I’ve never heard him speak before. He’s instantly likable, a sort of magic. I’m not going to try to summarize. Just a disjointed set of remarks, without an attempt to capture his thread:

For the Bush administration, getting it spun is job one.

This administration’s commitment to bad science will drive scientists away. 19,000 people dead in France from the heat, but there’s no climate change. Nooooo.

The concern over offshoring is short sighted. If you really want some part of the human race to remain poor and ignorant, why not do it within your own country? The Indian flag has Gandhi’s spinning wheel on it. He spun as a symbolic act to say that India shouldn’t rely on foreign economies.

It scares me to see Brazil as the future of politics. Even the Brazilians like to say that Brazil is the country of the future…and always will be.

Outlook is like a flaw with a mailer attached to it.

“Someone in a village in China gets a computer, plugs it in, and out comes this torrent of filth from all over the world.” This is how we Americans look to the world.

“it’s like a terrifying army, whom we’ve given carte blanche to go into our homes, and attack people less sophisticated than ourselves. and *this* is the “blooming orchid” of american culture?”

The Bush administration could have done something about these problems. IT would have been hard-core right wing but at least they could have been competent at it.

The Spaniards threw out the government on Sunday because they were angry at the government for lying to them about who planted the bombs.

Sir Martin Rhees thinks there’s a 50-50 that we’ll kill ourselves. Bruce is cheered up by this: “You mean it’s 50-50! That’s great damn odds!”

He’s watching microbial threats to health like SARS and bird flu. “Real spooky.” They mainly kill old people and this is the most top-heavy in heavy.

He’s waiting for Somali khat to show up in the US. It’s a bundle of straw you chew, “purple foam appears,” and you get in your technical and drive through the streets “wasting people.”

He ends by saying that “hope is the conviction that what you were doing made sense no matter how things turned out.”

Categories: Uncategorized dw