THERE IS A BIT OF THE PERSONALLY EMOTIONAL IN WHAT I AM ABOUT TO DISCUSS: I have an older brother, by name of Doug, who resides outside Mobile, Alabama and has been retired from the Navy for almost 30 years now.

Who, in the last couple of years, came down with a form of cancer associated with exposure to asbestos or related products (e.g., asbestos insulation in water pipes aboard ship)--in medical terms, mesothelioma.

Which Doug thinks he picked up by way of his Naval service aboard the battleship USS Oklahoma during the Vietnam War period, what with the insulating pipes below decks especially having asbestos ... and for which he's receiving treatment @ the VA Medical Centre in Mobile.

The which was brought up recently in conversation with some close friends of mine discussing family developments ... in turn shifting to a broader likelihood of whether an entire generation or two of Navy veterans as served aboard ship (in particular below decks) may have unwittingly developed mesothelioma as a byproduct of Naval service thanks to exposure to asbestos-based insulating material dating to less politically- and medically-sensitive times.

Not to mention the possibility that Navy veterans with service @ sea for the most part may have higher-than-average rates of risk for developing mesothelioma cf. the general populace--or, for that matter, other occupations where risk of exposure to asbestos or asbestos-containing components was considered "part of the job" (among them plumbers, steamfitters, insulation contractors and heating/cooling-system contractors) and among the hazards of the game.

And whether Navy and Marine Corps veterans can apply for, let alone obtain, compensation for service-connected illnesses, injuries or disabilities thanks to asbestos exposure and ensuing mesothelioma.

Making you wonder if mesothelioma may rival veneral diseases as among the more common maladies of those serving @ sea, never mind the latter likely being contracted during shore leave liasons with Mrs. Warren's Profession and its practicioners.

IN SPITE OF THE PROBLEMS AS PREVENTED MANY OF YOU ACCESSING THIS WEBLOG MUCH OF YESTERDAY, I hope this finds you fine and well, readers.

Even if Your Correspondent did quite a bit of sweeping up grit from the low spots of the motel's car park and driveway--grit which accumulates following rainwater drying off, and then some. Not a very pleasant sight to look @ in all honesty.

Otherwise, somewhat mild and a tad breezy as I produce this item, with the likelihood for some thunderstorms later this afterlunch into evening and tomorrow morning.

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JUST SO YOU DIDN'T FORGET, letterpost rates in the United States will be going up from Monday, as follows:

• Domestic letters: 42˘ for the first ounce, 17˘ each additional ounce or fraction thereof.
• Domestic postcards: 27˘
• International letters and postcards (airmail to all destinations): 72˘ per half-ounce to Canada or Mexico; 94˘ per half-ounce to all other countries. (Mail addressed to American Samoa, Guam, Puerto Rico, the United States Virgin Islands, the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, the Republic of the Marshall Islands, the Republic of Palau or the Federated States of Micronesia goes @ domestic letter rate. Likewise with APO/FPO addresses for United States military and some diplomatic personnel overseas.)
• Priority Mail: $4.80 for up to 2 pounds.
• Express Mail: $16.50 for up to 8 ounces.

(Those with more questions may want to visit the United States Postal Service website, or freecall 1-800-ASK-USPS.)

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IS THERE AN ECHO IN HERE? (PART I): Brave New Films and MoveOn.org would like to call your attention to the following video, as reveals what amounts to an "echo chamber" with dog-whistle overtones on Fox Prolefeed vis-a-vis whipping up war hysteria against Iran, using the same lame bromides and platitudes to justify the original ur-RAHOWA against Iran:

Having seen it, ask yourself if we, as a supposedly "morally superior" nation and society, can afford further war fanaticism of the crudest and most pathetic sort (considering The Terrible-Tempered Mr. Bang's late admission that the "real" reason for said ur-RAHOWA is to maintain dependency on oil imports as one with soverign identity).

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IS THERE AN ECHO IN HERE? (PART II): Further from MoveOn.org is this rather interesting challenge for you, dear reader, to spot discernible differences, ideological and otherwise, between His Fraudulency and The Terrible-Tempered Mr. Bang.

(Good luck finding any as would make the difference come Indecision 2008's climax in November.)

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PUTINIST RUSSIA, DOMINATED AS IT IS BY WEIRD AND UNWHOLESOME ELEMENTS AND SYNDICATES AS IT IS, can't help but find new and innovative places by which to conceal their ill-gained wealth @ the expense of a post-Soviet people and society risking the likelihood of living under a new brand of xenophobic fanaticism as would make the Soviet era look like Disneyland by comparison.

One rather unlikely venue is in real estate along the Gold Coast of southeastern Queensland, Australia, some 30 mile south of Brisbane, the state capital, as the crow flieth. Especially so beachfront or beachview apartment in the likes of such "in" areas as Tweed Heads, Surfer's Paradise and Mermaid Beach.

The prospect of which, according to the BBC World Service, leaves local police agencies rather leery about money laundering (especially where proceeds of crime, corruption or graft are involved) being behind such large-scale Russian investment, not to mention many of the big investors being weird and/or unwholesome elements more than likely.

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IT APPEARS LIKELY THAT THE CYCLONIC DEVASTATION AS AFFLICTED THE SO-CALLED "UNION OF MYANMAR" @ THE WEEKEND may have been more serious than initial estimates first suggested:

New official estimates suggest that the death toll may have exceeded some 15,000, with many thousands more left homeless--and a corrupt and incompetent military regime facing heat diplomatically for understimating the extent of the devastation, let alone developing any semblance of logistics for delivering relief within its official self-reliant ideology.

That, and a national plebiscite called for the weekend to approve or otherwise reject a new and hastily-drafted constitution which, in theory, is expected to establish a timetable for the restoration of democracy.

Could it be that the Myanmari military regime may be about to collapse as a consequence of underestimated cyclonic devastation? Stay tuned.

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REMEMBER THAT APPEARENCE BY FRINGE GOP CONGRESSIONAL CANDIDATE TONY ZIRKLE @ a neo-Nazi gathering in Chicago recently in honour of Adolf Hitler's birthday, making all manner of Julius Streicher-stylee remarks claiming that Jews dominated the pornography business?

As Right Wing Watch notes, it's probably the tip of a more sinister and just as menacing iceberg, so to speak:

Tony Zirkle’s 15 minutes of swastika-draped fame were widely reported last month, when the Indiana congressional candidate spoke at an American Nazi Party celebration of Adolf Hitler’s birthday. Zirkle, whose campaign warns of a link between Jews and pornography, offered the comical explanation that, despite the oversize Hitler portrait and Nazi flags directly behind him, the swastika armbands of the men on either side of him, and the words “Seig Heil” on the cake, “he didn't believe the event he attended included people necessarily of the Nazi mindset, pointing out the name isn't Nazi, but Nationalist Socialist Workers Party.” The candidate was duly reviled by his opponent in the Republican primary race, as well as by everybody else, as an isolated racist crackpot.

However, the report on the matter by the right-wing WorldNetDaily—a product of the anti-Bill Clinton Arkansas Project that now hosts columnists such as Ann Coulter, Pat Buchanan, and Chuck Norris—offered an unusual twist. After reviewing the story and printing a number of random comments from other websites (a common journalistic technique at WND), the article tried to put it in a kind of context: "Other congressional candidates have raised eyebrows with their speeches, too," it stated. But its only example was a quote from Rep. Keith Ellison comparing the time after September 11, 2001, when the Bush Administration asserted new executive privileges, to the time after the burning of the Reichstag, when Hitler consolidated his powers.

While Ellison took heat for using the metaphor, there is, to put it mildly, a pretty obvious distinction between making a rhetorical comparison of your opponents' tactics to historical events in Nazi Germany, and actually forging an alliance with present-day Nazis based on apparently shared values. So why did WND choose this as its only attempt at context?

Ellison, of course, was the first Muslim member of Congress, and after his election in 2006, the Right launched an effort to portray his presence in Washington as a dire threat to the nation. WorldNetDaily offered obsessive coverage through dozens of flimsy, paranoid articles with titles such as “Doubts grow over Muslim lawmaker's loyalty” and “Muslim congressman called 'security' issue.”

Since WND is so desperate for an example of an anti-Semitic political figure, it’s fortunate that Ted Pike provided a timely reminder. Pike, head of the National Prayer Network, has been a frequent source of quotes for WND whenever the site covered proposed federal hate-crimes protections, most recently in December.

Pike is best-known, however, for pushing out anti-Semitic propaganda along with his father, a radio talker in the 1980s. As People For the American Way reported in a press release from 1989, Pike was warning that there was “a tendency toward Jewish domination of society,” that “Jewish international bankers” were behind the Bolshevik Revolution, and that the state of Israel was “the first stage in Satan’s plan to take this world from Christ and give it to the Antichrist.” Twenty years ago, Pike was warning that the Jewish motivation behind hate-crimes legislation was to silence churches; today, he warns of the “homosexual agenda.”

We were reminded of Pike—and his place as a privileged WorldNetDaily commentator—after he sent out an e-mail alert two weeks ago complaining that the Southern Poverty Law Center had cited the National Prayer Network as a hate group:

Jewish activist groups want to increasingly broaden the terms "hate" and "anti-Semitism" to include evangelicals.…

Jewish activists thus display a truly hateful intent—to harm Christians and deprive them of freedom. Such activists work to warp public and government perceptions of Christian conservatives—demonizing us as potential sources of “homophobic,” anti-Semitic bigotry and possible violence. SPLC alleges a 48 percent increase of threat from the "radical right" since 2000. Jewish attack groups such as the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith, American Civil Liberties Union, and People for the American Way, smear “homophobic” evangelicals as being part of this “threat.”

After defaming Christians as "haters," Jewish supremacists want to actually outlaw Christian political activity and evangelism. The ADL created hate crime laws that will particularly outlaw reproof of sodomy and evangelism of non-Christians, especially Jews.

Which begs the question, dear readers, of where it necessarily follows that America's "antient and pecuilar soverignty and soverign identity" is conditioned by an unswerving and fanatically unyielding brand of hate, bigotry, intolerance, xenophobia, homophobia and anti-Semitism--all to be conveniently packaged as "Christian Patriot Love" if and when the need requires.

Especially considering a target audience of the vulnerable and marginalised who, themselves, are easy targets for such fear and hatemongering in the first place.

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(Thanks in the meantime to Pigeond.net's English-to-Engrish Translator for making the preceding possible. I hope you liked this interesting new approach to apologising for what happened to this and other Blogdrive-hosted blogs for a time today.)

(WITH APOLOGIES TO SMUDGE FROM SURF'S UP THERE for the quote in the subject of this posting....)

Shortly after World War II, an ultra-conservative and @ once anti-Communist group published a treatise entitled The Road Ahead, which gained wide circulation thanks to Reader's Digest later reprinting same in condensed form, as no doubt helped shape the likes of the John Birch Society, the unholy terror of anti-Communist excess in the early 1960's especially.

One of its most widely-quoted lines was that which suggested that "a strike should be considered an offence against society," as if suggesting that America's "antient and pecuilar soverignty and soverign identity" was conditioned by the defence of laissez-fare free-market capitalism based on corporatist models (which saw Industry expected to pacify Labour enough to the extent that the latter would not need to join "Communistic" labour unions), only to be ill-sorted thanks to Benito Mussolini's Fascists in Italy, who approriated corporatist thought.

And it seems there are still those who still see strikes--or, for that matter, industrial action of any kind by workers--as Crimes Against Society, as was the case among Communist regimes, with the added evil of such being looked upon as "giving aid and comfort to International Terrorism."

ConWebBlog explains:

Did you know that exercising your constitutional rights to take part in a strike is the same thing as terrorism?

That's what Lowell Ponte thinks. From his May 2 Newsmax column:

On May 1 a little-reported act of domestic terrorism struck the United States.

It cost our economy between $1 and $2 billion, equivalent to the theft of up to $26.66 from every American family of four–money you and your family will be paying in higher prices.

Even more troubling is that those who conspired to assault us have not been arrested, jailed, or even removed from their high-security-risk positions.

[...]

What happened along the West Coast on Thursday was sabotage designed to send an ideological message–and to intimidate both companies and politicians with a display of disruptive union power.

Two years ago Americans were concerned that the Persian Gulf nation Dubai was acquiring facilities in American ports, and that this might somehow open us to an increased risk of Islamist terrorism. These are not the only potential terrorists.

What terrorist event is he frothing over? The one-day May 1 work stoppage by dock workers on West Coast ports in protest of the Iraq war. Ponte offers no evidence to back up his assertion that the strike "cost our economy between $1 and $2 billion." Indeed, a 2002 report on the possible effects of a port strike projected a $4.7 billion impact in lost wages over a four-week strike, going on to note:

[A]ttempts to track down the source of the $1 billion a day and $2 billion a day figures widely quoted, which in each case turned out to be inaccurate reporting. To actually lose a billion dollars a day for two weeks, "we'd have to sink the ships," said [report author Patrick L.] Anderson, "the impact here is large enough to be reported without exaggeration."

Nevertheless, Ponte went on to claim that "In October 2002, the ILWU flexed its muscle through a work slowdown that cost shippers up to a billion dollars a day."

The rest of Ponte's column is largely guilt by association, attacking the alleged "radical leftist ideology" of the founder of the longshoreman's union. Ponte concluded: "We should remove security risks and saboteurs from America's ports, starting with the 6,000 longshoremen who conspired to cause May Day's shutdown."

Ponte isn't the only conservative to have recently expressed unorthodox views about constitutional rights. Last week, the Media Research Center's Brent Baker declared that "the First Amendment doesn't apply in North Carolina" because a couple of TV stations there decided not to air an inflammatory anti-Obama ad.

Come to think of it: Since when did workers participating in industrial action become seen as one with "security risks and saboteurs," let alone "giving aid and comfort to the enemy," which is considered treason?

And besides: Methinks Lowell Ponte must've been drinking the old Kool-Aid (as it were) reading Matt Sevetic's I Was A Communist For The FBI (which would later become a radio drama starring Dana Andrews and a movie starring Frank Lovejoy) and/or Herbert Philbrook's I Led Three Lives, not to mention the aforementioned The Road Ahead and other specimens of enforced McCarthy-era patriotism, for way too long off his Five-Foot Shelf....

Thanks, Smudge, for being spot-on right with the "dirty trash can full of poop" remark.

A COUPLE OF ITEMS IN "ENGRISH," SO TO SPEAK, AS MAY INTEREST SUCH SPECIMENS OF RELIGIOPOLITICAL ZEALOTRY AND TRUE BELIEF whose homophobia serves as cheap and cheerful raison d'etre for their cause of Defending the Sanctity and Purity of Marriage by making same the sole and exclusive monopoly of a heterosexual relationship:

• Sign posted @ a campground in Germany's Black Forest: "It is strictly forbidden on our Black Forest camping site that people of different sex, for instance, men and women, live together in one tent unless they are married with each other for that purpose."
• Sign posted in a Swiss hotel: "Because of the impropriety of entertaining guests of the opposite sex in the bedroom, it is suggested that the lobby be used for this purpose."

As if that weren't enough, considering the Religiopolitical Right's seeing women as nothing less than sex machines subject to the husband's will, some actual signs (again, in "Engrish") appealing(?) to the weaker sex:

• Notice in a Norwegian cocktail lounge: "Ladies are requested not to have children in the bar."
• Sign outside a Hong Kong tailors' shop: "Ladies may have a fit upstairs."
• Sign oustide a Romanian doctors' office: "Specialist in women and other diseases."
• Sign in the window of a Paris department store: "Dresses for streetwalking." (Cf. a German junk-mail flyer for a mail-order house: "Dresses for street walkers.")
• Sign ouside a Rome laundry: "Ladies, leave your clothes here and spend the afternoon having a good time."
• Sign spotted in an Acapulco hotel: "Our nylons cost more than common, but you'll find they are the best in the long run."

And seeing as how the Chris Matthews crowd is forever expecting women to "recognise their place," consider these instructions posted in the laundry room of a Tokyo hotel--in Engrish!

To everyone of the use, Laundromat.

Many people use a Laundromat. Let's comply with the next item to use it for the cleanness safety.

1. Let's read the explanation of the way of using it well, and use the washing machine, the dryness machine properly.

2. Let's wash a hand well before and after a wash.

3. Don't wash the person who get's an epidemic, and clothes which contacted with the person.

4. Don't wash a diaper which urine stuck to, sports shoes, an animal's rug because an unpleasantness is given to the person handled later and it is un-sanitation.

5. Let's bring it back after you spread the wash from the dryness machine and a state is done.

6. Please ask a satellite control person in charge for the inquiry about the establishment, the contact of in case of emergency.

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