Editor’s Notes

How you feel depends on how you look. How you look depends on how you feel. Apparently how they look and feel is more important to women than hanging out with some guy. Interesting result from a 10-city poll in the U.S. that can leave men thinking, “Now if I can just get past the clothes and engage her mind, then I might have a chance.” Or something like that. A quick, light read of just 261 words.

Then we get into oil, gas, pipelines, and reserves. The largest American natural gas pipeline operator has decided to pay a $7.3 million settlement rather than take a beating in court because it played hanky panky with Saddam Hussein during the United Nations Iraq oil-for-food program. Which proves that if you’ve got the money and friends in right places you don’t really need to do the time — well not all of it anyway.

Then we’ve got Russia telling Iran to smarten up over the nuclear issue and it looks like Iran is sitting up and taking notice. We won’t hold our breath on that one but scattered signs, when drawn together, form a pattern that suggests peaceful progress.

Russia and Germany, while going through the formality of ecological and other studies, are making noises that they’re in no mood to have anything that they consider frivolous stand in the way of a natural gas pipeline to run from Russia to Germany under the Baltic Sea. The pipeline will feed Germany and other West European countries.

While Bush and his buddies are sniffing and marking territory in Central Asia with plans to siphon off oil and natural gas, the Russian company LUKoil has struck a major pool in Colombia, South America. So we’ve got the Americans crowding the borders of Russia, and the Russians in the U.S. back yard, all planting straws and building pipelines. Now if everyone would go home, it seems to me the whole process of oil and gas extraction and delivery would be a whole lot less expensive, and a whole lot less complicated.

Finally we’ve got the mayor of Salt Lake City who represents what is America to me. Eloquently, in powerful poetic prose, he calls on Americans to raise their voices against the shame that their president has wrought in his betrayal of the fundamental principles upon which the United States would make its way in the world. Take time to read it, maybe more than once. Salt Lake City Mayor Ross C. "Rocky" Anderson, is the America I’ve always known and respected behind the tumult and the shouting of the band of idiots and charlatans who all too often wave the stolen conch and control the microphone. Anderson is America, not the sleazy band of hypocrites who crowd centre-stage from time to time.

Meanwhile, take it easy, but take it.

Looking forward,

Carl Dow

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