The shining city

turns out to be a prison: "Since 1971, U.S. prisons and jails have grown ten-fold -- from less then 200,000 inmates to 2.1 million -- while whites have dwindled to only 30 percent of the prison population. With only five percent of the world’s people, the U.S. accounts for 25 percent of the planet’s prisoners -- fully half of them Black. One out of eight prisoners on Earth is African American."

South African town suffers as living metaphor of Dubya's coup

'REUTERS -- Residents of a small South African coastal town are threatening to declare all-out war on baboons who have terrorized pre-schoolers, raided homes for food and urinated on clothes after pulling them out of closets.

'Diana Head, the chairwoman of the local taxpayers' association in Pringle Bay, an hour's drive east of Cape Town, told AFP that baboons broke into the local nursery school -- located in a church -- three times, using the same method. "The baboons lifted a window latch and stormed a church hall where the children were," she said. "They grabbed sandwiches and cold drinks out of the children’s hands. "The kids were traumatised afterwards. One teacher was so upset that she resigned." Head said baboons were breaking into houses about 15 times a month on average.

'"They have strong nails which they use to pull sliding doors off the hinges. When they get inside the houses they ransack the cupboard for food and have parties on the beds. "On a few occasions they have pulled clothes out of the cupboards and urinated on them."

'... Head said the problem escalated late last year when the head male in the baboon troop changed. "An alpha male who we named Charlie kept the troop under control but then he was replaced by a newcomer ..."'

Dreaming v Wind Farm... Which to lose?

Just as self-styled environmentalists have gone mad from being invited into the boardrooms of the powerful and managed to convince themselves that protection of mountain wilderness doesn't apply to wind facilities, so in Australia the protection of aboriginal songlines and sacred sites is to be thrown out the window for the dubious utility of wind plants.

The industrialists have successfully bought off their usual opponents, even placing themselves on the boards of environmental groups to show how much they care (not to steer decisions in their favor -- perish the thought!). In Australia, their response to the threat to the aboriginal "dreaming" is to -- hold hard, now! -- buy them off.

Nothing more than vandalism with a "green" label.

Click here for links about Australia's sacred sites.

The end justifies the means

The "Mayberry Machiavellis" still hard at it. Nazi Germany was a nation of laws, too.

Public health

A medical article I was editing contains this casually stated bit of
information: "A special program in the federal government of Brazil allows
for free distribution of antiretrovirals to all HIV-infected patients."

Bush asks Vatican to join campaign

The June 11 National Catholic Reporter's web-only "Report from Rome" reports that on his recent trip to Rome Bush asked the Vatican to get the U.S. bishops to speak out more against gay marriage to help his campaign for re-election. There was no response.

It might have helped Bush to remember that John Kerry is against gay marriage, too. And both candidates go against the church on almost every other issue: judicial murder, shafting the poor to further enrich the robber barons, invasion of Iraq, Israel's intransigence against the Palestinians, justice around the world, and so on.

"And, Yes, He Was a Great Communicator"

To the Editor, New York Times:

Reagan a great communicator? Geoffrey Nunberg's essay (Week in Review, June 13) compares him to several fictional characters, and indeed Reagan's rhetoric conveyed little more than his self-absorbed Hollywood version of the world. By this standard, Hitler and Mussolini were great communicators. Reagan may have been a good storyteller. Reality, however, was flagrantly missing from his speeches, and the U.S. with the rest of the world is suffering the consequences still.