BOTH MONKEYS AND SENATOR LARRY CRAIG KNOW
WHAT “PALMS UP” MEANS

The palm up gesture is getting a lot of play these days in the news. The first snippet is from a science article in the New York Times about non-verbal signaling. The second snippet is taken from the interrogation of REPUBLICAN Senator Larry Craig and is also about non-verbal signaling.

[SNIPPLE]
ATLANTA—The chimpanzees, after spotting the humans at the corner of their compound, came over to us with their arms outstretched and their palms turned upward. This was the chimps’ way of asking for a banana—and a lot more, as researchers here at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center have discovered.

That simple gesture, the upturned palm, is one of the oldest and most widely understood signals in the world. It’s activated by neural circuits inherited from ancient reptiles that abased themselves before larger animals. Chimps and other apes, notably humans, adapted it to ask not just for food, but also for more abstract forms of help, creating a new kind of signal that some researchers believe was the origin of human language.

If that’s true, if human eloquence can be traced from a primal message signifying “Gimme,” I’m not sure what conclusion to draw about our species. Maybe that we are inherently social creatures who survived and prevailed against mightier animals by learning to enlist the cooperation of others. Or maybe just that, in our heart of hearts, we are all slackers. . . .

Most of these gestures are performed unconsciously, but the palm-up was adapted long ago for conscious gestures by humans and other apes. . . . A chimp would use the palm-up gesture to ask other chimps to share food, for help in a fight, for sex or, most frequently, to request a grooming session. Bonobos used it most often as an invitation to play.
[PASTIE]

Now that we’ve got a fairly good picture of what the palm up gesture in monkeys and other Christian family value Republican animals means, let’s look at the following snippet from the interrogation of Senator Craig by Officer Karsnia.

[SNIPPLE]
KARSNIA: OK. And then with the hand. Um, how many times did you put your hand under the stall?

CRAIG: I don't recall. I remember reaching down once. There was a piece of toilet paper back behind me and picking it up.

KARSNIA: OK. Was your, was your palm down or up when you were doing that?

CRAIG: I don't recall.

KARSNIA: OK. I recall your palm being up. OK.

CRAIG: All right.

KARSNIA: When you pick up a piece of paper off the ground, your palm would be down, when you pick something up.

CRAIG: Yeah, probably would be. I recall picking the paper up.

KARSNIA: And I know it's hard to describe here on tape but actually what I saw was your fingers come underneath the stalls, you're actually ta ... touching the bottom of the stall divider. . . .
[PASTIE]

Perhaps Christian family values Red State Idaho Senator Craig was only asking officer Karsnia for a grooming session.

By the way, the monkey photo which I think must be of Senator Larry Craig is by Victor Koen

“GRAFT AND LOOTING” (i.e. Bushillvania Land)

For an excellent exposé of Bush’s wonderful capacity to reward business in his maniacal drive to privatize everything, read the article, “The Great Iraq Swindle” in the September 6, 2007 Rolling Stone. Below is a small piece of the whole article to wet your whistle with.

[SNIPPER]
The Bush administration's lack of interest in recovering stolen funds is one of the great scandals of the war. The White House has failed to litigate a single case against a contractor under the False Claims Act and has not sued anybody for breach of contract. It even declined to join in a lawsuit filed by whistle-blowers who are accusing KBR of improper invoicing in Fallujah. "For all the Bush administration claims to do in the war against terrorism," Grayson said in congressional testimony, "it is a no-show in the war against war profiteers." In nearly five years of some of the worst graft and looting in American history, the administration has recovered less than $6 million.

What's more, when anyone in the government tried to question what contractors were up to with taxpayer money, they were immediately blackballed and treated like an enemy. Take the case of Bunnatine "Bunny" Greenhouse, an outspoken and energetic woman of sixty-three who served as the chief procurement executive for the Army Corps of Engineers. In her position, Greenhouse was responsible for signing off on sole-source contracts—those awarded without competitive bids and thus most prone to corruption. Long before Iraq, she had begun to notice favoritism in the awarding of contracts to KBR, which was careful to recruit executives who had served in the military. "That was why I joined the corps: to stop this kind of clubby contracting," she says.

A few weeks before the Iraq War—started, Greenhouse was asked to sign off on the contract to restore Iraqi oil. The deal, she noticed, was suspicious on a number of fronts. For one thing, the company that had designed the project, KBR, was the same company that was being awarded the contract—a highly unusual and improper situation. For another, the corps wanted to award a massive "emergency" contract to KBR with no competition for up to five years, which Greenhouse thought was crazy. Who ever heard of a five-year emergency? After auditing the deal, the Pentagon found that KBR had overcharged the government $61 million for fuel. "The abuse related to contracts awarded to KBR," Greenhouse testified before the Senate, "represents the most blatant and improper contract abuse I have witnessed during the course of my professional career."

And how did her superiors in the Pentagon respond to the wrongdoing highlighted by their own chief procurement officer? First they gave KBR a waiver for the overbilling, blaming the problem on an Iraqi subcontractor. Then they dealt with Greenhouse by demoting her and cutting her salary, citing a negative performance review. The retaliation sent a clear message to any would-be whistle-blowers. "It puts a chill on you," Greenhouse says. "People are scared stiff."

They were scared stiff in Iraq, too, and for good reason. When civilian employees complained about looting or other improprieties, contractors sometimes threatened to throw them outside the gates of their bases—a life-threatening situation for any American. Robert Isakson, a former FBI agent who worked for Custer Battles, says that when he refused to go along with one scam involving a dummy company in Lebanon, he was detained by company security guards, who seized his ID badge and barred him from the base in Baghdad. He eventually had to make a hazardous, Papillon-esque journey across hostile Iraq to Jordan just to survive. (Custer Battles denies the charge.)
[PASTIE]

R.E. THE PHOTO ABOVE

Caption should read "The Wife Is Always The Last To Know"

FALWELL COMPLIMENTS THE DEVIL

He’s dead now, so this entrée, which has been lying around for some time, is quite old:

Anyhow… scrolling across the bottom of my news screen this morning (Date ?) came the news that Rev. Falwell is apologizing for comparing Clinton (Hillary?) to the devil. Said it was “tongue in cheek”. These public clergymen! They’re almost always doing some nonsense or other in their mouths with their tongues. Now that would be a real insult if the imaginary creature in Falwell’s brain actually existed, and comparing the devil to Hillary is a real compliment to the phantasm of the devil that religious people carry around in their heads. However, Falwell needs to be careful. He’s a con man, has been making his living conning people out of their money all his life (makes his living that way), so I believe he actually knows that what he says is nonsense much of the time, but he needs to remember that those who take him seriously are very gullible people. I mean—look at all the Biblical nonsense they take literally! An interesting sidelight is when I consider that perhaps Falwell has been peddling his nonsense so long that even he believes it. Of course, I’m told that the best con men of all are those who have convinced themselves of their own lies.

By the way, do you think their god was trying to give them a message about badmouthing the Clintons, when He took Falwell's life?


OF WILLIAM INGE AND OTHERS

Mertie and I had a brush with fame last Saturday night (Sept. 30, 2006) when we attended an Interplayers performance of William Inge’s play “Bus Stop”. I saw the 50’s movie with Marilyn Monroe and recall that I liked it. The Spokane performance featured Ellen Travolta and her husband John Bannon. It was just okay and not helped by the fact, for Mertie and me, that this man sitting directly in front of us kept coming in and leaving while the theater was still dark. I wondered aloud at intermission to Mertie about why the bastard was interrupting our enjoyment. This morning, a week later, the Spokesman reports that John Travolta was at the show to watch his sister perform. He reportedly had been ushered in and out at begining, end and intermission while the house lights were off in order not to distract from his sister and brother-in-law’s performance. I could have leaned forward and whispered in his ear. Ah, these brushes with the famous, really excites an old codger like mese’f, but what does it actually signify?

Also while on the topic of Inge—as a youth, I was truly moved by such movies as “Picnic”, “Dark At The Top Of The Stairs”, “Come Back Little Sheba”, and “Splendor In The Grass”. Specially “Picnic”. I identified with the drifter, played by William Holden, in “Picnic”, thinking myself doomed to be one myself, the perpetual outsider and “Dark… Top… Stairs” I recognized as an existential drama about a god which did not exist. I didn’t like Splendor all that much. I didn’t realize how much Inge had been a part of my thinking back in those days until I looked him up after Mertie and I returned from the play. Then all the dots connected, and I was not surprised to read that he offed himself June 10, 1973 in a deep depression. At about the same time as Inge kissed off his Earthly coil, my first marriage ended, and I set off for the deep South to work on a shrimper, a job which never came my way, so I ended up machining cylinder heads for Cessna aircraft engines down there, fishing off the shore end of the Dauphin Island bridge, south of Mobile, Alabama, learning to crab with my new friend George Wills, born and bred in New Orleans but working in Mobile, drinking Budweiser to excess, eating lots of clams, generally whoring around like the Holden drifter until I met my second wife, born and bred in Mobile. Then commenced a brief and dramatic period in my life in which I, born and bred a northern city rat, fancied myself quite the redneck. For all of six months, then my wife hit me with her hard hat, tried to strangle me and threw me out.

DANN’S ART





This picture by Mr. Irish shows you exactly the sort of wry humor that he is capable of. To see some more of his work, go to Honeychunks. I've got hanging in my own art hallway, one of Dann's works myself.










DEAR EDITOR

The following is a letter I sent off to Newsweek magazine which was generated by an extended piece they did on Facebook:

“One of the saddest most incomprehensible claims to arise out of your Facebook article was the statement by one of your respondents that he has 1,042 “closest friends.” How does anyone make time to personally get to know a thousand people on the one on one basis required for real friendship? I’m a 69 year old blogger myself, and I’ve poked around in some of these social networking sites. I’m astounded by the long lists of friends that participants claim to have. Many bloggers are obviously performing to attract attention rather than to develop close personal ties. A lot of what appears on Facebook and elsewhere seems to be the, "hey look at me I need attention" sort of relationship that one finds hollow and unrewarding in real life.

“I think one’s close friends are people who are physically close, people who one actually talks to face to face or has known personally for extended times in the past. I admit to emailing and phoning old friends who are now physically distant, who I haven’t seen in many years, but our friendships are still based on close past personal experiences, and we try from time to time to actually get together. Somewhere in the past, I came across the statement by a social commentator that one is lucky if he can claim one or two really true friendships in his whole life. I think I can count, perhaps, five close friends myself, maybe a few more. People I really trust with the facts rather than my performance piece, and the older I get, the less range my performances have.

“I’m honestly puzzled by this internet friendship phenomena. I wish someone would explain to me the huge psychological shift by which someone can imagine he or she has thousands of personal friends. Making friends face to face, as I know it, is such a daunting risky enterprise. Is the fact that website friendships don’t have to risk personal encounters that allows people to imagine they have more friends than they do? Is it social naiveté on their part or have I missed something along the way? Has the definition of “close friend” radically changed?”

PROPHETIC CASSADY

Because I happen to be reading, as I told you, On The Road for the many such time, I came across this passage. Cassady has showed up from California at Kerouac’s brother’s house in Virginia at Christmas 1948. They are involved in moving furniture and Jack’s mom from Virginia to New York. Kerouac says as they bop into New York, “He [Cassady] said we were a band of Arabs coming in to blow up New York.”

JEFFERSON—LIBERAL, (DARWINIAN?) AND INHERITANCE TAX SUPPORTER

"That these are our grievances which we have thus laid before his majesty, with that freedom of language and sentiment which becomes a free people claiming their rights, as derived from the laws of nature, and not as the gift of their chief magistrate: Let those flatter who fear; it is not an American art. To give praise which is not due might be well from the venal, but would ill beseem those who are asserting the rights of human nature. They know, and will therefore say, that kings are the servants: not the proprietors of the people. Open your breast, sire, to liberal and expanded thought.” —Thomas Jefferson in a Summary View of the Rights of British America

First, note Jefferson says that our human rights come from “the laws of nature”. I don’t see any appeal to a higher power here. And you know why he doesn’t appeal to god, don’t you—because to appeal to a god would put his claim to our freedoms on an equal footing with the king’s claim by divine right to his authority. To believe in god is to more or less admit that one is a monarchist. How many American Christians are truly monarchists at heart?

I don’t know how many times I come across a positive attitude toward liberalism in Jefferson’s writings. Why, do you think, conservatives so hate liberals when such fine men as Jefferson and others say they are also liberals? If these founders of our liberties were liberals, what scheme do conservatives have against our liberties, do you think?

Also, for those who hope to end forever inheritance taxes, we can peek into how Thomas Jefferson might want that tax to continue. In his autobiography he reports that while in the legislature of Virginia, he hoped that the “repeal of the laws of entail would prevent the accumulation and perpetuation of wealth in select families and preserve the soil of the country from being daily more and more absorbed in mortmain.” He saw that wealth might create an aristocracy in America just as birth had created an aristocracy in Europe. Thus, I suspicion he might be all for a steep inheritance tax if he saw how wealth has completely corrupted the political system which he and others like him created.

Photo is of condos along my walk on Officer's Row in Vancouver.

ON THE ROAD ROAD

Yep—I’m not making regular entries and, if you’ve been reading this, you know why.

As most of you know, literate enough to be reading a blog and not listening to some music on it or just wanting to see movin’ pitchurs [sic], this month we been celebrating the 50th year since Jack K’s great book, On The Road, was published in 1957. So I’ve commenced givin’ it my fifth or sixth read in my life, counting in that first read I give it back in my 20s, in the sixties sometime ago. This passage is near the beginning of Jack’s first trip West and it rings two bells with me. The photo below is out of Newsweek.

First, he’s stopped in Des Moines, Iowa to spend a night in a cheap hotel down by the rail yards. Well—I was a child in Des Moines when the Second World War ended. My stepmom, dad and I was living in a motel by a highway and I was out on the grass in front, playing, when all the car horns on the highway started to honking, and I ran in to ask my stepmom what was going on, and she was the one to tell me that the war was over. I must’ve been about eight years old I guess.

But more interesting to me is Jack’s state of mind in the following passage. I’ve experienced the same feeling more than once, and I know I’ve got friends that have also. And some who still do too. Most recently for me was just in the past few months. In Jack’s case, it’s cause he’s halfway between psychic places in himself. For me, the same. I’m still adjusting to this move from Spokane to Vancouver after 31 years in Spokane. And just two weeks ago, I had this feeling that I no longer knew who I was. Who am I here in Vancouver, all my friends back in Spokane, what’s left of family in Dayton, Ohio or down in Florida? Me being the oldest still alive in my family, the oldest of all the cousins, me next to step off the diving board into permanent unconsciousness. Also I’ve given up AA and Codependents Anonymous because my spiritual program just isn’t spiritual enough to fit anymore. So for the briefest of moments, I shared Jack’s feeling in the following paragraph. When I was adrift, I often didn’t know what I was feeling when I felt this stuff. This time, I wasn’t so shook up, and I realized that I had to get busy getting myself involved back into my life. So I’ve started writing a novel. That’s familiar. And working on poetry, also familiar. Then I’ve gone and joined the Portland area Humanists so I got a place to go have lunch with people I feel comfortable around on Sundays, and, soon, I think I’ll become a volunteer with the Vancouver library system, also familiar, as I was a friend of the library back in Spokane.

Anyhow, here’s Jack’s take on that certain feeling.


“I woke up as the sun was reddening; and that was the one distinct time in my life, the strangest moment of all, when I didn't know who I was—I was far away from home, haunted, and tired with travel, in a cheap hotel room I'd never seen, hearing the hiss of steam outside, and the creak of the old wood of the hotel, and footsteps upstairs, and all the sad sounds, and I looked at the cracked high ceiling and really didn't know who I was for about fifteen strange seconds. I wasn't scared; I was just somebody else, some stranger, and my whole life was a haunted life, the life of a ghost. I was half¬way across America, at the dividing line between the East of my youth and the West of my future, and maybe that's why¬ it happened right there and then, that strange red afternoon.” —Jack K.

PS: When you realize how often Jack went back and forth, he was always between one future and another, East or West, during his lifetime. He died in the same city my birth mother died in, St. Petersburg, Florida, of alcoholism. Like so many of my favorite authors.

OKAY. I GOT LITTLE TO SAY.


This is like, well, feeling orphaned. In this same issue of Newsweek is the celebration of the 50th anniversary since Jack Kerouac's On The Road was published. Can you believe it? Funny thing is that I know most modern young people could only sigh that this old man was once inspired, depressed, challenged . . . by these beings from a diminishing pantheon of artist/gods.

Moreso than by any church affiliation or incarnation of gods in Jesus form, these men asked me to think, to ponder my situation in this life, my home in the universe. My relationship with them was fraught with pain and change. They kicked me down the steps, and I had to, later, pick myself up and dust myself off. They gave me no hypothetical superbeing to do the job for me. They left me on my own, thank goodness.

WHY BUSH SHOULD BE IMPEACHED or
AT LEAST BE CHARGED AS A WAR CRIMINAL


Read the accumulating evidence documented in the “Investigative Status Report of the House Judiciary Committee Democratic Staff”.

The evidence of the wrong-doing, cruelty and un-Constitutional behavior of the Bush cadre is slowly accumulating. Never before have I witnessed (since Nixon?) an administration so full of liars and slanderers. Again, I want to point out that fundamentalist, Christian churches behave exactly like what is disclosed in the following report toward people who don’t agree with them or who commit “sins”. Unforgiving, closed-minded, savage and revengeful—that’s typical fundamentalist behavior, and, now, it’s infected the White House through Bush and company.

Read about it here.

MOUNT HOOD BUDDHA

The picture is of my third walk along the Vancouver waterfront. I come around a bend onto the Columbia River after emerging from a more wooded walk, and there he is in the distance—BuddhaHood. A friend, Geoff H. of Spokane, told me that Kerouac liked to say the mountains rising up in this regions were all Buddhas. This very much impressed me the next time I came upon this scene. Frequently, on morning walks, the Buddha is not visible, hidden in the river fogs, mysteriously awaiting more fortuitous signs.

[28] Struggle

What is this fog that licks against old gray walls and hides
The sun? My wildflowers shrivel in a killing frost,
Cold drizzle falls on October streets, walking makes me shiver.
Some New Age thinkers believe weather can affect our moods,
Some say we are the pawns of planetary alignments. Ha!
If only my fate were that easy to unravel, gladly
I'd reach up and shift the orbits of the earth and sun,
But this drizzly mist just swallows up my flailing fists.

That's in case you think only the BuddhaHood struggles with fog!!

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