What Powderfinger Said . . . Observations on Life in the Dying Empire

And God Said, "Let There be Morons."

2012-01-25T01:37:00.000-06:00

This is the kind of thing that confirms us as idiots in the eyes of the world:

An Indiana Senate committee on Wednesday endorsed teaching creationism in public schools, despite pleas from scientists and religious leaders to keep religion out of science classrooms.

Senate Bill 89 allows school corporations to authorize “the teaching of various theories concerning the origin of life” and specifically mentions “creation science” as one such theory.

State Sen. Scott Schneider, R-Indianapolis, who voted for the measure, said if there are many theories about life’s origins, students should be taught all of them. (Source)

The vote in the Senate Education Committee wasn't even close: 8-2. Now the bill will move on to the Republican-controlled Senate. If it passes, the school districts of the state will have the option teaching intelligent design as a theory explaining the origins of life right alongside the "theory" of evolution in science courses. (Source)

Creation science is to science as justice is to military justice. This is ridiculous. You know, I just have to shake my head. I grew up (and was educated) in a time when science and scientific learning garnered respect. Now, in some quarters, if scientists teaches it, it is wrong. This creation science bit and the denial of global warming are just two of the most visible of this disturbing trend. What is a normal person supposed to make of this? I find it scary.

Military Justice

2012-01-24T01:46:00.000-06:00

Did you see where the last Marine out of eight, Staff Sgt Frank Wuterich, was given a virtual free pass at his court martial for his part in the murder of 24 Iraqi civilians including 10 women and children and one guy in a wheelchair, in the town of Haditha in 2005? The charge against all of these Marines was manslaughter. This was another of those horrific acts that we actually heard about--how many other atrocities committed by our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan do you think will never come to light? I would argue that several more are out there. After one of the Marines in his squad was killed by an IED, Wuterich told his squad to shoot first and ask questions later as they entered a clutch of houses down the road from where the IED exploded. The other seven guys? Well, one was acquitted, and the other six guys had charges against them dropped. Wuterich pleaded out: he got to walk in exchange for a guilty plea to a single charge of negligent dereliction of duty.

The source article says nothing about his being dismissed from the service, but he's getting busted and is taking a pay cut. A little out of whack with the crime, dontcha think? We should note that military justice has actually progressed in sparing the guilty in this matter of murdering civilians. During the Vietnam war, Lt William Calley, who gave the order that resulted in the death of over 500 civilians at the village of Mai Lai, and his court martial sentenced him to life imprisonment, which only seems fair to me. (I have to observe, however, that Calley was basically the fall guy for this crime; it got covered up all up the chain, and didn't come out but by the investigative reporting of Seymour Hirsch of the NYT.) But there was such and outcry and furor that President Nixon pardoned him right out of Leavenworth and into civilian life. Wuterich, too, and his fellow killers will now blend back into American life as if nothing had ever happened. But Haditha will never be the same again.

Stacked Deck

2012-01-23T02:12:00.000-06:00

Reading in the paper today an article about bankruptcies. Two big name companies are now seeking what's called the "protection of Chapter 11" [of the bankruptcy code]. Hostess Brands--the Twinkie people--and Kodak. On the heels of American Airlines just a while back. I had only a general idea of what Chapter 11 was all about. I knew that it allowed companies to duck out of paying some of their creditors, and then come back to life as a company without a lot of that bothersome and pesky debt to worry about. What I didn't know, but probably should have, was the logical consequence of protecting a corporate entity is unprotecting everybody else involved. Which, when you think about it, is why corporations love Chapter 11, and why they got their legislative lackeys to write the law the way they did.

The company wins, but there a bunch of losers in Chapter 11. First, of all the stockholders, the owners of the business. They rarely get anything. Workers are fired. The landlord, he gets stiffed. And most egregious of all, the retirees . . . they really take it in the ear. But not to worry about the executives of many of these firms; they continue to draw their inflated salaries and bonuses. All three of the companies we've mentioned want to use bankruptcy to get out their pension promises. This is the second bankruptcy for Hostess. The federal Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp., which I never knew existed, is there to pick up the pieces*, within limits, for the retirees who get screwed by companies, but as you might imagine, it is currently running a (record) deficit of $27 billion mostly because it's had to cover so many workers left high and dry by their companies.

Be aware, if you aren't already, that since 2005, the bankruptcy laws for individuals have been tightened considerably. Student loans cannot be written off, for example. It's a stacked deck in favor of the moneyed interests, like everything else in this country.

*Funds are provided by a tax on the companies.

Out of Sync . . . Again

2012-01-22T00:40:00.000-06:00

Joe Paterno died today. He had lung cancer for a while. He went in the hospital just a day or so ago. And he's not going to come out.

I was doing something very unusual for me today. I watching NFL football. Something I rarely do, unless it's the Saints. But yesterday, Susan and I watched both the AFC and NFC championship games (great ones, btw), and I told her I don't if I have ever in my life watched two NFL games in one day. And during both, the gushing of tributes for Paterno started. Just two thoughts. And I guarantee you, either of these thoughts, much less the two of them put me out of sync with the vast majority of the rest of this country. Which I seem to be most of the time.

First, what was this guy, anyway? He was a damned football coach, for Pete's sake . . . a football coach who held his job a long time. A guy who apparently had already been defied on the Penn State campus long ago. All kinds of stuff named after him, and a holy shrine on the campus for him where the vigil lights--just like for the Sacred Heart of Jesus or Mary Immaculate in Catholic churches--now glow at his holy feet.

When prayers to Paterno cure the sick, he'll be sanctified a saint.

I repeat: this man was a football coach. He made no lasting or even temporary contribution to the history of western civilization. He's not leaving a building, a work of art, or even a recipe book behind him. His achievements, wins on the football field, bowl appearances, and so forth are like dust in the wind. Nobody remembers them. Which brings me to the second thought. I'm going to remember this guy, alright, and maybe others will, too. I'm going to remember him as somebody who suborned the practice of pedophilia by one of his longtime assistant coaches right there in his sports complex . He made a perfunctory report up the chain, but he did nothing else. Nothing. ("I wish I would have done more," he later said, after he had been outed. Well, no shit, dude!) He didn't confront the scumbag who was abusing children, much less fire his ass; he didn't press the school to investigate; he didn't follow up on his own report. What he did do was let the scumbag Sandusky continue to abuse kids. That's what "Joe Pa" means to me. I'll never forget him for that, just like I will never forget the hundreds of Catholic bishops who did the same exact thing with their vast collection of clerical scumbag pedophiles at the same time they posed as paragons of rectitude and arbiters of morality.

Update I: As expected, the media is overflowing today with bowing and scraping over Paterno. On Penn State campus there were a thousand candles and votive lights at the bronze shrine to the guy. Tears and lamentations.

Field of Dreams

2012-01-21T03:20:00.000-06:00

It was a fair book by Ray Kinsella, made famous by the movie "Field of Dreams" with Kevin Costner and James Early Jones, he of one of the greatest voices on the planet. Anyway, you all know how crazy about baseball I am. It's actually worse than you might think. There's not a day that passes that I don't dabble in something having to do with baseball. For example, I'm beginning to stir about selecting my fantasy teams for this season. I played fantasy ball for the first time last season. This coming season I'm going to be in two fantasy leagues.

I'm getting off the track. I wanted to tell you about something baseball-connected, but not necessarily this stuff. Part of my routine every day that passes is checking in with Baseball-Reference. There is simple nothing better for baseball people than this place. You can get lost there for days. Anyway, a regular feature of the site is an "In Memoriam" section listing the names of MLB-connected people who have died. I check it out sometimes because I'm curious, especially about guys who have died at fairly young ages. For example, today a guy named Randy Stein is listed. Who was this guy? Only 58 when he died. Why? How?

Well, the site won't tell you that. It'll tell you how old he was and the date of death. But the web yielded an obit for the guy. Early Onset Alzheimer's, which was diagnosed four years ago, was what killed him. As major leaguers go, this guy was pretty obscure. A pitcher with three teams for four years, he wasn't very good either.

But he went on to become successful in the insurance business. He liked the beach, and camping, pulling pranks, and M&Ms. Married to his high school sweetheart for 36 years; two daughters and a son; a grandchild. But now he's in the Field of Dreams. And he's left behind a whole lot of people who wish he were any place else and could not care less that his career ERA is 5.72.

Wait a Second . . .

2012-01-19T02:15:00.000-06:00

I got to thinking about the last bullet from yesterday's entry. I heard on the radio today--well, actually, it was on my iPod, and it was a recent episode of "This American Life" that reminded me about this. I remember the figures given there were like this. In 2006, a reputable poll recorded that 79 percent of Americans accepted the fact that human-stoked global warming (that is, a substantial increase in greenhouse gases, carbon dioxide, in the earth's atmosphere) was a fact. (I refuse to use the term "believe in" when referring global warming, as if we were talking about Santa Claus rather than a scientifically-verifiable fact.) Three years later, that figure had dropped to 46 percent.

So wait a second . . . what the hell is going on here? Okay. Let's do the logic. Who would gain if human-stoked global warming were not a fact? Who would gain if all these alarms about greenhouse gases would just go away? The answer is obvious: every industry associated with carbon dioxide emissions. And guess who these industries are? Did you guess industries connected in any way with fossil fuels? Gold star for you! and don't forget all the associated industries, the pilot fish on the bodies of traditional energy companies. By all accounts, the largest effort to debunk global warming has come from ExxonMobil. The oil giant has mounted a sophisticated, worldwide campaign that has obviously succeeded. And of course, their lackeys in Congress have assisted them. This campaign has been hugely successful. Just look at the numbers.

Of course, this kind of corporate hooey can only be swallowed if people are uninformed. Need I rail once again at the woeful ignorance of the American people on a vast number of subjects? I'm sure you're tired of hearing it.

This is a very interesting website: The Global Warming Portal

A Little Worrisome, Wouldn't You Say?

2012-01-18T04:29:00.000-06:00

Just think for a second about the implications of the following, all of which were culled from the "Index" in the latest number of Harper's.

Number of members of Congress among the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans by net worth: 57. (So what this means is that the body making laws for the 99 percent is either 13.1 or 10.6 percent comprised of the super rich people in the top one percent--depending on whether you're talking just representatives or reps and senators.) And they call this a "representative" democracy. We know very well who's represented up there don't we?
Every $1 billion in military spending creates 11,000 jobs; the same amount spent for education creates 27,000.
Hydrocodone is number one prescribed drug in America. US deaths attributable to painkiller overdoses were up by a factor of four from 1999-2008.
An average of 18 US veterans commit suicide every day--an astonishing figure. "Support the troops" is the easiest platitude to mouth, but it's a joke, really. Veterans are screwed over in myriad ways once they've been used up.
By 2050, the world will require 70 percent more food production to sustain the world's population; meanwhile, one-quarter of the world's land is considered "highly degraded" right now because of soil erosion, water pollution, loss of biodiversity. This is a pretty hopeful situation, no?
In 2011, 75 percent of Americans believed in anthroprogenic global warming; today 44 percent do. (A triumph of the "big lie.")

Our Lovely, Insane Country

2012-01-17T02:05:00.000-06:00

Bumper Sticker Sentiments Captured Recently in Norman, OK

OK, so Norman, Oklahoma, probably has enough Bubbas and Bubbettes resident to be a cause for concern, but believe me, in this state, Norman is a glowing oasis of culture. I have just two questions about this bumper sticker:

Let me get this straight . . . this guy is saying that all those wars (and all those wonderful soldiers thereof) are keeping us from being taken over by Arabs? Muslims? Mexicans? Immigrants of any description--who don't speak English, of course? Or is he referring to the soldiers of the British Empire in the 17th century who kept us from having Algonquin or Huron as our national language? You can thank a surfeit of idiocy for bumper stickers like this. If I were the teacher who taught this jackass how to read, I would not own up to it.
(Which kinda leads logically from the first question . . .) Just what kind of ninny puts this on his car for the whole world to see?

Allah Akbar

2012-01-16T01:16:00.000-06:00

A few days ago, a federal appeals court--not always the voice of sanity, but in this case definitely so--to the surprise of no one who knows anything about the US Constitution, declared unconstitutional Oklahoma's recently approved proposed constitutional amendment that barred judges in the state from considering Sharia or international law in formulating their decisions. (See here.) The Bubba electorate of this state thought that was such a fine idea they voted for it en masse, by a 7 to 3 majority, when it was offered as a state question in 2010. A couple of Republican dingbat representatives, naturally, had proposed the measure. It was nothing but hysteria-driven nonsense, but that the electorate of this state was heartily in favor of blatant discrimination against a religion other than Christianity just shows to what pass we've come in this country. Since 9/11, it seems the whole country has taken leave of its senses.

The federal judges pointed this very fact out: the proposed amendment openly discriminates by name against a specific religion, it said. Moreover, the supporters of the law could not point to any specific problem the proposed amendment addressed. "Indeed," they wrote, "they admitted at the preliminary injunction hearing that they did not know of even a single instance where an Oklahoma court had applied Sharia law or used the legal precepts of other nations or cultures, let alone that such applications or uses had resulted in concrete problems in Oklahoma."

Everybody's Bashing "Obamacare"--and They Should

2012-01-15T01:10:00.000-06:00

Everybody whose Republican and running for the presidential nomination are universal in bashing it. Much as I hate to revisit the subject of healthcare reform, because it makes me crazy to have to think once again of how a "progressive" president buddied up with the trolls in big pharma and the health insurance industry to ensure that the so-called healthcare reform legislation took care of their interests and not the interests of all those "American people" out there who were supposed to benefit. Problem is, nobody is calling this spade a spade.

Ultimately, Obama and his corporate-backed allies organized enough conservative Democrats in Congress to win, effectively turning healthcare “reform” into a blank-check TARP-style bailout for the health industry. But, of course, to even whisper that last truism is to now run the risk of being labeled a blasphemer in a conversation that can only tolerate misleading red-versus-blue analyses. In today’s national political debate, there are Republicans who insist “Obamacare” is a Canadian-style “takeover” of America’s healthcare system, and there are Democrats who insist that the health bill is a major Medicare-like achievement — any other argument, no matter how valid, has been vaporized by election-season pressure to fall in ideological line. (source)

The fact is, however, is that those same American people for whom all politicians of whatever stamp have been and are being royally screwed once again by the corporate overlords who run this country. A recent study published in the American Journal of Public Health which focused on the state of Arizona underscores one major fact. Having medical insurance doesn't mean people are not burdened by medical debt. This debt, and not whether one has health insurance or not, is the main barrier to people getting needed health care.

Democrats may not be saying it--indeed, healthcare "reform" is going to be trumpeted by the party hacks and professionals as one of the administration's great successes during the coming campaign--but in fact the legislation is not going to help many people outside of the corporations it was passed to protect. Plus it is a thoroughly misunderstood piece of legislation. People don't understand what the so-called reform really did. So it's good to remind ourselves of exactly what a pig-in-poke this legislation is. Here's the source for the following chart. It was formulated immediately before the bill passed in the Congress in spring 2010.

So don't let all the froth you're going to have to endure on this issue cloud the truth. And the sorry truth is, we are being played again by the people who continue to make a mockery of the "public interest."

Myth	Truth
1. This is a universal health care bill.	The bill is neither universal health care nor universal health insurance. Per the CBO: Total uninsured in 2019 with no bill: 54 million Total uninsured in 2019 with Senate bill: 24 million (44%)
2. Insurance companies hate this bill	This bill is almost identical to the plan written by AHIP, the insurance company trade association, in 2009. The original Senate Finance Committee bill was authored by a former Wellpoint VP. Since Congress released the first of its health care bills on October 30, 2009, health care stocks have risen 28.35%.
3. The bill will significantly bring down insurance premiums for most Americans.	The bill will not bring down premiums significantly, and certainly not the $2,500/year that the President promised. Annual premiums in 2016, status quo / with bill: Small group market, single: $7,800 / $7,800 Small group market, family: $19,300 / $19,200 Large Group market, single: $7,400 / $7,300 Large group market, family: $21,100 / $21,300 Individual market, single: $5,500 / $5,800^* Individual market, family: $13,100 / $15,200^*
4. The bill will make health care affordable for middle class Americans.	The bill will impose a financial hardship on middle class Americans who will be forced to buy a product that they can’t afford to use.A family of four making $66,370 will be forced to pay $5,243 per year for insurance. After basic necessities, this leaves them with $8,307 in discretionary income — out of which they would have to cover clothing, credit card and other debt, child care and education costs, in addition to $5,882 in annual out-of-pocket medical expenses for which families will be responsible.
5. This plan is similar to the Massachusetts plan, which makes health care affordable.	Many Massachusetts residents forgo health care because they can’t afford it.A 2009 study by the state of Massachusetts found that: 21% of residents forgo medical treatment because they can’t afford it, including 12% of children 18% have health insurance but can’t afford to use it
6. This bill provides health care to 31 million people who are currently uninsured.	This bill will mandate that millions of people who are currently uninsured must purchase insurance from private companies, or the IRS will collect up to 2% of their annual income in penalties. Some will be assisted with government subsidies.
7. You can keep the insurance you have if you like it.	The excise tax will result in employers switching to plans with higher co-pays and fewer covered services. Older, less healthy employees with employer-based health care will be forced to pay much more in out-of-pocket expenses than they do now.
8. The “excise tax” will encourage employers to reduce the scope of health care benefits, and they will pass the savings on to employees in the form of higher wages.	There is insufficient evidence that employers pass savings from reduced benefits on to employees.
9. This bill employs nearly every cost control idea available to bring down costs.	This bill does not bring down costs and leaves out nearly every key cost control measure, including: Public Option ($25-$110 billion) Medicare buy-in Drug reimportation ($19 billion) Medicare drug price negotiation ($300 billion) Shorter pathway to generic biologics ($71 billion)
10. The bill will require big companies like WalMart to provide insurance for their employees	The bill was written so that most WalMart employees will qualify for subsidies, and taxpayers will pick up a large portion of the cost of their coverage.
11. The bill “bends the cost curve” on health care.	The bill ignored proven ways to cut health care costs and still leaves 24 million people uninsured, all while slightly raising total annual costs by $234 million in 2019.“Bends the cost curve” is a misleading and trivial claim, as the US would still spend far more for care than other advanced countries. In 2009, health care costs were 17.3% of GDP. Annual cost of health care in 2019, status quo: $4,670.6 billion (20.8% of GDP) Annual cost of health care in 2019, Senate bill: $4,693.5 billion (20.9% of GDP)
12. The bill will provide immediate access to insurance for Americans who are uninsured because of a pre-existing condition.	Access to the “high risk pool” is limited and the pool is underfunded. It will cover few people, and will run out of money in 2011 or 2012Only those who have been uninsured for more than six months will qualify for the high risk pool. Only 0.7% of those without insurance now will get coverage, and the CMS report estimates it will run out of funding by 2011 or 2012.
13. The bill prohibits dropping people in individual plans from coverage when they get sick.	The bill does not empower a regulatory body to keep people from being dropped when they’re sick.There are already many states that have laws on the books prohibiting people from being dropped when they’re sick, but without an enforcement mechanism, there is little to hold the insurance companies in check.
14. The bill ensures consumers have access to an effective internal and external appeals process to challenge new insurance plan decisions.	The “internal appeals process” is in the hands of the insurance companies themselves, and the “external” one is up to each state. Ensuring that consumers have access to “internal appeals” simply means the insurance companies have to review their own decisions. And it is the responsibility of each state to provide an “external appeals process,” as there is neither funding nor a regulatory mechanism for enforcement at the federal level.
15. This bill will stop insurance companies from hiking rates 30%-40% per year.	This bill does not limit insurance company rate hikes. Private insurers continue to be exempt from anti-trust laws, and are free to raise rates without fear of competition in many areas of the country.
16. When the bill passes, people will begin receiving benefits under this bill immediately	Most provisions in this bill, such as an end to the ban on pre-existing conditions for adults, do not take effect until 2014. Six months from the date of passage, children could not be excluded from coverage due to pre-existing conditions, though insurance companies could charge more to cover them. Children would also be allowed to stay on their parents’ plans until age 26. There will be an elimination of lifetime coverage limits, a high risk pool for those who have been uninsured for more than 6 months, and community health centers will start receiving money.
17. The bill creates a pathway for single payer.	Bernie Sanders’ provision in the Senate bill does not start until 2017, and does not cover the Department of Labor, so no, it doesn’t create a pathway for single payer. Obama told Dennis Kucinich that the Ohio Representative’s amendment is similar to Bernie Sanders’ provision in the Senate bill, and creates a pathway to single payer. Since the waiver does not start until 2017, and does not cover the Department of Labor, it is nearly impossible to see how it gets around the ERISA laws that stand in the way of any practical state single payer system.
18 The bill will end medical bankruptcy and provide all Americans with peace of mind.	Most people with medical bankruptcies already have insurance, and out-of-pocket expenses will continue to be a burden on the middle class. In 2009, 1.5 million Americans declared bankruptcy Of those, 62% were medically related Three-quarters of those had health insurance The Obama bill leaves 24 million without insurance The maximum yearly out-of-pocket limit for a family will be $11,900 (PDF) on top of premiums A family with serious medical problems that last for a few years could easily be financially crushed by medical costs

*Cost of premiums goes up somewhat due to subsidies and mandates of better coverage. CBO assumes that cost of individual policies goes down 7-10%, and that people will buy more generous policies.

Ride On

2012-01-13T15:59:00.001-06:00

If you don't like this, you're probably on life support already.

The band is Little Axe. The song is "Ride On." We need something pleasant to close out this week.

Piss on US

2012-01-12T18:04:00.000-06:00

I imagine there's nobody in the whole world with access to media who doesn't know about the latest outrage perpetrated by US troops, in this case Marines, in one of our endless Middle East wars. Afghanistan. Desecration of the bodies of dead enemies. Four marines pissing on the dead bodies of three Taliban fighters. It's all on video, which if you're interested, can be found on YouTube. The video, placed on YouTube by another marine with the handle "semperfiLoneVoice,"--good for you and Good bless you, man--Tuesday, went viral Wednesday afternoon. (see this story) Official US government spokespeople, including the secretaries of state and defense, have publicly deplored the incident. Afghans and other Muslim nations are outraged, of course, and ever more convinced that the US military are vile, infidel occupiers, not the friends we profess to be. Two of the sadistic blockheads that did this have been identified. And I'm sure they'll run the other two down. And while they're at it, they need to get the guy who videoed the whole disgusting scene.

Listen, these guys are not the whole Marine Corps, but they and the miscellaneous sadists, outright killers, and other psychos that have been caught for crimes against innocent civilians and prisoners in Iraq, Afghanistan, etc. are representative of the inevitable consequences of war. Unfortunately, they probably represent a goodly number of their comrades. Why? Because saturated in an environment of violence and hatred, people readily shred their humanity. Above all else, war brutalizes people, it gives free rein to the basest impulses of humankind, it robs human beings of their capacity for rational thought. I was about to say it turns them into animals. In fact, animals seem more circumspect than people whose humanity has been distorted out of all recognition by the mindless violence and destruction of war.

So what's the upshot of all this? Yet another demonstration of how callous and cruel a country we've become. These guys might as well have pissed all over this country, because that's the upshot of what they've done in the eyes of the world. The guilty will be punished probably, not as severely as their gross crime deserves, but the memory of what they did and what they represent won't be going away.

Update I: The response of many people to this outrage is almost as outrageous. And really, really disgusting as well as scary. Check this out--read the comments. What a country we live in!

My Friend Bob

2012-01-11T14:00:00.000-06:00

Below, verbatim, is an email I recently sent to an old friend from my days as a historian for the Air Force at Tinker. He's a retired AF colonel, a staunch Republican, gun nut, lover of fast cars. That is, totally opposite from me. But we've remained friends across these barriers. Some background. As is his custom, he forwarded to me some right-wing b.s. written by another retired AF pilot. The gist of it was everybody in the current administration are devils and they have to turned out for the country to be saved. In reply I demurred, saying, among other things, that neither of the political parties was going to save the country and it was foolish to think so. To my surprise, he responded that he agreed, but he then asked "what's to be done?" This is my reply.

Is there anything that can be done, my friend? Obviously, the political process is not going to produce anything but more of the same, which means an ever burdensome existence for millions of people in this country. I'm not so sure anything substantial gets changed now without bloodshed and mayhem--not that I'm suggesting we go grab our pikes.

One of the enduring characteristics of this country is that it has, from the very beginning, thought of itself as superior to every other nation on the planet. By nature superior, by choice of God superior. Which somehow endows us with the power (or grace or ability or blessing, depending on where you're coming from) to escape history. When in fact, as a historian and I'm sure you can see it yourself, I can tell you our path looks just like the paths of other empires now on the dust heap of history. Concentration of wealth and political power in the hands of a small elite, endless wars (you can already hear the drumbeats for conflict with Iran), military spending sapping the creative impulses of the country, proliferation of internal controls, growing dependencies on the resources of others, and so on. What happens is there eventually comes a breaking point that brings the edifice toppling. Could be internal or external. Point is, it's inevitable.

I don't think there's much we wise old heads can do to change things materially. Unless there's some way I haven't heard of to get us off this path we've charted for ourselves. We can practice charity. We can take whatever course our wisdom as elders dictates whether that be as much service we can render to those being hurt, wounded, ground down, discouraged by this cruel process or helping others understand. We can embody peace and pass on to our progeny and any others we can influence virtues like honesty and compassion. And we have to muster as much faith as we can to see things through ourselves.

I know all of this sounds awful fatalistic . . . but I've tried to be honest about the way I really see things. We, both of us, are caught up this this maelstrom, Bob. And we know in our heart of hearts that politicians of any stripe or party are not going to save us. That's why I'm really calm about this election, and all to follow, actually. I've finally concluded that they don't mean anything. They don't change anything. They are a periodic plaything for the power elites and the lamestream media, and an obsession for all those political junkies, bloggers, and pundits. In fact, they are fraudulent exercises to convince the credulous that they actually have a voice in the way the country is governed. Both of us know better.

Sorry. I didn't mean to get so "soap-boxy" on you.

All the Stars Are Aligning

2012-01-10T03:45:00.000-06:00

All the stars in the heavens are beginning to align so the heavens will be just right for this country's next war. Have you noticed all the news lately about Iran's nuclear program? And have you gotten a load of what the GOP bimbos (with the exception of Ron Paul) running for the presidential nomination promise in the way of policy toward Iran? Virtually the same as that pronounced by Leon Panetta, the new, but not improved secretary of defense. Basically the policy is this: the U.S. (and the European Union) do not like the Iranian nuclear program, which, they say is aimed at developing a nuclear weapon. This prompts one of the two "red lines" that Panetta says Iran cannot cross. Therefore tougher economic sanctions that will make it harder for Iran to market its oil will be imposed. In response, Iran has threatened to blockade the strait of Hormuz through which a healthy chunk of the world's oil must traverse on its way to market. The US, says Panetta, will not allow Iran to block the strait of Hormuz. This is another "red line."

You would think that this is sufficient to satisfy anybody's fears that the US will not be standing tall in the face of yet another Islamic threat to the serenity of the world. But no. One of the more prominent bubble-heads running for president, Rick Santorum, asserts that Panetta has his facts wrong and that Iran's construction of a nuclear weapon is a "virtual certainty" unless the US military intervenes. So here's a guy that says "attack them now." Rick Perry, another of the gigantic intellects that wants to president, says we need to send troops back to Iraq! Presumably to be right on Iran's doorstep when it becomes necessary to invade the country.

Does any of this sound familiar? This is the unmistakable saber-rattling that occurs before deployment of the US military on yet another mission to save the world. The Pentagon and executive branch are in the process of ginning up another bogy-man that is a threat to freedom, world peace, and US interests. We know how this process works. And we know what lies at the end of it. More war.

I Keep Saying . . .

2012-01-09T02:12:00.000-06:00

. . . that nothing more that happens can surprise me. I keep saying it, and I keep being wrong. Catching up on a string of recorded "Colbert Report" shows, I encountered one that highlighted this story. I'm telling you, friends, this is a dangerously psychotic country we live in. The show was one obviously some days before Christmas. Colbert reported that the Scottsdale (AZ) Gun Club was offering the following "Get Your Holiday Picture With Santa And His Machine Guns!" A picture is worth a thousand words, so here are two. Under the happy family, note the flyer advertising this good deal. This site has more pictures if these don't make you sick enough.

Does this madness, this abomination, require any further comment? We are a doomed people. (If I didn't already have a great title for this blog, "We Are a Doomed People" would do nicely. Straight-forwardly true.)

. . . and baby makes three. Peace on Earth!


No, I'm not making this up.

Still Obsessing

2012-01-07T15:25:00.000-06:00

The question of why we like the things we do is still on my mind. I got sidetracked yesterday because I took off on collecting. I didn't mean to, although it was connected. What initially started me wondering was how some people do not and apparently cannot like baseball. My son-in-law comes to mind, and my wife. They aren't alone; there are many such people around. What forms our taste in anything? Sports, food, movies, music, culture, activities, books, and so on ad infinitum. Is it entirely enculturation? My dad took me to see baseball at the ballpark. I did the same for my boys. I like baseball; they like baseball. Simple cause and effect?

YUCK!

Or is it something innate? One of my regular readers here told me recently that she cannot stand rock and roll. Now here's a gal who doesn't mind being labeled an ex-hippie chick. Doubtless she was exposed to many, many hours of rock music. Who would have thought that someone with such a label would not like rock and roll? But she doesn't. Some people don't like broccoli--I don't--some don't like roller coasters--I'm neutral--don't like reading--I love it--don't like wearing hats--I do. Could all this be a function of personality? Maybe, like everything else they are beginning to discover, it's genetic. My God, if the advertisers ever crack the genetic code, we're all done for. They will own us even more than now, and that's a frightening thought.

At any rate, the randomness of individual people is a source of endless wonder and delight for me. We're all like fingerprints and snowflakes. No two ever alike. Ain't it great?

What's to Like?

2012-01-06T14:59:00.000-06:00

I was thinking the other day about a question I don't know the answer to. Why do we like the things we do? Where do our tastes in anything come from? What got me to thinking about this was my anticipation of the arrival of some stamps I ordered from a dealer up around Chicago. I collected stamps as a teenager. When I was in the Air Force in my mid-20s, I gave my entire collection, lock, stock, barrel, and stamp hinges, to a service friend. (Whatever possessed me to do this, I'll never know. It was an accumulation of about ten years worth of collecting, both U.S. and foreign, in a big fat album. This avid collector, a guy named Lanny Sockwell, must have thought he had died and gone to heaven.) I have kicked myself any number of times for this idiotic largesse since I resumed collecting stamps just a few years later.

So I collect stamps--just U.S.--and I have a bunch of books and music CDs, too.* It would be fair to say I'm a collector of these also. What makes some people like to collect things, while others have no interest at all in such things? I would suppose some people collect because they aim at having the collection worth something. But no true collector collects so he can sell his stuff. No, it's something much more intangible. Somehow, when I finish out a series, say all the commemorative US stamps issued in 1992 or 1940, there's a sense of accomplishment that sets in, a feeling that something significant has occurred. The complete set of books by an author or poet, same thing, even if you have not read the book. That's not necessary at all. Or every CD by a band or artist.

It's a great feeling. Nobody but another collector can understand this. I don't understand it myself.

*I've also got miscellaneous collections of things that aren't "active" collections, but that I'd never get rid of. Baseball cards, post cards, a few Mardi Gras doubloons.

Let's (Not) Get on with It

2012-01-05T13:05:00.000-06:00

Michael Hirsh writing in the National Journal make some points that I'd like to comment on. His basic premise is that the GOP presidential nomination race is over. It will be Obama vs Mitt Romney in the November general election. I think he's right about this. But along the way, he has a few other pertinent observations:

All the media frothing and flummoxing between now and whenever Romney secures the nomination is just a waste of time. Nobody still standing is going to win the Republican nomination over him.
The coming election will be one of the most vicious in our history and probably really close too. (Right on both counts. Super PAC funding of TV campaigns--allowed under the horrendous Supreme Court decision--which candidates can disavow as not coming from their camps, won't exhibit the slightest restraint. It's going to be nasty, but all US elections are nasty.)
The nomination is already beyond Gingrich, but he will fulminate anyway. Yep, that's what Gingrich does.
Let's get it straight about Rick Santorum. He's a frigging bum "whose views on sexual morality are close to medieval and whose neocon foreign policy (e.g., bomb Iran) won’t fly after a decade of disastrous wars—and who, on top of that, was once considered one of America’s dumbest senators by his peers on Capitol Hill—has very, very little chance of getting close to the nomination. He doesn’t have the money, the infrastructure, or the appeal beyond the hard right. The pundits will talk about his history as a blue-state senator, but the fact is that when Pennsylvania voters learned how truly right-wing Santorum was, he lost by 18 points in 2006 (he hasn’t held office for five years)—which, as Molly Ball of The Atlantic points out, 'was the biggest loss ever by an incumbent Pennsylvania Republican senator.'”
Neither Romney nor Obama will have a very enthusiastic base going into the election. Let's forget about Romney, a whore salivating after the nomination who will say anything to get it, and focus on Obama (who at one time I was actually enthusiastic for). "Salon’s Glenn Greenwald, in a powerful broadside this week, observed that progressives are flirting with Paul for the simple reason that Obama "has done heinous things with the power he has been vested," including waging covert wars with both Islamist extremists and with Iran. Greenwald accused progressives of not conducting an honest debate with themselves in which they admit the real trade-offs of this Democratic administration: We'll accept unchecked executive power in which Muslim children are killed as collateral damage in drone strikes and bankers are secretly bailed out, as long as we can have fewer cuts to entitlements and a more progressive Supreme Court. Said Greenwald: 'It is the classic lesser-of-two-evils rationale, the key being that it explicitly recognizes that both sides are 'evil': meaning it is not a Good versus Evil contest but a More Evil versus Less Evil contest.'"
This last is what the general election will be about. Not about conservatism vs liberalism.
Nothing will change as a result of this election. Nothing. The US government is bought and paid for no matter which party is in the White House. "In truth, Obama and Romney are far closer in mindset and philosophy than anyone is willing to acknowledge just now. Obama, despite his image, has sought to placate business and left Wall Street largely intact, and he is taking a far tougher line on foreign policy--one that reflects a traditional GOP "realpolitik" view and a dramatic ratcheting up of covert war-- than is generally acknowledged, even when it comes to China. Romney, increasingly desperate to win over his base against the onslaught of "Not-Romneys," has allowed his rhetoric to grow more inflamed on the trail, including commitments to a balanced-budget amendment and partially voucherizing Medicare as well as eliminating Obamacare. But based on his history, if he gets the nomination he is unlikely to follow through fully on these overheated pre-primary pledges and do many things dramatically differently, either on the economy or foreign policy. The problems of slow growth, chronic deficits and an overextended military will inevitably lend themselves to similar solutions from either an Obama or a Romney administration." That's the end of the quote. Allow me to observe, however, that these "similar solutions" will not solve any of the problems.

"So What"--Really?, Part II

2012-01-04T12:59:00.000-06:00

So you've seen all the numbers last time. And you've heard some of the stuff these "So What" people are saying. One guy, who attends the Catholic church to hear his mom sing in the choir, but for no other reason says, after reading neuro- and evolutionary psychology concludes that "we might as well be cars(!) That, to me, makes more sense than believing what you can't see." I don't suppose anybody has bothered to point out to this deep thinker that you can't see psychology either, nor atoms, nor truth, freedom, etc., etc. Maybe he doesn't believe in these things either, but I rather doubt it.

The thought processes that dismiss the validity of spirituality are broken and shallow, in my opinion, at least judging by the kind of comments the article contained. Here's another: "God? Purpose? You don't need an opinion on those things to function." Well, no, I don't guess you do. But you will function as what? Some creature of the consumer culture whose sole purpose in life is to acquire and to amass. And then there's this: "There may be unanswerable questions that could be cool or fascinating. Speculating on them is a fun parlor game [sic], but they don't shed any meaning on my life." Well, of course they don't, Bozo, because the meaning of your life is determined for you by the consumer culture that envelops you. And in fact, by making such a statement, you're basically saying that your life has no meaning. If you're good with that, than you're even more hopeless than you appear at first blush.

That gets to the root of it. The whole problem with discarding the big questions as irrelevant to one's life is that it makes one's life meaningless by definition. And if life means nothing, than there is no barrier to rationalizing the worst human behaviors imaginable. All the suffering we inflict upon one another, the injustices, the screaming inequalities, the stupid waste of resources and human lives--all of this can be justified if our lives are defined by nothing other than the accident of our being here.

I'm not claiming to have any answers to the big questions, no way. And I can certainly sympathize with those who execrate the baleful effects of organized religion in human history. Not a single one of them is blameless. But because religion is imperfect, grossly so, it seems to me, throughout human history, does not therefore mean our lives have no meaning other than what the world says. Hell, if that's the case, I'll take religion at its absolute worst. For at least they, in their halting, sometimes infuriating, sometimes scandalous and cruel ways, accept the concept of something bigger, something beyond the grubby, greedy self.

"So What?"--- Really?

2012-01-03T15:57:00.000-06:00

For some reason, and it's difficult to explain, this morning's piece in USA Today (which has become a frequent source lately since it lands in the driveway five days out of seven) entitled, "God, religion, atheism 'So what?' That's what many say" was really kinda upsetting to me. My spiritual journey in a nutshell: lifelong dissident Catholic; ordained deacon; out of the Church for myriad reasons since August 2010.

But still, to read that "So what?" characterizes the attitude of a growing number of people about matters spiritual is distressing. Apparently there are quite a few in this category, and judging my own family, both immediate and extended, and Susan's, too, that's pretty much the prevailing attitude. I cannot determine that many of those we are closest to and know best care about spirituality or even wonder about it. Maybe I do them all a disservice, and if so, I'm certainly sorry. But so it seems to me.

Here are some numbers:

44 percent told one survey they spend no time at all seeking "eternal wisdom"--a pretty lousy phrase, I think, but there it is
19 percent say "looking for meaning" is "useless."
Another survey finds 46 percent who never wonder whether they will go to heaven

Well, okay, on this one, I haven't got much of a problem. I don't wonder about it at all myself. Heaven is a specifically Christian concept, and so is the notion--derived from Scripture and expanded and expounded by centuries of theology and Church pronouncements--of "earning" a way there or forfeiting your place there by your actions is at best problematical and at worst, silly. I tend towards the silly side. Why? Because the whole concept anthropomorphizes God into a crabby and totally unreasonable perfectionist who contradicts himself at every turn by first creating humankind in his own image, according to Scripture, then instilling it with appetites, proclivities, bad genes, and drives that ultimately cause it to fail his rather exacting code of behavior which must be followed to get into heaven. The other alternative is hell where you go if your behavior doesn't measure up to the said exacting code. Yet the Christian God is a god of love. Hmmm.

Same survey found 28 percent who say finding a "deeper purpose" in the their life is not a priority
18 percent of those surveyed scoffed at the notion that God has a plan or purpose for everyone.

Does this mean that 72 percent are intent at some significant level on finding a deeper purpose in their lives? What does "priority" mean in this context? What about the 10 percent between the seekers and the scoffers? Are they seeking a deeper purpose but only sometimes or without much fervor? Sorry, I digress.

6.3 percent of Americans are totally secular, "unconnected to God or a higher power or any religious identity and willing to say religion is not important in their lives."

This figure is from Pew Forum's 2007 Religious Landscape Survey; it seems really low to me.

In fact, this has turned into quite a little essay, so I'll have to take it up again tomorrow. Right now I'm tired, and the subject really deserves closer attention than I've got to give it right now.

LaLa Land

2012-01-02T02:09:00.000-06:00

Here's how you know you're in LaLa land. PBS Newshour correspondent begins the night's program with "all eyes on Iowa, the center of the political universe." [Double take and sound of palm hitting forehead.] I'm getting less and less tolerant of hyperbole. And this really goes over the top, no? It's the worst kind of lamestream media nonsense. Center of the political universe??? For starters, how about the hubris and over-weening self-regard and self-importance of this statement? As if the political universe, whatever that is supposed to mean, didn't include other countries of singular significance. I suppose it's inevitable that Americans will continue to believe that they are the center of the universe, political or otherwise . . . at least until some national or global life event makes it unquestionably certain that the US is not the center of anything, unless we're talking about ignorance and naivete about the course of empire, the tides of history. 2012, I fear, will be another chapter in our continuing decline.

As for Iowa, the cast of clowns there vying for the Republican nomination for president . . . how can anybody take this aggregation seriously? I'm already detecting an undercurrent of extreme dissatisfaction or extreme indifference among Republicans with the presumptive winner there, Mitt Romney, a shameless chameleon who virtually salivates when he contemplates the prospect of being president. He stands for nothing whatever but saying whatever it will take for him to get elected. And this guy is looking like the likely opponent to Obama? Please.

But the media is in a frenzy. They now have eleven heavenly months in front of them they can devote to the feckless, meaningless poring over the entrails of the presidential "race." As if Iowa and every other caucus, straw poll, or primary actually meant that this country has decided to arrest its headlong plummet to terminal mediocrity. As if what president the corporations own will make a difference to the rest of us.

Droppings

2011-12-31T00:28:00.000-06:00

Today is New Year's Eve. When Susan and I were younger, it was always a night of some kind of activity. A couple of years ago we went out with my sister- and brother-in-law, but that broke a pattern. We have no plans for the evening. And since I'm writing this on New Year's Day, I can tell you exactly what we did. We lay on the sofa and sat in the chair and watched part of the show from New York, the Times Square madness. A sure sign, in my opinion, of just how bored one can be with the whole festive proceedings accompanying the turn of the calendar from one year to the next.

Give it up, Dick. Please.

Nothing so illustrates just where we are than the sight of Dick Clark. It was pitiful. I told Susan he looked like walking death, and he sounded like it, too. (She didn't agree, but then, she didn't really recognize Dick Clark anyway.) The picture at the left doesn't really do him justice, because it doesn't capture the slurred, unnatural voice and the shaking hands. The guy appears to have have a stroke or something. The young host tossed it over to Dick at intervals, and the old codger was allowed to speak a sentence or two before the camera mercifully left him alone. Lord, please spare me from having to be in plain sight of a bazillion people when I'm so old, I'm just short of slobbering. Which is about where "America's Oldest Teenager" is today.

Thankfully, we didn't stay with this show. Some of the music was pretty good, but nothing show-stopping. We switched over to a New Year's Eve concert by Coldplay on Austin City Limits. This was better on the whole than the mixture of musical groups that trotted out in Times Square and in the West Coast echo in L.A.

I ran across this bit today in the "Writer's Almanac", and I thought it interesting. Maybe you will too.

The Times Square celebration dates back to 1904, when The New York Times opened its headquarters on Longacre Square. The newspaper convinced the city to rename the area "Times Square," and they hosted a big party, complete with fireworks, on New Year's Eve. Two hundred thousandpeople attended, but the paper's owner, Adolph Ochs, wanted the next celebration to be even splashier. In 1907, the paper's head electrician constructed a giant lighted ball that was lowered from the building's flagpole. The first Times Square Ball was made of wood and iron, weighed 700 pounds, andwas lit by a hundred 25-watt bulbs. Now, it's made of Waterford crystal, weighs almost six tons, and is lit by more than 32,000 LED lights. The party in Times Square is attended by up to a million people every year.

Other cities have developed their own ball-dropping traditions. Atlanta, Georgia, drops a giant peach. Eastport, Maine, drops a sardine. Ocean City, Maryland, drops a beach ball, and Mobile, Alabama, drops a 600-pound electric Moon Pie. In Tempe, Arizona, a giant tortilla chip descends into amassive bowl of salsa. Brasstown, North Carolina, drops a Plexiglas pyramid containing a live possum; and Key West, Florida, drops an enormous ruby slipper with a drag queen inside it.

A Distant Peace

2011-12-30T18:53:00.000-06:00

Coming to the year's end, this tune seems somehow appropriate. . . it is by Jackson Browne from over 20 years ago and it still resonates. It was a different time when he sang, but the story was one we're familiar with.

Peace is what the world needs in 2012, so sorely, so badly. It's the only thing that offers humankind some chance at salvation. But it's so far distant, I'd be lying if I told you I was optimistic about its coming. God bless all you faithful readers, and God bless you even if you're just dropping in.

Jackson Browne - Lives In The Balance by Protest

Something We Need to Remember

2011-12-29T19:51:00.000-06:00

This was interesting, I thought. From my friend Bob Becker. Just another way of seeing how dumb we really are. You'll probably have to spin this up to a size where you can read it. Sorry I could not get it bigger here and still fit.

Palliatives for Militarism, Part II

2011-12-28T21:27:00.000-06:00

Continuing the discussion of what Andrew Bracevich prescribes for lessening militarism in the United States.

See
yesterday . . .
Devise an appropriate guage for determining the level of US defense spending--he suggests an amount equal to the amount spent by the next nine countries combined. It's still a vast sum, but it would save the country hundreds of billions.
Enhance alternative instruments of statecraft--An area of gross deficiency for the US. The country needs a highly competent agency to coordinate and manage US diplomacy. This all means spending more and improving the work of the State Department.
Revive the moribund concept of citizen-soldier--The all volunteer force has spawned an ethos "more akin to that of the French Foreign Legion." It's an imperial army. The army needs deep roots among the people of the republic. Ideal relationship of armed forces and democratic society is a symbiotic one."In terms of race, region, religion,a nd ethnicity, but above all in terms of class, America's armed services should--as they once did, at least in a rough way--mirror society. This does not mean return to conscription, but rather devising mechanisms to spur the willingness to serve in privileged America.
Reexamine the role of the National Guard and reserve components--Obviously. The original purpose was to provide an armed militia for community self-defense, not another manpower pool for the regular army and navy.
Reconcile the American military profession to American society--The officer corps should be rooted in society. I.e., the way values defining the military ethic are formed and inculcated have to be completely revised.

All this was explained in a lot greater detail in the book, but this should give you a taste. Everything he says makes sense, but I fear this country is just too far gone to ever take radical steps like he suggests. And everybody knows the old adage about "living by the sword."

Palliatives for Militarism

2011-12-27T19:52:00.000-06:00

In re the book I mentioned yesterday Bracevich's The New American Militarism is worth your time to read. If you're interested in how we got to this pitiful state of affairs we're in now, where one must grovel a the feet of the generals and kiss the posteriors of the military at every turn. (Bracevich argues that He argues that the virulent militarism we experience now in this country grew out of the Vietnam war. Just another of the truly bad things that war gave life to. I certainly would have located the origins of our militarism back to the Second World War. Until that time, the American people maintained a very healthy skepticism about the existence of standing armies among a free people.

Bracevich describes the following prescriptions as "not a panacea but the prospect of causing present-day militaristic tendencies to abate":

Heed the intentions of the Founders--nothing in the compact "commits or even encourages the US to employ military force to save the rest of humankind or to remake the world in its own image or even hints at any such purpose."
Revitalize the concept of separation of powers--the presidency has not gotten too strong; Congress has failed egregiously to fulfill its responsibilities of deciding when and if the US should undertake military interventions abroad
View Force as a Last Resort--Well, duh! Explicit renunciation of the Bush doctrine of preventative war. And return to declaratory policy in keeping with "our past moral and religious traditions, international law, and common sense."
Enhance US self-sufficiency--a corollary of the above. Limit extent of US dependence on foreign resources.
Organize US forces explicitly for national defense--Eschew "power projection."

Shed unnecessary obligations
Bring US troops home from places they are no longer needed
Make clear to allies they have to pull their fair share of the load

Continued tomorrow . . .

JFK Intel

2011-12-26T00:59:00.000-06:00

Hope everyone had a great holiday. I took a little break for family events. Back now and ready to ring in 2012. In the meantime, some interesting information that I was not fully aware of, and I thought you might not be either.

Both during the campaign and his presidency Jack Kennedy was a walking pharmaceutical crash dummy. Recent biographer, Robert Dallek--An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917-1963 (2003)--reports that "JFK was routinely injected with drug cocktails that included painkillers, amphetamines, steroids, cortisone, procaine, testosterone, codeine, and Ritalin." (Quote from Andrew J Bacevich, The New American Militarism: How Americans are Seduced by War [2005], 294 n.4). More from this great book tomorrow.

(I'll betcha J. Edgar Hoover's file on JFK was 6 inches thick. JFK was randy as a goat and three times as active, as is well known.)

Roasting by the Open Fire

2011-12-22T02:28:00.000-06:00

That is Prozac, the "Boston Terror" on the right. On the left is Gidget, who is a holiday guest, while her "parents" are visiting their human son and wife in Guam. I have often thought that if there is anything to reincarnation, one could do worse than recycling as a dog in America.

Crummy Shoes

2011-12-21T15:50:00.000-06:00

Click here for outrageous puns.

My daughter alerted me to this picture on this website. The best part was the whole long series of outrageous puns that followed the picture in the comments. You should check it out.

Let me tell you how weird I am. What would you think somebody's first reaction would be upon seeing this image? Certainly some variation on "This certainly is amusing," wouldn't you think? Well, that was not my reaction. I thought about what a waste this was in a world where there are so many people who are hungry. I really do have to let up sometime. I really do.

Word: Smart Bird

2011-12-20T03:07:00.000-06:00

Pigeon performing a math test.

Interesting piece today in the Times about a subject that interests me greatly. That would be birds. My kids and family are well aware of my fascination with our feathered friends. In fact, I get unshirted hell about it from my kids. I don't think I could ever have the time it would take to get to be real, official bird-watcher, but I've always found these creatures endlessly interesting. They figure in quite a number of my poems, for example.

Anyway, scientists have discovered hitherto unknown talents in an unlikely candidate for bird stardom, the ubiquitous pigeon. We've known for a while that these guys could count. Apparently lots of animals can count. Some time back we learned that monkeys "learned to rank groups of one, two and three items in various sizes and shapes. When tested, they were able to do the task even when unfamiliar numbers of things were introduced. In other words, having learned that two was more than one and three more than two, they could also figure out that five was more than two, or eight more than six." Now, it turns out that pigeons can do it too.

Amazing. Question now arises whether this ability evolved from the common ancestor of birds and primates about 300 million years ago or separately in the different species. Jury is still out on that one.

Fun, Fun, Fun

2011-12-19T17:09:00.000-06:00

As I'm periodically moved to do, I'd like to share with you some websites I've encountered that struck me as cool or useful or intriguing or perhaps all of the above. First of all, in music. I'm always looking for a new way to enjoy music or for some capability involving music I don't presently have. So have a look at these:

ListnPlay - this site is designed to marry songs and videos together. Type in a band or artist or album or song, and the site delivers up videos which you can then pull singly into a playlist.
LyricsnMusic - another aggregator site. This one not only gets the lyrics to a tune, but will also deliver up YouTube videos, concert dates, artwork, tabs, and Wikipedia results all on one page.
uWal ltv - massive walls of artist/band pictures. Move your mouse over them, click, and up comes a playlist, some of them pretty extensive. The key here is that you can narrow your search to specific genres, and there are 23 of these, everything from classical to tango. You can earmark favorites and construct playlists. In fact, you can do that with all of these sites.

And here's some more I've found recently:

Visual.ly - "Infographics and Data Generlizations" I'm a sucker for this sort of thing. I still have a much loved volume of this sort of thing called Understanding that first alerted me to these arresting ways of presenting data. Here's what the site says about itself: "Infographics and data visualizations are shifting the way people find and experience stories, creating a new way of seeing the world of data. They help communicate complex ideas in a clear, compact and beautiful way, taking deep data and presenting it in visual shorthand. We’ve collected the best examples on the web and gathered them for you to reference, share, and enjoy." Almost 6,000, divided by category.
knoword - From directions: "a game of quick thinking, smart decisions and great words. When you begin, you will be given one randomly generated dictionary definition along with the first letter of its corresponding word. You must fill in the rest of the word to experience a gain in points and an added time bonus. You will start off with one minute before the game ends, and every word is an opportunity to extend your time. If you're ever stuck on a word, just hit the skip button and a new puzzle will present itself."

Have a blast.

Help Me, Will Ya? Like Hell! Bang Bang

2011-12-17T02:15:00.000-06:00

. . . and you're dead. Here is the entry in Friday's USA Today for the news from Texas in the "Across the USA" section of the paper:

Arlington -- Arlington police spokeswoman Tiara Ellis Richard says a man who was fatally shot as he walked toward an SUV after a deadly wreck appears to have been a good Samaritan. The SUV driver, Thomas Lester Harper, is accused of causing the wreck that killed one motorist and also of shooting the man who approached to help. Harper is jailed on murder and intoxication manslaughter charges, plus two counts of child abandonment and endangerment, because his twin toddlers where with him in the SUV.

There's a fuller story with lots of pictures here. (There's a TV news video at the bottom of this story.) Luckily the two toddlers, a little boy and girl, were only slightly injured. But the accident involved eight vehicles and the driver of one of them, a pickup that Harper rammed, was killed. The erstwhile good Samaritan was named Clarence Robinson. He was 19 years old.

Am I the only person who thinks about our idiotic gun policy in this country after something like this happens. Why did this maniac have a gun?

Another Clap, Clap for the US Military

2011-12-16T01:38:00.000-06:00

Right on the heels of my heartfelt disdain for all the phoney celebratory rhetoric as the US military leaves Iraq, I cannot restrain myself from bursting out with another couple of claps for more superb management of our military forces. It's reported today that the Dept of Defense has paid hundreds of millions of our money in late fees to shipping companies for not returning shipping containers on time. Over the past ten years, the Pentagon has pissed away over $720 million because troops have been using the containers for shelter, storage, and building material. This is just fine with the contractors because if the military doesn't get them their boxes back, they have to pay $7,200 on an automatic "rent-to-own" fee for a box worth $3,200.

I worked for 32 in the Department of Defense, and I cannot tell you how common this sort of waste is. The country is reeling from the frauds and crimes of Wall Street, millions of people can't find two nickels to rub together, and the Pentagon goes its merry way pissing away our money by the billions. A trio of senators are demanding that the DoD cease this "wasteful practice," but I wouldn't be holding my breath waiting for the military to stop wasting money.

Clap, Clap

2011-12-15T00:14:00.000-06:00

The old Zen koan about what is the sound of one hand clapping does not apply here. Because I mean to convey an actual applause--consisting of exactly two hands clapping exactly two times. Not more. Because that is as much enthusiasm as I can gin up to mark the withdrawal of the last US troops from Iraq. A gaggle of diplomats, politicians, and military brass attended the obligatory "We're Leaving" ceremonies in Baghdad and listened to Leon Panetta, the third secretary of defense to preside over the awful war in Iraq, spout the obligatory lies for such occasions. About the high cost in blood and treasure (over 4,500 American lives and who knows how many Iraqis? The estimates range from over 100,000 to almost a million. Who knows?*) for Iraq and US, but "those lives have not been lost in vain." No? Then what the hell were they lost for? Panetta talked about an "independent, free and sovereign Iraq." He also said that the US departure begins a "new chapter in history" for Iraq. Yeah, right. What an empty and meaningless cliche. This is the kind of b.s. politicians spout all the time. What does such nonsense mean to the average Iraqi or the family here in our country whose son/daughter/husband/wife will not be around this Christmas or for any more Christmases at all?

It's all so much horse shit. The fact of the matter is the Iraq war was a terrible mistake. It was begun under false pretenses; it shattered formally firm US commitment not to be the aggressors in any war. Not to mention the mess we're leaving behind us. A country pretty much in turmoil right at Iran's doorstep. Think about it. Who came out ahead in this war? Won't take you long to figure out the only winner. Shiite Iran. And if you listen closely to what the pols are saying, you have to conclude that within a few years we'll be at war with Iran. You can bet on it.

*Only two things are very clear. US taxpayers will continue to pour huge sums of money into Iraq whether US troops are there or not, and George Bush did not fund a penny of the staggering expense for this conflict. Nobody really knows the monetary cost of this war. It approaches $1 trillion and twice that when you figure in future costs for veterans' healthcare and debt service.

Muy Excellent!

2011-12-14T17:21:00.000-06:00

Here's yet another of these bands and tunes I discovered just surfing around. Gems like this one are scattered all over the Web. This was Spinner's "song of the year." I had never heard of the band before, not unusual, but the band itself is a bit unusual. All women.

Love the lady rockers! Here's another video. This one very cool:

DOH!

2011-12-13T15:08:00.000-06:00

Okay, here's the scenario. Former CEO, current COO, and CFO of a multi-billion dollar brokerage firm sitting at a conference table before a congressional committee. Their corporation, MF Global Holdings, which is recently bankrupt, has lost $1.2 billion in money that belongs its clients, 36,000 of them. And none of these three bozos--one of them a former US senator, by the way--have any idea of what happened to that money. They were all like DOH! We don't have a clue; we wish we knew. And by the way, we're really sorry about this and we apologize to our [ripped off] customers. [Story here.]

The Justice Department has opened an investigation into the bankruptcy. The company went under after it bought $6.3 billion worth of bonds from heavily indebted European countries. OK, for starters what kind of asinine investments are these? You want to own some of Greece's debt? Ireland's? Italy's? Are you kidding me? And second, I respectfully submit that these three guys are three lying sacks of shit. Is it credible that the top management of a brokerage house knows nothing about transactions in the company involving billions of dollars? Hell, no. What happened is the company used money from client's accounts, which is supposed to be kept sacrosanct and separate from the firm's own investment money, to cover its losses on the shaky European bonds. And they ain't about to 'fess up to this. But you watch. Truth will out, and these guys will all be shown up for the perjurers they are.

Finding God [or a Particle of Him, at least]

2011-12-12T17:03:00.000-06:00

Various subatomic particles: Higgs Boson is not found yet.

Grab your thinking caps, brothers and sisters. Let's dip into theoretical subatomic physics, shall we? Remember that monstrous particle accelerator (it belongs to CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research) that took years to build over in Europe on the French/Swiss border? (It could have been in the US, as I recall, but we would not fund it.) Well, it's doing exactly what it was built for, smashing teeny little particles of matter into each other at unbelievable speeds. BOOM! They crash into each other and produce showers of subatomic particles, which scientists can then study. (Don't even ask me about how the photos of these crash aftermaths are taken.)

Since the early 1960s, a particularly important and striking subatomic particle has existed in theory only. It is called the Higgs boson or "the God particle." And why the nickname? Well, finding this thing would be a major step forward in our knowledge of what makes everything work, i.e., a key step on the road to the unified theory of everything. Physicists have figured out how both radioactive and electromagnetic forces work, "But they need to find the particle to complete their understanding of how these forces work together at the atomic level." As I understand it, explaining how matter acquires mass is and has been an elusive question. And in the crazy world of subatomic physics which is subject to the completely counter-intuitive laws of quantum mechanics, a particle can theoretically impart mass to other particles. This magical guy is the Higgs boson.

Finally, with all that background, I can impart the big news: physicists at the CERN lab report "they have seen evidence of the God particle's existence." The results they are studying are "tantalizing" but not a "conclusive" detection of the Higgs boson. By the end of next year, scientists are confident that experiments will be definitive, and the God particle will be conclusively proven to exist.

So is God going to be subatomic? Of course . . . among other things, not the least of which is elusive and mysterious.

Outrageous Numbers

2011-12-11T00:10:00.000-06:00

Some Thoughts on Majorities

2011-12-10T01:53:00.000-06:00

"The majority never has right on its side. Never I say! That is one of the social lies that a free, thinking man is bound to rebel against. Who makes up the majority in any given country? Is it the wise men or the fools? I think we must agree that the fools are in a terrible overwhelming majority, all the wide world over."

Henrik Ibsen

"What is morality in any given time or place? It is what the majority then and there happen to like, and immorality is what they dislike."

Alfred North Whitehead

"A wise man will not leave the right to the mercy of chance, nor wish it to prevail through the power of the majority. There is but little virtue in the action of masses of men."

Henry David Thoreau

"Haint't we got all the fools in town on our side? And ain't that a big enough majority in any town?"

Huck Finn

"People don't ask for facts in making up their minds. They would rather have one good, soul-satisfying emotion than a dozen facts."

Robert Keith Leavitt

" . . . the human race is divided politically into one wise man, nine knaves, and ninety fools out of every hundred. that is, by an optimistic observer. The nine knaves assemble themselves under the banner of the most knavish among them, and become 'politicians': the wise man stands out because he knows he is hopelessly outnumbered, and devotes himself to poetry, mathematics, or philosophy; while the ninety fools plod off behind the banners of the nine villains, according to fancy, into the labyrinths of chicanery, malice, and warfare."

T. H. White (The Book of Merlyn)

Musings

2011-12-09T01:33:00.000-06:00

I recently ran across a Roman proverb that goes thus: "The world wants to be deceived." It got me to thinking just how true it is. Just think about the masses of people in this country who believe that a "recovery" of the economy will restore things to the way they used to be. Or the similar masses who equate repression with security and believe that nations fight wars for peace.

Voices of the 99 Percent

2011-12-08T03:12:00.000-06:00


But one of the poignant testimonies out there, one of millions

Another testimony:

I am 66 years old, and don’t plan to retire, ever. I am fortunate that I look young, feel young, am healthy, and still have a job. Friends / contemporaries are not so lucky. One needs a liver transplant. One is in a wheelchair. They are both still working. Two others have not worked for 2 - 3 years. They are smart, talented, experienced, and desperately want to work. Instead, they have the terrifying prospect of years - 25 yrs? 30 yrs? the rest of their lives - spent in unexpected poverty. Through pure luck, I am me and not them. I could wake up tomorrow and be any one of them. We are the 99%!

Our creativity and labor is the foundation of wealth. Legalized greed and exploitation concentrates it in the hands of the 1%. We are Atlas. We carry the world on our shoulders! We are the 99% . . .

Hits me in the heart. I am 68 years old, Susan is 64. I cannot imagine us being in such a condition.

Go spend some time at the "We Are the 99 Percent" blog. This is just one person. Just one. Holding up a a sign at the "Occupy Wall Street" site in New York. There are pages and pages of such stories from people there. A real person behind every sign, every scribbled page of grief and suffering. And this is but one city in America. What are these people going to do?

I sit here typing this in my nice warm house. Tomorrow we will attend a Christmas party given by our neighborhood association. Everybody will have nice clothes, and we will dispose of who knows how much uneaten food afterwards. There is a serious disconnect going on here. There's a serious disconnect going on all across the country.

The Platinum Kiss

2011-12-07T02:33:00.000-06:00

Pretty good line in a recent USA Today story: "The golden parachute is evolving into the platinum kiss." About the recent exit packages that CEOs are garnering from companies across the spectrum in the US. It's this sort of thing, among other outrages, of course, that have spawned the nationwide "Occupy" movement. Is there a better example of pay inequity out there than this? To wit: IBM CEO Sam Palmisano will get $170 million when he steps aside; Gene Isenberg, $126 million from Nabors Industries. Google's Eric Smith got $100 million in stock when he departed as CEO. Smith is a real interesting case. The man had an equity stake in Google of over $5.5 billion. He remains chairman of the board, which could get him $7.25 million a year.

Are you kidding me? Surely in the face of the widespread suffering across this country, this is damn near criminal. But we have lost our capacity for outrage in this country. People ought to be out on the streets in thousands. But we are as supine as sheep in the face of the grossest kind of injustice. Whereas once some sort of solidarity among sufferers apparently existed, it is impossible to discern today, aside from the often inchoate occupiers scattered across the nation. It's almost as if people have decided to cower in their misery. It's a pretty good indication that people have essentially given up. Which makes the charade of selecting a president next year as if the choice will actually make a difference in the lives of ordinary people such a joke. I told Susan tonight that I'm actually sick to death already at the media feeding frenzy over the campaign for president. It's eleven months away, and it's overwhelming in its irrelevancy already. But that's another rant altogether.

Kicking Christmas Off in the Good Ole American Way

2011-12-06T03:02:00.000-06:00

Weihnachtmarkt (Christmas Market) in Frankfurt

I have no idea why anyone in the right mind would go out to stores on so-called "Black Friday"* under any circumstances. It is a mystery to me. Even given the fact that I don't particularly like shopping anyway. I avoid stores if at all possible and shop online. I cannot avoid the necessity to shop sometimes, but at no time, save perhaps in book stores, do I ever like it. And the Christmas madness on the streets and stores makes the experience all the more taxing. I did like shopping overseas, but not necessarily because I was buying anything. I found almost any kind of store in Germany and Europe when we lived there interesting, but that was just from the standpoint of the novelty of the goods on the shelves. Christmas time there was wonderful. The very first trip we took in Germany was to the Christmas market in Worms, which was held right next to the cathedral. I can still remember the wonder I had at this event. So utterly strange and new at the time for a person who had been living in the country only about a month at the time. I still remember the fetching and beautiful Christmas displays in the German shops. Christmas markets were everywhere with hot Gluwein, pretzels, gingerbread, and Wurst; crowds enjoying it all in the frosty air. This time of year was magical over there.

Don't know why I went on about all this. Maybe I was unconsciously setting up the stark contrast with the observation I meant to make at the beginning of this post. I.e., a story in USA Today a few days ago informs that among the biggest sellers on Black Friday were . . . guns. How utterly American! Nationwide there were over 129,000 background check requests filed with the FBI that day, far more--32% more, in fact--than the previous high. Nobody seems to have a good explanation for this surge. I could speculate, but it's simply easier to observe that a large portion of the American people are insane and be done with it.

*Where in the hell did this nickname come from? And when in hell did it become part of the American lexicon? Of course, "Black" as in "in the black" for the merchants is a perfectly good metaphor for our money-obsessed culture.

W. S. Merwin

2011-12-05T16:39:00.000-06:00

Merwin: a poet I found challenging when I first began reading his stuff. He still makes me work a little bit, but I'm none the worse for that. This is a wonderful little poem he wrote in 1997, packed so that unpacking it would take a bit of time, a bit of imagination. I had this posted in my cubicle for years . . . I'm sure it confirmed people's view of me as an eccentric at best, a radical weirdo at worst. I'm guilty on all counts.

Remembering

There are threads of old sound heard over and over
phrases of Shakespeare or Mozart the slender
wands of the auroras playing out from them
into dark time the passing of a few
migrants high in the night far from the ancient flocks
far from the rest of the words far from the instruments

Etchings

2011-12-03T04:04:00.000-06:00

There once was a guy named Fred that I knew. He has been dead now for over ten years. I have forgotten his last name, but I remember he worked in the library at Special Operations Command HQ. I was friends with the librarian, which is how I got to know Fred, and we used to exchange emails on this and that to break up the boredom of being fellow drones in a military bureaucracy. I remember him being an upbeat guy, and we would get in these discussions about "deep" things. Apparently, for I don't have his original, he observed in an email that I did not come across as "content"--fancy that. Here's what I wrote to him in response:

Dear Contented Fred,

No, I don't wish I were content.

I will be content when I am dead.

To be content is to see no room for improvement.

This bespeaks either a dull mind, an overblown opinion of oneself, or a childish Pollyana approach to life.

I have neither-nor, but rather a healthy self-knowledge, a sense of humor and a sense of the tragic, and a consequent empathy with people.

And what your prescription for this poor, sad world? More power-mongers? More gold-diggers? Liars, cheats, and thieves? Dullards and sheep? More lawyers? Manipulators, clowns, and self-delusives? More politicians? More game-players?

Nay, give me more artists, more music, more poetry, more wine. More thinking, fewer rules. More color, less carping. More love, less lechery. More God, fewer godless.

Clones of me wouldn't take themselves very seriously at least. And they would have peace at the core. The poor, sad world could do a lot worse.

I wrote this in the spring of 1997. Some of phraseology strikes me now as a bit much, and the tone is bit too judgmental and dogmatic. Nonetheless, I don't disagree with the general thrust of it here these fourteen years later.

Obvious

2011-12-02T16:22:00.000-06:00

A day or so ago, I was telling a friend about part of quote that I remembered, but I had no idea where I remembered it from. I thought I "had read it somewhere." Well, I have this big ole commonplace book--does anybody not familiar with the pre-computer age have any idea what this is? Anyway, I did indeed find the source of the quote, which in full ran this way:

It's nonsense that Americans are individualists. Deep down, we are a nation of herd animals: mouselike conformists who will lay at the doorstep all our rights--if you tell us that we won't have to worry about crime and that our property values will be protected.

This is from a guy named Dennis Judd who was quoted in Robert Kaplan's An Empire Wilderness (1998). But of course. This is one of those observations that is so blatantly obvious that anyone making it will be immediately condemned as anti-American. But one of the many anti-American things you can say in this land of the free that are blatantly obvious.

Housekeeping

2011-12-01T19:45:00.000-06:00

Some of you might have noticed that the blog has a kinda new look. No drastic changes. But the rearrangement of elements at the top and their placement over a new thematic photograph . . . well, I'm happy with it. Somehow, it seems to better represent what this blog is all about. At the same time as I did these changes, I removed all the names of individuals from the labels of my posts. Impossible, really, to decide who was mentioned enough to deserve a label beyond the obvious ones. But people will still be eminently findable. The Google search of the blog is instantaneous and accurate. You can still find "Rush Limbaugh" or "Barry Bonds" or "Tom Coburn" or "Benedict XVI" (or "pope," for that matter) just by siking Google on 'em. Plus there are lots of people, such as Michelle Bachman, who are now just as findable as Barrack Obama or George Bush (also found under "vile little pretender").

And the change certainly makes the label list more useful and attractive. At least I think so.

The One Percent

2011-11-30T17:41:00.000-06:00

Every week The New Yorker has a humor column entitled "Shouts & Murmurs." To be honest with you, lots of times I just skip it because, as I have mentioned before, my reading burden in heavy, if not back-breaking. This week though I was caught by the title of the piece by John Kenney, "We Are the One Percent." It begins "We, too, have mobilized," and continues in the voice of a fat cat. I have to tell you, it's been a while since I read such brilliant satire. Here are a couple of samples, but I commend the piece to you for full appreciation.

We're angry. We're angry at something we're calling "imagined frustration." By this we mean that, except for Congress, the White House, banks, major lobbyists, and the editorial boards of Fox News and the Wall Street Journal, no one is listening to us. And we're tired of it.

And more:

Here is our manifesto, still very much a work in progress, as it's cocktail hour and several of our protesters are out at the pool:

All wealth should be shared equally among the wealthy.
Eradicate poverty. (Note: Maybe a clearer way to say this would be "Eradicate the poor." Need to discuss.)
End business as usual. (Note: several members like the sound of this, but they don't know what it means. A suggestion has been made to add the word "hours" after "business.")
Implement a rule whereby the public cannot look at us and must keep a distance of at least twenty feet at all times.

And so on. Like all effective satire, this bites enough to be felt, but not to break the skin. Great stuff.

Rats on the Move

2011-11-29T17:29:00.001-06:00

Hi! My name is Herman Cain and I didn't do it.

Out of the truly motley gaggle of people who are seeking the presidential nomination for the Republican party, none of whom can I possibly imagine in the White House, one has stood out as buffoon in chief. Admittedly a difficult choice for the title, nonetheless Herman Cain gets the honor. No need to recount the many reasons this guy won the title going away . . . well, maybe not going away because Michelle Bachman and Rick Perry were closely contesting the spot, rivaling Cain in the display of the unfathomable depths of their ignorance. Cain was busy doing this himself, but being ignorant is no bar to the presidency. He was kinda hanging on as a curiosity. The black Republican pizza king. That in itself was enough to keep the guy hanging around. But that was before a passel of cluster bombs fell on his head.

A couple of weeks ago, or was it longer? Doesn't matter. Cain was accused of sexual harassment by a number of women. These acts allegedly took place when he was the president of the National Restaurant Association. He has been dogged to death by these charges ever since. Nine-nine-nine has been bye-bye-bye. Till now all Cain has been doing is a pretty poor tap dance around these charges.

Now a nuke has been dropped. A woman in Atlanta named Ginger White has informed the world that she and Cain carried on an affair for the past thirteen years. The buffoon in chief has suddenly morphed into a big, scraggly rat. Do I need to tell you he denies the charge? And does it surprise you to learn that his campaign now reports that he is "reassessing" his run for the presidency. What are the odds do you think that he'll be in the race more than a couple of more days? He ducked a big shindig in NYC tonight with a bunch of media heavies, and reportedly a couple of his staffer rats are deserting the sinking ship and going over to the King Rat: Newt Gingrich.

Gingrich! Can anyone believe that this despicable clown is the best they can find? I have not mentioned Mitt Romney, whom you would think would be the beneficiary of all this, but it's apparent that there's a fairly determined segment of the GOP, not clear how big a segment, who cannot abide Romney. He's an oily, lying bastard who's changed his position on so many issues, he cannot remember where and what he said a week ago. So the beat goes on. Is there a woodwork candidate for the Republicans? Rats are all that's left in the daylight.

Let's Play Pepper

2011-11-28T02:40:00.000-06:00

Pepper is a game played by baseball players in close proximity to one another. It's also a game, a brutal game played by the police against students at the University of California campus at Davis recently. They were in close proximity too. Close enough for cops to pepper spray people as nonchalantly as if they were watering a garden. If you have not seen videos of these public servants at work on students sitting cross-legged in the quad, you need to see it right now. It's chilling and frightening. Pepper spray in the face of perfectly peaceful protesters! Elsewhere on the same campus students were being jabbed with overhand baton thrusts, female professors were being pulled to the ground by their hair and arrested. Go to YouTube. You will find video of all these outrages. Notice the Nazi storm trooper gear. It's de riguer now for the cops everywhere.

I have been lamenting for several years now what we as a country are becoming. The aftermath of 9-11 has loosed the hounds of hell upon us. It makes me both fearful and furious to see what has become of our once precious civil liberties. Now it's dangerous to confront authorities, period. But we all have allowed this to happen. By our fears, by our paranoia, by our ignorance, and by our complacency. The buzzards have come home and are roosting, brothers and sisters. And their breath stinks of rot.

Here's Matt Taibbi on this incident:

What happened at UC Davis was the inevitable result of our failure to make sure our government stayed in the business of defending our principles. When we stopped insisting on that relationship with our government, they became something separate from us.
And we are stuck now with this fundamental conflict, whereby most of us are insisting that the law should apply equally to everyone, while the people running this country for years now have been operating according to the completely opposite principle that different people have different rights, and who deserves what protections is a completely subjective matter, determined by those in power, on a case-by-case basis.

He quotes Glenn Greenwald on the reason things have come to this unfortunate pass:

Despite all the rights of free speech and assembly flamboyantly guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution, the reality is that punishing the exercise of those rights with police force and state violence has been the reflexive response in America for quite some time. As Franke-Ruta put it, “America has a very long history of protests that meet with excessive or violent response, most vividly recorded in the second half of the 20th century.” Digby yesterday recounted a similar though even worse incident aimed at environmental protesters.

======

Although excessive police force has long been a reflexive response to American political protests, two developments in the post-9/11 world have exacerbated this. The first is that the U.S. Government — in the name of Terrorism — has aggressively para-militarized the nation’s domestic police forces by lavishing them with countless military-style weapons and other war-like technologies, training them in war-zone military tactics, and generally imposing a war mentality on them. Arming domestic police forces with para-military weaponry will ensure their systematic use even in the absence of a Terrorist attack on U.S. soil; they will simply find other, increasingly permissive uses for those weapons. Responding to peaceful protests and other expressions of growing citizenry unrest with brute force is a direct by-product of what we’ve allowed to be done to America’s domestic police forces in the name of the War on Terror (and, before that, in the name of the War on Drugs).

The second exacerbating development is more subtle but more important: the authoritarian mentality that has been nourished in the name of Terrorism. It’s a very small step to go from supporting the abuse of defenseless detainees (including one’s fellow citizens) to supporting the pepper-spraying and tasering of non-violent political protesters. It’s an even smaller step to go from supporting the power of the President to imprison or kill anyone he wants (including one’s fellow citizens and even their teenaged children) with no transparency, checks or due process to supporting the power of the police and the authorities who command them to punish with force anyone who commits the “crime” of non-compliance. At the root of all of those views is the classic authoritarian mindset: reflexive support for authority, contempt for those who challenge them, and a blind faith in their unilateral, unchecked decisions regarding who is Bad and deserves state-issued punishment.

Both these guys are far more elegant and at this moment more in control of themselves than I am when I contemplate what we've allowed our country to become.

Truk

2011-11-27T03:25:00.000-06:00


Front of 1930s era truck sunk in the waters around Truk since 1944

I actually knew about Truk (only now it's called Chuuk), knew that it was a battleground in World War II in the Pacific. But that's about all. I didn't know exactly where it was--somewhere down there in the southwest Pacific. I wasn't even clear on when the battle took place.

I found out: The island's lagoon was main base for Japan's South Pacific fleet and had a 45,000-man garrison. The island was heavily fortified and known to the Allies as the "Gibraltar of the Pacific." Operation Hailstone, launched by the United States with carrier aircraft in mid-February 1944 was one of the most important naval airstrikes of the war. Twelve Japanese warships, thirty-two merchant ships and 249 aircraft were destroyed, although the larger warships had moved to Palau a week earlier.


Japanese freighter struck by U.S. torpedo at Truk, 17 Feb 1944

This was long time ago--I would have been about six months old at the time. But I learn via HDNet World Reports that the idyllic lagoon, long a lure for divers who flock in there in their hundreds to enjoy the beautiful setting and the greatest shipwreck dive in the world, that a looming ecological catastrophe looms. Sunken tankers, not to mention all the other vessels, are reaching the point where they will break up* releasing millions of gallons of oil into the lagoon. This catastrophe would be worse than the Exxon Valdez Alaska spill. It would kill the lagoon and destroy the fragile, bare-existence economy of the island. There's a very expensive procedure by which the oil can be sucked out of the tankers, but the dirt-poor islanders cannot even afford to fix the potholes in their roads. Somebody else will have to pay. I nominate Japan. All in favor say "Aye!"

One of the things I most dread for my children and grandchildren is whatever the physical state of the planet will be in 40-50 years. How many other potential disasters like this loom that we don't know about? And will the world ever wake up to what humankind is doing to the planet? It's fast approaching the time when it will be too late.

*I didn't know this happened to metal ships, but it does. Apparently, this happens eventually to all submerged vessels. Note to self: need to find out more about this.

Geaux Tigers!!!!

2011-11-26T02:48:00.001-06:00

Just a note to note that the LSU Tigers, the number one team in the land, pounded number three Arkansas yesterday by a score of 41-17. After two quick TDs by the Hogs, one of them on a runback of a fumble that took a weird bounce right into the hands of a defender, LSU scored 41 points to Arkansas's 3. For the first time in its history, LSU is 12-0 on a season. The domination was frightful to behold. I have been an LSU fan for my whole life, and I've seen a lot of good Tiger teams over the years. This one is the best one I've ever seen.

(Of course, I'm aware that this passionate devotion to a college football team is at the least unseemly for one who sees the larger context of the corrupt NCAA athletic kingdom. But I just can't help it.)

Quoting Kuntsler

2011-11-25T01:53:00.000-06:00

The dust is finally settling, and I do hope I don't have to hit the road again till next year. I'm tired of traveling, tired of airplanes, airports, highways, and living out of a suitcase. We got back from Louisiana last Sunday. Our son Stu arrived about an hour before us, and he just left this morning after an all-too-short visit.

It's catch up time in a bunch of arenas, not the least of which is re-energizing this blog; I've been pretty spotty over the past week or so. And then there's all the blogs that have to be read . . . friends and relatives and my regulars. Of course, there's no way on God's green earth I keep up with all the blogs I dip into. There are few I read religiously, very few. James Kuntsler's "Clusterfuck Nation" is one of the exceptions to this rule (off the top of my head, I can think of only one other: "Baseball Time in Arlington" about the Rangers). Kuntsler and Matt Taibbi are writers who employ what I'd call the slashing style. No pussyfooting around with language niceties or foggy expression of their beliefs. And so Kuntsler begins his piece at the beginning of this month thus:

Portents of winter and the toothless chatter of flag-draped traitors vies with a fog of lies spread by Koch Brother messenger boys, Reagan nostalgia hucksters, suck-ups in office, Murdoch empire servlings, Banker PR catamites, and Jesus terrorists to occupy the national mind-space with a narcotic Jell-O of half-formed wish fulfillment scams. The nation is hostage to a confederacy of racketeers. Banking. Big Pharma. The Higher Ed / Loan nexus. GMO agri-biz. Fast food. Mandatory motoring. You name it. What a disgrace we are, and the worst of us are the least to know that.

Is there a clearer expression of the calamity that is our current state of affairs than "hostage to a confederacy of racketeers?" Is there a stronger expression of condemnation of what we've become than "disgrace"?

His outrage at the Penn State sex scandal is near boundless. He begins "Rudderless" like this:

The Penn State football sex scandal, and the depraved response of the university community at all levels, tells whatever you need to know about the spiritual condition of this floundering, rudderless, republic and its ignoble culture.

Correctly, trenchantly he interprets the hideous affair as a metaphor for America. And he's right on. He's revolted by every aspect of the scandal: "The intersection of America's fake warrior culture of football with the nation's fake moral and ethical culture is instructive. It has many levels . . . " from the cover-up by the university higher-ups to "the pretense that college football is a character-building endeavor." From "the phony 'prayer' session held in the Penn State stadium just before Saturday's 'big game' with the University of Nebraska" to the student demonstrations of support for Paterno and the football program to cable news wall-to-wall coverage of this event while several other earth-shaking events like the European debt crisis hardly got mentioned.

No, Kuntsler's not happy. He's angry and disgusted. Who can say these are unwarranted emotions?

Hello Again

2011-11-22T04:24:00.001-06:00

I've been "out of pocket," as they may still say in federalese. I've been engaged of late in heavy family matters. Driving Mom down to Louisiana--the trip went fine, by the way--and then the very day we got back, my son Stu is here to visit for several days. For the first time, I think, since we've been in Oklahoma, my two sons will not be able to sync their holiday visits. We will see Ben for a few days before Christmas. One of the awful things about having kids is that they invariably leave, and you have to fashion family out of these scattered precious times you have with them. All this by way of explanation as to where I've been and also to where I am if I cannot squeeze in a few moments to post over the next few days. It took me a couple of hours to catch up with all my online chess games that were hanging short of time just now.

Of course, the idiocy of what passes for our national government has not taken a holiday. It was announced yesterday that the so-called "super committee" that was going to attack the budget deficit has adjourned without accomplishing a damn thing. It's a broken record, this idiocy out of Washington. Naturally, I blame the Republicans, who would just as soon drive the country straight to hell before coming to grips with the perfectly obvious fact that the federal government requires more revenue to conduct its business. The vicious partisanship that has virtually paralyzed the government since Obama took office shows no sign of slacking.

I should mention that I don't consider the deficit the largest problem facing this increasingly sinking nation. No, first comes the economy with all those millions out of work, those millions who have been in this condition for months now. All those people who are losing their homes, and who are not going to have a Christmas this year. And then the interminable war in Afghanistan, which shows no sign of ever ending, and which is sucking billions of dollars out of us every month. So the government is as wrong-headed now as ever, and every day that passes just digs all of us into a deeper and deeper hole. Now I'm going to be a broken record: we are a doomed people.

We ARE in Kansas, Todo

2011-11-15T00:56:00.000-06:00

Got contraband, old lady?

So I'm about 12 miles west of Salina, Kansas, in a rented car with my almost 91-year-old Mom and my 64-year-old wife. I'm driving the former to Baton Rouge where she's moving in with my brother. It's been a long trip from Denver already. This Kansas State copper pulls alongside of me, gives me the eyeball, drops back and hits the lights. I pull over and the dude walks over to my mom's side of the car and tells me after I fumble with getting the window lowered--didn't know the car and fumbled with controls the whole day. Anyway, he tells me he's stopped me for--are you ready for this??--not using my turn indicator to signal lane changes.

He asks me for my license. Asks me if the car's rented (How did he know? We figured out later it has to be some code in the license plate number.) Checks out the rental papers. Wants to know where I'm going and why. Says he's going to run my license and if it checks out, he'll write me a warning ticket. While he's back there in his cruiser, another cop drives up beside him and sits there for awhile. (I wondered if I'd been reported as a possibly dangerous character with two lady cohorts, one near-ancient, the other obviously beyond poster-child status for the over-50 set. Not to mention fairly greying me, age 68.) The other cop leaves after a while, and the first guy comes back and gives me the warning ticket, and oh, by the way, do you mind if I look in your truck because there has been a lot of "contraband" crossing the country. (Why, hell yes, I frigging mind, think I, but I'm not going screw around with this yahoo; that's a no win game.) So we go to the trunk, and he finds it crammed with luggage (naturally!). I was sweating it like hell because I had two cases of wine in the trunk--is it not illegal to carry alcohol across state lines?-- and I would have been royally pissed if he said anything about that. But the wine was at the bottom of this spacious trunk, under all kinds of other other stuff, so he either doesn't see it, or less likely, decided not to say anything. But he does want to know what's inside a big roasting pan Susan is bringing home. I have to show him it's empty. He wants to know how my mom's stuff is getting to Baton Rouge. When were we going to get there, and some more questions I can't remember. Can you believe this?

Fact of the matter is, I was just being rousted. With my driving cap and pony tail and patterned tee shirt, I fit his and every other cop's profile of suspicious, and probably dangerous, character. Thus the hassle. Don't start me on the surpassing idiocy of it all, or on the fact that this is a clear example of police profiling--no way in hell I get stopped if I've got a high-and-tight Marine haircut--that one has no choice in such a situation but to allow this violation of his 4th Amendment rights (what would have happened if I said no to the trunk search?), that this situation happens all the time to the disadvantaged in our society. Don't start me.

Need I tell you that incidents like this don't particularly beef up my trust in cops?

A General Exit

2011-11-09T02:00:00.000-06:00

This will surprise you: According to USA Today, the Pentagon's pool of retired generals and admirals for use as "mentors," i.e., paid advisers, has dried up. There were 355 of these guys on the gravy train in 2010. Today there are 4. During the gravy days, the Pentagon was paying these "advisers" as much as $330 an hour. They worked as contractors for the services so normal ethics rules didn't apply. Sweet, huh? And almost to a man they were employed by giant defense contractors, whose products were sometimes involved in the projects the mentors were advising on.

After USA Today exposed the story in 2009, the secretary of defense capped the "mentors' pay, requiring public financial disclosures and hiring them as government employees, which required them to abide by federal ethics laws."

So guess what? The fat cat retired top brass quit. They said they didn't want to disclose their finances publicly. They also didn't want limits on working for private firms,* and of course there were numerous complaints that a cap of $179,000 a year and $86.10 per hour for their services was too low.

So how surprised are you? God, things are rotten in our state of Denmark!

*Which are invariably defense contractors, who invariably got cozy with the generals and admirals while they were still on active duty. The revolving door between the military and defense contractors is an ongoing, screaming scandal, but nobody cares.

Happy Valley

2011-11-08T00:52:00.000-06:00

Scumbag Sandusky and enabler Paterno in happier times

I knew it at one time, but I was reminded by all the news out of Penn State of late that that campus is known as "Happy Valley." It's more than a little ironic, don't you think, that this latest mecca for pedophilia should bear such a nickname? I don't have to tell you the sordid details of the scandal that is engulfing the happy valley school with its sainted football coach. Seems the defensive coordinator there under Saint Joe Paterno, Jerry Sandusky, sexually abused boys over a period of years, in some cases right there in the Penn State showers where he was seen on different occasions by members a clean-up crew and by a graduate assistant. Early reports say eight boys were victimized; the latest number I've heard is 20. And this is almost certainly too low. We veterans of the Catholic priest sex scandal know two irrefutable facts about pedophiles. They are serial offenders, and they don't stop abusing kids until they are caught. If you're talking years these slime balls are abusing kids before that, the victims can easily mount to over 50 or 60 kids or even more. (Chronology of the events leading to arrest of Sandusky here.)

What makes this thing so sordid is the same exact thing that happened with the Catholic church. Here the institution was a university and its squeaky clean football program and its squeaky clean legendary coach. But confronted with allegations that one of the football lights, Sandusky, had been caught sexually abusing children, the university covered the thing up and two of the college officials, including the Athletic Director, went on to perjure themselves before a grand jury in connection with this. And Saint Joe? Well, he was informed about this in 2002, and he reported it up the chain. And then . . . . does nothing. Doesn't confront Sandusky. Doesn't follow up on the report he made. Doesn't say anything when nothing happens in the case. And of course the higher ups don't do anything either.

WTF is wrong with these people? You have to wonder how much of this heinous behavior--the crime and the silence--is going on all over America. Is Penn State and the Catholic Church just the tip of a huge rancid iceberg?

Update I: The news Wednesday evening is that Paterno and the president of Penn State have both been fired. Good.

The End

2011-11-07T01:54:00.000-06:00


The truly amazing thing about these people who throw "class warfare" around is they don't have a frigging clue what they're talking about. True class warfare would have these people strung up long since.

These Truths

2011-11-05T00:15:00.000-05:00

the ones I'm about to list for you are supposedly self-evident. That's the way the Republican propaganda mill that's been churning out the same lies over and over for years on end now treats them. Here they are in no particular order:

Business does everything better than the government. And by extension, business people, even if they are buffoons like Herman Cain and Donald Trump, will naturally be better at running the government than a politician, lawyer, or dishwasher. Really? None of our greatest presidents--Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, FDR, TR--were businessmen. In fact, if you give me a minute, I might be able to think of a businessman president who rose higher than mediocre . . . hang on. I'll think of somebody . . .
Rich people are "job creators." Sheerest poppycock. This is nothing more than the tired, old discredited "trickle down" theory in new clothes. Give the rich more money, and eventually some of it will fall on the heads of the rest of us. Mere accumulations of money don't create jobs. What really creates jobs is great big bunches of people buying things. Rich people don't create jobs; they spend some of their sums of money and sock the rest away in safe investments.
Regulations kill jobs. Yeah, right. The lie is that regulations are so onerous and costly that businesses spend a lot of money that would be used to hire people. But this is nonsense. This country's experience with deregulation has shown over and over that in a deregulated environment businesses tend to consolidate into smaller numbers

You can probably think of others such as, free trade is always to be desired and criticizing the greedy rich is inciting class warfare. Equally as much bullshit as the other propositions. There is a real danger, of course, that constant repetition of these falsehoods will magically make them true at a certain point. I'm afraid we may have already reached that point. Not all of us, certainly, but a goodly number of people who are inclined to believe anything that drips off the lips of a Republican or somebody with lots of money. These things are believed because people desperately want them to be true. Because if these "truths" are not true, then the American system and the accompanying American dream--that part of it that says anyone in this "land of opportunity" can get filthy rich--are phonies also.

Your Neighborhood Poor

2011-11-04T16:17:00.000-05:00

ProPublica has an interesting online tool for you to give a whirl. Type in the zip code of your county (or parish) and it will tell you how it stands in terms of income inequality compared to other US counties. You can find it here. Just for information's sake, the county I live in, Cleveland, in Oklahoma shows 47 percent have more income inequality. That's about right. Oklahoma is in the middle on a lot of things. But just for grins I typed in a New Orleans address. Results: 99 percent of US counties have more income equality than Orleans Parish, LA. It does not get more stark than that. There is some discussion about the tool and its accuracy in the comments below.

Speaking of Texas

2011-11-03T01:03:00.000-05:00

If it weren't so pathetic, it would be funny. I'm talking about the speeches of George W. Bush. You've probably seen some of these snippets before, but a few were new to me, and the one with the kid standing behind him while he's talking is worth the price of admission by itself. Enjoy!

It's Texas

2011-11-02T00:25:00.000-05:00

She's one of the newer New York Times columnists, Gail Collins. Her most recent column points out once again just how crazy it is in Texas. This goofy governor of theirs Rick Perry who's embarrassing himself and his state daily is a perfect symbol of a place that, like Florida, has always been slightly unhinged.

Just a few days ago, Collins had a lot of fun in her column demonstrating this. To wit: a story about an assault with a frozen armadillo. Then there's the one about the pissed off Taco Bell customer who took out his aggressions with . . . not a taco, not a burrito. No, with a frigging gun! (But of course.) “Brian Tillerson, a manager at the Taco Bell/KFC restaurant, told The San Antonio Express-News that the man was angry the Beefy Crunch Burrito had gone from 99 cents to $1.49 each." Oh, well, hell. That explains it completely.

All this led up to a few paragraphs about Herman Cain, the pizza man who's running for the GOP presidential nomination. The latest on him is that three different women are accusing him of sexual harassment when he was heading up the National Restaurant Association, or something like that. Collins dismisses Cain. "Sexual harassment is a serious subject. But Herman Cain isn’t." Right. It's not worth discussing. Odds are, the guy's guilty, but he finished anyway as somebody anybody could take seriously. Unfortunately, the whole country is thinking like Texans. This can't be good.

Great Websites

2011-11-01T03:16:00.000-05:00

For various reasons.

Ninjawords: Doesn't everybody have a dictionary link on their toolbar? I cannot imagine anybody not having one. But till I discovered Ninjawords, I had to wait wait wait for the dictionary site to come up, type in the word, and wait for the system to grind out the word and definition. No more. If all you want is a quick definition, this dude will blow your hair back. Try it. Info about it here.
Wikisky: The kind of place that makes me realize just how little I know. But it fascinates me nonetheless. This is an astronomy site that you have to see to believe. Here's their own description of what it is: "Our on-line system is a detailed sky map. We generate the map automatically using our database with the positions and basic characteristics of space objects. You can get more details from Getting Started." I get lost here every time I go.
Kiva: Lend some money to some enterprising citizen of the developing world. Help them stand up a business, do yourself proud, and love your neighbor all at the same time. "[A] non-profit organization with a mission to connect people through lending to alleviate poverty. Leveraging the internet and a worldwide network of microfinance institutions, Kiva lets individuals lend as little as $25 to help create opportunity around the world."
Wikitravel:Wiki again? Yep. This is a Wiki Travel Guide. It's got over 25,000 destination guides and other articles for planning travel. Look up close by (ton of stuff on Oklahoma City) or what you're thinking about (rail travel across Canada). Tons of great information.

Nowhere to Go

2011-10-31T14:40:00.000-05:00

Is there nowhere to run on this globe from the baleful, sinister, and destructive power corporations hold over all our lives? No wonder there's a worldwide outbreak of visible protests against what they are doing to us. Listen, the "Occupy" movements that are happening everywhere are an encouraging sign. An indication that people are aware of what's happening to them. The pain that's being inflicted, the utter unfairness of what's being done to people all over the globe just so these monstrously rich companies can get even richer, can squeeze even more out of people who for over thirty years have been steadily bled by corporate and personal greed. I could probably blog every day on corporate malfeasance. It's a subject that never ends.

A case in point: I read that President Obama has ordered the FDA to "take actions to help reduce prescription drug shortages." Say what? Yes, that's correct. This year, in fact, shortages of over 200 of them have been reported--and this is near a record for this type of thing--involving cancer drugs, anesthetics for surgery patients, emergency medicines, electrolytes that patients need for IVs, and more. So what happens is treatment is delayed, surgeries postponed, or "make do with costlier and less-effective substitutes." Emphasis on costlier.

The FDA says many drugs in short supply are injectable, harder to manufacture, store, and ship. There are also supposedly manufacturing issues and raw materials shortages. Don't know about you, but this sounds like Big Pharma smoke. Why? Get this: "Companies may stop manufacturing older drugs in favor of newer, more profitable drugs, and the FDA can't require a firm to keep making a drug it wants to discontinue." What does that tell you? Tells me that generics are being discontinued along with the others that don't make as much profit.

The new executive order is not going to get at the root of the problem, which is unbridled greed. It's just going to require the FDA to urge drug manufacturers to voluntarily tell FDA about looming potential shortages so there will be earlier warnings. Oh, and the FDA is also going to monitor for price gouging. Monitor! Are you kidding me? Here's what the FDA spokesperson said about the current situation: "In recent months, we've heard reports of enormous markups such a blood pressure medicine usually priced at $26 being sold for $1,200." Do you think this is going to change with the FDA "monitoring"? This executive order is window dressing. Big Pharma is murdering us again. Bastards!

Anything They Choose

2011-10-29T19:31:00.000-05:00

The other day before I was so rudely and awfully interrupted by the Texas Ranger meltdown in the World Series, I was discussing the imminent shutdown of WikiLeaks, which is being brought on by the big credit card companies (banks) and online payment companies refusal to process donations to WikiLeaks. This has essentially cut off the website from it's life blood. Indeed, WikiLeaks has shut down publishing anything for the rest of the year to concentrate on fund-raising. I wish them well. They need $3.5 million to continue through next year.

Let me observe something else that's sinister about what these big money people are doing. I have already mentioned the debatable nature of the great bulk of what gets slapped with a security classification. I saw stuff classified in the Air Force and at Special Ops that you could read in any decent newspaper. This is what happens when you give the power to classify stuff to 100,000 paranoid idiots.

But is isn't what I wanted to point out. What I did want to underscore was the obvious. The immense, murderous power being wielded by these financial institutions. Here we have a case of their snuffing out the life of an organization they don't approve of under the guise of helping protect the "national interest" of the United States. Are you serious? Believe it: there's no "patriotism"--what an abused word!--no concern for the security of the country in what these companies do. It's an exercise of raw power. They have reasons of their own for stifling the hell out of websites that expose the shams and shames of government and corporations. WikiLeaks is the deathly enemy of deeds done in the dark. It can escape no one's notice that if Big Finance can snuff the life out of WikiLeaks, they can snuff the life out of anything they choose.

It's Over

2011-10-28T20:38:00.000-05:00

The dream is over.

My beloved Texas Rangers lost the seventh game of the World Series tonight by a score of 6-2. What more is there to say?

There Are Not Words . . .

2011-10-27T20:41:00.000-05:00

. . . to express the horror, the rage, the crushing disappointment of watching the baseball team that you have given your heart to for over a quarter century get within one strike of winning the World Series twice and then go on to lose the game in the bottom of the 11th inning to a weaker team, a team that but for a series of miracles would not even be in the World Series. I cannot find the words for the feeling that gives you. The best commentary on the game from the Texas Ranger point of view is at BBTIA with the accompanying comments from shattered Ranger fans.

Here is an email exchange I had with one of my very best friends. We jumped through all the doctorate hoops at LSU together. He's a true baseball fan, and a true friend. He understands.

Bro,
Have been out of pocket several days—just back from the Southern [Historical Association convention]. Of course, your name came up on several occasions, especially after the painful loss in the World Series. If there has ever been a more painful loss in the World Series, I don’t know when it was. Marius and I were going to turn in at decent hour (we were in Baltimore on Eastern Time) but got hooked about the middle of Game 6. We ran into a number of stunned Texans at the conference. I felt for you, bro

George, you are one of the truest of friends to understand the unbelievable hurt. There are not words to describe the crushing disappointment, the devastation. Baseball is the cruelest of sports. Bart Giamatti said the game was designed to break your heart. How utterly right he was. Of course, there are myriad explanations, all in retrospect, as to what might have been done in game 6 to avert disaster, but the ballplayers say they just "didn't get it done." That's as good a place to leave it as any.

Save this one observation: Ranger pitching, except for a few shining exceptions, just went south for most of this Series. As for the loss of the whole thing, I don't think there's a baseball team out there that could have recovered from game 6. Like I told my similarly saddened sons: this is like a wake service that never gets over. I don't think I can recover till next April, and maybe not even then.

Box score and play-by-play are here.

Slow Strangulation

2011-10-27T18:32:00.000-05:00

I recently found out (here) that WikiLeaks, that notorious or glorious site depending on your political proclivities, is probably going out of business by the end of the year. Reason: American financial companies have refused to process donation payments to Wikileaks. After the site published a quarter million state department cables, U.S. credit card and online payment companies decided they were not going to sully themselves with assisting this activity. Their action of course is slow but sure strangulation of the web site. According to its founder, Julian Assange, "If WikiLeaks does not find a way to remove this blockade, we will simply not be able to continue by the turn of the new year." In order to devote the organization's full time to raising money, Assange said that "publication operations" would cease for the nonce.

I'm sorry, but I see this whole affair as quite sinister, and far more threatening than the public service WikiLeaks is performing by outing the State Department and the Defense Department* secrecy.The reason for secrecy is these agencies, which exist on our tax dollars, don't want us to know, obviously, what sort of activities we're paying for. I worked in DoD for over 30 years, and I saw lots of classified material. And I'm here to tell you there was no rational reason for the vast majority of it to be classified. That said, I think the American people generally would be appalled by the kind of things that are being done in their name by our country. That's why Assange is doing a public service shining a light on this stuff.

More on this later.

*Before publishing the diplomatic cables, WikiLeaks had published nearly a half million military documents, some of which were classified, from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Papist Proclivities

2011-10-26T14:16:00.000-05:00

I read recently (here) that the religious beliefs of the one out of four Americans who call themselves Catholic are all over the lot. Fully 86 percent of them are not bothered that people holding beliefs contrary to official Church teaching consider themselves good members of the church. Even more amazing, four in ten Catholics say that you can be a good Catholic without believing in the "real presence" of Christ in the Eucharistic bread and wine. Other interesting findings, in line with these ideas: less than a third (31 percent) of Catholics attend weekly mass, and nearly half (47 percent) don't go to mass as often as once a month.

It's their own moral views, not those of the Church, that matter say over half of Catholics, even those who attend mass every week. The sexual scandal has had a devastating effect on people's view of the Church leadership. Eighty-three percent think the scandal has sapped leadership's political credibility; 77 percent thinks it's damaged pastors' abilities to minister. And only 29 percent (doubtless the troglodyte element) think the bishops have done a good or excellent job in dealing with the issue. I'm frankly amazed that any percentage at all could believe this.

The reason I even take time to notice all this, and find some of it amazing, is that I well remember the Church that was adamant about the necessity of believing everything taught by the Church lest your immortal soul be endangered. (It wasn't that long ago, if you're a geezer like me. It was million years ago if the only Catholic Church you know is the post-Vatican II one.) That has changed completely. I note with some dismay, however, that opposition to the death penalty is still relatively rare among Catholics. None of the numbers to the left there particularly surprise or bother me. Indeed, this chart more or less mirror my own feelings, except I oppose the death penalty a good deal more vehemently.

An Excellent Idea

2011-10-25T17:20:00.002-05:00

I first heard of this idea from Jame Kuntsler's column today. That is, a proposed amendment to the Constitution that would preclude corporations from claiming protections under the bill of rights. That is, an amendment that specifically undoes the 19th century Supreme Court decision by which corporations were defined as "persons" and thereby entitled to the rights that you or I have as a citizen of this country and, be it noted, as a real, genuine person with a pulse and all that. Section 1 of this proposed amendment says it all: "The U.S. Constitution protects only the rights of living human beings." What an excellent idea.

Who would have ever thought it could be otherwise? But in the madness that seems to infect our national government from Supreme Court to the Congress to the Defense Department and beyond, we confront a situation where the rights of corporations and unions to free speech (first amendment) entitles them to give unlimited amounts of money, and in most cases, unaccountable money, to influence elections. This as a result of the egregious Citizens United v FEC decision of last year. In plain English, what this decision did was turn over control of elections in this country to concentrated wealth. It is no longer a figure of speech--it it ever was--to describe a senator or member of Congress as bought and paid for.

We are about to embark on our first presidential election under these newly established "rights" for corporations and unions. (I mention the latter solely for accuracy . . . there is no comparison in terms of dollars available to buy elections.) Already, the sums of money being amassed by the president and his prospective challengers is obscene. And it's just going to get worse.

Cannot Resist

2011-10-24T15:40:00.000-05:00

I cannot resist quoting James Kuntsler at some length today. As I've mentioned before, he reminds me a lot of Hunter S. Thompson in the skillful and entertaining way he dispenses bile and venom onto the heads of the so richly deserving. He's talking here about the proposed constitutional amendment that would remove the notion of personhood from corporations. Check it out:

One idea floating around the Internet is very good: a constitutional amendment aimed at redefining downward the alleged "person-hood" of corporations, so as to drive vast amounts of money out of our politics. Notice that the President of the US shows no interest in this idea. If the President were an honorable fellow, he would announce his intention to decline running for a second term. A free-for-all in the Democratic Party may be the only thing that can save it from extinction. Not since the Whigs under Millard Fillmore has a US political party been so feeble and purposeless. It can crawl off and die now. Something else will take its place, I'm sure. I wish Occupy Wall Street would show up at the next Republican candidates' debate and hurl bushels of rotten tomatoes at the fakers and imbeciles arrayed on the stage. They need to be publicly humiliated beyond their own self-induced humiliations when they open their pie-holes to yap about "faith in God" and "liberty" and "family values" and all the other mendacious platitudes from their scanty trick-bag of so-called ideas. They make me ashamed to be an American - as if there wasn't already enough.

This is the first intimation, nay, outright charge, that Obama lacks honor. I don't think Kuntsler is overstating his case, which as you may have noticed, he does frequently. If you think about it, how honorable was this president when he led all his millions of supporters in 2008 to believe that he was someone we could count on to move the country in a different direction? someone who would make difference? He talked progressive-ism and delivered the opposite. As you see, Kuntsler has no use for either one of the parties. He's exactly where I am, or vice versa.

God Awful!

2011-10-22T23:56:00.000-05:00

Yes, I am a grown man. An educated man. A man of some culture. A man who entertains serious thoughts on a fairly regular basis. A man who published commercially: books, poems, other writings of all kinds. A man who prides himself on being rational and having the ability to separate wheat from chaff.

All of the above, but I have to tell you, against all reason and despite all these protestations, I am completely and utterly distraught over what happened tonight to the Texas Rangers in their own ballpark in the third game of the World Series. The were crushed by the St Louis Cardinals 16-7 (when it's that bad, it's humiliation, not just defeat). Ranger pitching sucked, their defense sucked (3 errors, all costly). The bats were acceptable, but they could have been golden in this game and it would not have mattered. The team played a really lousy game. They were God awful. It got so bad I turned the game off before it was over. Almost an unimaginable act.

I'm just sick. And really berating myself inwardly for being so attached to a damn baseball team. There are some pretty famous essays about this game that speak to this aspect of it, how it causes you to die a little, how it breaks your heart. I could write such a thing myself right now.

Play-by-play and box score are here. See also here for NY Times account.

Incredible!

2011-10-20T11:43:00.000-05:00

That's exactly what it is. Incredible. This post is #1000 in the continuing series that constitute this blog. The very first post I made to the brand new "What Powderfinger Said" (still a very clever title, I think) blog was about guns, one of my "crazed obsessions" that put in an appearance here fairly frequently. The date was April 25, 2008, before the election of that year, back when I had all kinds of faith in Obama, when I actually thought the political process could make a real difference. Back when George W. Bush, who I habitually refer to throughout as "the vile little pretender in the White House," was still disgracing the White House by his presence there. Back before the great real estate crash, the Great Recession (is that what we're calling it?), and of course the great bailout, which saved the banks so they could continue to rape us all daily, and so they could continue to award their top executives obscene amounts of money and grow even bigger than they were when they were too big to fail. Back before the oil spill. Back before the unbelievable fact of the Texas Rangers playing in the World Series for two straight years.

A lot of water has flowed under the bridge since April 2008. It occurs to me that we had only been back in Oklahoma for a year at that point. I could have never foreseen that here, three-and-a-half years later, I'd still be keeping up with this blog. Particularly in view of the fact that nobody reads it--or practically nobody-- that it's sometime tedious, often tendentious, or otherwise unworthy of either my time or anybody else's time. But for all that, the blog has survived, and it's undergone some few cosmetic changes until it pretty well hardened into what you see here now.

Recently my daughter changed the theme of her blog and in addition to sprucing up its looks. But the biggest change she instituted was restricting her entries to three a week. A necessary move, probably, because she spends God only knows how many hours on Facebook every week, and she does have a job and my two grandchildren to raise. Cannot understand that Facebook attraction, but do see the wisdom of limiting number of posts. I may seriously consider that idea myself. I'm so compulsive, this blog takes me away from stuff I should be doing: reading more books, writing more poems, walking the dog, chilling myself out with fewer blog entries about stuff that pisses me off but I cannot do anything about.

So here's to another 1000 posts . . . if I last that long.

Flat

2011-10-19T15:03:00.000-05:00

As in "flat on your butt"--which is the way you will be if something like a flat-tax plan ever passes. This flat-tax idea seems to be the latest gee-gaa plan being trotted out by the Republican candidates for the GOP nomination for president in next year's election. It's going to make everything better, they say. Rick Perry, the governor of Texas, beloved of the Tea Party nuts and flat-earth types who think science is absurd when they don't agree with its conclusions, is about to trot out his own flat tax proposal. It's a "me-too" move: Perry is countering the so-called "999 plan" being proposed by Herman Cain, the Godfather Pizza guy. One of the 999 triad is a 9 percent flat tax on incomes. Another is a 9 percent national sales tax (a consumption tax).

Here's all you need to know about these taxes the flat tax on incomes or on consumption: they're regressive. They fall much harder on middle and low income people than on the rich "for the simple reason that most lower income people use all of their income to pay for food, clothing, shelter and other consumption whereas members of the upper class have lots of cash to spare that they are unlikely ever to consume in their lifetimes. There are additional significant flaws in those tax schemes, like unrealistic economic assumptions, difficult transition paths, rosy revenue scenarios, misleading propaganda about rates and the probability that a national sales tax that cuts deeply into lower income finances will repress consumption that fuels small businesses." And they would join a lot of other regressive taxes already out there: state and municipal sales taxes, for example.

There's a really good discussion of why these tax proposals are good only for the uber rich right and why the Cain plan is even more regressive here.

It's Rarely Good News

2011-10-18T23:58:00.000-05:00

. . . means new Harper's Index. I am always fascinated by these things, although I have to observe that my renditions of some what they've said over the months has not engendered much in the way of comment or observation. (Although to be quite candid about it, I'm always delighted to get some kind of response for anything I write here. Yeah, I know I said this blog is basically self-therapy, and that is indeed true, but just think about it: why would I spend countless hours and God only knows how many words doing this if I did not want to have other people read it? I'd be a liar if I told you otherwise. I'm always delighted to know somebody is out there and paying attention.)

The Harper's Index rarely gives us good news. But the juxtaposition of the facts are always interesting at the very least. Much of the time they're a lot more than just interesting. To wit:

What's wrong with the U.S. Post Office

Percentage of U.S. Postal Service Expenses that go to labor costs: 89
Of FedEx and UPS expenses, respectively: 41,48

They are not in the Army now

Estimated percentage of Americans aged 17 to 24 who are ineligible to join the military: 75
Respective rank of obesity, drug and alcohol problems, and low "aptitude" among the most common reasons for ineligibility: 1, 2, 3

Hidden misery

Portion of unemployed people in the U.S. who are covered by primary unemployment insurance: 1/4 (What in the world are the other 3/4 doing?)

They're crazy down there in Florida

Percentage of all oxycodone sold to doctors in the U.S. last year that went to Florida: 89
Date on Which Florida began requiring potential welfare recipients to pass a drug test before receiving benefits: 7/1/2011
Percentage who have failed the test: 2.5
Estimated amount this will save the state over the next year in denied benefits: $98,000

What? I had no idea there even was such a thing.

Number of "designer vagina" operations paid for by the British National Health Service last year: 2,000
Percentage of women seeking the procedure who were deemed to have "normal" genitalia in a 2010 study: 100

Is this surprising? Not really

Amount by which a typical good-looking U.S. worker will out-earn a typical ugly one over a lifetime: $230,000
Estimated amount that discrimiantion against the ugly cost America each year: $20 billion

Bastard!

Date on which Joe Walsh (R, IL) said Washington can't put "one more dollar of debt upon the back of my kids": 7/13/2011
Amount that Walsh currently owes in back child support: $98,422

A Great Man

2011-10-17T00:39:00.000-05:00

Happy Birthday. Tutu is 80.

Several years ago when I was still living in Florida, I heard Bishop Desmond Tutu speak out on the University of South Florida's campus. I have to tell you, he was an amazing man. He had so much warmth, such love for people, it just oozed out of the guy. Plus a wonderful, rollicking sense of humor, and an infectious laugh that filled the auditorium when it struck. And he held his listeners positive rapt as he talked about the truth courts and the process of reconciliation between the races in this native South Africa. I still recall today, some twenty years later, how moved I was, how inspired. And how unworthy I felt of my own professed Christianity in the presence of this guy. I knew I was blessed to have been in the same room with him.

And lo, comes the latest issue of Vanity Fair (it's my wife's subscription, but naturally, since I don't have enough of my own stuff to read, I read a good bit of this magazine too) with a collection of quotes from Tutu given during a recent interview. Tell me this is not a class guy. Let me share some:

What is your idea of perfect happiness? When we all live together in harmony as one family, in real interdependence; when all have enough to eat, have enough clean water to drink, have decent health care, and we know war no more.
What is your greatest regret? Not telling people they had done very well often enough.
If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be? Not wanting so much to be loved.
What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery? Being treated as rubbish, as a nonperson.
What is your greatest extravagance? Rum-raisin ice cream.
What is your greatest fear? That we will destroy ourselves through our greed and our destruction of the environment.
What is your current state of mind? Joyful and serene.

Amen to all of it. Long may he live.

Once More!

2011-10-15T01:44:00.000-05:00

What can a fan of the Texas Rangers say at this point but "Wow!" or "Holy Cow!"? And don't forget, "I told you so." The Rangers clinched a return to the World Series for the second year in a row tonight by destroying the Detroit Tigers in the 6th game of the ALCS playoff. The Rangers scored 15 runs, and even if you erase the 9-run third inning, they still scored enough to beat the Tigers. There are actually some who frequent this blog who disparaged the confidence I had in this Ranger team, even going so far as to intimate that pride (among the team's supporters, no less) would be the team's undoing. Well, so much for that theory. There's no more room for trash talk, indeed, for anything to be said about which team is the best in the American League. Indeed, in a few more days, the Rangers will quite likely prove they are the best team in baseball. They are a team on a mission, and the St Louis Cardinals are a lucky wild card team which, because it's currently hot, leads some to believe they actually have a chance in the World Series. Well, these people are every bit as mistaken as those who gave the Tigers a chance.

The Rabbit Hole

2011-10-14T16:10:00.000-05:00

Interesting column by Paul Krugman in today's Times. He is concerned about the Republican party and the collection of Yahoos running for the party's nomination. They are all, every last one, mad as hatters who have jumped down the rabbit hole when it comes to economic policy, and it "terrifies" him. Frankly, I agree with him completely. Here's a snippet of what he says:

And since economic policy has to deal with the world we live in, not the fantasy world of the G.O.P.’s imagination, the prospect that one of these people may well be our next president is, frankly, terrifying.

In the real world, recent events were a devastating refutation of the free-market orthodoxy that has ruled American politics these past three decades. Above all, the long crusade against financial regulation, the successful effort to unravel the prudential rules established after the Great Depression on the grounds that they were unnecessary, ended up demonstrating — at immense cost to the nation — that those rules were necessary, after all.

But down the rabbit hole, none of that happened.

Precisely. I've been wondering for months on end what strange demons possess these guys that cause them to simply deny reality. Can they seriously believe that excessive government regulations and bad home loans to people who were not worthy of them were what brought the US and world economies to the brink of collapse? If this is truly what's in their minds, well I'd like a hookah bowl of whatever it is they're smoking.

Nikki Lane Won't Be Back

2011-10-13T16:18:00.000-05:00

Gone Gone Gone by Nikki Lane

Believe it or not, this singer Nikki Lane is not on YouTube. This is first for me, looking for a video of some musical artist I've stumbled across and not being able to find her/him. But there it is. All I can put up there is the little arrow. Nice tune. The ridiculous blouse she's wearing doesn't detract from the music. The song ain't bad. I've never had anything against country music, particularly when it's got a strong rock element to it. And this has got some swing to it, too. Enjoy.

So Many Needs

2011-10-12T13:30:00.000-05:00

Today Susan and I ate lunch* at a huge meeting hall in the Embassy Suites here. It was a fundraiser we had been invited to. Several hundred people were there to hear a presentation about the agency that takes care of, or should I say assists or ministers to, abused/neglected children and their parent(s) in Cleveland county. It struck me as I listened to members of the agency staff and board and testimonials from some of the kids and a dad they have served that the extent of human need, suffering, and want out there in the world is just mind-boggling. At this particular event, we heard horrifying figures on the numbers of kids affected, the gross ignorance of some people who have kids and mess them up for life by their cruelty and neglect. And all this damage done just in our little corner of the world: one county in Oklahoma.

Children are easily the most vulnerable victims in our society. In the world. No question about it. But what about that homeless guy I gave a buck to in Louisville? All those victims of storms, floods, tornadoes, tsunamis? Sufferers with sicknesses ranging from heart disease, a myriad of cancers, diabetes, Alzheimer's, and a thousand more? War's victims, refugees, political prisoners? The millions who are hungry? What about all the human needs you can list that I didn't?

*The lunch was lousy. And there was way too much of it. Far too much for everyone to eat it all. I did not see a single clean plate. So how much food was thrown in the garbage just at that one lunch in that one place? How much do we waste in the face of so much suffering? I kept thinking about all the hungry people within five miles of this rather swank hotel, and I wondered if anybody in there shared the same thoughts. I hope so.

Tidbits

2011-10-11T18:07:00.002-05:00

Gleaned from various spots on the Web today:

The OWS (Occupy Wall Street) movement is gaining steam. (Can there be the slightest doubt that this avenue for the mass of aggrieved to protest the present state of affairs will be seized by them? To wit: the gross inequity of our system and the drones at all levels of government who seems to consider it their job to keep things that way.
Writer Taylor Clark argues in Slate that The Strokes' Is This It is the best album of the past decade. "Is This It" was a decade-defining record that set the agenda for how rock sounded and even looked throughout the aughts." Naturally, a bizillion people will disagree, some vehemently, but that's what the nature of these sorts of pronouncements are all about. BTW, I have the album and think it's really good, but I would have to study the question more deeply to be definitive about the best of the decade.
Also debate going on today in Slate whether too many kids go to college. I vote yes.
Tomorrow the magical, mystical iCloud descends upon us, for good or ill. Pretty long piece on the Atlantic website argues it will be ill.
Washington has benched Mitch Moreland tonight for the playoff game in Detroit. Michael Young will be at first, Nap DH, and Torrealba catching.

Go Rangers!

Did You Think I Was Gone?

2011-10-10T23:21:00.000-05:00

Well, as a matter of fact, I was gone. I forgot to mention that I had to give a talk to the Louisville Civil War Round Table. I did that on Saturday evening, but we went over there on Friday and did not come back till Sunday. Add to those days, last Wednesday and Thursday, when I should have done blog entries and that will get you to right here.

I've got a lot on my mind. Here are some of the things, in no particular order: This whole Occupy Wall Street movement. Listen I'm all for these people on the streets. I am not naive enough or starry-eyed enough to think these freelance, free form demonstrations against the perfidious forces of greed that are eating the middle class up and have already pretty well destroyed the others is going to alter any of these forces. But I think the course of events is trending inevitably to more people on the streets, but I think it increasingly likely that they are going to be really pissed off people, not like the green tea and crumpet types who are politely trying to alert the country to a substantial body of opinion out here in the hinterlands that hates the banks and are doing a slow burn the more Wall Street flips them the bird.

In this regard, a recent entry from The Reformed Broker's blog is instructive:

You want to know why everyone in this country hates you and wants you dead, you big stupid fucking bank?

Here's why, pay attention:

(Reuters) – Bank of America Corp will pay $11 million to ousted executives Joe Price and Sallie Krawcheck, a large payout at a time when banks face protests over pay but smaller than the eight-figure packages some executives received before the financial crisis.

Krawcheck -- a former Citigroup Inc executive who came to Bank of America in 2009 and was one of the top-ranking women on Wall Street -- will receive a one-time payment of $5.15 million, according to separation agreements filed by the bank on Friday.

Price, a Bank of America veteran, gets $4.15 million. Each will also receive $850,000 over a one-year period.

Price was head of consumer banking and Krawcheck led wealth and investment operations.

Don't know how long the suffering people of United States are going to put up with this kind of idiocy.

Actually there's too much on my mind to talk about it all here. But I cannot close without observing that the Texas Rangers are up on Detroit 2 games to none in the American League Championship series. Today's game was made in heaven. A really tense eleven innings with Texas winning on a walk-off grand slam home run by Nellie Cruz. Awesome! Recap, box score, video, pix: all right here. Go Rangers!

One Sentence

2011-10-04T15:18:00.000-05:00

I had all the best intentions of blogging about the "Occupy Wall Street" movement(?)--is it a movement? What is it? . . . Anyway, to show how easily distracted I am, I just now ran across this website and feel compelled to share it with you. I'm thinking something like this will really appeal to my daughter, who loves postsecret.com. This site that I stumbled across is similar. It's called One Sentence. The subtitle tells all: "True Stories, Told in One Sentence." Now, who can resist that? Well, maybe some people can, but I can't. I naturally got hung up reading them. These sentences are a lot like M&M's. If you eat them one at a time, you'll have eaten five or six dozen before you know it. Of course, they run the gamut, from funny to bizarre to heart-wrenching and all over the rest of the emotional map.

So I thought you might like some samples:

When I asked her why he was out of her league her only response was, "Because I know he won't beat me."
I just walked in on my mom and neighbor smoking pot and felt so uncool.
The Soup Kitchen that I volunteered at as a teenager is now my only source of 3 meals a day.
I have freezer burn on my chest and under my boobs because I reasoned that a popsicle held up in my bra would be a great personal air conditioner.
My wedding cost $6700 and my divorce cost $16425, both were worth it.
As I cried in front of the cash register at CVS, a woman pitied me for having my college health insurance expire the day before and paid the $200 fee for my medication, saying "Christmas came early this year."
I asked my 93 year old Grandmother, who I adore, what she thought life was all about and she replied, "I don't think about those type of things." -- one of my favorites
I called my dad from my dorm to bitch about my dvd player not working only to be told that my home was on fire
"I wrote a poem for you," he said, then proceeded to read "Ode to your cleavage."

And so forth. Great stuff, and yet another way to waste time I could be much better spending on something productive.

I will "Occupy Wall Street" tomorrow.

By the Year 2050

2011-10-03T12:50:00.000-05:00

The latest number of Lapham's Quarterly has as its theme The Future.* Right up in the front is a two-page colored spread of a world map entitled "By the Year 2050 . . . " I thought it might be interesting for me to list without comment some of the pieces of information from this graphic. The reason no comment is necessary will be obvious. What more needs to be said beyond the bare statement of these facts:

Trash Superhighway: Five Texas-sized garbage patches will have formed in oceanic gyres crated by intersecting hot and cold currents. Two patches currently exist, one in the Pacific Ocean, one in the Atlantic.
Drying Out: Land around the Amazon River may reach the tipping point at which the forces of deforestation and climate-change trigger desertification.
Trail Blazing: Arctic sea ice will have shrunk by at least two-thirds, opening up year-round shipping routes across the Arctic Ocean.
Guess Who's Not Coming to Dinner: No fish will exist in the wild in commercially viable quantities in gigantic swathes of every ocean. (Seafood will be raised in giant, robotic, remote-controlled fish-farm pods that rove around the oceans, raising fish for commercial consumption.)
Troubled Waters: More than a billion people will lack adequate amounts of clean water. Situation will be most dire in Africa and across southern Asia.

*Lapham's Quarterly is one of my favorite periodicals. It is totally history oriented, profusely illustrated, and it contains only short pieces, which means you're not going to have to invest 30-45 minutes on an article like sometimes you have to do with Atlantic and especially The New Yorker. All of the articles are excerpts of previously published work by historically famous or influential people. This current issue, for example, has pieces by Gandhi, Thomas Paine, Livy, Jules Verne, Aeschylus, Boswell, Philip K. Dick, to name a few. Lapham was the former editor at Harper's, so I knew the quality of his mind and of his writing. I've been with the quarterly since Vol II and have enjoyed issues on such diverse topics as: medicine, food, travel, the city, religion, lines of work. It's not cheap ($60 a year), but it is fabulous.

Birthdays

2011-10-01T02:54:00.000-05:00

I'm again musing about the passage of time. Today is the birthday of my youngest child . . . he's 31 years old. Which, I say, is great for him. Right now he's heavily engaged in intellectual pursuit: earning his law degree. He's working hard, and from all indications, enjoying his life.

As is to be expected. The thirties and forties are the best decades, at least from my present perspective. Which doesn't make the other decades of our lives any less good. They are good or bad solely on the basis of our own highly subjective criteria.

But it really doesn't make any difference what we think, time's march is inexorable. When I was 31, I was also heavily engaged in intellectual pursuits. I was a father, husband, and graduate student at LSU. It was the year I got my master's degree. My dear wife was still in her twenties then, and my daughter Tanya was only six. I almost said "little daughter" till I remembered that just the other day she was over with her own daughter, who is nine. That was a long time ago. Time passes, and we pass with it.

The passage of time: it's a phrase that contains the whole of life, the whole of history, the whole of the future within it. Birthdays are but tiny little pricks of light in deep darkness, buoys in a vast, silent ocean.

Outrageous

2011-09-30T23:38:00.000-05:00

You want to hear something outrageous? A representative of American banking--I forget what his title was--had the gall this evening on the PBS News Hour* to claim that the outrageous new fee of $5 month the Bank of America is going to charge its customers for use of their debit card is to cover the increased costs of doing business brought on by the financial services reform bill of a few months ago. As if that bill had not been near totally gutted by the army of lobbyists that systematically carved any real reform out of the bill before it passed. That so-called reform is useless, but it certainly can be used by these miserable bankers to extort more millions out of the pockets of middling Americans.

The gall of these people! This is just another money gouging move by the most shameless gang of thieves on the planet. Think about it. A $60 a month fee for simply using your debit card, even if you use it only one time during the month. These are the people who nearly brought the world to its knees a couple of years ago, were bailed out with hundreds of billions of dollars from the taxpayers. These are the people who may yet, given the financial crisis in the European Union, bring the world to its knees anyway. And they sit there with a straight face and claim that this unconscionable fee is simply to cover the actual costs of debit card transactions.

Don't believe it. These people would not know the truth or tell it under any conditions I can imagine. But they don't have a worry in the world. People will supinely accept this latest outrage without a peep, and half the country, composed 99 percent of people who are dancing the bank's tune without protest will defend the bankers. Not like the Irish. They know all about bankers. If you missed it before, you should really go listen to what one of them had to say about the banking profession not too long ago. See my entry, "A Representative Irishman." What he said then is still true, what he said then has been true for 30-40 years at least.

*Segment begins around 17:15

Yet Another Great Big Lie

2011-09-29T17:41:00.000-05:00

Paul Krugman is out today in his blog reminding us of one of the biggest lies floated by the Republican party lately. To wit: "the zombie claim that fears of regulation are holding back job creation." There is "not a shred of evidence" to uphold this assertion, but evidence has never been a matter of great concern to the Republicans. Over the past few years, the old adage about the big lie is being proven over and over again. This stuff about regulations stifling the creation of jobs is no more absurd than the claim that the current state of the economy is something that Obama is responsible for (and not the ruinous Bush administration policies) or that the richest people in our society, who have to be protected from taxation, are job creators. Or the biggest falsehood of all: that the Republican party is honestly concerned about providing jobs during this recession rather than making as much political hay as they can so they can regain power next year. Yeah, I know you cannot believe any politicians, regardless of party. But, come on, there's a limit to the lies they should be allowed to tell.

Krugman references this article which totally debunks the Republicans' claim. Stomps all over it. Thoroughly proves it to be just another lump of bullshit the GOP are feeding us and calling it roast beef. What's truly discouraging is how many people are swallowing it down and asking for more. It's not made sense to me for many months.

I'm So Sorry

2011-09-28T23:00:00.000-05:00

Most Exciting Day in Baseball History

This is one of those nights when I'm so sorry for all those people out there who are not baseball fans. For this night brought to a close the 2011 season with an incredible array of games. I don't think I've ever seen a single season last day packed with so much drama. The division winners in all six divisions had been decided. But the wild card teams, the fourth team to get into the playoffs in each league, had not. One of the amazing things about this year is that the wild card spot at the beginning of September looked like it was no contest at all. Boston Red Sox and Atlanta Braves were both ahead of the immediate trailing team (Tampa Bay Rays and St Louis Cardinals, respectively) by about 9 games. This is like a horse being 9-10 lengths ahead down the stretch. In short, it's a huge lead. But, wonder of wonders, both those teams lost out on the final day of the season. The collapse of both these teams during September was epochal.

Boston and Atlanta collapses

Nobody knew who were the wild cards till the last minute. For the Rays to get in, Boston had to lose to Baltimore, a weak team. They did, but how they did was amazing. Boston went into the bottom of the 9th inning in Baltimore leading 3-2. And then they gave up two runs with nobody on and two outs. Amazing! (Box score and play-by-play)

And the Rays themselves had to beat the accursed New York Yankees. By the eighth inning in St Petersburg, it appeared this was a forlorn hope indeed. The Rays were down by 7 runs, 7-0. But here comes the miracle: the Rays score 6 runs in the bottom of the 8th. Trailing by a run in the bottom of the 9th, with two out, they tie the game on a home run by a guy named Dan Johnson. Who? This guy is a journeyman ballplayer, one of the worst hitters in baseball. He hit .119 for the year. Hit two homers, counting this one. Had an on-base percentage of .187. These are miserable numbers, trust me. He hits the ball out to tie and game goes into extra innings. Tampa goes on to win the game in the bottom of the 12th inning on a homer by a guy who had already hit one in the game. Box score and play-by-play of the game.

In the other league, St Louis had to win and Atlanta had to lose. St Louis, playing against the Houston Astros, the worst team in baseball, won handily. Everything depends on the Atlanta game, and Atlanta is leading by a run in the top of the 9th. But they cannot hold the lead against the best team in baseball, the Philadelphia Phillies. Their game goes into extra innings and the Braves lose it by a run in the 13th inning. Box score and play-by-play of the game.

Wow! I am just out of superlatives. I am so pumped for the post-season. Go Rangers! (who won a close one tonight and secured home field advantage for the beginning of the American League Divisional Series).

Some More Used to Be

2011-09-26T18:03:00.000-05:00

When I was writing yesterday, the entry really went in a different direction than what I had in mind. I'm not much of a nostalgic person* but I do begin to wonder if some aspects of the past were not preferable to what we've got now. Some of these thoughts center around communication and technology. Now, I'm as crazy about the benefits of computers as anyone. I'm more ambivalent about cell phones. It's great being about to be in touch, to call Susan from the grocery and ask if what I've got in my hand is the right thing. But texting and talking in virtually any venue? Including vehicles . . . when you're at the wheel? Please. Video game boxes that keep kids hypnotized for hours and hours? Computer games that do the same? Somehow, my gut tells me that these phenomena can't really be progress. Other things too: virtual depiction of sex on TV and in movies, debasement of the language, the pervasive fear in this society (a flotilla of cars at every school because parents are too scared to let their kids walk 2-3 blocks). How cold and hard we've become towards people we used to think it was our responsibility to care for: mentally ill, needy children, immigrants.

I was also thinking about the general decline of literacy in our society. Computers have something to do with this. Used to be there was a certain shared body of knowledge that everybody learned in high school, grammar school, even. No more. (Maybe I'm delusional, but quite a few of my contemporaries sense the same thing.) The vast sea of ignorance in which we all swim and sail is unfathomable. Used to be that reading was a leisure activity for a lot more people than it is now. People in society used to be more polite, more respectful of one another. Right. Well, that's gone.

Everything used to seem so much simpler back when. Is that because we were ignorant of all kinds of stuff we know now? Yeah, probably. But I can still miss those simpler times. I wish I didn't know half the crap I know now that just makes things seem worse.

(I decided I would allow myself this one wistful commentary on what used to be, hastening to assure you that I'm through whining.)

*I do have sentimental attachments to some strange things. Little trinkets are scattered all over my bookshelves. I still have the baseball glove and ball I used to toss around with my boys. (I've thought about how much fun it was to play catch, but then realize that I would no doubt really hurt my arm--at least make it sore for some time--and I wouldn't be able to throw as hard or as far.) Remembrances from out time in Germany: some mugs, maps, a smoker, a couple of albums of wine and beer labels. Susan and I have copies of just about every greeting card we've given each other over the 40+ years we've been married, a chronicle of our deepening love for one another. I'm loathe to part with them.

Used to Be

2011-09-25T16:17:00.000-05:00

I'm thinking today about yesterday. It's something aging people do since they've got so much more time behind them than in front of them. And for me, a professional historian, thinking about yesterday is habitual. It's a mode of thought that's most comfortable for me. I tend to think in aggregates, the big picture, the big things: nations, empires, broad historical currents, 50-year, 100-year blocks. There are probably historians personally constituted differently than I who don't do this. I can attest that this mode of thought often causes me to miss what's perfectly obvious to other people. Which is to say I am sometimes not exactly what you could call present-minded. My forgetfulness for the immediate is legendary, and it's only worsened with the passage of time.

There seem to be so many "used to be's" floating around my life. The most obvious is the "I used to be able to remember things." But there's a whole raft of others. Take heed, you young people. This is what awaits you.

I used to:

Be able to taste and smell better than I do now
Be able to drink fairly respectable amounts of alcohol. No more. No desire to either. (and of course I realize how malleable this "amount" would be, but you know what I mean)
Be able to play a much stronger game of chess
Be able go whole weeks without being bothered by a single pain in my body
Be able to count on regular functioning in the GI tract
Be able to go merrily along without having a bunch of my friends and friends of friends dealing with some more or less dangerous illness
Be able to get by with a lot fewer daily urinations
Be able to remember bands, book titles and their authors, movies and who was in them, etc.
Be able to spell better, not to mention remember everything in my vocabulary immediately
Be able to . . .

Well, you see how corporeal all these things are. There's no getting around the fact that your body reminds you the most often of the land you now inhabit. And the people you bring your ailing body to? These doctors? Hell, a lot of them look like teenagers to me.

I don't think this is a lament. Well, maybe just a little. But mostly it's just rumination. Body and mind are telling us things . . . and most of the time not too subtly.

It's a Great Embarrassment

2011-09-24T02:27:00.000-05:00

I don't know if other bloggers do this, but I suspect they do. I often back-date entries, i.e., writing Wednesday's blog entry on Thursday, Sunday's on Monday, etc. That's what I'm doing now. Typing at 1:35 a.m. on Sunday morning and posting to yesterday. (Of course, I would not have this problem at all if I weren't so anal about trying to maintain one daily blogging entry. I'm not like my friend Montag over at "A Father Talks to His Daughter about God." I mean that guy is prolific, sometimes half a dozen entries a day, always at least two or three. And sometimes he so erudite and deep I cannot really follow what he means. But it's all good. I like the way his mind works.) Anyway as I was saying, I read in the Writer's Almanac that tomorrow is the 54th anniversary of the day that President Eisenhower sent over a thousand federal troops to Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, to ensure the safety of nine black students who were the first to integrate the school. Like all the southern states, Arkansas had dragged its feet about implementing the order of the Supreme Court in 1954's epochal Brown decision. And in the case of Arkansas, the governor had used the state national guard to essentially prevent the blacks from attending the school. You can read all about the story here.

The point of the story is to tell how embarrassed I am now at what I was then, just another southern white guy who uncritically accepted the racism of everything and everybody around me, including my family and relatives, friends, the whole white culture in the South, as normal. It's a great embarrassment to me that won't, I fear, ever be subsiding. I was part of that whole culture of hate. My conversion, my sanity, came too late to eradicate what had gone before.


This is what it took in 1957 to get into your school . . . if you were a black person.

Hate--an iconic image of the time.

Speaking of Music . . .

2011-09-23T14:49:00.000-05:00

R.E.M.'s Reckoning Cover

As that most spiritual of all the Beatles, George Harrison, said: "All things must pass." And so it is with all rock bands. Hence the departure of R.E.M. from the scene. The band has decided to fold its tents after a long life of over thirty years. The news has put my daughter in mourning and greatly saddened my oldest son. Apparently R.E.M.'s retirement is analogous to the breakup of the Beatles for my generation, only R.E.M. was around for a lot longer. There's a long appreciation of the band in an article in Slate., and other write-ups all over the place.

I have to confess that the band was never one of my favorites, although for my kids, especially my daughter Tanya, the oldest, this was one of those bands around in your most formative years. Like the '60s bands--Beatles, Rolling Stones, Kinks--were for my generation. And as far as I'm concerned, R.E.M.'s best work was their earliest work. Murmur, Life's Rich Pageant, Fables of the Reconstruction, Reckoning, Document. I had all of these albums on cassette tape*, and I can remember playing them quite a bit. By the time the band had moved into the '90s, I wasn't listening to them much anymore. I just didn't think their stuff nearly as good as the early years. This isn't unusual, by the way. It's true of most rock bands. Which is to say, relatively short-lived bands and highly influential bands such as the Beatles, Nirvana, The New York Dolls, and The Velvet Underground die before their creative juices start to atrophy. They don't have bad albums to drag around as part of their history. Alas, that can never be said of groups that last thirty years. Nonetheless, it's always sad to witness the demise of something once great.

A Pox on Netflix

2011-09-22T18:25:00.000-05:00

David Pogue has a great column today on what was once my, and apparently millions of other people's, favorite company, Netflix. For about $15 a month they would provide as many DVDs as you wanted to watch, just so long you didn't have more than three DVDs out at any one time. I'm not sure exactly when they went into business, but it's been a while back, and I've been with them for a long time. Later the company developed a streaming movie function, too. Different price structures depending on how many DVDs you had out at a time, but you got both services. But recently Netflix, without any warning or preparation of its customers,changed the rules of the game in a big way. They split the two functions, you could have either streaming or physical DVD, but if you wanted to have the two together, they jacked the price way up.

People were pissed. I dropped DVD service altogether. Reportedly over a million customers just left. Now the company has made matters worse. The CEO came out with an "apology" that just made people madder. I won't go into details. You can read the Pogue article. Suffice it to say, people are going to have to deal with two different outfits--Netflix for streaming video, and a new company called "Quixster" for DVDs. Two bills, two web sites. More than twice the headache.

Hell, if I weren't in the middle of "Mad Men"--an HBO TV series Susan and I are watching--I'd be inclined to drop the company too. I am paying $8 a month for streaming, and most the movies offered are distinctly second tier. Just like the company now. They are going to have to reverse field pretty quickly are they are, I think, cooked.

Just Surfing Around . . .

2011-09-21T18:52:00.000-05:00

I came across this bizarre and vaguely unsettling video. At least I found it that way. The alternative band Tool is providing the music. Upon exploration, I find out the video is part of a movie called "MirrorMask," which I have never heard of, much less seen.

See what you think.

Here is the Wikipedia site for "MirrorMask" and the trailer.

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