Unpopular Ideas

Non-Regularity in Posting

2012-01-30T00:36:00.003-05:00

I wonder why I am so unable to post something every day on this site, say, for at least a week running. Instead I'm averaging about one a week, if I'm lucky. After all, every day I visit a number of other sites, hoping to see something new, and usually that happens. It's not that I'm short of subjects. Every morning I wake up with my head buzzing with things I could say, and more come flooding in throughout the day. And it's not that I haven't already written a lot of stuff anyway --- some might say far too much, for a weblog that nobody reads. This coming April will mark eight years since I started this weblog, and in that time I've written over 1,250 posts -- very few of which are only two sentences long.

I guess it's because, having finished the two big jobs that I started at the beginning of this winter -- fixing the leaks in my homemade pumphouse and cleaning out and reroofing my also homemade (as is everything else around here except the vehicles) car shed -- I am now spending the rest of this winter, and longer if I can manage it, working on my big stained glass Iris window, morning, noon, and night, and I don't allot much time for anything else. But having steadily avoided even so much as looking at things like facebook and twitter -- as much because I don't like those ill-chosen names as for any other reason -- I still like having this site, and in fact I feel kind of distinguished in having kept it going for so long, after reading from time to time that the great majority of people abandon their blogs within a week or two of starting one.

Two Recent Cases of Eloquences for the Good

2012-01-30T00:28:00.001-05:00

Lots of progressive sites are carrying a video showing Cory Booker, the mayor of Newark, New Jersey, refuting the end run that C. Christie, the governor of Booker's state, is trying to use to bury the law that the N.J. legislature recently passed to allow same-sex marriages. Christie opposes those unions but for political reasons would rather not veto the measure, and he is saying that the issue should instead be decided by all the N.J. voters, in a referendum.

My own view on this matter is that people should be allowed to marry anybody they damn well please and who in turn would want to marry them, regardless of gender. This is even though I have no understanding at all as to why a man would rather marry another man when there are all these much more desirable and fitting and interesting creatures called "women" everywhere you look. But then I also don't understand why people like beer, eggplant, and rap or country music either.

Christie is quoted as saying that this issue is too important to be left to the "129 people" in the state legislature and should be decided by all the citizens. But if that's true, then what's the use of having legislatures of any kind? Should they then be left to attend only to the picayune stuff? --Well, that's not a bad idea, since legislators tend to be a bunch of picayune rascals anyway. But that means that all the really important issues would be at the mercy of whatever the prevailing bigotries in the state are at the time. The thinking on legislators, and judges, too -- despite the bad luck with them that the Greeks and the Romans had right from the start -- is that they're wiser than the general run of people and will usually make the right decisions regardless of all.

Mayor Booker's rebuttal to Christie was brief but complete. He seems to have been able to make it right off the cuff, and I was highly impressed, as I was with the general aspects of the man himself. I had vaguely heard of him some time ago, but I didn't know that he had become the mayor of Newark, and anyone who undertakes that job is to be highly commended for that act alone, because Newark could lead other U.S. cities like Detroit, Gary, and East St. Louis in being perennially under the worst kinds of distress. Mayor Booker has all the appearance and sound of being highly competent, and he seems to have the potential of some day soon becoming B. Obama the Second, not in the sense of the kind of person that Obama is but instead in regard to accomplishments.

It should be said, though, that Booker's eloquence was a slam dunk, because the trickbag in Christie's idea is so easy to see.

For one thing, those on Christie's side would think they're on to something by arguing that he is being eminently reasonable, since right now polls indicate that 53% of New Jerseyans are in favor of allowing same-sex marriage. But the truth is connected with the fact as soon as a person gets filthy rich, his next move usually is to perpetuate the filth by taking Republican stands, and that's why it's so much more financially profitable to be a regressive than it is to be progressive. This is openly and vividly exemplified today by a formerly little known billionaire named Adelson, who has almost single-handedly backed the N. Gingrich campaign with 10 (ten) million bucks so far, with more available. I thought there were campaign laws against such things, and I don't understand how that can be, but there it is. And thus Republican money could and most likely would reverse that N.J. same-sex measure in very short order if it was put to a referendum.

Another reason why Booker had no trouble in shooting gigantic holes in Christie's proposal was that it is the easiest thing in the world to say how the voting would have gone in all the segregationist states of the South, and elsewhere, as Christie says should have been done, back in the 1960's, if the Rainbow desire to gain their proper civil rights had been put to referendums. Thumbs down everywhere, especially since Rainbows were not even allowed to vote. And in fact, I am now wondering if Christie's notion will give the Republicans the idea of trying to realize in one big swoop their fervent and obvious desire to roll back not just a few but all the Civil Rights advances of the past 60 years by seeing if they can bring about a review of all the Civil Rights of so-called "black" people and putting them to state and even national referendums.

Meanwhile, the other instance of "recent eloquences for the good" refers to a Tunisian writer named Hele Beji.

A couple of days ago, in his Informed Comment weblog, Juan Cole presented a statement titled "We Are All Tunisian Jews" that he had lifted from a French publication, in which Ms. Beji made an all-encompassing and incredibly eloquent protest to an outcry that had been made by some Tunisian religious extremists, upon the arrival in Tunisia of a Hamas leader, with words like "Death to the Jews!"

She quite rightly roundly condemned this attitude on the part of Tunisians anywhere, in a deeply heartfelt statement that could be profitably addressed not only to the Tunisians but also to the successful revolutionaries in Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Syria, and all the other Middle Eastern countries that have been rising up against their despotic rulers, and on beyond those to just about any revolution that has ever been made or will be made. This is because of the well-known tendency of a certain percentage of revolutions to eventually turn into tyrannies rivaling those that had just been overthrown.

An American patriot could sit back comfortably and say, "Well, of course that did happen in Russia, France, Cuba, and other places, but not here, as shown by what has not happened in the nearly 250 years since then." But these things take time. Consider for instance the numerous evil-minded groups of today that are collectively called "the Tea Party."

Mooning the Electorate

2012-01-26T23:40:00.004-05:00

"The selection of a Republican candidate for the presidency of this globalized and expansive empire is — and I mean this seriously — the greatest competition of idiocy and ignorance that has ever been."

Fidel Castro said that a day or two ago, in an opinion piece. Now 85 and having long since handed over the Cuban reins to his brother Raul, he didn't have much more than that to add - a far cry from his glory days -- he of the fabled three-hour speeches. But the irony here is that his assessment of the matter is so on the mark that he doesn't appear to be getting much disagreement, even, I suspect, among those Republicans who still retain some small sense of proportion.

For in fact it has been a wild ride so far on the nether side of the Moon, and it is still far from over, though the thinking now is that the original "Crazy Eights" have now been reduced to just two, M. Romney and N. Gingrich, with R. Paul and the Santorum loser still hanging in just because Gingrich's getting this far is a sure sign that anything can still happen there.

Speaking of the Moon, from his past and his Cupboard of Curiosities, Gingrich dragged out another of his wild notions for campaign purposes, during a visit to Florida's "Space Coast." He promised that if elected President, he would see to it that by the end of his second term in the White House, he would have a functioning American colony on the Moon, and that furthermore, soon thereafter, the first 13,000 Americans to be based there would be enough to form this country's 51st state.

This leads me to wonder what the rest of the world would have to say about that, because I assume that by this he sees the U.S. as taking over not just one part but all of the Moon -- for which the precedent would be the endlessly obscene British attempt to take over the whole of the Earth, an effort in which they at least partly succeeded to an unbelievable extent, while seeing nothing at all amiss in doing so. In tomorrow's world it's hard to imagine any one country succeeding in the same way on our lunar neighbor, no matter what overwhelming military advantages that nation might have.

Also the Chinese have just declared their intent to be the next to have its citizens walking on the Moon, and having shown how they can throw up huge skyscrapers in just a few days, nothing can be put past them -- all the more so because, compared to the U.S., they have relatively few foreign entanglements to distract them or to worry about, monetarily or otherwise.

By then they may even have achieved the great miracle of finding the first really worthwhile purpose for putting anything more than our fond gazes on the Moon.

"White Superiority" or What?

2012-01-26T08:17:00.006-05:00

Above is a quite astonishing picture of the way that J. Brewer, the governor of Arizona, chose to greet B. Obama, the President of all these United States, moments after he had stepped out of Air Force One on a visit the other day to her state. A true midget when compared to him in every respect, she is nevertheless angrily shaking her finger in his face. Obviously she is grabbing this rare opportunity to give him a piece of her mind in person.

And just as obviously she seems to be blissfully unaware that in large parts of the American culture, such a gesture incites an almost irresistible desire to suddenly grab that deeply insulting finger and jerk it out of its socket.

Brewer said that they were discussing his non-appreciation of her statement in a book she had just published, where she said that he had been condescending toward her during a half-hour that he gave her of his valuable time during an earlier visit of hers to the White House. But I think she had other motives for her ire and her finger-shaking, including the very obvious fact that he had not at all come to Arizona to see her.

This would not occur to the majority of Americans, but I am one of those who are absolutely certain that she would never have resorted to berating Mr. Obama in that or any other manner if he had not had the kind of skin color and hair that is so ingrained in her as being completely indicative of his native inferiority to her, no matter what his station in life.

Once upon a time the famous Scottish biographer, James Boswell, told his hero, Samuel Johnson, the famous English intellectual of the 18th century, that, contrary to Johnson's prejudices, Scotland has many delightful and scenic aspects, to which Johnson replied something on the order of: "Sir, I don't doubt that Scotland has many delightful aspects, of which the greatest is the high road back to England."

Similarly Arizona has many noble features, including the Hopis, the Navajos, and the Grand Canyon. But no one in their right mind would go to that state to see Ms. Brewer, who ranks high in an unusually large slew of governors of the worst kind, all of them not coincidentally Republicans, along with another Arizonan and undeniably the country's worst sheriff, a guy named Arpaio.

Yet I think that in one respect Obama was at fault here as well. In his place I would never have stood anywhere near that close to such a person, or actually anybody, even if she did appear to be a woman. And I don't care how noisy it may have been there at the airfield. -- he never needed to hear anything she had to say in any case.

Beauty and the Unspeakable

2012-01-19T12:05:00.003-05:00

Bartcop, that irascible and ardent lover of certain brands of tequila and Texas poker, has been running a pic of Sarah Palin that makes her appear to be as inviting and therefore of a certain warm, inspirational nature as any that anyone has ever seen of her. And whether or not this image is photoshopped or is a photo of someone else -- it seems incredibly easy for various ladies in the performance business to assume amazingly close likenesses to her -- this brings up once again the age-question of how an endlessly evil mind can exist within a gorgeous physical appearance. For isn't one reason that we take such pleasure in seeing physical beauty in a woman is that we assume that it is always accompanied and even made only possible by at least a modest amount of pleasing mental attributes? Few things pose this question as vividly as the being of S. Palin, and this is the greatest and so the only gift that J. McCain ever gave to the world.

I believe that the unavoidable pondering on this probably unanswerable question, if only by a certain number of the males in this world, is why it is so impossible to wipe her completely off the bulletin board of national attention, no matter what she does or doesn't do -- or, more accurately, what she does or does not say.

And for the same reason, it is undoubtedly nothing less than divine providence that she continues to live somewhere in the far reaches of Alaska, with seemingly no inclination ever to leave there, and where few people will ever have good reason to go, and never mind the wonders of present-day communications.

The Crow-Sledder

2012-01-18T00:20:00.001-05:00

On the site of the Atlantic you will find a totally fascinating

Youtube video

shot in Russia. Apparently in Russia they have a species of some especially heady crows, birds that are already widely known for their unusual smarts, because these ones have been known to use the roofs of those onion-shaped structures atop the Kremlin for some extra-curricular sport.

Somehow this one particular crow got hold of a big jar lid and discovered that it would make an excellent sled for sliding down the steeply pitched, snow- or ice-covered metal roofs of buildings. This video shows him or her placing the lid on the top edge of a roof, giving it a little shove to start it sliding downward and then jumping on top of it for a ride of 8, 10, or 12 feet, before being stopped by snow, at which point he or she picks up his precious impromptu sled with his beak and flies in an instant back up to the ridgeline for a repeat performance. He also tries an adjoining roof but finds that it doesn't meet his requirements, and he quickly returns to the fun spot.

Normally extended comment sections can and usually do deteriorate into being a big pain, but the one for this video on the Atlantic is some equally fun stuff from the beginning to wherever it ends, because in it numerous people try to come up with reasonable ideas about how this crow came to do this and what it all means in the greater scheme of things. And believe me these commenters come up with a LOT of ideas, especially when it comes to evolution, and it's great.

Generally they argue about whether the crow is working (for instance doing food-gathering of some sort) or playing. I'm stoutly on the side of those who say he's playing. Crows are like squirrels. They spend a lot of time just running around, seeing what's up.

I know this, because we have crows living with us, as I suppose everybody does who lives in the country, and I enjoy having them around, though they can be noisy at times, and I can't always resist the temptation to join in their debates, though I can tell by the silence that my contribution always receives that something must be grievously wrong with my accent, though certainly not with my line of reasoning.

J. Cole on R. Perry

2012-01-17T23:15:00.002-05:00

Juan Cole's posts on his Informed Comment weblog are consistently informative and interesting, and his panning today of Rick Perry, the man on the white horse who came charging out of Texas just a few months ago amid great expectations that he would sweep all before him on behalf of the Repubs, is no exception.

The rest of Cole's article keeps up the subtle but hard-hitting tone set by his very first paragraph, which reads as follows:

As an American, I’m deeply relieved that Gov. Rick Perry of Texas is highly unlikely to be president of the United States. As a blogger who occasionally enjoys a bit of satire, I have to say it is a real shame. Sometimes I spend an hour or so scouring for what news I want to blog about. All you’d have to do is just follow this guy around and report whatever came out of his mouth and it would be endlessly entertaining (at least until he provoked someone to rain down nuclear missiles on us just to shut him up).

Going by Perry's emanations throughout this primary season, I for the life of me can't understand how his state of mind could possibly have qualified him to be the governor of Texas, or to be a pilot in the U.S. Air Force in his younger and presumably better days.

Could it be that in recent months or years he has suffered some sort of early, slow-working cranial breakdown? Because they care so much about their country and their state, why haven't Texans descended upon Perry en masse long before now to escort him back home for a very long period of observation, rest, and treatment?

Names of Things

2012-01-13T04:36:00.002-05:00

One of my lifetime things has been naming things. Therefore it's no accident that the only thing I clearly remember about a thriller of scarcely eight years ago (whose title I have forgotten) was how fond the chief villain was of saying, "Give it a name." I thought it was heavyweight cool to go around saying that all the time.

Last night, while googling for the umpteenth time the brightness problem on my monster CRT monitor, I was astonished to find listed my own post on this subject in this weblog, published just a few weeks ago, and on the second page no less! And it looked exactly as if it belonged there.

I don't often -- well, never -- see my scribbles appearing in the distinguished pages of the Google search engine for literally all the world to see, and I knew where the fault lay -- in the title I had given to that post. It was too openly indicative of what the post was about.

There are two kinds of titles: the obscure ones and the fully applicable ones, and I am just as proficient at coming up with the former as I am with the latter.

Is this a problem? Is it necessary to change my ways when it comes to the names of my posts? Not at all.

Ah, the comforts and security of utter obscurity!

Lip Service -- Huntsman

2012-01-11T13:29:00.003-05:00

Out of respect and concern for one of the weakest of my physical components -- my stomach -- I have bent my ears to only a few words of all those uttered in the many debates that have been held throughout this already far overlong election season that so far has perversely involved nothing but the various combinations of people vying to become the Republican candidate for President. But I have read through all the so-called "live blogs" of these debates that have been appearing on the progressive Daily Kos and on the Lord-knows-what A. Sullivan's slice of the Daily Beast, together with the copious mentions and analyses of those events that appear elsewhere all over the Internet. And through it all, the aspirant that has struck me as being always the most interesting among those different packs of often berserk coyotes howling at the Moon has been the ex-governor of Utah and former ambassador to China, Jon Huntsman.

Quite naturally he has also been the quietest of them and the one who has consistently been polled as being in last place, and he has never enjoyed even a moment as the sprinter in the lead. But now he has finally made a surge during the long awaited and just concluded New Hampshire primary, and he ended up third with 17%, not far behind R. Paul's 23% second place to M. Romney, the winner. Many believe, however, that winning this year is not Huntsman's dream and that instead he's prepping to be the man, the Repubs' man, in the next go-round four years from now.

It's hard to know what to make of J. Huntsman, mainly because of the company he keeps -- this group of Republican candidates. People think that R. Paul, often billed to be a Libertarian instead of a Republican, is the wild card in the bunch, but closer than usual looks at Paul make one suspect that he could be doing a good job of operating behind a smokescreen. Huntsman, on the other hand, like Paul, stays away from the obligatory trashing of B. Obama at every opportunity, and in other respects stays on the subjects and the stands of his own choosing, and they are characterized by the lack of the vitriol favored by the audiences and from which the other Republican candidates have been taking most of their cues, and Huntsman's only true conservative tendencies are supposedly his fiscal ones. But that's not all bad, and indeed it's generally a good thing to want to spend only as much as you already have, if that's included in what is today considered to be conservative thinking when it comes to the cold cash.

I kind of think that Huntsman is not the real thing -- not so much in the way that he thinks of and presents himself, but instead in whether and how the Republican party would present him in 2016 or in any other forseeable year as the candidate of their choosing. It seems to me that that party has already gone much too far down the uncivilized road and their carefully unspoken but always No.1 creed of "keeping the neeggaz down," to be able to make that kind of room for a man like him.

And even if he were -- by the same kind of miracle that propelled B. Obama into office -- to be chosen as President nevertheless, how could he still comfortably serve in that role, in light of the problems facing the country and the world, far ahead of the usual picayune issues? With his insulated and isolated Utah desert background and all those children that he has collaborated in producing, how would be able to address with any credibility the largely repressed but still overwhelming main problem of humanity, which is the presence of too many people crowded on the relatively small strips of habitable land that are surrounded by truly enormous amounts of poisoned water amd an atmosphere, practically speaking, that is barely more than skin deep. Overpopulation is at the root and the heart of all these other problems that threaten calamities all the way down the road -- among them the running out of resources of many kinds, the poisoning of the environment, the extinctions of species, and the turning of the earth into one big sweltering greenhouse from which there is no escape?

In the face of all that, paying lip service to any of the usual nonsense that anyone who would be a Republican candidate has to heed wouldn't work, and that's why it was not a good sign when, midway through the Iowa campaign, Huntsman suddenly turned tail on his previous contention that climate change is real, which brought him so much admiration among the thinking elements of the population, and he now says the equivalent of, "Let's hold up. All the evidence is not yet in." As if the opening of the Northwest Passage is just a fairy tale.

Prudence Newly Acquired

2012-01-10T06:45:00.002-05:00

You will notice that lately the Republicans have had little or nothing to say about "illegal immigration." Yet at the beginning of this election season it was a hot subject among all their candidates for President, and they presented views that seemed almost calculated to offend the many Latinos in the land.

Now that votes of many kinds are beginning to be taken, the Repubs must have decided on being prudent, with the hope that the Latinos have short or preferably no memories at all, and instead they have picked gays as their latest targets of choice, along with the Rainbows, i.e. "black people," whom they can ignore but never forget. There must not be nearly as many gay people in the country as there are Latinos, while, H. Cain notwithstanding, the Repubs know that most Rainbows flushed their party down the toilet quite a long time ago.

What? No Credit Default Swaps?

2012-01-09T07:33:00.002-05:00

Somebody, after watching one of the numerous debates that have been waged by the varying numbers of aspiring Republican candidates, said nothing except to ask with a dazed expression on her face, "Do these men know that they are running to be the President of the United States?"

The economy is supposed to be the No. 1 issue by far during this election go-around, yet these guys (and the former gal) deal with it only to say, in lock step and with stupendous unity that the economy is ruined and it is all President Obama's fault, even while their party, especially in the U.S. Congress, has strived with might and main to keep the economy in that parlous state, so as to try to get their own people into the Oval Office this year. And nothing illustrates this point better than to note how rarely their Presidential wanna-be's have so much as mentioned credit default swaps. Maybe it's because there's nothing that people such as these fear more than to be so much as asked to explain what a credit default swap is.

I could not write a book, or maybe even one lucid paragraph myself as to what they are, because they are a mystery that is so closely held that even the various explanations that you will read, written by people who supposedly know all about whereof they speak, are nevertheless still heavily draped with murk and outright foolishness. Maybe this is because actually they make no sense at all. But as nearly as I can gather, they're a form of insurance or a wager, that a mortgage or some other loan or some such will or will not be paid off, and, presumably if it is not paid off in time, then the holder of that mortgage will see his bet paid off by somebody.

It seems to me that just as being able to sell mortgages to others who are unknown to the original mortgagee should be outlawed, so all these tools of financial infamy called "derivatives," especially credit default swaps, should be similarly declared to be crimes against humanity. But instead they became well-known for being among the chief tools of infamy during the Great GWBush Stickup of 2008, an act of terrorism inflicted on the U.S. by the big bankers and other financial villains, though it is more politely called by the more callous or less informed of the experts among us the "T.A.R.P. Bailout" -- a dumb name and an insult to all tarps everywhere, those highly useful and protective sheets of canvas or plastic. Because it appears that a great deal of all those trillions of dollars extorted from the taxpayers went to pay off the holders of these credit default swaps and other financial wagers that weren't in any way necessary or beneficial to anyone except those secret gamblers and that no one, least of all the original borrowers, asked them to make.

So what do these Repub candidates kept saying instead? While never telling exactly how, they lay the Stickup and that whole financial collapse of 2008 not at the feet of their own man, GWBush, in whose name the whole mess got started, during the eight years of his two terms. Instead they would have everyone believe that B. Obama is to be blamed instead, despite all his efforts to turn things around, which they are so loathe to see and which their side has resisted with all the dodges at their command.

I wish I could attend one of those debates and become one of the favored few who get to ask the candidates a question -- the question that so far no one has had the temerity to ask, even though it ranks in importance far above all those endless wrangles on issues that shouldn't even be issues, especially the ones that involve matters that shouldn't even be under the purview of the Government, with a woman's God-given right to decide for herself whether or not to have an abortion being the first of those -- a situation that should never be put in the hands of old men of any stripe who are so far beyond all the complexities of child birth and child rearing.

"Sir," I would ask (while trying my best to avoid putting into that word any inflection of respect that in no way exists in my case), I think that, instead of dealing with all this trite, inconsequential stuff, and instead getting on to the meat of the biggest issue, the wounded economy and how it got to this state, the American people would be better served if you, for instance, could tell us just what you intend to do about outlawing credit default swaps. And first of all, would you please enlighten us, in clear, intelligible language, on exactly what a credit default swap is."

Despite all those millions of dollars that most of these candidates possess, with the frontrunner, G. Romney being in the lead, I'll bet that this question would drop on those devils like a thunderbolt and cause all kinds of choking and sputtering, even if they had known days in advance that it was coming. Talking about credit default swaps must be akin to talking about the toilet habits of Jesus Christ.

R. Perry, with R. Santorum the most hapless of the Repub candidates still standing, calls the Social Security system a Ponzi scheme. But it's criminal even to speak of Ponzi schemes without bringng up credit default swaps first and foremost. Before the Great Stickup it was estimated that all the swaps floating around amounted to 681 trillion dollars. That is many times more money than all the countries in the world could put their hands on at one time, or at any time! And because credit default swaps have been quietly ignored instead of being dumped, that situation could be even worse these days.

Resurrection of a Monster ...er, Monitor

2012-01-01T12:42:00.002-05:00

Years ago, before flat panels came in, I bought at a very good price what not long before had been one of IBM's top of the line monitors. Black and a 21-incher, it was their model P-260. Companies that were clearing the way to making wholesale upgrades in their computer equipment would apparently sell their old stuff to a company called Merkor, who would then resell it to people like me who had long since decided that the best time to buy anything in the computer line was right after it became obsolete.

By today's standards this monitor was a monster, because it was built like a tank, it took up a huge amount of space on a computer desk, and it weighed a lot more than whatever its specifications said it did. Today I call it a "hernia inducer," becaused moving it around may have had something to do with the hernia operation that I had to have a little later.

But I was quite happy with it because it had such a great picture -- until one day its display got way too bright, and no amount of adjustment would correct it. Online research revealed that this was a universal problem with this variety of Sony-made Trinitron CRT, which was used not only on IBM monitors but also on those sold by a large number of other big computer companies.

The general concensus seemed to be that the handiest and only surefire cure was to replace a resistor, and that turned out to be easier than it sounds, though it was daunting anyway, because any kind of operation performed on a true monster cannot be taken lightly.

Actually my memory is saying that I didn't replace anything, because I found two resistors hooked up in there in series that looked to be the same kind of home job that I wanted to do, and both resistors were much larger than the replacements that I had bought. So I contented myself with just taking one out and thereby hopefully lowering the resistance in that regulator circuit a sufficient amount.

That improved things but not nearly enough, so next I called myself retiring that monitor permanently. As an alternative to taking it to the landfill, which would have been heavy work getting it into and out of the truck, I considered digging a deep hole somewhere on my property and burying the thing, and I was only kept from taking that crude road by my innate admiration of what a well-built piece of equipment that monitor was, and it still had a picture, though a badly faded one.

So I just let that thing sit off in an innocuous corner of my cluttered shop for another several years, while I used another surplus monitor -- a 17" Dell also with a Sony Trintron tube with a good picture.

But somewhere along the line, while switching things between buildings, a terrible memory lapse caused me to leave it sitting outside one night while it rained. But I had always wondered, hadn't I, what would happen if a monitor or a Tv were to be doused in some way?

I thought sure the Dell was ruined, but just to see, I stored it in a dry place, turned upside down to let water drain out, though I couldn't hear any sloshing around inside. And when I tried it three months later, lo and behold it worked as well as always.

That was three or four years ago. A few days ago the power cord connection at the rear of that monitor started smoking and flashing and sparking badly, though it was still delivering a picture. Nevertheless I decided that that wasn't safe, so I set the Dell out on my workshop deck with intentions of hauling it to the landfill for sure.

I then hauled the good ol' IBM P-260 back out of retirement, to use temporarily till I got around to getting a more modern and blessedly lightweight flat panel. This was easy to do and easy on my gut, because I had the 260 sitting right next to the computer desk,and so I just had to push it a few inches.

But meanwhile I got to tinkering with its adjustments once again, and I managed to darken its light blue screen to a dark gray, and that made it surprisingly usable again, with all the colors there, though muted, and all the information easily readable on that great big screen with that rock solid display, and suddenly I like this monitor again, and I'm very glad that I didn't cruelly leave it at the landfill or bury it in a dank hole.

And now all I have to do is to resolve to clear off the desk, wrestle that big heavy sucker over on its face without straining myself, and having another go at those resistors with a soldering iron.

It should be interesting, as such things always are.

(T) Virginians

2011-12-27T13:00:00.002-05:00

A news report about N. Gingrich's failure to come up with enough signatures to get on the primary ballot in Virginia referred to this being his home state. At first I was aghast. I thought it was deliberately meant as a slur against Virginia, or that it was one of the mistakes, most of them grammatical, that one sees newswriters making all the time these days. I had always thought Gingrich was instead a product of one of those more hapless states in the Union, like Georgia. But they were merely referring to the fact that McLean, a posh suburb in Northern Virginia, is his current place of residence, and Georgia is indeed still the state that regurgitated him up against perenially victimized and ostracized D.C.

He was one of those many in all the states who are drawn to the opportunities in D.C., all furnished by the Government, and when their dreams come true and their purses and their paunches become sufficiently fattened, they invariably deteriorate into becoming Republicans, at which point they then support every effort that anyone might want to make to castrate and cripple that same institution that made it possible for them to live so high up on the hog. So now R. Paul has risen higher in the effort to become the Repub candidate for President than R. Perry, because Paul promises to chop off five (5!) departments from the body of the Government, compared to the three spoken of by Perry, when he can remember them all.

Then I also realized that just a few days ago, in another post mentioning Gingrich, I had referred to myself as being a Virginian, with nothing added to explain that I am in no respect a product of Virginia. I am instead and will always be a Washingtonian.

I say that, though, not out of any deep infatuation with the place, for otherwise I would never have left there, right? And if I'm not still a Washingtonian down to my innermost fiber, then why are at least half the dreams in my slumbertimes always set somewhere in D.C., usually on some street or avenue there, on which I am desperately trying to get back home without being hassled or hijacked or some such, though the dream never lasts long enough to reveal what home that might be. It's just the hard , cold fact that, to its credit or to its discredit -- you take your pick -- I am purely a product of the Rainbow -- same-o same-o "black" -- community of Washington, D.C., though not the one that is there now. That community of which I'm speaking has most likely long since largely disappeared from the planet, by the usual methods of attrition, mainly by "passing away," as the kinder, gentler term puts it.

From now on I will have to remember to add something to the "Virginian" bit whenever I speak of myself that way, to denote that I am and will always be just a tranplant here, and the title of this post is my first shot at doing that, though I'm not sure of how successful that will be, or whether there should even be a reason for that to matter.

Disqualified Rascals

2011-12-24T15:12:00.003-05:00

Rick Perry a little earlier and now Newt Gingrich have both been banned from having their names appear on the ballots in the Virginia Republican primaries three months from now.

As a Virginia transplant who wrote scveral posts on this site opposing both men and who would never vote in a Republican primary in any case, my first reaction was that it couldn't happen to nicer guys, and my next thought was that though I've heard of brain waves being able to exert remarkable power from afar, this is ridiculous.

This says something extremely unflattering about the supporters of both men. Being required to submit 10,000 signatures before a certain date, they must've been unable even to count up to that nice, round number -- a bad disability that seems to have extended to the candidates themselves, because it is known that Gingrich delivered his signatures in person.

Update: It appears that three of the chronically "single-digitees" among the formerly crowded Republican Presidential field also failed to scare up enough signatures in Virginia, provided that Bachmann, Huntsman, or Santorum bothered to submit any at all. Thus M. Romney, always the presumptive frontrunner, and his latest serious challenger, R. Paul, will have the Republican side of Virginia all to themselves this coming "Super Tuesday."

Well, at least that means they will enjoy having some much better-looking poll numbers in that state than they've been used to seeing in early bird Iowa and New Hampshire, where for months anything close to 25% has been considered to be good and even great.

Meanwhile Gingrich and his people have scratched back hard, claiming that the fault lies not with them but with Virginia and its primary system instead, and they've vowed to get around this humiliation by mounting a strong write-in campaign. They must have also failed to learn that in Virginia -- where the law is especially hidebound, being strong on passing questionable new laws while repealing few if any unnecessary old ones -- write-in votes are not permitted in primaries.

We'll have to see how well that old wink-wink nudge-nudge stuff holds up here.

Rare Metal Squeezes

2011-12-24T14:44:00.003-05:00

It so happens that shenanigans in Asia have suddenly led to some price sky rockets that affect two of my main activities.

The first had to do with the solder that holds the pieces together in the copper foil method of assembling stained glass projects. The most recommended kind is 60/40, an alloy of 60% tin and 40% lead. Two or three years ago (I have stopped trusting what I tell people about time spans, because all that is starting to run badly together) you could get a pound for six or seven dollars. Now it has tripled to an average of 19 or 20 dollars.

This outrage could have something to do with the rare metals difficulty that has been going on with China, the world's chief supplier of those metals, though I always thought that the U.S. has plenty of lead mines, while I remember that during World War 2, the hangup with tin was that Malaya (now called Malaysia), not China, was the main source, but both places had been overrun by the Japanese, and I remember as a child doing my bit for the war effort by walking along the roads in then rural but now wall-to-wall shopping mall Landover, Maryland and picking up all the discarded cigarette packs I could find, tearing out the tinfoil inner linings, and molding them till soon I had a heavy, good-sized cube, for building a tank or a bomb or whatever.. It's surprising now to think how there was no shortage of those crumpled packs, while today you never see them among the roadside littler. They've been replaced by beer cans and fast food wrappings.

Rare metal companies are supposed to be gearing up in places like Death Valley to avoid being crunched by China, but I guess that hasn't gotten far enough along. Whenever foreign shortages develop, there're always supposed to be sources somewhere in this huge country of ours to take up the slack. Otherwise what was the use of grabbing all this land from the Indians?

But that's all right, because also I don't have anything at the moment to solder, being as that I haven't done any stained glass for about five months. But I suspect that whenever I do get something ready, a little roll of solder will still cost 20 bucks or more. Sellers get comfortable with that kind of windfall markup, you know

Computer hard drives have also tripled in price, and normally reasonable vendors are asking $110 or more for sizes that just a few weeks ago you could get for just $30 or $40. The cause of that, as I understand it, is that the makers of one particular piece that goes into the drives, I think it's called the slider, are all made in Thailand, and their factories all went under water during the recent floods there.

But I am suspicious, because the sellers feel justified in raising those prices so sharply and quickly by saying that though that may not be one right now, as soon as their inventory runs out, there's going to be a big shortage, and it could be a year or two before hard drives hit their former quite reasonable price, compared to what they used to cost in the old days for just a small fraction of modern capacities

It has the ring to me, though, of those who instantly raise the price of food to the survivors as soon as there's some natural catastrophe, grabbing the chance to make a quick killing. Shouldn't they wait till there actually is a shortage before they raise their prices? I guess not, because then people, knowing the shortage was coming up, would just gobble up all the hard drives they could find at those lower prices and hoard them.

I could be too attuned to how much things used to cost, compared to what they cost now. This mental malfunction reaches its nadir with a flyer that I get from an insurance company every year during my birthday, telling how much various common items cost the day I was born. That was a lot of years ago, yet somehow those prices, intended to sound comically low, don't seem to me to be too far out of line with what they should be today. (Smile)

Falls of Age

2011-12-23T13:42:00.000-05:00

I have developed what I hope is a slight version of the characteristic stoop of the aged, and I've been teased and criticized for having it and taking it so lightly, though never by teenagers or young adults. Instead it's always by people in their 50's and 60's. I guess it's because the sight of it reminds them that they themselves are fast approaching the bridge of no return (the dreaded age 80) that I am now so blithely crossing.

But the other day it occurred to me that there's a big advantage in being stooped, and that is that if you are shaky on your feet, as I am, it's much better to fall forward or to the side than it is to fall backward, because then you have a chance to throw out your hands and ward off injury, except maybe to your nose.

About ten years ago I had just such a complete backwards fall. It could've easily been serious but wasn't in any way, except to my self-esteem.

I was standing on a chair, with the back of it in front of me, while correcting the tilt of a painting (a la Jesse James at the moment when he was shot), and when I finished I must've totally forgotten where I was, because the next thing I knew I was toppling backwards with nothing to grab or otherwise save me, and on the way down I narrowly escaped having the back of my head hit the edge of the thick projecting ledge of my heating stove doors.

To this day I keep marveling that that blind, backward fall didn't hurt me in some way even without hitting that iron ledge. It must've been because all the relevant parts of my body slammed onto that hard tile floor at exactly the same instant and thus distributed the impact evenly.

But that's a piece of luck that you can't count on happening all the time.

A Good Question

2011-12-22T03:16:00.002-05:00

In light of my previous post on IQ's and SQ's, one might well ask, "Well, if you don't find any difference in the slob quotients between white and black, why the hell have you been living way down there in rural Virginia for the last 35 years, on a road where you and your wife are the only blacks (that you crazily prefer to call "Rainbows," and everybody else is "Euro," or white)? And from all that anybody has been able to see, all the while you've been doing that happily, too. Why don't you just go back up there amongst your own kind and let that be the end of it?"

That's a good question. And let me see. Where should I start?

First of all, my "own kind?" Having never encountered or heard of anything that could even remotely be considered to be "my own kind," I don't know who they could be and therefore I have no idea where they could be. That means that such a thing just doesn't exist.

Furthermore, I'm not living just anywhere in this countryside, just as I wasn't living just anywhere back in D.C. Both neighborhoods were/are on the odd, unusual side.

In D.C. we lived in a tiny enclave of detached but closely spaced small houses that in a sense were almost completely cut off from the rest of D.C. by main streets and by being right next to the U.S. National Arboretum. And by then "white flight" had left that neighborhood all-Rainbow as far as I know -- except for a crusty old Scotch carpenter and his wife, who, as it happened, lived right next door to us, though we didn't know they existed until after we moved in.. This guy had resolved that all his compatriots could flee the dusky invaders if they wanted, but by God, come hell or high water, he was going to stay there in his little white house till the day he died, and that is just what he did, peacefully.

And that is what I also hope to do, in my little homemade "green oak house" that I built here on this road with my own hands (and using a few of the tools that I inherited from old Gallagly), and I didn't move here because of who was already here. In fact, I was slightly fearful, having always thought that everything across the Potomac from D.C. was a howling wilderness. And in fact, I still think that, because Virginia is still basically a red state, even though there have been signs lately that it could be turning purple, while my home town, D.C., invariably takes the high road during national elections (though not with the local ones) by being the most consistently Democratic state in the whole Union, which helps to explain my own remarkable moral and political instincts.

The Virginia thoroughfare on which I live now, bearing a poetic if somewhat ostentatious name just as if it's some posh street in Chevy Chase, Maryland, or elsewhere, instead of being what it is, a gravel and sometimes rutted road that wanders on for miles deeper and deeper into woods where few people live but there is a huge forsaken-looking pine tree farm. Meanwhile the two mile stretch where that road starts and where we live is the most curious part, being populated by native-borns of modest means, homesteaders from the 1970's like myself and also generally of modest means, some retirees who have somewhat deeper pockets, and some miscellaneous move-ins, also of modest means -- four or five families in each group, though I'm beginning to think that those more affluent retirees are getting to be the majority.

This end of the road is characterized mainly by having a strong, artistic bent, of which I am also a part. Meanwhile I am on good terms with all the neighbors that I have met, which is most of them, just as I was at the Arboretum in D.C., and earlier on a more boisterous city street in the Trinidad section. And that is the main thing that matters. Being on good terms with your neighbors, who, all in all, were just as pleasant and law-abiding in D.C. as the ones here in the county.

Admittedly, the threat of some form of random petty larceny or worse was always hanging over our heads in D.C., much more so than it does here in the boonies. We made sure to keep our doors and windows locked tightly at night and when we weren't home, and I had never appreciated always having to be so conscientious about that, and for a long time I didn't put locks on the doors here on my new house in the woods, though after a while I did so, when a known criminal friend of a friend offhandedly advised me to. But there are places in this county where I wouldn't feel so secure, about being robbed and worse. Places where I would be rejected on sight, with all the attendant bad feeling, aggravations, and misgivings, somewhat more than in D.C.

I had never been happy with some aspects of the highschooling I got in D.C. There was too much thuggery on the one hand and too much Rainbow snobbery on the other. And I didn't think my son was having too good a time with it either, years farther on, so that was a big reason that I wanted to do the "back to the land bit" of the 1970's. I thought that things might be a little less uptight in a country school.

He would complain about school in D.C., but then down here he did exactly the same, though he ended up being showered with the kind of acclaim and praise that I never experienced, mainly because of the opportunities he had in becoming a track star and also the first chair saxophonist in the band, and when he went to college, he chose a place deep in the heart of a city even more packed with population than D.C. -- the University of Pennsylvania, in Philadelphia.

Chiefly however, I moved here to the sticks because I thought things would be much more pleasant if we were surrounded by oaks and hickories instead of people, and where I could use the fallen tree branches to keep warm, and I could have a big garden, and also I thought it would be really cool to live in a house that I had designed and built myself -- none of which were possible in D.C. or in any other city. And here somehow it all came to pass, not least because the chief virtue of the people here is not their ancestry, their intelligence, or even their slob content, but is instead their way of making themselves evident mainly by occasional muffled sounds far off in the distance through the trees.

SQ's Instead of IQ's

2011-12-22T02:04:00.001-05:00

Just recently Andrew Sullivan, the guiding force over at the Dish or the Daily Beast, was going on and on about the relative intelligence of the world's various ethnic groups , also known as "races," before he finally seemed to sense that something was not quite right about what he was doing, and he resolved to drop the whole thing. Maybe he got too many unquoted emails that accused him of bigotry. I don't know.

He may even have vowed never to return to that subject again. I don't recall. But if he did, I strongly suspect that, given the kind of guy that he presents himself as being, he won't be able to stick to it. He struck me as being much too deeply in love with what he had to say about the comparative intelligences of groups. But I guess one can feel comfortable with such a discourse if he is secure about his own place in the findings, and Sullivan is definitely certain about the top placement of himself and his European group when it comes to IQ's. Otherwise, for one thing, he wouldn't be so fond of using so much abstract language and delving into so many metaphysical matters, to the point of obvious showoffishness, when he isn't expounding on the joys of the gay lifestyle, which he does so often and in such detail that soon one suspects that actually he is only trying to convince himself of something.

Maybe that same matter of group membership is why I, on the other hand, never relished even thinking about IQ's, even in that brief period, at around the age of 20, when circumstances caused me to have to take several intelligence tests, and even though I always scored high in them. In fact I think that one test placed me in the top 2 percentile, and also I was unexpectedly made a member of Phi Beta Kappa, that high prestige college scholarly society, though as far as I know, I never got any benefit from being eligible for Mensa or from having that Phi Beta key.

Invariably in explorations such as Sullivan's into relative intelligence, the native populations of Europe place highest, while those of Africa, from whence most of my ancestors came, are ranked at the very bottom, just as in Israel, the Jews from Europe are seen to be superior in brain power to those who had been living elsewhere in the Middle East, and the Japanese see themselves as being smarter than the Chinese and everybody else in Asia and the world, and the Chinese see themselves as being more endowed with native intelligence than the Japanese and everybody else on the planet, and so forth and so on.

Instead I could look around when I was 20, and now today, too, and see that what I take to be intelligence doesn't play much of a part in the controlling factors in Europe, in the U.S., in the Middle East, in Asia, or anywhere else. Instead all the normal decencies are relegated to second place or worse, in deference to blind passions of many sorts. If this were not so, then, why are so many Americans so eager to attack Iran, and why are the Japanese still killing whales, and why are the Chinese and the Russians backing the Assad mass murderer in Syria, and why are the Israeli settlers on the West Bank moving so much in the spirit of the German guards on the numerous prison trains that headed for Theresienstadt (what a beautiful place name for such dreadful events), Sobibor, and Auschwitz in the 1940's? And above all, to cite the biggest issue of today's time, why is it that economics, which should be easy to fathom, has been made so complicated that now even the best minds of any hue are unable to untangle the stupendous financial mess that has been hanging over the whole world's head for close to a decade now and still threatens to strangle, or at least starve, everybody where they stand, except, naturally, for the affluents?

Though they rate highly as a form of video game, it's been clear for a long while that IQ tests actually don't measure anything worth measuring, and instead it has always seemed to me that SQ's -- slob quotients -- matter much more in the long run.

In the late 1940's a Democratic President, Harry S. Truman, made a fatal mistake when it came to upholding a concept that even he may have once believed in deeply, and that was "white supremacy." He integrated the U.S. Armed Forces, and a few years later I was inducted into one of those arms, the Air Force. And in there, after having spent the first two decades of my life living and being educated in almost entirely so-called "black" and therefore widely considered to be inferior settings, I got a good look at what turned out to be merely the first in a series of massively so-called "white" and therefore supposedly superior settings. And limited though those observations may still have been, I feel that I can still truthfully report one thing.

The slob quotients of those two groups are exactly the same. Not "close to" or "approximately," but exactly the same, and that likewise goes for the several representatives of all the other groups that I also have had chances to observe, fewer though they might have been -- and that is where the likes of A. Sullivan should be looking, though I doubt that they will be nearly as enamored -- if they are not too far gone -- of what they will see.

What You See -- an Observation on Newt G.

2011-12-20T07:13:00.000-05:00

With physical beauty being such a subjective concept when it comes to human beings, by being "in the eye of the beholder," the usefulness of it, aside from aiding in sexual attractiveness (purely for reproductive purposes, of course!) is always up in the air when it comes to drawing any solid conclusions.

Nevertheless it's easy to think that the things that Newt Gingrich's mirror have to say about him are going to weigh heavily against his denying B. Obama a second term as President -- or at least they should -- should the Republicans wallow their way into offering up the Ging Thing as their candidate.

Whether we want to accept it or not, the perception of a country is heavily influenced by the various external aspects of its chief executive, since those are the handiest and often the only indicators that are generally available to us. But it's not unlikely that those outer features can be taken as true manifestations of a person's inner workings. So would Newt Gingrich supply the kind of picture by which Americans might want their country to be perceived first and foremost?

I don't see how it can be denied that one of the main reasons that B. Obama gained the approval of a majority of the voters in the 2008 elections was the sleek, smooth, affable, and relatively young picture that he presented and thus transferred to the nation as a whole, with not one unnecessary pound or other feature on him. He seemed almost machine-tooled to create the greatest air of optimism, and that must've been at the heart of why the Norwegians so quickly handed him the Nobel Peace Prize. This, after all, is a world in which believable optimism is in very short supply, and therefore it has a value all its own. And despite the determined subsequent Repub efforts to grind him down by whatever means possible, Obama still presents that same aspect, though he is slightly grayer and he looks a little thinner around the jaws.

Here was a man who didn't have the foolish and congenitally uninformed look of GWBush, nor did he exhibit the puffy, eternally put-upon biliousness of J. McCain. And McCain knew that the personal contrast between him and Obama was striking , and it was in his way, and that was why he leaned so heavily in the other direction and for his running mate chose a piece of pure eye candy, of a vintage that was just right for her to be especially appreciated by older men -- a 44-year-old woman named Palin, though it turned out that just past her exceptional looks was a sheer, deep drop to a state in which nothing she said deserved even a fraction of the constant sparkle of her smile.

In contrast Gingrich looks like exactly what he is: a piece of puffy, paunchy, crusty, rusty, and dusty, waddling bad old news. The abiding meanness of his spirit and the numerous sins of his past are testified to by the inwardly collapsing, "black hole" structure of his face and by the bleak narrowness of his eyes. Even before he opens his mouth (which offers just endless torrents of the same), he doesn't at all reflect a vibrant America that is still in its early years and is eager to accept change and to move forward with the rest of the world in the advance of civilization. Instead he presents the sourness of a longtime prison guard who is dead certain that the inmates have still not been punished enough, and he feels that he's just the man to inflict more and more painful injustices upon them, regardless of whether they are innocent or guilty.

What a great day it would be for the U.S. if his campaign -- and indeed those of all the other Republican candidates -- could go the way of Herman Cain's effort and be suspended. And while we 're at it, that would go many times over for that party itself. That development would offer the best chances we have to avoid meeting something close to the unspeakable fate that the Germans swallowed whole, seventy-odd years ago.

Unusual Phobias

2011-12-12T22:49:00.006-05:00

Health Central, an internet health site, offers an interesting review of unusual phobias, and because I have always known that I have several phobias, I couldn't resist clicking to see if my two biggest are on that list -- fear of heights and the fear of leaving home. They weren't, so that must mean that they're usual instead, and that's the bad news.

The list started with fear of being touched -- aphenphosmphobia. Actually I have a touch of this one, though it doesn't stem from any traumatic childhood experience, unless, of course, you include Jim Crow. It comes more from the cold-blooded idea that since others might not want to be touched by me, I feel that it's only proper to be averse to being touched by them.

I don't at all suffer from cacophobia -- fear of ugliness. In fact, you might say I go maybe excessively in the other direction, so that, for instance, I have often thought that I have never seen a 100% ugly woman, because they always have at least one redeeming feature somewhere on them. But I've never gotten the chance to say that, nor, so far as I know, have I ever said to anybody that I have seen people who were so ugly that they were beautiful.

I never got the chance to develop a fear of stepmothers -- novercaphobia -- because I never had a stepmother. I don't fear stepfathers either, though I did have one of those. But because of that I am a little suspicious of them.

Also I have the complete opposite of vestiophobia -- fear of clothes . Instead I believe wholeheartedly in always wearing clothes, even though I am completely indifferent to styles, appearance, and so forth. One reason is that I don't like being cold, and this makes me wonder, from the pictures I see in such profusion, why half the women in the world, or at least this country, aren't going around perpetually shivering. I also don't like being naked, and I don't get anything out of seeing other people naked. I know where that came from. The senior high school that I attended, in D.C., while supposedly a good school, at least on the Rainbow ("black") scale of things, had a swimming pool, and swimming was a required part of physical ed. But unfortunately, for reasons that I don't fully know to this day, we had to take those classes buck naked -- separated by gender naturally -- and I didn't at all care for being naked among a bunch of other naked anybodies of any description.

Selenophobia is just ridiculous. I love the Moon, and the Sun, too. In fact I guess I worship them. Where would we be without either one, and in fact those two celestial bodies hanging in our sky are directly responsibile for the great majority of the beauty that we see in the world.

Obviously I don't have a fear of long words either -- hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia. I mention this one only out of the thrill of typing that name -- though actually I cut and pasted it instead. Didn't trust my memory to hold that word long enough, you understand, or even to ingest it in the first place.

Pteronophobia, the fear of feathers, is understandable only if you have a job being a chicken-plucker.

I don't have a fear of clowns - - coulrophobia -- either, though I never thought they were funny even while I was deepest in the throes of childhood. The only people I ever saw who looked good with their faces completely coated with snow white stuff were the makos -- the geisha-type women -- that I saw in person once in the inn in Miyajima, Japan, where I stayed during one of the most idyllic periods of my life, in 1959.

I also am not afflicted at all by the 10th and last unusual fear covered by the Health Central slideshow, panophobia -- the fear of everything. From everything that I've seen, heard, or read, my sense is that this is a disorder that is experienced much more by those in this country whose ancestors came primarily from Europe than it is by those whose forebears hearkened principally from Africa.

Venturing into the Eurozone

2011-12-09T22:35:00.002-05:00

I've been trying to pay closer attention to the financial difficulties now being experienced by the European Union, those 17 or so countries that have come together in a loose confederation, and, among other mutualities, are users of the currency called the Euro. We are told quite often that these guys need to get their act together with the Euro, not least because if they don't, it will be a disaster for the U.S. economy as well. It seems that, like the U.S., deficits among some of its members are collectively beating the EU over its head.

Affairs of high finance are usually far outside my normal range of interests, and therefore the ins and outs of this mess are not easy for me to understand. Yet I don't feel bad or inferior about it, because if they were easy to understand, since we are also given to understand that there is so much extra brain power among the Europeans when compared to all the other ethnicities in the world, they would have gotten their money matters straightened out a long time ago, or better yet, they wouldn't have gotten into such trouble in the first place.

To find out what's happening with the euro, what one learns out from U.S. news reports is practically useless, because our media pays as little attention as possible to what happens beyond our shores, and also they wouldn't know what's going on with the financial stuff anyway. Instead it's necessary to keep company with a site like the BBC News. And also it turns out that probably the best and most interesting way to get a handle on the Eurozone stuff is precisely to take sightings over the English gunbarrel.

That is because though the UK is a part of the EU, the British retain a touch too much of the colossal arrogance that at one time led them to go out and claim sovereignty over the majority of the world, and they haven't integrated themselves as much into this newly unified Europe as most of the other countries, of which their failure to use the euro and drop the pound is the most obvious sign. Yet the European bloc is their biggest trading partner, which means they are forced to pay close attention to its fortunes.

A day or two ago, all the countries in the EU except the UK but including as many as 10 other countries that aren't even in the EU agreed to have a treaty that would commit them to tighten up their financial practices, in the hope that this would, for one thing, help them to get past their current debt crisis. But after trying to get some exceptions drafted into the treaty that were specific to British interests and failing in that, the British decided to pick up all their marbles and go home. It is thought that the current British Prime Minister, a conservative named David Cameron, did this to satisfy the Europhobes in his party.

Some, like Andrew Sullivan in the Daily Beast, say that Cameron did exactly the right thing, but, like a member of the British Labour Party, I don't see it that way. So allow me to be so bold as to ask how that bid for isolation can possibly be a good move . Have the British decided that, like Israel, to depend on being in the U.S. camp even more, to keep up the illusion of being independent even though it only amounts to them having all the appearance of being boils on America's behind?

Britain, despite that huge empire that it had no so long ago, is still just a small country that isn't even attached to Europe or anything else, because it's on a small island. You would think it would behoove them to join forces with their nearest neighbors, a couple of whom, France and especially Germany, are bigger and stronger in important respects than the UK is, and that is not to mention the rest of the EU, which, even with its currently weak sisters, like Greece, Spain, and Italy, is, taken together, still a powerful force in world affairs.

Tents come in handy, when it comes to pissing times, as Lyndon B. Johnson said in so many words, a while ago.

Letter from the Black Pit

2011-11-28T00:06:00.002-05:00

The other day I got a letter from the H. Cain campaign. Besides saying other disgusting stuff, it asked me to send money to support his continuing effort, and they said $2,500 would be a good start.

I was amazed, and also highly dismayed, because I had thought the whole world knew that I am the very last person who should've been hit with something like this. Even the sight of my name and his on the same envelope induced feelings not far from nausea.

So far I have nevertheless been keeping this noisome curiosity piece, though at any given moment it is only seconds from being thrown into the fire.

I am still trying to figure out how my name got on one of H. Cain's campaign lists. It couldn't have been from voting records. I thought those campaigns only contacted people on their side of the wall, and I know you will believe me when I tell you that I have never ever voted Republican in any sense -- certain proof of my congenital good judgment.

Maybe somehow his people knew that I am a so-called "black man" in a certain age range, which he and they obviously equate with being idiots, as shown by one of his statements saying that people like me who always vote Democratic have been brainwashed. But I was never one of those bone-headed "brothers" who believed Cain's golddust twin, Clarence Thomas, instead of Anita Hill. Or maybe this is a case of some Republican "friend" playing what they regard as a harmless little "joke," which is not harmless at all.

Actually this missive from the H. Cain people amounts to being a colossal scam, because of the fact that the process I've been predicting is now in full swing, and that rascal is now being dumped overboard by the side with which he threw in his lot. Once the darling of the conservative Repubs and the media, now you rarely see Cain's name mentioned, even though he is reported as being still one of the frontrunners in the Iowa caucuses, which are scheduled to take place soon, when finally things will suddenly start getting serious.

Instead all the Republican fuss is now being expended on a fossil from ancient times, Newt Gingrich, though that could all easily be just wishful thinking, to avoid thinking about the man whom the so-called "smart money" still sees as being the eventual and inevitable Repub choice, the chameleon man, Willard Mitt Romney.

So any money sent to H. Cain at this moment will be funds sent by fools even more than usual, and will just go to line his capacious private pockets, that have undoubtedly already been stuffed full by this little fling of his in presidential politics, and he will be very happy.

If you've ever sought the ultimate definition of utter grossness, surely this current positioning of H. Cain would be a great candidate.

Zomping Out of the "Super Committee"

2011-11-22T09:53:00.002-05:00

Following the abortive fight a few months ago between the Presidency and the Congress over raising the Government's debt limit, the "super committee" that was then set up announced yesterday that after weeks of playing what an Air Force friend of many years ago might have called "playing grab-ass," they had failed to reach any agreement on their supposed goal of eliminating 1.2 trillion dollars from the Federal budget.

There's a bit of weeping and wailing over this, though it has all the look of being just a lot of crocodile tears. And it stood to reason that they would fail anyway, because their numbers by party were equal, six to six, and because, being members of Congress, they weren't the best people for the job, being as how, in general, Congress men and women are not the best people for any job of any importance.

This failure to agree is supposed to lead to automatic cuts that will now be made anyway, to the weapons of legal atrocities that are euphemistically called "war" and that are the Republicans' bread and butter and to the means of well-being for the less favored members of the populace that are the Democrats' chief interest, But little of real value is likely to come of that either, since these very same mischief-makers, the Conresspeople, have the means to tinker with that, too.

But even with that giant letdown still in prospect, some people argue strenuously that the Democrats came out ahead with the super committee's failure, while others are insisting just as vehemently that it was the Republicans who came out ahead, with both groups saying that their sides will now gain more through the automatic cuts.

It's highly baffling, this fact that it can't be clear as to who came out better. After all, isn't this -- and in fact everything to do with economics -- a simple matter of dollars and cents? You count how many dollars and cents you have -- not the money that you can raise or borrow but the money that you have right there at hand, which shouldn't be too hard to do, and then you count what the most important things you want will cost, and then you go on and spend your bucks first on those things. No fuss, no muss.

But no. Instead people from way back in the Middle Ages have found ways to invest economics with all kinds of hocus-pocus and other tomfoolery, just as other pursuits, such as religion and the law, have also done, so as to make these activities impenetrable to all but the Chosen Few. And so, by this late date in history, you have religion that is largely hypocrisy and legal systems that are largely criminal and economic systems that are largely resource-wasting and indecipherable even to the people that profess to know all about it. And if that's not true, then someone should inform me as to exactly why so many, if not all of the supposedly advanced countries and therefore in possession of the great majority of the top brains, are at this very moment deeply mired in economic confusion, conflicts, apprehensions, and paralysis.

When We Don't Know Something

2011-11-15T07:44:00.002-05:00

What do we do when somebody hits us with a question whose answer doesn't immediately occur to us?

H. Cain looks upward for far longer than a man supposedly with all the solutions should. As he is a man of God, being an associate minister in one of those monster, megachurches, maybe he and his God have worked out things so that the Great Almighty writes out the answers for him on the clouds. R. Perry grins and tries to come out with something humorous to say. S. Palin consults the palms of her hands.

I wonder how I would react in that situation? The best that I can guess is that I would probably answer with a stare that clearly questions my questioner's sanity. In other words, look at them like they were crazy, while waiting for them to come to their senses. Ha!

Another Trick Bag,. This One About Suicide

2011-11-15T06:49:00.003-05:00

Sometimes, and more often than they should, people write articles and get them published that are nothing more than "trick bags," because the pieces don't deliver what their titles promise.

Such an article is now running in Forbes magazine. Written by a Matthew Herper, it is called "What We Don't Know About Suicide."

That title seems to be promising to tell us something that we don't know. But if that "We" in the title includes the author himself, then how could he tell us anything that he doesn't know himself? But one brings up the article on his computer anyway, figuring that that title, like so many others, is just badly phrased, and that the article contains something new and interesting anyway.

But in fact this author does go on to tell us nothing new about suicide. Instead all he says is that a lot is still not known on the subject, and he does do us the service of subjecting that it will be a while yet before that changes, if ever, because suicide is so mysterious and daunting and terrible that even the the people charged with studying and trying to prevent it have too much trouble keeping from averting their eyes.

The several attached comments offered more, though still not much. Even though there were only seven of them, and all were somewhat detailed, they still suffered, as so many comment sections do, from coming at us from too many different and confusing directions at once. But I don't think it's inaccurate to say that that kind of thing works right in with the nature of suicide, too.

Get Out of My Space!

2011-11-14T05:50:00.001-05:00

Anyone reading the account that I am about to relate should set back the time when this event actually occurred to nearly two months ago.

Tonight (22 September), while I was alone in the house, as I will be for the next two weeks because my wife is down in Florida seeing to her stepfather, who is even more aged than I am, a visitor knocked, that I definitely did not want to see. It was N., the older son of G. and C., two of our closest friends and neighbors on this road. I have known N. all his life, and he was back from a very successful stint working on a salmon fishing boat in the waters of Alaska. But he is very severely plagued by an alcohol problem, though I had never seen him as thoroughly tanked as I could tell he obviously was the second I laid eyes on him.

Once, years ago, while I was also alone here, building my house, one cold night something scratched at my front door, and opening it, I found a skunk there right at my feet, grinning up at me. There was very little difference between that and N.'s appearance now.

He was expecting my wife to be there, knowing that she would be easier on him in that state than I would be, and I very much wished that she was there, too, because I spent his whole visit, which lasted not much more than a hour but seemed to stretch to an eternity, wondering how I was going to get him out of there.

One of the great tragedies of alcoholism is that people deep in their cups have no idea of what a big drag they can be on everything. They think they are just what the doctor ordered, when nothing could be farther from the truth.

I also deeply resented the fact that he, more than most people, should've already known and had a feeling for how much of a similar thing I had already suffered in my own family ten years ago, which left me badly traumatized and completely averse to having to go through anything like it again. Yet my wife, when I called her later and told her about it, said she thinks there's something about me that makes drunken people like to talk to me. She was thinking of a usually very mature and stable woman who took me through exactly the same kind of nightmare over the phone for another eternity, not long ago. And there had been others, farther back in the past.

I will admit one thing, To amuse myself nevertheless, I had a lot of fun launching every kind of insult I could think of against N. -- within limits. But he was so happy and completely out of everything that it was all water off a very slick duck's back.

But finally he said something like "Wha yer really tryntta tell me is geyoutta yer space. " (By that time he had lost nearly all command of the King's English.) And it was with great relish that I answered, "That's exactly right. Get the hell out of my space!" Or words to that effect.

My wife said that if she had been there, she would've let him stay here and sleep it off, but I didn't want anybody in that state to be in my house, and I did try to convince him, to no avail, to simply go to his parent's house, which is a very short and safe distance just up the road, but he wouldn't hear of it, and if he had stayed here, all he would have done would've been to keep raving on constantly and telling jokes and engaging in all kinds of other verbal tomfoolery, including telling me what a great and unique person I am.

When he finally did drive off, after I had escorted him up to the head of my driveway in the dark, it was in the direction of his own house, which is on the same road, but about 15 twisty miles away. This was soon after I told him the obvious, namely that after several close escapes already, he can't count on Lady Luck being on his side forever, but I guess that forever tempting the fates is N's biggest pleasure in life -- besides drinking -- and telling people to "f--k off."

What a trap he's in, and it's already been driving his parents and his newly married younger brother crazy for a very long time.

Now, fast forward to today when I am actually posting this.

My tolerance for drunkenness must have gotten even lower than it always was, even during the several times when I engaged in the same behavior myself, nearly six decades ago, though luckily I never had the ego that would have allowed me to get anywhere near the point where I would go visiting anybody while in that condition.

A few days ago we saw "Another Year," a Mike Leigh movie that had Leslie Mandeville in it -- another of that string of fabulous "mature" actresses of whom nearly half are British and in whom I seem to find an endless fascination. But that fascination still wasn't enough to stop me from failing to finish the movie, and the reason was that near the beginning of the film, and looking much younger than I thought she was, she played a very intense and convincing drunk scene.

Strange. It was just as if Mandeville herself had been in that state, though of course that could never have happened.

Too Much Attention

2011-11-14T04:39:00.003-05:00

Right now the Repubs can't be too happy with their near monopoly of what passes for political news in the country, for fear that it attracts too much attention to the pitiful bunch of aspirants, the Crazy Eight, that they have competing to be chosen as their candidate for President.

This contradicts the conventional wisdom that any publicity at all is good, but that shows how badly those lunatics in all their reckless screaming and running about have upended nearly all the furniture in the American house.

Even with the control of the mainsteam media that the conservatives enjoy through the ownership of all the outlets by tycoons who are all Republican, which is so total that even formerly enlightened publications like the Washington Post and the New York Times have long since gone "under," the media still can't keep the U.S. public completely uninformed, misinformed, ignorant, and malicious all by itself.

At least I keep hoping that it can't, but time is still waiting to tell.

Explanation for This Profligacy

2011-11-11T05:44:00.001-05:00

Whenever I throw more posts than usual out into the Great Universal Void of this weblog, as now, it usually means that I'm not getting enough sleep, not only because I have awakened with my head abuzz because of all the things I have just been dreaming, but also because it appears that the hours just before dawn are the best time for me to turn on the computer and type something, while I wait for the welcome daylight to arrive, finally.

The Obligatory Paterno Post

2011-11-11T05:28:00.003-05:00

A high ranking American religious figure, a deity more than just a high-ranking official in the Church, has bitten the dust.

This is if by now you have not yet sensed that the chief religion in the United States is not Christianity at all. It can't be, because the precepts of Christ are rarely followed anywhere in the country. But those of the real religion, Sports, are zealously put into play wherever you look, and the chief denomination of that religion is the game called football, a pursuit typified by the instant evolution of its players into men who have suffered the indignity of having their necks become suddenly shortened or the slopes of their shoulders have steepened and enlarged right up to the hinges of their jaws.

Unlike another deity in the same category, however, Steve Jobs, Joe Paterno didn't die, though by now he probably wishes he was dead. The longtime successful head coach of the Nittany Lions, a college football team somewhere in Central Pennsylvania, was instead fired, and with no hope of any kind of redress or of making an eventual comeback, because it seems that by many testimonies, one of his assistants has engaged in a long series of sexual crimes against young men and children, in which Paterno, by having covered up for him, has come to be seen as sharing a certain amount of the responsibility. Therefore, in the nation today, you can observe much weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth. Some students at the Pennsylvania State University even staged a full-scale riot right on the campus, because of the firing.

Little did I know that when it no longer became possible to go to the stadium whenever the whim struck me and buy a ticket to watch the Washington Redskins, because that privilige had suddenly become available only to season ticket holders, that deed, on the face of it such an evil thing, was actually one of the best things that could ever have happened with me. It was right up there with the day I decided that I no longer wanted to be a Baptist or anything else along those lines, and with that season ticket atrocity the same became true when it came to Sports -- cemented in stone a little later when I further realized that when you have seen one football or baseball or basketball game, you have actually seen them all.

Where is Sarah Palin, Now That the R's Need Her So Much?

2011-11-10T04:37:00.005-05:00

The absolute necessity of not choosing any of the Republican candidates for President during this election cycle couldn't have been more obvious than it was last night, during the 9th debate at which they all have been gathered. The efforts of this group, which has long since been dubbed -- and with great aptness -- the "Crazy Eight," seems to have reached its nadir when the guy from Texas, R. Perry, while trying to name three government agencies that he would eliminate should he win that office, absolutely could not remember one of them, nor could he even find that info in his paper crib notes. And so, after what is reported even by CNN, as having been a full minute of his fumbling up there on the stage in Michigan, for all the world to see, he finally gave up, even with people trying their best to help jog his memory, and afterward even Perry admitted that for all his efforts to improve on his many past debate stumbles, he had merely managed to put his best foot forward into an even deeper pile of Texas-size cow excrement.

For the record, the three departments that he thinks should be axed are those of Commerce, Education, and the one that he could not name, Energy. It seems especially odd that he would forget that one, because all along he has been pushing the idea that the country can only be saved by following his state's example in exploiting to the limit all sources of energy, though I wonder how many people, for instance in and around the Dallas- Fort Worth area, would say the same, in light of how their region is directly in the headlights of being badly torn up and their water contaminated by that ruinous technique of drilling for natural gas called "fracking?"

Actually, however, no one can be more sympathetic than I am when it comes to freezing up completely in front of an audience, and that is one reason, though not the main one, why I have largely avoided the whole idea of appearing before audiences of any kind, and especially never in that most fearful form of public speaking: debates. And so, for instance, I guess ever since I was a child I have happily entertained the notion of messing up on purpose, should I ever somehow be forced up on a stage in some sort of performance. In fact I think I would forget the Department of Energy merely because I would be too busy amusing myself with the notion of a purely intentional slip-up.

Another thing about this Perry mess is that it makes me wonder if he has followed at all the meteor trip through the doubtful skies of political acclaim of his fellow but now aborted Republican candidate for the Presidency, Sarah Palin? Unlike Perry, it didn't take her long to recognize her limitations in not knowing all the facts, and she soon resorted to taking advantage of the pretty, pale palms of her hands by inscribing them with her crib notes just before she faced any TV cameras.. The answer must be that, even if he had been aware of that strategy, such is Perry's mental incapacity that he would have needed a lot more than just two hands.

And that reminds me. Where is Ms Palin, now that the Repubs need her so much?

Today one thing is certain. The Crazy Eight certainly couldn't have fared any worse if she had been included in their number, even if it meant that thereby they would have had to be redubbed "the Nasty Nine."

En Passant, in the Fall

2011-11-09T05:02:00.003-05:00

When the evils of men -- and women -- become almost too much to be borne, it works to fill the mind instead with the sight of the October leaves falling from the trees.

A La the United States

2011-11-09T03:28:00.005-05:00

BBC is running an article on Europe's economic troubles, titled Europe's Four Big Dilemmas," that is easier to negotiate than the usual reports on economic stuff -- at least to someone who is as economically-challenged as I am. (I have always had a very simple creed when it comes to economic matters, and I like to believe that it has stood me in in good stead all this time. Save whenever possible, don't lust too much over expensive things (for which it eventually becomes impossible to cook up a real need anyway), pay no attention at all to the idea of being rich, and neither a borrower nor a lender be. In that latter case every few years borrowing something nevertheless becomes unavoidable, while lending becomes necessary much more often, with the subsequent losses that that so often involves, depending on the person, though in the long run those losses have never done me any lasting harm, except in my attitudes toward the people involved.)

But if you read the BBC article too fast, you might miss what the "Four Dilemmas" are, because the author maybe a little too seamlessly runs one into the other, using headings that are easily skipped over, instead of setting each dilemma off by saying something like "the first problem is....," "the second problem is....," and so forth.

The four headings of the cited article read: "Borrowers vs Lenders," "Austerity vs Growth," "Discipline vs Solidarity," and "Europe vs the Nations." But I think that what the author, Laurence Knight, says all boils down to the fact that the European Union is still just a collection of 17 countries still holding on tight to their former independence instead of being a federation like the U.S. or one big country like China, Russia, or Brazil, in which it is easier to get the various regions to work together.

There's probably nothing that can be done about that, though a real federation looks to be the best way for Europe to go. The European countries have far too long a history and a tradition of going their separate ways.

Maybe the Africans had that difficulty in mind.

The late and unlamented M. Gadhafi had a dream of just such a "United States of Africa," but the various African countries would have none of it, even though almost any kind of union between them would be better than what they have now. There, however, the motives weren't pure. Gadhafi was interested mainly in feeding his ego by becoming the President of such a federation, while the leaders of the individual countries liked their prerogatives too much, including enriching themselves monetarily at the expense of the populace.

I guess Gadhafi just came along with his idea far too late, after the English, the French, and other Europeans had carved up Africa into various nations where only tribes had existed earlier. The upshot must be that when nations are formed and have time to congeal, it's all over for certain things that might have been more salutary.

The Dismantling of Herman Cain

2011-11-02T03:40:00.001-04:00

It's funny and, for a change, not tragic.

Now that Herman Cain has served his purpose of furthering the illusion that the Republicans have long desired to put over on the American people, namely that they are all-inclusive and are indeed the "Big Tent," they want to shove him aside and leave him to perform, at best, in the circus sideshow outside the tent, while the Republicans decide which of the designated Big Two, M. Romney of Massachusetts or R. Perry, of Texas, gets to be the next President of the United States, as if the current holder of that office and the certain Democratic candidate, B. Obama, doesn't even exist. The Repubs have no doubt about their eventual success next year, because they feel that their absolute refusal to work with Obama has made him so unpopular and because, like Cain, he is also a Rainbow, and to them that means that he can and should always be easy to edge completely out of the scene.

It will be interesting to see how that concept works out for the Repubs, with respect to (and not for) Cain. as well as for the U.S. as a whole when it comes to B. Obama.

Hasn't the G.O.P. seen by now how H. Cain is nothing if not a king-sized egotist? And don't they know that when not taking time out to participate in the debates, he has been going around on a tour for his recently published book instead of engaging in much regular political campaigning? And don't they know that his book that he is so eager to sell is about the path of his life that culminates in his walking into the White House and calling it his new home? And don't they know that true egotists eventually jump beyond their initial cynicism that prompted their initial authorship, and they come to believe fervently in what they wrote in their own books?

I don't know. It may be that Cain does indeed accept his role as merely just another part of the infernal apparatus that so far as been so financially fruitful for him, and therefore he will gladly step aside in the correct deference to his masters.

But I doubt it.

He has tasted too much of the unlikely. In a very short time H. Cain has leaped from the bottom row of the Repub candidates all the way, in polls of somebody or another, to be the leader in the top row, despite having to backtrack on half the things that come out of his mouth. And as the weeks keep going by and instead of fading out after his turn as the so-called latest "Flavor of the Month," he continues in this phenomenon of actually outpolling both the Chosen Ones, Perry and Romney, he is turning out to be a big problem not only for the Republican Party but also for their handmaids, the U.S. news and pundit media. So, they ponder how to get rid of him since all else appears to be failing?

"I know what will do it," it's easy to picture the Conservative strategists saying. "How about a slight injection of that essential ingredient called 'sex?' That is sure to work in Herman's case," they assert, "especially because he's a Rainbow, and everybody knows how sexually out of control they are. And the great thing about this is that we can always blame the Left for unearthing a charge of past sexual transgressions and leveling it against him. That would surely fly, because the thinking of our beloved polling and voting dummies would be, why would we, the glorious Right, be responsible for bringing such a thing to light? After all, haven't we demonstrated the purity of our hearts by allowing Mr. Cain into our little vaudeville act despite his undesirable color and even to become not just the end man but to become the actual star of the show, thereby setting in stone the proposition that we are not racists. ==Magnificent! Let's go with it, shall we?"

And so they have gone with it. I am certain of that, because otherwise the Repubs were getting desperate Their program had drifted too far out of kilter even for them, and too much time had gone by when nothing else, not even the demonstrated and habitual Cain verbal idiocies (to say nothing about the obvious shortcomings of Romney and Perry) was working for their plan

Gadhafi's Gone

2011-10-21T06:26:00.002-04:00

Suddenly it seems that Moammar Gadhafi is no longer with us, as of yesterday, just seven months after the sweep against his longtime rule began.

There was a certain inevitability about the revolt in Libya that has some jarring elements, and as so often, those elements can probably all be chalked up to ego. After NATO joined in chasing him across Libya's top rim, along the Mediterranean coast, I thought it was likely that the moment Gadhafi saw the tide turning, he would seek refuge somewhere else, just in case, and there were lots of suggestions about that. Unlike the Tunisian former leader, Ben Ali, Gadhafi doesn't seem to have cultivated much in the way of friendship among his fellow Arabs, so that instead the speculations centered on various countries in the sub-Saharan region. But instead he stayed in Libya the whole time, so that eventually, as the rebel forces closed in on him in the last big hurdle, his hometown of Sirte that was so fiercely defended, he was eventually reduced to hiding in a drainage pipe, from which he was dragged out while still alive, much in the fashion of Saddam Hussein, who was pulled out of a previously prepared hidey-hole in the ground.

I had hoped that, like Saddam, Gadhafi would have a trial, so that we could hear what he had to say. He always had interesting things to say. But instead, after being captured alive, he was shot and killed almost on the spot, and so that was that.

As to who fired the fatal shots, there is, as of now, a bewildering variety of guesses, opinions, and what-not. with the headline suspects including crossfire between the various rebel groups, NATO, and even Gadhafi's own bodyguards.

Meanwhile the partnership between the U.S. news media and the Republican Party is hard at work trying to make sure that there is no suggestion that President Obama should get even a shred of credit for the ultimate disposal of the tyrannical Gadhafi, though that is hard to do, because the facts that are known should be obvious to even the dimmest of minds. But never mind. All that matters to those trying so hard to keep America's thought processes in a tight death grip of ignorance is that this comes at too inconvenient a moment, as typified by a remark make by the femina horriblis of the Republican President wanna-bes, the Bachmann woman, just a few days ago in the Las Vegas debate, to the effect that "Obama got us into Libya, now he's getting us into Africa," as if Libya and Uganda are not parts of the same continent.

The Repub-Media partnership has gotten so used to having the news reports all to itself and its scruffy Presidential aspirants, like a ghastly orchestra playing a piece consisting of only one theme, and that is that Obama is responsible for every ill in sight, and it can't have people playing any attention to this nevertheless all-important news item from Libya, because Gadhafi's end is full of significance for just about every other situation that is hanging fire in the oil-soaked Middle East.

Cain & Thomas, the Gold Dust Twins

2011-10-18T06:50:00.004-04:00

No reality of American life is more carefully and constantly left unsaid yet is always widely understood among at least one sector of the populace than is the fact that the main raison d'etre for the Republican Party is to "keep the neegaz down." But once that certainty is faced and acknowledged, then everything about that party suddenly falls into place. And by "neegaz" I refer not only to the descendants of the slaves brought over Africa and commonly but erroneously called "black" instead of the far more precise and charitable term, "Rainbows." Instead it also embraces members of many other groups whose interests and well-being overlap those of Rainbows, and whom I generally lump under the term of the "Have-Nots." But it is for the Rainbows that the sharpest and most numerous, lethally intended spear thrusts of the Republicans are always reserved. And among the longest and most poisonously tipped of those weapons is humiliation.

Right now two middle-aged Rainbow men in particular are standing out as being all too eager to serve as tools of that humiliation, and no wonder, for that activity has paid off handsomely for them, financially speaking, as have the careers of so many people who have chosen the Cruel and Nasty Side as the way to go in this country, which only goes to show that the old maxim that "money is the root of all evil" stands on firm ground, no matter how much lucre and all sorts of material stuff are worshipped, today as in so many past days.. These two men are Clarence Thomas, the longtime fraudulent occupier of one of the nine seats on the U.S. Supreme Court,.and a more recent arrival on the stage of national dishonor, Herman Cain, who has somehow jack-knifed himself into being one of the lead figures in the current run-up to the Republican primaries to determine their nominee to run for President.

Thomas, who gained his post as a result of being the mascot of a Republican Senator from Missouri whose name I am now pleased to be unable to recall, has since then gone a long way toward establishing himself as one of the most backward and inept Supreme Court justices ever -- an automatic vote for the perpetuation and enlargement of the American police state, and guess what is the preferred color of those confined in these ever-multiplying gulags? Those of his own color, naturally. This is a result that was easily foreseen those 20 or however many painful years it has been since Thomas was elevated to that lifetime post, to the eternal disgrace of many Democratic Senators as well as Republicans. The Democrats must've gone along with that blindness so as not to be seen as being racially prejudiced, and there were not a few ignoramus and chauvinistic Rainbow "brothers" who also went along with it, having had their jaws bent badly out of shape when, during the nominating process, Thomas was charged, and convincingly, with having sexually harassed a "sister," Anita Hill -- a thing they thought she not have done even if he was guilty, simply because he was a "brother.".

Now we see this Herman Cain guy taking advantage of a whole gang of inept Republican aspirants to the Presidency to try to vault over their heads into the preeminent spot, using as his pole a long series of notions that sound good to hell-bent conservatives but almost never make any sense in the larger world of common sense. They defend the things he says by calling them "plain-spoken," and it's just the kind of idiocy that they want to hear, though it might not be things they would want to say in good company, for fear of having their sanity seriously questioned.

But Cain serves an even more important service for them: they imagine that their support for him proves beyond any doubt that they are not racist, when, however, just the opposite is true, because it's clear as anything that he works for them only in the role of carrying the Republican's water, as does C. Thomas on the so-called "highest" court.

A good example of Cain's weak and shapeless mentality --_he comes out with these things every day, it seems -- is his recent declaration that if elected President he would separate the U.S. from Mexico with an electrified fence that would kill any Mexican attempting to scale it. Later on, when the towering inhumanity of that idea had been suggested to him, he came out with one of his favorite cover-ups for his various natterings, namely that he had just said that as a joke. But then, just a little later, after having apparently gotten a booster shot or something or another from an Arizona sheriff who has gotten a name for himself by terrorizing the so-called "illegal immigrants" in his state, Cain changed his mind again and said he would stand behind his notion of frying Mexicans on a fence after all. But doesn't that also involve, among other things, a certain number of Americans trying to go the other way as well, because that is the way that things work out? National borders are always crossed in both directions and not just one.

Therefore, for instance, we have it on the very best authority, the 0/11 hijackers, that Mexican women make the best wives, and that has not been forgotten.

And then there is Cain's much-discussed and simple-sounding "9-9-9" tax plan, with which he would replace the entire U.S. tax code. You would think that when he first voiced this idea, he would've realized how easily it could have been characterized as being the famous Satanic number turned upside down. The other Republican candidates, all male except for a shrill woman named M. Bachmann, deferred to her to make that all too obvious charge, though I think it would be even more effectively questioned by being called the "$9.99" plan, referring to the habit of retailers that has become so firmly embedded in the American fabric to put prices on everything ending with nines that are only one digit short of a good, round number, as if to always suggest to the consumer that he or she is getting a big bargain that actually amounts to only one cent -- a kind of commercial jiggery-pokery that I always thought should've been outlawed long ago..

I think of Thomas and Cain as being two shysters who are similar in their approaches to things and in being unapologetic humiliations not only to Rainbows but to the human species as a whole. And more than that, they also bear a certain physical resemblance to each other, with their heads that bring to mind oversized cannonballs, a likeness that is close enough to their being seen as modern-day Gold Dust Twins, harking back to the days when one often saw not only on grocery labels but also quite generously in the movies and on the radio and elsewhere, frequent depictions of Rainbows that were never meant to be complimentary. But when these discomforts are pointed out, there is also never an end to the Cains and the Thomases, whose advice always is, "Get over it."

But humiliation is not so easily dealt with -- or forgiven, or forgotten.

The Bogus Anti-Iran "Assassination Plot"

2011-10-14T11:16:00.001-04:00

During the primaries in the 2008 election cycle, I was an admirer and supporter of H. Clinton -- until from out of the blue she showed that she had become a heavy smoker of the anti-Iran drug -- an addiction that is common in the high places of politics and foreign policy but that makes no sense to me. I know that the officials in those high places can't possibly care that the people of Iran are under the heavy hammer of Islamic theocratic rule.   And after all, the Iranian people don't seem to be screaming too loud about it.   Maybe, after having had a close-hand look at how many Iraqis look back fondly at the despotic rule of Saddam Hussein and compare it favorably to the total ruin inflicted on Iraq by the Bush invasion, the Iranian populace has decided to let well enough alone . . .for now.

The only explanation for the anti-Iran attitude and its strength must be that in those American high places where H. Clinton lives, there is still great resentment about the hostage crisis of 30 years ago. Maybe they think that the ayatollahs have never been sufficiently punished for that bit of inhospitality toward the American ambassodorials, and Clinton and the others use their perception of a Iranian push to develop nuclear weapons as an excuse for a constant barrage of threats, sanctions, and other measures just short of outright warfare. And maybe they also do this on behalf of their two great friends in the Middle East, Saudia Arabia and Israel, both of whom, for very different reasons, would love to see an American military attack on Iran.

But if we believe in a world that is still halfway rational, that is not in the cards, because Iran is not Iraq or Afghanistan.   It is a big country.   It has 72 million able, energetic people, as compared to the Saudi figure, which is unagreed upon but ranges between 15 and 28 million, and the Israeli figure of only 8 million.   And that means there is no way that Iran can be suddenly rendered null and void. You can't just shove that many people out of the way, just like that.

In the light of all that, this Iranian plot to kill the Saudi ambassador that the U.S. spy agencies claim to have detected and foiled seems to have been made to order.   And that's just the trouble with it.   It is too pat, too made to order, and too full of characters straight from the laptops of uninspired tipsy TV crime drama writers.   And that is not to mention the dragging in of another big foreign policy bugaboo, the Mexican druglords and what-not.

In my rejection of this plot, I am not alone.   In Europe there has been widespread pooh-poohing of the credibility of this charge.   And that has also been the verdict of the two authorities that I go to first when it comes to Middle East affairs: Juan Cole's "Informed Comment," and As'ad Abukhalil's "Angry Arab News Service." Forget anyone at all in mainstream news media when it comes to reliability and reporting things thoroughly. Almost without exception those sources have long since been badly corrupted by the heavy hand of conservative ownership and the fashionability of conservative ideas. Cole, on the other hand, and more so than Abu, always has the best take on things, though Abukhalil still has interesting things to say about almost anything, and they both present convincing reasons for thinking that this "plot" is all a big crock -- starting with the fact that it doesn't fit in at all with the modus operandi of the Iranian version of the espionage spooks. Note especially what Cole has to say about perhaps the main character in the supposed plot, in a post that he titles "Wagging the Dog of Iran's Maxwell Smart."

I am surprised that both Obama and Clinton put perceptions of their credibility and common sense at so much risk by buying so heavily into this thing. They must be depending on the attention deficits that are so prevalent.

Philosophies of Face-Offs

2011-10-10T09:03:00.000-04:00

Sometimes, as I walk my woods and garden paths carrying only a naval whistle and a notably dull penknife, I think of the likelihood of encountering a bear, which could happen, because a number of them live in this area, and they're free to roam as they please. More than anyone else on this road, I have personal experience with this, because back when I had a chickenyard here at home and also a beeyard, those efforts gave two different bears the excuse to pay us several close-up visits, about 10 years apart.

Today, as in those other days, I have no fear for my own safety, at least nothing to compare with how I feel whenever I hear neighbors enjoying their target practice while I'm splitting or hauling firewood.. Instead I entertain myself with the purely theoretical (I hope) question of what would happen if a charging bear (grizzlies in the west, black bears around here) were to encounter a samurai of bygone ages armed mainly with his sword. Not the short sword sashed to his midsection that those warriors seem to have used mainly to disembowel their own selves while committing seppuku, but the long one, the katana, meant to finish off their adversaries by the boatload. You know, those fabulous blades interleaved and tempered with 40,000 hits of a swordsmith's hammer and said to be so exquisitely sharp and strong that they could easily cut through a 16-penny nail, which is a pretty substantial nail, almost as thick as a lead pencil.

I'm thinking that when faced with a charging bear the samurai ought to be able to get in the first lick before it gets too close. He ought to be able to lop off a paw or put a truly serious gash in the bear's chest or belly, or he might even be able to relieve the bear of its head with a single initial swipe. But would any of that be enough to stop the bear in its tracks, as the instant pain and shock caused it to realize that it had suddenly lost some absolutely essential part of its anatomy? Or would the sheer momentum of the onrushing bear with its huge, flailing arms and its snapping teeth carry it into the warrior regardless and thereby cause lethal harm to his person as well?

This scene must've already occurred in ancient Japan many times, because as far as I know, bears have always lived there as well, but I've never read about any such encounters, nor has such an occasion ever fit in, I guess, with the dramatic intent of Akira Kurosawa and the others..

Meanwhile the same principle and question of reflex and momentum must apply also to those scenes that you see all the time in crime dramas on TV and in films -- those faceoffs in which two enemy parties are pointing guns straight at the foreheads of their antagonists, and they're sweating and breathing hard, suffused with tension. But somehow I never feel that tension, because it merely makes me think that one or the other could easily win merely by squeezing the trigger. Wouldn't the other person be hit so quickly that he would never know what happened and so would have no chance to respond in kind? Or is it the thinking that the mere impact on the person being hit would cause his trigger finger to reflex just enough to fire his weapon as well?

You will never see this question answered in films. Instead, invariably both parties will back down. We could never expect any such resolution to occur between a charging bear and a bloodthirsty samurai.

The Apotheosis of S. Jobs

2011-10-10T01:34:00.000-04:00

Even long before his anticipated death a few days ago, at the hands of pancreatic cancer, Steve Jobs was so often mentioned and praised in the news for any number of reasons that I wonder if sheer embarrassment played a part in the escalation of his condition to that final state.   Every third or fourth news item seems to be about him and his demise, and about ways to set his memory into stone, and I am sure this deluge will go on for the next three or four weeks at least, no matter what happens in the rest of the world. This universal outpouring of praise on him is so profuse that I am sure that if, instead of being one of the leading lights during a couple of periods of at the Apple computer company, he had instead done something really incredible, such as eliminating racism, genocide, religious intolerance, global overheating, warfare, African warlords, credit swap defaults, the theft of the West Bank, home foreclosures, evictions, pollution, overfishing, or any one of the million other ills of the world or of the Seven Deadly Sins, he would not be celebrated nearly as lavishly as he is now.

Who or what is responsible for all this cathedral-building in honor of Steve Jobs? Can it be that the Mac and Apple users have finally taken over the world? If so, how could that be? How could I have missed that startling development? For it seems to me that it was only a decade or so ago when the users of Apple machines were still a small minority -- about 10 percent or so -- of the total computer users in the world, with the PC users still in the great majority.

In trying to think of how I could've completely missed being affected by the wonders of what is clearly the Steve Jobs Golden Age of Computer Stuff, the cause must be that somehow I have managed to get along just fine without having bought one single Apple product of any kind, ever since things first heated up in the computer world, at least on the home machine front, dating from the moment that I first spotted that incredible miracle, the game of Pong on one of those little Atari 2600 consoles, probably in a Sears store, back in the mid-1970's.

I ignored the Apple machines on purpose, because I didn't like that company's way of doing business, though I believe Jobs and his buddy Wozniak were intimately connected with it even then.   I thought the early Apple computers and later the Macs were way too proprietary.   If you had one of their machines, whenever you needed a part to fix it or some peripheral, you couldn't buy one made by any company other than by Apple.   This struck me as being greedy, tyrannical, undemocratic, and un-American, compared to the way that IBM, with the introduction of their first basic home computer, the XT, threw open the architecture of their machine to the world at large, and that made it possible for hundreds of small companies to make and to supply stuff to go into those machines, and that made PC stuff not only less expensive but also easier to obtain, since one had so many choices.

Of course, I know that IBM, being a true part of Big Business, did not do this out of the goodness of their hearts.   But it also occurs to me that I don't know exactly how they came to this decision.   They either under-rated the importance of the home market, and simply let it go at that, or or they were so wedded to their bread and butter office machines that they weren't interested in the home market even when it became obvious that there were dollars to be made there, too.   For whatever reason their open architecture was a boon to many small businesses, software as well as hardware, and to the numerous little guys like myself, who could then repeat their Erector Set childhood days by buying empty computer cases of all descriptions and then happily filling them up with items also of every description, and without breaking the bank.

I also disliked the Apple community for another reason. In the ensuing years, little wars of contention constantly broke out between PC and Mac users, and inevitably in these little spats the Mac users were the Republicans of the computer world, because they were always the more aggressive, argumentative, and nasty proponents of their machines. Just as Republicans take so much exception to so many people who persist in voting Democratic, it galled the Apple users that so many people insisted on sticking to their PC's, despite all the claims that the Apple users made about the superiority of their machines.

Because I never had any reason to get any of that equipment, I've never been in a position to know whether their arguments had any merit.   The first argument that is always made is about how superior the graphics are on Apple machines, making them especially useful for artists.   But I've never used computers for any of my painting or stained glass work.   Instead I use my battery of seven or eight PC's on probably a more primitive level -- namely for writing, listening to music, checking on the Internet, playing games, or just for the sheer joy of taking them apart and putting them together again, and I have no idea what the sleek, miniaturized world of Iphones and Ipods is all about, except that they couldn't possibly fit my hands..

I can't help feeling that I'm not missing much, except strains from a constantly bent neck and on my eyes from punching the tiny keys on those little monstrosities that seem to be almost cemented to younger, sweatier hands. And speaking of young, sweaty hands, I'm not in any social networks anyway, for obvious reasons.

About Herman Cain

2011-10-09T07:23:00.000-04:00

For days I've been trying to write a post about H. Cain, the end man on the vaudeville team that passes for the current aspirants to be the Republican nominee for President -- the one with the black face that is so skillfully put on that it looks real. But he is offensive in so many ways that their sheer number overwhelms me, as does the size and the quantity and variety of the threats posed by the other members of that team as well. My stomach isn't all that it could be.

The Case for Being Told

2011-09-30T10:28:00.000-04:00

There are numerous times when I wish movie-makers could've moved themselves to have a character say aloud what he's thinking. The main character in the British trilogy "The House of Cards," played by Ian Richardson, made doing that one of his big things, and it added greatly to the film's effect.   But that was a huge exception.   Otherwise, what used to be called "dramatic asides" are heard so rarely nowadays that it must mean that there's a hard and fast rule of movie-making to avoid them at all costs. It must have been decided long ago that the inarticulate hero or heroine is superbly chic or cool or awesome, while the moviegoer cannot be expected to tolerate hearing anything even remotely approaching self-revelation. A reflection of modern life?

Oh well.   I guess that does save the writing and the speaking of hundreds of extra lines, even it it does mean populating the average movie with animated lumps who seem to be indulging in endless sleepwalking and little else.

I just finished struggling through a Russian film that exhibited this glaring defect in painful profusion. Titled "How I Ended My Summer," it could much more aptly have borne the title, "How I Spent the Whole Summer Looking Stupid and Acting Accordingly by Saying Not a Word."

It tells of two men maintaining a cold, bleak existence at a weather station somewhere on an island in the arctic wastes.    One day the older and more serious of the pair is out fishing, when the younger man gets a radio message saying that his co-worker's beloved wife and child have just been killed in an auto accident.   The younger worker is told to pass this along to his co-worker, along with assurance that a ship is being sent to bring him back to the mainland in his bereavement.

Because this is a movie made by one of all your most clever people, when the older worker returns from his fishing trip, the younger man tells him absolutely nothing and instead keeps all that strictly to himself, for reasons that naturally we are left to figure out for ourselves -- necessarily unsatisfactorily, because that young guy's vocabulary doesn't extend past occasionally uttered four-letter expletives. Of course it all eventually comes out anyway, but with consequences far, far worse that they would have been if the news had been conveyed as was requested.

But this is how by far most of your bad and even worse movie plots go.   Things are carefully kept concealed till it's too late, when real life keeps telling us that everything and even the very worse news is always best revealed RIGHT NOW, and in language a little past the grunts of a bored polar bear.

R. Perry, Lummox from Texas

2011-09-25T12:20:00.000-04:00

If you do a Google search on 10 reasons why R. Perry should not be the President of the U.S., you will find a large number of such lists of various sizes ranging as high as 21, though many other reasons could also be added, because the more you learn about him, the more this man has all the appearance of a man carrying -- like an impossibly fertile opossum mother -- an unusually large number of such shortcomings clinging to his chest as much as to his back. Yet he is still being seen by some as this large, noble knight who, mounted on his mighty Texas steed (snow white of course), finally charged out of the burning wastes a couple of months ago and came to the rescue not only of the pack of Republican aspirants for the Presidency, who, for all their efforts, were fast being seen as just a gang of mangy armadillos, aimlessly milling around. Not only that but numbers of people who consider themselves as rational beyond all doubt also actually see this man as the one most qualified to lead the United States, ahead of all the country's other 300 million inhabitants, and never mind what that says about the country's inhabitants.

Not that Presidential elections have anything to do with picking the best person in the country for the job. Far from it. Oceans away from it. But still....

I first became reasonably aware of Perry a couple of years ago, when he announced that he supported the idea of the secession of Texas from the rest of the United States.

I would think that in a world where a reasonable number of heads and necks are in the proper alignment with each other, that position alone would leave him completely out of anyone's conception of him as the U.S. President, and never mind all the rest of those other nine or however many other reasons, all of them also quite legitimate. But maybe, just as Perry's party hungers to make the U.S. government smaller, which can only be done by chopping away many important parts of it and shoving them into the stove, similarly that party's ultimate aim in seeing him as being such a credible candidate would be to channel his secessionist tendencies into making the U.S. smaller, and that can also be done only by some serious demolition work, on the World Trade Center scale of things. Therefore this man's avid supporters are fighting to put into the Oval Office a man whose only purpose would be to total the country like a recklessly driven car, to reduce it to a state not of Texas but of a place where not enough would be left even to send to the crusher.

I can't put my finger on it right now but one list that I saw put forth another reason to forget about Perry that especially stuck in my mind, and that is that he is dumb. But whether we are talking about his urge to imitate the state of things that brought on the Civil War, or about social security, medicare, climate change, short-changing education, force-innoculating young girls, or any other issue, and when we remember how at Texas A&M, a merely so-so college, he struggled through with a long series of C's and D's, his obvious obtuseness is an over-arching trait that colors everything else about him. So it seems to me that by treasuring him, the G.O.P. is maligning not only the U.S. but the huge (though not necessarily great) state of Texas itself, by creating here a tradition of putting up for President Texas governors who were notably dense and are therefore seen by that party as being superbly qualified to lead the U.S. For now it has been established beyond all doubt that GW Bush's boat was also none too swift. Instead it was the absolute opposite, and now that party can only offer more of the same.

All this is totally incredible . . .and pitiful.

I wrote the first draft of this post a while ago, soon after Perry threw his hat into the ring, and since then I have noticed an interesting thing happening. After having at first been quite happy with Perry, the media forces who consider it their job rather than the voters to determine the U.S. President, have now begun to reconsider and are slowly backing away from him, mainly on the grounds that he has turned out to be too slow-witted, especially in debates. And so now he is being quietly dumped from contention, and the nod is being handed back to the original G.O.P. front runner, M. Romney.

I guess the insidious powers-that-be have started thinking that they need somebody who is more than just a men's wear clothing dummy, and also just a male version of Sarah Palin, but without her entertainment values. To appear on the same podium with Obama, they would need someone who at least looks as if he might know what the question was.

Death of the Bull Dance

2011-09-25T11:48:00.000-04:00

After the end of this year there is to be no more bullfighting in Catalonia, Spain's most important region, and the last corridas in Barcelona are about to be held.

Wow! That is big news!

Of course, it doesn't rate with the sudden announcement that was also made today, by the Saudi Arabian king, that women will for the first time be allowed not only to vote but also to be candidates in municipal elections. But still....

Many years ago, in my "Ernest Hemingway era," a phase that has been something of a curse to so many young, aspiring writers, or at least it used to be, I read his "documentary" on bullfighting, called "Death in the Afternoon." I found it to be his best full length work, way ahead of his more famous "For Whom the Bells Toll" and the awkwardly named "The Sun Also Rises."

The Ignored Afflicted

2011-09-24T10:23:00.002-04:00

The situation in the U.N. today strongly puts me in mind of the several conventions held, in 1860, just before the Civil War, by the group that was then called the Democratic Party, though, as the party of preference for the slaveowners, it somehow morphed over the next hundred years into being the present-day Republican Party, the party of preference for bigots of all kinds, and you can tell just how ignorant people are of history when they blithely refer to the Republicans as being "the party of Lincoln," when in reality they stopped being that the day that Jacob Javits, an outstandingly liberal senator from New York, no longer ran for office, in the 1950's.

Seeing that the Republicans embraced various views unfriendly to slavery, and that they could win, even with a candidate as rough-hewn and "homely" as Abraham Lincoln, the Democrats at their three conventions held within two months of each other, the first in Charleston, S.C., and the other two in Baltimore, tried to trick the American public into seeing things their way, and that included splitting apart, twice over, and presenting themselves in various guises. But try as they might to conceal the irreconcilable and terrible plight of the slaves from Africa in the southern states, mainly by never mentioning it, though that was at the heart of what the subsequent Civil War was all about, no matter how much the apologists for the secessionists insisted otherwise, then and now, those "Democrats" of the mid-19th Century were unable to succeed in such political sleight of hand.

Today all the pressure is being put on the Palestinians, the counterparts of the American slaves, to desist from applying to the U.N. for statehood, while nothing at all is being asked of the Israelis. Instead only one word is being spoken, and that is "negotiation," as if that is the be-all and end-all and the solution to all the problems between the Israelis and the Palestinians, when anyone who has followed the situation in the Middle East for any number of years would know that if one were looking for sincere adversaries with whom one would want to negotiate, men like B. Netanyahu and that Lieberman bird wouldn't even rate as a last choice.   Negotiations, interminably drawn-out negotiations would only give the Israelis time to take over more and more land with settlements, build higher and higher walls, and maintain more and more checkpoints -- all designed to drive some Palestinians out permanently, while confining all the rest eventually into tiny reservations, a la the Indians in the U.S., where those remaining Palestinians would likely find life so intolerable that they would soon leave for good, too, and the takeover of the West Bank would be complete, with the rationale being, "See? the sand nig- Oops! I mean the Palestinians -- didn't even want to be there in the first place, and this proves it!"

So in a Haaretz article devoted to supposedly reasonable reactions to the speech that Obama gave in the U.N. and in which he responded to the Palestinians exactly as he had been instructed to do by His Masters' Voice, you will find no mention of the things most hurtful to the Palestinians -- the economic chokeoffs, the settlements, the walls, the checkpoints, the segregated roads, and the segregated everything else.   Instead everything is seen only from the point of view of advantages for Israel, though it is the stronger and more favored party in the matter by far.

Here is a typical paragraph from that article:
J Street rejected the Palestinian UN bid, but its President Jeremy Ben-Ami said in a statement that Obama was right to say there is "no shortcut” to ending the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (so what else is new?) and that Obama must turn this "crisis" into "an opportunity to jumpstart meaningful diplomacy that yields results."

But to jumpstart anything, at least in modern vehicles that don't have clutches that can be slammed while the car is rolling downhill, you need a jumper cable, and Obama's has long since fallen into shreds from disuse and dry rot.

Not so long ago in the U.S., Jews, along with Rainbows, were the perpetual underdogs and scapegoats for almost everything imaginable.   But now they have left the Rainbows behind and have "graduated" into being among the overdogs.   If I were Jewish I would feel very uneasy about being given that status, and I am always much more comfortable with remaining among the underdogs.   I have found no reason not to continue thinking, as I always have, that to be an underdog is always the most moral, right, decent, just, and honorable position to be in.   And so it is now with the Palestinians, regardless of the badly aimed rockets of today and the suicide bombers of yesterday, to which a simple request for statehood ought to be lightyears more preferable. But the Israel sympathizers seem to view every Palestinian initiative as worthy only of being thrown out of sight down the same desert well.

Of course the Israelis would instantly answer that they, not the Palestinians, are the true underdogs in this, pointing out all the hostile Arab countries close by with much larger populations. We are asked to forget all the F-16 fighter planes, the several nuclear subs, the hundreds of nuclear bombs, and all the other modern weaponry that is not easily noticeable in Arab hands, plus the biggest deterrent of all, possession of one impossibly large and bodaciously mean pit bull of a country that is kept kenneled up overseas until needed to be sicced on someone such as the Iranians or the Palestinians.

But you would think that nevertheless that would make the Israelis all the more disposed to showing how much benefit they can be to the small slice of the Arab population with whom they have the closest contact.   Instead they just keep pressing their booted foot down on the Palestinian neck with all the more force, using the excuse that that kind of unrelenting torture is all that the Arabs understand.

It may be exceedingly idealistic to say this, but I feel comfortable in saying it anyway: That is a very slippery premise on which to base the whole future of the Promised Land.

Getting into Blog Bigtime

2011-09-22T10:00:00.001-04:00

Blogger has taken to greeting us during signon with a little ad saying, "Create killer content. Grow traffic. Monetize your blog. Learn from experts at BlogWorld, the world's largest blogging conference!" which will be held where else but in Los Angeles, a huge and outstandingly grubby city 3,000 long, hard miles away from here, in the first week of this coming November.

Is this something I would really want to do, or that in any way would be even possible for me to do?

Naw.

I really like the current, complete austerity of this weblog, though I am well aware of how unglamorous it is. It ties right in with everything else that I represent.

"Space Junk"

2011-09-22T04:26:00.002-04:00

A 6-ton, 35-feet long, human-made contraption called "UARS," that had been up in orbit for 20 years, has been declared to be no longer useful for measuring climate stuff, though several of its components are still operating. In recent weeks it has been falling back to earth, and it is expected to enter the atmosphere tomorrow, its final day, in a flaming display of not quite total disintegration.

Because in these fascist times fear has to be injected wherever possible into each and every news item, a caveat is always inserted close to the beginning of every report, saying that the chances of anyone being hit by any of the debris are only about 1 in 3,200.

With 20 acres of land here for the debris to land, I am not paying the slightest attention to all those concerns about any of those fragments hitting me or anyone else. Instead I just think of that reassuring note as being laughable. The odds are just not there.

Instead I keep thinking about how cool it would be have some fragment crashing through my generally thick canopy of trees and landing here, hopefully in plain sight and after having made enough noise that I would have noticed something.

If that happens we are instructed not to touch the object, and instead to notify the local law authorities at once.

I confess, I would be a trifle slow in doing that, not least because of the air of extreme self-importance that local law authorities always assume when they barge onto someone's property and take charge, with their yellow ribbons and all their other bullpoop.

But that's just me. Or would it be? Because I can assure you, I am not the only one in the sticks all over the world with a strong appreciation of their property rights. But that wouldn't be the end of it either. An even stronger factor would be the appeal of having such novel forbidden objects in one's secret possession, along with the possibilities of financial gain farther down the road. For that or other reasons, what the authorities are disarmingly pleased to call "space junk" could very easily be an ordinary man's space treasure, to have and to hold, so to speak.

However, all these are almost certain to be completely moot points anyway. The Earth has much more ocean than it has anything else, and through the eons all that water has been pretty greedy about gobbling up by far the lion's share of all the good stuff that daily zooms in from outer space.

So Sad for Obama -- the U.N. Palestinian Crisis

2011-09-21T10:25:00.001-04:00

So sad for Obama, because no matter what happens in this U.N. Palestinian thing, it's not going to do anything for his comfort zones. So you would think he would grab the bull by the horns and do something for once in the foreign policy area that would justify that Nobel Prize and, more importantly, earn him a solid chapter in the "Profiles of Courage," even if it does put the final seal of doom on his chances for a second term. But does a second term for Obama rate above all other considerations? I don't see why it should.

That singular act of courage would consist of not exercising the U.S. veto when the Palestinians formerly submit their application for statehood to the Security Council. But of course nothing like that has a ghost of a chance of happening with this man, although it's not certain that the results of doing that would be as dire as the predictions of the anti-Obamarites would have him and everybody else believe.

One reason is the large streak of principle that has always run through the Jewish character in the U.S. as well as through the Israeli people in Israel, and that streak could very well prevail over the hysteria being spread by the Netanyahu forces. The recent special election in a usually strongly Democratic district in New York City's boroughs, in which the Republican won by a wide margin, greatly helped by a generous number of Jewish votes, is being cited by the Teapubs as a strong indicator of the fate that awaits Obama if he does not use that veto, or even if he does not persuade the Palestinians to cease and desist, while of course asking nothing of the Israelis, though they and not the Palestinians are the real villains in the piece by a country mile. The Palestinians, after all, are not inexorably sprouting settlements deep inside Israeli territory and edging toward Tel Aviv.

But the mainstream news media in the U.S., which is 100% under the control of rightwing tycoons, is carefully keeping hidden the factors that a certain large if not prevailing percentage of Jewish people in the U.S. put the principles of being decent and right above all else, and especially because they see those principles as being behind what it means to be Jewish, and they do not at all buy the policies of the Israel leadership lock, stock, and barrel, just as not everyone does also in Israel itself.

Another thing about that New York election is that the previous holder of that seat, a man named Weiner, had been forced out of office because of some sort of sexual misstep, and the usual overwhelming stigma of that undoubtedly worked powerfully against the Democratic aspirant. Absolutely nothing was said about that "Weiner" factor in the media reports, which instead were engrossed and delighted at how the results could be seen as being a nearly fatal blow against Obama. But memories can't possibly be that short, even in Brooklyn and Queens.

With only a couple of days left before the Palestinian leader, M. Abbas, submits the Palestinian bid for detachment from their Israeli slave overseers, B. Obama is due to have meetings with Netanyahu and with Abbas. The meeting with Netanyahu means absolutely nothing, but then, no meeting with that bird ever does. But Obama still probably nurses the hope that Abbas, by withdrawing his submission at the last moment, will save Obama's skin, though it really won't, which is the main thing that makes his situation in this so sad.

Obama will probably put his request on a personal level, telling Abbas that if he persists, he will help ensure that Obama will not be around to "help" him through all the next five years. As if anything that Obama has done so far has really helped the Palestinians, and instead he has been in the Israeli camp all along, though that has not brought him support from the Jewish Teapubs any more than his numerous bendings and compromises with the Teapubs in general has brought him any respect from them either. Instead it has brought him all the more vilificiation and opposition from them every step of the way, which would persist even if he proposed that the Sun rises in the east and sets down in the west.

If he has any mettle at all, Abbas is going to say "Thanks but no thanks," after which, if Obama does exercise the veto, only the Israelis and those over whose minds they hold sway will be happy. But it will result in the U.S., a slave-holding country not so long ago, being seen more than ever as the leader of the New Confederacy of slaveholders, with the Palestinians forced to continue being the very unwilling chattels of the Israelis, even if over high, concrete walls -- a Confederacy that consists of, beside the U.S. and Israel, also Great Britain, Canada, and possibly Germany.

You would think that Obama would have foreseen all this from his earlier experiences with schoolyard intimidators years ago, and in consequence would, for instance, during the first visit that an Israeli leader made to the White House to give the new President his marching orders, he would have told that person to get lost then and there.

That would have saved him a lot of trouble from the start. But, more than me, he's the one that seriously needs to have a cataract operation, and right away.

Pitiful U.S. "Negotiations"

2011-09-20T12:35:00.001-04:00

It's pitiful beyond the meaning of the word, to watch the U.S. diplomats fall all over themselves in their frenzied efforts to persuade, pressure, cajole, threaten, sweet-talk, bully, and otherwise try to stop the Palestinian Authority from applying to the U.N. Security Council for recognition of a Palestinian state, as if the Palestinians haven't noticed how the U.S. has been so strongly on the Israeli side and so weakly on the Palestinian.   This means that in effect the Americans have nothing to offer the Palestinians -- and especially not in regard to the most painful issue by far, and that is the constant encroaching on Palestinian soil by Israeli "settlements," about which no promises are being made, though it is a process that has been very aptly characterized by the Palestinians as their being asked to negotiate over a pizza when the other party is as busy as can be eating the pizza.

The obvious question is, "Why now?"   I seem to recall that months and maybe years have elapsed since attempts of any negotiations were attempted by the U.S. or by Israel.   They were essentially not even speaking to the Palestinians.   But now, all of a great sudden, before this coming Friday, it's being deemed absolutely essential that the Palestinians climb down "off their high horse" and agree to enter fresh peace negotiation with the Israelis, when nothing is more certain that if the Israelis enter such negotiations at all, it will be always be out of bad faith. And meanwhile the Israelis aren't being asked to climb off a damn thing, least of all their determination to stop the establishment of more and more of the "settlements."

I don't know how much can be expected of this Abbas guy, the PA leader in this effort.   It seems to me that in the past he and the PA have been accused, and with apparently good reason, of being tools of the Israelis.   But, true or not, now he's on to a very good thing by going to the U.N. for this recognition. I hope he doesn't let the Israeli and American threats or inviting promises divert him in any way. And by doing so, he will accidentally do the United States a great favor, by demonstrating to its President the virtues of sticking to one's guns -- a trait that hasn't often been noticed in B. Obama's makeup.

Meanwhile another thing that I have noticed is how lacking the U.S. media coverage is on covering this Palestinian initiative, when it is by far the most dramatic and most morally important story that is unfolding in world affairs these days.   It shows how thoroughly the media, as well as the Executive Branch and most of the Legislative branch of the U.S. government, have been cowed by the supporters of the right wing Israeli leadership.   Instead, and strangely, you have to go straight to the horse's mouth, an Israeli newspaper called "Haaretz," in which so much time is bitterly spent on condemning the Netanyahu leadership that it's a wonder he hasn't ordered it to be closed down or at least for the Mossad to bomb it to bits.

Just the other day the leader of the Opposition Party in the Knesset, which I believe is called Kadima, a tough-as-nails woman named Tzipi Livni delivered a blistering attack on Netanyahu and his iron-assed coalition.   A rightwinger herself, ordinarily she isn't much to be admired, but simply because she is a female, she can't possibly be all bad, and in those statements she really outdid herself. For a real treat in elegant and heartfelt polemics, check it out.

(The report in Haaretz on the speech is intriguingly titled, "Livni: Israel's Diplomatic Stupidity is Pushing the United States into a Corner.")

Friedman on Israel

2011-09-20T11:13:00.001-04:00

One gets the distinct feeling that Angry Arab seized on the very first sentence of T. Friedman's article in the NYTimes titled "Israel: Adrift at Sea Alone," and felt no need to read any farther. That sentence goes: "I've never been more worried about Israel''s future." To which Angry responded along the lines of "What future? Israel has no future," and that was all.

Too bad, because I thought that all in all the article was largely right on the money, save for a few small lapses, such as saying that the aid flotilla that the Israeli commandos boarded and killed 10 of the mostly Turkish aid-bringers, mostly by shooting them in the back, had to be stopped because they were attempting to make a "reckless landing." So any acts that people perform in a good cause is reckless just because the wrongdoers make it dangerous?

Tell that to the Russians who at terrific cost to themselves stopped the German juggernaut during the Second World War and eventually pushed them back far enough to free the few that remained of the Jews and other prisoners in the Nazi death camps. Or. to bring it much closer to home, meaning these days, the protesters in Syria and Yemen, who, striving to change their countries' ruling regimes peacefully, are being shot down in huge numbers by their own military. To go out daily to demonstrate nevertheless may be reckless but also it's going down in the annals as almost incomparable in the pursuit of human betterment.

The American Middle East "Solution"

2011-09-20T07:59:00.000-04:00

(Another) Carl says:

The ambassador falls off the reasonable wagon with a big thud in his very last sentence, when he says: ". . .The PA should acknowledge the necessity of a two-state solution that can be achieved only with Israel’s willing participation . . .”

I think it very likely that over decades of eyeball-to-eyeball contact with the Israelis, one thing is crystal clear to the PA, and that is that the Israelis under practically any leadership have no intention whatsoever of EVER being willing to take part in a two-state solution. The PA is in the best position of anybody to know that the Israelis seem to have bought whole hog into the original “American Solution,” which is to pull off a fait accompli by slowly and inexorably shoving the inhabitants of the most recent several thousands of years off their land, as was done wholesale in the “settling” of the Wild West. It all just takes time, and for that the Israeli policy has shaped up to be expressed with only one word: “stall.” Stall all day today, this month, this year, and for many years to come if need be.

The above is a comment that I had the temerity to post about a week ago on Juan Cole's remarkably informative and civilized site, Informed Comment. In it Cole had posted a guest column by a former ambassador to the U.N. on European Affairs, G.B Helman. The title of the column, "The Palestinians Seek U.N. Recognition," as well as the first paragraph in my comment, give the general gist of the column.

I noticed the column and posted my comment much too late, and there was only one subsequent comment, a reply that went as follows:
Dr. blc says:

it’s not at all clear that the Israelis are unwilling to agree to a two-state solution. the record shows that it’s been the Palestinians and the Arabs that have been opposed to it far more than the Israelis.
at present there’s little hope of it being realized and that’s not all on the Israelis. Hamas also opposes a peace-and-partition deal which means that the Palestinians can’t deliver their end of a deal.

Though I never got around to answering the reply above, it was easy to see how severely flawed the reasoning in it was, besides being out of date. Hamas, after originally saying it would not take part in the U.N. initiative by the PA, then seems to have changed its mind and had said that it would go along, and I guess that's the reason why next to nothing is being heard from Hamas during this current fully justified application by the Palestinians to be recognized as a state.

But even if Hamas hadn't done that, what they said in opposition to the PA would've been of small account, because the West Bank is the big prize, and not at all Gaza, the tiny strip of land presided over by Hamas and from which, just to give the appearance of doing something for the cause, Hamas stupidly permits the lobbing of a few rockets now and then, which damage Israel hardly at all, though it does allow the Israelis to use Gaza as a sort of punching bag and gives them the excuse to scream "Murder!" to the high Heavens and to commit all sorts of injustices and get away with it, with the abject collusion of the U.S., including real murder on the high seas.

He Never Promised the Rose Garden

2011-09-18T08:25:00.001-04:00

As I have mentioned before, the noted historian Barbara W. Tuchman wrote a book called "The March of Folly," in which she dealt with the phenomenon of how national and other kinds of leaders consistently will do things that are against their countries' or other entities' own best interests.   But that deadly quirk is not at all confined to kings, presidents, prime ministers, popes, and what-not, and today we can see that threatening to happen with ordinary citizens in droves, in the runup to the elections next year, on all sides of the U.S. Racial Divides.

One case of this exists in how -- besides a number of others who had formerly professed to be on his side -- B. Obama seems to have run afoul of a certain number of his supposedly fellow Rainbows (i.e. "black people") who now are vowing to do him and by extension the Democratic Party some dirt by staying home during the voting next year and thereby they figure they will "get even" with the President and his party.

Why? For not exactly following in Martin Luther King Jr.'s footsteps when it came to leading Rainbows to "the Promised Land," as King vowed to keep trying to do during his very last sermon, back in 1968. (Even these Obama Antis could sense meanwhile that an industrial strength "Putney Swope" flip was completely out of the question.)

In that era when people all over the South and also in parts of the North were marching and getting beaten and arrested in droves and even dying in the struggle to obtain for Rainbows the right to vote for anything and anybody at all -- a right that was freely available to the worst so-called "white" hoodlum slobbering in the gutter, merely because of his melanin count -- this attitude of vowing to forgo voting purely out of spite of some kind would have been seen among the Rainbow educators in the institutions that I attended to be the height of ignorance and stupidity.   But alas I am not allowed to say that myself, openly and frankly. It would make somebody mad, with a vow to get even once over.   So that Tuesday a year from now these misguided souls intend to sit at home on their fat behinds and not vote, and the Devil take the hindmost -- which that horned entity will surely do, to the great, oily gratitude of those eternal pre-Fascists, the Teapublicans.

It's very disheartening.   Such non-keepers of the faith, as the late Adam Clayton Powell would say (a 1950's in-your-face Harlem Rainbow Congressman, though if a person was to see his picture or hear about his many escapades, this man would appear to have been the twin brother of Erroll Flynn instead), such people thereby show their deep ignorance of what voting is all about.   They actually think that by voting they are doing the Democratic Party a favor, along the lines of giving a sweating marathon runner a drink at about the 18th mile, when the reality is that it is the Democratic Party that is doing them and their interests a favor by so much as existing and doing the hard and steady work that they do.   Disgruntled progressives and liberals may huff and puff all they want, but the Democratic Party, for all its faults, is still the only force with a chance of slowing down or halting the Republican leading of the American electorate down the primrose path to a condition so tawdry and hateful that the country would be lucky to get out of it by means of another civil war..

It's not easy to start or to maintain a viable political party. At least in the U.S. it isn't.   If it were easy then there would long since have been a third and truly progressive party, and maybe not one but a number of them. Even the Tea so-called Party over on the other, dark side of things, is not really a party.   They have no chairman, no presiding committee, no organization to speak of. Instead they are merely a nasty attitude and little else.   They sneakily claim to be independent of a political party, but the truth is that they didn't just pop up out of nowhere.   Their faces would have been familiar among the same old, endlessly angry and resentful Republicans of all the past modern eras. Therefore they are just some sort of excrescence on the G.O.P. -- a malignant growth on the rectum of the Republican body..

The fact is that if people had been looking instead of just assuming, they would have noticed that, as far as I know, Obama never promised to be King's spiritual successor, and for several reasons.

The first is that he probably knows his limitations, and he's been trying hard to keep them concealed, among them the fact that he is no sort of a real leader.   He isn't iron-jawed and resolute enough. He is much more a constantly laidback professor given to saying, "Now, now, people."

Another is that Obama's familial legacy has no sort of tie-in with the American Rainbow's experience of all the injustices that they have sturdily endured. He can rely on his physical appearance, and he can play basketball every Thursday and profess to be naturally and fully tuned in, but that kind of grounding in the rigors of the past is something that either you have in every one of your cells or you don't, and it's just impossible to fake.

A third reason is that if he had promised to pick up where King left off, he would never have been elected President in the first place, and that only follows because U.S. Presidents are supposed to see to the interests of all the various groups in the country and not just one -- a principle that the G.O.P. has consistently ground underfoot whenever their turns came. And though people may routinely keep referring to him as the nation's first "black" President, I think it was generally recognized but left carefully unsaid that B. Obama is very much his mother's child and hardly at all his father's, and for that reason he was considered acceptable.

One of the hard, cold, and enduring cruelties of American life is that whereas a person of European descent can enjoy the luxury of taking Tuesday election days off and staying home and scratching his butt and drinking beer with a clear conscience, because his rights are always going to be preserved despite all the vapid screaming to the contrary, a principled Rainbow always has the obligation to pick himself up from any normal sloth and go out and vote. Essentially, unlike those in the dominant group, in at least this respect he is literally forced to do the right thing, and that's not all bad.

Similarly the drive to keep Rainbows as a group confined to the back of the bus is still so massive and ongoing that neither B. Obama nor any other President of color can have the option of being another Martin Luther King, for reasons already mentioned, and at least for the time being.   The best he or she can do is to try to block the eternally attempted rollbacks of the gains already made, while slipping in some new advance every now and again. And when there are other very big issues, of which B. Obama has more than his share to face right now, that tends to be stretched out to being very now and again.

A big consolation is that it ties in with the John Henry folk verse that goes:

      I was born one morning about the break of day.

      I picked up my burden, and I walked away.

Cataract Examination Postponed

2011-09-17T07:55:00.000-04:00

The eye surgeon, Dr. S., postponed the appointment I had for him to examine my eyes yesterday for the cataract situation, and now that won't take place for several weeks, because in a couple of days my wife is leaving for Florida to check on her very aged stepfather, and she intends to stay there for about two weeks. Her presence is necessary, because for both the examination and for the operation I would have to have somebody there with me.

Meanwhile yesterday, as I predicted, M., the gracious Southern belle who lives over on the Northern Neck, returned my call, and she gave me an even more complete rundown on how the operation went with her, four or five years ago, and with which she is extremely happy.

Her situation had been worse than mine, because while my eyesight only began to deteriorate seven or eight years ago, she, in her words, "hadn't been able to see across a room" for as long as she could remember, and she had always had to wear glasses or contacts. But now it's amazing to her how the operation gave her the ability to see things as clear as can be, except only that, because the new lens can't correct for everything, she chose distance vision, while for reading she still uses dollar store reading glasses, but only of the lowest strength. Meanwhile she spoke of how even the colors improved and became much more vivid -- an effect that especially interests me, though I wouldn't expect it to be as marked in my case, because colors are already vivid enough to me.

In fact, despite having had my spirits greatly lifted by talking with M., I am starting to waver about having this operation right now, and I've been wondering if I wasn't over-reacting when I went to the eye doctor a few days ago. I'm wondering if that business about not being able to read the road signs wasn't purely psychological, born out of not having been out on the main roads for several weeks previously. When a person does that for weeks at a time, as I do, the outside world always looks like a very strange and dangerous place when you finally venture back out into it, and being genuinely old doesn't help.

In all my day to day activities, my vision isn't a big problem. I can see everything that I need to see without glasses, though that could be a delusion, and it's true that I haven't read any books for several weeks now because of the newly oppressive small size of their print, and I really couldn't read the road signs.

Right now I don't know what I'm going to do when my wife and the doctor return, though because I've been talking and thinking about the op so much, I'll probably go through with it, especially if it turns out that, as my wife has heard is the case with contacts, with this cataract operation I could have a close-up lens put in one eye and a distance one in the other. M. didn't say anything about that. And also there's the strong curiosity that I always have about how things will go. It's going to be interesting to hear what the doctor will find to say.

The Temptations of Sarah Palin

2011-09-15T07:35:00.003-04:00

I've never been a fan of Sarah Palin, but I admit a certain inability to resist clicking on all the latest internet mentions of what she is into and what others are into when it comes to her. The very latest is that a guy named Joe McGinnis has written a book that is intended to reveal her darkest aspects, of which the most striking is the claim that when she was in her 20's and taking a fling at being a sportcaster just months before she married the T. Palin guy, she also had a brief fling with a Rainbow basketball star when he was in town for a tournament. Now people who don't like her are gleefully saying that this revelation will suddenly sink her political career right now, without a bubble.

Though I can't see how anyone could choose her to be the President, to me this incident, far from being a fatal drawback, actually gives her some dimension, of a kind that's been largely absent from her story till now, save for the facts that she's been raising five children, and that one has Down's Syndrome, while another has been grappling with the rigors of being a teenage mother. And I very much hope that those narrow minds who are the overwhelming majority of that political side that she has so mistakenly and resolutely embraced by the hindparts (or "hindpots" as that term was always pronounced in the surroundings of my early days) will not summarily toss her overboard just because once a long time ago she succumbed to a temptation regarding someone of the hated hue.

I think that Palin's has been a very interesting story and maybe even the biggest political fable of these times, unfolding ever since J. McCain pulled a shocker on everyone by plucking her out of the Alaskan obscurity and placing her squarely front and center in the American attention, as his idea of one or the three or four persons best qualified to lead the nation, ahead of all the other 300 million plus people in the U.S., even though, just for starters, she hadn't even begun to pay the dues that had already been paid by thousands of others through the years. But that was before she opened her mouth.

It has been a fable that will make great reading for future generations, when it will be long enough past the time when the stuff that does come out of her mouth will have lost all its present ability to raise the rabble. At that point I think she will be seen as having been a woman of quite modest intellect whose career was a classic example of how one who is in possession of such a supposedly great asset as a striking physical appearance and with a 100-watt smile to go with it, both of which will probably not diminish much in their appeal, if any, no matter how old she gets, still has to be on constant guard, because of the way that her looks keep leading to temptations being offered up that are hard and at times impossible to resist. That is the story of her life -- succumbing to temptation, not so much because she's weak but because there's been such an overwhelming number of enticements, and because in the days when the biggest stars visible to her were sports ones, she could never have dreamed that much larger siren calls would not only sound in her ears but would also actually come to pass, such as not only becoming the governor of a state, but, just a little later, landing her in a truly Alice in Wonderland manner in a position that was just one step away from becoming the second in command of all these United States -- just as if she had been born to be a favorite of God Himself.

That's why I never called Palin a "quitter" (at least I hope I didn't) for resigning midway through her term as Alaska governor. Instead, after she had abruptly and unexpectedly tasted the big times in the "lower 48," I saw it as a case of her simply seeing no point in further confining herself to the Arctic Circle. And besides, since she had come into such great demand, the prospect of constantly flying in and out of her home state had to have lost all attraction. The geography of much of Alaska and western Canada is noticeably stingy in its offerings of nice, safe emergency landing strips, you know.

Then there were all the other temptations that kept dropping in her lap -- all the goodies she bought for herself and her family by using all that free campaign money, and the reality shows, the book about herself, and above all the thinking by so many that even after all her many verbal missteps she was still and forever a credible candidate to be the next U.S. Prez.

Therefore it can be no wonder that much earlier in life, Ms Palin could also have succumbed to a sexual temptation involving a renowned athlete from out of town. This kind of thing happens with young people all the time. Like hungry polar bear cubs ready to taste anything that looks even remotely edible, young people succumb to nearly any temptation that offers itself, secure in the certainty, as they are in their mortality, that they will never be called out for it. To them, and rightly so, that's as ridiculous as a witness in a courtroom drama being called to task for not being able to remember where they were at some particular minute on some particular day in some particular month in some particular year, years earlier.

So if S. Palin does get pulled down completely by this escapade, and providing that that encounter with the ballplayer actually happened, it will only be because of that old color bugaboo that has long since permeated all of American life and keeps rearing its ugly head out of the fabric and the threads of the flag at every opportunity, no matter how much that nether side of American politics that puts it to so much use keeps trying to deny its presence.

Considerations of Cataracts

2011-09-14T09:52:00.001-04:00

The other day I went for the regular checkup on my eyes.   I got a very good report on the glaucoma.   The pressure in both eyes is down to 10, and the doctor said it didn't need to go any lower than that.   But the cataracts are another matter.   He had been leaving it up to me to say how bad they were getting, and it just so happened that during the drive to his office that morning, I started taking special note of how I couldn't read any road signs until I was right up on them.   This is okay as long as I stay around here but if I ever had to drive to some strange place, I could be in trouble. And I decided that since I'm getting tired of having everything looking as if there's a big brush fire burning just a couple of miles away, this time I would tell the doctor that maybe we should finally start thinking about it.

So day after tomorrow I have to go back so that the other doctor from Lynchburg can take a look.   He's the one that did the laser ops on my eyes for the glaucoma.

I am told that though it has to be done in a hospital, because of the need for a sterile environment, this cataract operation only takes about 20 minutes and has become pretty routine, and the results are such that afterward most people say that they are sorry they didn't have it sooner.   Still, I'm daunted by the idea of somebody slicing into both my eyeballs, taking out the lenses I was born with, and inserting new glass or plastic ones, even while I keep thinking how great it would be for my vision to be suddenly much clearer again.

Before I go to see Dr. S., I'm trying to get myself together enough to call M., a lady that I've known for a long time and who had this operation a while back, with great success.   She's already given me a full rundown on it, but that was three or more years ago, and I've forgotten the details.   I am sure she will be quite happy to go over it with me all over again. She is that kind of a woman.

The Big Anniversay Day

2011-09-11T08:43:00.000-04:00

Today my wife and I celebrate, quietly, our wedding anniversary. We were married exactly 46 years ago, in 1965. She was 22 and I was 35. It was the first marriage for both of us, and there things have stayed ever since.

But long before that, September 11 was also the birthday of my only sibling, my sister, Winifred. Younger than me by little over a year, in her later years she was badly beset by several illnesses, and she didn't quite make it to age 70, leaving us in January of 2002.

That means, however, that she was around for several months right after the events in New York, D.C., and Pennsylvania of 9/11, and she was badly drugged out by the coincidence of the dates.

For that and a great many other larger reasons, other than noting it in passing, I do not observe the anniversary of that day of the deaths of so many innocent people, plus the still never satisfactorily explained instant demolitions of those towers that, in their out of control grandiosity and their nondescript design that took no mental effort to conceive -- they need only to have seen Stanley Kubrick's movie, "2002" -- I see no reason for those twin monstrosities to be missed.

But those are not the worst aspects of 9/11, for I also think that the dead and the destruction were vastly dishonored by the measures that were taken in response by the administration that was then in charge of the U.S. Government. In very short order that administration's reactions, in which utter bile completely displaced any vestige of simple intelligence, severely damaged not only the U.S. but also several other countries, especially Iraq, in ways that dwarfed the immediate catastrophe wrought by those four airliners and their suicide hijackers. And even worse, that damage, wrought not by Islamist foreigners but instead by home, supposed Christians, is still having gangrenous effects on the American psyche, brought about by people who claim to be acting in the best interests of the country but are actually doing just the opposite. Yet they will be in the vanguard of those bringing flowers today in memory of the dead, when actually they should never have any business going anywhere near the sites of those several impacts of that day 10 years ago.

Political Reading

2011-09-09T07:49:00.003-04:00

This morning while I was scrolling through Google News, the site briefly flashed a message that I assume was meant for me personally. It said that at some unspecified time -- certainly not in this one morning! -- I had read 28 political articles, and that that was 3 times more than most readers.

Oh yeah.

It also said that therefore I should ask to have part of their site offered up in a political section.

They can forget that. God knows what those devils would choose to put in it.

I read through that site every day only at my own spiritual peril as it is. Like that segment of the American electorate that spends so much time dancing under the elephant's tail, their hearts can get into some very idiotic places.

The Empty Mouths

2011-09-08T19:56:00.000-04:00

The media and the pundits have spent the last several days telling us what President Obama is saying to Congress even as I type these words. Then, for the next several days, the media will tell us what he said, which will be just about the same thing, so that they need only change the tense of their verbs, while throwing in a few extra touches to try to cover themselves. Then, for a couple of weeks after that they will go over each of those recommendations about job creation yet again, this time for the purpose of happily telling us just why each of those can't and won't be done.

The evil-doers and the slack-jawed sure are having their way. Maybe, much as I never wanted to believe it, this country is in fact -- in the sense of why people attend college and take non-lucre-promising courses like the humanities -- already facing the bye-bye door.

Sadly Doomed Venture -- the President's Jobs Speech

2011-09-08T17:56:00.001-04:00

This evening B. Obama is slated to give a speech that is supposed to be intended to enlist Congress' help in "creating jobs."   But that will be a futile exercise, on several fronts.

   One is that everything he will say seems to have been already reported, and also already dismissed, so great has the racial hatred escalated over the mere idea of him being in office.

Furthermore I thought it had already been well established that chief executives by themselves can do little to create jobs, whether in a state or in the country as a whole. At best he can only try to create a climate in which hopefully more jobs will be created, but the jobs will be created not by him but by businesses. They are the ones that create jobs and hire people to fill them, while presidents and governors can only hire people to fill government posts that in large part have already been created long before they came into office.   A chief executive can and will take credit for any jobs added elsewhere during his time in office, or suffer for the lack of that having been done, and that is what is happening with the R. Perry guy right now, and with B. Obama.

Still another sign anticipating the ultimate futility of what the President is about to try to do tonight can be seen in the "clever" filip that has been added to so many of the media reports on this upcoming speech, and that is to say that Obama is trying to save jobs -- including his own. This kind of thing is said so often and with such glee that it's easy to see how many in the country have come to think of the bad jobs situation not at all out of any consideration for the many unfortunates who so desperately need and are searching for a job. No. It's as if that large number of one's fellow Americans doesn't even exist. Instead everything about the need for more jobs has come to be thought of purely in terms of the all-consuming desire to drive B. Obama out of the Oval Office as soon as possible, even though he's been a giant when compared, say, to the tiny but deadly succubus that immediately preceded him in the post.

Therefore it follows beyond any shadow of a doubt that for the next year or so, the Republican Congressmen will do everything in their power to prevent any climate from coming into being in which jobs can conceivably be created, because a new chapter has been added to their Holy Bible, saying that the fewer jobs created, the less chance there will be of Obama being reelected. Therefore, as the truest embodiments of that hatred of which I just spoke, of the Republican Congressmen -- who are the majority in the House and nearly so in the Senate -- some will not be physically present to hear Obama's speech, others who will be there will not listen to what he has to say, and absolutely none will go along with any of his requests. But we can expect to hear a loud boo or two -- a formerly ungentlemanly and unprecedented thing to do whenever a President speaks to Congress, but now, since Obama took office, is permitted.

God and the Burning of Texas

2011-09-05T10:21:00.000-04:00

A great deal of the state of Texas continues to burn, in the way of wild fires, excessive heat, and drought. But right along its eastern border a rain-heavy weather disturbance called "Lee" (after the Confederate general, no doubt) is ambling by while "perversely" refusing to favor Texas with more than a few drops. Meanwhile its governor, R. Perry, is in the thick of running for President, during which he misses no chance to glorify all the good things he claims to have done for his state. One of those deeds was to make a big thing of praying for rain a few weeks ago, but that also came to naught. Does this mean that God, whose close partners Perry and those on his side claim to be, conversely doesn't care for them at all, or does it mean that there is no God? This is something that those guys have to decide, though they will settle for blaming it all on the so-called "black" fellow sitting in the Oval office.

The irony is that those guys refer so many of the ills of the world to this man that it suggests that they have in fact, without realizing it, started to confuse B. Obama with God.

A Weather Log

2011-09-05T09:37:00.001-04:00

One of my wife's friends said to their book club that the weather is the biggest thing, the most important thing, and I agree with that completely. I especially like the way that the weather, so far, is beyond all human arrogances. All we can do about it -- so far -- is to just deal with it as it comes, and I think that's great.

Weather Underground keeps trying to encourage people to start weather weblogs, I guess on their site, and if I knew more about the science of weather, I would give that some strong consideration. But I have noticed how the weather aficianados just love to lace their jargon with all kinds of scientific terms. Anyway, I have always loved weather, and I think it would be cool to try to figure out just where storms are going and what they're going to do. I have a feeling that the computer up in my head would give me a good shot at being able to do that, and maybe even being good at it.

But so far it's only a thought ...because i only get real interested in the weather during the hurricane season, and that's less than half the year. Real weather nuts are interested in the weather even in the long stretches when nothing much is happening. But that's just what I would think and not at all something that I know.

The Case for a Large Government

2011-09-05T08:48:00.000-04:00

The constant demands that the Government be reduced in size make no sense. Pure mathematics say otherwise. Do the rightwingers know that the current population of the U.S. is now over 300 million? And that number is constantly growing, with most people coming from crabby, eternally discontented cultures, including this one.

It follows, then, that the more people a country has , the more demands they are likely to make, and therefore the need for an ever-enlarging government. And even if they didn't make so many demands, still their numbers would create more chances for politicians to become the makers of more and more laws, as well as furnishing increased job opportunities for those who are only too happy to enforce those extra-added laws. And between them these forces create more evils with which the government must deal, and so it has to keep growing in size to keep pace, not shrinking. And meanwhile, the roads and bridges that the government built to everyone's approval don't stay in good condition forever, and the hurricanes, the floods, and other natural disasters don't stop coming, and the commotions in the rest of the world don't stop but instead keep growing in number with the same increasing population, and on and on.

If G. Washington had to face the same aggravations over a period of months that confront B. Obama every day, I think he would have thrown it all up right quick, and yet the Teagrubs keep screaming for a mini-government, the size, I assume, of General Washington's, and to be staffed only by one segment of a population that consists of numerous segments. I don't get it!

Phases

2011-09-05T07:32:00.001-04:00

Looking back, it's easy to see how my life has been a sequence of a number of different parts or phases, one after the other, and the lines between them were sharp, being as that each one usually ended with my removing my person elsewhere, seldom to look back or to return for more than a minute or two. And though I don't get to make many new friends and acquaintances these days, in all those past places and phases I usually had a bunch of them. So it's a jolting thing, in the times when I do look back, to realize that whereas in my head all those past scenes remain just as they were, with the same people inhabiting them, and all those people still at the same age that they were then and in the same circumstances, nothing can be farther from the truth. And I have trouble facing the fact that because I am now so old, all those former friends and acquaintances and, yes, even the lunkheads, too, are all quite old, too, or nearly so, or even more, and a certain number of them can't be counted on to be still recognizable or even around, and that's the toughest thing of all to face.

I suspect that I'm less aware than most people my age are of how much any of this is the case, because it looks as if I deliberately exacerbated this state of a certain ignorance by permanently leaving the city where I spent the first 45 or so years of my life, half a lifetime ago. Doing that really cut off any of the ordinary possibilities of chance encounters or of getting any information, because nothing and no one where I've been living since then had anything to do with all that earlier part of my life. But even while I was in that former place, this process of falling away was going on, and I remember being struck by how, just a few years after I finished high school, though I got around quite a bit, believe it or not, still I hardly ever saw any of the legions of people that had swarmed those noisy halls all around me. I didn't think D.C. was that big a place, but I must've been very wrong, plus I hadn't taken into account how much of a state of flux everything there was in, as every place these days must be, because another thing that's been happening is that more new people are always flooding in than are streaming out, plus those weirdest of beings, new babies, are constantly being born.

It could be that all those previous phases, places, and even the people that I started out talking about must have vanished from the planet the moment I stepped out of those scenes. I wouldn't put it past whatever is responsible for anything.

Telling the Palestinians to Wait, for How Long?

2011-09-04T12:57:00.002-04:00

The Obama administration is urging the Palestinians to hold off on applying to the U.N. for statehood this month. It thinks they should wait for new peace talks with the Israelis to begin.

A lot of things have recently become badly unstitched for many people in the world today, and the reason is that they are suffering from a grievous lack of common sense and also the lessons that even recent history is supposed to have taught but obviously that teaching didn't take, and B. Obama is suffering from this disability no less than is the Republican Party, the Israelis, a large number of so-called "white" Americans, some erstwhile Progressives, and even too many Rainbows, as I think "black" Americans should be called. Nowhere is this malady more clearly focused than in the person of Mr. Obama.

People blithely keep referring to him as the "first black President," when in reality he has only a quarter of the essence of his Kenyan father in him if even that much, and instead he is mostly so-called "white," unless one is stupidly willing to totally ignore the huge importance of environment in shaping a person, though that actually counts for much more important than do genes, and in his case that factor was overwhelmingly "white." He spent his formative years with his Euro mother and grandpatents way off across the great Pacific Ocean, in Indonesia and in Hawaii. He wasn't raised anywhere near the American South, which has been the great battleground where the validity of the American "experiment" has been most often discussed and determined, in battles fought over and over again, most often in the form of how the European "white" majority has historically chosen to treat first the slaves brought over from Africa and later their descendants. I would even say that that issue centering on the Rainbows is the main measure of how much American virtue has always stood or fallen.

Unlike the great majority of Rainbows, B. Obama has no grounding in that struggle, even of the unconscious type, in the experiences of his forebears or in his own experience. There is no slavery or Jim Crow in his background, so that what he got of those things is merely second or third-hand at best. If he did have those experiences and the thoughts that they engender in what we might call his racial and political memory or resume, he would never have been elected President, so badly are the majority of American "whites" hobbled by fear and guilt when it comes to the people their forebears treated so badly while the country was being hammered into its present shape. But also he would never have gone along with the advice given him by the Israelis and others who are as heedless of many things as he is, to blindly and callously ask the Palestinians to keep on waiting for their country to be recognized.

If Obama were better equipped and prepared to face this issue in a honest and forthright manner, he would understand a couple of things that are as clear as can be. One is that the Palestinians have already been waiting for a very long time, longer than he has even been alive. Another is that as far as the Israelis, the stronger party and the oppressors in the matter, are concerned, the wait is open-ended, and their current leaders are fully prepared to let things go on as they are today, indefinitely. They will speak of how their ancestors possessed the "Holy Lands" 2,000 years ago, and they have waited that long to regain this land that they deem to be theirs and theirs alone. So Netanyahu, Lieberman, and the others are quite ready to have these constant attacks and reprisals sprinkled with occasional empty negotiations go on as they already have for more than 60 years.

History informs us that at a critical point in the Civil Rights struggle, during Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.'s 1963 Birmingham campaign, when a hardcore segregationist law officer named Bull Connor had thrown him into jail for the umpteenth time in an effort to end a determined civil rights protest in "his" city, King was asked by the noted evangelist Billy Graham and others in the clergy to hold off on his campaigns, in order to give the "white" majority more time to come to terms with the Rainbow desire to become full citizens in the American society -- or in short because he was starting to make "white" people mad. But King, in his usual eloquent fashion, decisively rebuffed and refuted that pious suggestion, in his famous "Letter From the Birmingham Jail."

There, or elsewhere, King made the very true observation that usually in these cases, "waiting" means "never."

Telling the Palestinians to wait in this year of 2011 or in any of the others to come is just as obscene and unthinking as it was in the case of the descendants of the slaves in 1963, because among things it is demanded with complete disregard for older generations that these go-slowers, believing themselves to be the rational and reasonable ones, are ready to see die without ever seeing a better day, and I always want to ask, "What about them, damn it!"

I wonder if the Obama people know anything about Birmingham in '63, or that letter that had to be smuggled out of that city's jail in a tube of toothpaste. I doubt it, though they cannot have missed seeing at least the fleeting images of the police dogs and the firehoses.

Capturing the Moment

2011-09-01T09:57:00.002-04:00

Though it happened a couple of weeks ago, my mind keeps reflecting on the first seconds of the "Mineral Earthquake."   This is because it was such a distortion of reality and even a very rude imposition upon perception.

Except for the Arabs in their tents and the Mongolians in their yurts, we all expect our houses or any other building that we happen to be in to be rock solid and never to move. This must come from all those eons of hustling the bears and other things out of caves, from South Africa to Lapland, and living in those places ourselves. and also it's because ordinarily things do conform with our expectations and our structures never do move. But that was what happened, though in the first couple of seconds my mind actively resisted the notion, because in real life it just couldn't happen.   My wonderful house that I designed myself and for which I hustled up the materials myself and that I bolted and nailed together myself was doing just that.   For no good reason suddenly the whole thing was actually moving, especially up near the ceiling, and not just a little but a whole lot, by about a foot, it seemed, though that couldn't have been true, or else every window in the house might have been broken, a gigantic bummer that I've been having no trouble imagining.

And also there was the accompanying sound of a fast-approaching vehicle of some kind that was at least a hundred feet wide and was rolling louder and louder down the road and was about to crash into my house in just a few more seconds!

Going by numerous reports I've read on the experience of others who felt the shock, from Atlanta to Chicago and up into Canada, that "enormous truck" sound was heard only by those close to the epicenter, which in our case I calculate was only about 65 miles northeast of here.

I'm glad that solid reality set in again, no more than 25 seconds after existence threatened to go somewhere else, where I definitely didn't want to be.

I never had time to worry about getting hurt or even killed. All I could think about was what the quake might be doing to my precious house, though that turned out to be, as far as I've been able to see, precisely nothing -- unless the house is collaborating with the earth, in keeping secrets.

Things were a little different, up there in li'l ol' Mineral.   A friend of ours happened to be in Mineral that day, doing some social work.   She was sitting on the back seat of her car, jotting down some notes, and she said the quake threw her completely out of the car. And also there was a lot of damage in Mineral, with broken glass everywhere and things thrown off shelves and so forth. And there the whole matter stood.

Being So Canada

2011-09-01T02:51:00.000-04:00

In one of the first episodes of the TV series "Southland," the Los Angeles detectives use the term "Canada" in a derogatory way.   If someone is charged with being "Canada," it seems to mean being soft on crime, or maybe just soft in general, such as in lifestyle. But as they are the ones openly wielding the guns, these characters can afford to be contemptuous or oblivious of the way that, long before its founding, Canada has been a place of refuge from wrongs committed in its much more unruly southern neighbor.

This summer that Canada thing has been showing itself in that country's biggest city in a unique and whimsical way that would probably have long since gone awry in most other places.

In the last three months one man has been going around Toronto robbing banks at his leisure and all on his own.   So far he has been successful in hitting 15 banks without incident, even though the police know exactly what he looks like, for he wears no mask or disguise of any kind.   He simply goes up to a window, informs the teller that he has a gun, and asks for money.   In only one of those robberies has a gun ever been seen.   The teller hands over the cash, and the man walks out, and that's that.

There must be several reasons for his success so far. One is the lack of noise and violence of any kind. Just the brief mention of a gun and that's it. Another is the fact that he's not greedy, aside from going to so many banks, because he only goes to one window in each place. Another reason must be -- and the photos taken by the surveillance cameras show it -- his air of total relaxation and aplomb. And still another is that the banks don't seem to get too worked up because they probably appreciate the way that he keeps everything in a very low key.   Also most likely he doesn't exactly clean up, though how much he's gotten is being kept a secret, with the statement only that serial bank robbers usually don't get big hauls.

But the main reason for his being able to pull this off without raising any great outcry must be the challenge.   I'm sure that the city police are hoping to be no less subtle and casual in nabbing him than he is while doing his thing, because after all, this is Canada.

The police claim to be certain they will get him.   I'm not so sure.   In fact, I would say that anybody that can carry this off is also savvy enough to call it a day and totally disappear, never to be seen again, no matter how much or how little he's gotten.

Let's see what happens.   We may never find out.   But in any case I think it would make a great episode in a TV crime series, though the people that make those things usually get too caught up in their formulas to appreciate something like this.

So Goes Vermont

2011-09-01T01:09:00.000-04:00

After clipping North Carolina and Virginia along their eastern edges,Hurricane Irene kept whirling northward. It didn't hit any of the big cities in the Northeast with the feared force, but as it covered a lot of area it dropped enough rain on the countryside to lift countless streams and rivers over their banks, and many rural occupants of those states are now dealing with the resulting floods. President Obama has just designated New York and Connecticut as disaster areas and made them eligible for federal aid, though, going by the news reports, state for state, Vermont seems to have been the hardest hit, and it can't be far behind in needing Federal help.

Ordinarily FEMA, the government agency that takes care of these things, would have enough money to do the job, but there have already been so many "natural" disasters across the U.S. this year that its resources have gotten badly stretched, and to help the deluged Northeast they will have to go back to Congress for more when it gets back in town, and it's possible that therein will lie a gigantic rub.

In light of the strong and continuing efforts being made by the Teapublican politicians to help no one except those who contribute to their re-election coffers and to hurt those who don't, several of the lawmakers in Congress have vowed to fight any efforts to give FEMA more money unless a matching amount is cut, not from the hides of the corporations, the military, or anyone else that they like, but from just about everybody else, especially those least able to fight back. And furthermore they're likely to be especially hostile to little Vermont, because in many ways it is the country's most progressive state. (Minnesota used to be my pick for that honor, but its inexplicable irresponsibility in having produced the likes of M. Bachmann was a spiritual betrayal too egregious and gross to be overlooked.)

One of Vermont's U.S. Senators is Bernie Sanders, a man of very progressive and perceptive ideas and the only official Independent in the Senate (the Lieberman slopbucket, uncertainly classified as a Democrat or as an Independent, is actually a Republican, which means that everything cancels out and he can't actually be anything), and the other Vermont senator is Patrick Leahy, who usually is one of the first to react to things with the most decent noises though he isn't quite as famous for following that up with more substantial deeds.

Vermont was also the main stomping grounds of the two most famous practicioners of the back-to-the-land movement that swept me down here to Virginia -- Helen and Scott Nearing. And it is currently the home of the proprietor of the "Dohiyi Mir" weblog, N. Todd Pritsky, whose site helped inspire me to get started on this, my own site, those many (7) years ago, a true if very quirky progressive, who, however, so far has said nothing about Irene's rampaging waters there.

So it's eerie that among all the states, the fates chose the one that is probably least in tune with everything that these Teapublican politicians stand for to be the one on which the storm focused its attentions to the sharpest degree. and it's going to be interesting to see what happens when FEMA asks for that money, since little can be expected of Congress even in the best of times.

Also oddly, speaking of here in Virginia, the chief Teapublican making this unholy demand is Eric Cantor, the Representative in the next district over from here to the west, but the Virginia Governor, a Repub who usually is so much of a total loss that I have avoided remembering his name, which is B. McDonnell, said quite clearly and sensibly that he didn't think this was the right time to be demanding unrelated budget cuts. It looks as if in his avidness to follow up on what he probably saw as his side's victory in the recent, fierce debt ceiling struggle, Cantor forgot that the eastern side of Virginia didn't go unscathed by the hurricane, or that he himself gladly asked for FEMA money just a few years ago.

How can the Teapubs be so certain of the rightness of their agenda when nothing they say ever holds any kind of water, and they have to resort to so much talking out of both sides of their mouths? And why would any decent people vote for characters like these?

These are among the most baffling questions of modern times.

The Political Harridans

2011-08-30T06:15:00.000-04:00

I am not an admirer of S. Palin.   She strikes me as being a hopeless lightweight, who, however, has just enough smarts to have discovered that in the tragically upside-down Republican world, she can pass herself off as something more -- a quise that instantly disappears whenever she takes a step into the larger setting.   But in the current sorting out of the Republican aspirants to the Oval Office, I have to admit that in one sense she is performing a valuable service.   Just by being she throws a clear perspective on the other harridan in that contest, M. Bachmann, who has been taking advantage of that same atmosphere of black is white and up is down.

So far Palin hasn't officially thrown her hat in the ring, and instead she is playing a daring game of letting anticipation work for her, until in her judgment just the right moment arrives to make her announcement.   Meanwhile, in the absence of Palin, Bachmann has been doing a lot of grunt work that has given her a certain amount of credibility that would have been available to her only in a world of the insane.

Putting aside their physical attributes and Palin's warm look and Bachmann's near hysterical frigidity, Bachmann's thought processes suffer just as badly in comparison. Palin is funny. Palin is a comic, and she has high entertainment value, if you're willing to temporarily overlook certain things. In contrast, there's nothing whatever funny and entertaining about M. Bachmann. Instead everything she does and says is freighted with malevolence.

Consider the kind of stuff Palin said when J. McCain first brought her off the tundra. So far Bachmann has come out with nothing to approach the charm of Palin's sincere and simple contention that from Alaska she could see Russia. Instead you will find things like Bachmann's statement that the recent earthquake, followed by the floods of Hurricane Irene, were God's punishment to the U.S. Northeast for the liberal political leanings there.

So, was the terrible rainlessness that deeply conservative Texas has been suffering this year a sign of God's wrath, too?

Things got worse when, seeing that that remark went over like a lead balloon, Bachmann quickly tried to cover herself by saying that she had just been joking. This is the standard lame excuse that adolescents use whenever someone calls them on some act that went awry, when in reality the culprits did intend just the sort of harm that they inflicted. Therefore in so speaking Bachmann was not being Presidential; instead she was being juvenile -- and worse.

I think of Palin as being too disengenuous to pull something as diabolical as that out of her gluteus.   The devil may make fleeting appearances in her but doesn't find the soil in her as fertile as it does that of M. Bachmann. This is what comes of the latter's habit of throwing professed Christianity at everything that moves.

Car Key Wouldn't Go In

2011-08-29T10:11:00.002-04:00

Over a month ago we had an unusual and mystifying car experience.   In the 2002 Coupe de Ville Cadillac that my wife inherited from her mother a few years ago, something metallic was blocking the key from going in more than a quarter of an inch into the ignition switch, rendering that big and otherwise still sumptuous vehicle strangely inoperable.   This isn't nearly as common as is the failure of a car key to turn the switch once it is in.

I am still a complete stranger to this car, and I have never driven it -- from my previous life in the city Cadillacs have an ethos to which I am strongly hostile -- so I was much shyer about fixing it than I would've been on the 22-year old Isuzu pickup that I drive -- on the probably bi-monthly occasions when I drive..   Still I tried several things to keep from doing the almost unthinkable, which was to have the car towed 10 miles to the nearest shop.

I had always heard that graphite powder was the thing to use on stuck locks instead of oil, so I tried that, but it didn't work.   Researching online led me to someone with a 2003 model of the same car who successfully used the old reliable WD-40, but that didn't work either.

Meanwhile online information also indicated that not being able to insert the key is most often due to one of those modern niceties of car manufacture that probably in the long run are more trouble than they're worth. A lot of ignition switches now come with a tiny retractable door set a short distance down in the keyhole that close it off when the car isn't in operation, to keep out dust or as part of elaborate anti-theft schemes, such as are likely to be found on over-fancy cars like the Cadillac -- and maybe even on every other car that's sold these days.

That's all well and good, but sometimes those little protective doors get stuck in the closed position, and various means have to be used to force them open, and, as the existence of this great "improvement" is unknown by many car owners, it can be a big hassle if the door hangs up while the car is a long way from any shop or mechanic, which you would expect would usually be the case, though we were lucky and it happened right in our driveway, and since wife also has an older Saturn that she uses much more often, we were able to let the Cadillac just sit while for a time we waited to see if the Caddy would come to its senses over such a highly niggling matter, and every few days we would try the key again, but for some reason that didn't work.

With that little door in mind, I kept trying to work up to the idea of putting the key that quarter-inch or so into the switch and then giving the top of it a whack or two with a tackhammer, but again I refrained, for fear of damaging the switch enough that it would really result in the car having to be towed. So I settled for seeing whether I could force a jeweler's screwdriver past the obstruction, and I did manage to get it in a millimeter or so farther, but then the screwdriver kept getting stuck, and it was hard to pull it back out.

Somewhere in all the collections of tools that I have scattered in several outbuildings, I have a dental pick that would've been better than the screwdriver and was less likely to mess something up, but I couldn't find it, before a very competent local mechanic came to take a look, after finally managing to fit it into his busy schedule.   He saw no way to fix the switch short of replacing it, so he ordered another one, and that took several more days to arrive and cost $55.   But the new switch came with no tumblers built in, and to get a locksmith to put them in meant removing the old lock first, and that required nevertheless somehow getting the key in just a little farther.

The mechanic had a pick similar to the one I have somewhere, and, finding that he could push it in a good deal deeper than the key, he then tried the key again, and voila!   Suddenly it would go in and out numerous times without jamming, and the car was suddenly fixed, just like that.

As glad as I am that that was all it took, I can't help kicking myself for being on the right track but being too leery of that big car to carry my ideas through.   But maybe also my little efforts with the graphite and the oil may have loosened up the obstruction enough to make it possible for the mechanic to push it aside and make it stay there, or at least open and shut the way it is supposed to, assuming it is a little dust door and not just a loose piece of metal.

But all in all, especially since the car was here at home and we were able to just let it sit for about a month before the solution dropped out of the sky, as I kept thinking it was morally obliged to do, such was the nature of the thing, the problem didn't actually cost us much in terms of anything, and we're supposed to get the money back for that unused switch, too.

Sinister Love: C. Rice and Her Admirers

2011-08-26T07:37:00.002-04:00

Mo Gadhafi, the former Libyan dictator who is now on the desperate run, must have left his comfortable lodgings in his Tripoli compound in a terrible hurry.   How else to explain at least two absolutely essential possessions that under less trying circumstances he would never have left behind.   One was a very distinctive military officer's cap, in which he seemed to like to pose when he was not playing his several other roles.   But even more important was a photograph album, probably compiled by all the best security agencies in the world and filled with pictures of GW Bush's close friend, confidante, handholder, adviser, and Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice.

Well, like Ymelda Marcos, the wife of another late dictator, and her shoes, Dafi probably has lots more caps where that one came from. And as for the album, there are the memories. . . .

Apparently all the pictures were of a quite respectable nature, but the sheer number and concentration of them showed that his interest in the lady went considerably beyond a mere casual interest -- as if he hadn't made that already stunningly clear when, in 2007, when the Bushies decided to make friends with him after many years of contention between the U.S. and Libya, and just one year before Rice became the first such American official in half a century to visit Libya and she had dinner with him, he went into a big rave with this:

"I support my darling black African woman.   . . .I admire and am very proud of the way she leans back and gives orders to the Arab leaders. ... Leezza, Leezza, Leezza. ... I love her very much. I admire her, and I'm proud of her, because she's a black woman of African origin."

Behind that, if there if there had ever been any doubts about Gadhafi's prevailing state of mind....

I mean, as women go, C. Rice does have a presentable enough appearance, and a picture of her taken when she was in her early 20's has always stuck in my mind, because it showed that she has especially noteworthy legs. But that was never noticed or said aloud about her. That was because C. Rice is not really a woman. Instead she is something else of an extremely ghastly nature. She is the epitome of a sinister nether-wing intellect, and in her case that trumps everything else about her, badly.

The fact that her toxic mentality exerted such a powerful hold on both G.W. Bush and on Gadhafi is therefore a monumentally bad reflection on both men.   I can't begin to think what the fact that she attracted two ragtags such as those two says about her. I do suspect that she was perfectly well aware that her hero and benefactor was not too swift, as shown by a picture showing her squeezing her face into a prune on a South American trip, when Bush wondered aloud whether there were any Rainbows in Brazil.

Gadhafi's statement is revealing in another way. He has a "Rainbow Thing."

I think I remember reading that in his earlier days he was reviled by his enemies among his fellow Arabs because they believed that he had unacceptable Rainbow ("black") blood running through him.   And then there was also his tendency to align Libya with the sub-Saharan countries to the south, and also to make a lot of use of Rainbow workers and mercenaries. And now today, the rebels who seem to have deposed of him for good are being charged with being racist in their treatment of these people, by, among things, keeping a great many of those workers in prison camps, because they are seen as being his loyal supporters, no matter what they might say.

But Gadhafi has always been bad company, and maybe that is being finally recognized by those nationals from the south of the desert, as well as by Ms Rice herself.

Destiny of the Dictators

2011-08-24T13:20:00.000-04:00

As of now, most things in Libya are matters of speculation, because Gadhafi has gone to ground and can't be found, though the consensus seems to be that he is still in Libya and even in Tripoli.

When he does come up for air, Gaddy's first order of business should be to clarify the spelling of his name. It seems to be at the mercy of anyone who happens so much as to mention him, and there's no doubt that the different ways must by now be in the hundreds. The upside, though, is that none of those supercilious spelling czars can come stomping down on you hard for mispelling it.   And think of all the completely defeated spellcheckers in the world!

Angry Arab probably has the longest and most bizarre-looking version -- Qadhdhafi -- but as he is death on anybody who doesn't speak Arabic, he probably thinks his spelling is the only correct one.   I think, though, that he would catch short shrift with it in the western world, especially in the raucous, impatient country in which he neverthless has unaccountably set up shop in apparent preference to anywhere in the Arab world: the U.S.

Meanwhile you have to wonder what people like Gadhafi and Assad of Syria are thinking. Especially Assad. For a while now he has been meeting the numerous protests of his countrymen by trying to mow them all down with gunfire. The number of dead at his hands must be up in the thousands by now, yet the protestors still turn out every day in large numbers. With all that blood on his hands and with no one in the outside world to approve of his actions, how can Assad think this can have any kind of a good ending for him, even if he should prevail and the protests finally subside?   What kind of a country would he be left with?   And has he been watching the outcome of his neighbor despot in Libya?
       The rebels have overrun Gadhafi's compound in Tripoli, and he has done what at least two other dictators of his stripe also did, though they did their thing on an even larger scale.   He has gone undeground, and now the hunt is on, and history says that most likely he will be pulled up into the air soon enough, like any ordinary bedraggled, scraggly mole.   In so doing he is following the example of Iraq's Saddam Hussein and of Germany's Adolph Shickelgruber -- not an illustrious pair for him to be following, either in their careers or in their endings -- and if he doesn't know that, someone should tell him.

You may remember that Saddam was pulled out of a hole in the ground out in the countryside and soon thereafter was hung.   And before that Gruber offed himself with cynaide pills, following which his underlings doused and burned his remains with many gallons of valuable gasoline, and the Russians never revealed what they did with whatever they found of him.

You would think that instead, if he followed his true god to the end, Gadhafi would come up out of there, shake himself off, and say, "Here I am, y'all, and the name if you don't mind is spelled such-and-such." He has all the credentials he needs for that kind of quirkness and cheekiness, and it would at least be the honorable thing to do, and he might even live long enough to go to the wonderful country of Holland, there to spout off what he thought he was doing.   That would be far preferable to what he is doing now, which is sounding like that Iraqi minister who, in one of those two ventures when the U.S. rolled up Saddam, kept idiotically proclaiming the imminent crushing of those Mark Twain Christians, though they were the ones who were actually holding all four aces in the deck.

Ghost Earthquakes

2011-08-24T11:31:00.001-04:00

It seems weird to me that it's been only a day since the earthquake. Could that have been one of its "ghost" effects -- that it severely dislocated a part of my already impaired time continuum?

Today I made another tour of my house, checking out the windows.   I put in a lot of windows, of many shapes and sizes, and it amazes me that that severe shaking of the house between the pair of gigantic, invisible hands didn't cause a crack in any of them. Maybe it's the fact that none of the panes are precisely cut and tightly puttied in like regular windows but are instead sitting a little loosely in their frames, wherein the space has grown even larger over the years because of the green oak slowly drying and shrinking farther away from the glass.   And in fact all of my homemade house is probably like that -- its various parts sitting loosely on and within each other.

Since my last post I've read that there was damage in at least two places in my hometown of Washington D.C., both of which rate high only on the symbolic list.   As is obvious -- and unless they've done something disagreeable since I stopped living there about 35 years ago -- the Washington Monument is, at about 555 feet, by far the tallest structure in D.C., and some cracks have been found at the very tip of that massive, granite obelisk.

The National Cathedral, a Catholic place of devotions, could very well be D.C.'s second tallest edifice, and the quake is reported as having caused "significant" damage there. I'm not surprised. The construction on that church seemed to be as never-ending and going on for about as long as the Israelis and the Palestinians have been at each other's throats. Maybe longer, maybe for as much as 100 years, and I'm not sure that they even finished it, and I think a lot of the unfinished work had to do with the statuary and the other decorative bricabrac inside, and maybe they still didn't have enough time to sufficiently fasten all that stuff in place.

Somebody also proposed that earthquakes are more serious in California than they are on the East Coast because the Earth's crust is older and more solid on the East Coast than it is out west. I'm wondering if that's the cause of what I regard as the ghostly nature of these three quakes that I've experienced here so far. They all have manifested themselves in various physical sensations such as induced queasiness and especially in noise and not at all in the damage that should have resulted but didn't.   Maybe here the entire crust moves in one piece instead of breaking up into smaller sections, and that would account for all the noise and very little damage but with the perpetrators of those alarming sounds never anywhere to be seen.

T

More on the Quake, Leading into Other Things

2011-08-24T01:44:00.001-04:00

Wife was in the county seat, 14 miles north of here, doing some campaign drudge work with envelopes, addresses, and that kind of stuff, when the quake yesterday shook the building.   The ramrod lady instantly told her workers to vacate the premises, an ancient brick structure, and thus exactly duplicating what they did at the massive granite FBI headquarters in D.C., 160 miles northeast of here.

Without being prompted, wife had exactly the same impression as K. and I, of the way it had sounded, of a big truck lolopping down the street.

It is being called the "Virginia Quake" because the epicenter turned out to be scarcely more than 65 miles northeast of our house, a supposedly shallow 3.7 miles under a place called "Mineral," through which I think I used to take shortcuts when I was commuting back and forth from D.C. while nailing together my house here.   But the tremor was felt from far south of here to all the way up into New England, as well as on out into the Midwest, though the totally negligible effects -- a few losses of cellphone capability and that's all -- were exactly the same all over as it was here.

Long and painful experience with the kind caused me to lose no time in wondering how all the anti-Obamarers were going to blame the earthquake on him, and finally decided that, because so many of those people are quasi-religious and therefore are not expected to make any sense, they would whisper to each other something like, "See?   This is what happens when they let a kneegah become the U.S. President.   It made God angry."

This isn't far-fetched at all, for today in hardly no time reading online, I chanced upon a statement by someone who indeed found it extremely amusing and clever to say that it was proper and fitting that it happened in the Obama era, because by extending over such a large area, the quake spread out its effects instead of concentrating it -- a variation of the frequent charge that he is a Socialist. I forgot who said it, though I think it was someone named "Thoreau." Not of course the Walden Pond Henry guy, or the French painter of the peaceable animals. I think they both would have had far more cool.

Quake Here

2011-08-23T15:00:00.000-04:00

Less than an hour ago I was sitting here at my computer reading about one or another of the many serious things happening in the world when right here in my most immediate world, something suddenly started giving my little home-made "green oak" house a good shaking, accompanined by a loud booming noise, as if an impossibly huge vehicle had suddenly started rolling down the road straight in this direction.   And this commotion lasted a long time, for almost 20 seconds I would say.   I jumped up and hurried to the kitchen, though I didn't run -- having turned 80 less than a month ago, I do not instinctively run anywhere anymore -- but by the time I got there, it was all over. . . .

The latest earthquake here.

I made a quick tour of the house and of the workshop, but I could see absolutely nothing amiss, and though both places are filled with things that could've fallen off shelves, there was none of that.

Then, a short while later, one of wife's cousins from Atlanta called, to see if we were all right.   He had just seen a newscast, and he said our earthquake here in Virginia had been measured as a 6.0.

I called my neighbor, K., the potter across the road. He said he was in his studio, making pots, and the quake gave everything a good shaking, the same as here in my house. He ran outside, and there he could see the ground moving. But again he saw nothing fallen, amongst all the pots in his shop or elsewhere. But he had exactly the same impression of the sound of it that I had -- of a very large truck thundering down the road.

This is the third small quake we've had here in the last 10 years or so.   I was outside for the first one, and experienced it as some invisible force that suddenly and briefly whooshed through the big trees overhead, while the second manifested itself entirely in a noise as if a house or some other building had suddenly been the victim of a gigantic explosion, just a few hundred yards away. I kept looking to see a big plume of smoke mounting into the sky over the trees, but naturally saw nothing.

It's odd that I had just finished reading online about a big earthquake that hit Colorado today or yesterday. I was surprised, as I never associate any place in the Rockies with quakes, but that was in large part how all those huge mountains got there in the first place, isn' it?

I wonder if these several tremors are pre-shocks leading up to something big here, later today or some time in the next 10,000 years?

Eating Libyan Crow

2011-08-22T11:22:00.001-04:00

Nothing -- aside from any hurricanes that should happen to form in the North Atlantic -- is more interesting than events today in Libya, with the regards to the situation on the ground there and the situation in the current U.S. political scene, where it looks as if very soon quite a few people will have to start eating large portions of crow.   In fact, I think they already have for a while now, though it's amazing and greatly entertaining to watch their attempts not to appear to be doing so.   And I include in that also someone who was almost as rabid about it as any Repub and should've easily known better, the sometimes badly over-reaching Angry Arab.

A few months ago, following the example set by other Arabs in overthrowing their longtime rulers of Tunisia and Egypt, people in Libya decided that they, too, had had enough of their likewise intolerable longtime tyrant, a veritable wreck of a man named M. Gadhafi, and they took up arms against him. But it turned out that all that weaponry that Gadhafi had been buying with all that oil money was not for use at all against the neighboring Egyptians or the Algerians, or against the Americans, the Israelis, the British, the German Nazis, Stalin's Russians, the armies of Napoleon, the Mamelukes, the Turks, the Romans, the Assyrians, the Scythians, the Neanderthals, or anyone else at all. Instead those weapons had been intended for use in putting down with maximum prejudice any locals who should threaten what Gadhafi saw as his inborn right to lord it over the Libyans in any way that he pleased and for as long as he pleased, deep into his idiocy and his growing senility.

And he was well on his way to slaughtering all those opponents, together with a good chunk of Libya's other citizenry, when various members of NATO thought it the honorable thing to step in and give the rebels a hand, almost entirely by operations from the air.

The British and the French were the main parties interested in doing this, but President Obama helped them to get the operation off to a good start by putting various U.S. military capabilities at their disposal, short, however, of any ground troops.

No matter. It had already become so fashionable to use every opportunity to trash the relatively innocuous and often subtle Obama (yes, hard as it may be for many to picture, even with a generous dose of African blood running through his arteries a man can still be subtle), some people almost instantly started calling the NATO venture "Obama's War."   Among other things, the Right Wing jumped at the chance to use this effort to take some of the heat off the onus of GW Bush's hideous invasion and occupation of Iraq, though there was absolutely no comparison between the two events. Obama kept the U.S. involvement at an absolute minimum, compared to what he could have used and to what Bush had used in Iraq.   In fact, the operation was only a few days old when Obama quietly stepped back and turned the spearheading of it entirely over to NATO, and thereafter, the news media, much as they would have liked to keep Obama lashed to Libya by his necktie, the interest of truth that couldn't be hidden or denied forced them to speak of Libya as being a NATO concern, and Obama's connection was hardly mentioned at all, except occasionally to repeat some Republican claim about how dearly the Libyan commitment was costing the U.S., though, as such things go, that cost was peanuts.

Now it looks as if from the bad guys' point of view, the worst is about to happen. The Libyan rebels, with not one American sergeant among them, has managed, with NATO's several thousand air sorties of various kinds, to drive all the way across Libya, and now they have entered Gadhafi's ultimate redoubt, the capital city of Tripoli, and, according to various reports, they already control most of that city, and it looks as if his time in the saddle is now down to just a few days if not mere hours.

And now it also looks as if Obama has something here that he can definitely claim as a victory, modest as his contributions were, and his detractors are faced with the difficult problem of figuring how to take that away from him.

In an opinion piece yesterday the highly conservative Wall Street Journal showed just how the Nasties propose to do that, short of ignoring this development entirely or by dismissing it as being of no consequence at all. (You may not be able to read the article to which I have just linked, if you don't subscribe to the WSJ. I don't, but yesterday I saw more than just the first paragraph or so, though I am sure this is the same article.) Anyway, the WSJ lauded the imminent triumph of the rebels, as it also did the NATO contribution, along with the U.S. involvement. But they tempered their praise by regretting that it had taken so long for the rebels to prevail, and the Journal said that it would have been better if more resources had been put into the operation by NATO from the start.

I avoid reading the WSJ, for the same reason that I would not go near a pack of howling wild dogs, but I would bet that in the past that publication has been among those who attacked Obama on the grounds of the U.S. costs that were going into the effort.

Meanwhile, in the article the term, "the U.S.," is always used, but nowhere is the name of B. Obama mentioned.   --It can never be conceded to the slightest degree that he picked the right horse, or in this case the right course of action to take, and all on his own to boot, for among the howls of outrage against him on Libya was the charge that he stepped in without getting the prior approval of the U.S. Congress or anyone else, though I had always thought, good for him. That would've been akin to getting the Mafia's approval. And after all, how was it that in attacking Obama over Libya, his detractors seemed to fail to notice that they were once more coming down on the side of the Worm, in this case a bloodthirsty wastrel named Gadhafi.

So these guys -- and gals -- should always watch out before they head for Obama's jugular like rabid vampire bats. As likely as not, he may be seeing the Worm that is invisible to their hate-clouded eyes.

Purely Piling on B. Obama

2011-08-22T07:55:00.001-04:00

Recently it's been painful for me to write anything to post here, the reason being that the biggest ongoing story these days is the concerted attempt to discredit President B. Obama for any reason that can possibly be dredged up, and in particular the way that so many so -called "Progressives" are increasingly following the Republican lead in trashing him at every opportunity, so much so that I am no longer able to see much difference between the two groups. And this is despite the fact that, much as it might've been expected, I didn't vote for Obama in the primaries, though I did do so in the general election.

This piling on became clear to me almost from the day that Obama was sworn in, at a site called "Common Dreams." Once upon a time Common Dreams had been a truly progressive site, but as soon as Obama became President he came under severe fire from the authors and the commenters there.   It quickly grew so vicious and constant that I had to stop reading Common Dreams.   Still, once in a while I would check back to see if the barrages against him had eased up any, but there was never any such luck.

Recently there was an article in Common Dreams that was typical of this unfortunate bag in which so many supposed Progressives now -- if they but knew -- find themselves hanging by their tongues. It is titled "The Bad Deal", and was written by someone named James Galbraith. Though the article is mostly about the recent agreement made on extending the debt ceiling, Galbraith devotes the first few paragraphs to his proposition that the Europeans are now also following the U.S. Republican lead in trashing Obama, and Galbraith seems to be gleeful about stating this. He sounds almost as delighted as were the great majority of the numerous commenters who rushed to throw their two cents onto the offal pile that begins and fatally discolors what is probably otherwise a quite credible discussion of the debt situation.

This has all been seen before. In Obama's case it is caused mainly by badly concealed skin color bigotry, but in Bill Clinton's time the same thing happened, and it was caused by the common cause that the hatred of the Republicans for anything even remotely worthwhile coincides with the contempt that certain Progressives feel whenever the Democrats don't quite do all the things that they want to see done and with the desired speed.   Plus it also involves the frustration that these Progressives feel at how remote the chances are of forming a third party that has any chance of furthering their goals.

I call this process of shooting one's self in their calf muscles the "Bartcop Syndrome."   During the GWBush regime, while he was strongly against the Repubs, the proprietor of the longtime and highly entertaining weblog, Bartcop, spent more time castigating the Democrats -- whom you would think he would have seen as being his natural allies -- than he did the Republicans. In fact sometimes it was hard not to think that he was actually a closet Repub, because of the abundance of pictures he would run of GW Bush, much more than of Clinton or anyone else.   Showing boatloads of pictures of someone is a sure sign of strong respect, isn't it?   And a quick look at Bartcop's site nowadays shows that, while he doesn't appreciate the current Repub "heroes" nearly as much as he did Bush, at least graphically, he still hasn't escaped his old follies, as demonstrated by the numerous shots he now likes to take at Obama.

I think I know the reason for this barely hidden Progressive admiration for the Repubs.   Not so deep in their hearts they would like to see Progressives being just like Repubs when it comes to unrelenting nastiness and unending aggressiveness.

These mistaken souls don't see the numerous Rocks of Stupidity and Insanities upon which those supposedly admirable traits have washed up and shipwrecked the Repubs, as is so clearly shown by their present crop of dummies who inexplicably see themselves as excellent candidates to be the next U.S. President, though they are mainly much better prospects for taking long hikes on the Planet Uranus.

The Stink Bugs Are Coming -- Back!

2011-08-08T08:21:00.002-04:00

This is the fourth year that the Japanese Beetles have not yet shown up, and for that I am eternally grateful, though I keep wishing I knew the reasons why.   Having seen the fight that has always been necessary to wage against them, during all my now large number of adult years, I had thought that they were immortal and that nothing could be done to keep them from coming back every year.   But something did.

But then, last year, a new invasive insect species suddenly showed up in large numbers -- another import from Asia, the brown marmorated stink bug.   They differ from the Japanese Beetles in that they are a very plain, undistinctive brown, and their armor plates don't come in nearly the dazzling array of bright metallic colors worn by the Beetles. The stink bugs also differ in that they don't restrict themselves to the outside, though last year they did do great damage to fruit crops, causing a loss of 37 million in apples alone.    They also like to invade homes and another other available buildings where they can find humans to aggravate with their loud and active buzzings and their "don't touch me or your nose will feel the pain" ethic And in contrast to the two or three months of the Beetles at their worst, the stink bugs hang around for pretty much half the year, mainly in the cold months, and they live up to their name, giving out a very distinct bad smell whenever they're squeezed, and sometimes when they';re not.

       We didn't know they existed until they showed up in our house and my workshop last year, as they did everywhere else around here and often in much larger infestations than we had, so that we've heard tales of people returning home to find their doors covered with large splotches of the things, just waiting to get in. And they definitely took away from the quality of life -- dropping down from above at the most unexpected times and then stupidly staring up and waiting for you to grab it and terminate it, after which there would always be others to replace them, many others, though thankfully not all at one time.

I've read that they entered the U.S. in a shipment of some kind to Allentown, Pennsylvania, another result of that worst year in my living memory, 2001, and they've been expanding their range ever since, and now they're well-established all over the Mid-Atlantic and reaching out for more.

We haven't seen any for four or five months, but now an article in the Washington Post assures us that the stink bugs have just been hibernating, in our homes and shops, and that, come late September, they'll be back again, and in much larger force than last year.

Before we moved here to rural Virginia about 35 years ago, people in D.C. had a good time warning us about the bears that would "eat us up." But I hadn't been here long before I noticed that the field mice were doing us much more damage than any of the rarely seen though admittedly still present bears. But the insects put both the bears and the mice to shame, and if it's not one, then it's many others.

Such is the natural world in which it is so much our pleasure to live.

Update, 21 August. Today my wife saw the first stinkbug of the season, one and one only, sitting on a freshly washed sheet that she had hung out to dry. I am disappointed, as the article that I mentioned gave the impression that we still had several weeks to go. Oh, well. Given the many vagaries of the insect world, maybe we won't be seeing as much of them this year, also regardless of what the article says. Hoping is all we can do when it comes to those little rascals.

Hitting the Debt Ceiling

2011-07-22T22:56:00.001-04:00

I've been reading -- and am only a few days from finishing -- " The Proud Tower," Barbara Tuchman's exploration of the situation in Europe and the U.S. in the 20 years just before World War 1 broke out.   And it just reinforces the idea that human history for the most part has consisted of the never-ending battle between the Haves and the Have-Nots among the population. The Haves by definition have the lion's share by far of all the comforts of life, while the Have-Nots are consigned to scrape by as best they can, and, in the eyes of the Haves, hopefully with as little as they can.

The book chronicles how incredibly high up on the hog the so-called "upper clases" were living in those years, as compared to the privations being endured by the ordinary working people, and the efforts of groups like the Liberals, the anarchists, the Socialists, and Labor to combat this situation.

Today, in the bitter fight between the Democrats and the Republicans, with a crucial deadline at hand, we can see that same story being played out yet again. The Republicans, the party of the Haves, are using this fight as an excuse to cut any spending, such as for the Medicare and Social Security safety nets, that would have helped the Have-Nots. To that end they absolutely refuse to consider obtaining any additional revenue by means of raising taxes and closing tax loopholes that would make those cuts unnecessary.

But this fight has an additional aspect that is carefully kept unexpressed, and but for that an agreement would have long since been reached to raise the debt ceiling yet again, as Congress already has done a number of times in recent years.   That additional poison factor is the burning desire of the Party of the Haves to discredit the current President as much as possible, not only to right the wrong that the Haves saw in the mere election of a President who was, disgracefully, as much as half "black" in his genetics, but also to make things so uncomfortable for him that none other of his persuasion will ever again aspire to serving in that office.

So everything the Party of the Haves does in this conflict has to be looked at more in terms of that skin color aspect than in the financial, especially because the leaders of that party are ignorant of the fine points of money matters.   Scurrility and brawling are easy to understand, whereas financial instruments are beyond them.

Something more important than "mere" dollars and cents are at stake in this one.

Heritage and the Heat Wave

2011-07-19T03:50:00.002-04:00

The two big news items these days are the struggle to increase the debt ceiling and the hot weather. Well, plus also the determinations that scientists have just made that people in most areas of the world are carrying Neanderthal blood, genes, DNA, frames of mind, or whatever. Only the people in sub-Sahara Africa are not carrying Neanderthal heritage.

Given the way that Neanderthals have been maligned ever since some of their skulls were first found, I don't expect this to be a popular conclusion.

I always thought the Neanderthals were cool myself, dealing with the Ice Age and all that kind of stuff in Europe and Russia. Especially the ones that you could see on the Discovery channels.

I've been waiting with interest to see what those who are vying to be the Republican candidate for President will have to say about this. So far there's been nothing, and in any case, it probably just means they will draw the transparent plastic sheeting of religion even tighter around their naked bodies and their deprived souls, while saying, "Science? Who cares what the scientists say?"

Yeah. Who cares what the scientists say, especially all the warnings they make about global warming. Yes, not when right now better than half the U.S. is in the grip of 100-degree days, with every prospect of a lot more of that to come. Who cares?

True Irony -- Crampons and Dog Livers

2011-07-19T03:25:00.001-04:00

Since I seem to be taking an extended course in learning how to survive in case I somehow find myself being a part of a team of unfortunates struggling to trek out of the unbelievable winds, snows, ice, low temps, crevasses, and the many other constant indignities of lower Antarctica, the main thing I have learned is never, never, never for any reason throw away your crampons -- sets of metal teeth that you attach to your boots to give you traction when you are crossing glaciers or climbing mountains.

Also, should you see a sledge loaded with most of your human food and all the dog food, plus your best tent, your warmest clothing, and all kinds of other invaluable things, disappear down an extremely deep crevasse along with all the strongest sled dogs and also a human member of your party -- which happened with a small party of Australians in Antarctica in 1912, as described in "Mawson's Will," a book not for the faint of heart or the weak of stomach, written by Lennard Bickel -- do not on any account eat the livers of the dogs that you have left, no matter how hungry you get.

The long survivor of that experience, plus the one man left with him, did just that. They were happy to get those livers -- and as a result they ended up having to deal with large parts of their fleshly substance simply disintegrating and falling off their bodies, and they never knew why. They were a few years too early to have heard of Vitamin A and how, though dog livers are rich in it, even just a little of it causes all sorts of disruptions in the work of other vitamins in keeping a person going.

That was true irony. They thought that with all that fresh air and exercise they were getting out there on the glaciers, they were doing the most resourceful thing, in the face of having nothing much else to eat during the trek of a hundred miles or more they were having to make before reaching any sort of rescue. One didn't make it, as a result of getting all that vitamin A. The other lived years longer, while blaming that dire disorder on everything except what had really tried to kill them more painfully and quickly than anything that that worst weather in the world could throw at them.

The Always Present "White" Woman

2011-07-10T08:34:00.002-04:00

Recently a woman somewhere named (Something) Anthony was tried on the charge of having killed her baby girl.   I noticed that this trial was getting a huge amount of media attention, and the more headlines about it that I saw, the tighter I stuck to the vow I had made from the beginning not to pay the slightest attention to the case, except to wonder what was so special about it that called for that much hoopla..   Now the trial is over and the jury voted the woman not guilty, and the land is awash with howls of outrage. (After all, she was charged, so she must've been guilty, right? And forget all that garbage about how a person is innocent until found guilty. Not in today's hard-bottomed America..) But still there's been no answer to that question about what was so special about that case to start with, compared to the large number of quite similar cases.

That attitude expressed by the community at large is what has been behind the undying hatred shown toward the admittedly hapless, former football hero O.J. Simpson, after he was tried on the charge of murdering his wife.   It's been pointed out, but to little avail, that people feeling so righteous and infuriated about Simpson having been found innocent would have had nothing to say if the victim had been his "black" first wife instead of his "white" second wife.   And another sports hero, Tiger Woods, only missed getting as much opprobrium because his Swedish wife was still very much alive.   Still, he had committed the almost as serious crime of having not only been unfaithful to her, but also he had done it with a succession of other beauties, most if not all of whom (and this is what made his actions so horrible though it was left largely unsaid) appeared to have been "white."

With reference to Ms Anthony a thinker in Tennessee named Stephen Shirley hits on this point and calls it the "Missing White Women Syndrome--"

where the media and public tend to focus on "damsels in distress." These damsels, most often young, attractive, white females, often receive incredible amounts of coverage while cases involving minority females or even boys of any ethnicity are often overlooked.

That hits the nail right on the head, and he makes a lot of other points in his article that also greatly needed to be said -- and I would only like to say that it might've been better for him to have substituted "usually" or even "almost always" instead of using that last "often" for the third time in the same sentence.. And while I'm at it, I might as well also question the name he gave to the syndrome. It seems even better to call it, the "Always Present White Women Syndrome," because that is what gives the syndrome its punch, their mere presence.

It's true that "white" women, on the whole, are an impressive bunch, but so are other women of all the other hues and persuasions. The gender is what is so special, and not the melanin count.

Meanwhile I found it something of a huge coincidence that if you scroll down a little on the right of the Shirley article, you will find a link (it might not be there now but here is another one) to a report that after Tiger Woods' badly betrayed "white" wife had packed the kids up and had apparently taken herself and everything else back to Sweden or wherever in a state of high dudgeon after she found out about his perfidies, she has now changed her mind and is moving back in with him.   The righteous among us will not be happy to hear that.   If true, I think it's great myself..

....

Boost to Hate Groups

2011-07-07T13:29:00.000-04:00

The presence of B. Obama in the U.S. Presidency has given U.S. hate groups fresh shots in their arms, their behinds, or wherever else they take their needles.

So says the BBC in more genteel words.

So what else is new?

Syria

2011-07-07T13:16:00.000-04:00

Angry Arab has expended several posts on correcting various points in an Economist article on Syria, yet he turned right around and said it is the best article he has seen on the situation in that country.

I agree that it is an excellent article.

If the Middle East could be pictured as being built like an arch, then Syria strikes me as being in certain ways its keystone country, more so than Egypt, Israel, Saudi Arabia, or any of the others.

The main question I've been having about Syria has to do with the tactic being used there, and in Bahrain, of dealing with the demonstrators against the current regime by shooting the protestors down where they stand, in large numbers. What then, would the Bashar regime end up with, should it manage to hang on to power? As my wife likes to ask whenever we see huge amounts of damage being done in movie and TV thrillers by the heroes or the police, usually through the use of vehicles and out of all proportion to anything that makes sense: "How will they explain this?"

Sorry, America

2011-06-29T10:15:00.000-04:00

The fact that I have not yet bought a roll of red duct tape reminds me that I have been sort of remiss in my contributions to the American economy. Over the years I have been a boon to several of the smaller industries, but generally speaking I have not put my shoulder to the economic wheel.. Sorry America!

But let me say this: if it had been up to me every citizen in the U.S. would not be up to their ears in the sea of the red ink of the 14 trillion dollar National Debt. In fact, they wouldn't be in debt at all. I have never gone into debt for anything, except a used house, and I didn't let that unfortunate circumstance last for long, to the dismay of a banker that I knew personally.

Women and Duct Tape

2011-06-29T09:41:00.005-04:00

The two most interesting articles I saw this morning were about the great and greater merits of duct tape and women, especially the red kind (of duct tape).

The title of the first article was "Why Women Are Better at Everything." And its lead sentence reads:

"Recently in the Wall Street Journal, MarketWatch columnist David Weidner noted that women "do almost everything better" than men — from politics to corporate management to investing."

The general gist of why that may be so is that women are more cautious about things, and it could be seen as a modern elaboration of the old adage, "Fools rush in where angels fear to tread."

The title of the second article was .Duct tape can even be used in the fight against infectious disease.

I'm not so sure about the first such use mentioned, which was to use red duct tape to mark off safety zones in hospitals to keep the workers at a safe distance from the infected. I don't see how tape on the floor can keep people at a safe distance from anybody But I liked the other impromptu medical uses given, especially the probably age-old one about covering a bad scrape with a paper towel or toilet paper and then wrapping it with duct tape, for which the red color should be especially good, and this means that I have to run right out and buy a roll.

I have never seen red duct tape on the store shelves, but then, I haven't been in any stores enough lately to have seen anything.

The Marvelous Human Capacity

2011-06-28T09:50:00.000-04:00

In the interest of finding out how the First World War came to be conducted in such a horrendous and limited form as a bunch of trenches strung across France and in other places as far-flung as Gallipoli, resulting in so much wholesale slaughter and not much else except setting the stage for the Second World War. I've been reading Barbara Tuchman's explanations in "The Gun of August." According to her it was clearly a matter of a great many self-important politicians and military leaders on all sides combining their talents for self-deception.. And on page 265 she may have summed it all up when she spoke of "the marvelous human capacity to see what you expect to see even if it is not there." .

And speaking of that, B. is coming over here in the next 45 minutes to play our weekly game of chess. It will be earlier than usual, because later it may be too hot for the ladies to take their usual walk.

Added Remarks

2011-06-28T09:21:00.000-04:00

Added remarks about the so-called "U.S. National Debt:" In whose name and on whose behalf was such a stupendous sum as fourteen (14) trillion dollars so stupidly borrowed? And were interest rates taken into account and amortization tables studied? Of course, it is well-known that the U.S. has its share of stupid people, but this is going some.

And anyway, does an amount that large even exist anywhere in the world? I mean all at one time, and in a form that can be seen and touched, as distinguished from ones and zeroes on computers, or in some other form that has real value, since value is such a relative thing? For instance, I would not spend a dime for all the skyscrapers in New York City, or for all the diamonds in South Africa for that matter, because they are of no value to me personally and would be way too much trouble if they were in my hands. But a good screwdriver, or a hammer, or a computer motherboard, or food to eat - those are things of real worth.

But maybe here, hopefully, it's only a matter of money valuations differing from one place to another, so that billions in one country could be seen as being equal only to pfennigs in another. There has to be a rational explanation for all this, because "Oops!" is not the right answer to owing 14 tril.

Where You're Headed

2011-06-27T14:01:00.000-04:00

Here is where you're headed, those of you who are certain citizens of the future, to the world in which it'll be increasingly hard to tell the real from the digital.

This video, best seen in full screen, and provided that it comes out all right from here to your monitor, shows how Japanese computer whizzes took parts from a six-girl musical group and combined them to make a seventh member who is not real, yet it's hard to tell that she is not real unless you've already been forewarned that something is not right.

What would I take first in that world? My first thought is being able to roam through a Triassic Age jungle, complete with the smells, the sounds, and the sights of some digital monsters with everything in place. Next I'd take a few hours in the Roman forum or maybe the Senate during a debate -- translated of course, then a few minutes in the Colosseum, and then a little while at Little Big Horn just when Custer happened to be trotting through, then a longer while sailing with Magellan through the Straits, and then checking out the market in 14th century Timbuktu, and then facing Billy the Kid in Lincoln County, New Mexico, while armed with something with real caliber, and on and on....

Here We Go Again -- the National Debt

2011-06-27T13:16:00.000-04:00

I had a very good friend named Fred, who unfortunately left this world long ago.   But even back in the 1970's, and I guess forever, people were talking about the National Debt and the ugliness of its size. And whenever the subject came up, Fred would say, "There's only one thing that I want somebody to tell me, and that is, who do we owe all that money to?"   And there was never an answer.   Not even a bad answer, for to say, "The banks," and let it go at that, never made enough sense.

If Fred thought the billions in debt in the '70's was bad, what would he think if today he were to read a BBC report that says the U.S. has a debt of fourteen (14) trillion dollars?

My question then is, to whom do we owe this sum that has such an otherworldly ring to it that I would not be surprised to hear that it doesn't even exist, and if you think that's being in denial, then you're quite right that I'm in denial, as I suspect every other American citizen is.

What are we talking about here?   Who had the 14 trillion in the first place that it could be borrowed?   I guess nobody, and what we are talking about instead is quite a lot of shadow money, called interest.

My guess, then, is that whoever thinks they're owed this sum is out of luck, because who has the muscle that is going to force the U.S. to pay this amount, even in respectable installments?   The name of China and its bankers is always put forward, but it's hard to see how they can have much effect, and besides, they have too many things that they have to worry about falling in on them from their rear.

I know I'm not looking at this in an informed, sophisticated way.   Still, unless questions like these are given some kind of sensible answers, it's hard to look at the National Debt crisis as the looming catastrophe that it is cracked up to be, and that instead its all a part of the continuing scam by the several Haves of the world to talk the many Have-Nots out of the little they have left, so that those greedies can go on off and happily spend all the ill-gotten gains that they have amassed ...but where, and on what?

Those are probably the most interesting questions of all, regarding all this.

Bad to Worse at Fukushima

2011-06-23T08:12:00.001-04:00

A report on Aljazeera takes a detailed and hard look at the current situation at the tsunami-damaged power plant in Fukushima, and things there don't look good, by a long shot.

"Fukushima has three nuclear reactors exposed and four fuel cores exposed," he said, "You probably have the equivalent of 20 nuclear reactor cores because of the fuel cores, and they are all in desperate need of being cooled, and there is no means to cool them effectively."

That is what Arnold Gundersen, a senior vice-president in the U.S. nuclear industry, says, and this man ought to know.   He has almost 40 years experience in operating 70 nuclear reactors, and a man with those credentials is very unlikely to paint such a dismal picture of a nuclear disaster if there is any way out of doing so.

I had thought that a meltdown is the ultimate nuclear power plant disaster and that just one was plenty enough, enough, that is, to put a large amount of territory off-limits for a great many years. But at Fukushima there have been not one but three meltdowns.. The Japanese authorities have come out and said so. And there have been not only these three incidents, meaning the nuclear fuel melting down into a big blob on the bottom of the reactor container, with more meltdowns in the offing, but also there's been one "meltthrough," meaning, besides melting to the floor, the fuel has also burned through several layers of the bottom of that "thermos bottle.". Even worse, all this stuff is still percolating and hot, and not much of anything else can be done until a way can be found to get the whole mess down to a decent temperature. Pouring water on it is the only way to do that, because of the half-life thing, but then you end up with thousands of tons of radioactive water, and ways have to be found to dispose of that safely, and no one knows yet how to do that.

Meanwhile the equivalent of 17 Manhattan Islands (minus all those monstrous skyscrapers, naturally) of Japanese territory is "likely" uninhabitable so far, which means that that land is uninhabitable, and that amount of lost Japanese real estate that is not seriously mountain can only rise, maybe sharply. Also these meltdowns have released a large amount of radioactivity in the air, at least as much as during Chernobyl, with as many as 19 more Chernobyls highly in prospect there at Fukushima, and already the U.S. Pacific Northwest is being affected, as shown by a 35 percent increase in infant mortality, which means that there is no telling what it is in Japan and in places close to Japan, like Korea, China, and the Philippines, though I guess that depends on which way the wind blows. The curvature of the earth must make Japan closer to the Pacific Northwest of the U.S. than it would seem, though those trips on several kinds of ships that I took from Seattle to Yokohama and back, in the 1950's and '60's, seemed pretty long, taking two weeks of non-stop chugging across the ocean, one way...

I suppose the rest of the world wishes that this disaster would just go away, so that it can once again lift its head safely from the sand.   But all the signs are that it is not going anywhere anytime soon except farther down into the toilet, because there seems to be much more hot water in Fukushima (and vice-versa) than can possibly be dealt with, short of digging a hole to China, and unfortunately China is right next door.   But maybe a few of those Chinese ghost cities, you know, for the Japanese ...and their neighbors, to live in temporarily ... till all this is over.....

The Japanese are some very resourceful people, so you never know.   After all, this problem is not just in their back yard.   It's inside their HOUSE. They have probably just decided to take their lumps and their casualties, while declining, politely or otherwise, to sip from any more nuclear cocktails.

The article also said that it wasn't too late for aftershocks to the big earthquake that kicked up Fukushima's tsunami. As if in response, yesterday a magnitude 6 to 7 quake hit in that vicinity. The reports speak of not much in the way of damage, deaths, or another tsunami so far, but they leave plenty of room for the usual ultimately more grievous truths to come out later.

I

Dangerous Analogies

2011-06-21T08:40:00.001-04:00

Right now I'm reading "The Guns of August," which might be Barbara Tuchman's best-known book. It is about the onset of the First World War.

In it she speaks of a concept that a French military thinker tried to sell to his colleagues, and she says it went over the same as if Mistinguett were to be nominated for admission into the French Academy of Arts or some such.

It's easy to grasp Tuchman's point, but the analogy still suffers if you don't know who Mistinguett was. Though I didn't know, nothing was lost and maybe something was gained, because now I do know, and it only took the usual one tap on Google's brain. She lived from 1875 to 1956, and she was a very famous French vaudeville singer and also known for her risque bits on stage and in her personal life. Among other things, she's the one who had her legs insured for half a million. I thought that was Jean Harlow, Mae West, Betty Grable, or somebody like them. But maybe they had theirs insured in dollars instead of francs. So it looks like I missed out on Mistinguett by just a little, and now you are forwarned and forearmed, should this analogy next be sprung on you.

This shows, however, how dangerous analogies and allusions can be, in that the reader can be short-changed if he is not seriously up on things, and also not up for stopping what he's doing and doing the googling -- or if the analogy is past its day, like in 1924.

George Will, the usually wrong-headed conservative columnist (and what conservative columnist is not wrong-headed?), whose name should never otherwise be included in the same sentence with that of Barbara Tuchman, relied heavily on analogies and allusions like that, after he graduated from Yale and got a job pontificating and thus had unlimited opportunities to show off his recently gained erudition, which he did, profusely. He should be quite old now. I wonder if he has grown out of that yet? Ha-ha.

But nowadays there is another political writer who outdoes Will in the overuse of that tempting literary device by a country mile. That is Angry Arab, of the celebrated Angry Arab News Service weblog, which I read every day because he is an interesting character, and it's also sometimes informative to find out what's vexing him now in the Arab world, and there are always ten or twelve of those, every day of the week, including Sundays. He uses analogies by the boatload and they are especially knotty to this American reader because they always refer to people with obscure Arabic names. I suspect these figures are unknown even to his Arabic readers most of the time, but it makes him look informed beyond all get-out, and that is the main thing.

Ghost Cities in China

2011-06-20T09:34:00.001-04:00

It's interesting to see how China, which has been a disgrace to communism in so many ways in the past 60 years, has found a new way to do so, and by using capitalistic methods.

There's a case for saying that the many accounts in the media speaking of "Chinese ghost towns" are misusing the language once again, and that instead, they should always say "Chinese ghost cities." because these things are not towns at all. They are bonafide cities -- if we can refer to them as being true cities, when they have an occupancy rate of only about 30 percent and in most cases much less -- built to house many millions of people, Ugly cities, but cities nevertheless, featuring a great many skyscratchers that look like they would bring about a great many deaths of the soul if all those apartments and offices were occupied.

The Chinese must have an incredibly efficient and huge construction industry, because all these nearly empty cities were thrown up in just the last few years, and there is also obviously a great deal of money tied up in them -- so much that we are told that these cities are a real threat to the world economy. As nearly as I can make out with my admittedly stunted economic mind, the reason is that a lot of the world's metal supply is tied up in these cities, and this has had a bad effect on the metal industries in other countries and that has affected the global economy and so forth and so on.

It is all a part of how everything on the planet is tied together and not only in human affairs -- a principle that I first ran into many years ago in a very interesting little 1941 paperback about the weather called "Storm," by George R. Stewart, in which he gives a saying that goes along the lines of, "A Chinese man sneezing in Peking can cause a hurricane in California," or some such. I can't quote it exactly, because like all my paperback treasures of the 1940's and '50's -- all that I could afford in the way of books in those days -- the pages, though still intact, are badly yellowed and dry with age, and they would start falling apart if I looked for anything in them.

The reason that all these freshly thrown-up cities in China are sitting there with just a few tenants so far is because of the usual economic demons that you see in capitalistic societies: speculators, developers gone wild, berserk bankers, and all the rest, and these edifices are too expensive for the middle class that was expected to move into them.

I would expect that, wherever they are living now, those middle class people will eventually move into those buildings, though only at some financial cost to somebody, hopefully not to a tie-dyer in Zanzibar.

But meanwhile what a great difference between the American ghost towns and the Chinese ghost cities! The American towns were much smaller, always just a few buildings thrown up hurriedly on the wagon trails during the frenzied rush westward and soon deserted and just left there, without even a match being put to the ruins, and today some of them are still kept in reasonably good states of desertion, for the benefit of drivers-by. As such the American ghost towns reach back farther and farther into the past, while the Chinese ghost cities reach a somewhat lesser distance ahead into an uncertain future, because among other things, where's all the water, the food, the fuel,the power, and all the other necessities of life going to come from when eventually these places are fully occupied?

All the same, just as I was always interested in ghost towns and ghost buildings during the several car trips that we took out west, I would very much like to walk around for a few minutes in one of these Chinese ghost cities. I don't know why edifices without any other humans around appeal to me so much.

Here is an interesting article that, along with a lot of satellite photos of these cities, explains what's with these eerie places..

Drivers License Renewal

2011-06-16T00:39:00.001-04:00

Yesterday morning wife drove me down to Lynchburg to get my driver's license renewed. Because such a thing is always on the traumatic side for me, a month ago I tried to make things easier for myself.   I wasn't totally confident about my sight.   I can see just about everything I want to see, except the birds sitting in the trees, but still things tend to be slightly murky, especially in bright daylight. It's great inside, though I'm beginning to wonder why book publishers are so stingy with the ink and the size of the print. So I went for a complete eye examination at my eye doctor, and he gave me a slip that I could give to the DMV people, so that I wouldn't have to be examined there.   I am still haunted by how when I got my first drivers license, at the age of 32, in 1963, I failed it twice before finally passing, not because I couldn't steer or park but because of nerves.   This galled me because they were the first and so far the only tests I have ever failed.

Wife arranged to get herself and me down there at the best possible time, exactly in midmonth and in the early morning, and I zipped right on through and was only at the DMV for about 10 minutes tops. So now, in the mail, I will get a new license, and just in time, too, because I only had a month and a half to go before my birthday came up and my old one would have expired..

And now guess what? My new license won't expire till 2019. That's right. Twenty nineteen!    That is eight years from now! I have that long before I will need to start worrying about it again!

And where will I be in 8 years?. Well, there's a good chance that it won't be on the road.   Not very much anyhow, despite our neighbors across the road, K. and L., who, on hearing this, said that in 2017 they will start casting a wary eye out for me behind the wheel.

Even right now I drive so little that if you needed my total mileage per year to get to the next big city, you wouldn't have enough to get there, even -- almost-- if you were already in the nearest big city.

Congress Notices Libya

2011-06-16T00:05:00.001-04:00

After about three months of the U.S. playing mainly a support role in the NATO military effort in Libya, some people are attacking President Obama for doing this. The sense of deja vu is so powerful here and goes back for so many years, with so many Presidents having gone to the latest shootouts without getting Congressional permission, that I would call it a case of beating about twenty (20) dead horses.

Things were probably slow in Congress. Summer is setting in, and for all I know they're in recess and spending all their time raising money and going to picnics and raising money. But so as not to let the public forget that there is a U.S..Congress, which is always an easy thing to do, a bunch of the more zealous among them thought they'd take advantage of this hiatus by trying to grab a few quick political points.

But their case, the very old one about how the White House is keeping the Congress out of the loop on military involvements, is weaker than usual because they have found nothing new to throw into the fire, plus the U.S. isn't exactly leading the charge in Libya,, and there are no U.S. ground troops involved. The Congressmen argue that the Libya thing is too expensive, because the cost to the U.S. is now just 200 mil short of 1 bil. But any U.S. military move anywhere and at any time is always going to cost an arm and a leg, regardless. That's just about Biblical.

World History ="Mine is Bigger Than Yourn"

2011-06-14T09:10:00.004-04:00

I have now read 350 of the 450 pages of Laurence Bergreen's book on the Magellan "Moluccan Armada" expedition, and I don't know what to say.   Man!   --Except that it has led me to wonder if a lot of history, both in the commission and in the telling of it, isn't in large part a matter of mostly male hormones that went seriously out of whack, so that history might be really best seen as being largely a series of medical case studies instead of evocations of the great achievements that statues, memorials, holidays, "the writing of many books" (as the writer of Ecclesiastes so scornfully said several thousand years ago) and other salutes to the "great men" are all built around.   How else to look at the Magellan saga rationally?   Because when all else is said and done, and all the characters are considered, from the biggest to the smallest, it is a very irrational story.
         At this point in my reading, Magellan is long since dead and gone, sliced into a bunch of never recovered pieces at the edge of the sea on an island in the Philippines, nearly as far from Spain as he can be in all directions.   He has successfully found and negotiated the straits named after him, and after that he has sailed many thousands of miles across the Pacific, and the main things he has discovered, to his stunning surprise and also horror, is that, one, the Spice Islands (Indonesia) that were supposed to be his ultimate destination are not just a crossbow shot past the other end of the straits, right next to Chile, and two, the Pacific Ocean is really, really BIG!
But he has also made two more discoveries that are equally serious, and this is where the story of him and his men goes seriously off the track.   Those trade winds that so conveniently pushed them across the broad Pacific with such great speed, ease, and abandon for 98 relatively blissful days, except for the eating and scurvy bit, have brought him not to the Spice Islands, as he might have thought God's will had obliged those winds to do.   Instead he has reached a bunch of other islands to which he has quickly given the name that their inhabitants have all been waiting for: "the Philippines,"   And the best thing about these islands is his fourth discovery: all he has to do to throw the fear of God into the inhabitants is to stand offshore and fire off some of the vast amounts of military hardware that he has hauled all this distance -- the cannons, the mortars, the muskets -- and everything else is a piece of cake. Follow up with planting a cross on the highest mountain on each island and that will bring everybody to Christ, especially after he demonstrates to all the local kings that one of his men dressed in a suit of armor would be more than equal to 100 of their nearly naked warriors.
         It's too bad that Magellan never made yet another discovery that would've stood him in good stead, and that would've been the self-awareness that by this time, all those months of being an all-mighty admiral of an "armada" had caused his cojones to swell far too large for his britches, and that he could've used some serious therapy.   Instead he gets into a mode of operation where he tells these kings that if they would just lead all their subjects into converting to Christianity, he, Magellan, will dispose of all their enemies.   And it is in the course of having picked a highly unnecessary fight with the enemies of one of those converted kings, just to show off how well the Spanish fight (in the 200 suits of armor that they had also brought along), that those enemies notice that those suits don't quite reach down far enough.   Magellan gets hit by a poisoned arrow in his leg that causes his chin to have an unplanned meeting with the sand, and that is followed by dozens of other arrows and chops in his arms and other places, and quickly he is history..
         So now, in my reading, his now badly bedraggled survivors have had to get rid of yet another of their ships, by fire, because seagoing termites have tunneled into it so badly, and now the "armada" is down to only two ships, after two others had already been lost even before they had cleared the straits,, one to a storm and another to crewmen who, taking expeditious advantage of the fact that Magellan was momentarily elsewhere in the straits, backed out of there without telling him and headed home again to Spain, because they had had enough of him and his high-handed ways..
        Therefore, it can be said that, thanks to his highly excessive religious zeal, Magellan's name can only loosely be attached to that first circumnavigation of the globe, and that the achievement was more that of the 18 uncelebrated guys, whoever they were, who were left to complete the second half of the trip before finally staggering into port nearly insensibly, home again in Spain, another long while later.   And the Magellan tale suggests that the great Age of Discovery was actually a story of mainly some avaricious adventurers just feeling their way along and bumping up against their ignorance of many things, including the many human shortcomings, the geography of the planet, the makeup and the validity of other cultures, the tenets of simple morality, and even of being able to tell the time at sea, so that they could always compute their latitude fairly easily but they could never be really sure of their longitude, which meant that much of the time they didn't know where they were even after they had gotten there, and so weren't able to write it down accurately, any more than they were able to record with the most reliable truth what they had seen and done.
        But still, there are certain things that you have to hand to those explorers, especially that thing of going up against the totally unknown, and I'm not saying that I don't envy them in many ways. I wonder how I would've done, going as I would've without a cross, a crescent, or any other religious symbol in my hand?.   But that is another innocent ramble for another day.

Finding the Strait and Narrow

2011-06-11T20:55:00.002-04:00

For my bedtime reading in the past several years, I've been concentrating on long accounts of life experienced at its utmost extremes. voluntarily or involuntarily, by a fortunate or an unfortunate few.   Right now it's "Over the Edge of the World," a 2004 book by Laurence Bergereen. This tells of a venture, not long after C. Columbus brought the Europeans over this way -- the first sea voyage completely around the world at one of its widest circumferences, headed, at first, by Ferdinand Magellan, a Portuguese, in a tiny but expensive fleet paid for by the Spanish, and how that arrangement came to be is a pretty wild story in itself.

Magellan had so many early failures that it's unbelievable that he would have even been considered for leading an expedition into the Great Unknown, which almost any trip of more than 100 miles out into the Atlantic was thought to be.   He got the chance by shrewdly taking advantage of some high-stakes boxing in the dark that was being conducted between the Spanish king, a guy named Charles, and the Portuguese king, a guy named Manuel.   Magellan's earlier setbacks must've helped, too.   It meant that he was expendable, as were most of the sailors, an unruly bunch, and the only real costs were for the ships themselves and the provisions.

And what was money anyway? The main Spanish industry of that day consisted of beating other Europeans to finding as many hitherto untouched territories as they could, so that they could relieve the natives of all their gold and other treasures that, it turned out, in the eyes of the Spanish rightfully belonged to the Spanish. and only to them.   And they had God's okay on that.

   Though Magellan was the guiding light of the whole thing, another of the many ironies of the voyage is that it was barely half over before death dropped him out of the telling altogether, through some sort of misunderstanding in the Philippines, as it gradually did in the case of nearly everybody else, after they had left Spain with such high expectations of finding a short cut across South America that would allow them and others, preferably and hopefully only the Spanish, to reach Indonesia, then called the Spice Islands, without too much trouble.   The idea was that the Spanish King could get a chokehold on the worldwide spice trade, while Magellan could finally secure his place in the world's esteem that he thought he so richly deserved.   But the immediate outcome of the expedition was that, of the five ships with 239 men aboard that had comprised the fleet when they set out in 1519, only one ship was still in enough of a floating condition to reappear off the Spanish coast four long years later, with only 18 men aboard, starved, in tatters, and barely able to tell what had happened.

       But they at least proved, beyond all shadow of the doubt, and before astronauts could bear witness and convincing photos could be taken, that the Earth was a huge globe, covered mostly by water, and that sailing ships, though they could fall over a number of things, one of those hazards was not the edge of the world -- which means, doesn't it, that this book was slightly misnamed.

         I haven't finished reading it. I'm not even halfway through.   I'm rationing it to myself, so as not to run out of reading material.   My own books, I mean, freshly bought from Amazon.   I don't like reading library books, as my wife does. You have to be too careful with them.

   But it seems to me that while Magellan didn't live to see the completion of the voyage, besides surmounting all the aggravations of even getting to leave Spain while still in charge of things, he did see the successful outcome of what must have been the main thrust of the voyage, which was not sailing completely around the world all at one shot. I have an idea that they were chased into doing that, for lack of any better alternatives.   Nor was it in even reaching the Spice Islands. Instead it was in solving a problem that had been as knotty for the Spanish and Portuguese explorers of the 16th Century as finding the complete Northwest Passage was for the English three centuries later, and that was in finding the waterway, the straits, across the southern part of South America that they knew were there and hopefully weren't going to turn out to be so far south that they would have had to cross part of Antarctica -- a development that would have been a really first-class downer, in almost anybody's book.

The trouble was, aside from being unable to wait long enough for Cessnas or Piper Cubs to be invented, which would have cleared the whole thing up in a hurry, they couldn't tell which of the many indentations into the southern South American coast were dead end inlets, the estuaries of rivers emptying into the Atlantic, or the big Prize. As a result Magellan spent a great deal of time trying to guess which one of those numerous openings into the coast hid the lucky number, and meanwhile the mutinous Spanish captains under him kept complaining and carping for all they were worth.

   So far, in this book, Magellan still hasn't found the straits that are now so justifiably named after him, but that's right around the corner, and I have a feeling that even while he's picking his way through them, long before he gets across the ocean and starts messing around in the Philippines, which to my geographical memory isn't exactly on the straight track to Indonesia, he's going to go through a lot more aggravation. I've always heard that that southern tip of South America is some of, if not the, toughest sailing in the world.

And now for one of my favorite verses from American blues music:

Which-a way, which-a way, does that blood red river run
From my back window, down to that setting sun.

Countries of the Criminal Class

2011-06-08T09:12:00.002-04:00

Here is going from one thing to another for you--

If I wanted I could have as many as five computer cases filled with stuff humming at one time, though I use only two monitors, two keyboards, and two mice, thanks to the magic of KVM switches.   Like the rest of my equipment of all kinds, all of those computers have some quirk that makes them temperamental to various degrees, but taken together they work great, and also it means that I never have to worry about having a complete computer breakdown.

That kind of a thing must be part of the rationale behind having harems. While the idea of five men to one woman is so obscene that it is totally out of the question, the notion of five women to one man sounds rational -- as a thought, not as a practical matter.

That is why it is so unforgivable that right now the Indians in India, just like their Chinese companions in population villainy, have been blotting out before they are even born as many of twenty percent of all those remarkable beings (at least to look at -- their only aspect that I can report on with authority), women from India.   Don't the Indians in India realize that the world needs as many of those creations as it can get, as long as they insist on having too many of everybody?

Their badly mistaken thinking on this matter has something to do with what if those "lost girls" were to be born and get married twenty years later -- dowries, parental greed, and all that kind of garbage -- I forgot what it's all about, except that this preference for scrubby men over glorious women is all the more reason for me to keep India right where, because of its population excesses, it has always been -- on my list of countries of the criminal class.

I've had this list since Nazi Germany in the 2nd World War. The charter members on the list are Germany, China and India for reasons just mentioned, and the Confederate States of America (except the county where I live, of course), even though the C.S.A. has finally moved its capital out of Richmond, which is just 100 miles down the turnpike from here, to Phoenix, after bypassing Anyplace, Texas (except Austin).   Not only does the C.S.A. absolutely refuse to stop its yearly celebrations of obvious wrongs of the past, but also it keeps right on investing heavily in every new permutation of the same crimes that comes along.

Newer countries on the list are Israel, because, of all people, they should know better, Colombia, because of everything, and . . . .

Who else?

Oh yes. Nigeria, because of its population excesses, its con men industry, and its massacres, and Somalia, because of its warlordisms and its massacres, Rwanda, because of its warlordisms and its massacres, the Central African Republic because of its warlordisms and its massacres, Sierra Leone because of its warlordisms and its massacres, Ivory Coast because of its warlordisms and its massacres, Ethiopia because of its warlordisms and its massacres, Sudan because of its warlordisms and its massacres, Mozambique because of its warlordisms and its massacres, Liberia because of its warlordisms and its massacres, Congo because of its warlordisms and its massacres--   How many have I left out?

Well, you get the idea.

Wife's Birthday

2011-06-07T10:46:00.000-04:00

Today my wife Esther turned 68.

The only significance that she sees in this seems to be that in just two more years she will be 70.

I told her not to worry. A lot of truly horrible things happened in my 70th year, both in the U.S. and personally. Hers will be much better.

Truncation Follies

2011-06-07T09:58:00.001-04:00

The BBC News writers are at it yet again.

When I saw their link this morning that read: "Chinese execute hit-and-run killer," I thought, Wow! The Chinese can really get serious about things! But then I read the story, and it quickly turned out that it wasn't a hit-and-run case in the ordinary sense of the term. Usually the driver never gets out of his car and instead just keeps on going. But in this incident the driver saw the woman whom he had knocked off her bicycle busy writing down his tag number and such, and fearing that she would use that to turn him in, he lost it completely, jumped out of his car, and stabbed her to death. Only then did he leave, which made it much more of a regular murder.

So hit and run drivers in the U.S. can breathe easier . . .for the time being.

Prediction for Today's Infants

2011-06-06T10:40:00.000-04:00

My wife says that she recently read a report predicting that fifty (50) percent of those people born after the year 2000 will probably live to be 100. That will be a LOT of centenarians still walking around.

If that turns out to be true, then it stands to reason that social security, medicare, and many other things need to be put on a much firmer footing not later but RIGHT NOW! --Instead of listening to the Teapublicans, who are working as hard as they can to -- in the words of S. Palin and others -- "take the country back," presumably.to where it was when people were doing good to reach age 55.

My Take on Palin's Latest

2011-06-06T00:38:00.000-04:00

I get a big kick out of Sarah Palin, though I can't understand how anyone in their right mind could think that she is anywhere close to being a reasonable prospect to lead the country.   Surely their respect for the Presidency must be higher than that! She skipped too many classes early in her life, being a beauty queen.

All the same, I think she has to be given credit for her enormous entertainment value. Of all the candidates whose names are kicked around, she is invariably the one most likely to tickle a person's funny bone, at times uncontrollably..

I think I know why that is.   It's in her personality, and specifically in her extreme volubility, and in her absolute determination to put her point forward, whatever it might be, even if so much of the time it makes no sense at all. Her latest dust-up, about the intent of Paul Revere's ride, is a great illustration.

She was asked, "Who was Paul Revere?" That is an unusually strange, foreshortened, and -- let's face it -- dumb question, since every American schoolchild through all the generations must know that he was the guy that jumped on his horse when the American Revolution was being born and rode through the countryside, warning the rebels or the patriots, depending on which side you were on, that, "The British are coming, the British are coming!"

I can see how anybody might be taken aback by this weird question, and Sarah Palin was no exception. But, as is her custom, she didn't dally or sidestep. You ask her something, she's going to answer it, some kind of a way. And since she couldn't immediately think of something key about Paul Revere, such as that he was a silversmith, and a masterful one, she fell back on a tactic that I am sure has stood her in good stead since her earliest days in school. She grabbed a fistful of phrases and words that sounded vaguely applicable out of the ether and, without trying to put them into any logical order, just hurled the whole verbal lump back at the questioner, complete with bells ringing, while saying that he warned the British.    It's called "trying to snow somebody," which fits right in, considering where she lives.

Besides seeing her doing this, it's also entertaining to see the lame defences being thrown up by her and her supporters.   They claim that by his own words Revere admitted that he was warning the British.   But the main writing of his that they cite has him telling some British soldiers who had surrounded him that the Rebels are arming and ready for business, and that he had already been riding for some time through the countryside raising the alarm to the Americans or rebels that the British were coming and to be ready. In my book that wasn't warning the British for their sake.    Instead it sounded to me like gutsy out and out heckling, or "agitating," as the guys during my youth would have said..

As for arguing that everybody was still British at that time, including the Rebels that Revere was warning, that is like saying that the people who fired on Fort Sumter were just good Americans. At the time of Revere's ride the sides were being chosen fast, and what those sides were was very clear.

.

Unusual Quiet

2011-06-05T07:35:00.002-04:00

It's been unusually quiet around here, outside, generally speaking, for the past two days.   At night, too.   The lull before the storm?   But what storm?

Part of it is because right now there are no industrial sounds.   Not the "industrial" as relates to factories, railroads, and the like. There is a railroad but no factories of any kind for a great many miles around, that I know of. I meant "industrial" instead in the sense of being industrious.   Nobody seems to be cutting any wood, having any wells dug, running any road equipment, building or repairing houses, or even mowing any hay or grass.   And even the U.S. Navy, from its safe position 200 miles away, hasn't sent its pairs of roaring jet fighters to attack us with their thunderous and sometimes scary, extreme noise pollution lately, which they do at intervals whose lengths are obviously determined by flipping coins, while thinking that the U.S. citizens living here are too few to matter, even though a couple of those citizens -- not anywhere close to a majority but at least a couple -- run up U.S. flags on poles every morning, and you would think that would be enough.

The other part is that the smaller wildlife -- the birds in the daytime and the insects any time -- are not having much to say.

There's probably not much use in even mentioning all this surrounding silence.   The use must be in just noticing it while I can.