Friends of Liberty

U.S. Agency Moves Closer to Lifting Ban on Admitting Foreign Travelers with HIV

Voice of America - July 2, 2009

The U.S. congressional reauthorization of PEPFAR, the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, in July, 2008, lifted a 15-year ban on HIV-positive foreign nationals from entering the United States. On Tuesday, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) initiated the final regulatory steps toward halting implementation of the ban.

Executive Director Rachel B. Tiven of New York-based Immigration Equality says that yesterday's action was a positive development, and that the ban, which has until now continued to classify HIV as a communicable disease that warrants exclusion from U.S. life, is expected to be fully lifted by December.

"This is the penultimate step, but it is not the end of the road. Until the 45-day notice and comment period is concluded, and until after that, the new regulation is finally published, it will not take effect. We expect, and we hope, and we will be monitoring the implementation of the final regulation, which we hope will happen before the end of the year," she said.

Tiven, who heads a national rights organization that advocates for equal treatment of immigrants and also gay and lesbian couples seeking to keep their families together in the United States, explains that the repeal of the HIV ban, which is the only disease ever singled out legislatively for immigration quarantine in America, has taken a year or more to implement because of standard administrative procedures followed by the U.S. government.

"It's standard procedure that all federal regulations have to go through, and it's a multi-step process, and by releasing the text of the new regulations, and putting them up for what's called Notice and Comment (a procedure that is the usual course for all new proposed regulations), the end of the HIV ban is really coming to the last big hurdle in a multi-step process," she noted.

Tiven calls the ban "an anachronistic exclusion that was not based on good science. It was based on fear and misinformation about HIV and AIDS."...

''Delete It'' [HisCareer]

from the artist formerly-known as Michael Jagoff
[from his upcoming bootleg album: Off-The-Record; recorded on microcassette; distributed anonymously]

[Introductory lyrics excised; no reason to revise bad rubbish]

[HisFamily/Advisors]: "Just plead it! Puh-leead it!"

[Mr. Jagoff]: "Shhhove it up your ass and eat it! [trademark: Yip!]
Sony got lucky, knows I'm not 'right,'
Hymie's so hungry...y'all's so uptight

Delete it...de-lete it...

Wipe it from your slate
'n clean it!
Take a big write-off,
y'all do alright;
Got a new boy-toy
be here tonight

Delete...de-lete it

[Yip!] I's just white enough to beat it.
Sony's all hungry,
dun know wrong from right;
gots Beatles albums,
I can sleep tight

Delete it...de-lete it.

Johnny Cochrane's gone,
and I need it!

Taken my passport,
can't take a flight;
Who's gonna scrub me
in lockup tonight?"

...De-lete It

[abrupt stop; no echo; or the sound of prison-gates shutting or a toilet-bowl flushing. Your pick.]

[copyright: Quincy Germs 2005]

Camp FEMA Project: Exposing FEMA's coming patriot internment camps

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: JUNE 25, 2009
[PLEASE FORWARD]

Alex Jones Jumps Onboard Camp FEMA Project

Alex Jones admitted that he rarely granted on-camera interview requests because he is so often the target of smear campaigns attempting to discredit his work and destroy the freedom movement in the United States, but when director William Lewis asked Alex to be the lead expert in a new political thriller about death camps in America, the award winning filmmaker said, “Yes.”

ST. LOUIS, MO (BSMG) JUNE 25, 2009 – The Patriot community’s number one shock-jock Alex Jones has officially jumped onboard the new feature film “Camp FEMA,” currently in production from producers William Lewis and Gary Franchi. Over the course of a two-day interview, Jones shared his passionate opinions on the New World Order takeover of America and the implementation of death camps in U.S. cities while also speaking to the topic of legislation enacted to keep Americans safe in a time of national emergency. “It’s all a lie,” according to Jones, with documents in hand to prove it. Producer Franchi and veteran anti-NWO filmmaker Lewis agree citing legislation highlighted in the film that will shock audiences when they learn that “continuity of government” plans do NOT include the continuity of the United States Constitution nor any of the rights enumerated and defended by our forefathers.

Behind the scenes, InfoWars producer Rob Dew helped coordinate Operation “Counterweight” as Jones and crew rolled out the red carpet for producers Lewis and Franchi - sharing previously unseen FEMA video footage and official documents that are essential in understanding the scope and complexity of the New World that is being created before our very eyes. “People will beg to get into the camps” vaunted Jones who predicted that an economic collapse would be used to herd Americans into FEMA installations already being setup across the country in renovated military bases and abandoned 1940’s Japanese Internment Camps...

A Debt The Founders Wouldn't Believe

By SEN. JUDD GREGG | Posted Friday, June 26, 2009 4:20 PM PT

In a 1789 letter to James Madison, Thomas Jefferson wrote: "The earth belongs to each of these generations, during its course, fully, and in their own right. The 2d. generation receives it clear of the debts and encumbrances of the 1st. The 3d of the 2d. and so on. For if the 1st. could charge it with a debt, then the earth would belong to the dead and not the living generation. Then no generation can contract debts greater than may be paid during the course of its own existence."

What would Thomas Jefferson think today, as the Obama administration puts this generation on a path to drive the debt sky-high, effectively leaving our children and grandchildren to foot the bill?

Over the past 40 years, U.S. debt has averaged 36% of our gross domestic product. Because of the current economic downturn and the fact that the government has had to serve as a lender of last resort to stabilize the financial system, we are seeing what should be only a short-term spike in our debt levels.

By the end of this fiscal year, our publicly-held debt will be about 57% of GDP. This is not a good situation, but a temporary spike in debt can be managed, just as it was in the past when we were facing the crises of World Wars I and II, the Civil War and the War of Independence. In those instances, debt was rapidly paid off during the postwar periods.

Under President Obama's budget plan for the nation, this debt will not be rapidly paid off once the recession ends. Instead, it will continue to mushroom, driven by the president's new proposed spending that we cannot afford, which comes on top of looming entitlement spending we are already facing as the baby boom generation moves into retirement.

Because of this spending, we will have budget shortfalls, or deficits, averaging $1 trillion each year for the next 10 years.

Since the president's budget does not propose to ask Americans today to pay for that additional spending through taxes, the only way for the U.S. government to get that money is to borrow it, which means adding to, not reducing, the debt. By the end of the budget period as proposed by the president, the debt will have skyrocketed to 82% of GDP, which is simply not sustainable.

Interest payments on that debt will soon be the largest single item in the federal budget — more than $800 billion per year in 10 years' time. That will eclipse what we will spend on national security, and is four times as much as we will spend on education, energy and transportation combined.

These are not abstract numbers, either — the debt will have an effect on every American. In 2019, under the president's plan, each U.S. household's share of the federal debt held by the public will be $133,000 — more than many Americans owe on their mortgage.

Passing a huge, unaffordable, debt-ridden government on to our children — a terrible thing for one generation to do to another — is only one of the troublesome aspects of this situation. The other reason for serious concern is our standing in the global economy, and most importantly, with our creditors.

Currently, the U.S. government has the highest possible credit score — a AAA from credit rating agencies such as Moody's and Standard & Poor's — so the debt issued by the U.S. Treasury is considered a very safe investment and is purchased by individual investors, public and private entities, and governments around the world.

U.S. Treasury debt is a desirable commodity, and that has helped to keep U.S. interest rates low.

In recent news, Standard & Poor's issued an early warning about the AAA rating of the United Kingdom, indicating that it might reduce the U.K.'s rating within the next two years. S&P has downgraded Ireland's debt rating twice so far this year.

What does this mean?

When a country's bond rating is downgraded, lenders will have less confidence that the country can repay its debt, and that country will have to borrow at higher interest rates.

Could this happen to the United States?

I certainly hope not, but China, our biggest creditor, is becoming increasingly concerned about our lack of fiscal discipline and the impact that continued excessive borrowing will have on the value of Treasuries that China holds.

A former adviser to the Chinese Central Bank recently said publicly that "the U.S. government should not be complacent," and noted that China has alternatives to buying U.S. Treasuries — that it could invest its money in safer vehicles.

If the Chinese start to reduce their purchases of our government securities because of our need to borrow increasing amounts of money to finance all the spending that the president has proposed, we will have to start offering higher interest payments to potential lenders to make our securities more attractive.

As that interest on U.S. Treasuries goes up, so does the financial burden on taxpayers in the next generation. This would hit the next generation with a double whammy — unnecessary debt we're already incurring, plus higher interest rates on our borrowing.

Right now we are on a perilous and unsustainable fiscal course, which, if left unchecked, will lead to some disastrous results — devaluation of the dollar, massive inflation and a confiscatory tax rate on our children that will destroy any hope for the same economic opportunities and lifestyle that we have enjoyed.

But that is exactly the plan the president has laid out. The Obama budget does nothing about the health care and Social Security costs that the credit rating agencies have warned about.

The current budget plan puts us in over our heads, fiscally speaking, and we cannot continue to ignore the warning signals. Thomas Jefferson was right — no generation should take on more debt than it can pay off during its lifetime — and we should take his wise words to heart.

Gregg, a Republican, is New Hampshire's senior senator and ranking member of the Senate Budget Committee.

South Korea boosts defense spending, warns of first-strike capability

By Daniel Tencer

Published: June 27, 2009
Updated 9 hours ago

In a reversal of the usual pattern, South Korea is now warning North Korea that it is developing a first-strike capacity against the communist country.

In the wake of a recent nuclear bomb test by North Korea, South Korea is ratcheting up its war of words against its northern neighbor, announcing plans to accelerate the deployment of defense systems.

A South Korean defense reform plan, reported on by the Korea Times, describes the country’s plans for a defense network that would link surveillance satellites, high-altitude reconnaissance aircraft and early-warning radar in an effort “to remove North Korea’s asymmetrical military threat of nuclear and missile programs.”

The paper quoted an official in South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff who said that “in the case of an emergency, the military could conduct pre-emptive strikes against nuclear and missile facilities.”

“Once signs of unusual movement, such as missile and nuclear tests, are detected, F-15K and other advanced aircraft are to conduct surgical strikes against the relevant facilities,” the paper says.

For its part, North Korea today lashed out at Japan on Saturday, threatening to shoot down any Japanese aircraft that attempt to spy on the isolated Stalinist state. AP reports that the North Korean government has instituted a two-week-long “no-sail zone” off its east coast, “raising concerns that it might test-fire short- or mid-range missiles in the coming days, in violation of a UN resolution.”

Tensions between North Korea and its neighbors have been on the rise since North Korea tested a nuclear bomb last month, despite years of efforts by successive U.S. administrations, Japan, China and others to bring the country into the international community. North Korea’s tests were roundly condemned by governments around the world, and led to a fresh round of sanctions against the country.

Even North Korea’s traditional protector, China, has exhibited frustration with the country’s nuclear program and aggressive language.

Canadian cops could get Internet-snooping powers

By Janice Tibbetts, Canwest News Service
June 18, 2009

A man surfs the internet in Beijing on June 15, 2009. Canadian Police have lobbied for a new law for almost 10 years, saying that they need to access "Internet safe havens" for gangsters, sexual predators and terrorists.

Photograph by: Frederick J. Brown, Getty Images

Bill could violate rights, privacy czar warns

Police will be given new powers to eavesdrop on Internet-based communications as part of a contentious government bill, to be announced today, which Public Safety Minister Peter Van Loan has said is needed to modernize surveillance laws crafted during "the era of the rotary phone."

The proposed legislation would force Internet service providers to allow law enforcement to tap into their systems to obtain data about users and their digital conversations.

Police have lobbied for a new law for almost 10 years, saying that they need to access "Internet safe havens" for gangsters, sexual predators and terrorists.

"This is really not about the warrantless tracking of Canadians' Internet use," said Clayton Pecknold, of the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police.

Privacy advocates and civil libertarians, however, have vocally opposed the prospect of giving police "lawful access" to the digital conversations of Canadians by being able to access such things as their text messages, emails, Web surfing habits and Internet phone lines.

"It is an issue that has proven to be very, very controversial," said Michael Geist, a law professor at University of Ottawa and public commentator on Internet legal issues...

A Blackheart's Tale

by Todd Brendan Fahey

I hadn't known Jurgen for very long -- a little over a year, maybe -- when the change occurred. And if others swear they had seen it coming from months back, I suppose I must take them at their word. But I had not, and was patently unprepared for the metamorphosis that took place just after the Christmas season, when Jurgen called me from the Ogden city lockup and asked me to post the five hundred-dollar bond because no one in his family would.

"Jesus Christ, what happened?"

I assumed that he had gone to the City Club after an argument with Patrice, and that he had knocked back five too many and couldn't survive the Breathalyzer. But I was wrong.

"It's awful," he said. And I could tell that he was crying real, anguished tears. Suddenly and with unnerving clarity, he whispered, "I feel so awful. I thought about tying off a bed sheet...", but then his voice trailed away.

"I'll be there in forty minutes. Are you good for that long?"

He said he thought so. By the exhausted resignation in his voice I felt reasonably certain that the suicidal impulses had passed and that he was now rounding the bend into that stage of dread that accompanies savage transgressions against a loved one. I knew before I'd even hung up the phone that Jurgen had beaten his wife, though I don't know precisely how I knew -- I had no reason to convict my good friend of such an offense.

As fellow English instructors at a local college, Jurgen had become one of my closest friends. I had met him at a critical juncture in his life, weighing heavily, as he was, the costs of separating from Patrice. In the ensuing weeks we talked frequently about his feelings of guilt and inadequacy, both as a lover to his wife and an apostatized member of the Mormon church.

"I'm glad I went on that mission before I left the church," he often said. "I learned Dutch and got the hell out of Ogden. I'd be managing the spark plug counter at some auto parts store if I hadn't gone. I swear to God I would."

But he was just as proud of the trip he made to Europe two summers later to study world literature, and he talked about that journey even more so, and particularly of the time he'd run stone out of money, his parents having no more to lend. He'd stowed away on a Greek freighter bound for France, lived in a park and swept out shops for food and wine. And he saw those six months as the highlight and real turning point of his terribly naive and sheltered life.

I've never considered myself a particularly religious man, but I have felt the transcendent ecstasy that comes with packing five or six big bags and flying over the polar cap, toward a year of the glorious unknown.

While Jurgen foraged for his supper across the Channel, I was tucked away daily in a private pub inside London's Senate Library, steeped in warm Guinness. And if my sojourn had changed me at all -- which it had, in more ways than I care to go into now -- his must have crumbled the low timbers of his convictions.

He came back to the States with the hunger of a defrocked monk, moved out of his parents' home, painting houses to settle his undergraduate tuition; after work, he'd scatter most of his paycheck at one of the few drinking holes in Ogden, Utah. That is when he met Patrice.

As he told it, she was the first woman he had ever picked up from a bar. And she was still a virgin, which made him happy. "It would have been a quick date if she'd had anyone to compare me with," he had said, on more than one occasion. She carried heavy baggage, but he accepted the troubled package with a Stoic's resolve.

Jurgen and I had become friends during our first summer session at the college, sharing an office and talking whenever we could about the stories of Raymond Carver, whose grim vision we both knew intrinsically. As new faculty, we were both teaching an extra load to pay off our student loans. It was on one of these warm July mornings that Jurgen called to tell me that his two-year-old bullmastiff had drowned in a canal while jogging alongside Patrice the previous evening -- a ritual he resolutely believed had helped his wife retain a fragile sanity during their young marriage. It was during that phone call that I first heard him cry, and I believe the rush of emotion had more to do with his fear of their future than the death of that sweet dog.

"I'm all right," he said at the time, "but I don't know what Trice is going to do. She loved that dog like a kid."

And it was hard not to: the brute stood about a yard high at the shoulder and its food bills ran higher than most orthodontics. It rode everywhere with Jurgen, seated stately in the front seat of his catshit-yellow convertible Volkswagen Thing, like a proud granite statue. Patrice stopped carrying Mace when the dog was a few months old, and Jurgen had said he felt so secure with the jowly passenger that he was tempted to drop the theft clause on his auto insurance.

About a half mile from their home, the dog had become thirsty and wrested the leash from Patrice's grip. Later, Patrice said she had frozen as the dog lost her footing on the silty lip of the drainage canal. Even later Patrice said she thanked God that the dog hadn't looked at her as she splashed into the water and was carried in a rush through a steel porthole and down into the bowels of an Ogden city aqueduct.

"She couldn't have dealt with the eyes," Jurgen had told me. "God, the poor dog must have been terrified."

I felt sick for several days after that phone call, and I wished he had never mentioned the eyes, because it hadn't occurred to me when he first told me the news. After that, whenever I thought about it, I saw a mammoth brindle dog pull away from its owner -- a petite blonde who was probably lucky not to have been pulled in herself; a young woman who had endured four fathers, all alcoholic, all wife beaters, one of whom, after being caught molesting her youngest sister, locked himself inside the garage and fell asleep to the Roy Acuff Singers against the backdrop of a running engine; a nervous, insecure young woman who, in the dark waters of that ditch, had lost the most constant, enduring and uncomplicated source of affection she had ever known. I saw all this and still I could have put the phone down, said a prayer for the beast's newly departed soul, and gone back to whatever the hell it was I was doing without a second thought . . . if it weren't for those goddamned eyes.

***

Two black banks of snow, the dregs of winter, lined the stretch of I-15 from Salt Lake City to Ogden, and though the heater in my old Honda had stopped working, I felt almost warm in the clear night air. I locked the car and hiked up the steps of the Ogden Municipal Jail. It was only the second time I had been to a penal institution. The first was as a freshman in college, when the resident assistant of my dormitory floor decided to celebrate his twenty-first birthday with a pub crawl along Santa Barbara's State Street. As we staggered slowly northward, the band of ten mostly underage preps dwindled as we faced the test we had imposed upon ourselves at each new bar: a mixed drink, a shot of hard liquor, and a full beer...until the Long Island iced teas at Joe's Cafe whittled us down to three. I remember riding in the front seat of a BMW back to University of California-Santa Barbara, sitting next to an elegant brunette whose name kept slipping through the grey fissures of my addled brain. Then, in a shift of scenery that can be understood only by veterans of the blackout, I found myself behind a dumpster near campus heaving what smelled to be the essence of my bile duct, the birthday boy and another young cad stalking along the unlit street, snapping off car antennae and howling like a pair of jackals.

We were all arrested that night. Somehow, though, I succeeded in dragging the officers several hundred feet to a puddle of my own vomit, which they recognized as authentic by cross-checking the stain on my sleeve, and I was released with a warning. And though Jurgen looked considerably better than the two hangover victims I'd bailed out nearly a decade earlier, his bond was much steeper. There was no restitution that my friend could offer; no extenuation offered for crimes of youth.

"Where you wanna go?" I asked him, after the bail clerk counted the hundred-dollar bills I had just laid on the counter.

"Let's get me a couple of belts," he said. "That's what I should have done before. Should have just left the house and drank right through it. Trice would have been asleep when I got back and I could have gone comatose, and neither of us would have remembered a thing."

We drove to the City Club, as it was only three or four blocks away and Jurgen knew the proprietor and knew he would let us stay past closing time. On our way in, a handsome, diminutive waiter, wearing a gold satin shirt unbuttoned to midchest, stopped us, placing an index finger lightly on Jurgen's arm.

"The owner's gone for the night," the young man said, glancing at Jurgen. "But he left the boxed set on the stereo. Want me to slip it in?"

I cringed, but Jurgen tapped the little queenie on his shoulder with a fist, like he would have any fraternity buddy. "You're a good man, Stephen," he said.

The waiter blushed and walked over to the stereo in back of the bar, where he dropped a CD into the platter.

Jurgen shrugged. "He's a nice guy--" He sat down at a dark table in the corner, the first strains of David Crosby's If I Could Only Remember My Name soaring through the speakers. "--queer as a three-dollar bill, but what the hell? He knows I'm married."

I watched Jurgen swipe the first whiskey from the tray while the waiter lowered a Pepsi onto the table, and I think it was the first time I actually felt embarrassed about my sobriety. We were both in the budding flower of our careers as Men of Letters, and I felt a certain professional responsibility to meet this crisis as all great men in the budding flower of their careers as writers had met similar crises: with a hearty laugh and a glass of Scotch whiskey, maybe even a cigarette. I knew it was irrational, but so probably did John Berryman and Fitzgerald and Dylan Thomas. And as soon as I made that diseased connection, I found myself committed.

Jurgen stared at me. "If this is a problem for you, we'll leave. Seriously," he said, resting his glass on a coaster. "I mean . . . I've got so much shit on my head, it feels like Bandini Mountain."

"Don't worry about it," I said calmly, but I could feel myself shaking under my coat. "I'll just join you for one, then I'll take you wherever you're sleeping tonight."

"Are you sure? . . ." he said, stammering as he searched for just the right words. "You can leave it, after just one?"

I walked to the bar and ordered a Cardhu, rocks, and came back to the table. "It'll feel good," I said, "knowing that I can leave it. It's been so long, it'll feel good."

He nodded and sipped from his glass and watched me as I pulled my own glass to my nose, inhaling the vapors, washing Cardhu around the rim, bringing it to my lips, letting the first wash of malt nectar flow past the tongue, a sting so full of pain and beauty and recollection that I lost consciousness for a bare moment. "What happened tonight?" I whispered, my voice far off in some boyhood tree house in Longview, Washington, victim to a bottle of Canadian Mist stolen by a neighbor kid from his father.

Jurgen finished off his Scotch and flagged down the waiter, who brought over two clean glasses and an announcement. "We're closing now. And so is the cash register. I can bring over the bottle if you want to pay me a little something for it now. I'll never tell."

"It's up to you." Jurgen shrugged. "I just know your wife's gonna freak if you come home three-to-the-wind. She's a good woman. You want to keep her."

I nodded and pulled my wallet from the back pocket of my jeans, removing a lone ten-dollar bill. "It's all I've got left."

The waiter smiled and left the bottle on the table. I don't know who poured first, but Jurgen didn't say a thing to me about my second glass, or my third. Instead, he repeated a variation on a story I had heard at least a dozen times in as many months. I didn't know what to say to him this time, any more than I had in the past: his wife was crazed, and I thought he was a natural-born saint for putting up with her.

She accused him of cheating at least twice a week and had flung books, ashtrays--anything within reach-- at his skull on at least three occasions. When she drank, she had the disconcerting habit of "revealing the family jewels," as he put it, despairingly, which made every barbecue and cocktail party a source of great anxiety for him.

I'm embarrassed to admit it, but I think I would have smacked her around, too. And I said so, finally -- just slipped off my well-lubed tongue, and it came as a genuine shock to my ears.

"No, no," he said, brightening, "I'm glad someone else agrees. God, I've actually worried about having a stroke! Three years of this crap. Here," he said, refilling my glass. "So, you don't think I'm scum?"

The room was pulsing. I stared at Jurgen and saw one of the most patient, decent men I've ever been privileged to know. "Huh-uh. But I couldn't tell you what to do, either. Looks like you're trapped."

He nodded. "Yeah. I knew it from the minute I proposed. She'd kill herself if I left; but I can't take it anymore. I just can't take it anymore. I was sitting in that ratty recliner in the livingroom, and she came in and started raving. It took me five minutes to figure out what the fuck she was talking about."

"What was it?" I said. I slid my half-full glass of Scotch toward the center of the table and grabbed for the watery dregs of the Pepsi, which I drank down gratefully, then began chewing on the ice. Suddenly, I couldn't stand the taste of the Scotch.

"Turned out she was still mad about a party we were at last week. She got really drunk and I lost her. When she finally came back from God knows where, I was talking to a cousin of an old student of mine. I wasn't doing anything wrong. Like, seven of us were standing around and, Jesus, I was just talking to the girl."

He shrugged. "So I finally got it out of her, what was bugging her. And then she went berserk! Ran into the kitchen and came back with a bunch of dirty plates and shit from the counter. She missed my head by about half an inch with a big meat fork. And then I lost it. Goddamn it, I was just tired of cleaning up all the broken pieces, just tired of dealing with her moods. So I socked her, knocked her out cold. After about three or four minutes, she wasn't waking up too good, so I called the paramedics."

"I thought she called the dogs."

He shook his head. "They brought an Ogden sheriff along with 'em, arrested me on the spot--something about a 'cooling-off period'. Trice couldn't stop screaming...sh' kept saying, 'I deserved it. He didn't mean it, I deserved it!' I felt like a turd."

The waiter poured the last of the fifth of Scotch into Jurgen's glass. "Almost closing time, boys. Unless you want to get locked in."

Jurgen shrugged and shot back the whiskey. "You wanna know what's weird?"

I nodded.

"She's gonna love me when I get home. She's gonna treat me better than she's ever treated me before; she's gonna keep a lid on it." He stared down into his empty glass. "Some gals need to be dominated -- know where the power's coming from. I wasn't thinking like that when I slugged her, but before you came and got me out of the can, I started thinking about Ray Carver. His wife was just like Trice. Carver used to tie on a big one, I mean a really big one, and when MaryAnn picked at him that 'one last time,' he'd bash a bottle over her noggin and then they'd make up and go to bed. It just came to me -- one of those moments of resolution you read about but never really ever have yourself. Everything I ever read by Carver just came at me, and I realized that Trice's been knocked around by every guy she's cared about until I found her. Here I was, thinking I was about to deliver her from a life worse than hell. I thought, I'm a nice guy, a returned missionary for Chrissakes, and I can treat this poor girl better than anyone's ever treated her before. I thought, y'know, maybe one day we'll have kids and start going to church again. I'd like my kids to go to church. But Trice didn't respect me. Now she's gonna love me."

I laid the ten-note on the table and buttoned the topmost button of my coat, and Jurgen and I walked slowly down the icy steps of the City Club. I asked him, one more time, whether he wouldn't rather come back to my apartment and sleep in the guest room and see Trice the next morning, but he declined graciously, and I dropped him off at the base of his driveway and drove back to Salt Lake.

I was glad that I had cut my losses at three, was actually very proud of myself, and the drive home went smoothly. The key slid quietly into the dead bolt, after which I took great care not to bump into the furniture. In high school, if my mother were still up, which she would be, I would be made to breathe into her face, and then I would invariably be grounded for the next two weeks. My father, having never enjoyed the taste of liquor, not even beer, grieved at seeing a nearly grown young man being subjected to such scrutiny, but he always supported her decision. When I turned twenty-one, a few months after I had returned from London, he paid for my admittance to a private rehabilitation clinic, but not once did he speak to me about it, not once did he ask how I felt in those early morning hours around a group conference table with eleven other shivering alcoholics. As for my mother, she thought her boy had been delivered back to her.

I heard a stirring in the bedroom, and when I did, I groped quickly for the refrigerator and sought out something spicy, stuffing my mouth with what was probably the dinner my wife had made for us and had to put away alone hours earlier -- a complicated dish, tasting of chicken marinated in a curry -- as she walked across the hardwood floor and I strained my eyes and saw the crushing hurt, then the anger.

No dishes would be broken in my house this night, no punches thrown. I would not make love to my wife for many days, and when I would, it would be for both of us a lonely, passionless affair.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

From Todd Brendan Fahey's upcoming collection of stories, to be published October 2009 as a Far Gone Book:

fragment of A String of Saturdays: The New Southern Romance

by Todd Brendan Fahey
June 21, 2009

"You've aged really well. Different than I thought. You still have those eyes. ...I've still got my nose," she laughs.

It's a laugh that is she. Never, in this incarnation, will she know how beautiful she really is. Such is not in her to know. It's something she gives away with her laugh.

"You've put on some weight--"

"You've thought about how I'd look?"

"Oh, so often. You know. Fuck, we were insanely in love with each other."

I made some motion to say it's alright, that there's no point in tracking back.

"Yeah. We've both done it. With me, it's that...goddamned perfume," he smiles, gritting his teeth. "And old Genesis."

"Ripples." They say it together, and find themselves laughing. Together. Love is a vacuum, in which nothing else survives. It is a complete laugh.

Stan smiles, just happy to have made the trip.

A dark beach near campus, '84; green windowpane in gelatin. The moon draws the ocean far out, the sheen of sand a blank sheet; time, a carpet across the sky. It could all end here and all would go on just as it is. A shattering thing. Plunge in, swim far out to sea, to not come back; sit and listen to the pitch and ebb of the waters. Whichever. All were here, have been, are, will be, from ever and forever more.

Why not just sit.

She kisses him fully in the mouth. An ancient thing, the collision. She was there, and now we are here. From really wanting to sleep to being under is a stride. The suck of a wave, the wash. Like breathing. The press of her lips a language of intention, insistence. All that had timed out, or been interrupted, waylaid, not given license to, rendered malem prohibitum, all that had kept him in limbo for so many years, now freed. She is not going to stop.

He casts his tongue across her teeth and upward to the flesh above, and she makes a sound that is from memory.

"Uhn.."

"m'I love you."

"m'I know." Grounds her knees into the cushions, astride.

His lift, lodge.

Another resonance, this one not from a place retained. "Doo...you remember coming up to the 10th floor, and we'd sing 'Pigs'...huuh..."

"Stay with me, Sharon."

"Hu...m'trying."

Unclasps his mouth from hers, holds her hips down tighter. "I remember everything. The color of your bedspread; the animals you kept on it. The smell of the staircase up to your room came to me in a dream one night, about five years ago. We're not there anymore."

"H'fuck," a breath coming as from runner in the last legs of it. She has never been here before.

"Stay with me."

"H'on the street that night..."

"May '85. I didn't see you; I felt you."

"That was so weird." She is settling down a bit. "I hadn't seen you in two years; there you were. Honest to God, I didn't know what to do. What did I do?"

"You jumped up off the street and I caught you."

That laugh again. "My friends thought I was insane."

It could end here and still be ok. He will not be disappointed. Like in an NDE--the light and the assurance and the seeing again of persons dear, and then drawn back to the body. Still a very beautiful thing to know; and it will all happen soon enough, anyway. Why not just sit.

She kisses him again. Different this time. It says, Thank You.

Fun in the Sun

Yo ho, yo ho... I love summertime on islands. This one is a swell weekend venue. The ferry allows motorcycles and cars; lots of horses and cows and white sand beaches and even bikinis in the hot months (rare, for this conservative kultur). Raw fish/sushi of the other variety. I suspect that psychedelic 'shrooms even grow in the cow patties, but my last hunt was indeterminate. Will try again next weekend.

All photos taken by and copyright Todd Brendan Fahey

N.Korea 'Made Millions from Insurance Scam'

englishnews@chosun.com / Jun. 19, 2009 11:10 KST

North Korea amassed a U.S. dollar fortune to buy luxury goods for leader Kim Jong-il through international insurance scams, the Washington Post reported Thursday. Based on testimony of Kim Kwang-jin, a former executive of North Korea's state insurance firm, the daily said US$20 million North Korea received from foreign insurance companies was delivered to Kim Jong-il through Beijing in February 2003.

The North made millions of dollars from major insurance firms for transportation accidents, burning of factories, and damages from natural disasters such as floods. "Some details emerged in London last year when lawyers for German insurance giant Allianz Global Investors, Lloyd's of London and several other reinsurers disputed a North Korean reinsurance claim for the 2005 crash of a helicopter into a government-owned warehouse in Pyongyang," the paper said. The insurance companies suspected that the crash as well as a ruling of the North Korean court was fabricated but withdrew their case during trial in London and settled with North Korea, a near-complete victory for the communist country.

The article appeared as the global community tries to implement sanctions against North Korea in accordance with the United States Security Council Resolution 1874, and this implies vigorous tracking of North Korean practice of accumulating Kim Jong-il's slush funds through global insurance fraud.