I'm underemployed, recurringly housebound with insanely painful now-sporadic (when I have meds) gout, an enlarged heart, and other health problems, particularly including lifelong recurring severe clinical depression. See here for a major crisis. I'm also sometimes available to some degree as a paid writer or researcher. This is a previous update on my situation & this -- and this from December 19th, 2005 update.
If you like my blog, and would like to help keep me find and stay in a new place long enough to get my disability claim approved, and maybe even afford food and prescriptions --
you are welcome to do so via the PayPal button. In return: free blog! Thank you muchly muchly. Only you can help! (I'll just handle preventing forest fires while you're busy for a moment.) So. LATEST UPDATES here and here.
New Option! Show your support by subscribing for $5/mo.! Free koala bear included! They're so cute!
Additional new options! $25/month Supporter subscription!
$50/month Patron subscription!
Sanely free of McCarthyite calling anyone a "traitor" since 2001!
Commenting Rules: Only comments that are courteous and respectful of other commenters will be allowed. Period. You must register to post; this takes about thirty seconds, and you need give no information other than a name/handle you will be known by; just stick gibberish into the line about creating a blog, and forget about it; you'll be done in under 30 seconds.
Also: posting a spam-type URL will be grounds for deletion.
"The brain is wider than the sky, For, put them side by side,
The one the other will include With ease, and you beside"
-- Emily Dickinson
"We will pursue peace as if there is no terrorism and fight terrorism as if there is no peace."
-- Yitzhak Rabin
"I have thought it my duty to exhibit things as they are, not as they ought to be."
-- Alexander Hamilton
"The stakes are too high for government to be a spectator sport."
-- Barbara Jordan
"Under democracy, one party always devotes its chief energies to
trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule --
and both commonly succeed, and are right."
-- H. L. Mencken
"Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom.
It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves."
-- William Pitt
"The only completely consistent people are the dead."
-- Aldous Huxley
"I have had my solutions for a long time; but I do not yet know how I am to arrive at them."
-- Karl F. Gauss
"Whatever evils either reason or declamation have imputed to extensive empire,
the power of Rome was attended with some beneficial consequences to mankind;
and the same freedom of intercourse which extended the vices, diffused likewise
the improvements of social life."
-- Edward Gibbon
"Augustus was sensible that mankind is governed by names; nor was he deceived in his
expectation, that the senate and people would submit to slavery, provided they were
respectfully assured that they still enjoyed their ancient freedom."
-- Edward Gibbon
"There exists in human nature a strong propensity to depreciate the advantages, and to magnify
the evils, of the present times."
-- Edward Gibbon
"Our youth now loves luxuries. They have bad manners, contempt for authority.
They show disrespect for elders and they
love to chatter instead of exercise.
Children are now tyrants, not the servants, of their households. They
no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents,
chatter before company, gobble up their food, and tyrannize
their teachers."
-- Socrates
"Before impugning an opponent's motives, even when they legitimately may be impugned, answer his arguments."
-- Sidney Hook
"Idealism, alas, does not protect one from ignorance, dogmatism, and foolishness."
-- Sidney Hook
"Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted."
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
"We take, and must continue to take, morally hazardous actions to preserve our civilization.
We must exercise our power. But we ought neither to believe that a nation is capable of perfect
disinterestedness in its exercise, nor become complacent about particular degrees of interest
and passion which corrupt the justice by which the exercise of power is legitimized."
-- Reinhold Niebuhr
"Faced with the choice of all the land without a Jewish state or a Jewish state without all the
land, we chose a Jewish state without all the land."
-- David Ben-Gurion
"...the proscribing any citizen as unworthy the public confidence by laying upon him
an incapacity of being called to offices of trust and emolument, unless he profess or renounce this
or that religious opinion, is depriving him injuriously of those privileges and advantages
to which, in common with his fellow citizens, he has a natural right; that it tends also
to corrupt the principles of that very religion it is meant to encourage, by bribing,
with a monopoly of worldly honours and emoluments, those who will externally profess
and conform to it; that though indeed these are criminals who do not withstand such
temptation, yet neither are those innocent who lay the bait in their way; that the
opinions of men are not the object of civil government, nor under its jurisdiction;
that to suffer the civil magistrate to intrude his powers into the field of opinion
and to restrain the profession or propagation of principles on supposition of their
ill tendency is a dangerous fallacy, which at once destroys all religious liberty,
because he being of course judge of that tendency will make his opinions the rule of
judgment, and approve or condemn the sentiments of others only as they shall square
with or differ from his own; that it is time enough for the rightful purposes of civil
government for its officers to interfere when principles break out into overt acts
against peace and good order; and finally, that truth is great and will prevail if
left to herself; that she is the proper and sufficient antagonist to error, and has
nothing to fear from the conflict unless by human interposition disarmed of her
natural weapons, free argument and debate; errors ceasing to be dangerous when it is
permitted freely to contradict them.
-- Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, Thomas Jefferson
"We don't live just by ideas. Ideas are part of the mixture of customs and practices,
intuitions and instincts that make human life a conscious activity susceptible to
improvement or debasement. A radical idea may be healthy as a provocation;
a temperate idea may be stultifying. It depends on the circumstances. One of the most
tiresome arguments against ideas is that their "tendency" is to some dire condition --
to totalitarianism, or to moral relativism, or to a war of all against all."
-- Louis Menand
"The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their neutrality in times of moral crisis."
-- Dante Alighieri
"He too serves a certain purpose who only stands and cheers."
-- Henry B. Adams
"The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the
poor to beg in the streets, steal bread, or sleep under a bridge."
-- Anatole France
"When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle."
-- Edmund Burke
"Education does not mean that we have become certified experts in business or mining or botany or journalism or epistemology;
it means that through the absorption of the moral, intellectual, and esthetic inheritance of the race we have come to
understand and control ourselves as well as the external world; that we have chosen the best as our associates both in spirit
and the flesh; that we have learned to add courtesy to culture, wisdom to knowledge, and forgiveness to understanding."
-- Will Durant
"Glimpses do ye seem to see of that mortally intolerable truth; that all deep, earnest thinking is
but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea; while the wildest
winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the treacherous, slavish shore?"
-- Herman Melville
"The most important political office is that of the private citizen."
-- Louis D. Brandeis
"If we desire respect for the law, we must first make the law respectable."
-- Louis D. Brandeis
"We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both."
-- Louis D. Brandeis
"It is an error to suppose that books have no influence; it is a slow influence, like flowing water carving out a canyon,
but it tells more and more with every year; and no one can pass an hour a day in the society of sages and heroes without
being lifted up a notch or two by the company he has kept."
-- Will Durant
"When you write, you’re trying to transpose what you’re thinking into something that is less like an annoying drone and more like a piece of music."
-- Louis Menand
"Sex is a continuum."
-- Gore Vidal
"I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should
make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibit the free exercise thereof, thus building a wall of separation between church and state."
-- Thomas Jefferson, letter to the Baptists of Danbury, Connecticut, 1802.
"The sum of our religion is peace and unanimity, but these can scarcely stand unless we define as little as possible,
and in many things leave one free to follow his own judgment, because there is great obscurity in many matters, and
man suffers from this almost congenital disease that he will not give in when once a controversy is started, and
after he is heated he regards as absolutely true that which he began to sponsor quite casually...."
-- Desiderius Erasmus
"Are we to have a censor whose imprimatur shall say what books may be sold, and what we may buy? And who is thus to dogmatize religious opinions for our citizens? Whose foot is to be the measure to which ours are all to be cut or stretched? Is a priest to be our inquisitor, or shall a layman, simple as ourselves, set up his reason as the rule of what we are to read, and what we must disbelieve?"
-- Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to N. G. Dufief, Philadelphia bookseller, 1814
"We are told that it is only people's objective actions that matter, and their subjective feelings are of no importance. Thus pacifists, by obstructing the war effort,
are 'objectively' aiding the Nazis; and therefore the fact that they may be personally hostile to Fascism is irrelevant. I have been guilty of saying this myself more than once. The same argument is applied to Trotskyism. Trotskyists are often credited, at any rate by Communists, with being active and conscious agents of Hitler; but when you point out the many and obvious reasons why this is unlikely to be true,
the 'objectively' line of talk is brought forward again. To criticize the Soviet Union helps Hitler: therefore 'Trotskyism is Fascism'. And when this has been established, the accusation of conscious treachery is usually repeated.
This is not only dishonest; it also carries a severe penalty with it. If you disregard people's motives, it becomes much harder to foresee their actions."
-- George Orwell, "As I Please," Tribune, 8 December 1944
"Wouldn't this be a great world if insecurity and desperation made us more attractive? If 'needy' were a turn-on?"
-- "Aaron Altman," Broadcast News
"The great thing about human language is that it prevents us from sticking to the matter at hand."
-- Lewis Thomas
"To be ignorant of what happened before you were born is to be ever a child. For what is man's lifetime unless the memory of past events is woven with those of earlier times?"
-- Cicero
"Reputation is what other people know about you. Honor is what you know about yourself."
-- Lois McMaster Bujold, A Civil Campaign
"Remember, Robin: evil is a pretty bad thing."
-- Batman
"Being evil is not a full-time job."
-- James Lileks
Gary Farber is now a licensed Double Super-Secret Master Pundit.
He does not always refer to himself in the third person.
Did he mention he was presently single?
The lutefisk is dead. Donate via the donation button on the top left
or I'll shoot this gefilte fish.
No, really, I seriously need the help at present. And I hate asking.
Current Total # of Donations Since Blog Began: 585
Subscribers to date at $5/month: 29 sign-ups; 14 cancellations; Total= 17
Supporter subscribers to date at $25/month: 6 sign-ups; 2 cancellation; Total= 4
Patron subscribers to date at $50/month: 8 sign-ups; 4 cancellations; Total= 4
And you may find yourself living in a shotgun shack
And you may find yourself in another part of the world
Farber's First Fundamental of Blogging:
If your idea of making an insightful point is to make fun of people's
names, or refer to them by rilly clever labels such as "The Big Me" or "The Shrub,"
chances are high that I'm not reading your blog. The same applies if you refer
to a group of people by disparaging terms such as "the Donks" or "the pals." (Note: I have to say I don't give that much of a damn any more.)
Farber's Second Fundamental of Blogging:
The more interested you are in scoring a "point" for a political "team," a "side," than in exploring the validity or value of an idea, the less interested I am in what you're saying.
(Note: Partially suspended for the Duration.)
Farber's Third Fundamental of Blogging:
If you see a link on another blog, and use it, credit the blog.
Some places I go:
[weblogs, sites, and columns]
People I've known and still miss include Isaac Asimov, rich brown, Charles Burbee, F. M. "Buzz" Busby, Terry Carr, A. Vincent Clarke, George Alec Effinger,
Bill & Sherry Fesselmeyer, George Flynn, John Milo "Mike" Ford. John Foyster, Jay Haldeman, Chuch Harris, Mike Hinge, Lee Hoffman, Terry Hughes, Damon Knight, Ross Pavlac, Bruce Pelz, Elmer Perdue, Tom Perry,
Larry Propp, Bill Rotsler, Art Saha, Bob Shaw, Martin Smith, Harry Stubbs, Bob Tucker, Reed Waller, Harry Warner, Jr., Jack Williamson, Walter A. Willis, Susan Wood, Kate Worley, and Roger Zelazny.
It's just a start.
And She of whom I must write someday.
You Like Me, You Really Like Me
...Darn: I saw that Gary had commented on this thread, and thought: oh. my. god. Perfect storm. Unstoppable cannonball, immovable object.
-- Hilzoy
Where would the blogosphere be without the Guardian? Guardian fish-barreling is now a venerable tradition. Yet even within this tradition, I don't believe there has ever been a more extensive and thorough essay than this one, from Gary Farber's fine blog. Gary appears to have examined every single thing that Guardian/Observer columnist Mary Ridell has ever written. He ties it all together, reaches inevitable conclusion. An archive can be a weapon.
-- Dr. Frank
Isn't Gary a cracking blogger, apropos of nothing in particular?
-- Alison Scott
I usually read you and Patrick several times a day, and I always get something from them. You've got great links, intellectually honest commentary, and a sense of humor. What's not to like?
-- Ted Barlow
...writer[s] I find myself checking out repeatedly when I'm in the mood to play follow-the-links. They're not all people I agree with all the time, or even most of the time, but I've found them all to be thoughtful writers, and that's the important thing, or should be.
-- Tom Tomorrow
Amygdala - So much stuff it reminds Unqualified Offerings that UO sometimes thinks of Gary Farber as "the liberal Instapundit." -- Jim Henley
I look at it almost every day. I can't follow all the links, but I read most of your pieces. The blog format really seems to suit you. It also suits me; I am not a news junkie, so having smart people like you ferret out the interesting stuff and leave it where I can find it is wonderful.
-- Lydia Nickerson
Gary is certainly a non-idiotarian 'liberal'...
-- Perry deHaviland
...the thoughtful and highly intelligent Gary Farber... My first reaction was that I definitely need to appease Gary Farber of Amygdala, one of the geniuses of our age.
-- Brad deLong
My friend Gary Farber at Amygdala is the sort of liberal for whom I happily give three cheers. [...] Damned incisive blogging....
-- Midwest Conservative Journal
If I ever start a paper, Clueless writes the foreign affairs column, Layne handles the city beat, Welch has the roving-reporter job, Tom Tomorrow runs the comic section (which carries Treacher, of course). MediaMinded runs the slots - that's the type of editor I want as the last line of defense. InstantMan runs the edit page - and you can forget about your Ivins and Wills and Friedmans and Teepens on the edit page - it's all Blair, VodkaP, C. Johnson, Aspara, Farber, Galt, and a dozen other worthies, with Justin 'I am smoking in such a provocative fashion' Raimondo tossed in for balance and comic relief.
Who wouldn't buy that paper? Who wouldn't want to read it? Who wouldn't climb over their mother to be in it?
-- James Lileks
Gary is a perceptive, intelligent, nice guy. Some of the stuff he comes up with is insightful, witty, and stimulating. And sometimes he manages to make me groan.
-- Charlie Stross
One of my issues with many poli-blogs is the dickhead tone so many bloggers affect to express their sense of righteous indignation. Gary Farber's thoughtful leftie takes on the world stand in sharp contrast with the usual rhetorical bullying. Plus, he likes "Pogo," which clearly attests to his unassaultable good taste.
-- oakhaus.com
Gary Farber is a principled liberal....
-- Bill Quick, The Daily Pundit
I read Amygdala...with regularity, as do all sensible websurfers.
-- Jim Henley, Unqualified Offerings
Okay, he is annoying, but he still posts a lot of good stuff.
-- Avedon Carol, The Sideshow
The only trouble with reading Amygdala is that it makes me feel like such a slacker. That Man Farber's a linking, posting, commenting machine, I tell you!
-- John Robinson, Sore Eyes
Jaysus. I saw him do something like this before, on a thread about Israel. It was pretty brutal. It's like watching one of those old WWF wrestlers grab an opponent's
face and grind away until the guy starts crying. I mean that in a nice & admiring way, you know.
-- Fontana Labs, Unfogged
We read you Gary Farber! We read you all the time! Its just that we are lazy with our blogroll. We are so very very lazy. We are always the last ones to the party but we always have snazzy bow ties.
-- Fafnir, Fafblog!
Gary Farber you are a genius of mad scientist proportions. I will bet there are like huge brains growin in jars all over your house.
-- Fafnir, Fafblog!
Gary Farber is the hardest working man in show blog business. He's like a young Gene Hackman blogging with his hair on fire, or something.
-- Belle Waring, John & Belle Have A Blog
I bow before the shrillitudinousness of Gary Farber, who has been blogging like a fiend.
-- Ted Barlow, Crooked Timber
Gary Farber only has two blogging modes: not at all, and 20 billion interesting posts a day [...] someone on the interweb whose opinions I can trust....
-- Belle Waring, John & Belle Have A Blog
Gary Farber! Jeez, the guy is practically a blogging legend, and I'm always surprised at the breadth of what he writes about.
-- PZ Meyers, Pharyngula
Gary Farber takes me to task, in a way befitting the gentleman he is.
-- Stephen Green, Vodkapundit
OH, SYRIA, OH, SYRIA: Jonathan Rauch points out that
"On January 1, five newly appointed countries began their two-year terms on the U.N. Security Council. The lucky winners: Bulgaria, Cameroon, Guinea, Mexico, and Syria. Those five joined the council's five permanent members and its five other rotating members in the United Nations' most prestigious job, which includes enforcing Security Council Resolution 1373. That resolution, as you may recall, was adopted shortly after the September 11 terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington. It calls upon all U.N. members to 'refrain from providing any form of support, active or passive, to entities or persons involved in terrorist acts.' It also—
"I think you have to deal with martyrdom. If you were to examine Islamic history you would find emirs and sultans and shahs much preferring to deal with a dead martyr than a live enemy."
[...]
"I think the only way you're going to defuse Islamic radicalism is the way Islamic radicalism has traditionally been defused, and that is on the battlefield. I don't think you're really going to wage a tit for tat propaganda campaign or any type of covert action. I think that won't work and will look fairly silly. The key here is you have to quell the virulent anti-Americanism that has grown up in the last decade and that you see expressed not only by al Qaeda, but also everywhere throughout the Middle East, particularly in places like Egypt and Saudi Arabia, who are nominally American allies. The primary jet-fuel for that anti-Americanism has been the impression, more or less justified, that the United States has been on the run."
[on whether the CIA had been "leashed"] "Well, would that U.S. intelligence ever met terrorists, let alone worried about hurting them or compromising our own morality recruiting them. So I think it's a bit premature to start getting terribly excited about whether the United States is going to start taking the gloves off. First they have to find the guys. [...] But realistically, I think this is a diversion from discussing the real issues of intelligence reform. It's camouflage. Some in the Agency love to talk about this, because it moves the conversation away from the real issues of whether the hundreds of officers they've got are really doing anything substantive, or whether they're just on the dole. That's the real conversation, not whether you need to employ dirty tactics. There is perhaps a time and place for some of these tactics, though not often. But it's really a tertiary issue when you've got this level of incompetence. It's like talking to a man who's got brain cancer about his head cold."
"Middle aged men can have sex as many times as they like without increasing their risk of having a stroke, according to research.
Scientists also discovered that frequent sexual intercourse can actually reduce the risk of suffering a fatal heart attack."
I'm reminded that in 1981, after being diagnosed with prostatitis, I was solemnly advised by my doctor that, to lessen symptoms of urinary frequency, I should have sex as frequently as possible.
"Please, it's just for medicinal purposes, really."
THOSE FLYING CHINESE BUGS: Considerably more detail in the Washington Post's version, including this insight into how the Chinese military are still doing business:
"After the listening devices were discovered, Western sources said, 20 Chinese air force officers and two officials from China Air Supply Import & Export Corp., which was involved in negotiations for the jet, were detained. Chinese sources said they were being investigated for negligence and for corruption – the American firms were paid about $10 million for the refitting job but China doled out $30 million."
[also the plane was supposed to be nicer than Air Force One and could]
"accommodate about 100 people in beige leather chairs that could be converted into beds. Larger, one-hour oxygen canisters replaced the 20-minute type used on most aircraft. And the new presidential suite consisted of a bedroom, sitting room and a bath with a shower. The firms also added a 48-inch television set, satellite communications and advanced avionics."
IS THIS THING ON?: Some e-mails to let me know that you read this page on occasion would be encouraging just now. Failing that, perhaps you'd like to e-mail me to tell me what a wretched site this is, how the colors hurt your eyes, I obviously know nothing about HTML, my opinions are banal, ill-chosen, and puerile, my expression juvenile, my choice of links inane and chaotic, I add no insight into anything, and the whole thing is redundant given the fifty-thousand other blogs now out there, and that, in fact, blogging is just so so 1998, and why have I leapt onto something whose edge bled out back in the twentieth century ?
"A Jewish friend of mine recently told me the joke of the Jewish guy on a desert island. After several years, he was discovered. He was proud of his survival and showed his liberators around the island. They were perplexed to see that he had actually built two temples to worship in. So they asked him why. 'Oh, that one I worship in,' he replied. 'That other one I won’t set foot in.' I couldn’t help thinking of that joke reading the New York Times this morning. This story was laugh-out-loud hilarious."
EXPATRIATES: Matt Welch has a nice little essay on what can happen to the analyses of expatriates, and others in an "isolated feedback-loop of a community":
"Living out in the world is an experience I can never recommend highly enough. But inevitably, as months turn into years, most expatriates end up defining themselves in opposition to the last frightful thing they remember about living in the mother country. Stumble around a beatiful downtown square swigging an open bottle of delicious wine, and you tend to reflect how your hometown is architecturally bland and legally puritanical. If you left at a time of recession, or during a period of particularly nasty politics, that image tends to become frozen in time, as if the U.S. was as static as, well, Europe."
[...]
"keep in mind that intellectual conformity within like-minded groups is a distinctly non-partisan phenomenon. The same people [...] could just as easily get it dead wrong next time, if they choose to gloat and preen instead of rigorously challenging their own assumptions."
[...]
"the kind of closed systems you'll find there almost always end up blocking out new ideas. If there are any positive outcomes from this season of enclave-bashing, surely one of them must be that the feedback loops on the Left have been forever infiltrated by thousands of new thinkers who aren't easily dismissed as water-carriers for the Empire. Another, hopefully, will be the rejection of bullshit ideas that have for too long received a political bye from progressives who know better. All in all, it's a grand opportunity for healthier debate to win out over wound-licking alienation."
"LONDON (Reuters) - China has said its intelligence officers found more than 20 spying devices in a Boeing 767 meant to become President Jiang Zemin's official plane after it was delivered from the U.S., the Financial Times said on Saturday. Citing Chinese officials, the newspaper said it was unclear when the aircraft was fitted with the bugs, said to be tiny and operated by satellite.
The devices were detected after the plane emitted a strange static whine during test flights in China in September, shortly after it was delivered. One device was found in a lavatory and another in the headboard of the presidential bed.
The discovery came ahead of a planned summit between President Bush and Jiang in Beijing next month. The Chinese president was said to be furious about the find, the FT said."
MEMORANDUM OF TELEPHONE CONVERSATION WITH THE PRESIDENT IN NEWPORT
The President telephoned with regard to giving the mileage figure in our reply to the Soviet note. The President said he didn't know how we can avoid this. The President said what it must be is that Defense and CIA must think they have tracking radar station the Soviets know nothing about.
The Secretary said most of it is carried on by another Government. The Secretary said it seemed to him if we make the flat assertion that the plane was not over their territorial land we will be asked the same question as if we say it never got within 30 miles, and the Secretary said it weakened our note considerably not to specify.
The President said that is the way he feels, but said the only thing is if the station is there--but the President said we wouldn't have to say anything else.
The Secretary said it seemed to him we can always say it came from direct communication with the plane and the Soviets can't prove or disprove it one way or the other.
The President asked if we didn't have direct communication.
The Secretary said no; the plane was under orders to communicate if they were in danger but did not do so.
The President said it must have been hit by a sidewinder type of thing. The President said he personally did not see the percentage in saying the plane did not go over Soviet territorial waters and not being able to say it never went within roughly 30 miles.
The Secretary said it weakens our case if we don't do this.
The President asked what their argument against this was.
The Secretary said they just say it might compromise us, but if we make a flat assertion it didn't go over territory, he couldn't see the difference.
The President said if we say that and they say they had a tracking station and sent fighters to check up, will we have to say how we know they didn't go closer than 30 miles if you have somebody like the World Court involved would you have to say how you knew this.
The Secretary said only up to a certain point.
The President said here is what he thinks--there is a weakness in the argument of the Air Force and Intelligence. The President said they say we never got out of international waters and never went over Soviet territory and how can you say that if you don't know where the plane was. The President said it seemed to him their argument is silly.
The Secretary said that is just what we have been arguing with them.
The President asked the Secretary to pass along his view to Defense and CIA.
"In explaining why Soviet Union did not intend war and believed world would eventually go Communist and our grandchildren live under Communism, he said this was because Soviet system was better and when this was demonstrated even we would adopt it. He then launched into long harangue, much of which along usual Communist lines. He referred to fact that our steel mills were producing at only half capacity and said this could never happen in Soviet Union and was fatal handicap to US."
[...]
"He was utterly convinced Soviets would exceed our production per capita by 1970. He mentioned unemployment in US and referred to his conversation with American labor leaders in San Francisco.(3) He contemptuously referred to them as having sold out to capitalism. He realized I would not agree with such appraisal but that was his view."
I REMINDED MYSELF that the Avalon Project is a treasure trove of historic documents. F'rinstance, from Ambassador Llewyllen Thompson's telegram from the US Moscow Embassy to Secretary of State Christian Herter, marked Eyes only Secretary -- the part Krushchev asked him not to report -- regarding part of his discussion with Krushchev of the RB-47 incident (you remember, where the Soviets shot down the US surveillance plane, and took two of the crew prisoner? No, after the U-2 thing):
"He referred to dissensions within US and in West and boasted theirs was monolithic system. (He did not mention China.) He said he had heard of discussions in West about dissensions within Soviet regime but said they were united not only in party but also in government, and pointed out he was head of both party and government. He said reports of his disputes with Suslov(7) and others were completely untrue and there was full agreement not only with him but with Mikoyan and Kozlov and others. He said even with Molotov there had not been basic disagreement over his policies,(8) particularly coexistence, but said Molotov carried burden of his age and background in his thinking. He said coexistence was Leninist policy and even Stalin had agreed with it."
"In an experiment that could lead to mass production of strong, lightweight silk, scientists at a Canadian biotechnology company and a United States Army research center have spliced spider genes into cells from cows and hamsters and induced the cells to churn out silk."
[...]
"The researchers, from Nexia and the United States Army Soldier and Biological Chemical Command in Natick, Mass., describe their work in today's issue of the journal Science. They said they had inserted genes derived from two species of spiders into kidney cells from baby hamsters and udder cells from cows. The genes caused the cells to produce silk proteins, which were collected and squeezed out a syringe into fibers.
The military is interested in silk for medical sutures and bulletproof vests."
