Montana cattle rancher once delivered to Pres. Clinton, by tractor, a bill to repeal the federal estate tax. Cornwell brayed that the tax "takes away all incentive of growing your business." Yet according to "Wealth and our Commonwealth," [(Beacon Press: 2003) by Bill Gates Sr., & Chuck Collins of *United for a Fair Economy, nee Share the Wealth], Cornwell grew his own business in recent years with lots of tax dollars - more than $400,000 in public subsidies, while grazing his herd on federal land at below-market rates....
   Supply-siders who argue that repealing the [estate] tax will spur job creation ignore research (and common sense) suggesting that rich people tend to save windfalls, not spend them.
   [How can they possibly spend them? They already have more than they could spend in a hundred lifetimes.]
   "The purchasing power of the super wealthy alone is not enough to propel our economy," say the authors.
   [Sure it is. But not their purchasing activity. The purchasing power is no good to the economy if it's not exercised.]
   Given their tax bracket, they should know.
   [Both Bill Gates' dad and Chuck Collins are wealthy.]
   ...What would the Founders have said to such a 'socialist' [our quotes] grab for private wealth?... Ben Franklin argued 'that no man ought to own more property than needed for his livelihood; the rest, by right, belonged to the state'.... John Adams wrote that 'equal liberty and public virtue' demanded that society 'make a division of land into small quantities, so that the multitude may be possessed of landed estates.'
   Gates and Collins call for...the most blessed [huh?] among us to make a small contribution to the common good.
   [Now that they've suctioned-in so much, it's going to take more than a small contribution, and it's going to take more than capricious voluntary contributions. It's going to take a systemic centrifugation of income on the scale of World War II, or better, and more gradual and market-oriented, on the scale of the national timesizing between 1938 and 1940 when we established for the first time a national workweek cap at the 44-hour level, then lowered it two hours each of the next two years, and achieved a 1% drop in the unemployment rate for each hour we cut the workweek (see our Great Fork in the Road page), thus reducing the wage-depressing labor surplus and gently overcoming the Black-Hole-scale money-absorption of the super-rich.]

3. 7/06 Focus on immigration issues, letter to editor by Mark Gerard Mantho of Winthrop MA, Boston Globe, H10.
   I wish to echo the sentiments of...Roger Hale, who condemned the issuance of matricular consular cards [huh?] by the government of Mexico to facilitate the influx of illegal aliens into the United States ("Strengthen immigration US laws" [sic, original], letter to editor by Roger J. Hale of Topsfield MA, 6/29/2003 BG, D10.)
   [Roger Hale explains, "Matricular consular cards are documents issued by Mexico, not the U.S., to make it easier for these illegal aliens to stay in America," and refers back to a June 22 BG article "States take lead in illegal immigration debate - Access to college, licensing at issue," by Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar, 6/22/2003 BG, A6.]
   According to the US Census Bureau, as of 2000 there were 8,700 illegal aliens residing in Massachusetts. The acceptance of such cards undermines an immigration policy sorely lacking in common sense and in desperate need of reform [and enforcement!].
   Attempts by lawmakers to water down and render toothless the 2002 English Immersion law (a ballot initiative that passed by an emphatic 68% of the vote), efforts by diversity advocates in Massachusetts to provide in-state tuition to illegal aliens, and consideration of granting driver's licenses to illegals in this state are but three recent illustrations of a situation that grows ever more untenable.
   Sooner or later, these issues must be dealt with in a sane, thoughtful fashion.
   [Hear hear, and it's a legal immigrant speaking (Phil Hyde).]

• Similar solar system found only 90 light years away, by Dennis Overbye, NYT, A15.
  [Grrrreat! we can get there in only three generations if we figger out how to go as phast as fotons.]
  A team of British, Australian and American astronomers announced yesterday that they had found a hint of home 90 light years away in the constellation Puppis. There, in what they say is the closest resemblance to Earth's solar system yet found in outer space, a Jupiterlike planet circles a sunlike star known as HD70642 in an orbit that corresponds to one halfway between Mars and Jupiter in our own system [i.e., to the orbit of Ceres and the other asteroidal parts of a fragmented planet - or, the waiting components of a still-uncoalesced planet]. The discovery raises the hopes of planet hunters that if they keep working they will find more and more potentially habitable systems like our own....
  [For the near-term, when 'ijits' like Dubya bring the whole Earth to Easter-Island-like ecological collapse, or for the loooong-term (10B AD) when our Sun supernovas? If HD70642 is like our Sun, it'll go nova at the same time and won't do us any good loooong-term.]
  The new planet has about twice the mass of Jupiter, and is in a circular six-year orbit. ...There is no evidence of any giant planets orbiting inward of the new planet, leaving a swath of space where smaller terrestrial planets could happily and stably exist....
  [Gee, we dunno, guys. Twice the mass of Jupiter in what corresponds to the most fragmented/unstable orbit in our solar system? That's a mighty big, mighty close "vacuum cleaner." How similar is HD70642 to our Sun to balance it?]
  The star HD70642 has the same mass as the Sun, within a few percent, and nearly the same age, 4.8B years..\..
  [Hmm, not bad. Who knows, this could be the most significant happening of this Fourth. HD70642's double-size Jupiter is better than the other candidates -]
  More than 100 planets have been detected orbiting other stars in the nearby reaches of our galaxy in the last few years. Most have been brutes the size of Jupiter, but in elongated orbits that whiz them around uncomfortably close to their stars, often inside the distance of Earth to the Sun. Such planets would be too hot and dense to support life, and their gravitational effects would chase smaller potentially habitable planets out of the system....

1. Europe acts to require labeling of genetically altered food - A move called consumer-friendly is criticized by the [big-biz stifled] United States, by Lizette Alvarez, NYT, A3.

2. [Howard] Dean's surge in fund-raising forces rivals to reassess him, by Nagourney & Janofsky, NYT, front page.
   [He and Dennis Kucinic are the only Dem candidates with any principles.]

3. Goldman [Sach]'s bears were the best at seeing [the] worst - [Wm.] Dudley's team stands atop forecasting survey; Looking to past for insights, by Jon Hilsenrath, WSJ, A2.
   ...The other [top bear]s included Ethan Harris of Lehman Bros.., Ram Bhagavatula [any relation to Dracavatula?] of Royal Bank of Scotland, and Mike Cosgrove of...Econoclast as the best forecasters for [last 6 months]....
   [And let's not forget Steve Roach of Morgan Stanley - 'speaking truth to,' well, money if not 'power' or intelligence.]

1. [1 UPsizing - 1000 new jobs]
   A U.S. chip plant [near Richardson TX] to be built for about $3B, WSJ, B5.
   Texas Instruments Inc...will need as many as 1,000 workers....

2. Europe turns tougher on U.S. crops - New rules would require more red tape, warnings in genetically altered food, by Scott Miller & Scott Kilman, WSJ, A2.
   [What a coincidence! Exactly what millions of Americans want!]