PAWN MY HONOR, SAY ‘TAINT SO

I just realized something while I was absent-mindedly picking my nose this morning. When our news media spend a lot of ink and hard-drive space talking about Rove or, in another era, Dick Morris/James Carville, etcetera, they seem to be forgetting that they have removed the American electorate from the equation. Reading these evaluations of campaign strategists, one might get the impression that voters are just empty pawns to be moved around by a master chess player into voting quays where they’ll vote as they’ve been manipulated to vote. Giving all the credit to the manipulators of public opinion ignores completely the American electorate to whom the manipulators are appealing. It’s just a little thing, a nuance, an emphasis, a sleight of hand trick, maybe not important at all to think about, but does someone have the emphasis wrong?

OKIE FROM MUSKOGEE, AWFULLY SMOKEY

Did you know how that song got wrote, I mean written? Merle and his band were passing through Oklahoma and saw a highway sign pointing to Muskogee, and, according to Jackie Daly, Tammy Wynette’s daughter (I was giving her bio of her mother a quick read-through while selling books recently), “Merle and the band members were well into smoke [marijuana] by then and someone made the crack, ‘I’ll bet they don’t smoke marijuana in Muskogee.’ Within fifty miles, the song was complete.”

The irony of that song becoming a conservative anthem, back in the day, can’t be overemphasized, can it? Here was a mocking reference, turned completely around, set on its head and massaged into a conservative, whiskey drinker’s phantasmagoria. Ain’t life just funny as a Muskogee highway sign?

WINSTON

“The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of the blessings. The inherent blessing of socialism is the equal sharing of misery.” —Winston Churchill

From this one may conclude one very certain thing about dear old Winston—he was not an atheist.

AWFULLY PROUD OF BABY STEPS

To a real mathematician, my page of math is just baby steps. It ain’t much, but here’s one page of exercises from my algebra text, and I’m awfully proud of this very simple page of work. The interesting feature is that one page equals only three exercises. Can’t wait to get to calculus. Just now looking at this sample before publishing, I realize that my "v"s in the final problem are formed incorrectly. They look like radical signs.


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BROWNBACK , YELLOW CHINA and WHITE WINTER

Reports coming up from way down low Australia reveal that China’s influence in that country is booming. Below are a few excerpts from a McClatchy news service story which appeared in our local paper, the Spokesman Review, today (January 21, 2007).


[SNIP]
BRISBANE, Australia – Over the past century, U.S. and Australian military forces have fought together in nearly every major global conflict, including both World Wars, Korea, Vietnam, the first Gulf War and now in Afghanistan and Iraq.

‘Australians have been at the pointy end of the spear in both Iraq and Afghanistan,’ said Michael J. Green, the former head of Asian affairs at the National Security Council in Washington.

So it may come as a surprise that a recent poll found that Australians feel about as warmly toward a new suitor in the region—China—as they do toward longtime ally America. Moreover, the poll found that Australians think China is the strongest power in Asia, eclipsing the United States. . .

A trickle of Chinese students enrolling in Australian schools has turned into a tide, and trade between the two countries has skyrocketed, turning Australian views of China rosier and making some U.S. policymakers uneasy. . .

‘I saw zero difference between President Bush and Prime Minister (John) Howard on China policy,’ said Green, the former National Security Council adviser to Bush.
[PASTE]

We must recall that Green is a Bushite and, as a member of the National Security Council, he served during the time when Bush and all his cohorts were lying at the rate of about one sound bite per minute per minute, so how can we pay any attention to what Green says. It’s obvious to anyone that Bush has cost us friendships and influence all over the world, and if America is declining in influence, most of that decline can be attributed to Bush’s illegal invasion of the sovereign nation, Iraq, as well his fundamentalist’s supporters’ anti-science and anti-fact biases.

Now why should I mention Sam Brownback in conjunction with this article about Australia? Well Sam just announced his run for the presidency and Brownback’s another one of those Christian fundamentalists who is, by conviction, anti-science and anti-progress. He will further decimate America’s once insurmountable lead in technology and science, and even more worldly scientists will go elsewhere for their educations. We need to ask Brownback, point-blank, if he subscribes to the facts of evolution or to the unsubstantiated literal interpretations of the Bible—that anti-science textbook—as to the origins of life. We can ill afford another presidency that is backward and reactionary. It will only hasten America’s already deepening decline as a force in world affairs. I think Americans do have to make a serious choice about whether we sink into Biblical superstition and become ever more like those backward Moslem nations we now oppose or choose the rational and effective methods of empiricism. Being hopeful, I am resisting my gloomy tendencies but being realistic about fundamentalist forces and their influence in America, the gloom factor tips the balance a little more to the dark side than the light.

PS: Speaking of light—yep, my backyard and we finally got winter.

WHAT’S THE DIFFERENCE?

The following eight paragraphs are snipped from a Time magazine article in October 9 2006. It discusses the small differences between us and some of our nearer relatives in the animal kingdom and how all of that difference can’t be explained simply by genetic differences. Several comments by myself are included between brackets and inserted in the text. If any of my asides are completely ignorant of the facts, please comment on the blog where you’ll also find this article.

The illustration is by Tim O'Brien for the Time magazine article.

[SNIP]
Even before the human genome was sequenced back in 2000, says biologist Sean
Carroll of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, "it was estimated that humans had 100,000 genes. When we got the genome, the estimate dropped to 25,000. Now we know the overall number is about 22,000, and it might even come down 
to 19,000.”

This shockingly small number made it clear to scientists that genes alone don't dictate the differences between species; the changes, they now know, also depend on molecular switches that
tell genes when and where to turn on and off. “Take the genes involved in creating the hand, the penis and the vertebrae," says Lovejoy. "These share some of the same structural genes. The pelvis is another example. Humans have a radically different pelvis from that of apes. It's like having the blueprints for two different brick houses. The bricks are the same, but the results are very different."

Those molecular switches lie in the noncoding regions of the genome—once known dismissively as junk DNA but lately rechristened the dark matter of the genome. Much of the genome's dark matter is, in fact, junk—the residue of evolutionary events long forgotten and no longer relevant. But a subset of the dark matter known as functional noncoding DNA, comprising some 3% to 4% of the genome and mostly embedded within and around the 
genes, is crucial. "Coding regions are much easier for us to study," 
says Carroll, whose new book, The Making of the Fittest: DNA and
the Ultimate Forensic Record of Evolution, delves deep into the issue. "But it may be the dark matter that governs a lot of what we 
actually see.”

What causes changes in both the dark matter and the genes themselves as one species evolves into another is random mutation, 
in which individual base pairs—the "letters" of the genetic alphabet—are flipped around like a typographical error. These changes stem from errors that occur during sexual reproduction, as DNA is copied and recombined. Sometimes long strings of letters are duplicated, creating multiple copies in the offspring. Sometimes they're deleted altogether or even picked up, turned around and reinserted backward. [Man—isn’t all this sex talk exciting—turning around and reinserting.] A group led by geneticist Stephen Scherer of the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto has identified 1,576 apparent
inversions between the chimp and human genomes; more than
half occurred sometime during human evolution. [Reading this Time magazine article, believe it or not, I got a whole new feel for what fucking is all about. Dawkins, in the selfish gene also tells us about how these bits of DNA are arranged and rearranged in the combining activities of replication. He even goes so far—I think I did put this in another blog entry some time back—as to suggest that genes aren’t so easily defined or “separated” one from the other because of these long strands of “dark” matter.]

When an inversion, deletion or duplication occurs in an unused portion of the genome, nothing much changes—and indeed, the human, chimp, and other genomes are full of such inert stretches of DNA. When it happens in a gene or in a functional 
noncoding stretch, by contrast an inversion or a duplication is often harmful. But sometimes, purely by chance, the change gives the new organism some sort of advantage that enables it to produce more offspring, thus perpetuating the change in another generation. [But sometimes, even though a generation or so might have increased progeny, I’ll bet whole ecosystems may have been destroyed and entire lines of successful change destroyed. In millions of years how often did catastrophes like that occur?]

A striking example of how gene dupication may have helped propel us away from our apelike origins appeared in Science last month. A research team led by James Sikela of the University of Colorado at Denver and Health Sciences Center, in Aurora, Colo., looked at a gene that is believed to code for a piece of protein, called DUF1220, found in areas of the brain associated 
with higher cognitive function. The gene comes in multiple copies in a wide range of primates—but, the scientists found, humans carry the most copies. African great apes have substantially fewer copies, and the number found in more distant kin—orangutans and Old World monkeys—drops off even more.

Another discovery, first published online by Nature two months ago, describes a gene that appears to play a role in human
brain development. A team led by biostatistician Katherine Pollard, now at the University of California, Davis, and Sofie Salama, of U.C. Santa Cruz., used a sophisticated computer program to search the genomes of humans, chimps and other vertebrates for
segments that have undergone changes at substantially accelerateded rates. They eventually homed in on 49 discrete areas they dubbed human accelerated regions, or HARs.

The region that changed most dramatically from chimps to humans, known as HARl, turns out to be part of a gene that is active in fetal brain tissue only between the seventh and 19th weeks of gestation. Although the gene's precise function is unknown, that happens to be the period when a protein called reelin helps the human cerebral cortex develop its characteristic six-layer structure. [It’s this layering, if I understand it correctly, that has allowed humans to slowly use language more and more abstractly and for the representations of the brain modules that recognize and combine bits of the material world to escape strict representational functions and to begin to combine the segments of the material world in symbolic relations and to apprehend non-material mental constructs like “future” and “past” and, O, so many more intellectual concepts.] What makes the team's research especially intriguing is that all but two of the HARs lie in those enigmatic functional noncoding regions of the genome, supporting the idea that much of
the difference between species happens there.
[PASTE]

WE POWERFUL ATHEISTS

According to foreign Moslems of the terrorist schism, all Americans are satanic or, at least, members of the body they call “The Great Satan”. And, according to many X-tian fundamentalists in America, we atheists are also satanic. Thus, to put these concepts into mathematical terms, a normal fundamentalist Xtian is satanic to the power of one while we atheists are Satan squared or the satanic raised to the power of two. So, according to Moslem fundamentalists, we have double the evil power of simple American Xtian satans. Wow! Are we atheists ever powerful!

"Beware! Beware! Weave a circle round him thrice, and close your eyes with holy dread, for he [we] on honey dew hath fed, and drunk the milk of paradise.”
—Sam Coleridge.

GOD'S GOT HIS EYES ON THE MONEY

Adrian Peterson, Oklahoma running back, will forego his final year of college ball and go into the NFL. He said, “It wasn’t an easy decision. I just put it in God’s hands.”

Now isn’t that funny! Guess what? God told him to forget empty principles like loyalty to the school who opened the door to opportunity and his teammates who might be depending on him next year. God told him to “go for the money.” Funny that evolutionary psychology would predict the same outcome of “turning it over”—the selfish choice, the put me first choice, the forget my teammates, my school, my gratitude for the scholarship. Funny how God put Adrian’s selfishness first, just as if Adrian were an animal, with animal instincts. Funny—I can’t tell the difference between Adrian’s hypothetical superbeing’s dictates and the dictates of the emerging consciousness of the evolving human species.

MOVIE TEST

Who is the star as a little girl on the far left of this photograph. Can you tell?

A PAGE FROM THE PAST

You recall I spoke of two friends who showed up at the wedding of George Thomas and Mertie Duncan? I showed you their photos—not too many days before today? Scroll back. You'll soon come upon them. Below is a photo of a page from my microzine, George & Mertie's Place, on which you can read two of Geoff's poems. The one on the right in the photo is Geoffrey, the man who wrote the poems below. The other fellow is also named Geoffrey, but he's a fisherman mostly, though he writes the occasional poem too. He can speak a lot of Russian and some Spanish too.

Beautiful are they not? The cartoon is a little flier I put together out of clip art I bought to use on the microzine. View the cartoon left to right.

BUTTER THE BREAD ON THE LEFT SIDE

In an interview with Atlantic Monthly national correspondent James Fallows, Bill Clinton, with Carl Rove in mind, said; ". . . . You don't understand this strip of the Republican party that controls everything basically," Clinton said. "These people are all white Protestant males. They don't do anything that surprises me. I've seen this my whole life." Reported by Troy Hooper of Aspen Daily News, Posted July 8, 2006

If he had wanted to further alienate the South from the Democratic Party, Bill Clinton might also have noted the Southern ideology of most of these men who run the Republican Party and the racial, economic and religious prejudice which sluices through their underlying beliefs. In a long ago early post, I mentioned that Bill was a Southern boy from the wrong side of the tracks, the kind of man that men of privilege, like Bush and company (lesser men in every way), envy and fear and want to keep in their places. This economic divide is what made, and make, their attacks on President Clinton and on the entire social safety net so vicious. Most Southern rednecks who support Bush are going against their own best interests, but Bush and company have been good at playing the religious card to blind them to what is being done to them in the back alleys of the Republican City on the Hill. We can only hope that Southern working men come to their senses and see which side their bread is buttered on.

IT MAY NOT BE SPACEWALKING but it’s

skywalking in Spokane.

















CONSCIOUSNESS, COMMUNICATION AND A CHIHUAHUA

This morning as I ran the electric razor over the wrinkles of my homely face, I got to thinking about consciousness, communication and our Chihuahua Chi Chi. Not long ago I read an essay about dogs and their uncanny ability to use humans as food sources and how they’d learned all their tricks basically in order to wiggle food out of us. Dogs were described as very apt parasites in symbiotic relationships with their masters. And, so, with complete superiority I let my thinking rest there for awhile. . . until this morning. Then I got to thinking back over my work life (a benefit of being in retirement) and all the masters that I had learned to please in order to earn my food, the skills I mastered (well. . . semi-mastered), the words I learned to please mommy and poppy, the social tricks for getting along. Well. . . what’s superior to a dog’s life and learning about all the things I learned in order to win my food from the complex culture I found myself born into?

We human animals sure like to pride ourselves on our free wills, but strip away all the ways we try to explain our behavior and down deep, we’ll see that most all of it is learned in order to get food, stay safe within the pack (or herd), and procreate. I don’t know what to make of those of us who got educations in the arts until I recall the movie, “Dead Poets Society”, and the claim made there that poetry was/is all about getting laid (which I sort of agree with when I think of all the ways I used my education in English and creative writing). The trouble is that most poets don’t put the grub on the kitchen table, unless they teach poetry or literature, and most women will eventually leave them for a man whose got a good job sweeping schoolroom floors. Don’t tell me different. I done seen it way to many times in my long and misled life.

HOME SCHOOLING IN AFGHANISTAN AND AMERICA or
EVOLUTION? WHO EVER HEARD OF IT?

According to an article in Newsweek (June, 2006) the Afghanistan Taliban know as well as our own fundamentalist Christians that “home schooling” is the way to brainwash children. The Taliban believes that “. . . the school system [in Afghanistan] is no more than a plot to impose Western ideas—even Christianity—on the country’s Muslim children. Back in February [2006], Taliban fighters threatened to shut down the only school in the town of Ghanzi, an hour's drive north of Kabul, according to Malak Mirza, 55, a local tribal elder. The townspeople sent back a strong message that the Taliban would be driven out of the area if the school was attacked. The Taliban relented on one condition: no Christianity (which is very occasionally taught in Afghanistan—surreptitiously—by zealous missionaries). They distrust any education that takes place outside madrassas [home schools]. ‘These extremists know that educated children are unlikely to follow religious extremism in the future,’ says Nadery. ‘The Taliban want to keep us backward.’ ”

I might add—so do fundamentalist Christians want to keep as many Americans as possible "backward". For only someone deeply uninformed, profoundly superstitious and biased could possibly believe a fraction of what the Bible tells them to believe.

POOR QUALITY? JUST CHARGE MORE!





I think I’m going to fire up a poetry writing tutoring service, say—humn—let me see—at the rate of thousand dollars an hour? No one else in the poetry teaching world makes that sort of a rate, do they? Will it work? This is truly a nation which knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.


A RECENT LETTER TO ABC

The following is a letter—slightly altered—I drafted and sent to ABC:

Subject: ABCNEWS.com EDITORIAL
Date: Thursday, January 11, 2007 8:22 PM
From: George Thomas
To:

To any remaining responsible party at ABC,

I have noticed very disturbing news coming out about ABC. At least three items.

1. You are bringing on the inflammatory, right wing commentator Glenn Beck to add content to Good Morning America.

2. You have participated in the restraint of trade by compiling an inaccurate list of advertisers (I know it was inaccurate because I contacted 85 or so of those advertisers personally, linking them to a copy of the memo) who you claim do not want to advertise on Air America radio programs, bankrupting the network on which the only clearly Democratic party talkers anywhere appeared on commercial radio. Your Republican Party bias is evident.

3. You have helped silence freedom of the press by forcing the shut down of a blogsite which was legally using clips of unrestrained, inflammatory and racist comments by ABC's KSFO radio station in San Francisco to inform advertisers of the kind of biased programming that ABC supports and encourages. If your tactic stands, legitimate fact gathering and reporting is certainly in danger. I can't believe that a major network is acting so irresponsibly, even to the eventually detriment of its own news department. For the full story on this go to.

The three actions taken together represent a clear effort to bend the news to the favor of the Republican Party and to silence all commentary which does not suit ABC's corporate ownership. This is the kind of behavior I'd expect of a South American national news organization controlled by a dictatorship.

I'm 69, and I don't think in my life I've ever been more ashamed of the antics of one of our three major broadcasting networks. You are discrediting ABC and smearing your own reputation. Eventually, as long as America remains free, this disgraceful and biased attitude of ABC towards the Democratic Party and free speech will become public knowledge. I hope someone with responsible journalistic instincts in your organization will see the error of your ways and quickly correct them unless your corporate leadership is truly in favor of the Bush regime's attack on civil liberties and American democracy.

Sincerely,
--
George Thomas
Spokane, Washington

A TRIBUTE TO DONALD HALL, POET

Donald Hall was recently appointed to be the Library of Congress’s 14th Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry. “Hall was born in Connecticut in 1928. He was educated at Harvard, Oxford and Stanford universities and taught at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. For the past 30 years he has lived on an old family farm in rural New Hampshire, in the house where his grandmother and his mother were born. He has two children and five grandchildren.” —a Library of Congress press release. (Photo Credit: By Larry Morris—The Washington Post) >>>

Not too long ago I was fortunate to find a collection of Hall’s poems in the little book store where I volunteer, selling books for the Friends of the Library to make money to donate to the Spokane Public Library. Next to the algebra I’m working on, I’m slipping a little reading in of Donald Hall’s poetry. Here's a few of them.

Once upon a time, as a poet, I knew the following well about poems, but that was, O, so long ago.

THE POEM

It discovers by night 

what the day hid from it. 

Sometimes it turns itself 

into an animal.
In summer it takes long walks
by itself where meadows
fold back from ditches.
Once it stood still
in a quiet row of machines. 

Who knows
what it is thinking?


This is a poet I imagine very personally as Donald Hall himself. I see a little of myself in it too.

THE CHILD

He lives among a dog, 

a tricycle, and a friend. 

Nobody owns him.

He walks by himself, beside
the black pool, in the cave 

where icicles of rock

rain hard water,
and the walls are rough
with the light of stone.

He hears low talking 

without words.
The hand of a wind touches him.

He walks until he is tired
or somebody calls him.
He leaves right away.

When he plays with his friend 

he stops suddenly
to hear the black water.


As a poet with an MFA, a child born in the depression with depression stories ringing in my ears and limbic system, who spent almost all his working years running machines as a machinist in factories, shipyards and small job shops, the next poem rings a thousand sad bells with me.

THE FOUNDATIONS OF AMERICAN INDUSTRY

In the Ford plant
at Ypsilanti
men named for their 

fathers work at steel 

machines named Bliss, 

Olaffson, Smith-Crieg, 

and Safety.

In the Ford plant
the generators
move quickly on
belts, a thousand now 

an hour. New men 

move to the belt when 

the shift comes.

For the most part
the men are young, and 

go home to their
Fords, and drive around, 

or watch TV,
sleep, and then go work, 

toward payday;

when they walk home 

they walk on sidewalks 

marked W
P A 38;
their old men made 

them, and they walk on 

their fathers.


Here’s a poetry test. Donald Hall now lives in New Hampshire and another great American poet spent a good part of his life teaching in New Hampshire. What poet does the rhythm of the phrase “a quarrel of vines” echo from in Donald Hall’s next poem? Do you know?

NEW HAMPSHIRE

A bear sleeps in a cellarhole; pine needles 

heap over a granite doorstep; a well brims 

with acorns and the broken leaves of an oak 

which grew where an anvil rusted in a forge.

Inside an anvil, inside a bear, inside a leaf,
a bark of rust grows on the tree of a gas pump;
EAT signs gather like leaves in the shallow 

cellars of diners; a wildcat waits for deer

on the roof of a car. Blacktop buckled by frost 

starts goldenrod from the highway. Fat honey bees

meander among raspberries, where a quarrel
of vines crawls into the spilled body of a plane.

LIFE BOILED AND DROWNED

According to an Associated Press report,

[SNIP]
“Two NASA space probes that visited Mars 30 years ago may have stumbled upon alien microbes on the Red Planet and inadvertently killed them, a scientist theorizes in a paper released Sunday.

“The problem was the Viking space probes of 1976-77 were looking for the wrong kind of life and didn't recognize it, the researcher said in a paper presented at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Seattle.

“This new report, based on a more expansive view of where life can take root, may have NASA looking for a different type of Martian life form when its next Mars spacecraft is launched later this year, one of the space agency's top scientists told The Associated Press.”
[PASTE]

Got me to thinking, along with many scientists much brighter and well-informed than me, that life must be everywhere in the Universe. It will always have to evolve since evolution seems always to multiply and complicate rather than simplify, from inanimate to animate, from unconscious to conscious. This is the most exciting stuff in the world, this evolution of consciousness, the ability of the human animal to become aware of itself adrift in the Universe, master of its own destiny, its ability to contemplate its future, even its own death. The end result has to be conscious life of a variety of types all over the Universe. Contrary to Biblical prophecy and awesome to the extreme, the Cosmos is alive with life and the hugest majority of it unnamed by the mythical Adam nor transported by an equally mythological Noah.

NOT ONLY ANN COULTER

Not too long back, I showed and commented upon a photo of Ann Coulter, pointing up that she might be a hard partier. If she is a conservative, Christian party girl, she and Mel Gibson (another hard-partying dude with conservative Christian claims) are not alone. Here’s an arrest photo of the cartoonist who draws Mallard Filmore, to your left, found on the Huffington’s Post with accompanying commentary by blogger Chris Kelly. Look at his eyes, like Coulter's—another of those really happy people who claim conservative credentials. Look, I'm not happy all the time myself. I've got my stories too, and I've had my hard times, but my suffering has been alleviated by skepticism and atheism. I'm no longer disappointed by "hope of things unseen" or of hope of future rewards for me and punishment for my enemies. All that sort of stuff leads to a face like you see on your left. Giving up fruitless hope sends one into the healthy despair that leads to acceptance and, thus, peace of mind.

[SNIP]
It was Tinsley's second arrest in six months. Which would suggest he has problems beyond loneliness and not being funny. But what was really inspiring was that he picked himself up, dusted himself off, used some paper towels to blot the puke, and composed the strip that appeared yesterday.

(I wish King Features would post it, but they don't. Take my word for it, it reads:)

MORE OUT ON A LIMB! ... MALLARD'S 2007 NEW-YEAR'S PREDICTIONS: HOLLYWOOD WILL CONTINUE TO MOCK "FAMILY VALUES"... MEANWHILE, RESEARCHERS WILL FINALLY DISCOVER A CELEBRITY'S KID WHO ISN'T MESSED UP AND IN REHAB...

The text is accompanied by a drawing of a long-nosed man, presumably a movie producer, laughing, presumably at Jesus on the cross. You can tell he's a movie producer, because he has a ponytail. And it's 1975.

In Indiana, where Tinsley was arrested, driving with a blood alcohol level of .08 is a class C misdemeanor. Tinsley's blood alcohol was 0.14. Which means Tinsley will pay a fine, have his license suspended and, "may be placed on probation and be required to enroll in, and pay for, a substance abuse education course."
[PASTE]

Thank you, Chris Kelly, for that info on the Huffington Post. The sad part is that I know from personal experience that anyone with the intelligence of a half-eaten burrito, trying to uphold and keep alive an attitude of Biblical inerrancy with all the facts modern people have at hand, is almost bound to fold up under the pressure of truth like a toothpick balancing a concrete block. I've got no doubt that many of them are also trying to hold back personal experience of abuse at the hands of other fundamentalists from erupting into consciousness and drowning them in pain. Thus, drugs, sex and alcohol—thus Rummy, Limbaugh, Cheney, Baker and Foley. . . You continue your list with your favorite conservatives.

FROM THE ARCHAIC PAST

All that follows is lightsome and airy-fairy, artful to a fault and faulty to an art. In the near future, I want to copy some poetry by Donald Hall that I recently was reading.

Two photos follow. Both photos are copies of photos, thus grainy and not too well defined. Howsomever—the first is a picture of my wife and I getting married in the Buddhist community center in Spokane, Washington, not a temple. Mertie and I occupy the central, lower section of the first photo. Many in attendance were Mertie’s Buddhist brothers and sisters as well as her immediate family while another contingent was made up of my friends and very immediate family—sons and daughters and granddaughter. The unusual feature of this service was that it was the first wedding performed in the facility and the Buddhist community was very gratified that Mertie and I so honored it.

Mertie and I had a tea ceremony, we read poems to each other, mine by e.e. cummings and hers by Sandburg. Then we sang to each other harmoniously:

I love you a bushel and peck,
A bushel and a peck
And a hug around the neck,
A hug around the neck
And a barrel and a heap,
A barrel and heap,
And I’m talking in my sleep
About you. . .
About you.

O, I love you a bushel and a peck,
You bet your pretty neck, I do. . .
Tootle loolte lootle,
Tootle loolte lootle,
Tootle loolte lootle looooo.

COOKIES AND MILK

This is me and two of my three best male friends in the world at the reception following the wedding. The third is in Ohio, back where I came from. A man is lucky to have one or two very good friends in the world. I’m fortunate to have two, plus one extra. I only wish I was as much a friend to my friends as they have been to me. What is a friend anyway? How does one know? How does one make such a judgment?

Mertie and I served milk and cookies for the reception and not much else, though the cookies were the huge sort that you find in espresso joints, baked by a very good local confectionary (the Rocket Bakery). Some might call us cheap, others frugal, others wise, but to Mertie and I, me on my fourth wedding and she on her third, this was a fun and lightsome event we concocted because love made our feet to grow wings and our limbic hearts to sing, not to be burdened down with gifts borne to us nor large expenses borne by us.

Another friend and his girlfriend wore black clothing and longish coats and dark fishnet hose (girlfriend not guy), verging on the Goth, in sympathy with the terrible error they thought weddings symbolized. Loved them very much for being themselves, and now they have gone off into the great unknown of lost friends who one thinks about but can no longer account for. Mr Mike, where have you wandered too?

MATH BLUES

Am now a week into my Algebra course at SCC and arriving at the lair of the dad-rat-it quadratic equations and all their ilk. Will I ever make it as far as the dungeon of the Calculus monster before my mind fails completely and I find myself with a booger on the end of my finger, not knowing how it got there?

A NAGGING DOUBT

Like any codger, I wonder sometimes if I'm repeating myself. How many times have I shared this info on my blog since its inception less than three years ago? I hope it's the first time I've put in the photos.

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

SOCIAL SECURITY BENEFITS FOR ALL.
GET A BILL STARTED TO PLACE ALL POLITICIANS ON SOCIAL SECURITY

I’ve had this in my future information pile for some time. Now, while we take a breather, while the Dems fire up our new Congress, take a moment to peruse this little piece of writing about Social Security. I didn’t realize just how outrageously out of order the situation is, and I kind of agree with the opinion expressed below.

PS: Photo—Mertie has a bite of lunch in the forests near the Washington coast.

[SNIP]
2008 Election Issue!! This must be an issue in "2008" Please! Keep it going.

SOCIAL SECURITY: Perhaps we are asking the wrong questions about social security during election years. Our Senators and Congresswomen do not pay into Social Security and, of course, they do not collect from it. You see, Social Security benefits were not suitable for persons of their rare elevation in society. They felt they should have a special plan for themselves. So, many years ago, they voted in their own benefit plan. In more recent years, no congressperson has felt the need to change it. After all, it is a great plan.

For all practical purposes their plan works like this: When they retire, they continue to draw the same pay until they die. Except it may increase from time to time for cost of living adjustments. For example, Senator Byrd and Congressman White and their wives may expect to draw $7,800,000.00 (that's Seven Million, Eight-Hundred Thousand Dollars), with their wives drawing $275,000.00 during the last years of their lives.

This is calculated on an average life span for each of those two Dignitaries. Younger Dignitaries who retire an early age, will receive much more during the rest of their lives.

Their cost for this excellent plan is $0.00. NADA... ZILCH.

This little perk they voted for themselves is free to them. You and I pick up the tab for this plan. The funds for this fine retirement plan come directly from the General Funds: "OUR TAX DOLLARS AT WORK"!

From our own Social Security Plan, which you and I pay (or have paid) into—every payday until we retire (which amount is matched by our employer)—we can expect to get an average of $1,000 per month after retirement. Or, in other words, we would have to collect our average of $1,000 monthly benefits for 68 years and one (1) month to equal Senator Bill Bradley's benefits!

Social Security could be very good if only one small change were made. That change would be to: Jerk the Golden Fleece Retirement Plan from under the Senators and Congressmen . Put them into the Social Security plan with the rest of us, then sit back... and see how fast they would fix it.

If enough people receive this, maybe a seed of awareness will be planted and maybe good changes will evolve. How many people CAN you send this to?

Better yet.... How many people WILL you send this to?
[PASTE]

WISE GUY SPEAKS

“The neatest human balancing trick is to become sufficiently skeptical and realistic, scientific even, to resist superstitious hogwash while remaining also optimistic and attached to those who live gullible lives, that is, nearly the entire human race.” —George Thomas

AMERICAN PRIDE, BUSHWHACKED AGAIN

A couple of days ago I was reading about a man who was tortured in Buenos Aires for some disagreement with authorities. Over my many years, I’ve always had a nearly automatic thought that follows reading about torture in other countries. It is, “I’m so glad to be living in a country where authorities don’t torture people.” And I almost had that thought as I read about the Argentine citizen, but, then, quite forcefully, another thought swept into my brain. “Bush. Conservatives. Torture. Wait a minute, I can no longer pride myself on being an American. Bush has changed all that.” As they say, “My limbic system [heart] sank.”

WHO SAID IT ??????????

“The more people I can see, or the wider I can expose my mind to different ideas, the more effective I can be as President.”

That’s right—you probably guessed it wasn’t the current mal-President. He’s incapable of thinking such a thought, let alone, living it. Of course, his inability to think such a thought is directly tied to his fundamentalism. Fundamentalism is fundamentally incapable of thinking new thoughts or changing when confronted by new information. The current Pres. prides himself on his illiteracy (Don't read papers!) and so do many of his followers who think that no book but their "Good Book" is fit for consumption (opinions vary as to how good it really is). I’m hoping I could be wrong. I’m hoping that a newly-evolved ability to change their thinking about old Bible information will show them able to change their minds. I stand ready to change mine when new information about relativism in the fundamentalist mind presents itself, but if fundamentalism remains unchanged, then, of course, I will be unable to change my evaluation of fundamentalism because nothing will have changed.

The president who uttered the expression that opened this segment was—da, da, da, dummmmmmm—John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Thinking of Kennedy made me wonder if we’ll ever again have an intellect like that of Kennedy, Wilson, Roosevelt, Lincoln, Jefferson at the American helm of state. With illiteracy and its concomitant conservatism growing in America, can a truly intelligent, compassionate American ever again win the presidency? The commercialized, internetacized, bloggeral culture modern boys and girls grow up in makes it highly unlikely they’ll appreciate, let alone idolize, a true intellectual ever again.


RUSSIA COLLAPSED. . .
FROM CARING?

Okay, that’s a little strong, but today, driving, when my mind turns over many thoughts, for the first time I saw that, perhaps, Russia collapsed because they were trying to continue to keep their social safety net together while arming themselves against possible American aggression and could not do both—help the poor and keep their military afloat—whereas the United States, under Reagan, threw the American poor under the bus (where they remain to this day) in order to build up the military and defeat the Russians who remained loyal to their social system which would not allow people to do without health care and housing as America does.

Photo is of Victoria, BC library building and public office building.

HAPPY 2007. . .

and now for something entirely the same. . . .

PAYMENT IN KIND

Well—we’ve now reached an American death toll in Iraq of 3000. That means we’ve more than paid Osama back for the less than 3000 people he killed in New York. It’s time to quit paying him, life for life, and get out of Iraq.

THE END OF THE AMERICAN DREAM

Diligent research by Martian archaeologists leads some authorities to the conclusion that this enigmatic figure on the right (discovered in Martian year 200,065) may have had something to do with the end of the human species of America and, more specifically, with the end of what was called in certain fragmentary documents they have recovered, "The American Dream".














EYE WITNESS ACCOUNTS? BAH HUMBUG!

Recently on a Tom Harmon radio segment, a Bible-believer claimed that the four gospels were based on eye-witness accounts, written not more than 50 years after the events described. Okay, not exactly true, but….so…. what does “eye-witness” signify?

Here’s some modern eye-witness testimony from Sunday’s Spokesman Review. All it takes is a little imagination to understand what an eye-witness account can be blown up into and how much validity any eye-witness account has:

An account of a ferryboat tragedy in Indonesia reads, “Witnesses reported seeing lifeboats carrying more survivors [none yet found]. . . and one person on board the ferry said most people had time to put on life jackets. Other survivors reported panicked passengers fighting over life jackets” as the ferry capsized. Now imagine someone, 50 years later, writing down that incident with only a handful of eye-witness accounts which had been passed down by word of mouth for decades. And imagine that these eye-witness accounts reported in our little local Spokesman are only a few of the disparate accounts coming from other eye-witnesses, being interpreted by other reporters and passed on to their listeners.

Or how about the hanging of Saddam Hussein? “ ‘He was shivering and his face was pale,’ said one witness who asked not to be identified…. Faroun [another witness] saw a different Saddam. ‘He was holding tight. He was not scared,’ he said.” Here’s two accounts of the same event with entirely different takes on Saddam at the time of his hanging. Each of these men will spread a different account of Saddam’s last moments, add in details that may or may not have been witnessed or witnessed inaccurately. As you can see, it all depends on what you personally have at stake in the matter.

Further, we must realize that none of the gospels are written from the point of view of an observer, as first person narratives, so the accounts don’t even show that they are first person narratives. They're written just like any general fiction book.

The writing of the four gospels, according to the scholars I read, was stretched out over 125 years, John having been written about 125 CE (Common Era). Two, Luke and Matthew were copies of Mark which may have been written as early as 50 years after the events supposedly happened. But by 50 years after the events described, when life expectancies were 25 years, may have been almost as much as two generations after the event described. That would have been like you or I writing down stories about our grandfathers which were told to us by others as if they were gospel and, then, spreading them as if they were gospel truth. We would not have any newspaper accounts or radio or TV broadcasts to help us with our task of separating out truth from fiction. And many of us would be hearing these tales months or years after the events described when someone wandered into our neighborhood with a tale we would either believe or not believe, depending upon our gullibility. Most of us, had we lived then, would be like African natives who have been and are being converted in recent centuries to this Christian tale of magical happenings. Our children, if we preach them this tale, are learning of this stuff exactly like early ignorant peoples were told the tale by missionaries. Each of us is missionary to our own children, selling them tales of magic, superstition and fortune telling or selling them tales based in fact.

I’m beginning to believe that some local fakir did gather a following in that far-distant time and his claims and beliefs (some of which were incredibly far-sighted) were reported and spread and later written down and turned into godly activities, but we have before us in America the Mormon experience which has established a tradition of its own in modern times, and we can witness, more or less, how this nutty event of finding gold tablets gets blown up by people coming after into something holy and miraculous when all it was was the claims of someone who was either a nut case or a con man. To believe any of the golden tablet stuff is to show oneself highly gullible. Where are the golden tablets? Where are they? Show me the golden tablets. What do you think I am—an ignorant fool?

And I ask the same thing of any believer in any hypothetical superbeing—show me the goods i.e. gods. Not too much to ask. Show me the proof. What do you think I am—an ignorant savage? Along this line of thinking—I can imagine that somewhere, deep in the bowels of the Mormon church, people are trying to create tablets which can’t be proven to be fake, otherwise Mormons are forever openly subject to being seen as incredibly gullible fools who are afraid to demand the proof. But, then, they were predisposed to being gullible by those gullible fools who have gone before in other religious guises.