Hibiscus #1 ©2006 glassfrequency

meditation improves immune system

In recent years, the practice of becoming more mindful and tuning in to ones internal experiences has gained scientific momentum. Multiple research studies have confirmed its beneficial effects in boosting the immune system and thickening brain areas in charge of decision-making and emotion regulation.

A new study recently found initial evidence for mindfulness meditation delaying the progression of HIV, the immune system destroying virus that causes AIDS.

Mindfulness meditation seems to prevent HIV progression by reducing stress and strengthening the immune system of HIV positive adults, said Creswell, the study’s lead author.

“This study provides the first indication that mindfulness meditation stress-management training can have a direct impact on slowing HIV disease progression,” Creswell said.


[via tricycle]

DEBT!

Ian Welsh has predictions about the economy
(and it's not pretty)

[excerpt]

It's bad. It's going to get worse. Governments are going to slash at the wrong time and instead of demanding that private actors clean up their books and take their losses, Treasury and the Fed are doing everything they can to aid and abet Banks and Wall Street in covering up how bad the losses are. This will mean years and years of zombie-banks, fictionally solvent, who actually have very little lending capacity.

If they are completely bailed out, it will be done at the expense of taxpayers, and probably on the basis of largely regressive taxes, and cutbacks in Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid (this is the current Washington (village) consensus, that "entitlement" programs are the problem— not the debt, tax cuts for the rich, the Iraq war and a bloated military budget.)


via The Left Coaster

ANTHRAX!

More questions from Glenn Greenwald

(Be careful, Glenn.)

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remember:

"We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''

~ senior advisor to the president, speaking to Ron Suskind

Black Sites
a NYT Book Review
by Alan Brinkley

THE DARK SIDE
The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals.
by Jane Mayer

---

There is no happy ending to this sordid and shameful story. Despite growing political pressure, despite Supreme Court decisions challenging the detainment policy, despite increasing revelations of the once-hidden program that have shocked the conscience of the world, there is little evidence that the secret camps and the torture programs have been abandoned or even much diminished. New heads of the Defense and Justice Departments have resisted addressing the torture issue, aware that dozens of their colleagues would face legal jeopardy should they do so. And the presidential candidates of both parties have so far shown little interest in confronting the use of torture or recommitting the country to the Geneva Conventions and to America’s own laws and traditions.

~ Alan Brinkley


via Balkinization

Israel Matters

Uri Avnery on Ehud Olmert:
[excerpt]
Olmert is a politician, soul and body, a complete opportunist and a smooth speaker, but lacks charisma and has no vision. He is satisfied with the routine mantra of a democratic, Jewish state.

After coming to power through the accident of Sharon's stroke, he tried at first to look as if he was following the same path. Sharon wanted to turn Israel into a strong, compact state by annexing the settlement blocs and leaving the Arab enclaves to a weak "Palestinian state". For this purpose he carried out the Gaza "separation". Olmert promised to do the same in the West Bank, but gave up the idea almost immediately. Throughout his term of office he invented grandiose schemes at a dizzying rate, with each of them doing little more than providing fuel to his spin-machine.

His incompetence as a leader and commander soon revealed itself. Lebanon War II was a disastrous scandal. The media, which had applauded enthusiastically at the beginning of the war, attacked him after the event for its "faulty execution", but ignored the main failure: the very decision to go to war without a clear and realistic aim and without a political and military strategy.

His incompetence as statesman and strategist was equaled by his competence as politician and survival artist. The fact that he held on for an additional two years after such a monumental failure testifies to his political acumen, but also to the degeneration of the Israeli political system.

After the war he was desperately in need of a new horse to ride. He chose the "political process" - negotiations with the Palestinians, and later on also with the Syrians.

This choice is significant: his sensitive political nose smelled that this is now the really popular thing: not Greater Israel, not the settlements, but peace negotiations and "two states for two peoples" - the more so as this was already popular with the US and Europe.

This week, Arab leaders complained that now "the political process will begin again from Square One." That is a complete misunderstanding: the "process" has never left Square One. It was wholly without content, wholly "spin". The "process" has become a substitute for peace, the idea of a "shelf agreement" a substitute for a real peace agreement. There was never any possibility that Olmert would dare to provoke the settlers.

The final summing-up of the Olmert era: not the smallest real step toward peace has been taken. The historic peace initiative of the Arab League has been buried. The secular, peace-seeking Palestinian leadership has been almost destroyed, paving the way for the Hamas takeover in the Gaza strip, and perhaps also in the West Bank. Not one single hut in a settlement was dismantled, and the settlements have been enlarged everywhere.

In one respect, Olmert resembled Sharon: they both loved money almost as much as power (as do Netanyahu and Barak). They both cultivated close relations with billionaires. They both trailed behind them a cloud of corruption wherever they went.

This did not hurt Sharon. He radiated leadership, and the scandals did not really harm him. He was robust enough to carry them on his back. Olmert, being much more fragile, was crushed by them.

In the end, he has fallen: not because of the criminal war, not because of his lack of seriousness in pursuing peace, not because of the appointment of a Minister of Justice whose aim is to destroy the judicial system, but because of cash in envelopes and free trips abroad.

WHEN FUTURE historians look for a way to characterize this chapter in the annals of the state, one word will readily present itself, the one the writer David Grossman applied in a similar context: hollow.

It was a hollow era. A hole in time. A meaningless period, devoid of content (though not for those who paid the price with their lives, destruction and ruins.)

And that is also the suitable title for Olmert himself. A hollow politician, devoid of vision.

Anyone researching the headlines of these two years will find a lot of drama there. A lot of initiatives. A lot of slogans. A lot of spin. A lot of hot air. And the sum of all this: nothing.

A hollow leader of a hollow party pursuing hollow policies in a hollow political system.

complete article: Hollow Time

from David Byrne:

Brian Eno and I have finished our new record, Everything That Happens Will Happen Today. One of the songs, “Strange Overtones,” will be available free August 4th — and the whole record will be available August 18th.

tour dates

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Radio DavidByrne returns to Sub-Saharan Africa this month.

SECURITY!

It appears that people are (finally) talking about this tech security story from March.

(Be sure to check out the laptop border guide before traveling.)

ANTHRAX!

from Glenn Greenwald:
[excerpt]

We now know -- we knew even before news of Ivins' suicide last night, and know especially in light of it -- that the anthrax attacks didn't come from Iraq or any foreign government at all. It came from our own Government's scientists, from the top Army bioweapons research laboratory.

More significantly, the false reports linking anthrax to Iraq also came from the U.S. Government -- from people with some type of significant links to the same facility responsible for the attacks themselves.

Surely the question of who generated those false Iraq-anthrax reports is one of the most significant and explosive stories of the last decade.

Those fabrications played some significant role -- I'd argue a very major role -- in propagandizing the American public to perceive of Saddam as a threat, and further, propagandized the public to believe that our country was sufficiently threatened by foreign elements that a whole series of radical policies that the neoconservatives both within and outside of the Bush administration wanted to pursue -- including an attack on Iraq and a whole array of assaults on our basic constitutional framework -- were justified and even necessary in order to survive.

MORE

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from a commenter on digby's site:

What does it tell you when the most significant American crimes of the past fifty years have gone effectively unsolved?

Acts which arguably had very specific effects upon the citizens, society, and economy of the United States?

Crimes where the perps (or, the alleged ones) are killed, declared mentally incompetent, or commit suicide?

What does that tell you?

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