While we still have time

Aiding the "Enemy"

2012-01-03T15:59:00.000-08:00

When I think about formative experiences in my life, many come to mind. I ran away from home when I was three years old. In Chicago. More likely I just wandered off. I remember being found by a couple of policemen, who bought me ice cream, and took me to see some horses in a pasture. No doubt they were police horses, which are still used extensively in Chicago. It was a great little adventure.

On Christmas Eve when I was five years old I told my older brother and sister that there was no Santa Claus. I had them jumping up and down screaming, enough to make my dad come out from his and my mother's bedroom to see what was going on. My brother and sister were wailing "He said there's no Santa Claus! He said there's no Santa Claus!" My dad turned to me and asked, "Is that true? Did you say there's no Santa Claus?" I answered, "Yes! There isn't any Santa Claus! I saw you bringing boxes into your room. You're wrapping gifts in there!"

He said "Come here," and took me around the corner in our "flat" apartment. Looking steeply down at me, he calmly said "Listen. You're going to go out there and tell them that there's a Santa Claus, or else you get no Christmas, no gifts, and you stay in your room." I looked steeply up at him, and said "Okay," and we went back around the corner, where I told my brother and sister "I was just kidding. There really is a Santa Claus." After that everything was fine, and we all enjoyed Christmas with plenty of gifts, which in those days I think we called presents.

I pulled a number of stunts like that growing up, including getting out of drying dishes because I said I was God, and didn't have to do any work (I was four then). The idea came from hearing my mother tell the story of Jesus teaching the elders.

I wrote about throwing gravel at Douglas MacArthur a couple of months before my sixth birthday in I Love a Parade.

There were a number of escapes and near misses growing up. I fell out of a weeping willow tree when I was eight, tumbling head-over-heels from the top of the tree, probably from 25 to 30 feet up, grabbing branches and breaking them on the way down, then landing on my head completely upside-down. I just got up and dusted myself off and walked home. It was one of those things you don't tell anyone about.

One old house we lived in had a barn in the back yard. I fell out of the loft and landed in a barrel. I was lucky again. Mostly it was just my pride that was hurt. The barn was torn down not long after that. I used the bricks from the foundation to make a fort.

I saved a kid from certain drowning when I was about eleven years old. It was a weird situation. I was goofing around near a construction site on a weekend when no one was around. There was a sewer line being built, and a pit around the open sewer was about fifteen feet deep, with loose soil sloping down to the sewer. I was there wandering around by myself, and the other kid was a neighborhood brat whom I tried to avoid. For some reason he tempted fate by climbing down into the pit, and the soil started giving away. He started falling towards the sewer, and I raced down and pulled him out, just in time. Not a word was spoken between us. No thanks, nothing. I went home, wanting to tell someone, but I couldn't. I would have been in trouble for being at the construction site.

I got chased by a bull once when I stepped through a pasture fence. I was chased by a weird guy in the dark when I was twelve. I wrote about this in The Fiend. I was chased by the police on Halloween when I was fourteen. This was something completely due to "bad companionship." A high school friend lived in a different part of town, and shenanigans like throwing firecrackers, eggs and pumpkins, soaping windows, lighting grocery bags filled with dog excrement on fire on people's porches, then ringing the doorbell - all were new experiences for me.

More fun than running from the police was running from and hiding under porches when being chased by a pickup truck full of guys from the local public high school. They were riding around town throwing pumpkins on parked cars. We would come out from hiding and yell obscenities at them, then scamper back between houses, hiding under the handy wooden porches. It was great fun, hearing them running past on the sidewalk, yelling "Where are you, you rotten punks? We'll get you!"

There were many other formative experiences as I was growing up - boy scouts, high school sports, being saved by my swimming teacher when I was drowning during lessons (My first puppy love. She was the chairman [they didn't say chairperson in those days] of the University of Illinois' homecoming committee that fall), and, of course getting into fights.

When I finished college I worked some short-term jobs, biding my time before being drafted, which, with the Vietnam war in full throttle, was a certainty. I worked on highway construction, in a stove factory, and in a putty factory, among other menial jobs. A high school friend wanted to try his luck in California, and asked me if I wanted to drive out there with him. I jumped at the chance, and in February of 1968, in his huge Pontiac Bonneville we headed out. On the way we stopped for a few days in Denver, staying at the Theta Chi house at the University of Denver, where we were welcomed as "brothers." My high school buddy had been in the fraternity in college, but I hadn't. He taught me the secret handshake (It wasn't much of a secret, the "brotherhood" handshake with crossed pinkies, if I remember right) and secret symbols, so I could fake it if needed.

The Theta Chi guys in Denver invited us to their ski weekend at a resort in Winter Park, so we drove to that, had some fun on the way in places like Central City, and at the Coors brewery in Golden, then back to Denver. We continued on, heading for Los Angeles. I spent four months in L.A., becoming the assistant manager of a high-end hot dog restaurant in the Pacific Palisades.

Among our many adventures in those four months was being chased out of Tijuana. No need to elaborate. I also read a script with the future Freddy Krueger, Bob Englund. I was terrible until my last line, calling him a nasty name. Brando couldn't have done it better. I didn't get along with Bob England, and my zinger took him out of character. I waited on James Mason at the Hot Dog Show, giving him lukewarm water for his Sanka. He came to the counter with the cup dangling from his little finger, and said, in his stentorian British accent, "Have you got any hot Coffee?" I shriveled like a raisin, offering to heat up some water. He left without leaving a tip.

I went to a concert at "Valley State" to see Big Brother and the Holding Company, featuring Janis Joplin. It was in the college gym, and my seat was in the bleachers at an angle behind the stage. Janis J kept looking at me between songs, because I wasn't applauding. I was kind of mesmerized, just taking it in. Finally, after looking at me like that after about eight songs she threw her castanets on the floor in anger. I didn't mean to be rude, but often have that effect on people. Sorry, Janis, you were great. Taj Mahal was also on the bill, and a band named Sweetwater.

In early June I spent a few days in San Francisco. While touring the UC Berkely Campus we happened upon a free concert being filmed for TV at the Greek Theater. It was a contest, won by the Chambers Brothers. Serendipity. It was a great sendoff, seeing them do "Time Has Come Today."

Then it was back to Illinois, where I enlisted in the Army, days ahead of being drafted.

It was in the Army where I grew into adulthood. I had to get through it without any help, relying on my own devices. I enlisted so that I could get the school I wanted, projector repair. That meant I had to take an extra year, so my enlistment lasted three years. The draft commitment would have been two years.

Those three years seemed to last forever. After projector repair school I was sent to Germany, where there was no authorization for projector repairmen. I was happy, though, because it was better than being sent to Vietnam, and the clerical jobs I worked in gave me a bit of status that shielded me from a lot of the harm that might have come my way.

Still, the three years I spent in the Army were some of the hardest of my life. I was a dissenter, a court jester, a whistleblower, and an instigator. I became an actor and an escape artist as well. I helped guys out of trouble, and showed them how to stand up for themselves against the Army. To me, the things that I showed them, like getting a JAG lawyer, were pretty simple, but to to truck drivers and mechanics who weren't highly literate, it was transcendent.

In one of my many escapes, one Saturday a guy in my unit tried to sell me a bag of marijuana in downtown Heidelberg, and I sensed trouble, easing away from the situation. Again, it was something simple. A stranger approached the guy, wearing a big wooden peace symbol tied to a piece of leather around his neck. He also was wearing a long-hair wig with a head band, a T shirt and vest, and vertically striped bell-bottom pants. He said, "Hey, what you got in that bag, man?" It was too obvious. I turned to the friend I was with and said "Let's get out of here." We backed away, and within about fifteen seconds three burly guys came from out of nowhere, tackled the attempted dealer and had him on the ground. We skedaddled across the Karl Theodor Bridge, managing to avoid getting involved in this silly drama any further.

One of my favorite memories is the time I was accused of a security violation. It was midsummer, 1970, and I was working as an orderly room clerk in the 503d Transportation Company, in Heidelberg, Germany. One of my daily duties was to bring the daily outgoing correspondence to the "Special Troops Group" message center, and pick up the incoming distribution. On one occasion the Company Clerk gave me a large manila envelope that was marked "classified," and said "This goes to S-1." S-1 is the military staff designation for personnel.

I dropped the envelope off at the Group Headquarters message center, not giving it a second thought. A few days later I was told that I had committed a security breach, or some such, and that I would likely receive an "Article 15," military vernacular for nonjudicial punishment. If you signed the Article 15 it meant you were accepting the charge and resulting punishment, likely a reduction in rank and a fine. If you refuse to sign, this meant you could be subject to a court martial, and if found guilty would receive a much more severe punishment.

I didn't feel I had done anything wrong, and had a few days to think it over. When the time came to report to the company commander and either accept or refuse the charges, I refused. I told the C.O. that I felt I was being made a scapegoat. I said that I wasn't told specifically to take the envelope to S-1, that the envelope was marked improperly - it should have been marked with a classification like confidential, secret or top secret, that I had no training in how to handle classified material, and that I shouldn't have been carrying the envelope because I didn't have a security clearance.

Each time I told the C.O. one of these things it was like hitting him in the stomach. After I finished he said something like "O.K. Hamilton, you're dismissed. Go back to work." The Article 15 wasn't his idea. It was the Group commander's, Colonel Tjossem ("Joe Sim"). He had to go back to Col. Tjossem and tell him that I refused to sign the Article 15.

I didn't hear anything more about the Article 15 or a court martial. I took a big chance and won, and I was pretty relieved and proud of myself. It was the only time in the Army that I was charged with anything, and I basically outsmarted the Army. It didn't take much, but still it was a victory I savor to this day.

What brought this case to mind was the pending trial of Bradley Manning, a private in the Army who is accused of releasing massive amounts of classified information to Wikileaks. His situation is far more serious, since he could receive the death penalty, but there are a surprising number of similarities.

One similarity is that it is unclear just what the security violation is. As in my case, he is accused of revealing "classified" material. Not confidential, secret, top secret, or the modern equivalent of "NATO Crypto." Just "classified."

It also is not clear what degree of security clearance Manning had, that he would have access to those documents of unknown classification. For example, if his security clearance was only "Secret," were any of the alleged violations beyond his authorization, and how did he have access to such documents? Would the death penalty apply to revealing confidential documents?

One of the charges against Manning is "aiding the enemy." Who, one might ask, is "the" enemy? "The" would imply a single "enemy." Since Bradley Manning was in "Iraq," would the "enemy" be "Iraq?" Specifically, the people of "Iraq?" Or, might the enemy be "Al Qaeda?" Or "Al Qaeda in Iraq?" We don't know, because we haven't been told. We haven't declared war on anyone, so we don't have an official "enemy," except the all-inclusive bugaboo, the "terrorists."

Some might remember that during the tenure of the Bush Criminal Regime that "Republicans" were routinely calling "Democrats" "terrorists" and "unpatriotic" on the floor(s) of the "U.S." Congress. For some curious reason, "terrorism" became a handy tool for politicians to stir the public's hysteria about a largely imagined threat. This handy tool continues to be used, with sporadic grandstand arrests of entrapped dupes. One could almost think that the "911" attacks were internally planned, having become such a useful device for promoting dubious policies, wars and legislation.

So "terrorism" as "the" "enemy" is a pretty meaningless demographic, because the term is used as much or more for propaganda purposes as it is for actual practitioners of terrorism. Who else, then, is the "enemy?" World opinion is one likelihood. Even more likely is the "American" people. Or at least the perceptions and beliefs of the "American" people. The "War on Terror" can't continue if the people don't believe it is worthy of their concern and money. Especially their (our) money. Since 2001 the "War on Terror" has been a gusher of money for the armaments industry, the "security" industry, and for companies like Halliburton and its subsidiary Kellog Brown and Root, suppliers of ancillary support for our invasions and occupations.

Rather than joining in on "leftist" paranoia about this dynamic, I prefer to expand the dynamic. The climate is becoming more chaotic, with an increasing number of tornadoes, hurricanes, floods, blizzards, droughts, heat waves, forest fires, and, most significantly, the melting of the polar ice caps. The oceans are getting warmer and rising. Protective reefs are dying. Due to overfishing, sea life is disappearing. Except, that is, around "Cuba."

Our economy is in deep trouble. We can no longer go around the planet invading people. That is, unless we want to go the way of the "Soviet Union," whose collapse was precipitated by an invasion of, coincidentally, "Afghanistan." our infinite growth system has already reached a point beyond sustainability, and future growth will only make environmental problems worse.

So ginning up hysteria about "terrorism" is now old, solves no problems except how to get more money to profiteers, and we have greatly more pressing problems. This is a great test for the human race. Can we rise above the low, the paranoid, the false, the devious and the avaricious? I think we can, but it remains to be seen if we will.
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There used to be a great live version of this song on YouTube, but they pulled it. This is the original studio version. They'll probably pull this too.

Most versions of this song have been pulled too. This one's pretty good. I hope it lasts. I don't care much for this version, but the video part is worth looking at.

When I first heard this song I was in the Army. It took some getting used to, but to this day it states the case for peace as well as any song out there.

It's 2012. We have a great year ahead. A song of optimism never hurt anyone.

Here's another song of optimism.

This video is pretty cheerful. It's the Pulaski, Wisconsin high school marching band playing "Union Maid" at the Tournament of Roses Parade January 2. Here's a version from Carnegie Hall with Billy Bragg and others

Memories of Christmas Past

2011-12-13T00:57:00.000-08:00

You never know what you're going to find rummaging through old things. I must have been eleven years old when I made this card. Catholicism provides an endless source of humor. Click on the image for a larger view.
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For the unfamiliar, the term means a sudden outburst, as in "Jesus mercy!" or "Praise be to God!" "Allahu Akbar!" would be a good example in another tradition. Still, I wonder what the nuns were thinking when they made the assignment to do these cards, and when they read them. I also wonder what my mother thought when I gave it to her.

Reverse Engineering

2011-12-11T02:12:00.000-08:00

It has been a while since I wrote about the economy. So many other matters have intervened, and another dry treatise on economic topics would likely bore people, and would also have zero impact. Things I have written about, from the "Arab spring" (which actually happened mostly in the winter) to the Madison uprising to the pedophile coaching scandals are all either directly or indirectly related to economic factors, so talk about theory could wait.

The uprising at the Wisconsin State Capitol is more about crime through political power than anything else. The governor, Scott Walker, came into office to enforce austerity on the government sector. Unfortunately for him, he has had a history of disregard for law and common decency, and went far beyond his "mandate," revealing his true intentions, which are to solidify power and eliminate opposition. All indications are that he will be recalled soon, and if there is any justice in the world, prosecuted as well.

The uprisings across the Arab world were rooted in economic woes, beginning in Tunisia as a result of a hopeles street vendor setting himself on fire. The revolts spread across north Africa and beyond because millions were fed up with their conditions of political and economic dispossession.

Inspired by these uprisings, the Occupy Wall Street movement tapped into frustration over the free ride the rich are getting in our ongoing economic decline. It is going into a dormancy for the most part as winter approaches, but will likely be back in the spring with some new energy and methods.

While all this unrest is in ferment the "U.S." is preparing for its upcoming presidential election. The state of the economy is the major determinant of who will win.

What all these dynamics have in common is that they will intensify or ease depending on the condition not just of our domestic economy, but worldwide conditions as well. The prospects are not good for economic conditions to get significantly better any time soon. A crisis as bad or worse than 2008 is likely.

It has been said repeatedly by economic observers on the "left" that Obama squandered his chance to heal our economic woes when he assumed office. Instead, he yielded to pressure, appointing Wall Street insiders as his chief economic advisers. This shouldn't have been a surprise, but for most people who voted for Obama, including me, it was. Money talks, and politicians are beholden to those who pay them bribes, known euphemistically as campaign donations. I donated twenty-five dollars. That didn't qualify me for anything more than my one vote, which I had anyway.

What I can safely say is that whether it is Tunis, Cairo, Athens, Madison or Washington, D.C., the established order will always decide for itself. For the wealthy and powerful, deciding for themselves is all they know. The only way for effective change to take place is to supplant the established order. In some countries this means overthrowing the government, but here in the "U.S." it means overthrowing the ruling class.

This seems like a tall order, unlikely to the point of impossibility, but the way things are going the system will collapse. The European system is collapsing, and likely will bite the dust within the next few months. The repercussions here in the "U.S." will be profound. It was the greed and irresponsibility our our banking system that precipitated the European crisis. They have their own structural and profligacy problems, but the "American" fraud system made everything worse. "American" banks and investors are deeply involved in Europe.

You can read about this anywhere. Common Dreams is a good place. Where I depart from "leftist" writing is that I assume overthrow of the established order worldwide. If it doesn't happen, then human civilization will cease. I'm an optimist. Therefore, overthrow is inevitable.

In this context, overthrow can be looked at in terms of backnavigation from a future of sustainability, democracy and an equitable distribution of income and wealth. The term reverse engineering came into our vocabulary in the early days of the "Iraq" war, when the Bush criminal regime bastardized methods used in the Air Force's SERE program to develop a torture program.

The same idea can be used for good as well as evil. A future of massive slavery, oppression, poverty and environmental degradation is unthinkable, so let's not bother ourselves with it. Assume a future of plenty, freedom, full employment with good jobs, clean air, clean water, a life-promoting climate, and an equitable distribution of income and wealth. Take that as the given end result, put it at the extreme axis of a scale of conditions, and at the other extreme axis put what we have now. The backnavigation or reverse engineering would be conceptually easy to imagine.

In this methodology intention to reach the other extreme axis would be assumed, which would mean everything we are doing now that is counterproductive to reaching the goal would have to be discarded. Some hindrances should be obvious - corporate personhood, bribing of politicians (campaign donations), any country being the "world's only superpower," regressive taxation, freedom to pollute, inordinate wealth, monopoly power, Fox News. Others, like deep water oil drilling and fracking for natural gas, are less obvious due to corporate propaganda efforts.

This may seem like a revolutionary or extreme approach, to which I would agree, relative to what we have now. The problem is that what we have now is an approach that will lead to the extinction of the human species, and many others as well. In a few years, when the effects of climate change intensify beyond what we can tolerate, new approaches will come. We can plan for it now, and avoid the kinds of extremes our ruling elite is cooking up. The "Patriot" act and other crackpot schemes to spy on the public, limit discourse, imprison without due process and hide what the government is doing are all evils for any by the ruling elite.

The movement to a police state is incremental, but all it will take is another "911" type attack or some other national emergency for the process to accelerate to completion. It won't work, of course, but it's all the ruling elite has. What a repression system will do is give those in power free rein to do what they want to stay in power. In other words, do more of what is being done now, but without opposition.

The problem for the ruling elite is that free rein for doing what is being done now will result in system collapse, and the end of the ruling elite anyway. Therefor, let's do the backnavigation from peace, prospertiy, health, full employment and a clean environment while we still have time.
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This song has gotten kind of hackneyed, but I still like it. This live version is a fresh look.

Here's another that still works.

This too.

For a little background on the Bush criminal regime's torture program, click here.

Tipping Point

2011-11-20T01:09:00.000-08:00

Sexual abuse by a college coach is in the news again, this time by an assistant basketball coach at Syracuse. This case is a little more in doubt than the Jerry Sandusky case, but the likelihood is that there is merit to the accusations. The news last night showed old footage of the coach, Bernie Fine, patting a player on the behind. We won't be seeing this goofy practice any more. I always thought the ubiquitous pats on the rear end a bit creepy. It's not something I have ever done, nor had it done to me.

I believe it is safe to say that these sex abuse reports are going to be coming out of the woodwork. The probability that these two cases are isolated incidents is extremely low, for the simple reason that sexual predation of all kinds is a characteristic of our culture, and the power that coaches wield on our college campuses is vastly out of proportion to their contributions to the education of students.

Football in particular is vulnerable to sexual shenanigans. The game itself is a kind of sexualized violence. The tight pants, shoulder pads and helmet lend an aura of super-masculinity to already super-large men. When the quarterback reaches under the center to "call the signals" he puts his top hand against the other player's anal sphincter and testicles. This is totally weird, but it is done everywhere. Then the center "hikes" the football between his legs into the quarterback's waiting hands, whereupon the quarterback either runs, passes, or hands the ball off to one of his "running backs." Players block, clobber and grab each other in an orgy of violent physical contact, often injuring each other for life. Fans go wild watching this spectacle, and spend billions of dollars a year to work themselves into states of intense excitement before, during and after games.

In my previous post I wrote about some of the coaches I have encountered in my life. I forgot one of my favorite stories. In 1978 I worked at the Campus Inn in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Like the name says, it is directly across the street from the University of Michigan campus. On the nights before home football games the U of M football team would be sequestered there to keep them focused on the next day's game. My job included valet parking of cars, bellman, and driving airline flight crews (Pan Am, Northwest) to and from the Detroit Airport. Among the notables whose cars I parked were Warren Zevon ($1 tip, thanks) and Ella Fitzgerald (No tip. I even carried her luggage. Ba dweep doodly bop bow!)

I enjoyed the Campus Inn. It was a pretty relaxed place to work, and all kinds of goofy things happened there. Employees got free meals at the "Victor's Lounge," the hotel's restaurant. There was a waitress I worked with who was so completely dumb, sincere and gorgeous that I just had to fall completely in love with her. There was a second restaurant near the lobby, and one day a customer started choking on some food. The stupid waitress went into a panic and ran one way, stopped suddenly, and ran the other way, completely helpless, without a clue as to what to do. She was so innocent and selfless that I think it was then that my heart was stolen. She had the same kind of flowing strawberry blond hair as Farrah Fawcett, but was far more beautiful. I wonder what ever became of her. She deserved a lot better than she would likely ever get.

One of the steady customers at the Campus Inn was the U of M football coach Bo Schembechler. He had recently been divorced, so he would meet at the hotel with his assistant coaches and other hangers on in what today would be called a "posse." They would all come in on Sunday mornings for a late breakfast, yuk it up for a while, and then leave. I would here them say things like "Let's go to Bo's place for beer and pizza." Or just "Let's go over to Bo's to watch the game." Boys' night out every day of the week.

One Sunday morning Bo came in by himself after parking his Chevy Suburban (precurser to the now omnipresent SUV) in the "tunnel" alongside the hotel. I told him he couldn't park there because it was a fire lane. The term fire lane has meaning. If there is a fire in the hotel, fire trucks need to get through the tunnel to where they can best locate to fight the fire. This meant nothing to Bo Schembechler. He breezed on past me as if I weren't there, not even bothering to look at me.

The street-facing restaurant was near enough to the front desk that conversations could be heard both ways. I groused to the front desk clerk about how Bo Schembechler was so arrogant that he thought he was too good to move his vehicle out of the fire lane. I went on about his post-season record, saying louder than I realized, "He can't even win a bowl game." At that point he had not won a bowl game, though he did later.

Bo and his posse never came back. I didn't miss them. He was just another arrogant coach to me. A few years later I was amused to watch him penalized for unsportsmanlike conduct at the Bluebonnet Bowl, a feat he reprised in his final game, the 1990 Rose Bowl (which he lost).

C'est la vie. By now a syndrome should be forming. Another coach story might make it clearer. When I moved to Madison in the early 1990s the easiest kind of work to find was in building maintenance, having worked in the construction trades and maintenance work for about twelve years. I found a job doing maintenance at a motel on the far east side of town, which sufficed until I could find something better. Most of what I did was painting rooms, with a lot of snow removal in the winter.

In March of every year the state wrestling and basketball tournaments are held at the University of Wisconsin, and every hotel and motel in town gets filled to capacity. The basketball team that stayed in the motel where I worked was in one of the smaller divisions, and I can't remember if they won or not. One thing I do remember is the partying that went on in the motel rooms. Not surprisingly, the cheerleaders paired-up with the basketball players, spending the night in the various rooms. The following morning was nonstop mayhem, with teenagers running around in the halls, going from room-to-room, and with some rooms remaining as private liaisons between intimate pairs. It was up to the coaches and teacher chaperons to get the students check out in time and on the buses to head home.

I remember one coach in particular, because he went around knocking on doors and demanded to be let in. A girl behind one of the doors said "I'm indisposed." The coach replied, "That's OK! I seen it before." He was almost a caricature of the dumb coach. "I seen it before" revealed his command of the English language. The "it" he referred to revealed his purpose for demanding to be let in. He said nothing about getting checked out and on the bus. He just wanted in on an obviously private and intimate situation between two students. If he had seen "it" before, he did something in the past that he shouldn't have been doing.

The coach and the chaperons were doing an irresponsible and incompetent job of chaperoning the students. Teenagers will be teenagers, but the adults in charge are supposed to be adults. Instead, what I saw was adults trying to be teenagers. I only worked at one motel during one championship season in one out of fifty states. If you extrapolate this to fifty states in championships throughout the school year every year, the creepiness of coaches is a silent epidemic.

I have yet another coaching story. During the early 2000s I worked as a substitute teacher when my regular job was slow. One day in about 2004 I was called to teach Physical Education (P.E., or Phy. Ed., as they say in Wisconsin) at one of the local high schools. The coach who taught the class was in his office when I arrived, but had to leave soon. He told me the last period was a coed class, and I wouldn't be able to get them to do anything. I had encountered this kind of attitude many times when substitute teaching, and thought "We'll see."

The class was indeed a challenge. They didn't dress in P.E. clothes, and weren't very interested in doing the day's activity, a softball game. I took the easy approach, telling them they could play in their street clothes, they could have mixed male and female teams, and that they could be on whichever side they wanted.

It worked. They played the entire hour, had great fun, and the most resistant girl in the class thanked me afterwards and shook my hand. One guy in the class was built like a football player, but a "troubled youth" type. He hit a long shot to the outfield, and ended up rounding the bases and sliding home head first. He was so happy I started feeling verklempt. Everyone on both teams cheered when he scored. These kids were the outcasts. I didn't treat them as outcasts, and they did as well as anyone, and had fun doing it.

One time when I was subbing in the 70s I was called to teach a high school math class whose regular teacher was the tennis coach. The kids weren't learning much. They told me all the teacher did was brag about his college fraternity. I got them working, except for one poor kid who the coach ignored completely. I thought taking an interest in him might help, but he was way behind the class, and it was too embarrassing for him to receive any attention. He should have been in special education, and certainly shouldn't have been in a class taught by a coach.

What all these stories have in common is the arrogance, self-focus, and irresponsibility of coaches I have encountered over the years. There were others who weren't so bad, but I would put them in the extreme minority. The ones I have described are the more typical. When you compound their already limited contributions to society with outlandishly high pay in college football and basketball, you can expect trouble. We have been seeing the results for decades, but now the dark side of the coaching profession is exploding in our faces.

Beyond just coaching, the culture of sports has reached a level of hyperbole that is obscene. Like the overinflated housing market of a few years ago, it had to come crashing down. With these pedophile scandals in sport the bubble has now burst. Along with the Occupy Wall Street movement, maybe we should start an Occupy college administration buildings movement. That's where the decisions are made. I wouldn't recommend an occupy athletic departments movement. It would be seen as anti-athlete.

Beyond sports, we are at a tipping point for which there is no turning back. Our system is corrupt. Not totally corrupt, but sufficiently corrupt. Sufficient for it to break down. The more it breaks down, the more that it will be broken down. A broken-down social system cannot be repaired. Witness the Soviet Union. Something new is on the way.
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This is a good read on the Jerry Sandusky saga.

This would be a good theme song for Jerry Sandusky.

Here's Ella Fitzgerald scat singing. Somewhere I have a Matt Groening cartoon about scat singing being a form of torture, or level of Hades, or something like that.
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Here's a funny update.

This update isn't so funny, but was entirely predictable.
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Wikipedia needs money again.

This is something new I'm trying.

Golden Opportunity

2011-11-14T01:30:00.000-08:00

There was a "moment of silence" before Saturday's Penn State football game. Symbolic moments of silence are a time-honored tradition at "American" sporting events, usually in remembrance of one or more people who have died.

This time it was different. Officially the moment of silence was for child abuse victims. Nothing specific, just children who have been abused somewhere, some time. Not how they were abused, not where, not how many, and not when. It was almost as if the school and the fans just up and decided to have a moment of silence for victims of child abuse.

It wasn't very convincing. The real mourning was for Joe Paterno, Penn State's football coach since 1966. That was forty-five years ago. I was a senior in college in 1966. Paterno played college football when I was one year old.

During Paterno's tenure at Penn State he won 409 games, the most of any coach in NCAA history. He attained that distinction on October 29 of this year, defeating Illinois 10-7. The record had been held by legendary Grambling coach Eddie Robinson.

Now Joe Paterno has been fired, leaving Penn State in disgrace after public disclosure of his role in the child molestation scandal involving one of his former coaches, Jerry Sandusky. Paterno knew about the molestations, but by all appearances participated in a coverup of the crimes, along with the university president and other officials. It would appear that the record for most victories trumped all other considerations in Joe Paterno's mind - his advanced age (84), criminal activity under his trust, protection of children, the integrity of the football program, his own integrity.

Like virtually everyone else in the country I was surprised and shocked at the news. I shouldn't have been. I wasn't so enamored of Joe Paterno. It seemed to me he stayed far past the time he should have retired. When Penn State joined the Big 10 athletic conference I thought it was a craven move to win championships and make money for the football program, to the detriment of the other 10 teams. Of course, it was, but that's the nature of the game.

In pondering the whys and wherefors of the Paterno scandal I looked back on my own athletic experience for insight. For every Heisman Trophy winner or All-American there are millions of other athletes who play at the margins, unheralded and in most cases unknown. I was one of those athletes, far back in the pack. Still, I played, and learned much in the organized sports that I played so ignomineously.

When I was ten years old my family moved to Kankakee, Illinois. It was a baseball town, and in 1958 the Little League team played in the World Series finals. They lost to a team from Mexico that had sixteen-year-olds on the team.

That same year I tried out for Pony League, the next level after Little League. I hadn't played in Little League, and in the tryouts faced fast pitching for the first time. The pitcher I faced, a guy named Jack Coy, was firing pitches at 90 miles per hour. In practice. What a waste. Major league scouts came to watch him pitch, but he later "threw out" his pitching arm, and didn't play baseball at all after Pony League.

The fast pitching scared the daylights out of me. I can still remember the sound of the pitches hitting the catcher's mitt. "Whop!" "Whop!" "Whop!" "Next batter!" I didn't make the cut.

The same thing happened the next year, without any batting practice. I wasn't a very good baseball player, and was smaller than most kids my age. When I was fourteen years old I was five feet tall and 85 pounds. I was pretty good for playing at the neighborhood park, but organized ball is on a different level.

Another thing stands out in my memory of going out for Pony League. During the mass tryout one of the coaches walked around, wearing his "Domestic Laundry" delivery driver's uniform, gripping a baseball the way pitchers do when they are breaking a ball in. He walked with swagger, and looked over the players like cattle at auction. Indeed, in the clipping at right the player assignments were referred to as an "auction," and players were "bought." I wonder what I went for.

Undeterred by this failure, I tried out for football when I started high school. I was the smallest kid on the team, but I was enjoying it, even though I was far back on what today would be called the "depth chart." My dad made me quit after about a month, telling me to devote myself to my studies, which I promptly stopped doing.

The following spring I went out for the track team, inspired by the great mile runner Roger Bannister. He was the first person to run a mile in less than four minutes, and I was inspired by his historic feat. I ran the mile at 4 minutes, 55 seconds in practice, and was put on the varsity track team, the only freshman on the team.

Unfortunately, I never broke five minutes again, and got steadily worse every year. In my senior year I gave up running the mile and switched to the half-mile. I ran a good race my first time out, but again got steadily worse each race.

In my junior and senior years in high school I played football again, without distinction. It was fun, though, especially in practice, where I often played defensive back. I could pick out who was going to carry the ball by the ways players lined up, which angered the coaches. Finally one of them asked me how I knew, and I told him. I thought this would get me some playing time, but I think the coaches resented me figuring something out that they should have known. They were pretty crappy coaches.

They did give everyone a chance, I have to say. I was put in at halfback in games where we were winning handily, and one time at fullback, where I gained one yard before being piled on by the defensive line. I got the wind knocked out of me, and the coaches likely thought I was dead. The other team had a guy who weighed 270 pounds, and a couple of others who were about 220. I weighed 125. My one yard got into the season statistics, and was better than some.

During my senior year in high school a friend organized a CYO (Catholic Youth Organization) basketball team, and invited me to play. He said we would probably end up in last place, but would have a lot of fun. That didn't sound like much fun to me, but I had an idea. I called a friend from the neighborhood, who was a star player on the public high school team that beat our team to win the regional tournament two years previous. He was six-foot-six, and was a fearsome talent, recently kicked off his college team for being a "gunner." He told me he would play if I paid his CYO membership fee, and I got the $11 from my dad, who believed he was paying for my membership. We won almost all our games, and would have won the championship had the officiating been honest. C'est la vie.

Strangely enough, basketball was probably my strongest sport. I went out for basketball when I was a high school freshman, and stayed on the team long enough to learn how to play defense - "Stay between your man and the basket" - and could jump pretty high. On the CYO team I was a good rebounder, and at five feet eight, played forward. I held the (then) highest scorer in the league scoreless, and we beat their team of public high school football stars by 28 points. It was the best team sport experience I ever had.

My greatest athletic performance was in Army basic training in 1968. Every few weeks we were given PT tests - physical training - to measure our progress in a number of tasks. I did pretty well in all of them, and surprised myself and the drill sergeants in "walking" the horizontal bars, where I maxed-out at 66. I think only one or two others in our company did better.

One of the greatest lessons I learned in the various organized sports I played (or attempted to play) was to be wary of men who become coaches. I remember as far back as grade school that I felt an unease around coaches. There was something kind of off about them. A guy volunteered as our grade school track coach when I was about 12 or 13 years old, and he was an incongruity. He didn't know anything about track, didn't know anything about coaching, was a hothead, and just had a really bad vibe. I don't remember what happened, but the track season didn't last very long, and we never ran in a meet. I never heard of the "coach" again.

I remember our high school coaches much better. They were typical of coaches I have seen elsewhere - pompous, egocentric, not very bright, favored their star players while ignoring everyone else, and not particularly good teachers. I've seen worse while substitute teaching.

The worst of all was when I had a job driving a school bus in the late 1980s to early '90s. The best money was in taking classes or sports teams on road trips. One Saturday I was assigned to drive the school baseball team to a game against West Aurora, a statewide power. The team lost the game despite a grand slam home run from its star player.

Usually when a game ended I would leave with the team as soon as the bus was loaded and everyone on board. Not this time. The coach had me turn of the engine, and proceeded to chew the team out for losing, not for anything specific, just for being losers. He was one of the biggest jerks I have ever come across. I felt like throwing him off the bus. The driver is the authority on the bus, and that was as close as I had come to telling someone to get out. From his tone it was pretty obvious that the coach only cared about himself and his job, and nothing for the players.

Nowadays sports are big business. Professional athletes make millions of dollars a year, and owners make even more, with some exceptions. College sports, technically amateur, have become an embarrassment. Coaches and athletic directors make millions, while players earn no money, at least officially. Schools are continually being caught paying players "under the table," or providing them with cars, clothes, TVs, and even prostitutes.

Here at the University of Wisconsin we have a perfect example. Athletic Director Barry Alvarez earns a salary of $1,000,000 per year. Football coach Bret Bielema's annual take is $2.5 million. Basketball coach Bo Ryan earns $2,111,364.

To get a better idea of how big the UW sports program is I took a tour a few days ago of the sports facilities. It's pretty unbelievable. Camp Randall Stadium, where the "Badgers" play football, holds over 80,000 fans. The Kohl Center, where the basketball and hockey teams play, holds 17,230. In a ranking of profits of major colleges in both football and basketball the football program makes the 22nd highest ($16,621,480), and the basketball program is 42nd ($10,126,893). Both are higher than Southern California's football program, 48th at $8,259,649.

Most stunning to me among the UW's athletic buildings is the indoor practice facility. It is imposing from the outside, but is even more daunting from the inside, with two underground levels. It has an eighty yard football field, a huge weight room, a sports medicine area, team meeting rooms, a tutoring center, and numerous other offices of which I don't know the function.

This is too much. It's too much everywhere. The two schools where I went to graduate school, Southern Illinois University and Northern Illinois University, both decided to go "big time" during my time at each. Money poured in, both from the state and from donors. Now they have expanded stadiums and big athletic budgets. The way college athletics began was to enhance the college experience for the players, making them well-rounded human beings through fair competition.

Now it is big business, the well-roundedness a matter of luck. The student athlete of today is athlete first, student maybe. Some go on to be doctors and lawyers and such, some to be coaches, some to sell insurance, and some go on to alcohol, drugs, crime and an early death. Many, especially football players, end up with serious brain injuries that cause lifetime difficulties. The important thing to the universities is that the athletes bring paying fans through the turnstiles.

The business of college sports has reached a zenith and nadir simultaneously. The money involved is beyond obscene, and now the scandals are rapidly catching up. The Penn State fiasco is the culmination of many years of malfeasance nationwide. If the most reputable sports program in the country covers up for a serial child molester and maybe worse, what, we must wonder, is going on everywhere else?

An even larger question is what is going on in the broader context of business, government, and other institutions. Sunday's 60 Minutes had a segment about how members of Congress from both parties, including the current and previous speakers of the House of Representatives, have been buying stocks based on inside information. These insider trades have yielded millions of dollars in free money. This is nothing new, but it is becoming clear that we have a comprehensively corrupt society.

Given the ongoing Wall Street fraud scandal, the corruption in our Congress, a corporate class that behaves with near-impunity, our increasingly fake mainstream news media, and the breakdown of some of our other major institutions, the larger question is if we are going the way of the Roman Empire. I think we are, but it is also a time of golden opportunity. There has been no other time since the Civil War that our country has been poised for fundamental change. With energy, wisdom, and more than a little good luck, we may be on the brink of a golden age.
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Here's an update from Weekend Update.

For a further examination of institutional self-protection, this story from CNN is a good start.

Here's another little update.

Maybe all we need is a little more Bread and Circus. An explanation of the term might help.

We all have dreams of greatness when we are young.

Time's a Wastin'

2011-09-05T01:30:00.000-07:00

In 1997 my job slowed down, so I needed to find something else to do in my off days. I answered an ad to sell satellite TV systems, thinking it would be easy money. It of course wasn't, and I ended up not selling even one. I did learn a thing or two, though.

One thing I learned was a little bit about how corporations interact with the political sphere. The Madison office of the satellite service was very small, but the local manager had big ambitions. Not long after I started he went to a convention in Las Vegas, where he met with executives from the satellite company's headquarters. He also met with executives from News Corp, the fake news and scandal conglomerate that is involved in its own scandal over hacking the phones of crime victims, celebrities and politicians. News Corp owns the "American" fake news network Fox, and in 1997 was negotiating with cable and satellite companies to expand its programming on their "bandwidth" spaces.

The local manager came back full of excitement about his meeting with the News Corp people. He raved about how they played hardball with ESPN, starting their own sports network when ESPN raised their broadcast fees. I didn't care much about this, but one thing he said stands out in my memory. The various broadcast media lobbied heavily for the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which deregulated the industry. The News Corp people bragged that they couldn't believe how easy it was to buy members of Congress.

Now we have the situation where News Corp is involved in a hacking scandal that may destroy the media empire of Rupert Murdoch, its principal owner. Minions of Murdoch's News of the World hacked the cell phone of a girl who was murdered, even deleting messages, which led police and her parents to believe she was still alive. Two other murder victims' phones were also hacked. Now investigators are expanding their inquiries to other crimes.

It is highly unlikely that News Corp committed crimes only in "Great Britain." The FBI is now investigating whether News Corp hacked the phones of "911" victims. A recent Rolling Stone article explores the possibility, or likelihood, that the same kinds of things that happened in "England" have indeed been happening here.

For me, all the proof I need is that News Corp's Fox News is a propaganda device for the "Republican" party. The fakery on Fox is well-known, but the criminal intent behind the fakery is only now becoming clear. Riling people up against immigrants, "liberals," "African-Americans," Obama, environmentalists, Muslims, homosexuals, women and the poor is all of one overall scheme. It is a combination of securing political power and making money.

Now, at long last, it's ashes, ashes, all fall down. This is likely the end of the Murdoch empire. It is likely also the beginning of the inevitable decline of hate media. Rush Limbaugh. Michael "Savage." Laura Ingram. Glenn Beck. Bill O'Reilly. Sean Hannity.

Things have been quiet about this scandal the past few weeks, but that likely won't last. The key element in this process is that our socioeconomic system is collapsing. This isn't simply a case of the ruling elite wanting to have all power to itself. It's more like a factional war, and not all power is invested in the extreme paranoid sector of our system. The "U.S." military, for example, recognizes the national security threat of global climate change.

If the military recognizes the dangers posed by climate change, then it is safe to say that the intelligence agencies also recognize the threat. This is a threat that endangers all life on this planet, but most particularly human life. It isn't going to go away because of News Corp, the "Tea Party," the "Republican" party, the "Democratic" party, or Rush Limbaugh.

Thanks to our "leaders," the economy is teetering on collapse. This is likely to be the last of this kind of irresponsibility. I suspect that word is filtering around that it's time to cut the crap. A good example is that last week National Public Radio reported that the Justice Department is taking a tougher stance on people who protest at abortion clinics. I have written before on this blog that I am uncomfortable with the idea of abortion, but that it's not my business to say it shouldn't be allowed. What I think is most important is freedom of choice. The second most important thing is that the "pro life" movement is a crackpot campaign, plain and simple. It is a threat to public order.

So there is cause for optimism. Not the way we necessarily would like or would have expected, but, hey, we'll take what we can get. Jobs are certainly the nation's top priority right now. But let's not forget about the evil Rupert Murdoch media empire and the threat it poses for our democracy and for our society. These are very bad people, and the sooner they are put out of business the better. Jail is the proper place for all of them. For Rupert Murdoch in particular, jail, revocation of citizenship, deportation and seizure of assets would be suitable responses to his criminality. Time's a wastin'.
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Here's some more info about Rupert Murdoch. This also.

Rupert Murdoch and News Corp is the main topic in today's interview with British singer/songwriter Billy Bragg on Democracy Now.

Billy Bragg's song "Never Buy the Sun," about how people in Liverpool refuse to buy the Murdoch newspaper after it lied about them. For some background, click here. There's a video about it too.

Billy Bragg has another song about News Corp's tabloid news, It Says Here.

This website is dedicated to boycotting Fox News.

Here's some Fox lies fun from right here in Madison. On the same website, there's more recent news about Rupert Murdoch. Surprise of surprises, Fox also lies about Labor Day.

If you haven't heard about the famous "palm trees" episode, click here. For the full video of the Sacramento, California incident click here. You can make up your own mind about who was the thug.

This Fox derivative expands on the Fox lies theme. The choice of features, and the descriptions therein reveal a pernicious agenda.

Here's another story about a pernicious hate/falsehood campaign.

For a good history of Fox News, click here.

If you are wondering about the source of "Tea Party" funding, click here.

In the realm of everything relating to everything else, this scheme fits the pattern.

You can use this video as a motivator.

Thanks

2011-06-17T12:10:00.000-07:00

I had some ideas festering to write about, but this picture is enough by itself to tell the story of the struggle against Wisconsin's governor and his nasty legislation. If you click on the picture a larger version appears. All the pictures are from Tuesday, June 14. The state Supreme Court had just decided, along partisan lines, to overturn the injunction against Governor Walker's union busting bill.

The girl in the photo was very proud of her sign, and wanted me to know she made it herself. If there were no other reason to keep fighting against this evil "Republican" scheme, the future of our children suffices.

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This song is getting a lot of play locally. Click here to learn more about the Coalition to Save Workers.

I linked to this song a few posts back, but it deserves an encore.

Others are giving their thanks to Scott Walker.

Here's some truth about the economy. Robert Reich was Clinton's Secretary of Labor until he quit at the end of the first term.

From Hooverville to Walkerville

2011-06-12T23:25:00.000-07:00

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Here's a video of Russ Feingold speaking at Walkerville on Sunday, June 12, 2011.

This video of Madison musician Whitney Mann is from the 2010 Madison Music Awards. She performed for free at Walkerville on Saturday, June 11. She was pretty incredible, sounding like a mix of Janis Joplin and Nora Jones. A thirty minute video from Wisconsin Public Television can be seen here.

Here's a little history of Hooverville.

The pictures with the inflatable palm trees are a fun reminder of the fake video on Fox News in March, showing supposedly violent union protesters in Madison with palm trees in the background.

Here's a bit of an update.

It looks as though there's a bit of parting on the "right."

Here's another update.

Sarah Palin Speaks to a Tea Party Rally in Madison

2011-04-21T23:41:00.000-07:00

Sara Palin came to Madison last Saturday to speak at the "Tea Party" tax day rally. It was a raucous event, with a seemingly endless series of speakers building invective to a crescendo that culminated with Palin's speech.

A lot of interesting things happened on the sidelines, with counter-ralliers from Madison's union supporters outnumbering the "Tea Partiers" by about three to one. The most interesting thing to me didn't become clear until I looked at the pictures I took of the event. Three of either Palin's or the "Tea Party" security detail wandered away from the stage area to linger among the counter-ralliers. I was in a picture-taking mood, and took a couple of shots of them. Curiously, as I was lining up my shot from the front, one of them got camera-shy and started to slink away. He wasn't fast enough, and I got the picture before he slipped away. In the picture of "Security" from behind you can see him glaring at me. He didn't like having his picture taken.

As I was getting photos together for posting on this blog I found the security detail more curious, and especially the guy who was so camera shy. I zoomed in on his hat, and it says "Los Angeles Police Special Weapons and..." I couldn't make out the rest, but it would seem to have been the word tactics.

Could a guy from the Los Angeles Police Department SWAT team come all the way to Madison, Wisconsin to provide his talents? What might he have had in mind? And why were he and his partners in security lurking among the counter-ralliers? Did his camera-shyness have anything to do with his curious background?

The likeliest thing is that the guy isn't or wasn't on the LAPD SWAT team at all. You can buy Los Angeles Police gear at a number of websites, like this one, and it is likely the hats can be bought at gun shows and gun nut conclaves like National Rifle Association meetings, or in ads in Soldier of Fortune Magazine. In other words, the "Security" man with the SWAT hat is in all likelihood not a law enforcement officer, but a fugitive from justice, who would have good reason for being camera-shy.

I don't have any certainty as to who the SWAT guy might be, but the times are certainly very weird, and Madison seems to be a big draw right now for strange people of all kinds with questionable of agendas. Here's an example of the kind of person the "Republicans" have hired to collect signatures for petitions to recall "Democratic" state senators.

This guy asked me to put this picture on the Web, so here it is. He was at the official counter-rally at the opposite side of the Capitol. He epitomized for me the best type of activist - soft-spoken, humble, sincere, someone who would rather be doing something else.

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Here's a video of part of Palin's speech. Here's another.

This video of Michelle Shocked with the Madison Firefighters bagpipe group is priceless. It was at the Wisconsin State Capitol on April 4, the anniversary of Martin Luther King's assassination. Jesse Jackson spoke afterwards. I managed to squeeze into a space behind the stage and get a few pictures. Jesse Jackson is at left in the picture at right, and one of the Memphis sanitation workers of 1968 is behind him.

I was going to blend these stories in a different post, but didn't. They're worth reading:

Fire the Rich

Anatomy of an Afghan War Tragedy

Budgetary Savings From Military Restraint

Walker's Budget bill is really about hurting unions

Here's a bit of old news.

Union Solidarity at the Wisconsin State Capitol

2011-03-16T14:27:00.000-07:00

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To view the publication of the budget bill click here.

Here's a great example of solidarity.

Here's another.

For a list of Walker donors to boycott, click here. Strangely, two of them are unions. For other boycott information, click here.

To get a better idea of what Walker is up to, click here.

This video provides a curious connection between Walker, the M&I Bank, and a private security company.

This radio program is a must-listen. The know-nothing segment with "conservative" New York Times columnist David Brooks is revelatory. He pretends to be an academic researcher, but has done no research, just assumes his own truth with assertions of "probably." As "conservatives" continually show us, they have nothing (except money of course).

For a good history of debt in "America," click on any of these icons:
MP3 Player Windows Media Player Download

For a little background on the "We're broke" talking point, click here. E.J. Dionne of the Washington Post adds this.

This analysis of public versus private is worth reading.

This, appearing in the New York Times, provides another historical perspective.

In response to this column, "Republicans" have demanded to read the professor's emails. The New York Times responded in this editorial on March 25.

New York Times columnist and Nobel laureate Paul Krugman weighs in on the Cronon situation here.

For more perspective on how we got into this predicament, this article is a must-read.

This, from Glenn Greenwald in Salon, offers a good perspective on the Koch brothers.

Here's something interesting from across the pond. As over here, so over there. I'm so glad.

Here's a song to listen to while looking at the pictures. This Billy Bragg version is a rouser.

This song, from the Dropkick Murphys, may or may not have been performed at the Boston Rally for Wisconsin Labor Union Rights on February 22. Think of it metaphorically. A recording of the song was played at the Madison rally on February 22. Here they are in Milwaukee on February 25.

Here's a song by the Straw Dogs, also from Boston, performed right here in Madison last month. They also played outside.

Here's something from Bruce Springsteen. Here's the original Woody Guthrie version.

For some labor history, click here.

This song is good for getting some organizing energy going. Nonviolently, of course.

The singing is highly imperfect, but here's a union song from the Wisconsin State Capitol. There are some more songs on the sidebar.

This is what we need to do, not just for the next few months, but for many years to come. The Grateful Dead take it to another level in this version.

Here's one for my grandfather, a conductor for the Illinois Central Railroad, including this train.
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Here's a few union links:

Wisconsin AFL-CIO

South Central Wisconsin Federation of Labor and affiliated unions

Dane County Deputy Sheriff's Association

Madison Professional Police Officers Association

International Association of Firefighters Local 311

AFSCME

Service Employees International Union-Wisconsin

Wisconsin Federation of Nurses & Health Professionals

Madison Teachers Incorporated

Wisconsin Education Association Council

Wisconsin State Employees Union
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Here's some news.

This too.

And, of course, scandal.

The Next Generation of Citizens

2011-02-27T15:15:00.000-08:00

A Perfect Time for Overthrow

2011-02-16T19:15:00.000-08:00

It helps if you're going to cover a big rally to get there early. Today was a perfect example. Union members across the state of Wisconsin rallied for the second day against governor Scott Walker's proposal to abolish bargaining rights of state workers and drastically reduce pay and benefits. This includes teachers, police, firefighters, corrections officers, game wardens, snow plow drivers, doctors, nurses, university professors, and a myriad of other state workers who staff the various divisions of state government. (You can read more about the proposal here)

I didn't get there until 4:30, when most people had left. It wasn't over by any means, though, as busloads of teachers and other union members were arriving from all over the state. The governor, a none-too-bright guy, has awakened a sleeping giant. Tomorrow's rally promises to be even bigger.

In the wave of "Republican" election gains last fall everyone from Barack Obama to governors and local officials nationwide are proposing drastic cuts in spending for government services and payments to less fortunate citizens for such things as home heat and help with food and rent. Nowhere in any of these plans is it mentioned to place any burden whatsoever on those who benefit the most from living in this country: the rich. The multibillionaires, multimillionaires, Wall Street profligates who destroyed our banking system with their greed, corporate executives who pollute the land and air, agricultural conglomerates who sell us tainted food, pharmaceutical executives who push harmful drugs down our throats, weapons manufacturers who promote wars in order to generate more demand for their implements of death, and much more. I shouldn't leave out the media conglomerates who shape and manipulate public perception to acquiesce to corporate propaganda.

There are rumblings of change, though. Just as in the recent upheaval in "Egypt," people right here in "America" are waking up to the reality of what is going on all around them. It is still winter, yet Wisconsinites from all over the state sacrificed their time, money, and energy to come to the state Capitol to stand up for their rights.

There are other rumblings. To my great delight, renowned economist Robert Reich is advocating for progressive income tax, much like existed before the demented era of "Conservatism" that began with the demented presidency of Ronald Reagan, starting in 1981. Reich also provided some insight into the budget debate.

On tonight's News Hour, independent Senator Bernie Sanders (Vermont) talked about how unfair the budgeting process is to the most vulnerable among us. Among the things he said were the following:

"...our middle class is collapsing. Our median family income has gone down. Poverty is going way, way up. And the gap between the very, very rich and everybody else is going wider.

So, I think, before you look at budgets or how you deal with the deficit, you have got to take that into consideration. For example, the top 1 percent today earn more income than do the bottom 50 percent. They earn about 22 percent of every dollar earned in America. And that gap is growing wider.

Meanwhile, what this budget includes are massive tax breaks for millionaires and billionaires. So, you have a situation. The rich are getting richer. Their tax rates have gone down for many, many years. Their effective tax rate right now -- people like Warren Buffett talk about this -- at 16 percent, is lower than at any time in recent history, and yet we're giving them huge tax breaks, while poverty in America is increasing.

We have the highest rate of childhood poverty in the industrialized world for our children, and we're cutting programs for those people. So, the first thing we have to deal with is revenue. And, as a nation, we have got to say, sorry, the rich are getting richer. They're doing really well. Our friends on Wall Street, we shouldn't have to worry about. They get huge amounts of compensation.

We cannot continue to give huge tax breaks to the wealthy, cut back on programs for the vulnerable. So, that's the first issue I think we have to deal with."

He goes on about how Obama is clueless (my term, not his), most significantly about the causes of the budget deficit:

"The deficit primarily has been caused by two wars unfunded, huge tax breaks to people who don't need it, an insurance-company-written Medicare Part D prescription drug program, and the bailout of Wall Street.

The cause of it is not hungry children in this country or people who are sleeping out on the street. So, we have got to deal with the deficit, but you do it in a fair and progressive way. For example, this year alone, we're losing a hundred billion dollars in revenue because corporations, the wealthy, are stashing their money in tax havens in the Cayman Islands.

This year, ExxonMobil, the most profitable corporation in the history of the world, is not paying a nickel in federal income taxes, despite having made $19 billion last year. In 2005, one-quarter of corporation -- large corporations in America making a trillion in revenue didn't pay a nickel in taxes. You have got a military budget which in many ways is still fighting the old Cold War.

So, I believe that we have to move toward significant deficit reduction, but you don't do it on the backs of the middle class and working families who are already suffering as a result of this Wall Street-caused recession.

You want to know the way to raise money? Put a transaction fee on Wall Street, so maybe we can curb some of the speculation and raise some money."

The same can be said for budget problems at the state and local level. The rich are not bearing any burden whatsoever. It is time to overthrow them, just like the "Egyptians" overthrew Mubarak. The days are getting longer, and the weather is getting warmer. It is a perfect time for overthrow.
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Here's a video of yesterday's Madison rally.

Here's another.

This video is a must see.

Here's a story about what it's like to be a teacher in Wisconsin.

There is power in a union.

For a little revolutionary energy, click here. Also here. One Tracy Chapman song isn't enough. Here's another.

Just change the name to Madison for this one.

Don't forget to have fun. Here's a nice Grateful Dead version.

This song might get some revolutionary energy going.

Can't leave the Beatles out. This version was for the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour.

Or Leonard Cohen.

Gil Scott-Heron did Hip-hop before it was called Hip-hop.

You likely never heard this song, but it still resonates.

This is my own personal dedication to Scott Walker, my favorite Stevie Wonder song. This is my second favorite.

Here's Walker announcing his proposal.

If Walker's bill passes, Wisconsin could lose $46 million in Federal funds.

For some history of union-busting, click here.

This story in Mother Jones describes the relationship between Wisconsin governor Scott Walker and the notorious Koch brothers.

For more information about the Koch brothers, click here. The New Yorker article by Jane Mayer can be seen by clicking here.

The New York Times has a story about the involvement of the Koch brothers in Wisconsin.

A diagram that depicts the connections between the Koch brothers and Wisconsin politics can be seen here.

A reporter posing as David Koch called Scott Walker on Tuesday, February 22, and got him to reveal his plans and intentions. Read about it here. Click here for the video.

Here's a bit of background on public employee pay versus private.

Here's some background on how Wall Street "investors" caused the mess we are in. For an interview that gives a shorter synopsis, click here.

This analysis by John Dean explains much about our current predicament. It is from a book he wrote on the subject of authoritarianism and conservatism.

Keep talking

2011-02-05T20:43:00.000-08:00

One would almost feel sympathy for Barack Obama. He ran for president in 2008, based solely on the thunder of his speech at the "Democratic" convention four years earlier. He delivered a great speech, ergo he's qualified to be president.

Now, I suspect, he's having second thoughts. He has no answers for anything, his health care law has been declared unconstitutional, the economy is still in the doldrums, and now his entire foreign "policy" is in freefall.

Had he studied a bit of history before running for president, he would realize that since before World War II our Federal government has supported a truly evil cluster of dictators worldwide, all with the intent of being the dominant force on the planet. Obama may or may not have known this, but he has shown no signs of reversing this "policy" towards the rest of the planet. In today's Huffington Post the lead headline is "OBAMA BACKS GRADUAL TRANSITION LED BY SULEIMAN." They actually link to an article in the New York Times, which details the "plan." The Suleiman in question is Omar Suleiman, "Egypt's" newly anointed vice-president and former head of intelligence for the country. He is widely reputed to have personally conducted the torture of prisoners, most notably men who have been "rendered" in "extraordinary" manner by the "U.S." "CIA."

Thus is complete Obama's descent into a hell of his own making. He may not have started out as a backer of the worst evils on the planet, but he now is in full embrace.

The descent was rapid. He wasted no time upon assuming office to show his support for the worst human rights crimes of the Bush regime. Now he has painted himself into a corner. The whole world knows about Suleiman, but Obama and his clique of department secretaries and advisors seem to believe rolling out another eloquent speech will be enough.

It won't. The world is likely tired of him. He's all talk, and his talk has become pro-forma, predictable, and boring. Before becoming a bore he gave a speech in Cairo in 2009 that may have unwittingly inspired the unrest that led to the protests of the past week-and-a-half. That's the risk you take when you inspire people. They might just decide to act on your inspiring rhetoric.

That includes, of course, people right here in the "USA." Nothing has been done, and nothing is intended to be done, about climate change (witness the State of the Union Speech). Nothing has been done or is intended to be done about the criminality on Wall Street. Indeed, Obama's administration is well-staffed with the very people who got us into the economic mess in which we now find ourselves trapped. Obama pre-gave in on letting the Bush tax cuts for the rich expire, supposedly to be "bipartisan," but likely for ruling-class cohesion (or something similar).

What I would like to see is for Barack Obama to give more speeches. A lot more speeches. He's doing a heckuva job, to coin a phrase, inspiring the masses of the planet to overthrow tyrannical regimes.

Punxsutawney Phil predicted four more weeks of winter a few days ago. Ahh, spring. My favorite season.
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I offered another take on the "Egypt" situation in a comment to an article in Salon a few days ago. This too.

Egypt Unrest: Didn't U.S. Intelligence See It Coming? (I wrote a comment to this one, it appears on the third page)

I was going to weave these articles into the story, but it took a slightly different direction:

Tahrir Square Gunfire: Egypt Protests Continue Overnight As Mubarak Supporters Attack

The New Face of Revolution: After Tunisia and Egypt, the World

Challenging America's Pharaoh

Mubarak Defies a Humiliated America, Emulating Netanyahu

Robert Fisk: Obama Administration Has Been Gutless and Cowardly in Dealing with the Mubarak Regime

As Violence Grows In Egypt, U.S. Influence Shrinks
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Here's a song that fits.

Here's another.

The part reveals the whole

2011-01-11T19:24:00.000-08:00

Every so often a coincidence occurs that points to a larger reality. Such was the case this past Saturday, when a mentally unstable man in Arizona went on a shooting spree, killing six people and injuring fourteen others.

I started the day listening to one of my favorite radio shows, People's Pharmacy, on Wisconsin Public Radio. The show features interviews with groundbreaking researchers on health-related concerns, and also informs listeners about natural remedies (non-pharmaceutical) for common illnesses. Last Saturday's segment was a bit of a surprise, discussing the behavioral effects of various medicines, with violence to others often being the result. The drugs mentioned range from psychoactive treatments like Prozac and Adderall, to drugs for stopping smoking (Chantix), treating malaria, hepatitis, insomnia and even asthma. The guest interviewed for the show was Thomas J. Moore, senior scientist for the Institute for Safe Medication Practices, authored a study titled Prescription Drugs Associated with Reports of Violence Towards Others.

I was a bit stunned by this revelation. You are almost not an "American" if you aren't taking some kind of medicine. Drugs are our religion, along with entertainment, food, and disrespect. I had written a comment titled Voluntary stupidity about how our culture is dumbing down, in response to an article in Salon. I have been noticing in recent years that there has been a regression in ordinary interactions with people, with basic communication becoming increasingly difficult. I was hoping to explore causation, but had yet to delve into the subject.

Later in the day I heard about the shooting in Arizona, and like most people was shocked and saddened. Also like most people, I assumed the killer was the garden variety "right wing" nut case. It turns out I was half-right.

It took a couple of days to make the connection with the People's Pharmacy revelation. Salon was the first of the media to take the discussion away from "left" to "right" political rhetoric, with this offering on Sunday. It was becoming increasingly clear that the assassin, Jared Loughner, is a person with some form of serious mental impairment.

I don't contend that medicines are the cause of Mr. Loughner's mental state. No one knows the cause. I just don't believe that people spontaneously go crazy, any more than they just "get" cancer, as if there is some sort of disease lottery in which we all have tickets.

In the coming days we will be hearing about Jared Loughner's life history ad absurdum, with speculations about what may have caused his decline. Psychiatrists and psychologists will emphasize that we don't know what causes schizophrenia, but that it seems to appear spontaneously, usually when a person is in his or her teens to early twenties. Could it be that schizophrenia coincides with the introduction of a pharmaceutical in a person's life?

I know from personal experience that medicines can be very dangerous to one's health. Two years ago my (then) primary care physician pressured me into taking the drug Simvastatin (also known as Zocor), a cholesterol medication. Within five days of taking this drug I was in severe pain from head to toe, joint and muscle. It was unbelievable. I missed seven days of work, and finally forced myself to return, barely able to walk.

I read up on the symptoms in various sources, and the consensus indicated that I had Rheumatoid Arthritis. Doctors at the Rheumatology department at the Madison veterans hospital diagnosed the problem as Polymyalgia Rheumatica, a variation of Rheumatoid Arthritis.

Since the onset of this disease I have lost forty pounds (I gained ten back), and have had to eliminate several foods, chiefly tomatoes and other nightshades, yeast, sugar, gluten and soy products. I still have some soreness, and if I eat any of these foods I soon am in an elevated level of pain. I should add that the only solution standard medicine has for this condition is drugs - pain medications and Prednisone, a very dangerous steroid. The only real help I got was from a couple of naturopaths in Madison, who told me to give up the foods that were aggravating the problem, and showed me how to do various internal cleansings.

I should consider myself lucky that I didn't have the kind of drug reaction Thomas Moore wrote about.

Whatever the cause of Jared Loughner's illness, we might want to ask ourselves why it is that in the supposedly most advanced civilization in human history that we are so vulnerable to such people. It will be argued that we have inadequate treatment for the mentally ill, that we have a culture of violence, that guns are too readily available, that our hateful and violence-inciting political rhetoric gets people riled-up, that we need more stringent law enforcement, more guns, less "liberal" permissiveness, and on, and on, and on.

Some of these arguments may be true, but they all miss a greater point. We live in a society that has traded community for anonymity. In pre-industrial societies, people were integrally connected to their immediate surroundings, with social organizations that wedded them to to family, tribe, church, temple, mosque, village, and manor. A person with a mental disorder would be noticed, and dealt with in any of a number of ways, from folk remedies to confinement and/or execution. The Catholic Church's proclivity for burning at the stake comes to mind as an approach we might want to avoid.

Most interesting to me are what we tend to refer to as shamanic practices by traditional societies. These methods vary around the planet, but are still used by healers far and wide, often with astounding results.

In my understanding the source of mental illness is either spirit possession or the person being stuck in a Middle World journey. This fits perfectly with the research about drug reactions. The drugs themselves may not be the cause of what we call schizophrenia, but catalysts for the persons who take them to enter altered states of consciousness, entering shamanic states that are beyond their capacity to control and unable to exit.

It is almost comical to me when I go to medical appointments. No matter whom I meet with, and no matter how well-meaning the various practitioners, specialists, and clinicians, the one thing they have in common is an underlying arrogance about the authority of their approach to healing. Some of it is well-founded, I have to admit. Surgeons of various kinds - neuro, cardio, general, etc. - have good reason to trust in their methods. Others, in the symptom-pharmaceutical school of thought, have no conception of their short-sightedness.

We can change. Global warming, er, climate change, will make us change. Depletion of natural resources will make us change. Social breakdown will make us change. The impossibility of our infinite growth economic system will make us change. And, in concert with all these factors, seemingly random violence will make us change.

It's pretty amazing, really, that a single event like this shooting can serve as such a hologram for where we are as a people, and how its synergy with everything else about our culture points so unmistakably toward a solution. The kind of society we have now is doomed. We're being told this on a daily basis. The only question at this point is when we finally give up on the mass industrial system and all its evils, and start creating a civilization that will last.
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Here's a song for a little inspiration. Here's another.

You may not have heard this version of an old gem about medicine. This medicine song is only slightly older. If only this were true, life would be much simpler. Thanks to some of the purveyors of pills, I find myself singing this song for a bit of solace.

This song is eerily appropriate.

Here's a song for our pharmaceutical companies. This is the original version, by its author. Compared to what the drug companies are shoving down our throats (with a little help from their friends in the medical profession), this medicine looks pretty harmless.

This song ends with a bit of a warning about taking medicines.

Here's one for Gabrielle Giffords and Christina-Taylor Green. This is the Harry Belafonte version.

For an example of the power of shamanic healing, click here. Click here for a quick video of the program.

Wisconsin Public Radio's Here on Earth aired this segment on shamanic practice in December 2009. You can access it by clicking on any of these links:
For links to other segments of the program, click here.

Here's something to read about the connection between shamanic states and mental illness.

If you are interested in shamanic journeying, this video is a good introduction. Here's one with a slower beat. Different strokes for different folks. There's a lot more to shamanic journeying, but everyone is different. You may reach some pretty deep levels.

For more information about statin drugs, click here.

A listing of Salon's coverage of the Arizona shooting can be seen by clicking here.

Momentum shift

2010-12-09T20:19:00.000-08:00

Every day lately we are bombarded with news, commentary and demagoguery about Wikileaks and its director Julian Assange. "U.S." officials are outraged about the release last month of thousands of diplomatic cables. There is also much outrage about the pending release of documents related to the 2008-2009 bank bailouts and related financial fraud. Interpol, the international police organization, put Assange on its "Red list," making him a most wanted criminal because "Sweden" wants to question him about a possible crime. Politicians and pundits say he should be tried for treason, apparently unaware that treason is a crime of betrayal against the country of which one is a citizen. Assange is "Australian."

Not lost in all the clamor is that the cables reveal the hypocrisy, cynicism, underhandedness, and deviousness of government officials at all levels, especially the highest. It isn't exactly revelatory that what goes on behind the scenes is less dignified and honorable than the public face of our elected officials, cabinet secretaries, diplomats and negotiators. The depth of the divide, though, is startling to most.

It didn't surprise me. It is no accident that over my entire life the international actions of the country of which I am a citizen have consistently been one of support for dictatorship, assassination, subversion, invasion, occupation, overthrow of governments, embargo, "sanction," and support for military oppression. For a synopsis of what is going on domestically, click here.

What I do find significant is not Wikileaks itself, but how the embarrassing information came its way. Wikileaks came to prominence earlier in the year for releasing a video showing "American" soldiers in "Iraq" wantonly killing innocent civilians, including children. An Army private first class, Bradley Manning, has been charged with "unauthorized disclosure of classified information." Not exactly treason, but he could be in jail for a long time.

How, I wonder, did the massive amount of diplomatic cables get to Wikileaks? Conventional wisdom has it that Bradley Manning or someone like him loaded them all on a USB drive. Some believe that Assange and his partners "hacked" the information from government computers. No one really knows. Hence, the international warrant for the arrest of Julian Assange. Get him down to "Guantanamo" where we can waterboard the truth out of him, it seems.

Maybe it is hacking, but I like to think that the document dump is a result of the honor and integrity of employees of government agencies, horrified at the criminality and complete lack of ethical standards at the highest levels of our government. The same may be happening in the banking system. So far the CEOs and senior managers of our nation's largest financial institutions have gotten off scot-free, and have reaped huge bonuses in the millions for their misdeeds. That has to rankle lower-level employees who actually care about other people, to say nothing of their own personal moraliity.

This is something hopeful. If governments and large corporations are just big machines that swallow people up like the "Borg" in Star Trek: The Next Generation, we are doomed. If, however, people are not automatons, but living, breathing, feeling conscious beings with a sense of right and wrong, then there is not just hope, but possibility. Wikileaks has opened a can of worms, so to speak, or opened the flodgates for disgruntled and principled people worldwide to risk everything for the planet an human civilization. This could be the momentum shift we've been waiting for.
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Here's an example of a video released of "NATO" military killing civilians in "Afghanistan." Here's another.

Here's a list of the top campaign contributors to Barack Obama in 2008.

For a little more about Barack Obama, man of the people, click here.

Here's a video to watch.

Brokeback barracks

2010-11-17T09:15:00.000-08:00

A story aired on NPR last Thursday, Veterans Day, about how a Pentagon survey indicates that the impact of rescinding the "Don't ask, don't tell" policy on homosexuals in the military would be minimal. They referred to a report in the Washington Post about the study that appeared the same day.

The various admirals and generals in the Joint Chiefs of Staff are compliant with the change, except for one: James Amos, the Commandant of the Marine Corps. He believes having "gays" serve in the Marines would be harmful. The New York Times quotes him thusly:

In comments to reporters in California this weekend, General Amos said that ending the ban in the middle of two wars would involve “risk” for Marines, who, unlike other service members who generally have private quarters, share rooms to promote unity. “There is nothing more intimate than young men and young women — and when you talk of infantry, we’re talking our young men — laying out, sleeping alongside of one another and sharing death, fear and loss of brothers,” said General Amos, 63. “I don’t know what the effect of that will be on cohesion. I mean, that’s what we’re looking at. It’s unit cohesion, it’s combat effectiveness.”

There may be another concern in the Marine Corps. I posted a comment about that possible concern to the NPR story, which was removed by their censors for violating their discussion standards. But, as Bob Marley so wisely put it, when one door is closed, another door will open. I can post it here:

I think I can shed a little light on why the Marine Corps commandant is uniquely opposed to homosexuals serving in the military. In the fall of 1968 I began my Army AIT at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, where I studied the manly art of projector repair. Among my ten or twelve classmates were two Marines, one a corporal, and the other a staff sergeant.

The sergeant was a "lifer," a pretty dumb guy, and we didn't have much to do with him. The corporal was a one-termer, finishing his four year commitment. He didn't have much to do with the staff sergeant either, and hung out with the rest of the class during breaks.

One day the corporal told us a story about his time in Vietnam, when a member of his platoon was discovered to be homosexual. He was forced to perform a well-known act on his knees for the entire platoon, which lined up for the fun. I asked him if he took part in the festivities, and he said yes, and something like, "Why not? It was a chance to get my d*#k s&%@&d."

The rest of us were pretty shocked and disgusted by this, and glad that we weren't Marines.

There have always been "gay" soldiers. Here's an example, from my basic training yearbook.

This is a completely ignored aspect to the "issue" of "gays" in the military. War is a crime against humanity. Men behave in depraved, horrific ways during war. Their lives are being threatened and taken on a regular and intense manner. The presence of homosexuals in their units would be the least among their concerns.

The real danger is to the homosexuals themselves. If found out, they could end up like the Marine in Vietnam, or worse. The idea of a Marine Corps commandant worrying about the comfort of his troops is pretty ludicrous. He's worried about his Marines turning into homosexuals.

Military training, especially in the Marines, is pretty close to being a big homosexual dance. In my Army basic training our drill sergeants would repeatedly yell things like "I want to see every swingin' dick outside of that barracks in two minutes," and calling people "dickhead," "dick," and "pussy." Why, I wondered, would a drill sergeant want to see every swingin' dick? What if they weren't swingin'? Would the drill sergeants still want to see them? I didn't bother to ask.

When our training company lined up for meals outside the "mess hall," we were standing at a variation of parade rest, and our belt buckles had to be touching the man in front of us. In other words, your stomach would be pressed against the rear end of the man in front of you. It was totally weird.

In the Marines, it is more extreme, and the esprit de corps and proximity to other troops is more intense. They also have the reputation of being "cannon fodder," of taking the worst and most dangerous combat challenges, and dying at higher rates than the other services.

Adding homosexuals to that mix might turn them all into "gays." Or at least that is what is feared, I suspect. What we read and hear from the news media about any issue tends to be on a superficial level, confining the discussion to concerns that disguise what is really at issue. Politicians and pundits complain that soldiers in "foxholes" would feel uncomfortable if they knew the other person in the foxhole was "gay."

Soldiers don't fight in "foxholes" anymore. In "Vietnam" the fighting was done on patrols, "search and destroy" missions, and defending "firebases" against attack. And, of course, no fighting at all, but bombing civilian targets in "North Vietnam." In "Iraq" and "Afghanistan" the fighting is done largely while on patrols. The "predator drones," of course, involve no fighting. "Gays" can locate remote targets as well as "straights."

I heard about one little incident, from one of the two Marines I came in cotact with in my entire three years in the Army. It is likely that there were far more incidents like this in the time our military was in "Vietnam," to say nothing about other wars, and in peacetime as well.

I have a simple solution to that problem: abolish the Marine Corps. If they can't be trusted to accept all legal citizens, then they are by definition un-American. They are a redundant force anyway, performing a task that is done by the Army, and at a far lower level of personal degradation and cult identity.

Our economy is collapsing. We don't have the luxury of going around the planet invading countries willy-nilly. We can't afford our bloated Defense budget. We don't need even half the amount of men and women in uniform we have now. Rather than reduce the number of service members by attrition or piecemeal, eliminating the Marines would accomplish the task in one quick gesture. They can live on in history.
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Update, December 3, 2010: This didn't fit into the story, but another thing the Marines at Fort Monmouth told me about were the "submariner" bars in San Diego - taverns frequented by Navy submarine crews, whom they said were all "queer." They described the bars as being for "gays" only, and that even Marines didn't dare enter them.

In a curious coincidence of sorts, a few months later when I graduated from projector repair school I was sent to "Germany." Along with other soldiers on the flight to "Germany" was a submarine crew. They didn't do anything that appeared to be "gay" behavior, but the togetherness they exhibited was remarkable. They were very close-knit, and I remember them being cheerful, and often referred to the "XO" - the executive officer - in a friendly and admiring manner, something of an equal.

I actually was a bit envious of their esprit de corps, but remembered what the Marines told me. Could it be that the nuclear submarines that protect our shores and spend six months at a time under the Polar ice caps are manned by homosexuals? What would Fred Phelps think of this? Or John McCain, Navy veteran and anti-"gay" activist?

I thought I invented the term "Brokeback Barracks," but it has been used before, most amusingly here.

The day after I submitted this post the Washington Times published an op-ed titled Obama's Brokeback barracks. I responed thusy, under a new alias, New User 3C467:

It's a bit curious that the day after I submitted a post to my blog, While we still have time, with the title "Brokeback Barracks," that the same title would appear at the Washington Times. Maybe it's one of those meaningful coincidences Carl Gustav Jung wrote about. Could there be a synchronicity of ideas here? Maybe if we examined our military training a little closer, we might see that the barracks of the various services are a tad more "brokeback" than we'd care to admit.

More curious pictures of military deserter George W. Bush can be seen here.

Here's a brief video update on the proposed extension of the Bush tax cuts for the rich.

This Michael Franti song doesn't say it all, but it says enough.

Hyping the apocalypse

2010-11-03T13:38:00.000-07:00

When I arrived at work on Sunday I walked past a cacophony of shouting and laughter emanating from the big screen TV in the break room. It was the NFL pregame show, and I was far enough away that all I could hear was hyped-up excitement from the usual panel of hyped-up excited football commentators.

I don't watch pro football. To me it is boring, brutal, and an opiate of the masses, replacing religion for millions of people. I grew up loving the game, and one of my father's best friends played center for the Chicago Bears. He was a colorful character, played college ball at Notre Dame, and in mythical "Irish" Catholic fashion, had a family of nine children. Their back yard had no grass.
My dad played quarterback for legendary Chicago high school power Mount Carmel. My own football career was a tad less exalted, but I played.

After Gale Sayers and Dick Butkus professional football became redundant and uninteresting, and it looked to me that it had to become increasingly violent and hystericized (a new word I just invented).

Mentioning pro football hype seems itself to be boring and redundant, but it makes for a perfect metaphor for our times. The NFL is a business, and now generates billions of dollars in revenue. Fan interest is critical, and hype is necessary to keep them at a high level of excitement about the game.

The same can be said for TV in general, and for our pop culture, dominated as it is by our various forms of electronic media.

And, sad to say, for our economic system. I could take any industry as an example. The pharmaceutical industry will do. It's not enough to generate new medicines to cure or mitigate disease. People have to be "pitched," to be made excited about the promise of new drugs. Men are now plagued with "erectile dysfunction," in what used to be a normal part of aging. Women are offered new "cures" for obesity. Statin drugs, of which I have some serious negative experience, are promoted as necessary treatments for cholesterol.

It goes on and on. In order to stay in business the pharmaceutical companies have to generate ever greater revenues. Many, if not most, of the drugs they sell have serious side effects, which can themselves cause great harm. That doesn't slow them down a bit. The need for growth requires a multi-faceted approach that includes paying elected officials for legislation they propose (campaign donations), paying doctors with golf vacations, money, free samples, restaurant meals, etc., and funding compliant university research.

And multimedia advertising, especially on television, hyping it with a combination of fear-mongering and great promise. If you have erectile dysfunction you aren't quite a man. In a mixed media of hype, some of the ads show groups of men watching pro football, implying the man watching pro football who has "ED" is faking it, not a real man.

There is no hype for eating a good diet, getting plenty of exercise, meditating and doing other practices like hatha yoga, tai chi, qigong, herbs, dietary supplements, and living a good life. Or avoiding motorcycles, which make men impotent, in one of the more amusing ironies of modern times.

Another product that is hyped more than any other is politics. Thanks to the emergence of the blowhard punditocracy, we now have a public forum of ideas that focuses on character assassination, fear-mongering, fake issues like the "ground zero mosque," lying, and, of course, hype.

Our economy is collapsing. We have an infinite growth economic system on a finite planet. Our system of reward and taxation is biased toward the already wealthy. Our productive system is destroying the ecosystem. Our political system is, in effect, a mafia, where the various actors are either controlled by payoffs from bankers and corporations, or appointed by those who are.

We have just had a shameful election, where an estimated four billion dollars was spent by the various candidates for office, or by their proxies. With that amount of money spent, it is safe to say that the election was bought, and bought by the rich. It is also safe to say that because the election was bought by the rich, the problems of our economy will not be solved, that things will get worse, and that they will get worse faster than before.

At some point reality will set in drastically. The weather disturbances we have been experiencing will get worse. The depletion and pollution of the oceans will get worse. The extinction of species will get worse. Unemployment will get worse. Our government will continue its aggressive interventions in other countries, apparently with "Iran" and "Yemen" being the next targets.

The synergy of these factors spells collapse. Sooner than we would believe could happen. I have long seen this coming. We don't have a forum of ideas that includes facing reality, so our paid-for intelligentsia will continue talking about side issues, non-issues and fake issues. I wonder what the NFL pregame shows will be like when it all comes down. One thing can be said for sure: Erectile dysfunction isn't going to matter much, except as a metaphor.
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I received a copy of True Enough in the mail yesterday, a "premium" for renewing my subscription to Salon. It is subtitled "Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society." It's a variation of the theme of this post.

Here's a tune for the times.

Click here for some Gale Sayers highlights. Here's some footage of Dick Butkus. Though he single-handedly raised the level of brutality in pro football, he was a pure athlete. I saw him play in his senior year a the University of Illinois when they played Minnesota. Butkus played center on offense as well as middle linebacker on defense. He opened holes three players wide. It was pretty unbelievable. Here's a pretty good highlights video of both players.

Wikipedia needs money:

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Update, January 30, 2010: Sunday, Jan 30, 2011 15:03 ET
The NFL: An indictment of America goes into greater depth about our national obsession with football.

Heretical thoughts

2010-10-25T23:59:00.000-07:00

Some of my greatest enjoyment in writing is when I respond to some item in the news, or some online appeal. Today I received an appeal from the long distance phone company Credo to petition Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas to apologize to his former aide Anita Hill. Hill testified against Thomas in his confirmation hearing, accusing him of crude sexual harassment and intimidation. (You can see a video of her testimony here) Thomas played victim, accusing the "Democrats" of a "high-tech lynching."

It worked. He succeeded in "playing the race card," and avoided the humiliation of being rejected for the nation's highest court. Anita Hill fell into obscurity, her reputation tarnished. As even the most casual observers know, Thomas's wife Virginia left a message on Hill's voicemail at Brandeis University, where she teaches, on October 16, asking Hill to apologize for hurting her husband.

Hill not only did not apologize, but turned the message over to campus police. She said she has nothing to apologize for, because her testimony was truthful.

The plot thickened later last week when a former girlfriend of Thomas, Lilian McEwen, said publicly that Thomas was obsessed with pornography.

I didn't expect to make any comment about the situation, the fortunes of a "right wing" Supreme Court justice not ranking high on my list of priorities. But when the invitation came to send the petition, I couldn't refuse. Along with signing the petition, you get to add a paragraph of your own, which I did:

If ever there were a bogus Supreme Court justice, it is you. Because you perjured yourself in your testimony before the Senate, you are morally and ethically unfit to sit on the nation's highest court. Well beyond Anita Hill, you should resign, and apologize to the American people. You should also apologize for the many dishonest and nasty decisions you have made. It would be your only genuine public service in a lifetime of disservice.

That was fun. Once I get in gear for such antics, it's hard to resist another. Fortuitously, another weird item appeared in the news. Today it was revealed that after all these years of kidnapping, torture, incommunicado, secrecy and delay, our Keystone Kops military tribunals at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba have finally produced a conviction. It was a guilty plea by Omar Khadr, who was accused of throwing a grenade at a "U.S." soldier in "Afghanistan" when he was fifteen years old.

It is not clear that Khadr is actually guilty of anything, or what he pleaded guilty to, but the idea of throwing a grenade in a war or pseudo-war situation constituting a war crime is a bit of a stretch. Especially when you consider that the war may have been contrived for other reasons by the Bush criminal regime, just like they concocted evidence to justify invading "Iraq."

I responded to the National Public Radio story about the guilty plea thusly:

One would think that there would be embarrassment over this conviction, but there isn't. This indicates how far we have fallen in our feeble attempts at empire. For our military "tribunal," they needed a conviction so badly that they would be proud of this one, a fifteen year old, tortured, charged with a "war crime," and held incommunicado for years in our impunicious semi-secret prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba - on the land of another sovereign country.

What this reveals is the way individuals subsume their ethics, morality, sense of decency, judgement and individuality to their place in the machinery of mass civilization (or lack of same). Personal scruples or independence of thought and action are constricted in favor of conformity, career, and cheap thrills.

I wonder if the various prosecutorial players in this drama think they have scored a major victory over "terrorism." I suspect they do. That's how far the subsuming of self can go. Of course, it may just be a pretend way of saving face. For all the millions (or more) that have been spent on Guantanamo they had better get at least one conviction. Way to go, boys!! We have taught a lesson to the fifteen year olds of the world!! Now, for the sixteen year olds.
Mon Oct 25 2010 21:27:46 GMT-0500 (Central Daylight Time)
Recommend (5)

I've been on kind of a roll the past couple of days. Again, as anyone paying any attention at all knows, NPR fired "news analyst" Juan Williams last week over remarks he made on "right wing" Fox News know-it-all Bill O'Reilly's show. Williams said he gets nervous and worried in airports when he sees people dressed in "Muslim garb." This was too good to pass up, and I wrote a comment to a CNN story about the firing:

It was really sporting of Juan Williams to acknowledge that there are good Muslims. He should have added that some of his best friends are Muslims. One thing left out of this deep analysis is the question of what constitutes "Muslim garb." Maybe it's a suit, bow tie, and closely cropped hair. Or the casual clothes of the "911" attackers. Or the uniform of any of our various college and professional sports teams. Or dressed like Bill O'Reilly, or Juan Williams.

There's not much to this story. Juan Williams is a hack journalist, but smart enough to finagle a salary out of Fox worth several millions. Pretty nice work. He made Roger Ailes of Fox look pretty dumb.

I don't think Juan Williams is so much a bigot as someone who fashions what he says to fit the venue. He fits right in at Fox, but it likely will not give them much, if any, of a ratings boost.

As for NPR, the firing was bungled. It's more a sign of the times than anything "liberal." Managers tend to be cowards, no matter what business. Williams should have been yanked long ago, but no one had the intestinal fortitude to confront him. We're all in the same boat.

In what was likely my most pertinent and valuable comment I responded to an interview on Wisconsin Public Radio this morning with these remarks:

It is an ongoing weakness of this segment that it is confined to the varying fortunes of the two leading political parties, as if there were some intrinsic meaning in the who's up - who's downness of the "Democrats" or the "Republicans."

At some point you might want to ask if these parties are bad for the country, and bad for the planet. They exist for themselves, and the American people are mere props in their theater of the absurd. For example, the planet is heating up to a degree that our survival as a species is in jeopardy. Neither of these parties have done anything to address this very serious problem.

Our economic system will collapse if it doesn't grow as what is known as a secular trend, and it therefore must grow forever. Planet Earth will not support infinite growth of output. The political parties are impotent in dealing with this reality.

Continuous growth of population will cause increasing levels of starvation, disease, poverty and depletion of resources. Our only solutions to this are war, building prisons, and making a lot of noise about "illegal" immigrants. These nonsolutions are what the political parties have to offer.

In other words, the political parties, entities unto themselves, are a detriment to the planet and the people who live on it. Those who promote this entitiy unto themselvesness do so for spurious reasons, having to do with their own entity unto themselvesness - ego, career, mutuality of conventional wisdom, pretend consciousness, and the like.

NPR's midday program Talk of the Nation had a forum last week on the role of teachers in education reform. I managed to provide a bit of heresy to the mix:

John Hamilton (HappyJack) wrote:

I was a plumber for years, and one of my favorite things was fixing toilets. The mechanics of how they work borders on genius. I had a simple approach, which was to ask three questions: what does it do when it is working properly, what is it doing now, and what can I do to return it to its normal level of functioning?

One thing we might want to ask is if we ever had a high functioning school system, what is different now, and what could be done to return to that high functioning level.

I also was a teacher for a number of years, mostly as a substitute, but also in a community college. What I found were the biggest problems were influences outside the classroom. Chief among them was the home situation - number of parents, family income, and quality of parenting. Another factor is the synergy created by the cultural milieu of the students. That is, for example, if you have a school, or school district where the students are predominantly from single-parent households with low income and poor parenting, then the individual student will be reinforced for failure by his or her peers.

It can truly be said that our political, business (corporate & banking), and cultural infrastructure has no intention of changing this dynamic.
Tuesday, October 19, 2010 4:17:46 PM
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Hardly anyone reads these comments, but they get read, and I can repost them here. If I can think differently, other people can too. All it takes is seeing an example. That's what started me in an independent direction. My father was the same way, and I grew up witnessing his various musings of a heretical nature. He also was a heretic in his profession, surgery, refusing to participate in fee splitting, much to his financial detriment.

I sharpened my heretical sword in Catholic schools, which were abundant with opportunities. I became a class clown, ala George Carlin, all the way through high school. When I continued my studies at a Catholic college I became more critical, but less comedic.

My greatest writing influences are Bob Dylan and former Chicago Tribune and Daily News columnist Mike Royko. Both were inspiring in their irreverence, sharpness of mind, and searing satire.

There are many others, and not necessarily writers. I still get inspired almost every day. When I see a baby I am inspired to do what I can to make sure there is an ecosystem for it to have a decent life on this planet. I said hello to a homeless guy the other day, who was sitting in front of the post office, trying to hide his bags of possessions. He looked pretty new to the predicament, an intelligent-looking, self respecting "Hispanic" man. I'd like to see a different system in this country, where people don't find themselves in this situation through no fault of their own, and on such a mass scale.

Heresy is my greatest contribution, so I hope to keep doing it as long as there are conventional truths to be debunked.
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Update: One of the great heretics of modern times, Julian Assange, was interviewed on Democracy Now. Here's a description of how his heresy is being received by the Pentagon and "U.S." news media. Foreign media, such as the Guardian, don't have the conformity and propaganda needs that media here do.
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Here's a good background song for thinking heretical thoughts. This too. And this. And, of course, this, one of my theme songs.

Here's a clip of one of the great heretics of all time.

Transformation

2010-10-12T00:38:00.000-07:00

Every so often I have an experience that renews my zest for life and can even be transformative. We all get into ruts - work, driving to and from work, preparing meals, doing dishes and other housework tasks, mild entertainment like TV or radio, sleep, and for me some Web surfing and writing.

I've been pretty lucky this year getting out of ruts at the Capitol Theater in Madison, going to events there that were either free or so well worth the price that the expense was trivial. When the Dalai Lama appeared there in May I was the last person to get in without a ticket (Here's a story about the appearance. Here's another). I was in the fourteenth row, dead center. NPR news anchor Michele Norris spoke there on September 29, and again I was among the last people to get in before it was full.

Surprisingly, the best event there was this past Saturday, when I went to a concert by rock/reggae/hip-hop artist Michael Franti and his band Spearhead. The rock station I listen to, WMMM, gave his song Say Hey (I love you) a lot of play, and I wanted to see him do it live.

The concert started off at a pretty energetic level, but I was bored. I was thinking I was getting too old for this kind of thing, and didn't feel like being there. Then it kicked into high gear. The band was pretty animated, with members going out into the audience to play, and Franti disappearing, then reappearing in the balcony. He invited a couple of pretty heavy women onto the stage at one point to dance along with him as he sang. It was pretty amazing. I captured most of it with my little digital camera turned to video, but so far it is unplayable. It was the first time I made a video of anything, and I learned one little lesson: Stop between songs, or you get a huge file that is near-impossible to play back. (Any tips on how to resolve this are welcome).

At one point Michael Franti started a song with a few lines from the Grateful Dead's Casey Jones. Lest anyone think it is a pro-drug song, it's just metaphor, like all great songs. It was a strange coincidence for me, because I had been working on the song to do in my next attempt at Gomeroke.

During another song I was thinking how much his voice sounds like reggae legend Peter Tosh. A few tunes later he invited the opening act, Tamarama, to come out and help him with the song Tosh dueted with Mick Jagger, Walk & Don't Look Back. (Here's a video of a previous performance.)

Franti introduced a new song he has been working on, a testament to the varieties of love experienced by people. He talked about being part Irish, German, French, African-American, and Seminole. He also spoke about being given up for adoption, and how he enjoyed coming to Wisconsin because it is where his adoptive parents are from.

He performed his summertime hit, The Sound of Sunshine, to great audience delight.

He didn't take a break, and when it finally came time for the concert to end, I began to wonder if he was going to do Say Hey. Then I reverted to my stock answer about concerts. You pay your money down and take what you get. It's all good, so stay in the present, not second-guessing about how you want it to be.

His second encore song, the finale, was Say Hey (I love you). It was a slow lead-in, and the energy was building up like a thunder cloud. As he started going into the song he invited all children six years old and under onto the stage. That was pretty neat, I thought, as the stage filled up with little kids.

Then he called for everyone over sixty to come onstage. I thought, urk, I don't want to do this, but it would have been more embarrassing not to go up, so up I went, and soon was dancing on stage with a bunch of kids, some people my age, and Michael Franti and his band.

It was surreal. Michael Franti is six foot-six, and towered over everyone else on stage. He was really gracious, and at one point turned around and asked my how old I am. I told him sixty-five, which he repeated, and he then asked a couple of other people. One person was sixty-six, so I wasn't the oldest.

His bass player scooted in front of me, and was also very gracious. I had to put Kleenex in my ears, it was so loud. Everyone in the house was singing and dancing along with the music, and the energy in the building was incredible.

Then it was over. His piano player came over to me to thank me for coming up on stage. I was pretty stunned, and told him this was better than a Grateful Dead show. They are from San Francisco, and he was thankful. A woman hugged me on the way out.

"Wicked" was getting out at the main theater of the Overture Center at the same time the concert ended, so there was a contrast between the high-brow and low-brow audiences. I think we got the better of the deal.

I feel like I'm a different person. Concerts tend to be uplifting for me, as I wrote about in Altered States a few years ago. This was on a different level, taking me out of myself, out of my safety zone more than before. Hmm. I've gone out of my safety zone my whole life, but this was different. I've done a lot of risky things, some that almost cost me my life, but dancing and singing on stage in front of a crowd of people is beyond anything I ever would have attempted on my own.

We are fortunate to have these transformative experiences. I'm still reeling from the concert (and my ears are still ringing), and looking to move forward with what I learned from this. I took a class many years ago with the great Dick Olney called "Thinking in other categories." This was truly in a different category. Go see Michael Franti if you get a chance. You might get called on stage.
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To view the video Michael Franti made after the show, click here.

This is one of the songs perfromed at the concert.

He did this song too. It's best with headphones. Two lead guitars! Here's another version. Then there's this acoustic version.

Here's an acoustic version of Say hey (I love you).

This video shows Michael Franti doing Walk and Don't Look Back, medleying into Casey Jones in a concert in 2009. Here's a version with "Counting Crows."

He did Say Hey last year in Santa Fe with kids on stage. See it here.

Here's a YouTube list of other Michael Franti songs.

For the words to Say Hey (I love you) click here. These guitar chords work. It seems to hint at capoing up one fret.

Here's a great live version of The Sound of Sunshine. And this, at the same concert, the 2010 Bonnaroo Music & Arts Festival in Tennessee. Here's an NPR story about Michael Franti at the Bonnaroo Festival, including the audio of the entire performance.

This is my favorite Peter Tosh song. In 1980 I lived in a house with the minions of Greenpeace Great Lakes in Ann Arbor. One of them had Peter Tosh's album "Mystic Man," and it played for many hours, kind of theme music for the group as they planned their latest shenanigans. They pulled a lot of stunts, going to Toronto to "jump the fence" at a nuclear plant, climbing a cooling tower at a huge coal plant in Hammond, Indiana (if I remember right), and something or other at a nuclear plant in legendary Rocky Flats, Colorado. Here's my second favorite Peter Tosh song.

This site links to a lot of transcripts of Dick Olney's workshops.

R.I.P. Solomon Burke. I wrote a little something about him here. For a more primordial version, click here.

Obama comes to Madison

2010-09-29T14:36:00.000-07:00

President Obama spoke at the University of Wisconsin in Madison yesterday, hoping to rally the "Democratic" base. He succeeded. It is supposed to be a down year for "Democrats," but an estimated 26,000 showed up for his speech at the Library Mall at the University of Wisconsin. I was sort of one of them. I didn't have the enthusiasm to arrive early, and actually didn't have the unthusiasm to go there at all, but figured that if I write a blog and the president comes to town, I should go. Also, Ben Harper was scheduled to sing a few songs.

By the time I got there, about 4:00 p.m., the line to get in was about 3/4 of a mile long. I kept walking and walking, expecting to find the end of the line. It just kept going and going. After I finally reached the end of the line, I waited a few minutes, not expecting to get into the event. I started to leave, and a campus policeman showed up and told the crowd the event was filled to capacity. He said they could hear Obama's speech at the legendary Bascom Hall. I didn't find that prospect appealing, and starting heading for home. I could watch the speech on TV in the relaxing environs of my humble abode.

It was worth the effort. I got to tour the campus more intimately than I had before, and enjoyed the panorama of buildings that had sprung up over the years. It was interesting to see how a crowd brings out the best and worst in people. The people in line were pretty subdued and polite, but the various ushers I came across were in full ego-glory, exalting in their power to direct the crowd.

The most touching scene was the father trying to comfort his daughter when he told her she wouldn't be able to see the president. This was better than seeing Obama. If I had a real photojournalist's eye I would have snapped a shot sooner, when the child was in full crying mode (I know that in the picture it looks like a boy, but it was a girl).

As for Obama's speech, it was pretty standard fare, feisty, eloquent, charismatic. I did watch it on TV at home, and was almost persuaded. His attack on the "Republicans" rang true, but his heroic stance of standing up to them didn't exactly jibe with real experience. He's still talking about the "blue" states and the "red" states, and still tries to talk fake-folksy, saying (sayin') things like workin' people, marchin' for civil rights, and fightin' for you. He also has the annoying habit of stretching out words ala Martin Luther King. Worst of all, he trotted out his tired metaphor of trying to meld the "red" states and "blue" states into the "United States of America." We may not get dead tired of him by 2012, but we will certainly have had enough of him by 2016.

He has continued Bush criminal regime practices of secrecy, domestic spying, "Guantanamo," the endless military incursion in "Afghanistan," the lingering involvement in "Iraq," and the worst elements of the "Patriot Act." In addition, he squandered golden opportunities to reform our healthcare and financial systems, leaving us with weak half reforms. He has stacked his economic team with Wall Street and fellow-traveler hacks. He retains a national security apparatus that is as committed to military adventurism as his predecessor.

Still, I'm glad he came. What I saw in the faces of the people in line was encouraging. It wasn't the hateful and crazed look of recent "Tea Party" rallies. People may have misplaced faith in Obama, but they at least are motivated in the right direction. We all want a world we can live in, and for our civilization to have a future. As long as people still have this motivation, there is hope for a better way to be on this planet.
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You can view a few scenes of the event by clicking here.

To see a video of Obama's speech, click here.

Ben Harper performed this song at the rally.

Extraordinary popular delusions

2010-08-16T14:17:00.000-07:00

One of the programs on Wisconsin Public Radio's Ideas Network had a discussion today about the mosque situation in New York City. The guest was a Muslim lawyer from Milwaukee, and the conversation was predictable: a litany of complaints about bigotry, Constitutional freedoms, Obama's vacillation and weakness, and paranoia about the "right wing."

I had to answer, and did:

To: talk@wpr.org
From: me
Date: August 16, 2008
Subject: Shed some light

This is a perfect example of how weak is our ability to perceive and communicate about our common concerns. Rather than hand-wringing and looking at the mosque "issue" in terms of political divisions and posturing, it can be easily understood from a psychological approach. As far back as 1841, Scottish author Charles Mackay was able to observe mass hysteria and group or mob mentality in his humorous and insightful book Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.

Masses of people are manipulable. They can be stirred to bigotry, xenophobia, fanaticism and violence by slick propagandists and clever salespersons. The more mass the civilization, the more vulnerable it is to hysteria. Witness the runup to the "Iraq" war.

What makes these manipulations more powerful and threatening is weak and compromised leadership in the ruling bodies that are the real target. We have a president who depends on advisers to tell him what he thinks. He will take a stand when backed into it, but will quickly backtrack, following "advice" to "game" the "issue."

"Democrats" in general are fair game for demagogues because they don't really stand for anything. They are as bought and paid for by Wall Street bankers and corporations as the "Republicans," and will sell out on such things as health care and financial "reform" in Pavlovian manner. If they really had beliefs and standards, they would possess a grounding in principle that would make standing up to bullies easy.

Unfortunately, this radio conversation sheds no light, stuck in what amounts to a complaint, otherise known as whining.

John Hamilton
Madison
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Sometimes my stuff gets read on the air, but this didn't. It may have been too late in the show. It matters little. The time is not quite ripe for getting beyond the simplistic. The mosque "issue" is totally contrived and fake, a ruse to get the rabble roused. It has been generated purely to drum up hatred and mob mentality, an age-old tactic to generate mass hysteria, and its resultant deriviatives - money and power. Obama and the "Democrats" are again showing themselves to be impotent, having no guiding principles other than their own money and power.
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On another note, Siddha Yoga is in the news again. It is the name of the spiritual path I once followed, and the new Julia Roberts movie "Eat, Pray, Love" has a scene or two about the lead character's involvement with the SYDA organization. Salon had an article ("piece") over the weekend covering the dark side of Siddha Yoga, and I again had to respond:

Stages of disciplehood

I was involved with the SYDA organization from 1976 to 1985, living in ashrams in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Ganeshpuri, India, South Fallsburg, New York, Houston and Honolulu. I was on the SYDA staff as a plumber and electrician at the Catskills ashram for two years.

It was mostly a positive experience for me, because I protected my independence. I was not part of the inner circle of Swami Müktananda, the guru for most of the time of my involvement. I didn't seek power or position, trusting the teaching that what matters is one's connection with one's inner Self (the Atman).

The scandals were the final straw that drove me away from the organization, but I never had much tolerance for the palace intrigue, the jockeying for power, and the crude and petty abuses of power that went on constantly at all levels of the organization.

The guru may have been deeply flawed, but the followers weren't so great either. Westerners in general tended to get stuck in the periphery, but the worst by far were Americans.

It's comical, looking back on it, how immature and narcissistic my fellow devotees were, and I have found this to be the case whenever I get involved with any meditation group, regardless of tradition.

The pattern is consistent: presumption of knowledge and spiritual power, mini-guruhood, "only through me," and what I call "Getting to know you, getting to know all about you." This last syndrome is followed by "You're this type of person, and here's what you should do." Is it any wonder that the next stage is your pants being removed?

—HappyJack
Read HappyJack's other letters
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It's a curious juxtaposition, this timely intersect of mass hysteria and the nature of cults. Both situations involve manipulation, psychological control, group fanaticism, and fake leaders. Maybe one of these days we'll learn from these errors. Maybe we'll even learn before it's too late. We'll find out soon enough. It's almost too late.
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And, in the road goes on forever and the party never ends category, I seem to be persona non grata in the ex-Siddha Yoga Yahoo group. I sent this yesterday, but it came back "undeliverable":

Greetings former Siddha Yogis. Or is it yogins? If times aren't strange enough for you, you might want to check out the latest in the long line of Indian gurus to generate masses of followers, "Sri Sri Ravi Shankar." Not to be confused with Ravi Shankar, or Sri Ravi Shankar, of which there are no doubt many.

I actually met the guy in April, after attending his public, hmm, darshan, or talk, in Milwaukee. I was thankful for the Muktananda experience. This guy pales in comparison, so obvious, so shallow. They don't even do the Indian music in a competent way.

He's bigger than SYDA, though they don't seem to have any ashrams around the world. He teaches a variation of pranayama exercises, and if you take his "Art of Living" course you have to sign a nondisclosure agreement. He likely takes in vastly more money than Siddha Yoga ever dreamed of. Curiously, he has a large Indian following.

I learned about him through the yoga teacher I had at the Madison VA, who emceed the Milwaukee event. I went there on a bus that was mostly Indian students at the University of Wisconsin . It was fun, and he certainly has an energy, but is a piker compared to the energy field around Muktananda. He was a longtime follower or devotee of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, of Beatles and Mia Farrow repute (Beach Boys too).

You can find out all you need to know about Sri Sri by entering Sri Sri in Google. He was interviewed by the BBC last week. One of the comical things about the event in Milwaukee is that a representative of the Mayor, Tom Barrett, presented the guru with the key to the city. This isn't normally done, but the person doing the introduction said that Sri Sri has been given the keys to about 200 cities around the world. Could this be a result of some kind of hustle? Naahh! A fake guru? Don't be cynical.
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A mini version of Sri Sri's Art of Living Course is offered through the Madison VA hospital. You have to sign the nondisclosure agreement if you want the secret "knowledge."

Sri Sri Ravi Shankar will likely have a short fifteen minutes of fame. You can tell a lot about a person by the look in his eye and in his body English. His movements are a little Nixon-like - deliberate and self-conscious. His eyes are kind of vacant, making him look a bit simple-minded.

Among the things Sri Sri said in his Milwaukee appearance was that there is no such thing as global warming. This was said to swooning responses from the audience. This is a time-honored technique. "Put your faith in me, dear ones. All is well in the world, as long as you believe what I tell you without question." It is a test of faith, and also a way of solidifying conformity.
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It would be short-sighted to leave "Catholicism" out of the mix. I didn't:

Can you be Catholic and disagree with the Vatican?

I grew up "Catholic," and graduated from a "Catholic" college. Then I left it for good. It's an institution created by men, is a very skewed form of "Christianity," and has no more claim as the one true religion than the Universal Life Church.

Somehow the authoritarian hierarchy of "The Church" believes that elaborate, highly sylized ritual approximates truth, as do highly convoluted arguments, doctrines, theses, and pronouncements.

It was surreal listening to "Father" Bourgeois talking about how "God" chose "Mary" to be the mother of his son, and blah, blah, blah on conventional wisdom about "Jesus" (Yeshua) and other assumed realities.

It's actually the same kind of "magical thinking" that established "authorities" call the beliefs of other religions and "cults." Handed down assumed wisdom is still pretend wisdom, carrying the same weight as a childhood tea party with imagined guests and empty cups.

In this entire context, is the "ordination" of women such a big deal? Begging acceptance in a men's club of pretenders seems to me a huge waste of talent, energy, and aspiration to the highest. The highest dwells within oneself, not in the institutions and buildings of men.

Connecting the dots

2010-07-27T23:05:00.000-07:00

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

2010-07-13T19:42:00.000-07:00

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

2010-07-05T19:15:00.000-07:00

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.

Newtonian Physics

2010-06-14T11:28:00.000-07:00

In a surprise of surprises, gold has been found in the hills of "Afghanistan." Lithium too. And copper, iron and cobalt. Just like the reverse engineering of torture, we now have a reverse engineered reason for waging war.

Which may have been the reason all along. The search for Osama bin Laden is a long-abandoned ruse. Freeing women from the burqa has come and gone as a justification for war. Ditto for sending girls to school. Lately it has simply been "defeating the Taliban," and "creating security."

In other words, we're there, and the reason is we're us, and we can be wherever we want. We have the money, we have the men, and we have the guns.

At least that was the way it was supposed to work. In today's Morning Edition on NPR, it was pointed out that it is one thing to discover great potential wealth. It is another thing to turn that potential into actual wealth. "Afghanistan" has no mining industry, a weak infrastructure of roads, no railroad, no developed seaport, and an unforgiving mountain terrain. It also has a weak and corrupt government, and no social infrastructure for anything beyond its opium economy. Good luck with the dreams of boundless riches.

For all the plans for glory, the descent into the evils of invasion, murder, kidnapping, torture, arbitrary imprisonment, and wasting of a trillion dollars of our treasury, we have nothing to show for the grand dream.

Have we learned anything? Not yet. As Johan Galtung, founder of the academic field of Peace and Conflict Studies put it in an interview aired on today's Democracy Now, we are likely to continue to make bad decisions until we become completely irrelevant.

There's not much else to say about this. We have a government and its corporate sponsors that are stuck in inertia, unable to break free of past habits. It's pure Newtonian Physics. This inertia will last until acted upon by "outside" forces.

At least outside in terms of the egos of the inert people involved. As we are seeing with the BP oil spill, the economy, the melting polar ice caps, the weather disturbances, and, last but not least, our failing efforts in "Iraq" and "Afghanistan," the "outside" forces are quite close to our daily lives.

As these outside forces to the egos of our ruling elite continue to synergistically act, they become, in effect, one big immovable force. Bigger by far than the inert ruling elite. It will break, and relatively soon. It doesn't need to be overthrown. It will overthrow itself. The revolution, which may or may not be televised, will be a self-immolation.
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Here's a video to watch. Then, the iconic "rap" of so long ago.

The Beatles have a slightly different view. This is the more familiar version.

The Rolling Stones have a similar view.

Tracy Chapman varies on the theme thusly. Learn to play it here.

Here's the Jefferson Airplane at Woodstock.

The Four non blondes had their one hit with this song, a great one.

I summed up a presentation to an Economics seminar with this song when I was in graduate school. One professor stormed out in anger and disgust. It worked.

Identity crisis

2010-06-01T23:59:00.000-07:00

There's a great op-ed in today's New York Times by "Israeli" author Amos OZ. He describes the history of "Israel," and how the country became obsessed with power and force. At one point he remarks that "To a man with a big hammer, says the proverb, every problem looks like a nail."

Oz continues, observing that the "Israeli" government believes that "the Palestinian problem can be crushed instead of solved." This view will fail, he contends, because "Hamas is an idea, a desperate and fanatical idea that grew out of the desolation and frustration of many Palestinians. No idea has ever been defeated by force — not by siege, not by bombardment, not by being flattened with tank treads and not by marine commandos. To defeat an idea, you have to offer a better idea, a more attractive and acceptable one."

I had my own response to the "Israeli" attack on the "Turkish" rescue ship, a comment to a CNN story:

"I wonder what it is like living in 'Israel,' now a totally paranoid state. This is what it comes to when you group-identify to ever more extreme levels. At some point 'Jews' and 'Israelis' will find it to their benefit as functioning human beings that they give up the hysteria about 'the' 'holocaust.' A good way to start is by calling it something like the World War II genocide, or the Nazi genocide. Then maybe establishing 'Israel' as a secular state, independent of religion or ethnicity. Or, 'we' could continue giving them billions every year, with silent approval of whatever atrocity the country commits, and see what we get."
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As I have written numerous times in this blog, the main cause of armed conflict on this planet is mistaken identity. "Jews" identify themselves as "Jews," "Palestinians" identify themselves as "Palestinians," "Muslims" identify themselves as "Muslims," "Christians" identify themselves as "Christians," and, last but not least, "Americans" identify themselves as "Americans."

These various identities are not who any of us are. There is nothing that is in any way unique or special about being an "Israeli," but nothing is sufficient cause to kill many thousands of people over the past sixty-two years or so. It's the same identification process that enabled "Nazis" to put millions of people to death in concentration camps during "World War II."

What should be interesting to "Americans" is how our government responds. It responds predictably, calling for an investigation, not by the "U.N." Security Council, but by "Israel." Why would this be? Our government, siding with the oppressor? Are we, as some say, in the pocket of "Israel?"

Not exactly. It's partly symbiotic. We give "Israel" billions every year in exchange for it being "our" nuclear power in the "Mideast." "Israel" is a handy threat to disobedient or independent governments in the region.

There's a bit more to the equation. The "Israeli" lobby, known by the acronym "AIPAC," holds sway over the "U.S." Congress, and any elected official who deviates from official truth about "Israel," or who questions the billions in aid to the "Jewish" state can expect to pay a severe political price.

More to the point, though, is that at the national level, our "representatives" have no human principles to guide them. They only have the principles of power, control, dominance, and preservation of the status quo - the existing power structure.

There is a system in place, a system that includes invasions of virtually defenseless countries like "Iraq" and "Afghanistan." It includes preservation of the lawlessness of Wall Street banks, of passively allowing the destruction of our environment, of impunity for the Bush criminal regime, and of avoiding any real economic reform, because it would threaten the supremacy of the wealthy in this country.

At the heart of all these problems is identity. The wealthy identify themselves as wealthy, the members of the Bush criminal regime identify with their criminality, the destroyers of the environment identify with the power to destroy, and the Wall Street bankers identify with their ability to accumulate money for themselves. The government and people in "Israel" identify with their otherness from anyone else on the planet. That's why they call themselves "Zionists," and God's chosen people.

Maybe some day our species will emerge from this tendency for mistaken identity. Until then, we will be visited by one identity crisis after another.
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I made a proposal for "Mideast" peace a couple of years ago. It hasn't aged a bit.

The New York Times makes a minimal suggestion for our floundering president here.

More information can be found here.

Here's an example of what happens when "Jews" dissent against "Israel."

On other concerns, Noam Chomsky offers some insight.
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Here's an update with some background on the situation in "Gaza."

This story gives a little more depth.

This might surprise some.

Not all "Jews" support the behavior of the State of "Israel." An organization named "J Street," for example, is working in our nation's capital for sanity in our involvement in the "Mideast."

Jewish Voices for Peace is another.
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Here's a song to suit the situation.

This song never loses its relevance.

This Waterboys song deserves a repost.

The myth of leadership

2010-05-20T15:18:00.000-07:00

Time flies. I had "minor" surgery at the Madison veterans hospital in March, and it seems like it was yesterday. The surgeon who operated on me is from "Pakistan," and he did a perfect job. Far better, I might add, than the "American" doctors who misdiagnosed the problem for thirteen years. Because of the risk of complications, elaborate measures were taken to make sure the operation was safe, and that I would have a speedy recovery. Though I'm not the world's most trustful guy, I had total confidence things would go well, and they did. It would be nice if I were this right all the time.

I wish the "Pakistani" doctor well. He faces many difficulties beyond the normal challenges of practicing medicine, which are serious enough. Thanks to our elite's futile and phony attempt at empire, "Pakistan" is the new "Iraq," the place where "our" empire builders failed so miserably.

Rumblings are getting louder about the next campaign, which will likely be some kind of "intervention" in "Pakistan." Nearing the level of surreal, Hillary Clinton warned "Pakistan" of the "severe consequences" if an attack on the "U.S." is based there.

Even more surreal was the exchange on May 5 between pretty boy "journalist" George Stephanopoulos and "Iran" president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Stephanopoulos badgered Ahmadinejad with questions about the curious rumor that Osama bin Laden is in "Tehran," the capital of "Iran." You can watch the exchange here.

Are they this desperate? George Stephanopoulos a crusading "journalist?" Only the really stupid or impaired would take this exchange seriously. I made a comment to the YouTube video in three parts, due to their character limit. Here it is in its entirety:

This is very revealing. First, it is revealing about ABC, in what appears to be an attempt to score a ratings "coup." I never heard the rumor that Osama bin Laden was in "Iran" before. So where did this information come from? Bin Laden, a "Sunni" "Muslim," would not be especially inclined to take refuge in "Iran," a "Shiite" "country."

Then there is George Stephanopoulos, "former" political operative, and now a "journalist." Somehow he seemed to hope that this exchange would establish him as a courageous, truth-seeking questioner of "authority." Sorry, George. It just cemented your reputation as a bottom-feeding opportunist and rumor mongerer (not monger; monger is a verb, mongerer is a noun).

The question is the equivalent of "When did you stop beating your wife?" There's no way to deny it when it is set up in the affirmative.

Ahmadinejad handled Stephanopoulos like Muhammad Ali with Floyd Patterson. He raised one great point: Maybe Osama bin Laden is in Washington, D.C. His family has been a lot more friendly with the Bushes than with the "Iranians." This little debate should be called the fight of the little guys. They both are about 5' 6" tall.
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I don't have any belief on the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden. My strongest suspicion is that he died years ago, likely for reasons of bad health. But who knows? Maybe he is in Washington, D.C. The real goings-on at the highest levels are clouded by deceit, so anyone's guess is as good as anyone else's.

We have been inundated with lies from high places over the past, well, fifty years or so, but even long before that. Where the lies have been most abundant is in the realm of international relations, especially in the waging of war and in threats of war. The entire eight years of the presidency of George W. Bush marked an era of total, brazen, murderous deceit, yet his legacy lives on. It's even more deceptive now, because the raw, uncouth lies of Bush have been replaced by the smooth articulation of Obama.

I began having doubts about Barack Obama on March 5, 2007. He appeared before a group of "black" ministers on the anniversary of the Selma, Alabama voting rights march of 1965. He spoke in a distinctly "African-American," or "southern" accent, donned for just that occasion, and discarded for most occasions thereafter (you can watch it here). No part of his formative years were spent among the descendents of "African" slaves, and he does not speak in "black" dialect or accent normally. Obama's cultural roots are entirely "white," "Hawaiian," and "Indonesian."

Even worse was Hillary Clinton at the same event, with an equally phony accent, more obvious with her blond hair and pale skin. One has to wonder who these people think they are fooling.

Themselves, mostly, but also many among us who need to believe them, for a variety of reasons. I voted for Obama, in spite of my doubts, and donated money to his campaign.

It's called willing suspension of disbelief. Breaking the term down into its parts, the first thing to look at is willing: believing something to be true when ample evidence exists that shows you that it is not. Then there is suspension of disbelief. That is when you deny or gloss over something you know to be true, and act in a way contradictory to what you know to be true.

For me, what should have been the clincher was during the '08 campaign, when Obama said he would attack "Pakistan" if there was "actionable intelligence" that indicated Osama bin Laden was hiding there, or that "terrorists" were hiding there. What stood out for me was not so much the threat, but the way he pronounced "Pakistan," as if Paah-kee-staahn. He still pronounces it that way, and now the news media have followed suit. Herd mentality. Herds of sheep.

Obama doesn't pronounce Afghanistan as Aahf-gaahn-ee-staahn, but somehow finds himself married to his pronunciation of Pakistan.

It is a curious oddity. Barack Obama not only can become "black" for a day, he can also "up-accent" to formal pronunciations of names of countries when he feels the need.

These pretensions would be meaningless if there were no context in his presidency. If he were playing it straight as president, honestly engaging in policy formation in domestic and international concerns, his posturing would not matter.

Instead, we are finding him to be a man without principle, a consummate politician, completely malleable, willing to change positions whenever he sees it is to his advantage.

This is dangerous. A man without principle is capable of anything. Obama has surrounded himself with Washington, D.C. insiders, Wall Street insiders, and military insiders. People who stand for the elites, the powerful, the wealthy, and the connected. I have said before in this blog that Obama is at a disadvantage to his various military and national security advisers, having never served in uniform. He is also at a disadvantage relative to his economic advisers, having no grounding in Economics or banking. He served four years as a "U.S." senator, but there is little indication that he learned anything in that short tenure.

In what might be the most revealing of our president's character is his appearance at the opening day ceremonies of the Washington Nationals baseball team. Obama threw out the first pitch. He was pretty obviously out of his element. He spent too much time shaking hands and talking with the members of the military honor guard, and when he finally got to the pitcher's mound to throw the first pitch, he was hesitant.

It soon became apparent why. Obama got ready to throw, then delayed, winding up a few times. Finally lobbing the ball, he embarrassed himself, and anyone watching. He throws like a girl. The president of the "United States" throws a baseball "like a girl." Girls who play sports don't even throw like that anymore, so Obama actually throws the way girls with no athletic ability do. Didn't he ever throw any rocks as a kid?

He could be forgiven. In the time I spent living in "Hawaii," not once did I see any kids playing baseball. The only thing close was a "Japanese"-"American" softball league that played at a park on Makiki Street in Honolulu. They were very good players.

The University of Hawaii also had one of the best baseball teams in the country, so someone was playing baseball. Just not Barack Obama.

I truly believe that Obama is an unformed man (not to be confused with uninformed man, or uniformed man). He even swings a golf club "like a girl." In the sport he actually played, basketball, he is moderately skilled, but from what I have seen he plays a pretty timid form of the game.

I can empathize with Obama in his predicament, and have written about it several times in this blog (example) and elsewhere. That does not mean I have no concerns about him, though. Given the intractable economic, social, environmental, and international problems we face as a people, having an unformed man serving as the "most powerful man on earth" does not bode well for the future.

"Leftists" might not be comfortable with this analysis, but "rightists" likely would be. I wouldn't have imagined I would find myself in this unlikely position, but such is the life of the heretic. It hasn't been that long since heretics were burned at the stake, so I partly take it as a responsibility to take advantage of the freedom.

Also, I feel more free to pursue truth than earlier in my life. Not "the" truth, but truth, which is a tad less absolute. Decades ago, when I was less careful about what I would say, I survived an attempt on my life. One of these days I might write about it. For now I can say that the experience made me think of the rest of my life as gravy, a blessing.

What the unformed-ness of Obama means for me is that if I can recognize this, others can too. This is why the "White House," and "Democrats" in general are such fair game for "right wing" "pundits" and various other demogogues. They see an opening, and stoke the fires of hatred and hysteria. If the "Democrats" were not compromised by their duplicity and corruption there would be no basis for "right wing" hate-mongering.

More to the root of the problem, the real weakness is our electoral system. Because of what it takes to be elected president - tons of money, manufacture of myth, clever deceptions about beliefs and policies, misrepresentation of opponents - it is extremely likely that the result will be an enlightened statesman occupying our nation's highest office.

Obama, unformed man, is still the best we can do under the circumstances. We could have fallen for the myth of John Edwards. Or Christopher Dodd. Or Hillary Clinton. Or John McCain. After George W. Bush, any of them would look like some sort of messiah. In truth, they are all deeply flawed human beings, ambitious, self-focused, compromised.

What appears obvious to me is that at this stage of human civilization the presidency of the "United States" is too big a responsibility for one person. We "elect" someone to be our "leader," when no one can adequately "lead" such a large country with such a complexity of challenges. Especially when the selection process does not really advance leadership.

As for answers, there aren't any. Except time. What will happen will happen. We are involved in two "theaters" of war, both waged for pretty bogus reasons, draining our treasury and demoralizing our military. Our "leadership" isn't capable of redirecting our economy, or of reducing the threat of climate change. The response to the oil spill in the Gulf of "Mexico" has been political grandstanding and posturing. The campaign to isolate and discredit "Iran" is highly suspicious, likely a prelude to some sort of military action.

Our one hope is to know what we are dealing with, face the facts of what we can know, and respond appropriately. We can start discussing real change. First, we must understand what we are changing from. Given the problems we face, we can then decide what we want to change to. What kind of system would have a humane and just program for reducing population? What kind of system would place limits on overall economic output? What kind of system would guarantee full employment? What kind of system would act to reduce carbon emissions? What kind of system would eliminate the power of corporations over our lives? What kind of system would have no need for empire?

Not the one we have now.
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Here's some music from "Pakistan," by Sufi singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. Here's another. He died in 1997.

This music is from "Persia," also known as "Iran." It sounds a bit like this, eh?

Here's a song about our president. For the chords and lyrics, click here. Here's another. The chords and lyrics can be found here.

Let's not forget this one.

Joseph's Coat, linked in the previous post, fits the theme for this post too. Here's the lyrics. I couldn't find a site with the chords.

This Kinks song fits. The chords and lyrics are found here.

This too.

The Waterboys have a song that is perfect for this post.
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Here's an update on the BP oil spill.

Here's another, mentioning the "N" word.

Too big to fail

2010-05-02T21:50:00.000-07:00

In 1985 I left "Hawaii" after living there for two years. It was a great experience living in "Hawaii," but it wasn't home. I found out that there was an extension of the Illinois veterans scholarship for thirty credits at state schools, and after spending most of a year working in Madison, I began graduate school at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb.

My intention was to earn a teaching certificate. With my background in Economics, I could become qualified to teach social studies, either in the upper-grades or in high school.

Because I already had an undergraduate degree, I had to take all my classes at the graduate level. I didn't mind. I applied for entry to the master's program in Educational Psychology, since it was the nearest major to the courses I was taking. Because of one professor, a sub-major of sorts, or area of concentration, in Transpersonal Psychology was available. It's an unfortunate name, but the field is focused on states of consciousness beyond the personal, or ego-centered states the vast majority of us find ourselves trapped in as we travel through our earthly existence.

I ended up not getting the teaching certificate. I was in the process of setting up my student teaching semester, and bought what I thought was a decent car from a friend. The friend warned me about the car, but I believed otherwise. In the hottest part of the heat wave of 1988 I drove, or attempted to drive, to the school where I was supposed to student teach, for an interview.

I didn't make it to the interview. The car threw a piston on the highway, and that was the end of that. I went back to DeKalb and finished my master's degree, which was not worth much. Employment in the field of Educational Psychology is mostly at the doctoral level. I could have found work in test development, but knew I would last about three days doing that kind of work.

It was not time and effort wasted, though. I learned a lot, and the knowledge and experience has been of immense value as I try to make sense of the times in which we live.

A perfect example is today. I awoke with a plan to record the rerun of the final show of Bill Moyers Journal, and to write a blog post about something that was festering.

The festering topic wasn't meant to be written. As Carl Gustav Jung would say, meaningful coincididences intervened. Jung is the most prominent early inspiration in the development of the field of Transpersonal Psychology. He introduced the idea of synchronicity, the occurrence of two or more causally unrelated events that are experienced in a meaningful way. Another term for this is meaningful coincidence.

I turned the TV on earlier than the Moyers show was scheduled to start, wanting to finesse my failing memory. A program called MoneyTrack was on, and today's segment covered the banking crisis. Economist Simon Johnson was being interviewed, and among the things he said was if a bank is too big to fail, it is too big to exist.

The idea of too big to fail has been around for a while, but gained new significance in the government "bailout" of the megabanks in 2008. The law authorizing the bailout, titled the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008, was enacted to authorize the Treasury to spend up to $700 billion to purchase troubled assets of big banks, especially mortgage backed securities that were bundles of worthless sub-prime loans.

I wished I had recorded the segment, but continued in my morning of information gathering. My favorite show on Wisconsin Public Radio, To the best of our knowledge, began at 9:00 a.m., and I listened to it. The program presents interviews with various authors, researchers, writers and activists on various topics. Today's topic was titled Sacred Nature, and one of the featured interviewees was environmental writer Bill McKibben, who talked about his new book Eaarth. At one point McKibben said that when a bank is too big to fail, it is too big to exist. I took note.

After the radio program ended I returned my attention to the TV, and made sure I didn't miss the Moyers show. In one of the segments Moyers interviewed former Texas Agriculture Commissioner Jim Hightower. Calling himself "America's number one populist," Hightower advocates grass roots organizing against corporate control of our lives. At one point he said that when banks are too big to fail, they are too big to exist.

During the time I was a guru disciple it was said that when you receive a message three times, it is a real message. I don't know if this is true or not, but I knew I had to write about the too big to fail phenomenon.

What Johnson, McKibben, and Hightower all were saying is that the big banks have to be broken up into smaller entities, more manageable, closer to individual customers, and less likely to engage in illegal and unethical activities. They would be less likely to have influence over Congress, with a lower capacity to bribe.

In Economics there is a principle known as increasing returns to scale, or economies of scale. It means that there are cost savings that accrue as business entities, known in the jargon as firms, get larger. At some point the cost savings reach a maximum, and then, as the individual firm gets larger, costs incrementally increase. This is known as decresing returns to scale, or "diseconomies" of scale.

That's the theoretical construct, or at least one of them. Another is the inefficiency of monopoly power, resulting in higher prices of goods and services, stifling of competition, and lower output. The net result of monopoly is a lower level of overall economic well-being.

There isn't much talk in theoretical Economics about criminality, but that was the, er, prime factor in the banking collapse. Maybe an enterprising economist somewhere could come up with a theory of the diseconomies of mass criminality. How about Steven Levitt?

As I was pondering the concept of too big to fail, I wondered about other situations where the term would apply. If the solution to banks being too big to fail is breaking them up, what about other industries? Are the drug companies too big to fail? Are the insurance companies too big to fail? Are the agribusiness conglomerates, like Monsanto and Archer Daniels Midland? How about General Electric, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, and other "defense" contractors? Are they too big to fail?

Is British Petroleum (BP) too big to fail? Maybe, but they seem to have suffered a recent failure. How about Massey Energy? It was too big to fail until its negligence caused the worst mine disaster in twenty five years.

There are many other possibilities of too big to fail. All you have to do is think of something big. If the weapons manufacturers, for example, are too big to fail, maybe the "Defense Department" is also too big to fail. Its estimated budget for this year is $1.223 trillion. With a budget like that, failure in two "wars" is a tad unthinkable.

What do you do when you're too big to fail? For the "Defense" establishment, how about another war? Erstwhile presidential candidate John McCain sang "Bomb Iran" a while back. It likely wasn't a "Freudian slip." Maybe it was a Jungian slip.

Going beyond even the "Defense" mega-establishment, which Dwight Eisenhower called the military industrial complex, maybe the "U.S." is too big to fail. "China," for sure. "Japan," "Germany," "France," "Great Britain," "Canada," "Mexico," and, perhaps most notoriously, "Greece."

"Russia" deserves its own special mention for too big to fail. It used to be the linchpin of the "Soviet Union," which had its own experience of being too big to fail. It failed.

Maybe the "Catholic" Church is too big to fail.

This is no idle exercise. We have a government that is controlled by "Wall Street," large corporations, and the "defense" establishment. They are all too big to fail, and this conditon means that all other priorities are subsumed under the need to keep them from failing. Given that the Polar ice caps are melting, but this dynamic is a lower priority than parasitic "Wall Street," the Polar ice caps will melt.

At what point, one must wonder, will the Polar ice caps be too big to fail? As things stand, not yet. Maybe next year. Or the year after. Or the year after. Don't hold your breath. There will be plenty of time for that.
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The other interview on the Bill Moyers Journal, with writer Barry Lopez, is worth a read or listen.
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To read more about NIU and DeKalb, click here.
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Here's a bit of an update from CNN, some words of warning from Nobel laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz.

Here's a bit of an update from Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone about the Goldman Sachs debacle.

This article from Truthout is a must read.

Here's another, from Greg Palast.
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Here are some songs appropriate to the theme, one from Dave Mason, and another from Quicksilver Messenger Service. Here's one from Spirit. And this from the Grateful Dead. And, of course, Dylan. Here's a great song from the Talking Heads. This Neil Young song is pretty timeless. Here's a relic from the Broadway musical "Hair." This is my favorite Talking Heads song. This gem is from the Kinks (Here's the words and chords).Los Lobos gave us this treasure. Strange Boat, by the Waterboys. And this, from the Waterboys, a great song.

Here's another great song, from John Gorka. Here's the lyrics and chords.

This song has nothing to do with the theme, it's just my favorite Kinks song, a great rocker. Here's the chords and lyrics. This Waterboys song is also worth a listen. It's a cover of Van Morrison, but it stands on its own greatness.

Love is all you need

2010-03-24T17:35:00.000-07:00

One of my favorite stories from my time as a guru disciple is the tale of the great King Janaka and the sage Vashishta in ancient "India." Of course, when the term "ancient" is used, we are talking about myth. King Janaka may or may not have existed, but the story is a great one, and has far-reaching implications for our current predicament.

The king is described as wise, benevolent and just, he lived in a lavish palace, was served sumptuous meals, attended by many servants, and had great wealth and power. The way the story was told by the guru was that King Janaka would enjoy his kingdom, but when he slept he would have a vivid dream that he was alone in a forest, starving and miserable, covered in filth, lost and wandering.

Janaka would have this dream repeatedly, and became distressed, wondering which was real, the dream or the waking state. He summoned the great sage Vashishta, told him about the dream, and asked him, "Oh, sage! Which is real, the dream or the waking state?"

The sage Vashishta answered him, "Oh, king! When will you wake up? Neither is real." A more elaborate rendition is given at the website Atmapress: "'King Janaka, neither of these two roles is true. You alone are true. You, yourself, are the truth. The you who was present as the witnessing conscious in both the dream state and in the waking state; that you who witnessed both these states, is the true reality. Life during the daytime is a day-dream; during the night it is a night-dream. They are both illusions. They are filled with defects and flaws because they constantly change from one thing to another; so they cannot be real. Only you who remain unchanged in all these states are real, free of all change and illusion.' This was also emphasized in the Gita, where Krishna pointed out the important truth that the world is constantly changing and that the Self alone is real and ever unchanging."

This story has stayed with me over the years, and it continues to provide a calming perspective on the events and noise of modern life. I am not a king, and I have both enjoyable and not-so-enjoyable dreams. I do live reasonably well, though, and like anyone else in "America," am bombarded with stimuli from the physical world on a daily basis. Much of that stimuli is from the various mass communication media: radio, television, the Internet, newspapers, magazines, books and even pamphlets and flyers.

Another way of putting it is to quote the great statement from the Upanishads of Vedanta scripture: "jagan mithya" - the world is false. Only Brahman, absolute consciousness, is real.

Somewhere in my studies I remember reading or hearing about how there is a continuum between the material level and the absolute level of reality, with the material level being the least real, or most unreal. One of these days I'll have to study the topic more in depth, but for now, the important thing is what this insight says about life on this plane of consciousness.

It is at its core false. It will end for each and every one of us. There is nothing permanent about physical reality, our desires, our fears, our pains and pleasures, and our beliefs about them. Failure to recognize this inevitably leads to false methods of being on this plane, and various ploys and deceptions on ourselves and others in order to make the unreal real.

A very simple example of this occurred a couple of Saturdays ago, when I was listening to the news on National Public Radio (NPR). I couldn't find it in the archives, but reporter Julie McCarthy referred to the "Pakistani Taliban" as "Al Qaeda backed militants." The assumption and implication of this statement is twofold: that "Al Qaeda" exists to the degree that it can "back" an army of "militants" or "terrorists," and that said "militants" would not be doing what they are doing without the "backing" of "Al Qaeda."

This is not a small or insignificant example. A relationship between the now mythical "Al Qaeda" and the "Pakistani Taliban" has been established, not by demonstration of fact, not backed by evidence, but by conventional wisdom. This is from the most credible established news source in the country, National Public Radio.

Continuing with National Public Radio, Bush criminal regime strategist Karl Rove was interviewed on Fresh Air on March 17. Rove was quizzed as if he had something real and valuable to say, when his entire adult life has been consumed with the pursuit of criminal means to gain and abuse power.

Many people posted comments to the show, disagreeing with Rove on several points, and I of course had my own take, seen on this page:

It is a testament to how far we have fallen as a people that Karl Rove would be considered a legitimate guest on the country's most credible interview program. By any objective standard the Bush regime was the most criminal in the nation's history, and the most serious threat to the planet ever.

Rove, filling the intellectual vacuum presented by Bush, was the mastermind of this criminal operation, at least to the degree that what was purveyed could be called mastery of anything. Thankfully, this criminal operation ultimately failed, though it is far from finished with its scheming.

First in the attempts to re-legitimize the Bush criminal regime is to re-legitimize Karl Rove. This scheme began with his ascension, in a manner of speaking, to a position at the mob-incitement network known as Fox. Then, to expand the encroachment, Fresh Air. Next, who knows?

I just think for balance other great criminals should have their say on Fresh Air. How about Charles Manson? Richard Allen Davis? Rodney Alcala? John Albert Gardner? If you don't like the comparisons, I have a few questions. Are you happy with the elections of 2000 and 2004? Are you happy with the invasions and occupations of "Iraq" and "Afghanistan?" The economy? Torture? 911?
Wednesday, March 17, 2010 8:43:25 PM
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An even better example of this penchant for falsehood is the Obama Administration. Elected on a wave of hope for the future and revulsion for the criminal regime he was replacing, Obama took office with the expectation that he would usher in a new era of peace, harmony, economic recovery, and justice for all.

The euphoria lasted a few months, but is long gone. Obama appointed and reappointed some of the key players in our economic collapse to top positions in his cabinet and the Federal Reserve System (Chairman).

There is no change in our economic order, and no intention to change it.

Health care reform is now known as "Health insurance reform." It reforms nothing, but will bring billions more in dollars to the insurance companies. Obama has been campaigning around the country, but given his toothless "reform" plan, the campaign is really for his presidency.

We are still bogged down in two "wars," which are technically "military campaigns" waged without declarations of war against anyone or any country. Our various forces are attacking unarmed civilians on a regular basis in "Afghanistan," and are busy doing something or other in "Iraq." After seven years in "Iraq" and eight plus in "Afghanistan," one would think something meaningful would have been accomplished by now. Maybe next week.

The prison in "Guantanamo Bay," "Cuba," is still operating.

Obama has backed off on trying "Guantanamo" prisoners in civilian courts, reverting to the military tribunals of the Bush criminal regime.

The domestic spying system set up by the Bush criminal regime is still in place.

Obama's "Race to the Top" education "reform" is doomed to failure. The very name "Race to the Top" means some win, most lose. What kind of education system is it that makes it official policy to establish a division of its students between "winners" and "losers?"

More can be gleaned about the Obama regime's backtracking on its vision at a recent Democracy Now, where longtime analyst Noam Chomsky is interviewed.

We have been deluding ourselves. We would be better off if we had political candidates who promised to do very little, would work to keep the system going, and would serve whatever interest that would pay the most for what it wanted. At least it would be a little more honest.

Or does it matter? If the world is false, so what? This level of reality is inherently unreal - temporary, illusory, relative, limited, subjective, and a vast ocean of suffering.

It matters. There is something real in this world. Love is real. Compassion is real. All else that is true flows from this fundamental reality. The Beatles were right. All you need is love.

I have been lucky. Lucky to be alive, for one thing, after a number of close calls. Lucky to leave Catholicism when I found it lacking (And, I might add, lucky to have flunked out of being an altar boy.). Lucky to have served in the U.S. Army without killing or being killed. Lucky to have more formal education than most people dream of attaining. Lucky to have worked skillfully in numerous occupations, not being enslaved by any of them, able to maintain my dignity, and free to walk away when conditions warranted. Lucky to have nearly free medical care when so many others have no care whatsoever. Lucky to have reached retirement age with at least some semblance of a livable income in the offings.

But the one thing I am most lucky to have availed in this life is the state of love. It has been a gift from the Divine realm. I did not know what love was until 1976, though I thought I did. It took an awakening, Shaktipat Diksha, at the level of the heart, or Anahata Chakra in yogic terms (I wrote about the experience a bit in Altered states and I love a parade.). I used to believe it came from my erstwhile guru, Swami Muktananda, but now I'm not so sure. I was staying at a Sikh ashram right here in Madison, Wisconsin, and the awakening may have been due to the various difficult Kundalini Yoga exercises I was doing.

Or it may just have been a reward for my intense study of yoga philosophy at the time. Whatever the reason, the experience of love has been the overriding meaningful experience of my life, and the guiding principle.

This does not mean that I am an expert by any means, or that I have attained anything. It also does not mean that I don't have to make an effort to be a better person, or that I can stand by while others are suffering.

Quite the contrary. Love is what motivates me to write this blog. It motivates me to send money here and there to make the world a better place (It's not much money. I don't have much.). It motivates me to fight, or more accurately, to contend, where assumed power assumes too much. Sometimes that contention is for my own survival on this planet, and sometimes it is for the well-being of others. In the immortal words of that great sage Kenny Rogers, sometimes you have to fight (or contend) when you're a man. You just have to know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em; know when to walk away, know when to run.

All you need is love was ridiculed when the Beatles introduced it in 1967. "Right wingers" would certainly find the notion ridiculous today. "Left wingers" aren't such beacons of love either, but the energy state (not emotion - that is only a lower manifestation) is more likely to be found in people who advocate the things "leftists" favor.

As we move in time towards increasing severity of the problems of climate change, the unsustainability of our economic system, the breakdown of our social order, and of mass paranoia, it should be pretty obvious that the only thing that will get us out of this mess is love, and its correspondent energy of compassion. If we fail, it will be a failure of being.

All the hysteria about Obama's near-meaningless health care bill is failure of being. Failed human beings, fueled by hatred of nothing, are consumed with loathing of Obama because he is perceived as "black."
It is a made-up projection of fear, murderous in intent, based on the nothingness of "race." There is no such thing as "race."

So we are at a crossroads. I look at it as an easy crossroads. We may choose to descend into raging fear and hatred, but the longer the rabble-rousing continues at Fox News and other mob-incitement media, the more precarious and desperate it becomes. It is an energy that has to go to more extreme levels of falsehood and hysteria in order to sustain itself. Unless the dupes of hysteria are able to reach superhuman levels of fanaticism, they will fall ill and die in large numbers. They tend to be older, so it is unlikely that these superhuman levels will be seen.

Lest we forget, we recently emerged from this. We can go back to it, or worse, or we can move forward.

In other words, the times, they are a changin'. Soon, I believe, our energies will shift. We can start by putting a little love in our hearts.
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Here are a few more Beatles songs that fit the theme: I want to hold your hand, And I love her, She loves you, Love me do, I saw her standing there, You've got to hide your love away, Words of love (a Buddy Holly song, great version), Eight days a week, Dear Prudence, Rain, Across the Universe, Within you and without you, In my life, Act Naturally, Tomorrow Never Knows, Flying/Blue Jay Way, Dear One, Here comes the sun, and Let it Be.

This is for anyone I have ever loved. (A couple of alternate versions can be seen here and here. Click here for chords and lyrics. Full text of lyrics is here,and here if you want an easy copy and paste.) The picture at 0:48 is of Sai Baba of Shirdi, a renowned Sufi saint of "India." The video was pretty obviously filmed in Rio (de Janeiro), but curiously, there is a wall there with pictures of holy beings of "India." At the end of my time in "India" in 1978, Muktananda sponsored a tour of sacred cities of the "Maharashtra" state of "India." One of them was Shirdi. I had one of my most, er, powerful experiences there, while sitting on a bench across from where Sai Baba meditated. According to legend, where I was sitting was the spot Sai Baba's guru sat watching him while he meditated. (Here's some info about the creator of the song and video, Michael Franti.)

Another aspect of the video worth mentioning is that the men dressed in white who look like they are break dancing are actually practicing Capoeira, a dance-martial art form developed by "African" slaves in "Brazil." By disguising the fighting style with dance and music, the slaves were able to avoid suppression of the practice by plantation owners. There's a Capoeira group that operates in Madison, and one at the University of Wisconsin as well.

The snake at 1:11 in the video appears to be a young "Brazilian" python. If you can stand to look at snakes, this site shows pictures of the variety of snakes in "Brazil."

"Eterna Paz Para A Comunidade" painted on the wall at 3:38 of the video is "Portuguese" for "Eternal Peace for the comunity."
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Postscript:
Tonight (March 24) I went to a talk given by Vandana Shiva, a world leader in the movement to return to sanity. Whatever you might find lacking in what I have written will easily be filled in by this very smart, courageous, and strong woman from "India." The emphasis of her work is agriculture, and you can find out more at her website, Navdanya.

In the question and answer period after her talk an audience member, who appeared to be a retired professor of either Biology or Agriculture (of the industrial sort), asked a loaded question, which was really not a question, about how it is that the "Green revolution" has been so successful in feeding people.

She answered him eloquently, concisely, to the point, and explained that the supposed statistics of success are selective and faked, that there is more starvation worldwide as a result of the "Green revolution," and that rampant world population growth is also a result of the "Green revolution." The guy went cringing away, stunned by her knowledge and strength. The UW student newspaper The Badger Herald did excellent coverage of the event, including a video of the audience questions.
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I missed the talk on campus by economist and author Jeremy Rifkin in December, but a synopsis can be read here.
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This interview with author Naomi Wolf is worth reading.
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I started following this blog today, only to find out the author died earlier this month. It's still worth checking out.
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Here's a short reading list:

Economics without illusions

Freakonomics

Predictably Irrational

Towards a Steady State Economy
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In the realm of Hip-hop music, one would be hard-pressed to top this classic. Knowing the words got me through many a day of substitute teaching.
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I also post these musings at Smirking Chimp, which has a lot of other useful items to read. I post them here and here as well, but these sites are pretty obscure. The Obama blog is for campaign supporters. A little free speech will do them good.