Overnight Thread: Of Dragonflies and Damselflies…

  Many years ago I went off on a madcap trip down the Colorado River…  Fortunately, before we left at 5 am in a tiny VW bug to drive the Coast Road / CA Highway One, heading south, I did manage to get a genuine Australian bush hat with wide brim, chin strap and full netting from brim to shoulders (which I still have).  And some spectacular insect cream.  To complete the picture, Indian voile caftans and white cotton gloves.

It was one of those trips that became a strange odyssey.  At the end, after washing up, more or less, at one of the least blythe places on earth, Blythe AZ, we landed back at the base camp, a house in Oxnard, one that had plastic flowers in the garden.

In between tho were moments of utter beauty, despite our being out in ‘the wild’, and in no way ready for it…

One was the dragonflies.  And defintely the damselflies.  As they are the ones that, romantically one thinks, form a heart as they mate.  Reading over this page from Dr John Abbott of UT… the real story is not so blythe, shall we say.

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More to come…

UPDATE, 11:53 pm

Via e-mail [thanks!} comes this cheering bit of protest (full text):

WASHINGTON -- White House Advisor Karl Rove was the target of a protest on the American University campus Tuesday night, NBC 4 reported.

Rove was on the campus to talk to the College Republicans, but when he got outside more than a dozen students began throwing things at him and at his car, an American University spokesperson said.

The students then got on the ground and laid down in front of his car as a protest.

The students said security officials picked them up and carried them away so Rove could leave.

Police said they have dealt with a lot of protests on campus and this one was handled peacefully.

No one was arrested.

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Bob Parry takes a look at the extended hypocrisy over POWs, ours, theirs, photographing POWs, Geneva Conventions, transgressions (theirs, never ours) and so on...

From the close:

[T]hough these controversies about Bush’s disdain for international law are well known to the U.S. news media, the context disappeared again when press interest turned to the captured British sailors in late March 2007.

Suddenly, it was a new day with Bush and Blair fully committed to international law. Even a relatively minor Geneva transgression, such as filming captives eating, became a justification for unrestrained outrage.

Without any acknowledgement about their own abrogation of international law, the British and U.S. governments lifted these principles from the gutter, dusted them off and put them on a pedestal.

The grand human rights defender, George W. Bush, lectured other countries about “inexcusable behavior” – and no prominent Western journalist called him to account for his contradictions.

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 Iraq SLogger’s round up of Iraqi press:

Daily Column

Iraqi Papers Wed: Trouble In The North

 

The Security Plan Spreads to Mosul

 

By AMER MOHSEN Posted 5 hr. 30 min. ago

While Az-Zaman reported a marked deterioration of security conditions in Mosul, Al-Mada is announcing that the operation “Imposing the Law” (aka the Security Plan) will be extended to the Northern city.

 

Al-Mada quoted the governor of the province of Nineveh (where Mosul is located) as saying that the Mosul security plan will be modeled after Baghdad’s: It will include searching some areas known to harbor armed groups, arresting suspects and establishing presence in the “hot zones.”

Az-Zaman said that the security situation in Mosul has been eroding in recent weeks, with more widespread violence and a reappearance of unidentified bodies in the city’s outskirts. As an aside, Az-Zaman routinely refers to Mosul as “Iraq’s second largest city,” while Basra in the South is widely acknowledged as holding that position. Az-Zaman’s claim may reflect a sectarian bias, as Mosul is a majority-Sunni city, while Basra is largely Shi’a. [snip]

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