PizzaQ: What's Bush made of? /// e-mails about Ron Paul & big Chicago Tribune article

Well sure, click all you want.

I've airbrush-deleted the url of the creator of this image for the Vleeptron PizzaQ Honor System. After somebody wins the Pizza, I'll credit the creator.

This image is a mosaic composed of 1200 small photographic similar elements. What are the elements? 4 Slices with endives, garlic, shallots.

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Okay, back to Agence-Vleeptron Presse's continuing in-depth top-tier journalistic coverage of the interminable and cartoonesque USA Presidential Campaign 2008.

A few posts ago I replied to a mass-spam from a close relative, in which, as an aside, he described Republican candidate US Congressman Ron Paul as a right-wing nutcase. So this thread really began HERE.

Paul, and Democratic Congressman Dennis Kucinich of Ohio (who just introduced a bill in the House of Representatives to impeach Vice-President Cheney), are the two most marginalized, asterisked, dismissed and written-off of the numerous candidates. Both major parties and their leading candidates wish Paul and Kucinich would just drop out and vanish already. But Kucinich and Paul are surprisingly tough-skinned and stubborn, and refuse to vanish at the convenience of conventional politicians. They have messages they wish to send to American voters, and as long as they can find a microphone and an audience and just enough money to get there, they're going to keep sending their messages.

I admire both of them for that. They're shaping the campaign, or their part in it, far more than the campaign is shaping them. The major candidates are wetting their fingers to gauge the wind, and consulting polls and focus groups hourly, and daily change their stands on various issues as a function of the volatile political weather.

Paul and Kucinich, on the other hand, have consistent, well-defined positions on the issues they consider critically important, and seem oblivious to the changing political weather, or to polls or focus groups.

Some back-and-forth e-mails, after which a most interesting Chicago Tribune article about Ron Paul and his surprising campaign.

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to nephew:
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Hmmmm well, you pulled my lawnmower cord with your mass spam e-mail, so this is all your fault.

Ron Paul really had been just the tiniest, most ill-defined blip on my radar screen when this business came up. What little I'd known of him either I liked, or else wildly amused me in a positive sort of way. But I'd written him off as a highly localized phenomenon, an obstetrician who rang doorbells so well among his neighbors in some obscure Texas district that they'd learned to love him and vote for him over and over again whether he ran as a Libertarian or a Republican. (Bernie [Sanders, US Senator from Vermont] hasn't always stayed True to his original SOCIALIST badge either; as time goes by and his ambitions rise, INDEPENDENT seems to be the more comfy term on his lapel.)

Anyway, my thoughts about your spam focused and ratcheted up the attention I pay to Ron Paul. I look particularly through his record and words for Red Flags, like Kill The Jews or an old KKK membership -- early in his Congressional career, John Anderson had incautiously signed on to a Christian Nation thing, and it dogged and soured his otherwise very positive and appealing third-party candidacy.

I still haven't found any smoking gun in Ron Paul's hand or mouth. Most of what could be portrayed (by a worried political adversary) as objectionable in his legislative record is a consistent and direct consequence of his disgust of and opposition to the cancerous growth of federal power and spending.

We've had several generations of being inculcated to ask: "Who wouldn't vote for subsidized milk for schoolkids?" But Ron Paul seems strange and bizarre because he considers the cumulative effect on America of fifty years and 50,000 "good" federal-centric programs which Congress renews and expands every year.

So the most objectionable aspects of Paul, I suspect, are a matter of focus/depth of field. We've become accustomed to seeing the free milk in the kindergarten, judging it Good, and not thinking beyond that.

Which is exactly how the American Dairy Association and 10,000 other industrial lobbyists want the American voter to think. The way things have been working for the past half-century,

* the kiddies get their milk (Hooray!)

and

* a lobbyist gets to buy a new luxury oceanfront summer home in Maine (insert the interjection you feel is appropriate here)

There's a good recent example. I don't like legalized gambling very much, and for various reasons that's a sentiment a lot of Americans share. A couple of years ago, Ralph Reed [former head of the Christian Coalition] marshalled thousands of God-fearing Christians to successfully oppose an Indian tribe's application for a new casino in Texas. (Hooray!)

It took a while to uncover it, but it turned out Reed wasn't strictly doing Jesus' work in this anti-gambling mission. He was secretly in partnership with Jack Abramoff, who wanted the casino blocked because he was the lobbyist for the Indian tribe in Louisiana with the nearest competing casino. Reed and Abramoff were getting secretly rich by seemingly pushing a fine, noble and even holy agenda. (Insert appropriate injerjection here.)

Paul the obstetrician probably loves milk for kiddies, and Paul probably isn't personally wild about legalized gambling, but Paul the Libertarian is looking at a bigger picture, and asking: What's REALLY going on here? Who's being hustled and bamboozled? Who's getting richer and richer? This is an entire way of looking at government which you're just never going to hear a single word about from the campaigns of The Serious Candidates. (Fred Thompson, in fact, when not a TV actor, is a millionaire K-Street lobbyist, and one of his clients was Haiti's Aristide.)

I think we should be careful about dismissing Paul's radically different focus too hastily. If there are very bad consequences if Paulism were ever to infect the White House, I would much rather the American electorate spend a lot of time actively and publicly discussing and debating them. Right now Paul's odd ideas never even get discussed or heard; they tend to be pre-dismissed and pre-rejected, certainly by the campaigns of the "serious" candidates (which are hostile to any and all ideas and issues to begin with).

Anyway I bother you today with

http://www.chicagotribune.com/features/lifestyle/chi-1113ronpaulnov13,0,5136273.story?coll=chi-newsbreaking-hed

The significance isn't that it's about Paul. I think the great significance is that an ancient pillar of The Mainstream Commercial Media has had its robotic attention momentarily jarred from The Serious Presidential Candidates to devote a huge amount of front-page space to a whacko who, by all conventional media wisdom, should barely be noticed, should at the very best be a tiny asterisk on The Tribune's page 6. Anybody can find reams of stuff about Paul on The Libertarian Review -- but huge attention in The Chicago Tribune???

It is very possible something Very Large is happening. And the article discusses the rather startling strength of Paul's grassroots small-donor fundraising -- which is simply NOT how The Serious Candidates raise their massive campaign funds. (Good buzzword this year: bundling. Ron Paul doesn't bundle.)

As for me, I don't know whom I'd vote for if it was tomorrow. Because I'm a lifelong lefty, I'd probably check Kucinich. But maybe not.

Though it shocked and distressed me at first, I had great experiences voting for one Republican -- our late congressman Silvio Conte -- because he spoke far better to [notoriously ultra-liberal and progressive] Northampton and Amherst [Massachusetts] and served us far better than any of the loop vanity Dem schmucks and schmuckeusses who tried to unseat him. In his last term, Conte (a WWII [Navy] vet) voted NO to Bush I's Gulf War. So even the odd Republican has the capacity to woo me and sing songs I love to hear.

But if it was tomorrow, this ghastly war has rendered me a thoroughly single-issue voter. Stop The Fucking War Now.

Please continue to keep me apprised of any Serious Candidates who claim as bluntly and clearly as Paul and Kucinich that they'll also stop this war immediately. I'm not nearly as well-informed as I like to pretend I am; for the sake of my health and blood pressure, I tend to tune out an enormous amount of Campaign 2008.

Maybe Hillary is my savior, maybe Edwards, maybe Obama. If you know stuff, make me wise, I will be sincerely grateful.

B

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Nephew replies:
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I don't know about the Holy Trinity, but rumor has it that additional un-real Dems say they'd be serious about ending the war fast: Richardson is the most real of them, but also media-abused Gravel. I liked the write-up on Gravel in the recent Nation:

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20071126/kim.

Here's their thing on Richardson:

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20071126/anderson .

Richardson's website says he promises to have all troops home by 2009. For a little while I thought I would really like Richardson, but then I saw a YouTube video of him giving a speech on health care and 1) he sucked at explaining what his plan actually was, and 2) his plan was lame.

I'm stuck being a 4-issue voter: end the war, deal seriously with global warming, universal healthcare--anything claiming to be that that's other than single-payer will be hard for me to swallow, and reversing the legalization of torture and all this war on terror crap. I'm not sure that any candidate, Paul included, can clean sweep my issues.

I say all this cuz I'd like to keep you in the lefty fold, but I hear everything you say about Paul and it sounds right good to me. I took an online survey that tells you which candidates are supposedly closest to you in your issue orientation, and Paul was ranked way, way higher than all the other Republicans on my response list.

http://www.vajoe.com/candidate_calculator.html

Kucinich was my top match, according to the computer tabulator. I forget how others came out. Interestingly, though it's a military related website, Gravel is the top match of the over 1,000,000 people who've done the survey. McCain is in dead last, ha! ha!

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to Nephew:
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Well, as I said, I mainly wanted to point out that Paul (unlike Kucinich) has managed to capture some of the interest of the mainstream media.

(The Nation is not the mainstream media. It's sweet, thoughtful, important, prestigious, literate, has citations, etc. But it ain't the mainstream media.)

I think if Kucinich had spent the last two weeks campaigning in the nude, with a Viagra erection, no one in the mainstream media would have noticed.

But indeed, I would really love to be a bi-issue voter, and Kucinich is the only candidate who has the cojones (or nipples -- does that translate?) to stand up and say Out Loud: Single Payer Health Plan.

As I've mentioned, this translates into mainstream American political English as "Hello, I want America to have a health care plan just like Castro's Cuba, please make me your President."

I'll check out the Candidate Computer on vajoe.com , thanks, that looks pretty nifty.

Here's the Naughty Little Secret about the American Military -- not the official Department of Defense, but the ranks, the actual serving people: Contrary to what Fox would have you believe, the independent anonymous polls conducted free of DoD influence always show a huge Democratic and even anti-war presence.

It was like that during Vietnam, too, though for different historical reasons.

Service personnel need a job, a way to support families, and a way to get college money. The military offers all these things in a brutal, harsh, sinking civilian labor market for those who don't have college degrees. For a lot of America, it's the military, or it's Wendy's, or it's Unemployment. (Do they still have Unemployment? Substitute: Homelessness.)

More than that, most of them are not in the Combat Arms, most of them are not the Rambo movie guys. To keep one of those in the field, it takes five Technical, Educated, Skilled, Trained types doing support and administrative jobs far from combat.

Rambo votes for Bush maybe. (The combat arms are not noted for their intelligence.)

But he's out-voted 5 to 1 by the sane ones who program computers and schedule shiploads of food and supplies between continents, and by the medics who staff the hospitals. They're neither genocidal nor suicidal.

(The genocidal and suicidal ones leave the military and walk across the street and sign up with Blackwater.)

If it was tomorrow, I'd [X] Kucinich.

In Yiddish and a lot of other lingos, they say: If my grandmother had testicles, she'd be my grandfather. By November '08 we will be gifted with the usual choice: The better of two plagues.

My friends, who had a college daughter, begged me to vote for Gore (rather than Nader) for their Single Issue: No matter how lame a president Gore might be, his four or eight years of federal judge appointments would be far better for defending reproductive rights than four or eight years of Bush's appointments -- which my naive and hopeless Truth & Beauty Nader vote, they felt, would assist. Moreover, a president is a fleeting thing of 4 or 8 years, but a federal judge or Supreme Court justice endureth forever.

That became my mom's Single Issue too -- Defend Roe v. Wade at all costs, she remembered the half-century before Roe v. Wade with unbelievable anger and bitterness. To her, those were the years of America's Lethal Horror War Against Women.

Some kid on YouTube made a video in which he (acting the role of the hooded prisoner) demonstrates waterboarding. I guess keywording "waterboarding" ought to get it. Don't get me started on Torture as a 3rd voter issue. I feel as if I'm hallucinating on LSD, or have some brain fungus infection when I turn on the cable or read the front page, from NY Times to NY Daily News, and watch this spirited, vigorous, never-ending national debate about whether Americans should torture Muslims or not.

I used to enjoy some LSD hallucinations. Not this one. This is the Mother of All Bad Trips.

B

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The Chicago Tribune (Chicago, Illinois daily)
Friday 16 November 2007

THE CONTENDERS: RON PAUL

Paul: A seller of ideas

They call him Dr. No -- no big government, no big spending, no flouting the Constitution. And no interest in slick political image.

by Lisa Anderson, Tribune national correspondent
lbanderson@tribune.com

ANGLETON, Texas -- No more Department of Education. No more Federal Reserve Bank. No more Medicare or Medicaid. No more membership in the United Nations or NATO. No more federal drug laws. And, no more U.S. troops in Iraq -- or anywhere else on foreign soil.

The Internal Revenue Service would be history in the first week that Ron Paul sits behind the desk in the Oval Office. And the dismantling of the above-mentioned entities and relationships -- plus a long list of others -- soon would commence.

Think that sounds eccentric, strange, even crazy? Many of the libertarian-minded, 10-term congressman's rivals for the GOP presidential nomination think so and have said so.

But, to a growing, Internet-based pool of supporters, the silver-haired obstetrician turned politician is the sanest man at the Republican debates and perhaps in all of Congress. Paul attracts an unusual political potpourri of people of all ages and viewpoints, including a sprinkling of conspiracy theorists and other extremists whose views Paul's campaign disavows. While most supporters ardently oppose the Iraq war, what they all share is a deep disenchantment and distrust of the federal government in its present form and a fervent belief in Paul's plans to change it.

On Nov. 5, they demonstrated their passion for Paul in spectacular fashion, raising $4.2 million, mostly online, in 24 hours, rocketing him close to his $12 million goal for the fourth quarter. In terms of 2008 GOP presidential candidates, Paul's take broke the previous one-day record of $3.1million set by Mitt Romney Jan. 8.

Hammering home a singular message of freedom, free markets, smaller federal government and greater personal responsibility, Paul, at 72, is nothing if not consistent. Personally, he seems very much the same in a one-on-one conversation as he does on the stump: earnest, serious and slightly stunned. Although pleasant, he, unlike most politicians, makes no effort to charm. He leaves an impression that he is out to sell ideas, not himself.

Politically, he also is relentlessly consistent: If it is not explicitly authorized in the U.S. Constitution, Paul opposes it, particularly if it involves spending. He has opposed so many things over his political career that he has been dubbed "Dr. No."

The money that would be saved from the elimination of many federal programs, not to mention the Iraq war, he contends, would more than provide a state-based safety net for those Americans who can't help themselves and for those depending on Social Security, which eventually he would phase out. States, not the federal government, should deal with issues such as abortion and the nature of marriage, he says. And, though he dreams of a day America returns to a gold standard, he would be happy just to see the country stop taking on huge foreign debt and running up deficits by printing money for which it has no solid backing.

Off and running

Money, specifically monetary policy, is a long-term Paul obsession, the foundation of many of his ideas and books and the catalyst of his political career. In his 20s, he became interested in the libertarian-flavored Austrian school of economics, which favors a commodity-backed currency and markets free of government interference. When President Richard Nixon effectively severed the U.S. dollar from the gold standard in 1971, Paul has said, he felt impelled to enter politics.

Emerging as an unlikely Republican rock star among young voters, Paul actually draws cheers on college campuses when he calls for abolishing the Federal Reserve System.

"It amazes me no end that they even have thought about it," he said in a recent interview.

Asked about his appeal to young people, he said, "They don't trust government. Government has been messing things up. And they respond favorably to not worrying about paying income tax and getting out of Social Security."

In terms of foreign policy, he said, "I make them feel good that you can be conservative and pro-truth and pro-American and pro-Constitution and not want to go to war for needless purposes. They've been made to feel ... that if you don't support all these invasions and all this fighting, somehow you're anti-American."

Paul has infuriated some, including his GOP rivals, by suggesting that U.S. foreign policy has fueled terrorism and contributed to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. He often says, "They came over here because we went over there."

Meanwhile, he has proved not only more popular but more bankable than many -- including himself -- might have expected. Even before the Nov. 5 cascade of cash, Paul's campaign had more than $5 million on hand at the close of the third quarter,exceeding the coffers of such better-known White House hopefuls as Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), Sen. Joe Biden (D-Del.), Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) and Republican former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee.

No fear

"I think one thing that appeals to the young people is that he'll speak his mind and he doesn't care who likes or doesn't like it," said Bruce Buchanan, a professor of government who specializes in presidential politics at the University of Texas at Austin. "That old saw that he'd rather be right than be president fits."

Long unafraid to take rock-solid stands on issues that would turn other candidates' knees to jelly -- witness his opposition to gun control and censorship of pornography or anything else on the Internet, and his approval of decriminalizing marijuana and prostitution -- Paul has developed the unlikely political habit of saying exactly what he thinks. All the time. Whether he's on the floor of the House of Representatives or on the couch of "The Tonight Show With Jay Leno."

Down-home but passionate

A slight, craggy-faced man whose crinkly eyes and ski-slope nose might suggest an older version of commentator Bill O'Reilly, Ron Paul cuts a figure more down-home than dashing. He projects a mild-mannered demeanor but turns fiery when he talks about the need for change in the federal government. And there is a steely certainty to his views that even his fans concede sound radical on first hearing.

Some have compared Paul's formidable performance on the Internet with that of former Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean, another maverick who also scored early success on the Internet, both in raising money and his profile. The majority of Paul's funds come from online donors, and his campaign Web site -- RonPaul2008.com -- is often a political traffic-topper in a crowded presidential field. For the week ending Oct. 27, traffic on Paul's site vied for the top slot with that of Sen. Hillary Clinton and handily trounced all other GOP candidate sites, according to Hitwise.com, which monitors Internet usage. "Ron Paul" was the most searched political term for the prior month.

Yet in most presidential race polls, Paul hovers in the low single digits -- often within the margin of error. In his best showing to date, 7.4 percent of likely New Hampshire primary voters supported him, according to a New Hampshire Institute of Politics poll released Oct. 25.

Although he ran as the Libertarian Party presidential nominee in 1988, Paul says he has no plans to run as anything other than Republican in 2008. He also says he has no intention of running for the U.S. Senate seat being vacated by his fellow Texas Republican Kay Bailey Hutchison. And he has no plans to quit the presidential race.

"What people are afraid of is Paul will never leave" the race for the White House, said Robert Stein, a political scientist at Rice University in Houston and a longtime Paul watcher. "You have to know Ron Paul as I do. This guy just keeps on ticking."

Ron Paul consistently draws enthusiastic crowds, often topping 1,500 people, during campaign stops around the country, particularly at colleges and universities. But name recognition remains problematic.

"Is Ron Paul the actor, the one who used to be an actor?" one student was overheard asking as she strolled past signs for a Paul event on the University of Southern California campus earlier this fall.

No, that would be Fred Thompson.

Paul's name can draw blank stares even in his own district. At the Brazoria County Fair in Angleton on a hot and dusty October day, it seemed most people were far more familiar with such signature delicacies as fried Oreos, fried pickles and Brobdingnagian-size roasted turkey legs than they were with their own representative in Congress, who happens to be running for the White House.

"I know he was a doctor in Lake Jackson," said Bubba Kettler, 44, an electric company lineman.

Teresa Petersen, sitting amid crates of the velvety, mottled chocolate-and-white Standard Rex rabbits her sons brought to show at the fair, fondly recalled Ron Paul. Mother of a child with autism, Petersen went to see Paul in a district office to persuade him to oppose the 2004 reauthorization of the Individuals With Disabilities Improvement in Education Act. Many parent groups at the time contended that proposed changes in the act weakened educational opportunities for disabled children.

Amiable and approachable

"He was just a really nice man. He was very easy to talk to," recalled Petersen, 45, who is a full-time student at Brazosport College. "He was very aware of the issue," she said, adding "He did end up voting 'no' on that.

"Actually, I found out later that he votes 'no' on most things, so there went all the air out of my bubble," she added with a laugh.

Representing the 14th Congressional District, Paul covers a swath of the Texas Gulf Coast running south of Houston from about Galveston to Corpus Christi. A mix of rural, suburban and beach communities, the district has a large petrochemical industry presence, cattle ranching, rice farming and numbers many NASA workers among its roughly 650,000 residents.

Although Paul steadfastly opposes farm subsidies, greater support for NASA and funding for FEMA in a famously hurricane-prone district, he continues to be re-elected comfortably. "It's not that kind of relationship," said the University of Texas' Buchanan. "It's more on the order of 'This is a man we trust,' as opposed to 'What's in it for us?'"

Born August 20, 1935, in Pittsburgh, Ronald Ernest Paul was the third of five sons born to a dairy farmer in the nearby tiny suburb of Green Tree. He began working for his father at an early age and delivered milk during his years at Dormont High School. There he met Carol Wells, daughter of a well-to-do coffee broker. They have five children, 18 grandchildren and one great-grandchild. They celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary this year.

"The first time I ever saw him, he was running a track event," recalled Carol Paul, 71, in a recent phone conversation.

"I think what impressed me too was that everybody liked him. But he was a serious student and a serious athlete. He spent most of his time doing that. He wasn't one of the big dating crowd. He was student body president his senior year. He didn't run for it. They wanted him."

Paul worked his way through Gettysburg College, initially planning to follow two of his brothers into the ministry. But an interest in biology led him instead to the Duke University School of Medicine. He and Carol married in his last semester at Gettysburg, and she worked to put him through medical school.

Paul was a flight surgeon in the U.S. Air Force and Air National Guard from 1963 to 1968; he was not assigned to serve in Vietnam. In 40 years as an OB-GYN in the Lake Jackson area, he estimates, he has delivered more than 4,000 babies.It pains Carol Paul to hear her husband booed or criticized by rivals during debates, but she takes pride in his attitude. "He has no animosity to these people," she said. "He forgives. But I don't know if he can ever forgive about the war, the boys we've lost and the fact we went in for lies."

Ron Paul is the only GOP candidate unequivocally opposed to the Iraq war and was the only Republican representative who did not vote in support of it. He is also the rare congressman who refuses a Congressional pension, because he considers the use of taxpayer money in this fashion an abuse of power. For the same reason, he never accepted taxpayer-funded Medicare or Medicaid in his practice, nor did he allow his children to take federal loans for college.

Paul appears financially comfortable but not exceedingly wealthy, according to filings with the Federal Election Commission. Most of his holdings are in about two dozen gold and silver firms, many valued at less than $15,000 and none valued at more than $250,000.

A turnabout

Paul likes to tell people that when constituents came to visit him in his Washington office, it would invariably be parents with reluctant children in tow. These days, he says, it is more often young people introducing their skeptical parents to him.

There are more than 260 Students for Ron Paul chapters around the country, and one of them is at USC in Los Angeles. There Paul stood under a blazing sun on a hot September afternoon speaking to a rally that swiftly grew from a few hundred students to more than 1,500. Among them was history major Luke Murphy, 20. Murphy found out about Paul from his twin brother, who discovered him on the Internet.

"My little brother is going to a Ron Paul rally in San Francisco tomorrow, and he's bringing my mother," he said, noting that septuagenarian Paul may be too "radical" for the "older generation."

Lorraine Clearman, a 67-year-old school administrator, admitted she was cynical when she arrived earlier that same day to hear Paul speak at a $500-a-head fundraising breakfast at the Ritz-Carlton in Pasadena. She went at the behest of her daughter, Holly Clearman, 47, who works with school drop-outs in Los Angeles, and her 14-year-old grandson, Anthony Iatropoulos.

Anthony, a 9th grader, said his mother had introduced him to Paul's ideas. But, he added, "I don't just blindly follow my mother. I feel with sincerity that Ron Paul is hope for America." "Hope for America" is Paul's campaign slogan.

By late October, Lorraine Clearman was sold on Paul. "These positive young supporters give me optimism for the future of our country," she said in an e-mail. "This election may well be bought, and the next ones as well, but the movement may prevail in the end. My conscience will only let me vote for Ron Paul."

No matter how things turn out in 2008, Paul believes he will have made an impact, or at least a dent, in the political landscape. "They can't silence us," he said. "The message is out of the bag, so to speak. The message is out there. I have no idea what's going to happen to the campaign. I'm doing so much better than I ever dreamed."

As he recently said on The Tonight Show, "There's probably a risk I could win."

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WHAT YOU MAY NOT KNOW ABOUT ... RONALD ERNEST PAUL

BORN: Aug. 20, 1935; Pittsburgh

EDUCATION: Gettysburg College, graduated in 1957 (BA, major in biology); Duke University School of Medicine, graduated in 1961 with a medical degree.

POLITICAL CAREER: U.S. House of Representatives, 1976; 1978-84; 1997-present. Defeated in GOP primary for U.S. Senate in 1984. Ran as Libertarian Party presidential candidate in 1988.

OTHER JOBS: OB-GYN

FAMILY: Wife, Carol Wells (married Feb. 1, 1957); five children: Ronald, Lori, Randal, Robert and Joy

RELIGION: Baptist

MUSICAL INSTRUMENT: None

POLITICAL HERO: Sen. Robert A. Taft

FAVORITE FOODS: Tilapia, chocolate chip cookies

FAVORITE MODE OF EXERCISE: Tries to walk at least 3 miles in the morning and bicycle at least 10 miles in the afternoon.

FAVORITE BOOKS: "Human Action: A Treatise on Economics" by Ludwig von Mises and "The Road to Serfdom" by Friedrich A. Hayek

FAVORITE TV SHOW: Financial news

FAVORITE MOVIE: "Dr. Zhivago"

FAVORITE HYMN: "A Mighty Fortress Is Our God"

TELL US A JOKE: He doesn't joke.

=====================

Copyright © 2007, Chicago Tribune

LA abandons scheme to map Muslim population zones

Before this fairly short driveby story vanishes off the national radar, i want to grab it and re-post it.

What other religion or ethnicity in the USA would tolerate, or be forced to tolerate, this kind of police crap?

I'm glad the LA Muslim community stood up and Just Said No, I'm glad the American Civil Liberties Union advocated for them, I'm glad the police scheme died at birth. (Or so the LAPD and the mayor say it's dead; these are LA cops, and a secret law unto themselves decade after decade.)

There's a huge institutional pressure, from the federal government, from state government, from city government, to make Muslim-Americans into compromised second-class citizens who must learn to accept a lower status of citizenship, with fewer rights and a lower threshold of expectations of justice, and a more hostile and adversarial relationship with law enforcement. Like Japanese-Americans and German-Americans during World War II, Muslim-Americans are being told, in hundreds of ways -- their experience as airport passengers, for example -- that they're not full American citizens. The rest of the American people are simultaneously being educated to want and to accept this change in the status of Muslim-Americans, and to assume and believe there's a good and necessary reason for it.

That's enough for now, here's the story. This police mapping plan blows dead rats. I'm glad it was stopped. If it was really stopped.

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The New York Times
Friday 16 November 2007

Los Angeles Police Scrap
Proposal to Map Muslim Areas

by Neil MacFarquhar

The Los Angeles Police Department is scrapping its controversial plan to create a map detailing the Muslim communities in the sprawling metropolitan area, bowing to the outcry among Muslims and others that the project was a thinly disguised form of racial profiling.

“We put it out there, it was rejected, it’s dead on arrival,” the police chief, William J. Bratton, said at a news conference after a meeting with Muslim residents and civil rights organizations who had criticized the plan. “It will not be going forward.”

Various advocates for Muslims, as well as the American Civil Liberties Union, expressed elation that the plan, first proposed as a means of tracking possible radicalization, had been shelved.

“When they talk about mapping in law enforcement, they talk about mapping gang areas, mapping high-crime areas,” said Salam Al-Marayati, the executive director of the Muslim Public Affairs Council, based in Los Angeles, which had initially considered acting as the Police Department’s partner in the plan.

“Extending mapping of a criminal nature to a mainstream community, that was offensive to Muslim Americans, they felt like they were all being treated as suspects,” Mr. Marayati said.

Chief Bratton expressed regret that the plan might have added to any suspicions about the police harbored by Muslims.

Michael P. Downing, a deputy Los Angeles police chief who leads the counterterrorism bureau, said after the meeting that he had been trying to mirror a plan that he saw in Britain that had been welcomed by Muslims there. The Los Angeles meeting, scheduled to address the initial outcry, was used to emphasize the importance of developing more extensive interaction between the Police Department and Muslim residents, the police said.

Muslim activists expressed some concern that Mr. Downing still seemed convinced that the potential for radicalization among Muslims in the United States remained strong.

The mapping proposal first came to light on October 30 when Mr. Downing testified before a Senate committee investigating the potential for radicalization among American Muslims.

Mr. Downing said the Police Department wanted to work with a Muslim partner and an academic institution to determine the geographic distribution of Muslims and “look at their history, demographics, language, culture, ethnic breakdown, socioeconomic status and social interactions.”

The problem that some Muslims have integrating in Europe has been a source of radicalization, he said in a later interview, and the point would be to try to avoid that here.

But Muslim groups immediately objected — not least on the ground that unlike in much of Europe, Muslims did not live in their own separate neighborhoods in the United States. In addition, there have been virtually no cases of the kind seen in Europe, they said, where a native son flies off to Pakistan or Afghanistan for training and then returns to create a homegrown terrorist cell that carries out deadly attacks.

Mayor Antonio R. Villaraigosa of Los Angeles said in a statement that he agreed the mapping plan should not proceed.

“While I believe the department’s efforts to reach out to the Muslim communities were well intentioned, the mapping proposal has created a level of fear and apprehension that made it counterproductive,” Mr. Villaraigosa said.

The greater Los Angeles area, including Riverside and Orange Counties, is home to an estimated 500,000 Muslims, making it the second-largest concentration in the country after New York City.

- 30 -

Michael Parrish contributed reporting.

the new Vleeptron Supercomputer is On Its Way / Adventures in Responsibility and Boredom

Why certainly,
click if you wish.

Vleeptron would sincerely like to thank all of you -- Abbas, PatfromCH, Jim, Steve -- for your excellent and valuable advice about what kind of new computer system I should buy.

I also consulted my psycho teenage criminal friends on Undernet IRC and they told me what the hottest laptops and iPhones to steal and shoplift are this year. (Fortunately most of them seem to have moms and dads who keep them out of jail, but certainly aren't happy about it.)

I came THIS CLOSE to putting my $$$$$$$$ down on that sexy ridiculous Maserati monster computer at the top -- it's called the XPS 720 Red Extreme Gamer, and I would have been the envy of every 12-year-old boy in the Universe.

THIS CLOSE.

But I made the Fatal Mistake of dragging a professional computer consultant -- the guys who have been keeping my dying piece-o-crap HP on Life Support for the last 3 years -- into it, and for the most sensible and realistic and practical reasons, he talked me out of the lurid Fantasie Drool Machine from Outer Space Tomorrow, and sold me The Yawn-o-Tronic 7000 (below).

It was like getting ready to climb aboard a Triumph Bonneville 750 Dual-Carburetor motorcycle (the stencil on the front forks said "World's Fastest Production Motorcycle," but I can't swear to that, I only got it up to 105 mph/169 kph one time) and kick the starter -- but buying a Toyota hybrid minivan instead. My heart is broken.

Now I'll be the envy of every real estate, insurance and accounting agency, dentist, and medium-sized Protestant church in North America.

But I'll be able to sleep worry-free at night for the next 5 years.

And my Yawn-o-Tronic has a metric shitload (= 0.883 English shitload) of wholly unecessary Punch and Power for the Weird Things I like to do with my computer. (I like to kill gnats with thermonuclear bombs.)

Actually I'm going to join the Dutch Power Cows and Fold Proteins like nobody's business. I am going to power ON this sucker and never turn it off again. I'm going to get STATS! STATS! Vleeptron Dude is going to become a Mega-Star in Intergalactic Distributed Computing.

And write code. Number Theory stuff mostly, I guess. Maybe take a whack at an odd game. I hate playing computer games, but I love the challenge of inventing and writing them. This is going to be a really super programming development platform. Who sells a LisP package?

Be happy for me. In a mighty struggle between my Inner Sixties Nudist Anarchist Hippie and my Inner Calvinist, Sensible and Responsible have triumphed. For the next five years, I will have no digital regrets or remorse or shame whatsoever.

I wanted to run away to Las Vegas with a big bag of cocaine, a 5-liter bottle of tequila, and Vivika and Tifani the identical twin redheaded freckled cheerleaders ... but I got sensible and acted my age, and will be happily sitting in front of the fireplace with the wife and cats listening to Bing Crosby singing Christmas carols and sipping cocoa instead.

"Of all our regrets,
the coldest and most empty
are of temptations
we have successfully resisted."

-- James Branch Cabell

But when nobody was looking, I shoved a Lot Of Wicked Fun inside my new Yawn-o-Tronic 7000. You just can't tell from the outside. From the outside, it just looks like a computer.

(Actually they're not identical, they're fraternal. Their freckle patterns are different.)

"quite an unbalanced character" vs. "lost his marbles" -- in Pakistan, pot calls kettle black

Click image for larger.

The New York Times (USA)
Tuesday 13 November 2007

In Interview, Musharraf
Defends Rule by Decree

by Carlotta Gall, David Rohde and Jane Perlez

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, November 13 -- The president of Pakistan, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, vigorously defended his declaration of emergency rule in a 40-minute interview, insisting that it would not interfere with the holding of free and fair elections.

"The emergency is to ensure elections go in an undisturbed manner," the president of Pakistan, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, said in an interview with The New York Times today.

He defended the decree issued 10 days ago that scrapped the Constitution, dismissed the Supreme Court and resulted in the arrests of 2,500 opposition party workers, lawyers and human rights advocates, and rejected an appeal by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to lift emergency rule.

"I totally disagree with her," General Musharraf said in an interview with The New York Times at the presidential building here on Tuesday. "The emergency is to ensure elections go in an undisturbed manner."

General Musharraf said the decree was justified because the Supreme Court had meddled in politics, specifically the validity of his re-election, and because of the serious threat from terrorists.

In the interview General Musharraf was critical of the opposition leader, Benazir Bhutto, saying she was confrontational and would be difficult to work with.

General Musharraf complained about her conduct since her return a month ago, saying: "You come here on supposedly on a reconciliatory mode, and right before you land, you’re on a confrontationist mode. I am afraid this is producing negative vibes, negative optics."

In the interview, the general, dressed in a gray suit and blue tie, described Pakistan as suffering from a "disturbed terrorist environment."

"I don’t know, I don’t know," he said when asked when the emergency rule would end. "We need to see the environment."

He refused to say when he would step down as army leader and become a civilian president, a demand that President Bush has urged publicly and also did privately in a telephone call last week. "It will happen soon," he said of giving up the military post.

The general, who has been backed with more than $10 billion by the Bush administration, most of it for the military, asked for even more support, and more patience.

The administration has called the general the best bet to fight against Al Qaeda and Islamic militants but has also complained that the Pakistani military has been sporadic and often ineffective.

In the interview, General Musharraf said the Pakistani army had limited resources in taking on the fight.

"Ten days back, of 20 Cobra helicopters, we have only one that was serviceable," he said. "We need more support."

But he said the army had regrouped in northern and southern Waziristan, where the army faced the strongest challenge from the militants who he called a "vicious enemy."

"Now wherever the disturbance, we will strike very very strongly," he said. Since imposing the emergency rule, Washington has pressed the general to lift it.

The United States Embassy confirmed today that the envoy it was sending to press General Musharraf to end emergency rule was Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte, who is expected to arrive in Islamabad at the end of the week.

Last week, Mr. Negroponte told [the U.S.] Congress that the general was "indispensable" as an ally in the fight against terror.

Before he imposed the emergency rule, General Musharraf had been expected to become a civilian president this Thursday.

Ms. Bhutto remained under house arrest, confined by police barricades in a house in Lahore after the government said she could not lead a protest rally from Lahore to Islamabad.

At another point, General Musharraf said Ms. Bhutto was under house arrest for seven days because she had accused the chief minister of the province of Punjab, Chaudhry Pervez Elahi, of plotting against her.

Thus Ms. Bhutto was grounded to prevent an incident that she could then blame on the government, he said.

Ms. Bhutto’s plan for her party members to participate in a "caravan" across the Punjab was "a preposterous thing to do."

Gen. Musharraf questioned Ms. Bhutto’s popularity, and at one point scanned an Op-Ed article she recently wrote for The Times that he had brought with him to the interview.

In reaction to her claim that she would sweep elections, the general said: "Let’s start the elections and let’s see whether she wins," he said, at another point. "Constitutionally today she has been prime minister twice, what about the third time? She is not legally allowed, she is not constitutionally allowed. Why are we taking things for granted?" Earlier in his regime, General Musharraf passed a law forbidding a Prime Minister serving more than two terms, a rule that forbids Ms. Bhutto and another opponent, former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif.

Stepping up her rhetoric against Mr. Musharraf, Ms. Bhutto said today he should resign. The President replied in the interview that "she has no right" to ask.

General Musharraf, who has been criticized for being isolated inside the cocoon of the presidency, insisted he was in touch with the mood of Pakistanis, and said he believed emergency rule was popular.

Based on information from "several organizations," and feedback from politicians and friends, he said: "I know what they feel about the media, I know what they feel about the emergency when all these suicide bombings were taking place," he said of the views of the Pakistani people.

"Their view is why have I done it so late."

Western governments and Western media, he said, misread Ms. Bhutto’s support because they placed too much emphasis on the significance of human rights advocates in Pakistan.

"You go and meet human rights activists," he challenged his interviewers. "Ninety percent of them may have never cast their votes. They sleep on the day of elections."

General Musharraf said nearly a dozen independent news television stations that had been closed under the emergency decree would be allowed to re-open if they agreed to a government code of conduct.

Asked why a human rights advocate, Asma Jehangir, who heads the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, had been arrested when she attended a meeting at the commission’s headquarters on the first day of emergency rule, he replied: "Because she was agitating and trying to disturb the peace."

He called Ms. Jehangir, the leading human rights advocate in Pakistan and one of the first women lawyers, "quite an unbalanced character."

General Musharraf criticized Ms. Jehangir for being too ambitious in her agenda on how to achieve better rights for women.

Pakistani women deserved more opportunities, and he cited his own legislation that amended the laws to protect women against accusations of rape and adultery.

But Ms. Jehangir, he said, wanted to go too fast, and would therefore fail.

- 30 -

==========

Asma Jahangir
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Asma Jilani Jahangir (born 1952 in Lahore) is a Pakistani lawyer and human rights activist.

She has been the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Religion or Belief since 2004 (first attached to the former Commission on Human Rights, now to the Human Rights Council). Previously, she served as the UN Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Arbitrary and Summary Executions.

Born into a prosperous family with a history of activism (her father, Malik Jilani, was a former colonel in the Pakistan Army, entered politics upon retirement and spent time in jail and under house arrest for opposing military dictatorships), Jahangir herself became involved at a young age in protests against the military regime in Pakistan. She completed her law degree in 1978.

She cut her teeth during protests against the Hudood Ordinance put in place as part of Gen. Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq's Islamization program in Pakistan. She is a founding member of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, and has served as Secretary-General and later Chair of the organization.

In 1980, Asma Jahangir and her sister, Hina Jilani, got together with few fellow activists and lawyers and formed the first law firm established by women in Pakistan. They also helped form the Women's Action Forum (WAF) in the same year. The first WAF demonstration was in 1983 when some 25-50 women took to the streets protesting the famous Safia Bibi case. Safia, a young blind girl, had been raped yet had ended up in jail on the charge of zina. "We (their law firm) had been given a lot of cases by the advocate general and the moment this demonstration came to light, the cases were taken away from us." Asma recalls. [1]

In 1995, Jahangir received the Martin Ennals Award for Human Rights Defenders.

In her capacity as a UN official, Jahangir was in Pakistan when a state of emergency was declared by President Pervez Musharraf. On November 5, 2007, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Louise Arbour indicated that Jahangir was among the judicial and political officials detained by the Musharraf government. [2]

On November 5, 2007, The Economist reported that: "Over 500 lawyers, opposition politicians and human rights activists have been arrested. They include Asma Jahangir, boss of the country’s human-rights commission and a former UN special rapporteur. In an e-mail from house arrest, where she has been placed for 90 days, Ms Jahangir regretted that General Musharraf had "lost his marbles." (see:

http://www.economist.com/world/asia/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10088419)

Personal life

She has a son and two daughters. Sulema Jahangir, her daughter, is a lawyer.

External links

* Profile of Asma Jahangir
* News Report on appointment as Rapporteur on Freedom of Religion or Belief
* UN Special Rapporteur on freedom of religion or belief
* Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP)
* Time Magazine profile

References

1. ^ Dawn-The Reviewer, April 2, 1998, "A ray of hope"
2. ^ UN's top rights official voices alarm at imposition of state of emergency. United Nations (2007-11-05). Retrieved on 2007-11-05.

"One of Us" by Eric Bazilian / Prince's cover / intangible music

Eric Bazilian of The Hooters,
composer of "One of Us"

Between now and when I finally take the plunge and buy my new Barnum-o-Tronik 7000 Supercomputer, I really need to start backing up and saving some of the treasures and drek I've been collecting on this hard disk for the last eight years or so.

I am particularly suspicious of Music which comes in an Intangible Form that cannot be seen or touched. It's just Not Natural.

But S.W.M.B.O. has discovered this iPod Thing, and is being lured into the iPod Kult -- largely because it is promising to make about a ton of CDs simply vanish from our living space, all to be replaced by strings of zeroes and ones which will fit in a box the size of a wallet.

All very unnatural. There's something wrong with Music you can't Touch or See.

I am thinking about this because of one particular treasure, a song I never possessed in tangible form, not vinyl, not CD. One day long ago, and one time only, I saw Prince on TV sing his version of the song "One of Us." And it just knocked me over, knocked my socks off, blew my mind (astonishment from circa 1968), rocked my world. I had to have it. Life couldn't go on until it was blasting through my speakers.

Commenced the strangest hunt through Cyberspace, not helped much by my profound ignorance about the song and my relative unfamiliarity with Prince's oeuvre. (Frankly, his pouting and the tightness of his velvet trousers always scared me. Perry Como never pouted and his trousers never scared me.)

I finally wound up on a website of a French-speaking Swiss guy who was clearly the biggest Prince Fan in the Universe. There was no Union Jack flag to click on for an English version of the site. Yes, I'd come to the right place, but the right place, the Galactic Cathedral of Prince, was entirely en francaise.

If he didn't have Prince's cover of "One of Us" -- well, then I was hallucinating because it didn't exist. I wanted it So Bad that I reached for my dismal, pathetic, laughable francaise skills and wrote him an e-mail entirely in French. He must have comprendre mon merde sufficiement, because this lovely Helvetian promptly sent me (and this was B.C. -- Before Cable) an email with an attachment that consisted of an enormous string of zeroes and ones -- probably the biggest file I'd ever received -- and when I clicked this file and stuck it in my audio player -- Wow. Encroyable. Unglaublich. Fantastische.

Okay, well, I will say One Nice Thing about Intangible Music. If I'd received this song in vinyl and played it 72,311 times (like how many times I played my Glenn Gould LP of the Mozart piano sonatas), it would have decayed horribly into a festering plague of pops, hisses, cracks, skips and scratches. CDs weren't immune from physical damage, either -- just a different but equally unattractive and annoying sound to troubles on a sick CD.

But you can play an mp3 (or .wav or .midi) 50 gazillion times, and it will sound exactly the same as it sounded the first time you played it. And that's not chopped liver. (Cette n'est pas pate de foie gras.)

Try doing that with your Perry Como 78s on a Webcor record player with a sapphire needle.

I have just reproduced the "One Of Us" experiment, and that fucking song, and that fucking Strange Person from Minneapolis, Minnesota USA, still causes exactly the same volcanic explosion in my mind, ears and heart as he did the first time I played the Swiss guy's mp3. Go Prince! Go God! Go Digital Music!

Aeons ago I waxed poetic about this cover of this song, I think about the time of the Birth of Original Vleeptron. Lord, I sincerely apologize for my ignorance back then. Joan Osborne's cover of "One of Us" had been so horrifyingly overplayed (she invented the Whiny Teen Lilith Faire Acoustic Sound, and I wish somebody would un-invent it already), but I thought she'd written the song. She hadn't. One Commenter -- his heart was in the right place -- told me that Prince wrote it.

I wander from Ignorance to Ignorance. But slowly, very slowly, I get a little smarter. Prince didn't write this startlingly original song. Joan Osborne didn't write it.

A Caucasian USA male named Eric Bazilian wrote it. Bazilian, a founding member of The Hooters, cranked out this original smash for Joan Osborne's first album "Relish" in 1995. It certainly solved all Joan's problems with the rent and groceries for a while.

Here are the lyrics. When Prince covered it, he was having intractible contractual problems with the Warner label, and would appear at negotiations with the word SLAVE written hugely in black Magic Marker on his forehead, just to express his feelings about his situation. In his cover, he changed the line

"just a slob like one of us"

to

"just a slave like one of us"

which was just dandy to my ears and heart.

So when I finally crank up my new Barnum-o-Tronik 7000 Supercomputer, this song will be the first file I transfer and run through my new Snazzoramic Digital Speakers.

After the lyrics, Wikipedia's article about the song and the very interesting bio of Mister Eric Bazilian. I imagine this song also solved a lot of his rent and grocery and guitar string problems.

Got kids? Rob some gas stations and send 'em to the nearest Quaker school. That's Bob's advice. (Don't tell the Quakers you're paying the tuition with armed robberies.)

====================

One Of Us
Artist: Prince
Album: Emancipation

Words, music by Eric Bazilian

(We didn't write this song, but listen)
If God had a name, what would it be
And would we call it 2 His face
If we were faced with Him and all His glory?
What would U ask if U had just one question?

Yeah, yeah, God is great
Yeah, yeah, God is good
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah!

CHORUS:

What if God was one of us?
Just a slave like one of us?
Just a stranger on the bus
Tryin' 2 make His way home

If God had a face, what would it look like
And would U wanna see it
If seeing meant that U would have 2 believe in things like heaven
And Jesus and the saints and all the prophets?

Yeah, yeah, God is great
Yeah, yeah, God is good
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah!

CHORUS

Yeah

Yeah, yeah, God is great
Yeah, yeah, God is good
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah!

What if God was one of us?
Just a slob (slave) like one of us?
Just a stranger on the bus
Tryin' 2 make His way home

Like a holy rollin' stone
Back up 2 heaven all alone
Nobody callin' on the phone
'Cept 4 the Pope maybe in Rome
But He ain't home, He aint home, He ain't home!
No, no, no, He ain't home! {x2}
Oh yeah, oh!

What if God was one us? {x4}

===================

One of Us (song)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

"One of Us"
"One of Us" cover
Single by Joan Osborne
from the album Relish
Released 1995
Genre Pop
Length 5:21 (Album Version)
Label Blue Gorilla Records/Mercury Records
Writer Eric Bazilian
Producer Rick Chertoff

"One of Us" is a song written by Eric Bazilian (of The Hooters) and originally released by Joan Osborne.

The song deals with various aspects of belief in God by asking questions inviting the listener to consider how they might relate to God, such as "Would you call [God's name] to his face?" or "Would you want to see [God's face] if seeing meant that you would have to believe?" The title of the song comes from the refrain, "What if God was one of us?"

Released in March 1995 on the album Relish (produced by Rick Chertoff), it hit the top 40 in November of the same year. With this song, Osborne received one of many Grammy nominations in 1995, including Best Female Pop Vocal Performance, but failed to win. One year later Prince covered the song for his 'Emancipation' LP.

Around January 1996, "One of Us" hit the top 10. Finally in March 1996 "One of Us" climbed to No. 1 on Rock On The Net's ARC Weekly Top 40 and stayed there for 2 weeks. Its peak chart position on the Billboard Hot 100 was No. 4.

Controversy

In 1996, William Donohue, President of the Catholic League, took issue with the song. In light of the time and money she had donated to Planned Parenthood, Donahue claimed the song was agenda-driven and danced "awfully close to the line of Catholic baiting[1]".

In popular culture

In 2003, the television series Joan of Arcadia debuted. The opening credits feature a re-recorded version of "One of Us" by Osborne specifically for the show.

=================

Eric Bazilian
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Background information
Birth name Eric Bazilian
Born July 21, 1953 (1953-07-21) (age 54)
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S.
Genre(s) Rock
Instrument(s) Singer
Guitar
Melodica
Saxophone
Mandolin
Keyboards
Bass guitar
Drums
Years active 1978 – present
Associated
acts The Hooters
Website http://www.ericbazilian.com

Eric Bazilian (born July 21, 1953 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S.) is an American singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, arranger and producer, best known for being a founding member of the rock band The Hooters.

Early life

Eric Bazilian was born at the University of Pennsylvania Hospital in Philadelphia to a father who was a psychiatrist and a mother who was a concert pianist.

He began playing the piano at age five, and his uncle taught him guitar at nine. He never took formal musical lessons. At the age of 10, while watching The Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show, Bazilian realized that playing and creating music was what he wished to pursue with his life.

At 16 years old, while attending Germantown Friends School, Bazilian started writing songs for his first band, Evil Seed. This band played all original music at "B-ins" at Belmont Plateau in Fairmont Park.

By the mid 1970s, while attending the University of Pennsylvania, where he earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Physics, Bazilian met Rob Hyman and Rick Chertoff, with whom he formed a band called Baby Grand. They would release two albums during their tenure.

Tenure with The Hooters

After Baby Grand disbanded, Hyman and Bazilian decided to try something new by combining reggae, ska, and rock'n'roll to create The Hooters in 1980.

Nervous Night, The Hooters' 1985 debut on Columbia Records, sold in excess of 2 million copies and included Billboard Top 40 hits "Day By Day" (#18), "And We Danced" (#21) and "Where Do The Children Go" (#38).

After releasing six albums, The Hooters obtained a large global following throughout the 1980s and 1990s. As a result, they were asked to open three major musical events of the late 20th century:

* Live Aid in Philadelphia in 1985

* Amnesty International Concert at Giants Stadium in 1986,and

* Roger Waters' The Wall Concert in Berlin in 1990

In 1995, The Hooters went on hiatus, although Hyman and Bazilian would continue to collaborate together on musical projects for other artists.

Bazilian reunited with The Hooters on successful headlining European summer tours in 2003, 2004 and 2005.

2007 saw the release of Time Stand Still, their first album of new material since 1993.

"One of Us"

Bazilian has become recognized internationally for being a songwriter, session musician, arranger and producer for numerous artists.

In 1995, he played all those roles for Joan Osborne's debut album Relish, which was nominated for six Grammy Awards, including Song of the Year for the No. 4 Billboard hit "One of Us," which Bazilian single-handedly wrote.

"One of Us" has since been covered by many artists throughout the world, among them being Prince, Doctor Evil in Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me, Martyn Joseph, Scott Bradoka, Sharla Jackson Band, Wildside, Jackie "O", DJ Irene, Outta Control, and Seal.

In 2003, "One of Us" was used as the theme song for the CBS television series Joan of Arcadia. It has also appeared on the soundtracks of numerous movies, including Vanilla Sky (2001), Bruce Almighty (2003) and Diary of a Mad Black Woman (2005).

In more recent years, The Hooters have also performed "One of Us" in their live shows.

Solo career

Bazilian has released two solo albums to date:

The Optimist (2000)

1. Driving In England
2. Until You Dare
3. Gemini Yo Yo
4. Bye Bye Baby
5. U.G.L.Y.
6. When I Was The Man
7. Kid From Outer Space
8. Be My Woman
9. Fiddlesticks
10. Hopelessly, Relentlessly
11. Mind Going Down
12. The Optimist

A Very Dull Boy (2002)

1. A Very Dull Boy
2. Lucky To Be
3. Insomnia
4. Since You Ask
5. Feeling Your Pain
6. A Pocket Full Of Nothing
7. Ella Fitzgerald
8. Too Much Of My Time
9. Lump Of Clay
10. Hallelujah And Amen

Recognitions

On November 17, 2000, Bazilian was inducted into the Philadelphia Walk of Fame on the Avenue of the Arts.

On April 21, 2004, Bazilian won an ASCAP Film and Television Music Award for "One of Us" as the theme song for the CBS television series Joan of Arcadia.

Songwriter

Bazilian has written songs for numerous artists throughout the world, among them:

* Billie Myers - "Kiss The Rain"

* Robbie Williams - "Old Before I Die"

* Joan Osborne - "Dracula Moon"; "Ladder"; "Let’s Just Get Naked"; "Lumina"; "One Of Us"; "Pensacola"; "Right Hand Man"; "Saint Teresa"

* Amanda Marshall - "Believe In You"; "Best Of Me"; "Give Up Giving In"; "If I Didn't Have You"; "Love Lift Me"; "Never Said Goodbye"; "Ride"; "Shades Of Grey"; "Too Little Too Late"; "Why Don't You Love Me"

* Ricky Martin - "Private Emotion"

* Scorpions - "Remember the Good Times"; "Dreamers"; "Humanity"; "We Were Born To Fly"; "The Future Never Dies"; "You're Lovin' Me To Death"; "Love Will Keep Us Alive"; "Your Last Song"; "Cold"; "She Said"

* Annie Carrier - "Attitude"

* Sarah Hudson - "Girl on the Verge"; "Little"

* Des'ree - "God Only Knows"

* Bijou Phillips - "Hawaii"; "Just Look Around"

* Patty Smyth - "Heartache Heard Around the World"; "Never Enough"

* Alejandra Guzman - "Hoy Me Voy A Querer"

* Bon Jovi - "I Get a Rush"; "One Man Band"

* Bif Naked - "I Love Myself Today"

* The Calling - "Just That Good"; "Stigmatized"

* Jonatha[n?] Brooke - "Less Than Love is Nothing"

* Ronnie Spector - "Never Gonna Be Your Baby"

* Shannon McNally - "Now That I Know"

* Zucchero - "Pure Love"

* LeAnn Rimes - "Safest Place"

* Cyndi Lauper - "Someone Like Me"; "That's What I Think"

* Matt Nathanson - "Suspended"

* Alannah Myles - "Bad 4 You"

* D-Side - "My Best Chance"

* Jon Bon Jovi - "Ugly"

* Journey - "To Be Alive Again"

* Leah Andreone - "Incon[c?]eivable"

* Lucia Cifarelli - "We Are Angels"

* Midge Ure - "Fallen Angel"

* Nordman - "Hjalp Mig Att Leva"; " Sorg Min Alskarina"

* Tommy Conwell and the Young Rumblers - "Half A Heart"

External links

* Eric Bazilian official website
* Eric Bazilian official MySpace page
* Eric Bazilian at the Internet Movie Database

The Hooters
Current members
Eric Bazilian | Rob Hyman | David Uosikkinen | John Lilley | Fran Smith Jr.

Former members
Bobby Woods | John Kuzma | Rob Miller | Andy King | Mindy Jostyn

Discography:
Studio albums: Amore | Nervous Night | One Way Home | Zig Zag | Out of Body | Time Stand Still

Live albums: The Hooters Live

Compilations: Hooterization: A Retrospective

Video releases: Nervous Night | The Ultimate Clip Collection

Solo albums
Eric Bazilian: The Optimist | A Very Dull Boy
Fran Smith Jr.: For No Apparent Reason | Man Meets Machine
Andy King: Spiritual Pre-School

MalariaControl.net -- a project you can host on your PC, and save lives in Sub-Saharan Africa

Click image, of course.

MalariaControl.net is a very interesting Distributed Computing volunteer project that promises real gains, measured in longer and healthier lives and fewer deaths, primarily in Sub-Saharan Africa. By giving the MalariaControl.net software an unobtrusive home on your PC to use your unused CPU time (just always keep your PC ON), you help shape and squeeze answers from an evolving mathematical model which guides medical strategy and targets finite resources in combating the deadly disease malaria.

As with all the exploding new D.P. projects, you can make yourself part of accomplishing valuable work or solving extremely difficult problems without having to become a professional expert in the field. Click click click and you're saving lives; clickety-click and you're getting the world closer to answering a profound scientific or mathematical mystery.

Or you can skip the science and the medicine and the math, and just go nuts over the STATS! Exactly like the videogame at the pizza parlor with your initials in the Top Scorer position.

Everybody's always waiting for a Miracle Magic Bullet which will cure a disease like malaria. But there don't seem to be Magic Bullets in our Real World. One of the most difficult problems in combatting malaria is the scarcity of medical resources, personnel and funding in Sub-Saharan Africa. There's stuff that works, but often not much money to buy and distribute even the cheap stuff.

Consequently, trivial and un-magical as it seems, insecticide-drenched anti-mosquito sleeping nets have become one of the most important weapons in today's battle against malaria. The answers your PC computes and sends back to the mathematical model show how best to allocate net funding and illuminate the best distribution schemes.

================

How does MalariaControl.net work?

Mathematical models are important decision-making tools for the control of infectious diseases and malaria was one of the first infections to which this was applied. In the 19th century, a pioneer of malaria modeling, Ronald Ross, saw the value of mathematical analyses in planning malaria control, and developed the first mathematical model for malaria.

The likely impact of malaria control interventions has generally been inferred from clinical trial results, even though only short-term effects are assessed in trials. Few comparative analyses of the potential impact of different malaria control strategies have aimed to quantify the inevitable longer term impacts.

The inherent uncertainties make it difficult to optimize malaria control strategies or to prioritize areas of research.

Requirements of a predictive model for the effects of malaria interventions.

Characteristics of individual P. falciparum infections. A model for use in predicting the population impact of a malaria intervention strategy must embed within it a relevant description of the course of individual infections.

Short-term effects on individuals. Drug treatments and vaccines may have effects on outcomes that are more complex than the effects on primary infections in the non-immune host.

If the effect of a vaccine is simply to reduce the force of infection, the short-term consequences in terms of morbidity and mortality risks are not simply proportional to the reduction in infection rate.

Long-term effects individual impact. The introduction of insecticide-treated nets (ITNs) for malaria control has been accompanied by extensive debate about possible long-term effects. Related issues arise with regard to vaccines.

Long term effects of vaccination programs are even more difficult to predict, since field trials of malaria vaccines carried out thus far consider only impacts that can be measured during the 6-18 months follow-up periods. Unfortunately, the longer term consequences of a vaccination program cannot simply be extrapolated from the results of such trials. For example, some benefits of vaccination may take an extended period to become evident. This will be particularly the case if there is natural boosting or if there are effects on transmission dynamics. Conversely, vaccination may result merely in delay of morbidity and mortality in some individuals, in which case field trials may suggest a greater benefit than will be observed during implementation and scaling up of malaria vaccine programs.

Interdependence of hosts. An epidemiologic model for the effects of an intervention program must consider the dependence between events in different individuals. Field trials of interventions are generally designed with the objective of directly protecting individuals either from infection or from consequent morbidity and mortality, and do not consider broader effects on transmission.

Interdependence of hosts has been the core of most subsequent malaria modeling exercises.

Structure of the malaria models used by MalariaControl.net

Swiss Tropical Institute has developed new models to make quantitative predictions of the potential impact of vaccination against P. falciparum malaria.

The main component of these models is a stochastic simulation of the epidemiology of P. falciparum that incorporates insights from the within-host models, but is implemented independently of them. We have used this epidemiologic model to simulate the results from the recently completed trials of the malaria vaccine RTS,S/AS02 carried out in adult men in the Gambia and in children aged 1-5 years in Mozambique.

The model has also been employed to predict the potential epidemiologic impact of such a vaccine, and the cost-effectiveness. To make these predictions we incorporated costing data and a model for the health system currently in place in a low-income country context, based largely on data from Tanzania.

In addition Swiss Tropical Institute has also made progress on developing within-host dynamics of malaria. This work is intended to complement earlier within-host models, specifically with a view to providing insights relevant to modeling vaccination, useful for informing the epidemiologic models. The within-host models have been fitted to data from malariatherapy patients and lead to conclusions that are particularly relevant to the modeling of asexual blood-stage vaccination.

An important strength is that the epidemiologic model ties together an ensemble of interconnected sub-models validated against actual field data from various settings across Africa. In view of the complex malaria life cycle and gaps in our current knowledge there are inherent limitations attached to some of these components, which in turn influence the overall model outcomes.

To the best STI team's knowledge this is the most comprehensive population-based simulation of malaria yet developed. It represents an important new tool for rational planning of malaria control and vaccine development, and can readily be adapted to assess efficacy and cost-effectiveness of other malaria control interventions employed singly or in combination. This makes it possible to integrate epidemiologic and economic considerations in rational formulation of policy to reduce the intolerable burden of malaria.

The current burden of malaria morbidity and mortality, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, is so large that even an intervention that modifies the course of infection in only a proportion of recipients without any effects on transmission may be worth pursuing. Transmission effects should not be ignored, but need to be just one part of a model that includes also the independent effects.

Strategy of epidemiologic modeling

The models need to simulate the processes that may be affected by vaccination, and also to capture the relationships between these processes and outcomes of public health importance. For our model we use as input the seasonal pattern of transmission, and make predictions of the consequent infection rate of humans. We then consider how this relationship may be modified by naturally acquired immunity, or by vaccination.

Swiss Tropical Institute embed an empirical description of within-host asexual parasite densities in the model for the infection process to give stochastic predictions of parasite densities as a function of the age of a malaria infection, and model the effect of immunity to asexual blood stages by considering how the distribution of parasite densities is modified in the semi-immune host. This model for immunity provides a straightforward basis for analyzing possible effects of asexual blood-stage vaccines, which can be simulated by a function that reduces parasite densities.

Swiss Tropical Institute analyze the relationship between asexual parasite densities and infectivity to the vector in malariatherapy patients in order to derive a model for the transmission to the mosquito vector. This relationship is used to simulate the transmission-blocking effects of vaccines. This makes use of the simulated population distribution of parasite densities to predict the human infectious reservoir for P. falciparum.

An important simplification in the strategy is to avoid predicting those intermediate variables whose quantitative relationships with epidemiologic outcomes are very uncertain.

Stochastic simulation. Swiss Tropical Institute use individual-based simulations with 5-day time steps to implement our models of P. falciparum epidemiology. This approach makes it possible to model populations of hosts and infections, each characterized by a set of continuous and static variables (parasite densities, infection durations, and immune status variables for individual hosts). This approach can allow more realistic consideration of the stochastic interactions between individual hosts and pathogens than the use of compartment models. A disadvantage is that it is computationally more intensive than the deterministic alternatives. All modules were implemented using the FORTRAN programming language.

Fitting to real data. The uncertainty inherent in complex models needs to be minimized by ensuring that all elements of the model conform as much as possible to reality.

Swiss Tropical Institute has fitted different components of the model to a wealth of datasets from many different ecologic and epidemiologic settings. Our approach leads to implicit statistical models requiring many repeated simulations in order to make approximate parameter estimates. Swiss Tropical Institute was able to fit these using a simulated annealing algorithm, distributing simulations across our local computer network.

Modular structure. The computational demands and complexity of the fitting process meant that it was not feasible to fit our overall model to all the relevant data simultaneously, so different sub-models were fitted separately.

These sub-models were fitted to field data quantifying the relationship between malaria transmission and the outcome of interest. Each sub-model was thus fitted conditionally on the parameter estimates made at earlier stages in the fitting process. This approach made it possible for us to allow for the dynamic effects of the treatment of clinical episodes, an important consideration when STI use the model to predict the impact of interventions.

Equations. In view of the modular structure of the project, the underlying equations of the epidemiologic model are grouped around six main components: (i) infection of the human host; (ii) characteristics of the simulated infections; (iii) infectivity to mosquitoes; (iv) acute morbidity; (v) mortality; (vi) anemia.