Well My Hearties,

Have you all enjoyed the past week, with HMS Great Britain continuing to career around the icy seas from one disaster to another? As if the Northern Rock crash weren't bad enough, one could now be forgiven for believing that, with the Master Gordon Brown at the helm ill-ably assisted by his First Mate Alistair Darling, we were actually out searching for icebergs to hit in some sick attempt to outdo the Titanic. When on taking over the premiership Gordon talked about "open government", few of us realised it would be so open as to allow HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) to put at risk of exposure to the whole world some of the most sensitive data imaginable, including the bank account details of some 25 million people and 7.2 million families.

SWASTIKA: There is a stirring in underground hate-groups. As African

Americans, Jews, Muslims and other non-white groups gain political and media

influence. Due to jealousy, this hatred arises. There is an effort to

re-write the history of the holocaust from Hitler's perspective and have

this distorted historical view-point taught in universities. There is an

increasing desire among anti-semitics to deny the severity of the holocaust

and to portray concentration camps as "camps"

PENTAGON: The Pentagon is becoming popular among Earth Lovers and Pagans.

It has earned a bad reputation in religious circles. Some religious people

think that the pentagon is "of the devil" In fact the Pentagon represents

the Five Elements: Fire, Earth, Air, Water and Spirit. Many

Environmentalist and Earth Lovers and Witches will begin to wear the

Pentagon. This is the beginning of a HUGE back to Earth movement.

Technology will serve NATURE.

RAINBOW: There is a battle over the Rainbow between LGBT communities and

religious communities. Initially, when the LGBT community claimed the

Rainbow, the religious communities developed Rainbow phobia. In some cases

the LGBT community is One with the spiritual community and in this case the

Rainbow is shared. However, now there is a desire [by the religious

community] to re-claim the Rainbow. What's in a Rainbow? Whoever has the

Rainbow gains the majority of political and legal influence and an immense

amount of favor.

CROSS: The cross is losing [but it has not lost it yet]...it's exploitive

power. There may still be attempts to use the cross unethically. However,

the cross is in the process of becoming nothing more then an artistic

artifact...a piece of art to look at in a museum. There is still a great

attempt to keep the cross in use as an instrument of fear. There is an

attempt to make christianity a world religion instead of valuing all of the

cultures and religions of the world.

~Sage Rachel

I had an epiphany about ten years ago when I was invited to a White House picnic for the press corps. I was there for about twenty minutes when it hit me that all these people (liberals and conservatives alike) -- all the members of the press, all the politicians, all the lobbyists -- are interrelated and they all depend on each other. To most of the country the term "inside the Beltway" is a kind of euphemism, but I saw it in action that day.

In Washington no one really has permanent friends or enemies because everyone is so interdependent. The politicians are dependent on the press for good coverage and the press is dependent on the politicians for access. If they can't get access, they've got nothing to report. And that's the danger of the corporatization of media. When I first started working in radio, for example, news wasn't a profit center. News was something you did because your license said you were required to operate in the public interest. Little by little, that's changed. The biggest impetus to making media "go corporate" was the Telecommunications Act of 1996. That allowed the consolidation of broadcast outlets that didn't exist before. The effect has been to make the need for access even more pronounced because there is more pressure to perform and make money. The object before was to fulfill an obligation that those stations and outlets felt they had to their listeners and viewers. The object now is the bottom line.

A nurse flicked on the light at 5:30 A.M. My first day on Ward 57 had begun. "What's your pain on a scale of zero to ten, with ten the worst pain you've ever had?" she asked. Pain was apparently so endemic here it was charted on a meter. "Five," I replied, testing the waters. Morning rounds immediately followed, a raucous rush hour of doctors consulting with night nurses and checking on their patients. A pair of interns entered in bright yellow smocks, face masks, and rubber gloves -- protection against a drug-resistant bacterial infection common to Iraq, Acinetobacter baumannii, which is contracted through open wounds. The young doctors rebandaged my arm. They used tiny tweezers to pull out and replace pieces of cotton string in eight deep holes of my right thigh and buttocks. I screamed ten on the pain scale and received a shot of Demerol.