Hampton Roads Publishing Company Blog

We Are All Potentially Enemy Combatants
June 20, 2007
By John W. Whitehead

“There ought to be limits to freedom.”—George W. Bush

The fabric of our nation is unraveling, and our freedoms are hanging by a thread.

In a world where the president has the power to label anyone, whether a citizen or permanent resident, an enemy combatant and detain that person indefinitely without trial, no liberty exists and everyone is potentially an “enemy combatant.”

According to the Bush Administration, Ali Saleh Kahlah Al-Marri is such a person.

This legal alien, residing in Peoria, Ill., with his wife and children, was attending college when he was swept up by government agents. He was held in a military prison for four years without ever being charged with a crime. And for the first 16 months of his imprisonment, this man’s family was not even allowed to see him, speak to him or reassure themselves that he was alive and well.

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Do you know about Paul Potts?

English television has a show called “Britain’s Got Talent” that, I gather, is produced once a year. Something like the old Ted Mack’s Amateur Hour, it offers people a chance at national recognition. Various acts audition, compete in semi-finals, are voted into the finals, and then are chosen on the basis of call-ins from the audience. The producers of the show claimed to have received more than 2 million votes.

Unlike the days of Ted Mack, when a show missed was missed forever, this is the Internet age (or the beginnings of it, anyway) and millions of people who don’t watch British television — or, in my case, any television — got to see the performance of Paul Potts because people taped it and put it on to YouTube, and then uncounted others passed the link on to their friends and said, “you really should hear this.”

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This little report from Live Science — http://www.livescience.com/health/070617_touching_faces.html — was included in the ever-useful daily Schwartzreport. It interested me chiefly because it was an indication that science is slowly catching up to interconnections between people that it has long assumed impossible.

Last year I was writing a little book on health and healing — written not from research but from my own experience — and I gave some thought to the fact that some prospective fathers feel the pains of the prospective mother. “Myth!” says science of the phenomenon called “sympathy pains.” But I know otherwise, because when I am engaged in healing work, I often feel where the person’s problem is, a phantom pain or ache that then goes away when it has finished serving as beacon. I know that lots of healers experience this, though some of them discourage it lest they be tempted to take on another’s health problem.

Anyway, as i say, science is gradually beginning to catch up, and will do so quicker if it can just discard its materialist superstition.

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Here is an irritating piece — and by a minister! — that demonstrates the shallow rationalism that is one of the curses of our time. He thinks he is demolishing fundamentalism here, but to my mind what he is actually doing is showing fundamentalism’s mirror image. Shall we call it liberal fundamentalism? He clearly has no clue that in fact weather is tied to things besides physical causes. What kind of minister doesn’t realize that spirit is real, and has real consequences? But that’s liberal fundamentalism for you. Note, too, the patronizing tone here, the voice of pure reason, reaching to the unenlightened.

This from an unrelentingly liberal source of various news items, http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_dennis_d_070616_weather_is_not_god_s.htm

June 17, 2007 at 08:32:05
Weather is Not God’s Judgement… It’s Weather
by Dennis Diehl

http://www.opednews.com

Christian Fundamentalists just know whenever there are major hurricanes, volcanoes, a day of tornadoes, earthquakes, storms, hail, drought, fire and frogs upon the land….it is God trying (does God have to try?) to tell us all something. We don’t think that the God that can verbalize….

“I blasted you with blight and mildew [from too much rain]. When your gardens increased, your vineyards, your fig trees, and your olive trees, the locust devoured them; yet you have not returned to Me,’ says the Lord” (Amos 4:9)
could also say:

“Hi…God here. I’m here in person because it’s really important we have a talk. I want you to be happier than this so let’s have a chat. I have no need to smite you with bad weather because I’m here in person so you don’t have to guess if I am using weather to get your attention, or if it’s just weather.

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An unusual Michael Ventura column.

FOR CASSAVETES: A PROMISE KEPT LATE

March 17, 1983. It’s after 10 at night, the phone rings, I pick up, and the caller announces, “Michael! This is John!” Then he launches into a monologue I can barely follow, while I’m trying to figure who “John” might be. I don’t know any Johns very well. It takes a few moments to realize that this is Cassavetes speaking. Surprised — no, stunned — I wish I’d listened harder to his initial barrage of sentences. The man is very enthusiastic about something. I’m trying to get my bearings while he’s praising me for an interview we’d done six months before, the last time we’d spoken. During the interview he’d stopped suddenly and said, “This isn’t going well,” and I said, “Trust me, I see your words as printed sentences as you’re saying them, and this is going very well.” Now it seems he agrees, and that I know my business is something he respects. Of course this pleases me very much, but still his rap tonight doesn’t compute — my impression of the man is that it’s not like him to make conversation, and, at the moment, that’s what he’s doing. The thought occurs: maybe he’s drunk. In his circles, as in mine, people often are. Now he’s saying that he’s gotten a deal to direct Love Streams. Do I remember the play?

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EDWARD OEHLER

A 1912 photograph shows the extent of the ice cap atop Mount Kilimanjaro.

GEORG KASER

A similar photo taken in 2006 illustrates the cap’s decline.

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You may have suspected as much from personal or second-hand experience, but a new study puts it into black and white….

But then, I would argue that much of conventional medicine is driven less by good doctoring than my insurance regulations, fear of lawsuits, reimbursement prodecures, etc.

From the New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/14/health/14insure.html?ei=5070&en=ad6641d0ca50e281&ex=1182484800&adxnnl=1&emc=eta1&adxnnlx=1181826912-sIGTDNVIleruBmS+L0tuAQ

In Health Care, Cost Isn’t Proof of High Quality
By REED ABELSON
Published: June 14, 2007

Stark evidence that high medical payments do not necessarily buy high-quality patient care is presented in a hospital study set for release today.

In a Pennsylvania government survey of the state’s 60 hospitals that perform heart bypass surgery, the best-paid hospital received nearly $100,000, on average, for the operation while the least-paid got less than $20,000. At both, patients had comparable lengths of stay and death rates.

And among the 20 hospitals serving metropolitan Philadelphia, two of the highest paid actually had higher-than-expected death rates, the survey found.

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I assume that this article, from The Scotsman, is not a hoax. It doesn’t seem at all impossible to me. http://news.scotsman.com/scitech.cfm?id=952732006

New device helps patients to grow back own teeth

RACHEL WILLIAMS

SCIENTISTS have created a device that can make human teeth grow back.

The tiny ultrasound machine fits into a patient’s mouth on a braces bracket or a removable plastic crown, where it gently massages gums and stimulates dental growth from the root.

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Big surprise. But although scientists may take a long time, they’re gradually getting there. Via a friend, from http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/news/article-23395112-details/Is%20this%20REALLY%20proof%20that%20man%20can%20see%20into%20the%0future/article.do

Is this REALLY proof that man can see into the future?

Do some of us avoid tragedy by foreseeing it? Some scientists nowbelieve that the brain really CAN predict events before they happen

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A friend sent me this poem, which seems appropriate to the website of a book publisher.

The Haunted Bookshop
for Howard Gerwing

Isn’t haunted.

Not by definition at any rate.

However, if Ciardi is to be believed,
every word contains a ghost,
is a root into the past, and writing
is an act of raising the dead, a way
of communicating, and all our bodies
are like graves perhaps, resting
places haunted by life, and these ghosts
are merely movements of language
we feel on the backs of our necks,
and the shop a place of origins,
a graveyard where flesh melts
and leaves the inside of a book.

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