Laurence is quite a reporter, and has been doing a splendid job, often at great personal cost, since Vietnam. I can not recommend his excellent Vietnam-era memoir The Cat From Hue strongly enough.

He was also the correspondent at the heart of CBS' program-length docco The World of Charlie Company, a memorable take on life in the field as a grunt in Vietnam.

From the NYT review of the book, also mentioning the CBS documentary, found at www.thecatfromhue.com:

Laurence capped his Vietnam tours with ''The World of Charlie Company,'' an extraordinary documentary, broadcast by CBS in 1970. In ''The Cat From Hue,'' he discusses the making of the film in detail, and it stands as an epitaph of the war's futility. In the film, the soldiers speak for themselves. They know they neither should be, nor want to be, in Vietnam. By this time drug and alcohol abuse in the Army was widespread, and the disconnect between officers and G.I.'s had become ever more apparent. After initially approving and aiding the project, the military shut it down. ''The generals must have known, better than we, that when good soldiers argue openly about the wisdom of fighting a war, as they had in Charlie Company, the war is lost,'' he notes. Shortly after the film was broadcast, a West Point military instructor asked CBS for permission to show it to his classes.

Those who still regard Vietnam as a great moral crusade, who continue to insist that the military would have won had it been properly supported, and who blame the biased reporting of the news media for turning the nation against the war, probably would indict Laurence as a willing accomplice in the outcome. But he offers ample evidence of the futility and disillusionment felt by both Americans and Vietnamese. Pilots related their frustration with the ineffectiveness of their bombing; the military's daily press briefings had no correlation to reality; search-and-destroy missions had turned into the destruction of peasant villages, ostensibly to save them -- it was all there, waiting to be reported. John Laurence and the news media did not concoct the estrangement between reality and the official versions of the war.

With a hat tip to both Yogi Berra and John Fogerty, it's deja vu all over again...

...and that they end well.

And heed the recommendation on the photos. They are the visible manifestations of your memories, and will help preserve them for any future generations. Anything else can be replaced almost anywhere.

If you keep posting, I will keep reading, wherever you land.

I believe Irakere's first US appearance was in 1978, at Carnegie Hall, as a surprise late guest after a concert billed as "Three Pianos, Two Guitars". (A memorable lineup in its own right.)

I was at that performance. One of the most spectacular live performances I have ever seen - and heard, in any case.

These guys can play.

Airliners are likely not going to be used again any time soon. The Homeland Security Theater does make it somewhat inconvenient, and that will induce the bad guys to look elsewhere. They're studious opportunists, and likely looking around in some degree of depth even as I write this.

On the other hand, there are plenty of low-tech short-term disruptions that would be achievable at low cost, with high disruptive yield. Freeway intersections and overpasses at or near certain critical points are one that comes immediately to mind. Electrical power substations are left unguarded almost anywhere. (They're fenced, true, but fences are a poor defense against a "satchel charge".)

Container ports are so very vulnerable. It's not even necessary to bring a ship to dockside if someone's smart. (I've talked about this here and elsewhere before, I feel no need to repeat myself as to details.) All our measures are based on the containers making landfall. That's not involved in the truly bad scenarios.

We have build the Maginot Line all over again. And the other guys are not stupid. They don't need large, spectacular acts, not at all. A well-coordinated series of well-placed disruptions will cause panic, unbelievable economic damage, and more likely than not, severe repression "in the name of Homeland Security" - which, of course, will do nothing more to protect anyone or anything.

Actually, things are beginning to point towards a likelihood of a fungal cause. From the LA Times, 4/26/07:

A fungus that caused widespread loss of bee colonies in Europe and Asia may be playing a crucial role in the mysterious phenomenon known as Colony Collapse Disorder that is wiping out bees across the United States, UC San Francisco researchers said Wednesday.

Researchers have been struggling for months to explain the disorder, and the new findings provide the first solid evidence pointing to a potential cause.

(...)

Other researchers said Wednesday that they too had found the fungus, a single-celled parasite called Nosema ceranae, in affected hives from around the country — as well as in some hives where bees had survived. Those researchers have also found two other fungi and half a dozen viruses in the dead bees.

N. ceranae is "one of many pathogens" in the bees, said entomologist Diana Cox-Foster of Pennsylvania State University. "By itself, it is probably not the culprit … but it may be one of the key players."

So maybe it's not a pure certainty, still, it is beginning to look like a pointer in the right direction.

I, too, have concerns about GM crops, and also concerns about the hysteria regarding them. My personal preference is to let researchers find the cause before rushing to blame something such as GM corn, cell phones (!), or other targets of opportunity. Once the cause is known it can be addressed. The hysteric approach is just muddying up the search for a cause, which again is of paramount importance in the search for a solution.