Connecting the dots

It has been said over and over and over again that the reason the "911" conspirators were successful was that the intelligence services failed to "connect the dots." They were unable to interpret raw data, and could not see a connection between and among the simplest of circumstances. Like several "Arab" men learning how to fly big jet airplanes, but not bothering to learn how to land them.

Money sent to the conspirators from "Al Qaeda" sources was not cause for alarm. No connection was made to "chatter" on international phone calls that indicated the attacks were being planned. Evidence of meetings and trainings that were attended by the plotters did not generate any alarm, except from a marginalized few. Most significant of those sounding the alarm were former FBI counterterrorism investigator John O'Neill, and White House counter-terrorism chief Richard Clarke. O'Neill died at the World Trade Center, a truly mythical captain going down with his ship.

Another set of dots that weren't connected was the theft of the 2000 presidential election, the subsequent invasions of two countries rich in mineral wealth and strategic location, illegal domestic spying, the "Patriot" Act, the corruption of the Department of Justice, and the free regulatory ride given to corporations from 2001 to the present.

I can connect a few more dots: the recently fired General Stanley McChrystal; the revelations last week in the Washington Post about the vast spying network that has ballooned since the 2001 attacks; and the Wikileaks exposure of "secrets" our government has been hiding from us about what has been going on in "Afghanistan."

For me, the picture at right is all the connection I need. It is holographic - the whole represented by the part. The destruction of the World Trade Center and the attack on the Pentagon were the handy excuse to unleash something that was lying not-so-
dormant in our national character. All of our alcoholism, drug addiction, violence, pornography and self-loathing became personified in George W. Bush, a multi-addict with no history of doing anything responsible in his life without having it given to him.

As a people, we degenerated into barbarism quickly, invading without hesitation, looting, abusing, kidnapping, torturing, murdering, and even gang-raping. For good measure, we are now finding out that employees at the Pentagon, the NSA, and among "defense" contractors have been involved in child pornography.

What passes for "journalism" is barroom loudmouth bellowing, the kind of thing that keeps police busy all over the country on weekend nights.

How, one might ask, does the picture of the naked, hooded boy at Abu Ghraib connect these seemingly disconnected dots? It's easy. First, General Stanley McChrystal. What the Rolling Stone article showed was that the overriding factor in his prosecution of the "war" was nothing more or less than his own ego. Everything else was secondary.

With this sense of priority, is the well-being of the people of "Afghanistan," or even "America," likely to improve under his efforts? No, and now that he is gone, has the "mission" changed? No. Same mission. Different general. Interchangeable parts, in our modern professional Army. The new commander of both wars has bragged about how much fun it is to kill the "Taliban." Of course, one man's "Taliban" is another man's "Afghani" civilian.

The next dot - the massive spying network that no one seems to know how big, what it costs, or if it does anything worthwhile - is the kind of thing instituted by collections of men with compromised intentions. In other words, politicians and corporations. As with General McChrystal, ego rules. Ego and money, nearly synonymous in modern "America."

The third dot - Wikileaks. The editors of the site published over 90,000 military and diplomatic documents related to the "war" in "Afghanistan." The documents connect their own dots by implication, showing that our presence in "Afghanistan" makes us hated by the people, that we aren't accomplishing anything, our "ally," "Pakistan," is helping the "Taliban," and the "Taliban" likely have heat-seeking anti-aircraft missiles - "Stingers." Not exactly the stuff of victory around the next corner. And certainly not the stuff of finding Osama bin Laden.

One final dot: the House of Representatives today voted $59 billion to extend funding of our two "wars."

Domestic politics is the überdot. It has been all along. The invasions, the occupations, the kidnapping, the torture, the imprisonment, the looting, the capture of Saddam Hussein, the predator drones, the killings of civilians - it's all about domestic politics in the "USA." And domestic politics is about ego. The egos of little men. A few women, but mostly little men.

We have House and Senate "elections" this fall, and then the frenzy of the 2012 presidential "election." With all these egos at stake, the likelihood that the "policies" for "Iraq" and "Afghanistan" will change is zilch. For people living in these countries, good luck. Your suffering is far from over.

For people in "Iran," some egos in "Washington" have you in their sights.

Meanwhile, the planet is experiencing the hottest summer on record. The "U.S." Senate has given up on passing any legislation to deal with climate change.
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Here's a video of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange

Here's a "legitimate" news source's take on the Wikileaks story.

For a statistical study of the fate of Guantanamo prisoners, click here.

Here's a video that is pertinent to our mass predicament. It is a good prelude to reading Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.

Self-dealing nation

Every so often I find myself in a phase where I have to contend with a cluster of challenges simultaneously. It can be job, abode, vehicle, health, dental, and even bicycle. When this happens I find the best way to get through the challenges is to first stop everything and relax. Then I get to work, taking the most important task first, dealing with it, then moving on to the next challenges in descending order of importance.

For example, I had been contending with a number of situations of bad service from the VA (Department of Veterans Affairs) hospital in Madison, to the point where it was getting pretty frustrating, and sometimes a bit surreal. One guy, doing a blood draw for lab tests, stuck the needle completely through the vein in my arm, and wondered why he wasn't getting any blood. He was too busy attempting standup comedy to bother with doing his job correctly. I should say that these occurrences involved a minority of my visits to the VA, but enough to where a certain pattern was emerging.

One can complain about single incidents of rudeness, negligence, laziness and incompetence, but it is far more effective when a number of occurrences can be brought to the attention of the appropriate authority. The pattern I found was of self-focus. Rather than focusing on the task at hand, or on the veteran in front of them (me), the offending parties were busy serving themselves in one way or another. They all likely now hate me, but their focus (or foci) has been redirected.

Generalizing to the country as a whole, I can safely say that the problem of self-dealing is the one single ailment that is most responsible for destroying the country, and in the process, human civilization.

This is apparent in the behavior of corporations, of the banksters (a type of gangster) on Wall Street, of the Congress, the Federal bureaucracy, the command structure of the military, and, last but not least, the president.

Our government is now hoarding data on the BP oil spill. For what reason? Could it be self-dealing?

A perfect example of self-dealing is the continuing prosecution of the occupation and aggression by "U.S." forces in "Afghanistan." As Eric Margolis noted in the Toronto Sun, "Too many political careers in the U.S., Canada and Europe hang on this misbegotten war."

Margolis also makes the astute observation that "This brutal David versus Goliath conflict brings no honour upon the western powers waging it, including Canada. They are widely seen abroad as waging yet another pitiless colonial war against a small, backward people for resource domination and strategic geography."

This would seem obvious, but it is unlikely the "U.S." presence in "Afghanistan" will end any time soon. It is not about what is best for "Afghanistan," the "U.S.," the "NATO" countries, or "War on terror." It is about the egos and careers of the "leaders" involved, principally Barack Obama, President of the United States.

Obama needs to at least "hold his ground" until after the 2012 "election." The "war" may be a political liability, but it will be an even greater one if he pulls "U.S." troops out of the "country," and chaos ensues. This is something to keep in mind as the casualties mount. "Americans" are dying because of Barack Obama's need to be reelected. And, of course, many more "Afghanis" (not "Afghan." An "Afghan" is a sweater, a blanket, a rug, or a hound).

All this, while, as a Stanford University study tells us, heat waves like the one experienced recently on the East Coast are likely to become commonplace. Among other things.

I don't have any special knowledge, or any psychic powers, but I wrote about the folly of invading "Afghanstan" in the fall of 2001, in a letter to the University of Wisconsin student newspaper, the Badger Herald:

Vietnam, Horowitz need closer examination by students

The Badger Herald is not usually part of my daily reading, but I read it when it comes my way. This past Friday I happened to be in an area where the paper is available, and couldn’t help seeing the full-page add "An Open Letter to Anti-War Demonstrators" from David Horowitz.

I also can’t help responding.

Most students at the UW don’t know much about the Vietnam War, the opposition to it or David Horowitz. To know more about all three would give students a helpful context for forming their own perceptions of the current situation.

The Vietnam War was fundamentally a colonial war the United States inherited from France, who pulled out after the infamous Dien Bien Phu defeat of 1954. Under the guise of the “Cold War” campaign of defeating “communism” anywhere in the world, our government poured billions of dollars, many thousands of troops, the CIA and a vast propaganda machine into the Vietnam effort, with the aim of propping up a seemingly endless sequence of puppet dictators whom we called “democratic.”

After mounting casualties in excess of 55,000 American soldiers, millions of Vietnamese killed, the waste of vast resources and mounting opposition at home, the war effort was abandoned in 1975. It has been called a defeat, but there was never anything about it to win or lose in the first place. The opposition to the war was many faceted, Mr. Horowitz’s contention of “Marxism” notwithstanding. It included clergy, civil-rights activists, intellectuals, artists, the baby-care author Dr. Spock, mothers of killed soldiers and Americans of all walks of life. It grew larger and larger, and the federal government, directed by then-President Richard “I am not a crook” Nixon, held on until way past the time any sensible withdrawal should have taken place.

Mr. Horowitz states that “Unlike the Vietnam War, this one has no ambiguity.” He goes on to say that “Our enemies have pronounced a fatwah, or “death sentence,” against every man, woman and child in this country. Now is the time to stand up and defend it.”

Merriam-Webster defines ambiguous as uncertain, or capable of being understood in two or more possible senses or ways. The attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon can be understood in a number of ways. Since no one has actually produced a fatwah document, and the known perpetrators come from a number of Middle Eastern countries, an Islamic holy war is certainly a strong possibility. Another might be a single attempt to rid the Middle East of American meddling. Revenge for perceived U.S. terrorism might also be a reason. Whatever the reason, there is much ambiguity in how to respond to the attacks.

The knee-jerk right-wing response is scorched-Earth military action. Another approach would be to look at the acts as criminal in nature, and try to ferret out the organizers and funders of the crimes.

A long-run approach for the U.S. government, and the corporations that sponsor it, could be to act with a sense of honor, reciprocity and respect toward all peoples of the world.

This is almost too radical to contemplate, but is the only way I see to avoid the unimaginable death and destruction that will inevitably follow, given the momentum of what our government and corporations have done in the past.

Which brings us to the futile and frustrated life of David Horowitz. I remember David Horowitz when he wrote for Ramparts magazine in the 1960s. He was a good writer, and his writing was very much like it is now: a sense of mission, and a romantic approach to his own place in that mission.

Since that time, Mr. Horowitz has been something of a right-wing ideologue. He is not part of the Republican establishment, most likely because he is seen as a turncoat, or some sort of interloper, likely to change spots when the terrain changes. Whatever the case, he looks to the college campus as his land of opportunity.

The thing I find most amusing about Mr. Horowitz’s “Open letter” is his admission that his former opposition to the Vietnam War “crossed the line between dissent and actual treason.” If he is so remorseful about his past crimes, I wonder why he hasn’t followed up on his pronouncement of self-guilt with a passing of sentence and execution. After all, the penalty for treason was certainly death in those days, and still is for some offenses.

The best thing a college student can do is develop the skills to be able to separate the wheat from the chaff. We are entering very difficult times. We have an infinite-growth economic system on a finite planet. We are poisoning our environment. The weather is changing. We have a corrupt idiot for president, who was installed in office after benefiting from massive vote fraud.

Much of the world hates the United States because of what our government, in service to its ruling elites, has done around the world. The generation preparing to be our nation’s next body politic is facing the most difficult challenges of any in our history. I wish you all the best, and hope we all come out of this era with a humane and mutually beneficial civilization.

John Hamilton
Madison
U.S. Army, 1968-71

Tuesday, October 2, 2001
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Here we are, almost nine years later, with no end in sight. A trillion dollars spent on two criminally concocted and prosecuted wars, for reasons having to do with the egos of politicians, the profits of corporations, and the "mortarboards" of medals for generals and admirals.

And the BP goes on, to paraphrase the late great Salvatore Bono.
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Here's an update on one of the effects of the folly of war.

Here's an update on our president's fake attempts at financial reform.

For a little ambiguity, read this.
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Here's Sonny and Cher.

This song from a band named Easterhouse, which seems to have been one guy, is a good one for getting psyched for taking on challenges.

One of the best concerts I ever went to was by Jerry Reed. He was a country Jimi Hendrix on the guitar.

Some of us remember Martha and the Vandellas.

The Lovin' Spoonful had a "hit" with this song.

There is cause for optimism

It has been almost six years since I started writing this blog. My intention from the beginning has been to raise the level of dialogue on this planet to a level above the simplistic, the petty, the feigned ideological, the crassly materialistic, and the partisan. A lofty goal, to be sure, but I realized then, as now, that if we don't rise to a higher level of interaction we are doomed as a species.

Not much seems to have changed since my first post, which is as pertinent today as it was then. The four main themes I have stressed over the years have been the need to abandon the narrow mythology of the "left" versus "right" model, the futility of an infinite growth economy, that the behavior of corporations and governments that violate criminal laws are not simple "policy" and "business" activities, but offenses against the common good that should be prosecuted and punished, and that "nations" are artificial and temporary impositions on the planet that should be seen as such.

There are rumblings of change. People are getting tired of the "left" to "right" fixation, and some are expressing their frustration with it. Arianna Huffington appeared in a discussion on CNN on June 27, and said "This whole framing as a right versus left debate - a liberal verse conservative debate is completely flawed. It's obsolete. It's making it much harder for us to solve our problems as a country." I posted a comment to the story under one of my aliases:

Arianna Says Frustration With Obama Goes Beyond Left And Right

southsidejohnny 10:53 PM on 6/27/2010
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Arianna Huffington is performing a great service. We have a pretty low level forum of ideas and discourse, most clearly embodied by the tired, hackneyed, outdated model of "left" versus "right." Professors sit in "endowed" chairs nationwide expounding on this false divide. Pundits make millions of dollars spouting gibberish about these two imaginary poles of an imaginary spectrum. Millions of people post comments to blogs and news sites, expounding on how the "right" or the "left" is responsible for the world's ills.

Our economy is collapsing. The polar ice caps are melting. The Pentagon is bleeding our treasury dry. Our social fabric is disintegrating. There are too many people in the world. The oceans are being fished to extinction, and polluted without hesitation by oil drilling and dumping of waste. Neither the illusory "left" nor the illusory "right" has an inkling of how to solve these problems. Instead, they rage on with staged arguments. To get on stage all one has to do is assume a role and read the script. As long as we go along with this theater of the absurd, we are doomed. This will not deter the fundamentalists of the religion of "left" and "right." The only way out of this is for people to stop listening. This may take some treatment, maybe a twelve step program, withdrawal and occasional relapse, but we don't have a lot of time to change the way we look at things.
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There is even a book and website, both titled Beyond Right and Left, published by a professor in "Australia," David McKnight. His site is worth checking out.

Most significant is our president, Barack Obama, who said in an address on March 31 that "Ultimately, we need to move beyond the tired debates of the left and the right, between business leaders and environmentalists..."

These remarks were, of course, made in the context of his advocacy of further offshore oil drilling. Obama is not a particularly "ideological" personage anyway, but it's worth noting that he finds the "left" to "right" model less than useful.

We still have a long way to go if we are to even begin to save human civilization. The conversation in general remains at a pretty low level. About the economy, for instance, most of the talk these days is about "stimulus" versus "budget deficit," and "financial reform" versus unbridled greed, and saving the environment versus unbridled growth.

There has long been discussion of the limits to growth, starting with the "Classical" economists, the main one being Thomas Malthus. In his 1798 book An Essay on the Principle of Population, Malthus observed that food production increases arithmetically, while population increases exponentially, resulting in widespread starvation. The Club of Rome report in 1972 revived the controversy, but soon was ignored and forgotten. More recently, the work of economist Herman Daly has provided a framework for further exploration of the subject. One example is Hanna Newcombe, who wrote Limits to growth versus sustainable development.

Not much progress has been made on the criminal responsibility front. None of the activities of the Bush criminal regime have been prosecuted by the Obama administration, for one very obvious reason: once you go down that road you become vulnerable to criminal prosecution of your own actions. "Afghanistan," for instance. "Guantanamo." "Iraq. The "Patriot Act." Domestic spying. Deals with "Wall Street." Deals with the health care industry, mainly the insurance companies and pharmaceutical companies.

And, depending on how things go, ginning up a war with "Iran," similar to the ginned-up wars in "Afghanistan" and "Iraq."

Barack Obama may not want to run the risk of prosecuting the crimes of the Bush regime, but it is pretty clear someone is paying for Bush's crimes. The US of A is paying, and Obama himself is paying a painful price, wedding himself to Bush's phony wars, the collapse of the economy, and the failure of our government's regulatory function.

One of the unintended consequences of the "wars" in "Iraq" and "Afghanistan" is increasing futility in trying to prop up the illusion of "countries." Neither of these officially designated "countries" is very cohesive or even manageable. It took a ("CIA" trained and financed) brutal dictator like Saddam Hussein to keep the fiction of "Iraq" together. Concocted in 1921 by then British colonial secretary Winston Churchill, the "country" is now a fragile collection of disparate ethnic and religious antagonists, verging on breakdown and open civil war. Only the presence of "U.S." troops keeps it together, notwithstanding propaganda to the contrary.

"Afghanistan" is of course worse. The "Pashtuns" constitute anywhere from 40% to 52% of the population, depending on who you believe. It has never had any resemblance to a unified "country," except in the eyes of its various invaders throughout history. The latest, of course is us, or NATO, as the fiction goes. The invasion and occupation is "American" for all practical purposes, with some other "countries" tagging along as props. They are gradually dropping out of the scheme.

So despite the difficulties we face, there is a ferment, and the prospects for change have never been better. The dialogue is improving, and can improve more if we continue in this new momentum.
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As well as writing this blog, I post to other sites, mainly news publications. Here are a few examples:

Study of Waterboarding Coverage Prompts a Debate in the Press

55. John Hamilton Madison, Wisconsin July 6th, 20103:52 pm
(Here's a link to the study.)

This looks like a business decision rather than a journalistic one, which is one of the reasons why the New York Times is in decline. Little men, protecting their little jobs, make little decisions that they think no one will notice.

What the decision makers at the New York Times pretend not to realize is that the Bush criminal regime clearly intended, and succeeded at, employing a psychological trick, turning their criminal behavior into a political controversy. It hadn't been a controversy previously, but the practice had to be euphemized in order to take the stuffing out of any criminal culpability.

This kind of journalism is itself criminal. If there is any public trust at all to be had by our news media, then they have to be held to a certain standard. Enabling a thoroughly criminal regime is the kind of thing usually seen in dictatorships. For the same thing to be practiced at the nation's "newspaper of record" renders that record one that is criminal in nature.

One has to wonder to what limit the New York Times would go along with crimes in high places. If the government were rounding up citizens and "disappearing" them over the Atlantic Ocean, would the Times think it tendentious to call the practice murder? Given its current standard, yes.

Completely missing in the discussion of this "controversy" is the context in which the water torture occurred. Following the attacks of September 11, 2001, Congress authorized military action in "Afghanistan," with the express purpose of capturing or killing Osama bin Laden. Had this been the real intention, he would have been captured or killed long ago. The torture regime that was instituted was for the same purpose that torture is always practiced: to terrorize, to harm, to disempower, to deter, and for personal and institutional enjoyment. The Times has played its own part in the merriment.

Not to belabor the point, but the Bush criminal regime then proceeded to gin up another war, in "Iraq," in 2003. Waged on false pretenses, the "war" expanded on the use of torture, with the result being revenge killings by "Iraqis" that likely caused untold "American" deaths. Way to go New York Times.

The bad name given our country by the various torture practices lost us many friends around the planet, and our status as "the world's only superpower" is a hollow one indeed. We can softpedal, euphemize, trivialize, and engage in any number of propaganda methods to "cleanse" our reputation, but people know. "All the news that is fit to print" by the New York Times does not make all the news truthful or honorable.

Or, as Bob Dylan once put it, all the money you made will never buy back your soul.
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This comment is to a segment on National Public Radio's All Things Considered:

Week In Politics: Kagan, Jobs, Immigration

John Hamilton (HappyJack) wrote:

It is almost comical to hear David Brooks expound on the economy. E.J. Dionne isn't much better. Stimulus, ala John Maynard Keynes, works to a degree, but it is to the degree that growth of GNP would be happening in an otherwise healthy economy.

We do not have an otherwise healthy economy. Our banking system is legally criminal, which, though it can make a few people very rich, maldistributes economic reward away from the many. There is no effective intention to correct this situation.

More serious is the fact that the ecosystem, long thought to be "exogenous" to the economic system, is now showing its endogyny in an unforgiving fashion. As a time variable, it will intensify. Because a mass system needs to grow in output in order to avoid collapse, there are two dynamics that are mutually incompatible. Ultimately, the human dynamic will have to give way to the ecological.

And last but not least is the problem of innovation as a motor to growth. When the leading innovations on the horizon are frivolous luxury electronics like the ipad and the latest incarnation of Grand Theft Auto, prospects are not good for the advancement of the human species. Or its survival.

These are concerns beyond the purview of pundits, who think small.

Friday, July 02, 2010 4:42:15 PM
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Unintended Consequences of the Enterprise Value Tax

southsidejohnny 08:55 PM on 6/18/2010
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I'm old enough to remember when there was progressive taxation. This is not to be confused with "Progressivism," the political movement that began with Robert La Follette. What progressive taxation means is that an increasing percentage of the income and/or wealth is taxed as income increases. For example, Nelson Rockefeller was in the 90% bracket. He was a "liberal" "Republican," a type of being which no longer exists. He was a piece of crap (read: Attica prison riot), but far less a piece of crap than what we have today.

Our political discourse is so degraded that any discussion of progressive taxation is treated as communist heresy. In such a limited forum of ideas we have self-serving claptrap like this article, passing for reasoned discourse.

Our economic system is collapsing. I believe it will collapse. No "unless we do this" or "unless we do that." We will have arguments like the one above to remember when it becomes clear what got us into this mess. This is what Karl Marx meant when he said Capitalism contains the seeds of its own ruin. He meant it straight-up, Capitalism behaving at its best, but corrupt, greedy, self-glorying, narcissistic Capitalism will self-immolate more rapidly.

We might as well start figuring out what the next system will be. We have plenty of examples, private and public, of how not to run an economic system. Maybe by a process of "neti-neti" (not this, not this) ...
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This is a reply to an interview on the NPR program On Point:

Dangerous Economic Fault Lines

This is a pretty empty conversation. The professor deserves credit for looking beyond the numbers, but he doesn’t look very far. In a mass industrial market economic system, the total output has to grow as a secular trend – over the span of time. It doesn’t have to grow every year, but does have to grow as a long-term aggregate. Otherwise, it collapses, which our economy is doing.

A functioning economic system grows by innovating – creating new products, new markets, new sources of supply, new methods of production, and/or new ways fo organizing industry. There is nothing in the offings that will generate domestic or worldwide growth in the immediate or long run.

So, the economic system will change, either voluntarily or involuntarily. We don’t have the kind of ruling elite that is capable of voluntary change. The best way of looking at what to change to is by taking global warming as the benchmark, or frame of reference. We need to ask what kind of system will provide full employment without destroying the ecosystem?

With the ecosystem as the starting point, we can make sane, distributive, equitable, and sustainable plans to create an economic system that has a future. The present arrangement has a very short future.

Posted by John Hamilton, on June 17th, 2010 at 8:51 PM
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This is a comment to an article in Salon:

How about a reconciliation commission?

I'm sure that there are millions of people in this country who have committed rape, robbery, beatings and murder who have no one to listen to their stories or their expressions of suffering. It's part of the price paid for criminal activity. We can feel compassion for the suffering, but that doesn't mean we have an obligation to take on the burden of their pain.

It would be helpful for veterans of Abu Ghraib, Camp Bucca, Guantanamo, Bagram, and other torture sites to have their own reconciliation commission, where they tell their stories in public, and ask for forgiveness.

An example of this kind of investigation is the Vietnam veterans who conducted the Winter Soldier investigation in Detroit in 1971. Another, of course, is the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa that took place in 1995.

What is most important is to understand what took place, how it was authorized and developed, and how it can be avoided in the future.

Of course, the obvious is to stop invading people, and to stop the threatening behavior around the world. Maybe with more exposure of what we do when we invade countries the lesson will take.

As to the ethical challenges faced by journalists, there are guidelines, as in any other profession. There are also colleagues, some of whom may have the ability to listen.

—HappyJack
Tuesday, June 29, 2010 12:05 PM ET
Read HappyJack's other letters
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You can do the same thing. All it takes is some insight, an urge to tell truth, a concern for the future of the planet and some healthy skepticism of what the "mainstream" media spew out. Have at it.
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Here's the great Ry Cooder, with another great, Flaco Jimenez. The assembled group was called the Moula Banda Rhythm Aces for the occasion. It's a variation on the spelling of the Sanskrit term Mula Bandha (pronounced like "moola bonda"), a yogic practice that involves contracting pelvic organs to move sexual energy up the spine, accessing higher states of consciousness.

Click here for a version by Bruce Springsteen. Here's a video of the only time I have ever seen Bruce Springsteen live. He was great that day, and it was free. Here's the words and chords to the first song, and here's the second one. I likely wouldn't have wasted my vote on Kerry if I hadn't been there. Instead, I would have wasted it again on Ralph Nader. Click here for a picture of the event. Here's another.

Here's Woody Guthrie.

Some in our ruling "elite" would like to bring this back. It's a kind of reverse psychology, because it is what they deserve. This Ry Cooder version is priceless.

This Creedence song never gets old.

It took a while to warm to this song. Country Joe McDonald is a Navy veteran.

It's not too late to try this.

A lot of people are singing this song.

Some are singing this instead, wondering about the future. United we stand is taking on new meaning.

Here's some Bob Marley for a little inspiration. And this, my favorite. Sometimes it takes a little of this.

And, one of my all-time favorites, from Tom Paxton.

Melanie seconds that emotion.
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This post also appears on Smirking Chimp, where it seems to get read by more people. The comments are a good barometer of the state of our level of discourse. We have much work to do.