ACTION WITHOUT ATTACHMENT? AH, NO... OR... HOW?
"Indeed, the BHAGAVAD GITA itself, as a chapter of this warrior epic [MAHABHARATA], is in aim and content a lecture of encouragement to a young prince afflicted with a qualm of conscience before giving the signal of battle, to free his mind from all sense of grief and guilt in killing. 'For that which is born, death is certain,' he is told; 'and for that which is dead, birth is certain. You should not grieve over the unavoidable.... The Supreme Self, which dwells in all bodies, can never be slain." Weapons cut it not; fire burns it not; water wets it not; the wind does not wither it. Eternal, universal, unchanging, unmovable, the Self is the same forever.'
"'... Dwelling in all bodies, the Self can never be slain. Therefore you should not grieve for any creature.'
"And that, in sum, is the ultimate ground, in Oriental thinking, of all peace. In the field of action—which is to say, in life—there is no peace, and there can never be. The formula, then, for the attainment of peace is to act, as one must, but without attachment. 'Being established in yoga'; the young warrior prince Arjuna of the GITA is taught, 'perform your actions, casting off attachment and remaining even-minded, both in success and in failure. This evenness is what is called yoga. And far inferior is mere action to action performed with this evenness of mind. Seek refuge in this evenness. Wretched are all who work for results. Endued with evenness of mind, one casts off in this very life both good deeds and evil deeds. Strive, therefore, for yoga. Yoga is skill in action."' (from MYTHS TO LIVE BY, Campbell, pp. 201-202)
I get great amusement out of all these calls to transcendent action, whether Christian or Buddhist, calls to action with noble purpose or so beyond my humanity as to be devoid of purpose. How can any action be free of purpose since it must take place with the body's purpose even if only the purposes of the body to pee and to poop? For I am but a man, with the weakness of the frail, human man, and the unquenchable desires born of my biological nature. Philosophy and religion are always trying to make us poor humans commit ourselves to a pie in the sky dream of behavior.
Sounds hopeless to some, I imagine, yet, I think we do have a chance to clean up our acts, but we shall never clean them up until we cast aside morality and begin to consider the science of behavior. When we can ask and answer, "Is selfishness a moral dilemma or a scientific problem," then we can finally start to get to the bottom of my bottom and the breast of her breast.
LOVE JOE CAMPBELL
I love Campbell's brilliant work in unraveling the mythological histories and mysteries of the old world and the new. Odd, that his life's work, which urges the necessity for the power of mythology in every human life, should so much undermine the narrow theologians' rigid mythologies. I take Joe Campbell's ideas a step further. Humans do need to tell themselves some sort of story (or call it mythology) about life that makes sense to them otherwise life 'feels' meaningless. But atheists are a different cut of person. Atheists tell themselves nonfiction stories, documentaries and stuff while theists continue to tell themselves the same old fictional stories of supernatural daring do.
__________________________________________
"Parts of Texas look like Kansas with a goiter." — Unknown
Wednesday, May 11, 2005
Monday, May 09, 2005
DUALISM IS AS DEAD AS GLEASON’S POOR SOUL
According to Michael Shermer who publishes the SKEPTIC magazine, thinking that we have a soul is both intuitive and wrong. I’ve come across this idea in several pieces of writing I’ve read lately, and I think Michael Shermer is only popularizing the findings of hard science in this sweet and wonderful put down of the idea of soul. I think I came across this idea in Joseph Campbell’s MYTHS TO LIVE BY too. Anyhow, this article is in the September 2004 issue of “Scientific American” p. 38:
[Open quote.] When I was 17 in 1971, I purchased my dream car—a 1966 Ford Mustang—blue with a white vinyl roof, bucket seats and a powerful eight-cylinder 289-cubic-inch engine that could peg the speedometer at 140 miles per hour. As testosterone-overloaded young men are wont to do, however, over the course of the next 15 years I systematically wrecked and replaced nearly every part of that car, to the extent that by the time I sold it in 1986 there was hardly an original piece remaining. Nevertheless, I turned a tidy profit because my "1966" Mustang was now a collector's classic. Even though the physical components were not original, its being—its "Mustangness"—was that model's complete form. My Mustang's essence—its “soul"—was more than a pile of parts; it was a pattern of information arranged in a particular way.
The analogy applies to humans and souls. The actual atoms and molecules that make up my brain and body today are not the same ones that I was born with on September 8, 1954, a half-century ago this month. Still, I am "Michael Shermer," the sum of the information coded in my DNA and neural memories. My friends and family do not treat me any differently from moment to moment, even though atoms and molecules are cycling in and out of my body and brain, because these people assume that the basic pattern remains unchanged. My soul is a pattern of information.
Dualists hold that body and soul are separate entities and that the soul will continue beyond the existence of the physical body. Monists contend that body and soul are the same and that the death of the body—the disintegration of DNA and neurons that store my personal information—spells the end of the soul. Until a technology is developed to preserve our patterns with a more durable medium than the electric meat of our carbon-based protein (silicon chips is one suggestion), when we die our patterns die with us.
The principal barrier to a general acceptance of the monist position is that it is counterintuitive. As Yale University psychologist Paul Bloom argues in his intriguing book, Descartes' Baby (Basic Books,2004), we are natural-born dualists. Children and adults alike speak of "my body," as if "my" and "body" are dissimilar. In one of many experiments Bloom recounts, for example, young children are told a story about a mouse that gets munched by an alligator. The children agree that the mouse's body is dead—it does not need to go to the bathroom, it can't hear, and its brain no longer works. Yet they insist that the mouse is still hungry, is concerned about the alligator, and wants to go home. "This is the foundation for the more articulated view of the afterlife you usually find in older children and adults," Bloom explains. " Once children learn that the brain is involved in thinking, they don't take it as showing that the brain is the source of mental life; they don't become materialists. Rather they interpret 'thinking' in a narrow sense and conclude that the brain is a cognitive prosthesis, something added to the soul to enhance its computing power."
The reason dualism is intuitive is that the brain does not perceive itself and so ascribes mental activity to a separate source. Hallucinations of preternatural beings (ghosts, angels, aliens) are sensed as real entities, out-of-body and near-death experiences are perceived as external events, and the pattern of information that is our memories, personality and "self" is sensed as a soul.
Is scientific monism in conflict with religious dualism? Yes, it is. Either the soul survives death or it does not, and there is no scientific evidence that it does. Does monism extirpate all meaning in life? I think not. If this is all there is, then every moment, every relationship and every person counts—and counts more if there is no tomorrow than if there is. Through no divine design or cosmic plan, we have inherited the mantle of life's caretaker on the earth, the only home we have ever known. The realization that we exist together for a narrow slice of time and a limited fraction of space elevates us all to a higher plane of humanity and humility, a passing moment on the proscenium of the cosmos. [Close quote.]
Michael Shermer is publisher of www.skeptic.com Skeptic and author of The Science of Good and Evil.
A COUPLE OF SWEET FILMS (CIRCA APRIL 1, 2005)
This week’s films from the library were quite intriguing:
“Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter. . . and Spring” (Kim Ki-Duk, director)
“Carnage” (Delphine Gleize, director)
“Osama” (Siddiq Barmak, director)
“In My Skin” (Marina De Van, director)
A one man monastery, a bull that feeds the imagination, a girl passing as a boy and a woman who likes to eat her own flesh. Could you tie together the titles with the short descriptions I’ve given you? Good luck!
I recommend “In My Skin” just for the intensity of the acting alone. The moments when Marina de Van (writer and actress too) is cutting into herself and begins to chew on small pieces of her flesh is so uncomfortable that my wife and I writhed and looked away. Well, at least, I looked away.
“Spring, Summer etcetera” was one of the most elegiac movies I’ve seen in a long time. I watched it twice in one day. Once while I was home alone and again with my wife. It’s Buddhist philosophy brilliantly translated into film life. There is a connection in this slowly unfolded film to the torture of the protagonist in “In My Skin”. . . .
Why do I go on like this? I liked watching all four of the films, yet I wasn’t moved to new awarenesses by them. I have nothing to say about them. I feel almost dead tonight. This is no time to be writing about interesting films. I’ll kill every body’s taste for them with my sepulchral and uninviting style. Anyhow, if you’re a true film buff, you’ll want to see all four of these films, except, maybe, “Carnage” which I might say was just too cute for words.
_________________________________________
“An intellectual is a man who takes more words than necessary to tell more than he knows.” —Dwight David Eisenhower [Sometimes....] and [Did he have British General Montgomery in mind when he said this or just me?]
According to Michael Shermer who publishes the SKEPTIC magazine, thinking that we have a soul is both intuitive and wrong. I’ve come across this idea in several pieces of writing I’ve read lately, and I think Michael Shermer is only popularizing the findings of hard science in this sweet and wonderful put down of the idea of soul. I think I came across this idea in Joseph Campbell’s MYTHS TO LIVE BY too. Anyhow, this article is in the September 2004 issue of “Scientific American” p. 38:
[Open quote.] When I was 17 in 1971, I purchased my dream car—a 1966 Ford Mustang—blue with a white vinyl roof, bucket seats and a powerful eight-cylinder 289-cubic-inch engine that could peg the speedometer at 140 miles per hour. As testosterone-overloaded young men are wont to do, however, over the course of the next 15 years I systematically wrecked and replaced nearly every part of that car, to the extent that by the time I sold it in 1986 there was hardly an original piece remaining. Nevertheless, I turned a tidy profit because my "1966" Mustang was now a collector's classic. Even though the physical components were not original, its being—its "Mustangness"—was that model's complete form. My Mustang's essence—its “soul"—was more than a pile of parts; it was a pattern of information arranged in a particular way.
The analogy applies to humans and souls. The actual atoms and molecules that make up my brain and body today are not the same ones that I was born with on September 8, 1954, a half-century ago this month. Still, I am "Michael Shermer," the sum of the information coded in my DNA and neural memories. My friends and family do not treat me any differently from moment to moment, even though atoms and molecules are cycling in and out of my body and brain, because these people assume that the basic pattern remains unchanged. My soul is a pattern of information.
Dualists hold that body and soul are separate entities and that the soul will continue beyond the existence of the physical body. Monists contend that body and soul are the same and that the death of the body—the disintegration of DNA and neurons that store my personal information—spells the end of the soul. Until a technology is developed to preserve our patterns with a more durable medium than the electric meat of our carbon-based protein (silicon chips is one suggestion), when we die our patterns die with us.
The principal barrier to a general acceptance of the monist position is that it is counterintuitive. As Yale University psychologist Paul Bloom argues in his intriguing book, Descartes' Baby (Basic Books,2004), we are natural-born dualists. Children and adults alike speak of "my body," as if "my" and "body" are dissimilar. In one of many experiments Bloom recounts, for example, young children are told a story about a mouse that gets munched by an alligator. The children agree that the mouse's body is dead—it does not need to go to the bathroom, it can't hear, and its brain no longer works. Yet they insist that the mouse is still hungry, is concerned about the alligator, and wants to go home. "This is the foundation for the more articulated view of the afterlife you usually find in older children and adults," Bloom explains. " Once children learn that the brain is involved in thinking, they don't take it as showing that the brain is the source of mental life; they don't become materialists. Rather they interpret 'thinking' in a narrow sense and conclude that the brain is a cognitive prosthesis, something added to the soul to enhance its computing power."
The reason dualism is intuitive is that the brain does not perceive itself and so ascribes mental activity to a separate source. Hallucinations of preternatural beings (ghosts, angels, aliens) are sensed as real entities, out-of-body and near-death experiences are perceived as external events, and the pattern of information that is our memories, personality and "self" is sensed as a soul.
Is scientific monism in conflict with religious dualism? Yes, it is. Either the soul survives death or it does not, and there is no scientific evidence that it does. Does monism extirpate all meaning in life? I think not. If this is all there is, then every moment, every relationship and every person counts—and counts more if there is no tomorrow than if there is. Through no divine design or cosmic plan, we have inherited the mantle of life's caretaker on the earth, the only home we have ever known. The realization that we exist together for a narrow slice of time and a limited fraction of space elevates us all to a higher plane of humanity and humility, a passing moment on the proscenium of the cosmos. [Close quote.]
Michael Shermer is publisher of www.skeptic.com Skeptic and author of The Science of Good and Evil.
A COUPLE OF SWEET FILMS (CIRCA APRIL 1, 2005)
This week’s films from the library were quite intriguing:
“Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter. . . and Spring” (Kim Ki-Duk, director)
“Carnage” (Delphine Gleize, director)
“Osama” (Siddiq Barmak, director)
“In My Skin” (Marina De Van, director)
A one man monastery, a bull that feeds the imagination, a girl passing as a boy and a woman who likes to eat her own flesh. Could you tie together the titles with the short descriptions I’ve given you? Good luck!
I recommend “In My Skin” just for the intensity of the acting alone. The moments when Marina de Van (writer and actress too) is cutting into herself and begins to chew on small pieces of her flesh is so uncomfortable that my wife and I writhed and looked away. Well, at least, I looked away.
“Spring, Summer etcetera” was one of the most elegiac movies I’ve seen in a long time. I watched it twice in one day. Once while I was home alone and again with my wife. It’s Buddhist philosophy brilliantly translated into film life. There is a connection in this slowly unfolded film to the torture of the protagonist in “In My Skin”. . . .
Why do I go on like this? I liked watching all four of the films, yet I wasn’t moved to new awarenesses by them. I have nothing to say about them. I feel almost dead tonight. This is no time to be writing about interesting films. I’ll kill every body’s taste for them with my sepulchral and uninviting style. Anyhow, if you’re a true film buff, you’ll want to see all four of these films, except, maybe, “Carnage” which I might say was just too cute for words.
_________________________________________
“An intellectual is a man who takes more words than necessary to tell more than he knows.” —Dwight David Eisenhower [Sometimes....] and [Did he have British General Montgomery in mind when he said this or just me?]
Saturday, May 07, 2005
INTELLIGENT DESIGN
Following are two letters. One is by a friend of mine and the second is the letter of a man who, I believe, could also be a friend of mine. My hat is off to Reverend Bristow. I could easily sit down and discuss any issue with such a man of reason and intelligence, without rancor for, at least, he’s a man who begins with facts. His interpretation of the facts of evolution is not the same as that of an atheist like myself, but his interpretation of the facts of evolution is at least based on the evolutionary evidence as we know the facts in the twenty-first century. To try to discuss the facts of evolution with a Bible literalist is like trying to talk to a Neanderthal who thinks that fire is a living spirit. Mr. Bristow brings us back to the original discussion of all humankind since time immemorial which is, “Does god exist?” Which existence, of course, can never be proven, but evolution, on the other hand, is nothing but the facts.
All I have ever asked from fundamentalists who refuse to accept the facts is that we begin with the facts and not hide our heads in the sand. If, after accepting reality, a man or woman still wishes to believe in the existence of a spiritual realm and being outside of time and space, I can accept their view of reality with a modicum of tranquility. I don’t sense a frightening Taliban-like irrationality hiding behind an American mask when I talk to men like Bristow.
__________________________________
First Letter:
I'm glad that people like Scott Minnich are bringing evolution into the light ("Conference explores intelligent design," April 8). The light of day is friend to the fact.
My problem with intelligent design is with the accuracy of the term. As I look at the abundant fossil evidence stretched out over evolutionary time, the millions of dead life forms that didn't work, the failed Neanderthal experiment, the feathered dinosaurs, all those botched trial models of all sorts throughout the millennia, I don't see any evidence of an intelligent design.
Why, for example, give a worthless set of eyes to the mole who doesn't need them or wings to the ostrich? Why create and destroy the Cro-Magnon experiment?
In fact, I see conclusive evidence not for intelligent design but for the sort of trial and error method that an inventor such as Thomas Edison might use. I see undeniable evidence that nature itself has used the trial and error method and that no intelligent design is needed to explain the species. Another name for the trial and error method that is evident in nature is natural selection. Conference closed.
Clifford Smith
Spokane, WA
_______________________
Second Letter:
As both a Christian pastor and an admirer of the research of Charles Darwin, I read Clifford Smith's letter with interest ("The design isn't intelligent," April 21). Smith argues that the fossil records negate the possibility of an intelligent design, because of the many "dead life forms," including extinct species.
His argument seems to presuppose that if an Intelligence were guiding natural history, then evolution would have unfolded in a straight line from single cell to (who else?) us. But because there are dead end branches in the tree of life, Smith seems to say, then it's simply a case of matter going at it blind. Providing this Intelligence thinks and acts like us, that is.
But suppose that when we finally discern all the interconnectedness within natural history, we discover that every life form, in its own time, played an essential role in the biosphere? What if evolution would have been altered or arrested without the presence of species now no longer extant? If so, then these "dead life forms" would constitute the cost of evolutionary change - or, one might equally argue, the cost of creation.
John Temple Brlstow
Spokane, WA
BUSH HIDES FACTS FROM AMERICAN PUBLIC
In yesterday’s SPOKESMAN REVIEW (April 27, 2005, p. A1) we learn that Condi Rice is holding back evidence which concludes that terrorist attacks are growing in number and intensity around the world and in Iraq. John Negroponte is also helping hide the facts from Americans. Liars are just exactly what Bush needed on his team and so he appointed them.
TOM DELAY IS A BUSHALIKE (SEE ABOVE)
Tom Delay, House Leader, also likes to lie and dissemble in order to keep his ethical lapses from getting their just desserts. Jim Drinkard in USA TODAY reports (as printed in the SPOKESMAN REVIEW, April 27, 2005, p. A3) that “All five Republicans on the House ethics committee have financial links to Tom Delay....”
THE TYPICAL CONSERVATIVE
Both of the reports above about ethical lapses in our Republican controlled American government is just what we can expect from those sorts of people. They have the morals and tactics of fascists. Of course, if you like what they are doing, then it’s just tough tactics to you. If the bulldozer is running over your foot, however, then the shoe is also on the other foot.
_______________________________________________________
“The universe is a pitiless, mechanical phenomena, and we either accept that or we don’t. Once accepted, however, peace settles on the wise man. Anguish, on the other hand, results when we try to encompass the “pitiless mechanical universe” and “a caring god” all within the same human brain.” —George Thomas
Following are two letters. One is by a friend of mine and the second is the letter of a man who, I believe, could also be a friend of mine. My hat is off to Reverend Bristow. I could easily sit down and discuss any issue with such a man of reason and intelligence, without rancor for, at least, he’s a man who begins with facts. His interpretation of the facts of evolution is not the same as that of an atheist like myself, but his interpretation of the facts of evolution is at least based on the evolutionary evidence as we know the facts in the twenty-first century. To try to discuss the facts of evolution with a Bible literalist is like trying to talk to a Neanderthal who thinks that fire is a living spirit. Mr. Bristow brings us back to the original discussion of all humankind since time immemorial which is, “Does god exist?” Which existence, of course, can never be proven, but evolution, on the other hand, is nothing but the facts.
All I have ever asked from fundamentalists who refuse to accept the facts is that we begin with the facts and not hide our heads in the sand. If, after accepting reality, a man or woman still wishes to believe in the existence of a spiritual realm and being outside of time and space, I can accept their view of reality with a modicum of tranquility. I don’t sense a frightening Taliban-like irrationality hiding behind an American mask when I talk to men like Bristow.
__________________________________
First Letter:
I'm glad that people like Scott Minnich are bringing evolution into the light ("Conference explores intelligent design," April 8). The light of day is friend to the fact.
My problem with intelligent design is with the accuracy of the term. As I look at the abundant fossil evidence stretched out over evolutionary time, the millions of dead life forms that didn't work, the failed Neanderthal experiment, the feathered dinosaurs, all those botched trial models of all sorts throughout the millennia, I don't see any evidence of an intelligent design.
Why, for example, give a worthless set of eyes to the mole who doesn't need them or wings to the ostrich? Why create and destroy the Cro-Magnon experiment?
In fact, I see conclusive evidence not for intelligent design but for the sort of trial and error method that an inventor such as Thomas Edison might use. I see undeniable evidence that nature itself has used the trial and error method and that no intelligent design is needed to explain the species. Another name for the trial and error method that is evident in nature is natural selection. Conference closed.
Clifford Smith
Spokane, WA
_______________________
Second Letter:
As both a Christian pastor and an admirer of the research of Charles Darwin, I read Clifford Smith's letter with interest ("The design isn't intelligent," April 21). Smith argues that the fossil records negate the possibility of an intelligent design, because of the many "dead life forms," including extinct species.
His argument seems to presuppose that if an Intelligence were guiding natural history, then evolution would have unfolded in a straight line from single cell to (who else?) us. But because there are dead end branches in the tree of life, Smith seems to say, then it's simply a case of matter going at it blind. Providing this Intelligence thinks and acts like us, that is.
But suppose that when we finally discern all the interconnectedness within natural history, we discover that every life form, in its own time, played an essential role in the biosphere? What if evolution would have been altered or arrested without the presence of species now no longer extant? If so, then these "dead life forms" would constitute the cost of evolutionary change - or, one might equally argue, the cost of creation.
John Temple Brlstow
Spokane, WA
BUSH HIDES FACTS FROM AMERICAN PUBLIC
In yesterday’s SPOKESMAN REVIEW (April 27, 2005, p. A1) we learn that Condi Rice is holding back evidence which concludes that terrorist attacks are growing in number and intensity around the world and in Iraq. John Negroponte is also helping hide the facts from Americans. Liars are just exactly what Bush needed on his team and so he appointed them.
TOM DELAY IS A BUSHALIKE (SEE ABOVE)
Tom Delay, House Leader, also likes to lie and dissemble in order to keep his ethical lapses from getting their just desserts. Jim Drinkard in USA TODAY reports (as printed in the SPOKESMAN REVIEW, April 27, 2005, p. A3) that “All five Republicans on the House ethics committee have financial links to Tom Delay....”
THE TYPICAL CONSERVATIVE
Both of the reports above about ethical lapses in our Republican controlled American government is just what we can expect from those sorts of people. They have the morals and tactics of fascists. Of course, if you like what they are doing, then it’s just tough tactics to you. If the bulldozer is running over your foot, however, then the shoe is also on the other foot.
_______________________________________________________
“The universe is a pitiless, mechanical phenomena, and we either accept that or we don’t. Once accepted, however, peace settles on the wise man. Anguish, on the other hand, results when we try to encompass the “pitiless mechanical universe” and “a caring god” all within the same human brain.” —George Thomas
Friday, May 06, 2005
FLAILING AT THE MEDIA
Jeez, readers: I had to get up early in the morning to get these two gripes off my shoulders, but, then, I went to bed early, about 9:30 pm, so to get up at 4:30 am maybe isn’t so early after all. Anyhow, I think my letters to the editor which follow are self explanatory. If not, you can always comment:
Dear Editors,
I noted a hint of apologetics for the Bush administration (and your "US News and World Report" news staff) in one of your “The Week” briefs entitled “Terrorism’s Latest Report Card”. (p. 16) Your editors, in an afterward to the brief, call the growth of Iraq into an Afghanistan-like “melting pot” for jihadists around the world “Another unforeseen result of the war’s messy aftermath”. Italics mine.
Your people must have been focusing on Bush, Wolfowitz, Perle and Cheney because I was certainly hearing and reading in other sources about the possibility that Iraq would become a center for terrorism after our invasion destabilized it long before our illegal invasion of that country made us the world’s newest bad guy. Of course I was out there on the streets doing protest marches with the rest of the nation’s voices of reason at the time too. On the streets one would be likely to hear reason and caution rather than the din of media distortion.
As I now hear it—those most in support of the war and least well informed were listeners to TV and radio, not readers. What happened over there with you guys?
Sincerely from the State of Washington,
Geo
To the powers that be at CPB (Corp. For Public Broadcasting),
Recently I watched your excellent docudrama about the events which occurred in the nation of Rwanda not too many years ago. A touching picture of what can happen when the forces of the right or left stimulate the ignorant mainstream into acts of political violence. The French Revolution comes to mind and the Nazi regime in Germany and communist revolution under Stalin in Russian. And, of course, the current American administration which stampeded the American masses and religious fools into war in Iraqi.
Imagine my surprise, then, to hear that Paul Wolfowitz was to be commenting after the show about Rwanda. Wolfowitz is a neocon who lied to Congress and the American people about various things (including the made up stories of an Iraqi front woman about Saddam’s atrocities) in order to push America into an illegal war of aggression in Iraq. Mr. Wolfowitz, of course, should be tried by international courts for war crimes, but since he comes from one of the currently most powerful nations of the world, he’ll be spared that. As we know, those who win wars are the ones who write its history.
Of course I didn’t listen to Wolfowitz’s lies after your show. I’ve heard enough of them, but public television has been tainted by letting such a discredited person comment on one of its shows as if he were an impartial observer or a scholar or an objective authority on the world scene. I kind of think of him as a Hutu-type sympathizer for worldly aggression by powerful people upon weaker people.
I do understand that your predicament is yet another act of mind control and falsification by the Bush neocons. As I hear it, there is now an information czar in charge there at CPB who will force on public television a sort of equal opportunity for the liars to have their say. I thought we discredited that sort of deal in commercial TV some time back. Isn’t it the same conservative forces who eliminated that practice on commercial TV the ones who are trying to force it onto public TV? What is the reason for their public hypocrisy?
I will not abandon public TV just because of this current political Hutuite aberration. I hope a time will come when the current liars will be out of power and scholarly and objective people will be back in the driver’s seat. Then America will be the “good guy” once more in the world and honest investigation the norm at CPB. Is there anything I can do to alter this propagandistic trend?
Thank you for all the good years, and we’ll survive the present bad ones,
Geo
___________________________________________
“Birth, ancestry and that which you yourself have not achieved can hardly be called your own.” —Greek proverb [A solid argument for boosting the estate tax to 100 percent rather than cutting it.]
Jeez, readers: I had to get up early in the morning to get these two gripes off my shoulders, but, then, I went to bed early, about 9:30 pm, so to get up at 4:30 am maybe isn’t so early after all. Anyhow, I think my letters to the editor which follow are self explanatory. If not, you can always comment:
Dear Editors,
I noted a hint of apologetics for the Bush administration (and your "US News and World Report" news staff) in one of your “The Week” briefs entitled “Terrorism’s Latest Report Card”. (p. 16) Your editors, in an afterward to the brief, call the growth of Iraq into an Afghanistan-like “melting pot” for jihadists around the world “Another unforeseen result of the war’s messy aftermath”. Italics mine.
Your people must have been focusing on Bush, Wolfowitz, Perle and Cheney because I was certainly hearing and reading in other sources about the possibility that Iraq would become a center for terrorism after our invasion destabilized it long before our illegal invasion of that country made us the world’s newest bad guy. Of course I was out there on the streets doing protest marches with the rest of the nation’s voices of reason at the time too. On the streets one would be likely to hear reason and caution rather than the din of media distortion.
As I now hear it—those most in support of the war and least well informed were listeners to TV and radio, not readers. What happened over there with you guys?
Sincerely from the State of Washington,
Geo
To the powers that be at CPB (Corp. For Public Broadcasting),
Recently I watched your excellent docudrama about the events which occurred in the nation of Rwanda not too many years ago. A touching picture of what can happen when the forces of the right or left stimulate the ignorant mainstream into acts of political violence. The French Revolution comes to mind and the Nazi regime in Germany and communist revolution under Stalin in Russian. And, of course, the current American administration which stampeded the American masses and religious fools into war in Iraqi.
Imagine my surprise, then, to hear that Paul Wolfowitz was to be commenting after the show about Rwanda. Wolfowitz is a neocon who lied to Congress and the American people about various things (including the made up stories of an Iraqi front woman about Saddam’s atrocities) in order to push America into an illegal war of aggression in Iraq. Mr. Wolfowitz, of course, should be tried by international courts for war crimes, but since he comes from one of the currently most powerful nations of the world, he’ll be spared that. As we know, those who win wars are the ones who write its history.
Of course I didn’t listen to Wolfowitz’s lies after your show. I’ve heard enough of them, but public television has been tainted by letting such a discredited person comment on one of its shows as if he were an impartial observer or a scholar or an objective authority on the world scene. I kind of think of him as a Hutu-type sympathizer for worldly aggression by powerful people upon weaker people.
I do understand that your predicament is yet another act of mind control and falsification by the Bush neocons. As I hear it, there is now an information czar in charge there at CPB who will force on public television a sort of equal opportunity for the liars to have their say. I thought we discredited that sort of deal in commercial TV some time back. Isn’t it the same conservative forces who eliminated that practice on commercial TV the ones who are trying to force it onto public TV? What is the reason for their public hypocrisy?
I will not abandon public TV just because of this current political Hutuite aberration. I hope a time will come when the current liars will be out of power and scholarly and objective people will be back in the driver’s seat. Then America will be the “good guy” once more in the world and honest investigation the norm at CPB. Is there anything I can do to alter this propagandistic trend?
Thank you for all the good years, and we’ll survive the present bad ones,
Geo
___________________________________________
“Birth, ancestry and that which you yourself have not achieved can hardly be called your own.” —Greek proverb [A solid argument for boosting the estate tax to 100 percent rather than cutting it.]
Wednesday, May 04, 2005
SOMETIMES FRIGHTENING THOUGHTS ENTER MY BRAIN
Most modern peoples now know that the human animal has evolved to the point where it is outside of evolution and has the capacity to tamper with its own evolutionary destiny. The tool for its escape from its animal “fate” is human consciousness. When that appeared on the scene, humanity had kicked open the cell door of its bodily prison. Such knowledge ought to bring us hope, but our boundless human ignorance puts a damper on that because we humans are now able to act on “conscious thoughts” and some of those thoughts are non-adaptive and possibly very harmful to human survival.
Almost every week I go down to my local library and check out three to five films, usually foreign films with those “horrid” subtitles. I say “horrid” for the benefit of those of you who hate subtitles, but of course, I don’t mind subtitles myself because, decades ago, I voluntarily switched to foreign films in order to escape from the boring and predictable American fare that was polluting movie theaters and the Tv in American homes. I’d do anything to catch a glimpse of a female body other than my wife’s. Yes, I was a bad and very human animal/boy when young. Anyhow. . . three of the movies I brought home this week dovetailed with and provoked another thought drifting around in the human biosphere during these past few years. One of the thought-provoking films was “Leila”, an Iranian film, another was “Kadosh”, an Israeli film, and the third was “The Vertical Ray of the Sun”, a Vietnam film.
The Iranian and Israeli films had to do with fundamentalist religious ideas about procreation and filling up the earth with male religious armies. Both showed the plight of barren women in those two backward religious cultures in which a wife may be replaced so that the man can find a fertile woman. Of course, no one is allowed to find out if it’s the man who is infertile. The whole blame for barrenness is put on the women of the culture. Meanwhile, the beautiful Vietnam film just shows ordinary people dealing with ordinary family travails in an exotic and lushly filmed atmosphere. Watching it, I could almost imagine I was watching an Ingmar Bergman film or the plot of a Tennessee Williams play, and Vietnam is, I believe, both communist and Buddhist.
The frightening idea to emerge in my brain from these films and environmental studies is the horrible effect that the religious ignorance and brutality of Orthodox Judaism and fundamentalist Islam can have on our environment. Not to mention, the stupid procreative ideas of the Catholic and Mormon Churches which also put emphasis on overpopulating the earth so that their personal religions can close the population gap with those other religions. That’s right. . . we’ve got a population arms race going on at the same time we are reaching the limits of population numbers which the earth can safely sustain. Those three major religions (Christianity, Islam and Judaism) are polluting the earth with their numbers and hastening the demise of the human species. They encourage and spread “conscious” ideas which are non-adaptive and self-destructive, and I don’t know if they can wise up in time to stop the carnage of fucking creation. The sad part is that the more backward and primitive the culture which harbors the religion, the more likely the government will encourage the stupid religious ideas which threaten even the most reasonable and rational of us human animals. I hate to point out where that puts America under our current Bushite regime.
In short, a little study of the situation shows us that these three major religions are the source of stupid backward ideas which are not only irrational but actually counterproductive and non-adaptive to human well being. Of course, the irony, and there’s always irony in religions, is that these religious peoples have rationalized the biological imperative to increase and multiply at all costs. Funny but those, who rage against the facts of evolution, are actually, as usual, the most under the power and influence of their evolutionary drives and impulses, and they’re totally ignorant of it. But, you know, perhaps we haven’t escaped evolution yet. Some great plague or atomic war may erupt out of this population arms race and drastically reduce the numbers of this human ape population, waving its religious standards on every street corner of our earth cities. The irony stacked on irony in this situation is that human consciousness, if only there were more of it, is the key to stopping the population arms race. All we have to do as a species is open our conscious eyes and look about us. A new dawn awaits us! You can see that dawn in the Vietnamese film, “The Vertical Ray of the Sun” and other films of the enlightenment.
______________________________________
“I’d be astonished if this planet is still going by fifty years from now. I don’t think it will reach 2000. It would be miraculous.” —Alistaire Cooke [Anybody can misstate his case by a millennia or so. Just ask those who believe in the coming of the rapture every hundred years or so and sort of can be accused of praying for their own demise.]
Most modern peoples now know that the human animal has evolved to the point where it is outside of evolution and has the capacity to tamper with its own evolutionary destiny. The tool for its escape from its animal “fate” is human consciousness. When that appeared on the scene, humanity had kicked open the cell door of its bodily prison. Such knowledge ought to bring us hope, but our boundless human ignorance puts a damper on that because we humans are now able to act on “conscious thoughts” and some of those thoughts are non-adaptive and possibly very harmful to human survival.
Almost every week I go down to my local library and check out three to five films, usually foreign films with those “horrid” subtitles. I say “horrid” for the benefit of those of you who hate subtitles, but of course, I don’t mind subtitles myself because, decades ago, I voluntarily switched to foreign films in order to escape from the boring and predictable American fare that was polluting movie theaters and the Tv in American homes. I’d do anything to catch a glimpse of a female body other than my wife’s. Yes, I was a bad and very human animal/boy when young. Anyhow. . . three of the movies I brought home this week dovetailed with and provoked another thought drifting around in the human biosphere during these past few years. One of the thought-provoking films was “Leila”, an Iranian film, another was “Kadosh”, an Israeli film, and the third was “The Vertical Ray of the Sun”, a Vietnam film.
The Iranian and Israeli films had to do with fundamentalist religious ideas about procreation and filling up the earth with male religious armies. Both showed the plight of barren women in those two backward religious cultures in which a wife may be replaced so that the man can find a fertile woman. Of course, no one is allowed to find out if it’s the man who is infertile. The whole blame for barrenness is put on the women of the culture. Meanwhile, the beautiful Vietnam film just shows ordinary people dealing with ordinary family travails in an exotic and lushly filmed atmosphere. Watching it, I could almost imagine I was watching an Ingmar Bergman film or the plot of a Tennessee Williams play, and Vietnam is, I believe, both communist and Buddhist.
The frightening idea to emerge in my brain from these films and environmental studies is the horrible effect that the religious ignorance and brutality of Orthodox Judaism and fundamentalist Islam can have on our environment. Not to mention, the stupid procreative ideas of the Catholic and Mormon Churches which also put emphasis on overpopulating the earth so that their personal religions can close the population gap with those other religions. That’s right. . . we’ve got a population arms race going on at the same time we are reaching the limits of population numbers which the earth can safely sustain. Those three major religions (Christianity, Islam and Judaism) are polluting the earth with their numbers and hastening the demise of the human species. They encourage and spread “conscious” ideas which are non-adaptive and self-destructive, and I don’t know if they can wise up in time to stop the carnage of fucking creation. The sad part is that the more backward and primitive the culture which harbors the religion, the more likely the government will encourage the stupid religious ideas which threaten even the most reasonable and rational of us human animals. I hate to point out where that puts America under our current Bushite regime.
In short, a little study of the situation shows us that these three major religions are the source of stupid backward ideas which are not only irrational but actually counterproductive and non-adaptive to human well being. Of course, the irony, and there’s always irony in religions, is that these religious peoples have rationalized the biological imperative to increase and multiply at all costs. Funny but those, who rage against the facts of evolution, are actually, as usual, the most under the power and influence of their evolutionary drives and impulses, and they’re totally ignorant of it. But, you know, perhaps we haven’t escaped evolution yet. Some great plague or atomic war may erupt out of this population arms race and drastically reduce the numbers of this human ape population, waving its religious standards on every street corner of our earth cities. The irony stacked on irony in this situation is that human consciousness, if only there were more of it, is the key to stopping the population arms race. All we have to do as a species is open our conscious eyes and look about us. A new dawn awaits us! You can see that dawn in the Vietnamese film, “The Vertical Ray of the Sun” and other films of the enlightenment.
______________________________________
“I’d be astonished if this planet is still going by fifty years from now. I don’t think it will reach 2000. It would be miraculous.” —Alistaire Cooke [Anybody can misstate his case by a millennia or so. Just ask those who believe in the coming of the rapture every hundred years or so and sort of can be accused of praying for their own demise.]
Monday, May 02, 2005
YOU CAN TRUST SCIENTIFIC METHODOLOGY
From China. Came across a NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC article about the dinosaurs who evolved into birds. The photos were the best I've ever seen in that area. What's exciting about these findings is that they definitely pinpoint changes in body types which could be said to reveal what Christians call "missing links" as in when they challenge natural selection: "Where are the missing links?"
But the thing which most excited me was a recognition of how much scientists argue among themselves and debate the facts. I mean no claim goes without challenge, serious challenge. Scientists don't let anything pass which is questionable. Everything is open to debate. Nothing is sacred. It's a process I can trust. Scientists practice the truth that "When it comes to the truth, nothing can be sacred."
On the other hand, look at the evangelicals and Bible literalists! They begin with the sacred which goes unchallenged, and they circle around the Bible, facing outward and defend, defend, defend. No one challenges any of the Bible's outlandish claims. They are not scientists and have no method for arriving at the facts. That's how you know that their claims are without merit. Any outfit which doesn't first arrive at the bedrock facts of their case cannot be taken seriously, in fact, in the whole history of humankind, they are always proven wrong.
DEATH BY HEMINGWAY
I don't know what Hunter's motive was, but I know he tried to write and live like Hemingway, and now we hear that he died like Hemingway, eating a tasty bullet. Yes, Hunter S. Thompson is dead, poor "Hunt" is dead and lying in his grave, and all the Gonzoists in the world can't write Hunter back together again. His tale is told and it's the tale of an idiot, a sound and a fury signifying more signifying. Will we never leave off signifying since all our signifying is naught but excuse and justifying what it is we're bound to anyway? Goodnight sweat Hunter, goodnight.
GARLIC BREAD
My wife brought up garlic last night as a method to combat my climbing cholesterol count. High but not too bad yet and well within the range of diet and exercise changes. I brought it down last year by similar methods. But garlic reminds me of the old, wildly red-haired, bony woman who used to visit with my grandma when I lived with her. My grandmother would make me give Mrs. Smelly a big hug every time she visited grandmother's house. How I hated the ordeal. The woman reeked, stank of garlic. Then in reading Vidal's book, THE GOLDEN AGE, I discover that Eleanor Roosevelt also ate raw garlic every day for some reason or other. Now did this woman know that Eleanor used garlic? Is that why she used it? Was I connected by reeking air to the President's wife through the habits of an old, bony, red-haired woman?
MAY I RECOMMEND A MOVIE?
Watched a great Italian film this week called "The Embalmer", directed by Matteo Garron. An older male, a younger man and a woman are the three legs of this triangle of jealousy, and the triangle is revealed slowly, like a striptease dance, until the dirty underwear comes off only at the very end.
A relentless film about obsessions and passions. Dialogue is right on and seems as plebeian as the characters it reveals. Love, lust and passion are never mentioned as these three characters go about swinging their wrecking balls at one another in a worsening triangle of entanglement. Mood is unrelievedly somber. The tension never eases up though nothing seems too ominous until the very end of the movie, then, of course, as in all good creative work, the conclusion justifies the entire film. By being so right on, so inevitable, you are surprised you hadn't seen it coming. It's so obvious, isn't it, you think, as the final scene sinks in....
STILL MORE ITALIAN
Just watched for third time "La Strada" by Fellini and am forced to say, wow, it's still a powerful film about loneliness, isolation and yearning and lost hopes. Somewhere in the back of my mind I had imagined that "La Strada" would seem as old as black and white with emotionally unbelievable characters who do things out of romantic passions I no longer believe in. Then, as I watched it, for awhile, Masina's winsomeness was almost too much for me, but she was a little retarded, we must remember, and completely naive to the ways of the world. Finally, when the great Zamponi grovels with his lonely pain in the sand by the sea, it breaks on me that I am also that lonely man, selfish and feeling absolutely alone in my loveless state of selfishness, and that, indeed, if we are honest with ourselves, we are all as isolated as the brutal strongman or as the "yearning for the unattainable" Gelsomina. Honestly, life is like that, and no amount of gods are going to take that away if we are truly honest with ourselves, though that truth should set us free to take life in like a whole watermelon rather than shrink like seedy puddle in the sun.
_______________________________________________________
"Nobody talks more of free enterprise and competition and the best man winning than the man who inherited his father's store or farm." —C. Wright Mills
From China. Came across a NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC article about the dinosaurs who evolved into birds. The photos were the best I've ever seen in that area. What's exciting about these findings is that they definitely pinpoint changes in body types which could be said to reveal what Christians call "missing links" as in when they challenge natural selection: "Where are the missing links?"
But the thing which most excited me was a recognition of how much scientists argue among themselves and debate the facts. I mean no claim goes without challenge, serious challenge. Scientists don't let anything pass which is questionable. Everything is open to debate. Nothing is sacred. It's a process I can trust. Scientists practice the truth that "When it comes to the truth, nothing can be sacred."
On the other hand, look at the evangelicals and Bible literalists! They begin with the sacred which goes unchallenged, and they circle around the Bible, facing outward and defend, defend, defend. No one challenges any of the Bible's outlandish claims. They are not scientists and have no method for arriving at the facts. That's how you know that their claims are without merit. Any outfit which doesn't first arrive at the bedrock facts of their case cannot be taken seriously, in fact, in the whole history of humankind, they are always proven wrong.
DEATH BY HEMINGWAY
I don't know what Hunter's motive was, but I know he tried to write and live like Hemingway, and now we hear that he died like Hemingway, eating a tasty bullet. Yes, Hunter S. Thompson is dead, poor "Hunt" is dead and lying in his grave, and all the Gonzoists in the world can't write Hunter back together again. His tale is told and it's the tale of an idiot, a sound and a fury signifying more signifying. Will we never leave off signifying since all our signifying is naught but excuse and justifying what it is we're bound to anyway? Goodnight sweat Hunter, goodnight.
GARLIC BREAD
My wife brought up garlic last night as a method to combat my climbing cholesterol count. High but not too bad yet and well within the range of diet and exercise changes. I brought it down last year by similar methods. But garlic reminds me of the old, wildly red-haired, bony woman who used to visit with my grandma when I lived with her. My grandmother would make me give Mrs. Smelly a big hug every time she visited grandmother's house. How I hated the ordeal. The woman reeked, stank of garlic. Then in reading Vidal's book, THE GOLDEN AGE, I discover that Eleanor Roosevelt also ate raw garlic every day for some reason or other. Now did this woman know that Eleanor used garlic? Is that why she used it? Was I connected by reeking air to the President's wife through the habits of an old, bony, red-haired woman?
MAY I RECOMMEND A MOVIE?
Watched a great Italian film this week called "The Embalmer", directed by Matteo Garron. An older male, a younger man and a woman are the three legs of this triangle of jealousy, and the triangle is revealed slowly, like a striptease dance, until the dirty underwear comes off only at the very end.
A relentless film about obsessions and passions. Dialogue is right on and seems as plebeian as the characters it reveals. Love, lust and passion are never mentioned as these three characters go about swinging their wrecking balls at one another in a worsening triangle of entanglement. Mood is unrelievedly somber. The tension never eases up though nothing seems too ominous until the very end of the movie, then, of course, as in all good creative work, the conclusion justifies the entire film. By being so right on, so inevitable, you are surprised you hadn't seen it coming. It's so obvious, isn't it, you think, as the final scene sinks in....
STILL MORE ITALIAN
Just watched for third time "La Strada" by Fellini and am forced to say, wow, it's still a powerful film about loneliness, isolation and yearning and lost hopes. Somewhere in the back of my mind I had imagined that "La Strada" would seem as old as black and white with emotionally unbelievable characters who do things out of romantic passions I no longer believe in. Then, as I watched it, for awhile, Masina's winsomeness was almost too much for me, but she was a little retarded, we must remember, and completely naive to the ways of the world. Finally, when the great Zamponi grovels with his lonely pain in the sand by the sea, it breaks on me that I am also that lonely man, selfish and feeling absolutely alone in my loveless state of selfishness, and that, indeed, if we are honest with ourselves, we are all as isolated as the brutal strongman or as the "yearning for the unattainable" Gelsomina. Honestly, life is like that, and no amount of gods are going to take that away if we are truly honest with ourselves, though that truth should set us free to take life in like a whole watermelon rather than shrink like seedy puddle in the sun.
_______________________________________________________
"Nobody talks more of free enterprise and competition and the best man winning than the man who inherited his father's store or farm." —C. Wright Mills
Friday, April 29, 2005
ANNE COULTER IS A DANGER TO AMERICA
I got a chance to glance through Anne Coulter's book, TREASON, today while I was volunteering at the Spokane Library book store, "Buy the Book", and her title's right on: her book IS treasonous in its intent to destroy trust in American government so as to make it an easier target for the wealthy, like Coulter, to control or to so devide us that the Chinese can run us easily into the ground.
Her book as far as I can see is without scholarly foundation. It's the rant of a political hack, full of generalizations and glib easy clichés. I see no real studious survey of the American condition with an intent to really inform the people about the troubles our government might be in. She is no deep intellect, yet, to our current batch of religiously political simpletons, she might pass as someone who has something to say.
One clear example of her distortions is how she brings in Kennedy's womanizing to tear him down and uses his womanizing to also attack the press. She claims that the "liberal" press was protecting Kennedy, thus belittling the press of the past, but she fails to mention that the press for years did not touch the sex life of any politicians, liberal or conservative. Her ommision of such an obvious detail is her standard practice, it seems, for the book goes on like that, falsifying by omissions and distortions and generalizations without detail. I was surprised to see that some reviewers gave her any credit at all.
YES—WHO DO WE RUN THE COUNTRY TO BENEFIT THE MOST?
"Do we run the country for the people, or do we run it for the nameless, faceless banks or international corporations?" asks Harvard Law School Prof. Elizabeth Warren. "That was the issue way back as far back as the Depression. The ultimate decision was we run it for the people. . . . And now we have made a complete turnabout: We not only don't invest in the middle class, we drain away from the middle class. We tax them harder; we leave them with bigger risks like never before in history. And we take away the last shred of a safety net—bankruptcy. It's war on the middle class." (from an essay by Lou Dobbs in U.S. News & World Report, May 2, 2005)
OF COURSE THE RICH GET RICHER IN REPUBLICAN ADMINISTRATIONS: SEE HOW
"Eliminating the estate tax on the wealthiest Americans is both reckless fiscal policy and deeply unfair to the rest of the nation. Plus, it's based on specious logic." —Mortimer B. Zuckerman, Editor-in-Chief (U.S. News & World Report, May 2, 2005)
___________________________________________________________
"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former." —Albert Einstein [I didn't know Albert lived in this century during the current Bush administration with his fundamentalist voters.]
I got a chance to glance through Anne Coulter's book, TREASON, today while I was volunteering at the Spokane Library book store, "Buy the Book", and her title's right on: her book IS treasonous in its intent to destroy trust in American government so as to make it an easier target for the wealthy, like Coulter, to control or to so devide us that the Chinese can run us easily into the ground.
Her book as far as I can see is without scholarly foundation. It's the rant of a political hack, full of generalizations and glib easy clichés. I see no real studious survey of the American condition with an intent to really inform the people about the troubles our government might be in. She is no deep intellect, yet, to our current batch of religiously political simpletons, she might pass as someone who has something to say.
One clear example of her distortions is how she brings in Kennedy's womanizing to tear him down and uses his womanizing to also attack the press. She claims that the "liberal" press was protecting Kennedy, thus belittling the press of the past, but she fails to mention that the press for years did not touch the sex life of any politicians, liberal or conservative. Her ommision of such an obvious detail is her standard practice, it seems, for the book goes on like that, falsifying by omissions and distortions and generalizations without detail. I was surprised to see that some reviewers gave her any credit at all.
YES—WHO DO WE RUN THE COUNTRY TO BENEFIT THE MOST?
"Do we run the country for the people, or do we run it for the nameless, faceless banks or international corporations?" asks Harvard Law School Prof. Elizabeth Warren. "That was the issue way back as far back as the Depression. The ultimate decision was we run it for the people. . . . And now we have made a complete turnabout: We not only don't invest in the middle class, we drain away from the middle class. We tax them harder; we leave them with bigger risks like never before in history. And we take away the last shred of a safety net—bankruptcy. It's war on the middle class." (from an essay by Lou Dobbs in U.S. News & World Report, May 2, 2005)
OF COURSE THE RICH GET RICHER IN REPUBLICAN ADMINISTRATIONS: SEE HOW
"Eliminating the estate tax on the wealthiest Americans is both reckless fiscal policy and deeply unfair to the rest of the nation. Plus, it's based on specious logic." —Mortimer B. Zuckerman, Editor-in-Chief (U.S. News & World Report, May 2, 2005)
___________________________________________________________
"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former." —Albert Einstein [I didn't know Albert lived in this century during the current Bush administration with his fundamentalist voters.]
Wednesday, April 27, 2005
JAMES WOODS DOES GOOD STUFF OUT OF SIGHT
Mertie and I just watched a little James Wood’s movie with Melanie Griffith, Vincent Kartheiser and Natasha Gregson Wagner. It’s called “Another Day In Paradise” made in 1998. I never heard of it before I bought it 2 films for 5 bucks at Hollywood Videos, but for unrelieved intensity, it’s been awhile since I’ve come across such an impressive film. Maybe I’m just vulnerable, but the movie was so real to me that it depressed me. Usually I can be pretty detached from even the most powerful films now in my older age, but this one hooked me. The film’s director is Larry Clark of “Kids” infamy.
Two old love/hate crooks, Sid (Griffith) and Mel (Woods) adopt a pair of young lovers and take them into the heart of a crime spree—a series of false moves and gunplay which over and over again threatens their lives until Rosie dies from an overdose (okay, so I told you) and then the shit really hits the fan. I wouldn’t call the ending so much redemptive as a relief. Yes, I breathed a sigh of relief at the end. I was glad to be out of Wood’s increasing madness too. And nothing in the concluding moments is not foreshadowed so that each tick of the final clock, you can nod a yes to. A well put together piece of work. And James Wood’s ought to get his pockmarked face plastered onto an Oscar someday.
BIRMINGHAM, ALABAMA: BIBLE BELT HEARTS AND POWERS
Jay Reeves, in an Associated Press release in the Spokesman Review (March 27, 2005) reports that:
“Evidence in Richard Scrushy's fraud trial has made the goings-on at HealthSouth Corp. sound more like an episode of ‘The Dukes of Hazzard’ than the operations of a Fortune 500 company.
After eight weeks of testimony, a picture has emerged of a Southern-fried culture at the rehabilitation and medical services chain.
According to testimony, Scrushy and another executive held a meeting in the middle of a sprawling Alabama lake known for floating beer bashes and bass fishing, and Scrushy once told a CFO they all needed to stay aboard ‘this pickup truck’— HealthSouth—despite its financial problems.
Meanwhile, a witness told of a bar brawl that broke out at a going-away party for a key executive who quit the company rather than get involved in the fraud, which prosecutors say amounted to $2.7 billion in inflated earnings over about seven years.
Prosecutors say Scrushy was at the heart of a conspiracy to overstate HealthSouth earnings from 1996 through 2002, directing subordinates to commit fraud so it would appear the company was meeting Wall Street estimates...............
Scrushy has recently been projecting a more church-going image, singing hymns with his third wife Leslie who is his former secretary at HealthSouth and the daughter of a Methodist preacher. Scrushy has preached in at least two churches during his trial and his wife has been seen praying with supporters around the courthouse.
The couple have taken a break during the trial from their daily TV show, which typically features Bible study.”
Yep, that’s right, the Scrushys, like almost all Southern crooks, practice the guitar picking, Bible studying, Bible thumping, praying in tongues, pickup running, deep South morality which currently runs our country top to bottom from the mightiest boardroom to the least pulpit, from the smallest office space to the loudest pulpit. Scrushy is just one bole weevil under the pickup floorboard of the South which is full of those morality weevils. Look at Lay of Enron and born again Ebbers at WorldCom. Look at Biblemouth Delay and all his Southern buddies. Southern corruption, religion coated, is everywhere. Even in Spokane the guy who ran Spokane’s Washington Water Power into financial trouble was an Enron Texan, that so and so. The guys who bilked California rate payers were Southern crooks. These Southern crooks are all psuedo-religious con men.
And still Southerner Bush holds onto a 45% favorable rating. How could that be? You got to study the South and live there and know the Bible belt mentality. These are not sophisticated people down there. They’ve been taken in by lying Bible thumpers all their lives. How can we expect them to see through the dishonesty lodged in their churches now? Bush and Rove and his crew are playing naive Southerners like a school of speckled trout. They’re pulling them out of the warm Gulf waters on their double hooked spec rigs as fast as they can hook ‘em horns. It’s not that everyone in the South is corrupt; it’s just that way too many of them are so Bible-sated that they can’t tell when they’re being conned by Bible cons, religious and commercial.
We just 40 years ago dragged the South kicking and screaming into the 20th century. How can we expect a bunch of people who only yesterday were knee deep in the cotton fields of segregation to even begin to develop a healthy, fairly honest democratic mentality, a mind sharp enough to tell a truth so deep as atheism, the root of the best democracy. This is the South where the dishonesty and corruption is founded on the lies taught in every fundamentalist church in the South.
Let me simplify. You go to church down there all your life and learn to love Jesus and that kind old preacher man who heads up your congregation. You’re told there is not one falsehood in that Bible book fully of historical inaccuracies, fictions and poetry, bad morality and invented characters. You don’t read a lot of other books that can show you the falsehoods because you’ve been taught that to be too well informed is in bad taste. It makes you a “smarty pants” and smarty pantses don’t have many friends. So you buckle down and swallow the lies. You stay naive. You start your life listening to someone lie to you who does not know he is lying. That’s the most effective liar—someone who believes his own lies. So you are being set up to believe lies of all kinds by the very best liars, liars you love and honor. Your kindly old pastor is an effective liar because he bought the lie too and now his lie to you is of the very best quality. So it goes generation to generation.
And, in the midst of those churches are the smarter guys who only half believe the Bible lies. So they learn they can con you by using your religion as a hook. They say all the right things and pull all the correct strings, and they con you and keep you poor and dumb and down. And you don’t like to think of yourself as being so dumb as to defeat yourself so you hang on ever more tightly to your Bible mentality and you “hate with all your might” any wiseass who attacks the faith of your babyhood because if you have to admit to that, then your whole faith system comes tumbling down, and you’d have to see just how badly you are being conned by these wonderful con men. You’d have to admit you’re a fool. You might even have to face that god is a con. Sad to say, that even a few of the kindly old gentlemen in the pulpits are also lying to you and knowing they lie. They are the worst of the Southern liars.
And that’s how you end up supporting a rogue like Bush, a con man who maybe half believes his own con. That’s the South I know and met when I lived there. Nice friendly people who’ll stab you in the back because they’ve been taught to be nice and swallow the lie pill with a smile and don’t dare call the preacher man a liar. They are gutted, breaded and skillet fried to a golden brown for devouring.
Mertie and I just watched a little James Wood’s movie with Melanie Griffith, Vincent Kartheiser and Natasha Gregson Wagner. It’s called “Another Day In Paradise” made in 1998. I never heard of it before I bought it 2 films for 5 bucks at Hollywood Videos, but for unrelieved intensity, it’s been awhile since I’ve come across such an impressive film. Maybe I’m just vulnerable, but the movie was so real to me that it depressed me. Usually I can be pretty detached from even the most powerful films now in my older age, but this one hooked me. The film’s director is Larry Clark of “Kids” infamy.
Two old love/hate crooks, Sid (Griffith) and Mel (Woods) adopt a pair of young lovers and take them into the heart of a crime spree—a series of false moves and gunplay which over and over again threatens their lives until Rosie dies from an overdose (okay, so I told you) and then the shit really hits the fan. I wouldn’t call the ending so much redemptive as a relief. Yes, I breathed a sigh of relief at the end. I was glad to be out of Wood’s increasing madness too. And nothing in the concluding moments is not foreshadowed so that each tick of the final clock, you can nod a yes to. A well put together piece of work. And James Wood’s ought to get his pockmarked face plastered onto an Oscar someday.
BIRMINGHAM, ALABAMA: BIBLE BELT HEARTS AND POWERS
Jay Reeves, in an Associated Press release in the Spokesman Review (March 27, 2005) reports that:
“Evidence in Richard Scrushy's fraud trial has made the goings-on at HealthSouth Corp. sound more like an episode of ‘The Dukes of Hazzard’ than the operations of a Fortune 500 company.
After eight weeks of testimony, a picture has emerged of a Southern-fried culture at the rehabilitation and medical services chain.
According to testimony, Scrushy and another executive held a meeting in the middle of a sprawling Alabama lake known for floating beer bashes and bass fishing, and Scrushy once told a CFO they all needed to stay aboard ‘this pickup truck’— HealthSouth—despite its financial problems.
Meanwhile, a witness told of a bar brawl that broke out at a going-away party for a key executive who quit the company rather than get involved in the fraud, which prosecutors say amounted to $2.7 billion in inflated earnings over about seven years.
Prosecutors say Scrushy was at the heart of a conspiracy to overstate HealthSouth earnings from 1996 through 2002, directing subordinates to commit fraud so it would appear the company was meeting Wall Street estimates...............
Scrushy has recently been projecting a more church-going image, singing hymns with his third wife Leslie who is his former secretary at HealthSouth and the daughter of a Methodist preacher. Scrushy has preached in at least two churches during his trial and his wife has been seen praying with supporters around the courthouse.
The couple have taken a break during the trial from their daily TV show, which typically features Bible study.”
Yep, that’s right, the Scrushys, like almost all Southern crooks, practice the guitar picking, Bible studying, Bible thumping, praying in tongues, pickup running, deep South morality which currently runs our country top to bottom from the mightiest boardroom to the least pulpit, from the smallest office space to the loudest pulpit. Scrushy is just one bole weevil under the pickup floorboard of the South which is full of those morality weevils. Look at Lay of Enron and born again Ebbers at WorldCom. Look at Biblemouth Delay and all his Southern buddies. Southern corruption, religion coated, is everywhere. Even in Spokane the guy who ran Spokane’s Washington Water Power into financial trouble was an Enron Texan, that so and so. The guys who bilked California rate payers were Southern crooks. These Southern crooks are all psuedo-religious con men.
And still Southerner Bush holds onto a 45% favorable rating. How could that be? You got to study the South and live there and know the Bible belt mentality. These are not sophisticated people down there. They’ve been taken in by lying Bible thumpers all their lives. How can we expect them to see through the dishonesty lodged in their churches now? Bush and Rove and his crew are playing naive Southerners like a school of speckled trout. They’re pulling them out of the warm Gulf waters on their double hooked spec rigs as fast as they can hook ‘em horns. It’s not that everyone in the South is corrupt; it’s just that way too many of them are so Bible-sated that they can’t tell when they’re being conned by Bible cons, religious and commercial.
We just 40 years ago dragged the South kicking and screaming into the 20th century. How can we expect a bunch of people who only yesterday were knee deep in the cotton fields of segregation to even begin to develop a healthy, fairly honest democratic mentality, a mind sharp enough to tell a truth so deep as atheism, the root of the best democracy. This is the South where the dishonesty and corruption is founded on the lies taught in every fundamentalist church in the South.
Let me simplify. You go to church down there all your life and learn to love Jesus and that kind old preacher man who heads up your congregation. You’re told there is not one falsehood in that Bible book fully of historical inaccuracies, fictions and poetry, bad morality and invented characters. You don’t read a lot of other books that can show you the falsehoods because you’ve been taught that to be too well informed is in bad taste. It makes you a “smarty pants” and smarty pantses don’t have many friends. So you buckle down and swallow the lies. You stay naive. You start your life listening to someone lie to you who does not know he is lying. That’s the most effective liar—someone who believes his own lies. So you are being set up to believe lies of all kinds by the very best liars, liars you love and honor. Your kindly old pastor is an effective liar because he bought the lie too and now his lie to you is of the very best quality. So it goes generation to generation.
And, in the midst of those churches are the smarter guys who only half believe the Bible lies. So they learn they can con you by using your religion as a hook. They say all the right things and pull all the correct strings, and they con you and keep you poor and dumb and down. And you don’t like to think of yourself as being so dumb as to defeat yourself so you hang on ever more tightly to your Bible mentality and you “hate with all your might” any wiseass who attacks the faith of your babyhood because if you have to admit to that, then your whole faith system comes tumbling down, and you’d have to see just how badly you are being conned by these wonderful con men. You’d have to admit you’re a fool. You might even have to face that god is a con. Sad to say, that even a few of the kindly old gentlemen in the pulpits are also lying to you and knowing they lie. They are the worst of the Southern liars.
And that’s how you end up supporting a rogue like Bush, a con man who maybe half believes his own con. That’s the South I know and met when I lived there. Nice friendly people who’ll stab you in the back because they’ve been taught to be nice and swallow the lie pill with a smile and don’t dare call the preacher man a liar. They are gutted, breaded and skillet fried to a golden brown for devouring.
Friday, April 22, 2005
XTIAN FUNDIES CONTROLLING AMERICA
Last year, the fundamentalist Christian Talliban in American forced Federated Department Stores to remove a British brand name from its shelves: French Connection, United Kingdon (acronym FCUK). Today, they forced Microsoft to discontinue support for an anti-discrimination bill to protect gay employment and housing in the State of Washington. They are currently trying to force very radical judges on us by altering the rules of the Senate which have been in effect for 200 years. They've forced movies and books to delete negative references to their particular form of dictatorial religion in the last year.
If the fundamentalist Talliban in Christianity can force major commercial enterprises to back down, imagine what they can do (and do do in small southern towns) to the freedoms of those of us few free individuals who recognize no gods and no masters? Can it be long before some of us are fined for being witches or burned at the stake for being atheists? Look, don't laugh. These fundamentalists are undemocratic in their psychologies and disrespecting of basic human and governmental freedoms. They are misled into thinking that their truth is the only truth and, therefore, can justify any behavior to force their aims onto the rest of us. We have all of history to remind us of past Christian cruelty and terror.
Will the internet allow us to continue to keep freedom alive after religious McCarthyism comes to dominate American culture? Who knows? 'Cause right now bills are waddling on their little duck feet to control and censor the internet, and few of our current congresspeople are brave enough to stand up to fundamentalist power.
I recently came across a Christian minister who 25 years ago said that "Fascism in America will come wearing the face of Christianity." Right on, brother.
PS: For those of you too young to recall—this suppression of American institutions and beliefs by the rabid barking of a strong minority of "true believers" is "McCarthyism". You are in the middle of it. You are experiencing it right now if you will but look around and recogize it. You will be able to understand what your parents are talking about when they refer to McCarthyism.
A REAL ETERNITY IN REAL TIME
I’m absolutely certain in this modern age of ours that few of us can really believe any more in a hidden life of spiritual beings, of arisen gods and places in space where our immaterial selves live on, doing goodness knows what for eternity. That’s why fundamentalism is so desperate, so angry and violent. They know a truth which they cannot accept. It plagues them and they kick and scream like children being dragged to Saturday night bath.
Yet, look! On this other hand, on the material hand, perhaps man is about to achieve an eternal life of the material body. This life will not be so peaceful as a heaven where the sounds of harps go on all day long and one’s sandals scrape along golden streets. Eternity without god! Now that’s a volkswagen of another color! That’s what men and women of the future face. Think of all the changes which must happen within the human psyche before it will be able to accept such an ambivalent eternity as this? Yet, here we are, face to face with it, and the face in the mirror we see will be transcendent beyond anything we could have imagined in order to accept this bloody gift.
ETERNITY IN FLESH?
And yet we troubled humans exist in painful flesh! Now here’s a real quandary. Can we cast off this too too troubled coil and keep it too?
From HOUSE OF CARDS (P. 29): "For example, studies find that the incidence of alcoholism is related to the alcoholism of the biological parents of children who have been adopted and is unrelated to the alcoholism of the children’s adoptive parents. That does not mean that a child with an alcoholic biological parent, or even two, is more likely than not to become an alcoholic. Far from it—most children of alcoholic biological parents do not become alcoholics themselves. The study’s conclusions mean simply that there’s a trend, involving genetic constitution." —ROBYN DAWES
SPEAKING OF THE FLESH—DON'T SEX ME UP OR I'LL GO TO HELL!
Over the years, I keep rediscovering this idea in a thousand forms, from essays to short stories to novels. I'm sure it's deeply in the works of Tennessee Williams, James Joyce, and D. H. Lawrence, to name just a few. So, passed on to me, I worked it into my psyche and even think it infects my own sex life with my past wives and even my current wife. Now, of course, the dastardly Robyn Dawes debunks the Catholic idea in his book, HOUSE OF CARDS. Any young person reading this—beware the ideas of your time because when you grow old you may find that all things you learned are balderdash. In fact, after you read this book, you'll question everything you believe. Should I even believe this book? Will a pendulum swing back the other way and knock Dawes off the desk too. Then what shall any of us believe. Indeed!
"The Catholic Church retained the hierarchical structure of the soul, so that the highest level consisted of the “pure” love of Christ and God, and the lowest level consisted of impure lust for the sensual and material things of the earth—to the point that celibacy (or “virginity”) and asceticism were common among devout Christians at a very early date." (House of Cards, Dawes, p. 207).
And, if any are looking, you'll see modern day Christians trying again, for the thousandth time in history, to put the genie back in the bottle again, and only shamed human beings can come out of making sex "wrong" again.
THE NAME OF GOD IS PROPAGANDA
Yet, given all the nice ideas expressed above, we are mired in this now of lies and deceit, and the fearful ones who can't look ahead hold us back with injections of their fear. Why are they so fearful if they, indeed, believe their mythology?
When I think of the Bush tactic of lying until others believe and when I think of he Christian lie repeated over and over and over, I see the propaganda is alive and well on the Christian right. No wonder Bush believes the lie of god and so easily lies to others. It's all part of the self-fulfilling myths. Even Joe Campbell was misguided enough to believe that we all needed "myths" to live by.
Why not live by the story of truth that science tells? Though some like to call science just another myth, at least that myth is based in fact and mathematics rather than stale old stories and the hierarchical tales that monkeys tell in their grimaces and leaping and squawking.
"(Goebbels maintained that the effects of propaganda depend less on a belief in the legitimacy of the source than on the repetition and intensity of the propaganda itself. Subsequent psychological experiments have borne out this contention; experimenters have condistantly found that people tend to judge that whatever has been repeated is true—even when the repetition is only of the words in the assertion. Are we, for example, immune to the effects of repetitive news that we know to be “managed” simply because we know that what we are being shown and told is what those managing it want us to see and hear? (I know I was not during the recent Gulf War.)" (HOUSE OF CARDS, p. 202)
Will we be able to overcome the Christian/Moslem/Jewish lies and ring in the new mythology of life eternal?
______________________________________________________
“She got her good looks from her father—he’s a plastic surgeon.” —Groucho Marx
Last year, the fundamentalist Christian Talliban in American forced Federated Department Stores to remove a British brand name from its shelves: French Connection, United Kingdon (acronym FCUK). Today, they forced Microsoft to discontinue support for an anti-discrimination bill to protect gay employment and housing in the State of Washington. They are currently trying to force very radical judges on us by altering the rules of the Senate which have been in effect for 200 years. They've forced movies and books to delete negative references to their particular form of dictatorial religion in the last year.
If the fundamentalist Talliban in Christianity can force major commercial enterprises to back down, imagine what they can do (and do do in small southern towns) to the freedoms of those of us few free individuals who recognize no gods and no masters? Can it be long before some of us are fined for being witches or burned at the stake for being atheists? Look, don't laugh. These fundamentalists are undemocratic in their psychologies and disrespecting of basic human and governmental freedoms. They are misled into thinking that their truth is the only truth and, therefore, can justify any behavior to force their aims onto the rest of us. We have all of history to remind us of past Christian cruelty and terror.
Will the internet allow us to continue to keep freedom alive after religious McCarthyism comes to dominate American culture? Who knows? 'Cause right now bills are waddling on their little duck feet to control and censor the internet, and few of our current congresspeople are brave enough to stand up to fundamentalist power.
I recently came across a Christian minister who 25 years ago said that "Fascism in America will come wearing the face of Christianity." Right on, brother.
PS: For those of you too young to recall—this suppression of American institutions and beliefs by the rabid barking of a strong minority of "true believers" is "McCarthyism". You are in the middle of it. You are experiencing it right now if you will but look around and recogize it. You will be able to understand what your parents are talking about when they refer to McCarthyism.
A REAL ETERNITY IN REAL TIME
I’m absolutely certain in this modern age of ours that few of us can really believe any more in a hidden life of spiritual beings, of arisen gods and places in space where our immaterial selves live on, doing goodness knows what for eternity. That’s why fundamentalism is so desperate, so angry and violent. They know a truth which they cannot accept. It plagues them and they kick and scream like children being dragged to Saturday night bath.
Yet, look! On this other hand, on the material hand, perhaps man is about to achieve an eternal life of the material body. This life will not be so peaceful as a heaven where the sounds of harps go on all day long and one’s sandals scrape along golden streets. Eternity without god! Now that’s a volkswagen of another color! That’s what men and women of the future face. Think of all the changes which must happen within the human psyche before it will be able to accept such an ambivalent eternity as this? Yet, here we are, face to face with it, and the face in the mirror we see will be transcendent beyond anything we could have imagined in order to accept this bloody gift.
ETERNITY IN FLESH?
And yet we troubled humans exist in painful flesh! Now here’s a real quandary. Can we cast off this too too troubled coil and keep it too?
From HOUSE OF CARDS (P. 29): "For example, studies find that the incidence of alcoholism is related to the alcoholism of the biological parents of children who have been adopted and is unrelated to the alcoholism of the children’s adoptive parents. That does not mean that a child with an alcoholic biological parent, or even two, is more likely than not to become an alcoholic. Far from it—most children of alcoholic biological parents do not become alcoholics themselves. The study’s conclusions mean simply that there’s a trend, involving genetic constitution." —ROBYN DAWES
SPEAKING OF THE FLESH—DON'T SEX ME UP OR I'LL GO TO HELL!
Over the years, I keep rediscovering this idea in a thousand forms, from essays to short stories to novels. I'm sure it's deeply in the works of Tennessee Williams, James Joyce, and D. H. Lawrence, to name just a few. So, passed on to me, I worked it into my psyche and even think it infects my own sex life with my past wives and even my current wife. Now, of course, the dastardly Robyn Dawes debunks the Catholic idea in his book, HOUSE OF CARDS. Any young person reading this—beware the ideas of your time because when you grow old you may find that all things you learned are balderdash. In fact, after you read this book, you'll question everything you believe. Should I even believe this book? Will a pendulum swing back the other way and knock Dawes off the desk too. Then what shall any of us believe. Indeed!
"The Catholic Church retained the hierarchical structure of the soul, so that the highest level consisted of the “pure” love of Christ and God, and the lowest level consisted of impure lust for the sensual and material things of the earth—to the point that celibacy (or “virginity”) and asceticism were common among devout Christians at a very early date." (House of Cards, Dawes, p. 207).
And, if any are looking, you'll see modern day Christians trying again, for the thousandth time in history, to put the genie back in the bottle again, and only shamed human beings can come out of making sex "wrong" again.
THE NAME OF GOD IS PROPAGANDA
Yet, given all the nice ideas expressed above, we are mired in this now of lies and deceit, and the fearful ones who can't look ahead hold us back with injections of their fear. Why are they so fearful if they, indeed, believe their mythology?
When I think of the Bush tactic of lying until others believe and when I think of he Christian lie repeated over and over and over, I see the propaganda is alive and well on the Christian right. No wonder Bush believes the lie of god and so easily lies to others. It's all part of the self-fulfilling myths. Even Joe Campbell was misguided enough to believe that we all needed "myths" to live by.
Why not live by the story of truth that science tells? Though some like to call science just another myth, at least that myth is based in fact and mathematics rather than stale old stories and the hierarchical tales that monkeys tell in their grimaces and leaping and squawking.
"(Goebbels maintained that the effects of propaganda depend less on a belief in the legitimacy of the source than on the repetition and intensity of the propaganda itself. Subsequent psychological experiments have borne out this contention; experimenters have condistantly found that people tend to judge that whatever has been repeated is true—even when the repetition is only of the words in the assertion. Are we, for example, immune to the effects of repetitive news that we know to be “managed” simply because we know that what we are being shown and told is what those managing it want us to see and hear? (I know I was not during the recent Gulf War.)" (HOUSE OF CARDS, p. 202)
Will we be able to overcome the Christian/Moslem/Jewish lies and ring in the new mythology of life eternal?
______________________________________________________
“She got her good looks from her father—he’s a plastic surgeon.” —Groucho Marx
Wednesday, April 20, 2005
FROM ONE BARBARIAN TO ANOTHER: THEY MAKE NO BONES ABOUT IT
“A Yale student named William H. Russell started the secret society [Skull and Bones, Bush’s bunch at Yale] organization in 1832 in an effort to create a new world order that would place the best and the brightest at the helm of society. A wealthy elitist, Russell believed that the most important decisions should only be made by those who are bred to make them, so he created an environment that would shape the world. He called his group the Brotherhood of Death or, more informally, the order of Skull and Bones, patterned after a secret society in Germany, also in 1832…. Within Skull and Bones, all Bonesmen are called ‘Knights’, and members refer to the rest of the world as barbarians.”
I’d say that Russell’s plan to place “the best and the brightest” in charge of the world has come down a notch or two with that intellectual dolt, Bush, now in the presidency. Also how adult can a group be which still plays at knights and kings in a college system and calls itself by the silly romantic name of “Brotherhood of Death”? Laird preserve us from such fools. Many of us knew back in the 1960s how immature and frivolous these fraternities were and they still are, but they’re back in these supposedly serious conservative times. Do the Skull-kers make you think of the storm and fury of the Nazi legions with their death’s heads and romantic obsessions with black and death and Teutonic knights? Do you get it, kiddos, these lunatics in charge of our nation are out of touch with reality.
MEANWHILE BACK IN THE REAL, WORKADAY WORLD
AFSCME APPEALS FOR WORKER SOLIDARITY AGAINST BUSH ATTACKS ON UNIONS AND ON SOCIAL SECURITY:
The following paragraphs are copied from an AFSCME mailing to its unionized workers around the country. They are taking seriously Bush’s neoconservative moves which, in my opinion, aim to return American workers and unionists to the impoverished and powerless conditions they suffered with long before Roosevelt made major changes which gave some power to the average American to control his and her destiny. Read and weep:
[Open Quote.]
Organizing and Bargaining Rights Targeted
Since the Bush administration took over in 2001, it has targeted the rights of workers, including our rights to organize and to bargain for fair wages.
The administration’s first act was to weaken the National Labor Relations Board. It blocked funding, stacked the group with anti-worker members and voted to allow union-busting campaigns to be subsidized by taxpayer dollars. All this has created an environment where employers can squash to organize and fire employees without just cause.
Now, with less than 8 percent of the private sector unionized and 36 percent of the public sector organized, the anti-worker forces have targeted the rights of public employees. That is why it was the first official act of the governors of Kentucky, Missouri and Indiana to revoke our collective bargaining rights. In fact, Gov. Mitch Daniels of Indiana and Gov. Matt Blunt of Missouri repealed our rights on the same day, January 11, 2005.
None of us are safe, even if we have a collective bargaining law. That is why we have launched this campaign and why you need to get involved.
This is just the beginning if we don’t stop them…
While we battle the anti-worker movement at the state level, we also have a big fight on our hands in the nation’s capital.
President Bush wants to privatise Social Security. The Bush plan would replace a portion of Social Security with risky private accounts, leading to huge cuts in guaranteed benefits that workers have earned and are counting on.
The plan is bad even for public employees not covered by Social Security, because it could lead to the dismantling of our traditional pension plans, replacing them with risky private accounts.
Here is what is wrong with the Bush plan:
• No matter what you choose, you lose. Under Bush’s plan, all workers would see their future benefits cut by at least 30 percent — even if you don’t opt for a private account. If you do choose an account, your guaranteed benefits would be cut an additional 20 percent or more.
• You will give up $152,000 in benefits. According to estimates, an average retiree who lives 20 years past retirement and chooses a private account will lose $152,000. (Center for Economic and Policy Research)
• There is a hidden tax on your retirement fund. For every dollar workers have in their private accounts at retirement, the government will deduct 50 cents from the guaranteed benefits they have earned by paying into the Social Security system.
• You will not control your account. The private investment accounts will not be controlled by the people who put money into them. They will be controlled by large private companies on Wall Street that will be more concerned about their bottom lines than your retirement.
_________________________________________________________________
“The business of government is to keep the government out of business—that is, unless business needs government aid.” —Will Rogers
“A Yale student named William H. Russell started the secret society [Skull and Bones, Bush’s bunch at Yale] organization in 1832 in an effort to create a new world order that would place the best and the brightest at the helm of society. A wealthy elitist, Russell believed that the most important decisions should only be made by those who are bred to make them, so he created an environment that would shape the world. He called his group the Brotherhood of Death or, more informally, the order of Skull and Bones, patterned after a secret society in Germany, also in 1832…. Within Skull and Bones, all Bonesmen are called ‘Knights’, and members refer to the rest of the world as barbarians.”
I’d say that Russell’s plan to place “the best and the brightest” in charge of the world has come down a notch or two with that intellectual dolt, Bush, now in the presidency. Also how adult can a group be which still plays at knights and kings in a college system and calls itself by the silly romantic name of “Brotherhood of Death”? Laird preserve us from such fools. Many of us knew back in the 1960s how immature and frivolous these fraternities were and they still are, but they’re back in these supposedly serious conservative times. Do the Skull-kers make you think of the storm and fury of the Nazi legions with their death’s heads and romantic obsessions with black and death and Teutonic knights? Do you get it, kiddos, these lunatics in charge of our nation are out of touch with reality.
MEANWHILE BACK IN THE REAL, WORKADAY WORLD
AFSCME APPEALS FOR WORKER SOLIDARITY AGAINST BUSH ATTACKS ON UNIONS AND ON SOCIAL SECURITY:
The following paragraphs are copied from an AFSCME mailing to its unionized workers around the country. They are taking seriously Bush’s neoconservative moves which, in my opinion, aim to return American workers and unionists to the impoverished and powerless conditions they suffered with long before Roosevelt made major changes which gave some power to the average American to control his and her destiny. Read and weep:
[Open Quote.]
Organizing and Bargaining Rights Targeted
Since the Bush administration took over in 2001, it has targeted the rights of workers, including our rights to organize and to bargain for fair wages.
The administration’s first act was to weaken the National Labor Relations Board. It blocked funding, stacked the group with anti-worker members and voted to allow union-busting campaigns to be subsidized by taxpayer dollars. All this has created an environment where employers can squash to organize and fire employees without just cause.
Now, with less than 8 percent of the private sector unionized and 36 percent of the public sector organized, the anti-worker forces have targeted the rights of public employees. That is why it was the first official act of the governors of Kentucky, Missouri and Indiana to revoke our collective bargaining rights. In fact, Gov. Mitch Daniels of Indiana and Gov. Matt Blunt of Missouri repealed our rights on the same day, January 11, 2005.
None of us are safe, even if we have a collective bargaining law. That is why we have launched this campaign and why you need to get involved.
This is just the beginning if we don’t stop them…
While we battle the anti-worker movement at the state level, we also have a big fight on our hands in the nation’s capital.
President Bush wants to privatise Social Security. The Bush plan would replace a portion of Social Security with risky private accounts, leading to huge cuts in guaranteed benefits that workers have earned and are counting on.
The plan is bad even for public employees not covered by Social Security, because it could lead to the dismantling of our traditional pension plans, replacing them with risky private accounts.
Here is what is wrong with the Bush plan:
• No matter what you choose, you lose. Under Bush’s plan, all workers would see their future benefits cut by at least 30 percent — even if you don’t opt for a private account. If you do choose an account, your guaranteed benefits would be cut an additional 20 percent or more.
• You will give up $152,000 in benefits. According to estimates, an average retiree who lives 20 years past retirement and chooses a private account will lose $152,000. (Center for Economic and Policy Research)
• There is a hidden tax on your retirement fund. For every dollar workers have in their private accounts at retirement, the government will deduct 50 cents from the guaranteed benefits they have earned by paying into the Social Security system.
• You will not control your account. The private investment accounts will not be controlled by the people who put money into them. They will be controlled by large private companies on Wall Street that will be more concerned about their bottom lines than your retirement.
_________________________________________________________________
“The business of government is to keep the government out of business—that is, unless business needs government aid.” —Will Rogers
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