The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2013 annual report for this blog.
Here’s an excerpt:
A New York City subway train holds 1,200 people. This blog was viewed about 4,400 times in 2013. If it were a NYC subway train, it would take about 4 trips to carry that many people.
Light at the End of the Tunnel
MOTHER’S ADVICE and HUMAN BEHAVIOR:
Mom’s Advice: “Use Clorox to get rid of the DNA evidence. Burn the barn.” – Some CSI-type crime show.
G.W. Bush’s recent efforts to rewrite his history remind me of Ramses the Great (pharaoh of the biblical exodus, if you believe). He is called “great” because he managed to live longer than any other pharaoh and used the time to build more monuments to himself than all his predecessors and successors combined. He had a factory that just turned out busts of his head so that he could knock the heads off other pharaohs’ statues and put his in their place. He advertised himself shamelessly: painting and carving the story of the Battle of Kadesh on every wall and pillar in sight. Kadesh was not even a draw and Rameses quickly signed a peace treaty with the victorious Hittite King, and went back to Egypt. He nearly got himself killed and almost lost his army due to his egotistical rash actions as an inexperienced military leader, but he declared victory from near defeat, and covered up the fact that he came precious close to losing the farm – not just for himself, but for the whole kingdom of Egypt. And that’s why G.W. Bush’s recent rewrite of his history reminds me of Ramses the Great, pharaoh of the biblical exodus, if you believe. G.W. became president of the United States by the skin of his teeth and the lies on his lips: the same way Ramses II became “Great.” – 11/04.
“Did Benjamin Franklin give up when the Germans shot down his kite?” – T. J. Detweiler pep talk, Recess.
Islands w/ apple.
AND GOD CREATED THE UNIVERSE (Humor):
And God created the universe in the wink of an eye. And the wink was a billion billion years long, and a trillion, trillion years wide. When it was done, everybody wondered what He had done, for it was all new and different, and nobody knew where anything was, and nobody knew what to make of it.
Everybody in those days was the angels, archangels, seraphim and cherubim, and they only knew what they knew, which wasn’t much, but mostly concerned with telling God how great He was, and God was getting to the point where He didn’t know if what they said counted for very much. He knew what it would be before they said it, because that’s just the way they were, and He should know because He made them that way. Which was “Catch 22” because how do you get an unbiased review from palace courtiers and the pep squad?
No brainer, god had to create somebody absolutely ignorant about how he or she got here. It would behoove everybody already present to become invisible to maintain the mystery. This new somebody would receive skills and abilities sufficient to pose ultimate questions, and to invent answers to them. They were to be guided by various natural clues and signposts, wandering know-it-alls, and ambiguous events anonymously reported. The new somebodies would arrive naked in the world, and cobble together reasons and whys from the smorgasbord laid before them, with an occasional stick up the ass to keep them moving. (more…)
OLD BLACK MAGIC:
“Separateness is a useful illusion.” – The Big Kahuna.
Separateness is a youthful illusion. Jl.
“God, the original Tony Soprano.” – church sign, Simpsons.
The ancient Sumerians had no concept of guilt or sin. Later, the Renaissance considered a life unencumbered by revealed religion. Religionists study “The Book” in preference to studying themselves; they put enormous energy into it, which if applied to the exploration of self, might produce a more fulfilling result.
“Monotheism is the flip side of intolerance.” – TV Travel Channel on sacred sites, explaining Amarna, Egypt.
Note: In the typical Christian, Moslem, Jewish life, Life is a pain. One must suffer and hopefully endure until the bitter pill of death is administered. Within that pain is the typically human drive to pursue happiness. Happiness is fleeting, of course, but its pursuit keeps us busy, which alleviates the pain, and the fear we have of death. Pursuing happiness is an attempt to overcome and/or keep the pain at bay as long as humanly possible; but it is just a pastime after all, not a destination.
“[When I die] all these moments will be lost in time, like tears in the rain.” – Rutger Hauer, Bladerunner.
INAPPROPRIATE BEHAVIORS:
“What is it like to feel a stranger?” – – PBS question. Senator Craig?
I wrote: “Ryan’s wagon was parked by the curb with its tailgate down.” Spell check gave me: “The curb with its tailgate down parked Ryan’s wagon.” Typed: “Ryan’s tailgate was parked with its wagon down at the curb.” Speel check not trubled. Glow figger.
“Monte Markham as the voice of Plutarch.” – credit, Cleopatra, A&E Classroom. Get central casting! He doesn’t even sound like Plutarch.
She boasted she could shoot and manage a horse as well as a man. (Duck, guys!).
“There’s never been ANYTHING like it.” – Shaq, for Icy Hot.
We have different views of art. He draws a stick. I struggle for “stickness.” 8/97
Creative people routinely demonstrate how to get from here to there. 10/97
Q: “Just when are you coming down to earth, young man?” A: “When it’s all over, I hope.” – Fred Astaire, The Sky’s the Limit.
“No doesn’t mean no. It means you gotta cut a corner, work harder, and beat the system.” – Baloo, Disney’s Tailspin, 1/94. Walt Disney, always a powerful force for strong evangelistic coporatist morality.
“We want to talk about reducing nuclear weapons, particularly the kind that kill people.” – Casper Weinberger, Nixon’s Secretary of Defense, CBS News.
“Mr. Begin has offered to let each member of the PLO to leave Lebanon carrying an arm.” Dianne Sawyer, 6/30/82. But leave the other arm and both legs behind.
“On a farm with no watch dog, the fox rules the roost.” – Ancient Sumerian proverb.
“NEVAH GO THIRSTY AGAIN!”
“Don’t drink alone, Scarlet. People always find out, and it ruins the reputation.” – Rhett Butler (Clark Gable), Gone With the Wind.
DAMN LIBERAL CONSERVATIVES:
Against “tax and spend bleeding heart liberal socialist democrats,” place “rob, rape, and ruin selfish warmongering radical conservative republicans.”
Said of the Congress: “They have to find a way to institutionalize the existing situation, so they don’t have to fix it.”
“It’s the lie you tell yourself that matters.” – Inspector Morse, ’95.
“No sensible man would allow himself to be sent to war to defend a politician.” – Minister, The Dreyfus Affair.
Q: Why do we serve the system? A: Because it’s comforting in its routines and, like any abused child, we’d rather keep the horror we’ve got than deal with fear of the unknown and the uncertainty of change.
Our national debate has become timid. The Neville Brothers sing, “You can tell the truth, as long as you don’t tell too much.” So what can one do about it? Here’s a starter list:
Thomas Jefferson wrote, “I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of society but the people themselves.”
LAST COMMENT:
Pain is an itch we can’t scratch. All life is pain in the Buddhistic sense. Its temporal fleeting nature is a constant bitter sweetness, forever a tear on the edge of beauty, a sigh on the cusp of grief. We only get it for a moment, and sitting in silence, alone, we can feel its presence somewhere, always within, always informing, if we will it so.
Peace and Love, brothers and sisters. Keep on keepin’ on, and don’t forget to salute the Man in the Moon!
JUST KEEPS GETTING BETTER:
Published on Tuesday, July 28, 2009 by The Guardian/UK
Human Activity Is Driving Earth’s ‘Sixth Great Extinction Event’. Population growth, pollution, and invasive species are having a disastrous effect on species in the southern hemisphere, a major review by conservationists warns, by Ian Sample. Earth is experiencing its “sixth great extinction event” with disease and human activity taking a devastating toll on vulnerable species, according to a major review by conservationists.
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2009/07/28-11
Excerpt: SNEAKY PEOPLE, unpublished novella.
Okay, this is a story about me. It’s my diary, so I can write about anything I want – even things I wouldn’t tell other people (especially other men). I’m a sneaky person. I come from a long line of sneaky people – really sneaky people. We’re part of the anonymous swarm that comes out like rats – day or night – picking off top or bottom of the midden heap (depending upon status in the pack) – seeking sustenance while awaiting the ever-approaching End of the World.
Which is pretty much occurring every day. The End of the World is both cumulative and individual specific. On the upper end of the End of the World Scale is Climate Change, which promises wholesale extinction (and, some bitch winters and summers between now and then); and, on the other is the latest starving Somali, homeless person, or helpless geriatric. Somebody’s pretty much meeting the End of the World every single second.
I was born in San Francisco a bit before the mid-point of the Twentieth Century. My parents were apprehensive about the spreading World War of that time and, I believe, my arrival was an oasis of joy for them – odd as that seems to me now. My birth was an opportunity for them to hold the rest of the insane world temporarily at bay, basking in the momentary glow of life’s continuity. Like all young people, they huddled secretly under the covers with their arms around each other, whispering about futures and possibilities – hopes.
My presence – miniscule and infantile – was accepted as God’s reassurance that all of us – each one: Dad, Mom, and Jr. – would come out all right. In the end, the enemy would be defeated and the world brought majestically into the bright, painless peace of Forever After and the New Deal (which sounds like a rock group and if someone cops the name, I’ll sue).
However, my parents honestly felt that they were finishing the “undone business of World War I” – there were still German vermin to exterminate and, unexpectedly, the sudden need to fumigate Italy and delouse Japan.
Shortly after I was born, father was sent to the war by our beleaguered government and mother moved in with his mother – grandma – and three maiden aunts who were all destined to have affairs with transient servicemen who “might be killed in a matter of weeks,” and were. None of my aunts’ fellahs made it back. One aunt went bonkers, one married a dull-witted postman, and the third wed a fat automobile dealer and got a divorce from the rest of us.
Anyway, we waited at grandma’s for dad to come home.
He arrived late at night three years later. He was flown into San Francisco International and taxied seventeen miles to his mother’s Oceanside home – to his wife and growing son. I looked up at him as he stood over my bed.
“Did you fly home?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said with a pleased laugh. “Do you remember me?”
“I have your picture,” I replied, pointing to his image on my dresser.
He looked at himself in the photograph for a long time, silent and withdrawn. The day the photo had been taken, he had been a young soldier, vibrant, self-assured, and alive. His face now was subtly different from the one in the photograph mounted between fifty-caliber machinegun rounds. In the picture he was young and proud with new sergeant’s stripes on his Eighth Army Air Force uniform. Standing there looking at himself, he was weary and grim. A trace of the young man remained – a hint of optimism, which fired his eyes.
“I’ll see you tomorrow,” he said at last, hardly believing that this would and could be so, that the bombs were left far behind, and gratefully forgetful that half the world’s population was still awakening in a world of ruins – picking hungrily through the rubble, hunting rats for nourishment.
I learned that he’d been in photo reconnaissance. I liked the sound. The French word “reconnaissance” had a lean mean underground battlefield resonance. I was a romantic kid. (That drove Dad nuts – among other things). I learned, too, one evening when he was drinking, something he did more and more, that he had helped empty a rocket-hit orphanage one night in downtown London, carrying out its dead and dying children and their bloody parts.
He saw and lived with death as a routine for three years. His photograph war souvenir album had pictures of massive bombers dumping lethal rain on Dresden, Berlin, German gun emplacements in Normandy, French coastal towns, war ships and hospitals, trains, cars, horses, wagons, canals and villages. Now, home, he attacked normal civilian life as if it was the new enemy. He had lost time to make up, things to do, family to feed and a top to possibly find.
In his free time, he watched boxing on the new-fangled television, tense with pleasure waiting for the knockouts, heavy K. O. punches, and T. K. O. s swimming in blood. He watched the gymnastic exhibitions of professional wrestling until he realized that the mayhem wasn’t real. He watched John Wayne repeatedly and successfully storm Iwo Jima. He saw Errol Flynn shoot his way single-handedly through the entire Japanese Army in Burma. He observed as Jeff Chandler really died of pleurisy while filming a mediocre account of Merrill’s Marauders on location in Imperial Indochina. Pa’s latent violence had to translate into real life.
He punched Ma. He punched me. He drank himself finally and completely to death. In his scarred wake, he left two sons, one daughter, and his frightened, yet indefatigable wife. He also left behind the lingering echoes of Henry David Thoreau, “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”
Father was a desperate man.
I’ve thought since that he was born in belief, raised in faith, condemned to hell, pardoned to purgatory, and eventually dispatched to…wherever he went.
Mother always said, “The War changed him.” This is certainly so – I’ve seen other young men come back from Korea and Viet Nam. They all have Dad’s eyes. The men who fought at Salamis probably looked that way too. Bloody fields and death process slowly.
Because of all this, justifications of violence appall me. Its price is too high. Brought home in the eyes of our young men, violence compounds as it seeks its vent. Within the peacetime marketplace it ripples out on a high, spreading across the schoolyards, streaming into ghetto back alleys, finding its way into the boardroom. Man against man, clan against clan. So it goes, as Vonnegut says, and I? I go on, watching to left and right, mindful of the dangers on the street, wary in my sleep – as restless as I was at the mouth of my cave one million years ago.
The history of mankind is a dry narration of famous battles, famous generals and famous kings, interspersed with profiles of failed political, social, economic and religious systems, which all rose and fell on the profit line. The chronicle of anything else is incidental, a coffee table book. Art, music, literature, dance, theater, magic are a sideshow to the main show. Those things are the province of dreamers, romantics and fools. For, if anyone is able to live a placid life, outside the maniacal slashing and hacking of whole peoples intent on the obliteration of other whole peoples, then one is, indeed, fortunate.
Life is a series of accidents. Chance, not choice, governs (although, why we are in one spot at a particular time and not in another may be divinely inspired). However, I doubt there is a Master Plan. Master plans and master crimes require cumbersome plotting. One can, or should be able to see their patterns, but impulse fires most of us. We deal with consequences afterward, which is when they should properly be dealt with, I guess.
I’d like to do something to help my fellow human beings, but I don’t know what. Everybody’s fighting and clawing, biting and scratching. I’m hiding. Scared to death. Who wants to attract attention? The threat to life may be worldwide conflagration, or in the mouth of some filthy city alley, with a knife wielding, coked-up assailant standing over one’s punctured corpse. “Neither a peacekeeper, nor a lender be.” It’s too painful, too expensive, and too dangerous. Experience is a great teacher; if we survive the lesson, but we’re still not gonna get out of this alive.
I wish I could stop the clock. Turn back time until I’m just short of the primordial ooze – watch by degrees the slow progression of life. See just how long it takes to make a human being out of all that gloop. Think about just how quickly that complex organism can cancel itself out with a single bullet.
The universe is infinite. I don’t really understand what that means, and it’s expanding, but into what? It’s cosmic and vast and when you think about it, without the artificial augmentation of religious zealotry, perhaps meaningless. Even so, this ship was pilotless before we knew that it had no pilot and continues so and nothing changes that. Either way, I don’t expect the Creator to wash my dirty laundry or lift my heavy load. It’s clear I gotta hoe my own corn.
I am alive, well, and living past the immoral end of the Twentieth Century and on the ignorant cusp of the early Twenty-first – unhappily still under threat of the nuclear-bomb, dismayed by Russians and Chinese, the System and the decay of the World, as ever. “Is it just for the moment we live?” You betcha. What’s it all about, Alfie? The End of the World is only a heartbeat away. Whether one is one of a half million blown away at Hiroshima, drowning alone in the pool of a cliffside villa in Monterey, or choking in the arms of a lover on a sunny Egyptian Sunday.
Well, Diary, that’s my Summer Vacation. I’m going home now. Wonder what I’ll find? It’s still the End of the World and Sissy Wagner doesn’t love me anymore. Who’s going to do my laundry?
— JL:PDX, 8-09
IMPORTANT LINK: Bats are present throughout most of the world and perform vital ecological roles such as pollinating flowers and dispersing fruit seeds. Many tropical plant species depend entirely on bats for the distribution of their seeds.
Bats are on a clear trajectory toward oblivion. The Center for Biological Diversity has warned that the bat crisis is dire while calling for more funding to try to determine what, exactly, is killing America’s bats — and how the disease can be stopped.
http://www.biologicaldiversity.org/campaigns/bat_crisis_the_white-nose_syndrome/index.html
HOW TO FIGHT REPUBLICAN INSURANCE NAZIS:
ABSTRACT:
7 Ways We Can Fight Back Against the Rising Fascist Threat
Writing about fascism for Americans is a fraught business. A third of the readers dismiss the topic (and the blogger’s sanity); they’ve got their own definition, or anyone who invokes the F-word is a de facto alarmist of questionable credibility.
Another third dismiss it because America has been fascist since (choose one:) 1) 9/11; 2) Reagan; 3) McCarthy; 4) the Civil War; 5) July 4, 1776. For them, careful analysis and worried warnings are dangerously naive.
The final third engage in thoughtful discussion, including what must be done.
The most insidious part of fascism is that when it’s obvious to everyone that these people are dangerously out of control, it’s too late to do anything about it. Early warnings are the business of futurists. We can still change our minds, and spend our future elsewhere, but we are now actively choosing, whether aware of it or not. Things are happening now that set a course we may be unable to alter.
How do we turn back? A few basic principles:
First: Teabaggers must not win. When a bully learns that intimidation and threats work, he does more of it. The longer he goes without penalty, the worse he gets and the harder it is to stop him. Do nothing, and he takes over.
It only takes a handful of thugs to terrorize people into giving up civil rights, abandoning democracy and doing what they’re told. The main imperative becomes staying off the goons’ radar. All enforcers need do is make a horrific example out of “troublemakers” now and then to keep everybody else in line.
With a colossal conservative investment in organizing and directing teabaggers, we’d be stupid to believe that this will go away when Congress returns in September. Having had a taste of power and publicity, these newly empowered mobs are likely to stick around and see what else they can muck up.
Our choice is stark: knock them back while they’re new, small and not yet entrenched; or later when they have real power to fight, and the cost is higher.
Second: Think nationally, fight locally. Conservatives run this fight as a national campaign, but the terror that fuels fascism is always intensely, intimately local. Fascist goon squads recruit from the neighborhood, built on people we know. Since that’s where they start, that’s where they have to be stopped. This is why all the best tactics involve community-level action. Anybody who sits this one out because they assume that folks in D.C. will handle it shouldn’t be surprised when they get “special treatment” from longtime neighbors, or discover their car vandalized.
That’s the next baby step from where we are now; and in some places, it’s already happening. Winning means getting out and defending community standards and boundaries while they’re still there to be defended.
Third: Use nonviolent resistance — leave heavy lifting and rough enforcement to police. The only way to stop a bully is to stand up to them, but that doesn’t involve eye-for-an-eye. If we meet thuggery with thuggery, we lose, because they’re better at, and enjoy it. The right wing is looking hard to make a case that they’re innocent victims of the “left”. The Nazis used this kind of victim-blaming to tremendous effect as they built up their party. We must not give our proto-brownshirts any basis to make the same kind of argument.
It’s about the moral high ground. Our choices must be consistent with our values. Standing up for health care reform is important; but before that, we need to stand up for civil discourse and free speech. We’re defending the rule of law; our best tactic is to use the law. When people from either side cross the line, it’s time for police and prosecutors to assert that bullying people in a public meeting (or anywhere else) is illegal and will not be tolerated.
Fourth: Make sure media gets the story right. Teabaggers run out of power if the media turns off their cameras, but this nefariously incited drama is a real ratings-booster. Left alone, the media (local news in particular) turn these hate and fear mongers into cultural heroes. The best cure for bad speech is good speech: documented, on YouTube, blogged, spread widely; a coordinated rapid-response letterwriting to local papers; and keeping local reporters well-fed with news of concerned nonpartisan citizens working to keep control of democratic discourse in the face of organized thugs trying to suppress it. Since the media are watching, make sure they see it all.
Fifth: Support legislators who don’t show fear. The Democratic leadership knows that these noisy, scary people don’t represent the 73 percent of Americans who support health care reform. The GOP runs the risk of being marginalized as the Party of No, and the Party of Moonbat Crazy. If you’ve never attended a public meeting, August 2009 is the month to start. Your congressperson’s Web site probably lists his or her schedule, or a number to call to inquire.
That’s a first step. Do more. Write. Call. Find out where your local congressional office is, and drop by. Tell staff how you feel about health care reform, teabaggers, your legislator’s courage. If they’re stressed, encourage them. A constituent in the office counts. One visit or call is good. More is better. Contact your representatives at least once a week to support their public service.
Sixth: Shut down the hate talkers. Teabaggers come straight out of right-wing talk-radio audiences, mainlining raw emotion and toxic misinformation: “death panels!” “kill your granny!” “Join the “resistance!” Cut off this endless torrent of lies and fearmongering to power down the whole movement. Basic recipe:
Finally: Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. Conservatives invest a lot of money and effort to build a mass movement aimed at destroying democratic government — and they’re not going to let up as long as Democrats are in control. This is our new reality — and it comes straight out of Chapter 6 of Hitler’s Mein Kampf. They intend to keep the outrage junkies high with never-ending, made-up reasons to act out. Which means that even if we win this round, we must push back against the bullies, over and over, for the next three to seven years.
There are only two outcomes: get very good at spotting and stopping these attempts at a brownshirt takeover the minute they crop up; or they get very good at public intimidation and keep ratcheting it up toward violence and goon rule.
That’s how it’s going to be for the rest of this administration. The sooner we resign ourselves to the zero-sum nature of this fight, the sooner we can get on with getting good at it.
Sara Robinson is a fellow at the Campaign for America’s Future and a consulting partner with the Cognitive Policy Works in Seattle. One of the few trained social futurists in North America, she has blogged on authoritarian and extremist movements at Orcinus since 2006, and is a founding member of Group News Blog.
Read the full story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/141929/
One nation indivisible.
Thousands March in 3-Day Showdown with Banking Industry By Kari Lydersen, AlterNet.
Tired of bailouts and fat paychecks for those that created the economic catastrophe, marchers made clear demands to tame an out-of-control financial system.
Workers gave pink slips to the country’s top bankers Tuesday morning to culminate three days of protests, billed as the Showdown in Chicago, during the American Bankers’ Association’s annual meeting.
Before a jeering and cheering crowd of 5,000 union members and activists, Armando Robles, president of UE Local 1110 and a leader of the Republic Windows factory occupation last year, attached big, fluorescent pink slips to larger-than-life cutouts of retiring Bank of America CEO Ken Lewis, Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf and JP Morgan Chase CEO James Dimon.
The three CEOs were probably among the bank officials meeting in the Sheraton behind the stage that featured speeches by AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, Change to Win Chairwoman Anna Burger, the Rev. Jesse Jackson and workers and community leaders.
After “firing” the bank CEOs, Adam Kader of the workers group Arise Chicago presented a notice that the banks’ $17.8 trillion “loan” in taxpayer-bailout funds is due since, he said, banks have not complied with the conditions placed on the handout by the people. READ MORE:
http://www.alternet.org/workplace/143547/thousands_march_in_3-day_showdown_with_banking_industry
Tea Party Movement Returns, This Time with Much More Dangerous and Explicit Rhetoric By Frank Schaeffer, AlterNet.
It’s not too hard to guess where talk of ‘Judgement Day’ can lead to in the context of a right-wing, gun-loving movement.
According to the “Tea Party” website, Tea Party Express II: Countdown To Judgment Day” is underway. Here’s how their website describes it:
All throughout the recent Tea Party Express national bus tour we kept receiving calls from people around the nation who lived far away from the route our buses took across America. We vowed at the time to keep the Tea Party Express effort alive — and that’s exactly what we are doing.Join us from October 25th to November 11th, 2009 as we tell Congress and the White House: “Enough!” Let’s stand up and stop the bailouts, cap and trade, out-of-control spending, government-run health care, and higher taxes! We’re back and determined to take our country back!
What will happen on their predicted “Judgment Day”?
If you buy the biblical spin of the Religious Right folks — that make up the bulk of the Tea Party movement — the implication is clear: Jesus will soon return, send all Democrats, gays, blacks, progressives, liberals, college-educated unbelievers, etc., to Hell, while saving what Sarah Palin calls “us” “Real Americans” — in other words unreconstructed frightened and resentful white lower middle class Americans.
(As a former right wing evangelical anti-abortion leader who built a good career from these folks — until I quit in disgust with myself, the anti-American nature of the movement and the takeover the Republican Party by extremists — I know of what I speak.)
If you put the secular/right’s “tree-of-Liberty-must-be-watered-by-the-blood-of-tyrants-Timothy McVeigh spin on the Judgment Day scenario; then there will soon be a hoped for bloody day of reckoning for the occupant of the White House.
The Case for Marijuana Legalization and Regulation By Paul Armentano, AlterNet.
An exclusive look at the historic testimony prepared for a special hearing on legalizing marijuana to the California Assembly.
The following is the testimony NORML Deputy Director Paul Armentano will deliver on Oct. 28 to the California Assembly Public Safety Committee’s special hearing on “the legalization of marijuana: social, fiscal and legal implications for California.” Assemblyman Tom Ammiano, D-San Francisco, sponsor of AB 390, The Marijuana Control, Regulation and Education Act, is the chairman of the committee.
By any objective standard, marijuana prohibition is an abject failure.
Nationwide, U.S. law enforcement have arrested over 20 million American citizens for marijuana offenses since 1965, yet today marijuana is more prevalent than ever before, adolescents have easier access to marijuana than ever before, the drug is more potent than ever before, and there is more violence associated with the illegal marijuana trade than ever before.
Over 100 million Americans nationally have used marijuana despite prohibition, and 1 in 10 — according to current government survey data — use it regularly.
The criminal prohibition of marijuana has not dissuaded anyone from using marijuana or reduced its availability; however, the strict enforcement of this policy has adversely impacted the lives and careers of millions of people who simply elected to use a substance to relax that is objectively safer than alcohol.
NORML believes that the state of California ought to amend criminal prohibition and replace it with a system of legalization, taxation, regulation and education.
The case for legalization and regulation
Only through state government regulation will we be able to bring necessary controls to the commercial marijuana market. READ MORE:
http://www.alternet.org/drugreporter/143558/the_case_for_marijuana_legalization_and_regulation
30 Reasons Fox News Is Not Legit By Eric Boehlert, Media Matters for America.
Fox News routinely, and blatantly, breaks the code to which ethical journalists are supposed to aspire. READ MORE:
http://www.alternet.org/media/143541/30_reasons_fox_news_is_not_legit
Why Won’t Obama Send Condolence Letters to the Parents of Soldiers Who Have Committed Suicide? By Amy Goodman, Democracy Now!.
The bereaved parents of Chancellor Keesling, a US soldier who took his own life in Iraq, wonder why the death of their son is treated differently than other mortalities. READ MORE:
Apocalypse Soon: Halloween Interview on Overpopulation with Kierán Suckling
Scared of ghosts, goblins, and jack-o-lanterns? None of those are on the Santa Fe Reporter‘s list of the top five environmental horrors. But human overpopulation is. “Apocalypse Soon: Today’s Environmental Horrors Could Lead to a Scary Sci-Fi Future” interviews Center for Biological Diversity director Kierán Suckling. Click below to read the whole article. Here are few excerpts:
“Virtually everything that is destroying wildlife habitat and the environment is driven by overpopulation,” Kierán Suckling, executive director of the nonprofit Center for Biological Diversity, says.
“Whether it’s too many people diverting water out of the Rio Grande or too much wood use leading to the logging of old-growth forests, the bottom line is there are too many people using too many resources to be able to have a healthy environment.”
“It’s great to focus on reducing our carbon footprint, but…unless we start reducing the footprints to begin with, we and other species are not going to survive on this planet.”
“The majority of environmental groups avoid addressing overpopulation like the plague. I think that’s largely because they lack the courage of their convictions. They are fearful that in saying that [we are overpopulated] they will be viewed as being anti-human somehow–as if squalor and overpopulation are somehow pro-human.”
Read the Santa Fe Reporter interview and learn what the Center’s doing to confront the overpopulation crisis head-on.
Iraq debate – personal historical view
Date: Wednesday, February 14, 2007 8:25 PM
Colin Powell said, “Don’t get into war unless it’s absolutely necessary, and when we do, go to win, no half measures,” but it doesn’t apply very much in real life.
As a Vietnam era veteran, I know Johnson’s phony Gulf of Tonkin Incident fished us into war (I was drafted). He bought into the radical right’s communist containment scare. The Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars wrote:
“In part, the process of deception has also been unintentional. Much of the rhetoric and many of the actions that have accompanied our… involvement have been ad hoc responses to situations of stress: a cumulative series of reflex moves and lunges produced by deepening executive anxiety, defensiveness, alarm, desperation, and even a sensed state of siege. Similarly in rhetoric, our ‘national honor,’ ‘[enemies] with nuclear weapons,’ and the goal of ‘peace with honor’ – all have misled the public. At the root of executive deception is a vast amount of executive self-deception – or, .to put it bluntly, stupidity.”
America blithely ignores offers of friendship and makes enemies as fast as we can throw the first sucker punch. This is not military sense; it’s a bad case of ideology and invention over reason and fact. But, Americans don’t run out when the fight’s tough – see: Khe San. We stood nearly twenty years while our military-industrial complex ruined Vietnam. Our prolonged stay, and side invasions of Cambodia and Laos, generationally disrupted and destabilized Southeast Asia, distorted America’s rule of law, and led directly to the Bush neoconservative leadership miasma.
We are now fighting a war for the health and life of the republic. Look at how the radical right Republicans have warped the nation they want us to fight for, die for, and honor. The self-destructive insanity of the radical right Republican way of war makes it looks as if the bad guys have already won.
NEWS LINKS:
Published on Friday, September 11, 2009 by TomDispatch.com
How 9/11 Should Be Remembered. The Extraordinary Achievements of Ordinary People by Rebecca Solnit. Eight years ago, 2,600 people lost their lives in Manhattan, and then several million people lost their story. The al-Qaeda attack on the Twin Towers did not defeat New Yorkers. It destroyed the buildings, contaminated the region, killed thousands, and disrupted the global economy, but it most assuredly did not conquer the citizenry. They were only defeated when their resilience was stolen from them by clichés, by the invisibility of what they accomplished that extraordinary morning, and by the very word “terrorism,” which suggests that they, or we, were all terrified. The distortion, even obliteration, of what actually happened was a necessary precursor to launching the obscene response that culminated in a war on Iraq, a war we lost (even if some of us don’t know that yet), and the loss of civil liberties and democratic principles that went with it. Only We Can Terrorize Ourselves
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/09/11
Published on Friday, September 11, 2009 by The Nation
Afghanistan and the Wages of Empire by John Nichols. It is amusing, if remarkable, that there are still some players in Washington who try to maintain the fantasy that Afghan President Hamid Karzai governs with anything akin to legitimacy. Karzai, an alleged oil-industry fixer awarded control of his country by occupying powers, has always served with strings attached.
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/09/11-8
Posted September 11, 2009.
Obama’s Quagmire Looks a Lot like Vietnam by Robert Scheer, Truthdig.
The way he’s headed on Afghanistan, Barack Obama is threatened with a quagmire that could bog down his presidency. True, he doesn’t seem a bit like Lyndon Johnson, but the way he’s headed on Afghanistan, Barack Obama is threatened with a quagmire that could bog down his presidency. LBJ also had a progressive agenda in mind, beginning with his war on poverty, but it was soon overwhelmed by the cost and divisiveness engendered by a meaningless, and seemingly endless, war in Vietnam.
http://www.alternet.org/world/142565/obama%27s_quagmire_looks_a_lot_like_vietnam/
Victory is a state of mind.
RECENT NEWS FROM THE FRONT:
Published on Thursday, September 3, 2009 by the Associated Press ‘We Are Heading Towards an Abyss’ U.N. chief tells 150 governments that time running out on climate change. GENEVA – U.N. chief Ban Ki-moon told a meeting of some 150 governments on Thursday that time is running out for a new climate deal to cut greenhouse gas emissions.
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2009/09/03
Published on Friday, September 4, 2009 by The Guardian/UK Global Warming Has Made Arctic Summers Hottest for 2,000 Years. The Arctic has warmed as a result of climate change, despite the Earth being farther from the sun during summer months by Ian Sample. Warming as a result of increased levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere has overwhelmed a millennia-long cycle of natural cooling in the Arctic, raising temperatures in the region to their highest for at least 2,000 years, according to a report.
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2009/09/04-3
Published on Friday, September 4, 2009 by The Guardian/UK Current Economic Growth Model Is ‘Immoral’, Says Prescott. With the world’s population growing to nine million by 2050, Britain’s former deputy PM predicts far more crucial and complex talks in Copenhagen than in Kyoto by Jonathan Watts. John Prescott, the former UK climate negotiator, called on developed nations today to accept a new model of economic growth that would create a more equitable spread of carbon emissions in the world. Speaking to the Guardian in Beijing, Prescott said talks at Copenhagen would probably not be decided until an 11th-hour crisis, but that no global consensus could be reached without a fairer spread of emissions.
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2009/09/04-8
Verizon Wireless Faces Ire Over Mountaintop Removal Rally
Currently, Verizon Wireless is cosponsoring a pro-mountaintop-removal, anti-climate, anti-union Labor Day rally — and the Center for Biological Diversity is leading a pressure campaign to compel a quick about-face. Massey Energy’s “Friends of America” rally, to be held atop a former surface mine in West Virginia next Monday, will cheer for the devastating practice of mountaintop-removal coal mining, which blows up mountains and chokes waterways with debris in Appalachian habitat. The rally, organized by coal giant Massey Energy, will guest-star global warming denier Lord Christopher Monckton, and boasts an on-site anti-climate legislation petition to sign. Further, the rally’s Web site homepage shockingly features the company’s CEO on video accusing “environmental extremists” of destroying jobs by opposing mountaintop removal. (Meanwhile, the rally is competing with the nearby 71st annual United Coal Workers of America Labor Day celebration for attendees.)
But thanks to the Center’s immediate leap into action and bold national grassroots campaign, Verizon Wireless may be losing more than a few of its 87 million customers: Thousands of them are asking, Can you hear us now? and pledging to spend their money with their conscience. On August 30, the Center notified Verizon Wireless’ CEO in no uncertain terms that Verizon must withdraw support for the rally and mountaintop removal or we’d have to tell our 225,000 supporters why we left their pro-coal, anti-environmentalist, anti-union company. Now we’ve joined forces with CREDO Action, and in just three days our concerned citizens submitted 69,000 letters and made hundreds of phone calls to Verizon telling it to drop the rally.
Join us in commanding Verizon Wireless to withdraw its sponsorship and read more about our opposition in Advertizing Age. Help submit more than 100,000 letters by Labor Day — join the cause on Facebook, tweet about Verizon, and learn why Grist magazine calls Massey’s CEO “the scariest polluter in America” in this New York Times piece.
CENTER FOR BIOLOGICAL DIVERSITY.
http://www.biologicaldiversity.org/
Tip o' the hat to ALL HAT NO CATTLE: Watching the Cons in Conservatism.
ABSTRACT: Republican Fascists.
EXPERTS SAY:
PAUL KRUGMAN, New York Times.
At recent town halls, angry protestors are yelling, “This is America!” to drown out public debate, and threatening democratic members of Congress with lynching for daring to speak the truth about health care. Some commentators want us to believe that this is just good old civil disobedience. It is not.
Experts on right-wing culture and politics say we are finally becoming a fascist state. A fascist American future looms in the very near future if these people are allowed to win — or even hold their ground.
Published on Friday, August 7, 2009 by The New York Times
THE TOWN HALL MOB by Paul Krugman
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/08/07-1
William L. Shirer, Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. Simon & Schuster.
“…Hitler organized a bunch of roughneck war veterans into ‘strong-arm’ squads…These uniformed rowdies… soon took to breaking up [meetings] of other parties. Hitler told an audience, ‘The National Socialist Movement will in the future ruthlessly prevent – if necessary by force – all meetings or lectures that are likely to distract the minds of our fellow countrymen.’”
Frank Schaeffer, AlterNet: writer and author of Crazy for God: How I Grew Up As One Of The Elect, Helped Found The Religious Right, And Lived To Take All (Or Almost All) Of It Back.
Here’s the emerging American version of the fascist’s formula: combine millions of dollars of lobbyists’ money with embittered troublemakers who have a small army of not terribly bright white angry people (collected over decades through pro-life mass mailing networks) at their beck and call, ever ready to believe any myth or lie circulated by the semi literate and completely and routinely misinformed right wing Evangelical religious underground. Then put his little mob together with the insurance companies’ big bucks. That’s how it works — American Brown Shirts at the ready. Republican leaders taking insurance industry money and organizing what amounts to roving bands of thugs not only need to be exposed but should also become absolute pariahs.
The Lobbyist-run Groups “Americans for Prosperity ” and “FreedomWorks” Dick Armey-Orchestrated Memo:
Here is a leaked excerpt from the folks organizing the intimidation campaign:
THE “SCORCHED EARTH POLICY”
Dick Armey and company have been driven mad by their reversal, not just of political fortunes but of seeing that they’ve wasted their lives. They now know they were wrong: about the country, the free market, war for fun and profit, and what the American people really want. They made their best case and were rejected by the American people — and by history. Bush was their man and he turned out to be a fool. So now all the Republican gurus have left is what the defeated Germans of World War Two had: a scorched earth policy. If they can’t win then everyone must go down. Obama must fail! The country must fail!
No, I don’t believe that these people are about to take over the country. No, the sky is not falling. But the Republican Party is. It is now profoundly anti-American.
Sara Robinson, AlterNet: Fellow at the Campaign for America’s Future, and a consulting partner with the Cognitive Policy Works in Seattle. One of the few trained social futurists in North America, she has blogged on authoritarian and extremist movements at Orcinus since 2006, and is a founding member of Group News Blog.
What is fascism?
Pre-eminent historian Robert Paxton defines the term as: “a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.”
Fascism unfolds in five stages.
In the first stage, a rural movement emerges to effect some kind of nationalist renewal. They come together to restore a broken social order, always drawing on themes of unity, order, and purity. Reason is rejected in favor of passionate emotion, rooted in the promise of restoring lost national pride by resurrecting the culture’s traditional myths and values, and purging society of the toxic influence of outsiders and intellectuals blamed for current misery.
Modern American conservatism was built on these themes. From “Morning in America” to the Rapture-ready religious right to the white nationalism promoted by the GOP through various racist groups, American proto-fascism offers redemption by promising to restore the innocence of a traditional, white, Christian, male-dominated America. The entire Republican party now openly defines itself along these lines. It is blatantly racist, sexist, repressed, exclusionary, and permanently addicted to the politics of fear and rage. It has no shame, no apologies. These same threads weave through every fascist movement in history.
In the second stage, fascist movements take root, turn into real political parties, and seize their seat at the table of power. The political base comes from rural, less-educated parts of the country; and offers themselves as informal goon squads organized to intimidate farmworkers on behalf of large landowners. The KKK persecuted black sharecroppers and enforced Jim Crow. The Italian Squadristi and the German Brownshirts broke up farmers’ strikes. These days, GOP-sanctioned anti-immigrant groups make life hell for Hispanic agricultural workers in the US. GOP right-wing goon squads are getting basic training that they may eventually use to intimidate the rest of us.
The second stage also depends on a weak liberal state, whose inadequacies create disorder, decline, or humiliation; and political deadlock because the Right – heir to power but unable to continue to wield it alone – refuses to accept a growing Left as a legitimate governing partner.” Hitler and Mussolini both took power under these same circumstances: “deadlock of constitutional government (produced in part by the polarization that the fascists abetted); conservative leaders who felt threatened by loss of capacity to keep the population under control at a moment of massive popular mobilization; an advancing Left; and conservative leaders who refused to work with that Left and who felt unable to continue to govern against the Left without further reinforcement.”
Sounds eerily like the dire straits Republicans are now in. Though the GOP has been humiliated, rejected, and reduced to rump status by a series of epic national catastrophes mostly of its own making, its leadership can’t even imagine governing cooperatively with the newly mobilized and ascendant Democrats. Lacking legitimate routes back to power, their last hope is to invest the hardcore remainder of their base with an undeserved legitimacy, recruit them as shock troops, and overthrow American democracy by force. If they can’t win elections or policy fights, they’re more than willing to take it to the streets, and seize power by bullying Americans into silence and complicity.
When that unholy alliance is made, the third stage — the transition to full-fledged government fascism — begins.
The third stage: being there
A deliberate, committed institutional partnership is forming between America’s conservative elites and its emerging homegrown brownshirt horde.
The “Teabag Movement” was created out of whole cloth by astroturf groups like Dick Armey’s FreedomWorks and Tim Phillips’ Americans for Prosperity, with massive media help from FOX News. The nonsense-issue Birther fracas is openly ratified by congressional Republicans. Armey professionally-produced a field manual that carefully instructs conservative goon squads in the fine art of disrupting the democratic governing process. Republican House Minority Leader John Boehner applauds and promotes a video of the disruptions and looks forward to “a long, hot August for Democrats in Congress.”
This is the sign we were waiting for — the one that tells us that yes, kids: we are there now. America’s conservative elites have openly thrown in with the country’s legions of discontented far right thugs. They have explicitly deputized them and empowered them to act as their enforcement arm on America’s streets, sanctioning the physical harassment and intimidation of workers, liberals, and public officials who won’t do their political or economic bidding.
This is the catalyzing moment at which honest-to-Hitler fascism begins. It’s also our very last chance to stop it.
The Road Ahead
We’ve arrived. We are now parked on the exact spot where our best experts tell us full-blown fascism is born. Every day that the conservatives in Congress, the right-wing talking heads, and their noisy minions are allowed to hold up our ability to govern the country is another day we’re slowly creeping across the final line beyond which, history tells us, no country has ever been able to return.
How do we pull back? That’s my next post.
Published on Sunday, August 9, 2009 by OurFuture.org
FASCIST AMERICA: ARE WE THERE YET? by Sara Robinson
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/08/09-5
READ THE FULL ARTICLES AT THE LINKS PROVIDED
HOW TO FIGHT REPUBLICAN INSURANCE NAZIS:
Writing about fascism for Americans is a fraught business. A third of the readers dismiss the topic (and the blogger’s sanity); they’ve got their own definition, or anyone who invokes the F-word is a de facto alarmist of questionable credibility.
Another third dismiss it because America has been fascist since (choose one:) 1) 9/11; 2) Reagan; 3) McCarthy; 4) the Civil War; 5) July 4, 1776. For them, careful analysis and worried warnings are dangerously naive.
The final third engage in thoughtful discussion, including what must be done.
The most insidious part of fascism is that when it’s obvious to everyone that these people are dangerously out of control, it’s too late to do anything about it. Early warnings are the business of futurists. We can still change our minds, and spend our future elsewhere, but we are now actively choosing, whether aware of it or not. Things are happening now that set a course we may be unable to alter.
How do we turn back? A few basic principles:
First: Teabaggers must not win. When a bully learns that intimidation and threats work, he does more of it. The longer he goes without penalty, the worse he gets and the harder it is to stop him. Do nothing, and he takes over.
It only takes a handful of thugs to terrorize people into giving up civil rights, abandoning democracy and doing what they’re told. The main imperative becomes staying off the goons’ radar. All enforcers need do is make a horrific example out of “troublemakers” now and then to keep everybody else in line.
With a colossal conservative investment in organizing and directing teabaggers, we’d be stupid to believe that this will go away when Congress returns in September. Having had a taste of power and publicity, these newly empowered mobs are likely to stick around and see what else they can muck up.
Our choice is stark: knock them back while they’re new, small and not yet entrenched; or later when they have real power to fight, and the cost is higher.
Second: Think nationally, fight locally. Conservatives run this fight as a national campaign, but the terror that fuels fascism is always intensely, intimately local. Fascist goon squads recruit from the neighborhood, built on people we know. Since that’s where they start, that’s where they have to be stopped. This is why all the best tactics involve community-level action. Anybody who sits this one out because they assume that folks in D.C. will handle it shouldn’t be surprised when they get “special treatment” from longtime neighbors, or discover their car vandalized.
That’s the next baby step from where we are now; and in some places, it’s already happening. Winning means getting out and defending community standards and boundaries while they’re still there to be defended.
Third: Use nonviolent resistance — leave heavy lifting and rough enforcement to police. The only way to stop a bully is to stand up to them, but that doesn’t involve eye-for-an-eye. If we meet thuggery with thuggery, we lose, because they’re better at, and enjoy it. The right wing is looking hard to make a case that they’re innocent victims of the “left”. The Nazis used this kind of victim-blaming to tremendous effect as they built up their party. We must not give our proto-brownshirts any basis to make the same kind of argument.
It’s about the moral high ground. Our choices must be consistent with our values. Standing up for health care reform is important; but before that, we need to stand up for civil discourse and free speech. We’re defending the rule of law; our best tactic is to use the law. When people from either side cross the line, it’s time for police and prosecutors to assert that bullying people in a public meeting (or anywhere else) is illegal and will not be tolerated.
Fourth: Make sure media gets the story right. Teabaggers run out of power if the media turns off their cameras, but this nefariously incited drama is a real ratings-booster. Left alone, the media (local news in particular) turn these hate and fear mongers into cultural heroes. The best cure for bad speech is good speech: documented, on YouTube, blogged, spread widely; a coordinated rapid-response letterwriting to local papers; and keeping local reporters well-fed with news of concerned nonpartisan citizens working to keep control of democratic discourse in the face of organized thugs trying to suppress it. Since the media are watching, make sure they see it all.
Fifth: Support legislators who don’t show fear. The Democratic leadership knows that these noisy, scary people don’t represent the 73 percent of Americans who support health care reform. The GOP runs the risk of being marginalized as the Party of No, and the Party of Moonbat Crazy. If you’ve never attended a public meeting, August 2009 is the month to start. Your congressperson’s Web site probably lists his or her schedule, or a number to call to inquire.
That’s a first step. Do more. Write. Call. Find out where your local congressional office is, and drop by. Tell staff how you feel about health care reform, teabaggers, your legislator’s courage. If they’re stressed, encourage them. A constituent in the office counts. One visit or call is good. More is better. Contact your representatives at least once a week to support their public service.
Sixth: Shut down the hate talkers. Teabaggers come straight out of right-wing talk-radio audiences, mainlining raw emotion and toxic misinformation: “death panels!” “kill your granny!” “Join the “resistance!” Cut off this endless torrent of lies and fearmongering to power down the whole movement. Basic recipe:
Finally: Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. Conservatives invest a lot of money and effort to build a mass movement aimed at destroying democratic government — and they’re not going to let up as long as Democrats are in control. This is our new reality — and it comes straight out of Chapter 6 of Hitler’s Mein Kampf. They intend to keep the outrage junkies high with never-ending, made-up reasons to act out. Which means that even if we win this round, we must push back against the bullies, over and over, for the next three to seven years.
There are only two outcomes: get very good at spotting and stopping these attempts at a brownshirt takeover the minute they crop up; or they get very good at public intimidation and keep ratcheting it up toward violence and goon rule.
That’s how it’s going to be for the rest of this administration. The sooner we resign ourselves to the zero-sum nature of this fight, the sooner we can get on with getting good at it.
Sara Robinson is a fellow at the Campaign for America’s Future and a consulting partner with the Cognitive Policy Works in Seattle. One of the few trained social futurists in North America, she has blogged on authoritarian and extremist movements at Orcinus since 2006, and is a founding member of Group News Blog.
Read the full story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/141929/
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