Melançon Enterprises • a multidivision multinational since 1980

Lest those who do know that both the Bush regime and the current Iranian regime are evil fool themselves into the wishful thinking that a U.S. attack on Iran would have any good at all:

In help to: http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/091307Z.shtml

In regards to the difficulties people have receiving Truthout e-mail at AOL and Yahoo, may I suggest:

1. Point people to an ISP founded precisely to ensure people's access to independent media: http://www.indylink.org

2. Use a progressive e-mail service such as Electric Embers that has vast experience dealing with the big ISPs: http://electricembers.org/

best,

benjamin melançon

Also wrote back to Steve Anderson of http://coanews.org/ who sent me the link:

I have no idea what aimlesspassion.com could be used for, so I didn't register it even though I thought of it. That's progress.

Mom told us this story.

Mom and Dad, young, camping the first time with a new tent (a big frame canvas one that Jakob, Dan, and I remember well from when we were young and the tent was old).

Mom eventually figured out how to get the tent set up.

Not long after, three attractive young women came into the next campsite. They could only see Dad, and came over and asked:

"Can you help us with our tent?"

Dad replied:

"No, but she can."

Pointing his thumb toward Mom in the tent.

They were very disappointed.

Dad said there were Indians he was with out West – and I'm totally blanking on where, but I want to say Washington State – who were the funniest people he ever knew.

He also said they asked if he was an Indian, because he sure was dark enough and there was a tribe with blue eyes somewhere around.

They would parody, well, white culture so well it left my Dad in stitches:

Dad always said he thought that human beings split from apes way back, farther back in time than scientists reported it when such estimates first made it into the public.

And indeed, every few years in my memory while Dad was alive, new evidence pushed the evolutionary divergence farther back.

Here we go again.

A professor I knew, I was walking with him on campus. He told me that I was very lucky.

I didn't know what he was talking about. He was surrounded by learning, knowledge, teaching.

You are free, he said. You can say what you want.

Dad told me he had a great respect for educated people, not having an education himself.

It took me a long time to realize, to understand, that those with a college education are not smarter than me, usually did not know more than me.

He still said it as if he hoped I would tell him that he was right in the first place, that there was a there there.

He usually followed this by talking about how lucky he was to have had so many intelligent people in his life to educate him, frequently women.

Dad told me more than once, in a times-have-changed-for-the-worse manner:

When the stock market crashed in 1929, reporters at the Boston Globe cheered.

When it falls now [in specific reference to a 1970s or 1980s drop, I think] it is like a funeral.

I tried to point out that the aftermath of that stock market crash of 1929 was the Great Depression – the most recent big one of many in U.S. history, actually – and it hurt a lot more than just the rich.