WALL MOTTOS TO ADDRESS A COMMISSIONER'S PERSONAL CRISIS

I speak here in support of the traditional motto, E Pluribus Unum, rather than the newer, One Nation Under God. My stand is based on three premises:

1) The One Nation Under God junior motto is divisive and does not include all Americans and their many beliefs, whereas the more traditional motto, E Pluribus Unum, which means “one from many” is inclusive and excludes no American for the matter of his or her personal beliefs. It was proposed for the first Great Seal of the United States by Adams, Franklin, and Jefferson in 1776. That Commissioner Mielke’s motto divides us is self evidently displayed in this meeting room.

2) During these times of systematic government surveillance that seems to trouble many of us, the junior motto celebrates another time when government was also peering over our shoulders. The McCarthy Era in the 1950s when this motto was pushed upon us was a fearful time for many Americans. Black lists were compiled, people lost their jobs, loyalty oaths were required, lives ruined and freedom to speak one’s mind was severely challenged by the intolerant disciples of Senator Joe McCarthy and the House Unamerican Activities Committee. Do we truly want to honor a time with a plaque in need of revision from a time when American freedoms were so severely under attack?

3) Commissioner Mielke was encouraged by distant California strangers to suggest his motto for Vancouver, and it’s reported he remarked he thought the motto was a good idea because he imagined that people were falling away from his idea of God, and they needed to be reminded of their shortcomings with a wall plaque. I don’t know how Mr. Mielke knows who is and who is not falling away from his idea of God, but, more importantly, if people are falling away from Commissioner Mielke’s idea of God or, if he, himself, is falling away from God, that is a matter of personal conscience. The problem needs to be discussed with religious leaders in their houses of worship and in their homes. It’s a matter between them and their churches and ought not to become a matter of public policy, addressed by a sign on a public wall.

AN ANALOGY FOR THE MISSING LINK

THE AGES OF MAN: AN ANALOGY FOR THE MISSING LINK

All analogies break down. They’re not perfect, but here’s the best I can do to illustrate where the missing link charges by the Creationists break down.

Imagine that at the moment of birth, an unmanned camera begins to take snapshots of a person every second from the moment of his birth to the moment of his death. At the moment of this being’s death, a daily record of his entire existence is now stored on file in the Whole Earth Library along with the photo records of all the people in Whole Earth County.

Now, with that moment by moment record of existence for your perusal, if I asked you to point to the exact moments when the being moved from infant to toddler and toddler to adolescent, from adolescent to post-adolescent, from post-adolescent to young man (you get the picture), could you identify those moments? No, of course not, because there is no missing link. The change is so gradual that you can’t do it. Same with the whole history of life on earth, only we’re talking about “species creep” in reality and not Shakespeare’s "Ages of Man".

You’ll say, “But I can still tell that’s a male child and a man all the way through.” Okay, all analogies break down, so let me make the analogy even a little closer to the case at hand.

Let’s add some details to the being’s life. At some point in the being’s life, he fights in a war, becomes a one-legged, one armed paraplegic in a wheel chair whose face is so badly disfigured by fire and shrapnel that nothing can reconstitute it because he’s in a fairly unscientific age. But since we have the entire record on file, stored in the archives of the Whole Earth Library, we still know this man to be the same being all the way through. It’s all on record, and we can definitely now recognize the prewar from the postwar being.

But let’s add another bit of reality to the case.

Suppose a hurricane tears into the Whole Earth Library long after the man is dead and passed away. It spreads the record of his existence over a twenty mile area. Some of the photos drop into fires which are burning, some onto the surfaces of the river and float away, some onto the surface of a lake to soak and sink, some drop into wells and crevices (you get the picture—destruction and dispersal of the record of our man). But if you get to the spot of the catastrophe soon enough, given the amount of evidence still remaining, you will probably pretty easily figure out that this series of snapshots are of one being, unless, of course, many other series of snapshots are lying around and mixed up with his. Now the problem of finding the “moments of transition” is getting very complicated by too much evidence and by it’s being randomly dispersed and mixed with other kinds of photo evidence all over the county. In fact, I’d say the ability to identify any missing “link” or “moment when his age changed” is now pretty well lost to time, even though we know they occurred. Probably we could never have done it in the first place, given the nature of the reality of change’s slow time frame.

But let’s add more reality to our analogy.

Over a period of two thousand years, many wars are fought over this very ground where the remaining photos lie. Bombs blow craters and refill them. Nature does its work too. Wild fires cross and re-cross the ground, rains fall on it, sun burns down, winds blow, natural catastrophes sweep over the land (you get the picture). Surveying the ground where the Whole Earth Library once stood, we’ll be lucky to find evidence that a library was there at all, let alone a weathered photo of a single man, our man. Any photo that might lie on the surface will be weathered and faded, and it will be hard to even identify it as a photo. Our photos of the man would seem like bits of the earth itself.

Now, how will we be able to identify the “moments of transition” through Shakespeare’s Ages of Man of this particular example of our species, even if we find four or five photos? I think it’s impossible, don’t you? At this point, I’ve brought us somewhere near to just before our current age of exploration where we humans stood when Darwin arrived on the scene. 

But let’s get even more real.

Suppose an alien “consciousness” evolves (the key word is consciousness) with the body of what we might call an ant, a consciousness which has never heard of humankind and its culture and which evolved somewhere far from Whole Earth County (maybe another planet) but which  eventually grows curious enough to travel over the earth to see what’s up.

Standing on the grounds of what was once Whole Earth County, the alien consciousness finds one fairly intact and not too faded photo which, fortuitously, has been protected inside an upside down ration tin which one of its many feet kicks as it walks. It’s the picture of a human infant in a crib. The ant consciousness has no idea what it’s seeing but it’s curious. It can’t tell animate from inanimate in the photo. The ant calls for backup.

More ants arrive and begin to search the ground and dig it up. After decades of human time, the ant researchers come up with three more photos of our original man. Of course, they don’t know that. We do because we are a sort of objective camera which is observing and recording this whole tale. One photo is a full length view of him as a young man before the war. Another shows him from the waist up in a hospital bathrobe. He’s in early convalescence just after the war, with face burned beyond recognition, missing limbs, in a wheelchair built for bipedal persons. The third photo is from our man’s death bed scene with a hairless, toothless, shriveled face peeking over the edge of a hospital sheet.

At this point in our story, the ant consciousness can’t even tell if this “thing” in a barred place which you and I recognize as an infant is the same kind of thing that sits in a wheeled carriage or as the thing peeking out of the covers. They just have no concept for these “things” they’re seeing in the snapshots.

Eventually, though, one bright researcher ant notes that all the things have heads and maybe eyes, except for the thing in the wheeled thing. The researcher can’t make out that thing’s blasted, burned head too well. You know? No one can really tell if these things they’re looking at are one thing or four things. Not really. So they’re stored away in fossil drawers.

Eventually, however, other ant consciousness begins to understand from other photos that these things they are studying had things which took pictures of other things, and they learn that photo paper has distinctive traces and that some photos are numbered or marked in some way or another. Call the discovery of paper types and the numbering systems for photos, the underlying and connecting thread of all the photos, “natural selection” or “DNA”.

Now, to wrap this analogy up, a researcher near Whole Earth County pulls the four photos of our man out of the fossil drawer and study’s the paper. The researcher finds the four photos are made of the same paper. By their numbering, research can sequence them.

Finally, as a few more photos from Whole Earth County pile up, the ants can reliably predict that these different “beings” or “things” are connected in a line by the DNA of photo paper, but the transition points between the thing in the barred cage, and the prewar thing squinting in sunlight, and the thing in the wheeled carriage and the old thing under the sheet are perhaps forever missing. Still, our ant consciousness has snapped the picture correctly.

AN OLD BEATNICK MEETS GEORGE BUSH IN A TAVERN

Finally watched The Butler last night. Spent a large part of the movie in tears. All the pain that finally buried this "very sensitive" child under alcohol abuse came back last night. The interesting thing to me is how "conservative" I was as child and youth, in that I believed all the myths about America. After WWII, I really believed all the things about America's greatness, its love of freedom and justice and free speech. What the 50s and 60s taught me, finally and painfully, was that the American people were no better or worse than any other nation of people. 

Unrealistic "idealism" is what tortures modern conservatives also. They cling to the past, and they believe all the nonsense they were taught as children. They can't see modern America in a real light, and they are incapable of seeing the "injustices" created by free enterprise or capitalism. I do believe that capitalism is the best method for distributing a nation's wealth as long as the distance between those most and least rewarded does not grow too great. Which it has. 

Sadly, modern Teapublicans can't help "blaming" others for being poor because conservatives cling to the myth of "free will", thus it's easy for them to blame others and to praise themselves. They are controlled by evolutionary forces just as much as the less fortunate are controlled by genes and nurture. Those who succeed usually have a "sense of entitlement". The sense of entitlement describes a psychological or electrochemical state in the brain/body that leads to success. Their "psychological state" is a cause of success rather than an effect of success, and a grown Teapublican can no more take credit for that psychological state of being than a honeybee can take credit for being the queen of the hive. 

This film explores the difference

In my own case, I was driven by pain to try and understand who I was and what made me into the person I was. Success became secondary to that struggle. I was tortured by insecurity and shame. Until I reached the bottom of my personal struggle, trying to escape my worker bee status was next to impossible. It was like trying to climb up a hill of marbles. By the time I did understand the forces that drove me, I was in my 50s, a late start in the rush to earn fame and fortune in the free enterprise system. If only Teapublicans understood their fortunate electrochemical inheritance and quit "being proud" of themselves, we'd have quite a different nation to live in. 

Pardon my length, but simple-mindedness is not one of my strongly evolved characteristics. Complexity of thought comes with the territory of self-understanding. Thus, I am not George Bush and he is not me. Back in the day, however, I'm sure we'd have enjoyed drinking a beer together had we known each other. I enjoyed the company of many a young George Bush in the taverns where I "bought my alcoholism" one drink at a time.

FEATHERED SHAFT OF BEATNICK OLDSTER PUNCTURES A DUCK'S BREAST

Today I took my hour walkabout in the nearby Fred Meyer store (recently purchased by Kroger). When I emerged, the clouds had flown the sky, and, unfortunately, I missed a chance to take my walk on a decently warm winter's day.

My real topic, however, is a sadder theme. At one corner of Freddy's, I several times passed the angry face of Phil Duck, glaring from a pillow no compassionate woman would want to lay her cheek upon, and I realized for the zillionth time how sad the face of the average (not all) faith-ridden Southern male is. He can display only various shades of two faces: an angry face and the sarcastic smile which is all the humor an embittered Southern male can manage. Just study the faces and listen to the quips of the Duck Billed Robertson family. It's so obvious, it's a wonder not more are wise to the ducktails they use as mouths.

Their foul temperament comes from two sources. Their forefathers lost a war and they still can't get over it, and they are the victims of a religion which encourges the average (not all) father to lay freely about himself with a rod upon the shoulders and backsides of his average child so as not to spoil him. From such an unspoiled philosophy, the average (not all) Southern Bible Bibber is left with bitterness and sarcasm as his two responses to a world he did not make and cannot accept. If that isn't a sad tale, I don't know one when I see it. 

The story I linked to above (see Phil Duck) claims that their ducky show sports 8.6 million viewers. If you'll notice that number is close to the numbers that old time German, Rush Limbaugh, used to claim and Fox News still claims. All three claim the same sad number of embittered, out of touch Americans. A very sad, small, unchanging number indeed.

ADAM CORNFORD: COULD BE TRUE

READ THIS PIECE BY ADAM CORNFORD, people. You can't go wrong. The first two paragraphs are below, but go to his blog and read it all up.

Apart from the issue of corporate money, I think there are deep historical reasons for the collapse of conservatism American-style as an ideology. They have to do with the senescence of possessive individualism in the age of global human cooperation and massive human impacts on the biosphere. Possessive individualism as a worldview originated with the hyperacquisitive English gentry class in the later seventeenth century and was codified into philosophy by thinkers like Adam Smith. It is worth remembering that the wording Madison wanted for the opening of the Declaration of Independence was “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Property.” Possessive individualism has been the ideological foundation of capitalism ever since.

Now, however, it is obsolete, for two reasons, both global in scope: the rise of the transnational corporation, and the advancing ecological crisis. Karl Marx long ago described the joint-stock corporation as “capitalist communism” and believed that its global development would unify humanity, but in a coercive and destructive way, dragging the world into deeper and deeper cyclical crises that would result in mass unemployment, hunger, and war. He therefore anticipated a point at which the working people of the world, recognizing their own transnational unity and practical interdependence, would collectively overthrow capitalism and establish what he called “the free association of the producers” in which “the full and free development of each depends on the full and free development of all.” This, not state ownership, was Marx’s vision, founded on the notion of the “social individual” for whom the freedom of others is not the limit of her own, but its expansion. In other words, socialism offers a fundamentally different vision both of freedom and of the individual. This vision was eclipsed both by authoritarian state capitalism masquerading as “socialism” in the USSR, China, and elsewhere, and by the enormous postwar boom that was actually premised on a greatly enlarged public sector. As that boom collapsed, the response of the ruling elites, especially in the US and the UK, was to promote possessive individualism with a vengeance (as “conservatism”) through a vast and well-funded network of foundations, think-tanks, media outlets—and churches.

WHY DON'T CONSUMERS OWN WHAT THEY PAY FOR?

Nazis didn't like socialism either

The consuming taxpayers pay for everything in the world. We pay the wages of the politicians and the dividends of the wealthy. We pay through taxes for certain necessary services and for personnel to operate those services, and, through the price of our purchases, we pay the salaries of all corporate people and the wage earners of those corporations. Isn't that clear enough—as consumers we pay each others wages in both the private and public sectors? 


Since we workers pay for everything, we ought to be pretty furious at those who sit around and skim the cream off the free market (capitalistic) economic system while the real generators of wealth go hungry and go without good health care. What we need to do is figure out a way to get all those top dog corporate monkeys, stock holders and dividend takers off our consuming, taxpaying backs, but how do we do that without making ourselves vulnerable to a government that we might make too large and before they assassinate real reformers? Where are the Teapublicans when we need them? This "free market" economic system ought to make all us tax paying consumers mad as hell!

SELFISHNESS BRED INTO US. CAN WE WHIP IT?

Keep this to the front of our minds as the Teapublican Party continues holding impoverished children, the handicapped, retired seniors and veterans hostage in order to get a budget agreement that permanently harms those vulnerable groups. Four percent of any population is sociopathic. Then there are many others with very low empathetic (conscience) brain functions. I'm sure conscience or lack of it can be plotted on a bell curve just as can most human traits. I believe it's safe to say that the Teapublican Party is dominated by those two groups of people. It's not their fault—they were born that way—but the rest of us should watch out when they try to con us into going along with them by attempting to manipulate our evolved adaptations for selfishness. Our agreement with their selfish policies might indicate we also might be brain damaged. Let's hope the human species is slowly evolving toward more altruistic behavior than selfish behavior. The world need not be as selfish as it is. 

TEAPUBLICANS MIX UP CAUSE AND EFFECT: A BRAIN DEFECT

Republicans frequently mix up cause and effect when they discuss human behavior. Clear evidence of that confusion is revealed in their plan for cutting back on COLA increases for seniors on social security. It's called chained consumer price index (CPI). Roughly, chained CPI assumes that as one's income decreases, he (or she) will spend less on food (i.e. steak to chicken) or prescriptions or medical care, etcetera. Thus, according to Republicans, senior benefits can be reduced since they will spend less. However, that is assbackwards. The chained CPI reduces money to people on social security benefits and creates the effect of people spending less on necessary items. A chained CPI will force people to spend less because they'll have less to spend.

Republicans think the same backward way about capitalism. Obviously, for capitalism (or free enterprise) to work, many must be poor so that a few may be wealthy. I can see no evidence in history or currently where capitalism does not create much poverty while allowing only a very few to fully benefit from it, but when altruists discuss helping those whose poverty is created by capitalism, the wealthy Republican, instead of feeling responsible to relieve the poverty their economic system creates, blames the poor for being poor in a system which needs many to be poor if it is to work correctly. Cause and effect are clearly turned around in a Republican's brain. 

I think Teapublicanism is a brain defect of cause and effect caused when the circuits between moral feelings and one's actions aren't fully developed. In order to be so callous, one must not be able to feel the pain of others very deeply. 

LUNATICS OF THE RIGHT: JUSTICE SCALIA

proves that reason is not necessarily sanity

Yesterday I saw a tee shirt that read, WHEN NOTHING GOES RIGHT, GO LEFT

I often am surprised when an old friend (who admits he still lives in fear of the devil) and I discuss things from afar how far I've entered into the intelligent world and have left behind the "things of the devil". Another old friend once told me that "we become what we fear". I see evidence of that fear turning people nasty whenever an old crack brain like Scalia reveals how far back into the dark ages his brain has sunk. It's sad that a grown man has not grown emotionally beyond the 9-11 year old stage when fairies and other invisible things are very real. You can see the work of punishing nuns and priests in such beliefs as Scalia endorses. Further, if he truly believes in the devil, he is but one step removed from punishing people he imagines are witches. In fact, he would probably be one of those nit-pickers, looking for proofs of witchcraft in things like the shape of a person's head or color of their eyes. Read or watch Arthur Miller's The Crucible to see how reason can twist reality until reality seems a nightmare. That's what reason does. People who still believe in that devil nonsense are scary and completely irrational in all their beliefs. (For example, they would destroy a nation's economy in order to get their way.) They are exactly like the Abbot of Citeaux, Arnaud Amalric, the crusader whose army reached the outskirts Béziers. When he was asked if all in the city should be killed since some of them were Christian, he told his crusaders, "Kill them all. God will know his own." That's reason at work. Spooky man is Scalia. 

FLIPPING THE TRUTH...A TEAPUBLICAN TACTIC

the face of terrorism in America

The Teapublican terror brigade's alien cell in the American government hopes that we don't recall what they've been saying for months, i.e. we're going to shut down your American government if you don't do what we want. Their allies in terror at Fox News have already forgotten or they never knew, since, mostly, they just make up the news as they go along. If the Teapublicans and their wealthy friends in broadcasting manage to flip the responsibility for the shutdown, then we'll know that the American people have lost their ability to think for themselves. Like the Nazi's the Teapublicans believe that if they lie long enough and frequently enough, the people will come to believe the lie. Will it work in such an obvious case as this one?