7 Color Lagoon

Dave Nalle has just written this article for Blogcritics.org on the continuing battle for the legalization of Marijuana for medical use and research.

The gist of the article is:

Yet again the House of Representatives is considering a vote on the Hinchey-Rohrbacher Amendment, the Wilmot Proviso of the new millennium. It’s an amendment jointly sponsored by a Republican and a Democrat to protect the rights and safety of private users of medical marijuana and exempt them from criminal prosecution. It doesn’t legalize pot and doesn’t even generally decriminalize marijuana. All it does is make sure that those suffering with AIDS, cancer, glaucoma, and other medical conditions won’t be thrown in jail for using the one viable treatment available for their conditions. It restricts federal authorities from interfering with state laws that protect medical marijuana users in the 11 states which have passed medical marijuana laws.

I responded there and continue to sing the praises of an old friend and a fine legislator, Maurice Hinchey (110th Congressional District - Dem. NY). His stand takes sense and compassion and courage. They are not new virtures for him.

Maurice and I became friends when I began photography and journalism in the Hudson Valley in the early 1980s. He was in the NY State Lesgislature and was nice enough to take me with him one day to hang out together in the State Capitol. I made a lot of pictures that I hope helped him in his, then, new career. One set that he pushed the guards to allow me to shoot — looking down at the bicameral floor of the House — became one of my all-time best sellers as a stock photo.

The silliest part of the day was me, still new to photography, weighed down with all the camera bodies and lenses I owned (Nikon Ftns then), watching Maurice to follow him to any meeting, caucus or floor debate. He stood, formally, and headed off the floor. I grabbed my gear and followed at a run. I was loading film, checking meters and barely noticed before holding a camera to my eye that we were in the mens’ room standing in front of the urinals. Unlike recent movies that consider it de rigeur I was totally uninterested in the urinal shot.

Maurice is now in the Federal House of Representatives. I think he is in his 6th term. He is a fine politician in the sense of the word that comes from JFK’s Profiles in Courage.

Amazingly he continues to win in the 110th which runs an increditble gamut of distance and of outlooks from the most conservative and the radical good ole boys to the aging Hippies of Woodstock and the exurban professionals of the Hudson Valley. Throw in some college and university communities and mix it together. The first race was close against one of those anti- everything, radical rightists, law and order freaks. Now he continues to win and the numbers are not so close.

Having a few good men in Washington makes the country continue to work in spite of the dangers of the present Executive branch.

I add from his web site

Maurice Hinchey was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in November 1992 after serving 18 years in the New York State Assembly, including 14 years as Chairman of the Committee on Environmental Conservation. From January 1993 through December 1998, he was a member of the House Committee on Banking and Financial Services and the House Committee on Natural Resources. He was then elected by his colleagues to the House Appropriations Committee and serves on its subcommittees on Agriculture and the Interior. The congressman is also one of 20 members on the bicameral and bipartisan Joint Economic Committee. Additionally, Hinchey serves on the Board of Visitors of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.

Early in his first year in Congress, Hinchey initiated and led the successful effort to preserve Sterling Forest, the last significant area of open space in the New York metropolitan region and an important watershed for southeastern New York and northern New Jersey. He also introduced and saw enacted legislation to create the Hudson River Valley National Heritage Area, the first federal action formally recognizing the fundamentally significant role the people of the Hudson Valley played in the early development of America and its institutions.

Perhaps he is able to cross the red & blue lines of currently dichotomized America because his background was not in an insulated suburb or wealthy, urban barrio:

Born on Manhattan’s Lower West Side in 1938 and raised there and in Saugerties, New York, Hinchey enlisted in the U.S. Navy after high school graduation, serving in the Pacific on the destroyer U.S.S. Marshall. After receiving an honorable discharge, he worked for two years as a laborer in a Hudson Valley cement plant. Hinchey then enrolled in the State University of New York at New Paltz and put himself through college working as a night-shift toll collector on the New York State Thruway. He went on to earn a master’s degree at SUNY New Paltz and did advanced graduate work in public administration and economics at the State University of New York at Albany.

News and politics

The Gestapo put the name and face of Virginia Hall on a “Wanted” poster. The USA gave her the Distinguished Service Cross “… for extraordinary heroism in connection with military operations against the enemy.” She was the only woman awarded the DSS during WWII. Finally there is a new book of her life and a renewed interest in her CIA career.

The book is The Wolves at the Door: The True Story of America’s Greatest Female Spy by Judith L. Pearson. There is an excellent review by Hayden B. Peake in the “unclassified” case studies of the CIA .

This is the quintessential female hero and the kind of CIA (as she became after the SOE and the OSS) agent that the Agency needs to show off in these years foliowing 9/11 and the legacy of too many scandals through the last half of the century.

In the years after the 80s and 90s when the archives of US and British intelligence services became more accessible, the history of this remarkable woman began to be more widely known and the facts (as well as the legends) began to be separated. Ms. Pearson’s biography further clarifies and illuminates the facts. The facts are at least good enough to be fiction. Virginia Hall makes it, according to this biography and the records, as well-fitted for a role-model for girls, women and not just a few men.

She was born in Baltimore and made it known rather early that she did not plan a life as a proper hausfrau. She went to Barnard and Radcliffe (we can assume she was not a dunce) and then continued at the Sorbonne and finally at the Konsularakademie in Vienna. She was intent on being in the foreign service but did not do well in her first exam. She then decided to take a job as a clerk in an embassy overseas. She thought she would gain experience and “the foot in the door”. In 1933 in Turkey, while a clerk in the embassy, she lost her foot in a hunting accident. A prosthesis was made of wood and she returned to the Foreign Service in Venice. There she met not only with any anti-feminist feelings but “… She was told that Department regulations prohibited hiring anyone without the necessary number of appendages”.

She was bored in an embassy job and quit in ‘39. In 1940 she volunteered as an ambulance driver for the French Army. In 1940 the Germans were taking Europe. Hall escaped to England.

Working in the US embassy she met Vera Atkins and her future was changed. The legendary Atkins in the SOE

… had well-placed friends, learned quickly, and was soon helping with recruitment, monitoring agent training, and looking after agent needs while behind the lines in France. F Section supported the resistance in matters of training, logistics, and sabotage. Getting suitable agents to work with the French was a constant problem and Atkins developed a knack for finding good ones.

Hall seemed like a good one. She was bright, a defender of freedom against the German enemy and knew French and German ( albeit with an American accent). In 1941 she entered Vichy France as an American reporter.

For the next 14 months, using various aliases—Bridgette LeContre, Marie, Philomène, Germaine—she worked to organize the resistance, help downed fliers escape, provide courier service for other agents, and obtain supplies for the clandestine presses and the forgers—all this while managing to write articles for the Post and avoid the Gestapo that had penetrated many of the resistance networks.

In late 1942, we are told, she had to flee France when the Germans took all of it following the allied invasion of North Africa. Her only way out was, with her one leg and prosthesis (she called it Cuthbert), to walk through the snow across the Pyrenee Mountains to Spain.

Hall, in the legends, parachuted into France with her prosthesis in her knapsack. The Wolves At The Door shows, instead, that she took a “motorboat” to France where, in 1944,

… Working in disguise as an old woman farmhand, she organized sabotage operations, supported resistance groups as a radio operator and courier, located drop zones for the RAF, and eventually worked with a Jedburgh team to sabotage German military movements. Once again she managed to avoid capture, despite some close calls.

She changed from OSS to CIA in the late 40’s and continued to serve (in the “clandestine services”) until mandatory retirement in 1966 put her to pasture. She had never been allowed to work in a Foreign Service job “in a peacetime station overseas”.

After the war, Hall’s achievements were to be publicly recognized with the presentation of the Distinguished Service Cross by President Harry Truman. She declined the honor, however, preferring to receive the award without publicity from OSS chief Gen. William Donovan, and thus preserve her cover for clandestine work in the postwar era.

I was fascinated by thisCIA site with its unclassified material, good PR (even including a CIA Kids’ Homepage and, to really top it off, the CIA Museum .

The Journal and a PDF download are at the CIA site .
HERE.

More seriously, there is “The World Fact Book” with a plethora of information for the curious, students and, I guess, budding spies.

Why, I wondered, would finding a CIA site, a well-written book review and the story of a forgotten, woman hero(ine) entrance me so much. After all, the CIA has not gotten great press since Viet Nam, the assassination of President Allende (supporting Gen. Pinochet’s mass murders), questions surrounding the Bay of Pigs and President Kennedy’s murder plot and all the other conspiracy theories and facts of the last half of the 20th century.

However, here is the kind of academic “Intelligence Community” of which Jack Ryan and Tom Clancy wove their stories of a mythically superior Agency. This link takes you to an unclassified edition of Historical Perspectives with articles like these:

Building an “Intelligence Literature”
Fifty Years of Studies in Intelligence
Nicholas Dujmovic

Politics and Intelligence
The “Photo Gap” that Delayed Discovery of Missiles in Cuba
Max Holland

CIA in the Classroom
Twenty Years of Officers in Residence
John Hollister Hedley
INTELLIGENCE TODAY AND TOMORROW

Collection and Analysis on Iraq
A Critical look at Britain’s Spy Machinery
Philip H. J. Davies

A PDF version is available for download. It is a glimpse of the workings of real “spies” and, perhaps, a new way to look at an agency that is sorely needed in a world gone somewhat mad yet again. We don’t need the domestic spying that is prevalent under the present administration but we do need the legacy of Virginia Hall and the OSS who fought the second German attempt to destroy civilization just as forces today look to crumble the underpinnings of our world.

books News and politics

There was a recent article on Blogcritics and here “American Soft Power Becomes Extra Crispy”.

This photo fits well. This is the State House in Austin, Texas. A beautiful sunset and lovely grounds. It was the last trip from the US to MX by truck before I was too weak to do it every year. This was a visual good-bye to the US.

I am working on an on-going thread, Expatriate Diary or something such. We shall see…

This was called “News From The Heart: Cardiologist Donates Blood During Surgery” and was picked as a weekly best of show. Take a look at Blogcritics archived article.

NEWS FROM THE HEART

There are many complaints about the medical profession. There are also heroic doctors at work.

I often post about problems with physicians, errors, insensitivity and the omnipresent police-state tactics governing medications and their studies.

There is also the“>heroic doctor, the surgeon, in this case, who interrupted cardiac surgery to give blood for a young patient. It this case, reported by the AP, Dr. Weinstein from Westchester County, New York was operating on an 8 year old patient during a mercy mission to El Salvador. The boy needed his rare B negative blood. The doctor took 20 minutes off to give a pint which was given to the boy while he continued the heart valve surgery.

The 43-year-old Weinstein was on a charity trip with Heart Care International when he did the surgery at Bloom Hospital in San Salvador.

In the May 11 operation, which had begun 12 hours earlier, the boy’s failing aortic valve was replaced with his pulmonary valve and the pulmonary valve was replaced with an artificial valve.

“The surgery had been going well, everything was working great, but he was bleeding a lot and they didn’t have a lot of the medicines we would use to stop the bleeding,” Weinstein said.

They were running out of blood to give the boy, Weinstein said. When he asked the boy’s blood type, he discovered they were both B-negative.

Weinstein, who said he was an occasional blood donor — “but never like this” — said the interruption to donate a pint lasted about 20 minutes.

Credit must be given where credit is due. The medical profession is far from bereft of compassion and their oath, no matter how far back the Greek origins, remains alive.

Over the past two years I have written a few articles for Blogcritics, Desicritics and for my health related blog, Health Reports that have been critical of procedures, medicating, fear of federal authorities or insensitivity. I do not believe that that is really the norm but that they often work to the best of their abilities and do remember their original (we hope) commitment to healing and alleviating of pain. Some, however, are more committed than others. Dr. Weinstein of Westchester County, New York is such a doctor.

My cousin in Jerusalem who is ultra-religious sent me the news report to bolster his repeated attempts to make me proud of Jews in general and of the religion. Since I am not religious I do not attribute this doctor’s action to his religion as much as to his personal morality and dedication which can be found in all manner of religious flavors.

Another recent cardiological report of interest is in a BBC reportLiving Organ Transplant. The article describes the first ever transplantation of a heart that had been kept beating from the time of its “harvest” to the surgical implantation. The procedure was developed and accomplished in the U.K.

Two more valuable medical sites of extreme interest are: Cardiology“Presented and explained by Robert J. Matthews, MD. Dr. Matthews even answers questions about symptoms and treatments individually from the site.

Another is Heart Linx on the MD Linx Network.

In my health related blog, Health Reports I also noted that I remain opposed to a transplant for me. There would be too much time spent waiting for a donor heart near a modern hospital (less if this procedure is adopted), too much danger and pain in the operation (I already survived a by-pass and 6 or 7 angioplasties) and the anti-rejection period and medications would mean more time hanging out in an urban atmosphere in the US with the same problems, essentially, as an AIDS patient — a sponge for any disease.

I chose the CardioVascular Institute at Baptist Hospital in Miami partly because (originally) they did not offer transpants. I remained because of the success and level of care I have received.

It does point out for cardiac, stroke and other “popular” disease sufferers that the secret is to hang in there as long as possible because the advances are coming with greater frequency. The modern world does have wonders left up its sleeve. Hopefully the religious zealots and Luddites will not find any way to slow these advances.

Honors are great. Maybe even honorable.

Blogcritics this week picked News From The Heart: Cardiologist Donates Blood During Surgery as a Pick of the Week.

Thanks go to Lisa McKay, a fine Blogcritics editor, whose blog, Between Wisdom and Murder is well worth a read.

Check it out there or on my health-related blog, Health Reports.

Photo from Bacalar, Mexico © Beringer-Dratch.

I was reading on Blogcritics about KFC . “KFC Raises Eyebrows, Cholesterol With New Offering” writes Pete Blackwell. He writes, amusingly, “It’s tough… out there in fast food land.” Perhaps the pseudo-chicken is crispy. But is it the American soft power that was once made of the Statue of Liberty, the American Dream, Levis and the vision of success in business?

American soft power that once made the world yearn to come to America and to emulate its’ ideals has become crispy and sometimes rancid. The Statue of Liberty needs a 1400 mile to protect her. Levis are no longer banned in Russia and the rest of the world has knocked them off or made designer versions. Mexico has tequila and Mayan ruins. Italy offers style. Our insistent powers of attraction and of the American dream have soured into Blackhawk helicopters and smart bombs, Guantanamo and Alcatraz.

The new soft power of the most powerful nation on Earth is fast food, junk food, sweet drinks, convenience foods and abominable movies of sex, violence, superficiality and money-worship. In the world of junk food,

Competition is fierce and marketing budgets are immense. In an attempt to get a leg up, fast food outlets are forced to continually update their menus with new—or apparently new—items.

Now come the new huge servings for the newly huge Americans: “… Hardees has … their new gigantic hamburgers and Burger King … their Enormous Omelet Sandwich. Talk about truth in advertising: the latter fare, which consists of bacon, sausage, cheese and eggs on a bun, weighs in at 730 calories, 47 grams of fat (including 87% of the daily allotment of saturated fat) nearly 2,000 mg of sodium and 138% of the RDA for cholesterol.” (For me this is a day’s worth of salt, a week’s worth of cholesterol and 1.5 days of fat.) This is America. It has become a symbol, a icon of the American Dream with gas guzzlers, smart bombs, border walls and surly security people. America is rewriting itself. It is finding new types of “soft power” with which to influence the world.

This is America’s legacy to the world that once looked to the Liberty Bell, Elvis Presley, Babe Ruth and Hollywood. Our soft power base has gone from the Dream to breast-like golden arches, the kid on a Dominos motorbike and a president spying on all his own citizens.

“>Soft Power is, as Joseph Nye, Jr, the originator of the term, writes:

… the ability to get what you want by attracting and persuading others to adopt your goals. It differs from hard power, the ability to use the carrots and sticks of economic and military might to make others follow your will. Both hard and soft power are important in the war on terrorism, but attraction is much cheaper than coercion, and an asset that needs to be nourished.

What can the government do? Soft power grows out of both U.S. culture and U.S. policies. From Hollywood to higher education, civil society does far more to present the United States to other peoples than the government does. Hollywood often portrays consumerism, sex and violence, but it also promotes values of individualism, upward mobility and freedom (including for women). These values make America attractive to many people overseas, but some fundamentalists see them as a threat.

Contrasting views often exist side by side in the same country. For example, Iranian officials excoriate America as a “great satan” while teenagers secretly watch smuggled Hollywood videos.

Peter Ackerman, the chairman for the International Center For Non Violent Conflict in 2004 spoke to an open forum on soft power,

I think it’s fair to say we are all here today for a common reason: because we care about democracy and human rights, and we want to explore new policy approaches. We typically see policy options through the dichotomous lens of hard and soft power. Hard power is the use of military force and economic measures, often in response to short and intermediate crises; its policies are generally more coercive. Soft power is what makes America’s ideas and society more attractive, in the words of Joe Nye, and includes measures such as cultural exchanges and public diplomacy. Soft power is applied consistently over the long term, and is designed to encourage cooperation and accommodation.

The debate over the merits of each form of this power is decades, if not centuries, old. It has intensified certainly since 9/11. One side declares soft power irrelevant — these are the enemies to whom the U.S. will never be attractive; while the other side claims our military initiatives could never succeed with the world hating America. Yet the debate is really two sides of the same coin: that foreign policy initiatives emanating from the United States or other major powers are all that counts in world affairs.

In 2005 Carl Bildt in the Financial Times laments the tensions building in Europe to negate the positive aspects of its soft power under the post 9/11 worries about security in his article, “Europe must keep its ’soft power” from June 1, 2005

in recent years, Europe has prided itself on the perceived success of its so-called “soft power”.Indeed, there is no way to explain the swift and smooth transformation of societies from Estonia to Bulgaria without referring to both the magnetism of the EU and the model it was able to provide. Hard power can certainly bring down regimes, as Iraq demonstrated, but in order to build new regimes, soft power is largely required.

But there is now a serious risk that Europe will curb its soft powers just when they are perhaps most needed. Such a development would have grave consequences for the stability of the wider region.

Here in Mexico we see the results of America’s exports of addictive foods that might look cheap in America but are quite expensive here. They are bringing America an epidemic of obesity, diabetes, cancer, heart disease and stroke. Yet they are one of our major exports visible to others. In Mexico the diabetes rates and level of heart problems increase. Check out a few Blogcritics articles on the subject:

“Burger King: Eat Like a Pig” by Screen Rant.

A review of Eric Schloesser’s book, Fast Food Nation

Eric Schlosser delves deep into the history, practices and culture of America’s love-affair with fast food, and the lasting impact (both economic and otherwise) that the obsession creates. Schlosser’s pen is wide ranging, from the cattle farms, feedlots and agribusiness of yesterday, today and tomorrow to fast-food’s impact on labor practices and the meat-packing industry (guaranteed to make you view vegetarianism with a more sympathetic eye). His comprehensive tome examines the history and development of fast-food, including such varied and little known subtopics such as the taste-enhancing chemists (housed quietly in the New Jersey industrial strip) that add the final filip to the industry’s special sauces. Very little escapes his gaze, including elegant factoids such as the profit margins on soft drinks (very, very high, particularly when you “supersize” your drink) to internal McDonalds’ discussions on the brand merit of keeping the golden arches (The gist is that they resemble female breasts…

And the recent “The Healthy Skeptic: I Hate The Food Police And You Should Too” bySal Marinello.

The fast food controversy is funny if serious. The exportation of Ronald MacDonald with a Mexican accent is less than evil but the fact remains that the world has begun to see us not as a bastion of freedom and opportunity but as a purveyor of greasy food, bad taste and unbridled lust for profit. And that is soft power. When it comes to the real stuff — stealth bombers, cruise missiles, satellite surveillance and black ops against any government that dares to disagree; then we are losing our place on the world’s stage where the hero stands and there are always new would-be heroes ready to woo the audience with their values.

Photo © Beringer-Dratch. Mime in New Orleans before the deluge.

I have trouble passing up a great astro-photograph. This one of the surface of the sun spewing flares and fired with the nuclear fires of heaven (surely our own private star would not spew the fires of hell). Photo © by NASA.

The explanation from the Astronomical Picture of the Day is

Explanation: It was a quiet day on the Sun. The above image shows, however, that even during off days the Sun’s surface is a busy place. Shown in ultraviolet light, the relatively cool dark regions have temperatures of thousands of degrees Celsius. Large sunspot group AR 9169 is visible as the bright area near the horizon. The bright glowing gas flowing around the sunspots has a temperature of over one million degrees Celsius. The reason for the high temperatures is unknown but thought to be related to the rapidly changing magnetic field loops that channel solar plasma. Sunspot group AR 9169 moved across the Sun during 2000 September and decayed in a few weeks.

The American Health Association has added an important new site to its’ web pages. This one is on heart attacks and complements the original page as well as the pages and links about stroke risks, prevention, treatment and post-stroke life.

The“> new page is in both English and Spanish.

The AHA and the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute have begun a campaign called “Act in Time”,

The American Heart Association and the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute have launched a new “Act in Time” campaign to increase people’s awareness of heart attack and the importance of calling 9-1-1 immediately at the onset of heart attack symptoms. Find the links here.
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Dial 9-1-1 Fast
Heart attack and stroke are life-and-death emergencies — every second counts. If you see or have any of the listed symptoms, immediately call 9-1-1. Not all these signs occur in every heart attack or stroke. Sometimes they go away and return. If some occur, get help fast! Today heart attack and stroke victims can benefit from new medications and treatments unavailable to patients in years past. For example, clot-busting drugs can stop some heart attacks and strokes in progress, reducing disability and saving lives. But to be effective, these drugs must be given relatively quickly after heart attack or stroke symptoms first appear. So again, don’t delay — get help right away!

The stroke page is also a help and is available with a clicken Español.

These are more than worth a look. They contain the knowledge to help save your life or keep it from being weakened, shortened and worsened. I know because I took too long to get to the hospital when I had a heart attack and there was extensive damage to the heart that might have been prevented. The result has been twelve difficult years of fighting to survive heart failure, coronary artery disease, angina and cardiac rhythm dysfunctions.

Don”t follow in my footsteps. Act In Time!.