Tangerine-shaped moon again tonight

Tangerine-shaped moon again tonight, so white
Low riding in the pitch-black cloudless Eastern sky
Hovering, just hovering, not resting any any table-top
house-tops or tree-tops,
Looking more like it's being held ever so still
By some invisible puppeteer's strings

But how'd the moon move there tonight, midnight,
What arc did it travel?
What course did it take?

There is so much that I don't know,
That I still need to learn.

Coming by it honestly

Noted by Professor Juan Cole:

It isn’t odd that atheists and agnostics know a lot about religion. They’ve looked into it in order to come by their doubts honestly.

Paraphrasing: It isn't odd that students and war protesters know a lot about American foreign policy. They've looked into it in order to come by their doubts honestly.

Either the betrayer or the thief

Presently am reading Denis Johnson's novel: Tree of Smoke - A Novel. In it there's a homily which reminded me of a sermon I heard given here in town at St. Paul's United Church of Christ in November, 2006.

What were today's readings? He'd lost the book again, the schedule of liturgy. He hadn't actually consulted it for years, just read what he wanted, whatever verses the Book opened to. "Here's something." He read in English: "If there be therefore any consolation in Christ, if any comfort of love, if any fellowship of the Spirit, if any bowels and mercies ..." He tried to explain in the local dialect what he thought might be meant by "bowels and mercies," and ended by saying, "I'm not sure what it means. Maybe how we feel toward our families."

He sought Matthew 27:5 -- And he cast down the pieces of silver in the temple, and departed, and went and hanged himself.

And now the homily. "In English today." He gave no reason why. Maybe it went without saying that the Joe's presence suggested this courtesy. Not that any of them would understand his thoughts in any language. Superstitious vampire-worshippers. But he himself had once seen the aswang flying with a child's bloody limb between her jaws.

"I've told them I'm going to do the homily in English. I don't really have anything prepared. We speak of our reading today, about Judas Iscariot the traitor: And he cast down the pieces of silver in the temple, and departed, and went and hanged himself.

"He goes back to the temple, to the ones who paid him to betray his Master. He want to give back their dirty silver but they won't take it. Ever think why? Why they turn down perfectly good money? Nobody paid me to betray Jesus, but what does it matter, eh? I could never pay them back. They would never take back their dirty money."

In over thirty years he hadn't spoken at such length in his native language. He let it run on, the English coming out of his head as out of a loudspeaker. "My grandmother used to use that expression, 'bowels and mercies.' I never asked her what it meant.

"I remember how I rejected my grandmother. I loved her very much, I was her favorite, but then, when I came to my early teens, twelve, thirteen, she came to live with us, and I was very unkind to her. She was just some old woman, and I was very unkind.

"I don't like to remember that. The memory is very bitter. My grandmother love me, and I treated her with disrespect. I felt no love for anyone.

"Here, of course, where the people are so poor, so sick, you can't love them. It would pull you under. You wold go under. Everyone here knows how to love, but love them back -- it's quicksand. I'm not the Christ. No man is the Christ.

"Other times we're the their on the cross, the one who got crucified next to Jesus, the thief who turned to Jesus and said, 'Remember me when you get to your Kingdom.' And Jesus had mercy and said, 'This day you shall be with me in Paradise.' I really think we have to be one of the other. We're either the betrayer, or we're the thief...

But of course, the sermon which this reminded me of was nothing like the one above. At the UCC, the Assistant Minister spoke on the parable of the prodigal son, and she made this point: that there were different levels of meaning to the parables of Jesus, and how frustrating it must have been that his disciples only seemed to get the surface level of meaning.

On the surface, the prodigal son is the story about a father and a son; yet, on another level, it is the story about a father and TWO sons, the one who was off put that his father would make such a big deal for the return of the prodigal, while the son who had faithfully served could make the Rodney Dangerfield complaining, "I don't get no respect." On yet another level, this story is about the other brother, and how he too, is prodigal, so ultimately, the story is about us, how sometimes we are the prodigal son, and sometimes the brother, and how, at our best, we can forgive.

Marat in the courtyard,
Marat underground.
Sometimes the otter, and
Sometimes the hound

Sometimes the betrayer,
sometimes the thief.

There must be some kind of way out of here,
Said the joker to the theif.

And this, I think, is ultimately why we must read fiction -- to make these connections, to see our lives in the lives of others, and theirs in ours.

Terror Threats and Alerts in France

Terror Threats and Alerts in France is republished with permission of STRATFOR.

By Scott Stewart

The Eiffel Tower was evacuated Sept. 28 after an anonymous bomb threat against the symbolic Parisian tourist attraction was phoned in; no explosive device was found. The day before the Eiffel Tower threat, French authorities closed the Gare Saint-Lazare in central Paris after an abandoned package, later determined innocuous, was spotted in the train station.

These two incidents serve as the latest reminders of the current apprehension in France that a terrorist attack is imminent. This concern was expressed in a very public way Sept. 11, when Bernard Squarcini, the head of France’s Central Directorate of Interior Intelligence (known by its French acronym, DCRI), told French newspaper Le Journal du Dimanche that the risk of an attack in France has never been higher. Never is a long time, and France has long faced terrorist threats, making this statement quite remarkable.

Squarcini has noted in recent interviews that the combination of France’s history as a colonial power, its military involvement in Afghanistan and the impending French ban on veils that cover the full face and body (niqabs and burqas) combined to influence this threat environment.

A Month of Threats

After the French Senate approved the burqa ban Sept. 14 — which will go into effect next March — a bomb threat against the Eiffel Tower was called in that evening, causing French authorities to evacuate the site and sweep it for explosive devices.

On Sept. 16, five French citizens were abducted from the Nigerien uranium-mining town of Arlit in an operation later claimed by al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), a claim French Defense Minister Herve Morin later assessed as valid. In July, French Prime Minister Francois Fillon declared that France was at war with the North African al Qaeda franchise after the group killed a French hostage it had kidnapped in April. Fillon’s announcement came three days after the end of a four-day French-Mauritanian offensive against AQIM militants that resulted in the deaths of several militants. After the offensive, AQIM branded French President Nicolas Sarkozy an enemy of Allah and warned France that it would not rest until it had avenged the deaths of its fighters.

French officials have also received unsubstantiated reports from foreign liaison services of plans for suicide bombings in Paris. National Police Chief Frederic Pechenard told Europe 1 radio Sept. 22 that in addition to the threatening statements from AQIM, the French have received specific information that the group is working to target France.

On Sept. 6, Der Spiegel reported that authorities were investigating reports provided by the United States that a German-born Islamist extremist arrested in Afghanistan has warned of possible terrorist attacks in Germany and elsewhere in Europe — including France — planned by jihadists based in Pakistan. This story hit the English-language media Sept. 28, and included reports that the threat may have involved plans to launch Mumbai-like armed assaults in multiple targets in Europe.

In the words of Squarcini to the press, these combined incidents mean “all the blinkers are on red.” This statement is strikingly similar to one in the 9/11 Commission Report attributed to then-CIA Director George Tenet, who said that in July 2001 “the system was blinking red.”

While an examination of the current threat situation in France is interesting, it is equally interesting to observe the way that the French are handling their threat warnings in the media.

The Threat Environment in France

While its neighbors such as Spain and the United Kingdom have suffered bloody attacks since 9/11, the French so far apparently have been spared — although there are some who suspect the yet-unsolved June 2009 crash of Air France Flight 447 may have resulted from foul play, along with the explosion at the AZF fertilizer plant in September 2001.

France has long been squarely in the crosshairs of jihadist groups such as AQIM. This is due not only to its former colonial involvement in North Africa but also to its continued support of governments in countries like Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia deemed un-Islamic by jihadists. It is also due to France’s military commitment in Afghanistan. Moreover, on the domestic side, France has a significant Muslim minority largely segregated in slums known in French as “banlieues” outside France’s major cities. A significant proportion of the young Muslim men who live in these areas are unemployed and disaffected. This disaffection has been displayed periodically in the form of large-scale riots such as those in October 2005 and November 2007, both of which resulted in massive property destruction and produced the worst civil unrest in France since the late 1960s. While not all those involved in the riots were Muslims, Muslims did play a significant and visible role in them.

Moves by the French government such as the burqa ban have stoked these tensions and feelings of anger and alienation. The ban, like the 2004 ban against headscarves in French schools, angered not only jihadists but also some mainstream Muslims in France and beyond.

Still, other than a minor bombing outside the the Indonesian Embassy in Paris in October 2004, France has seemingly been spared the type of attacks seen in Madrid in March 2004 and London in July 2005. And this is in spite of the fact that France has had to deal with Islamist militants for far longer than its neighbors. Algerian Islamist militants staged a series of attacks involving gas canisters filled with nails and bolts on the Paris subway system in 1995 and 1996, and during the 1980s France experienced a rash of terrorist attacks. In 1981 and 1982, a group known as the Lebanese Armed Revolutionary Faction attacked a series of diplomatic and military targets in several French cities. Algerian militants also hijacked an Air France flight in December 1994, a situation resolved when personnel from the French Groupe d’Intervention de la Gendarmerie Nationale (GIGN) stormed the aircraft in Marseilles and killed all four hijackers.

“Shoe Bomber” Richard Reid, who is serving a life sentence in the United States for trying to blow up a Paris-to-Miami flight with an explosives-stuffed shoe in December 2001, staged his attack out of France.

In 2001, French authorities broke up a French-Algerian terrorist cell planning to attack the U.S. Embassy in Paris. The six militants, some of whom French authorities had linked to terrorist training camps in Afghanistan, were convicted and sentenced to lengthy prison terms.

Also in 2001, Algerian extremists were convicted in connection with an aborted plot to attack a Christmas market at Strasbourg Cathedral on New Year’s Eve 2000.

In January 2005, French police arrested a cell of alleged Chechen and Algerian militants, charging members with plotting terrorist attacks in Western Europe. According to French authorities, the group planned attacks against government and Jewish targets in the United Kingdom as well as against Russian diplomatic and business targets in Western and Central Europe. Other targets included tourist attractions and crowds in the United Kingdom and France and French train stations.

More recently, in October 2009, French particle physicist Adlene Hicheur and his brother, Halim, who holds a Ph.D. in physiology and biomechanics, were arrested and charged with helping AQIM plan terrorist attacks in France.

In the final analysis, France is clearly overdue for a successful jihadist attack, and has been overdue for several years now. Perhaps the only thing that has spared the country has been a combination of proactive, skillful police and intelligence work — the kind that resulted in the thwarted attempts discussed above — and a little bit of luck.

Alerts

France has a national security alert system called the Vigipirate, which has four levels:

* Yellow, which means there is an uncertain threat.
* Orange, which signifies there is a plausible threat.
* Red, which signals a highly probable threat.
* Scarlet, which indicates a certain or known threat.

The Vigipirate level has been set at red since the aftermath of the July 2005 London bombings. This level is probably justified given that France is overdue for an attack, and French authorities undoubtedly have been busy investigating a large number of potential threats since the decision was made to raise the level to red. Still, as we have long discussed, this type of warning system has a tendency to get some attention when the levels are initially raised, but after five years of living at level red, French citizens are undoubtedly experiencing some degree of alert fatigue — and this is why Squarcini’s recent statements are so interesting. Apparently, he does not have the type of hard intelligence required to raise the threat level to scarlet — or perhaps the French government does not want to run the political risk of the backlash to the restrictive security measures they would have to institute if they raised the level. Such measures could include dramatically increasing security personnel and checkpoints and closing certain metro stops, train stations and airports, all things that could be incredibly disruptive.

Generally speaking, a figure like Squarcini would not provide the type of warnings he has recently shared in the press if his service had a firm grasp on the suspects behind the plot(s) about which he is concerned. For example, the FBI felt it had good coverage of groups plotting attacks in some of the recent thwarted plots in the United States, including the group arrested in May 2009 and charged with plotting to bomb two Jewish targets in the Bronx and shoot down a military aircraft at an Air National Guard base. In such a case, the director of the FBI did not feel the need to alert the public to the threat; he believed his agents had everything under control. Therefore, that Squarcini is providing this warning indicates his service does not have a handle on the threat or threats.

Information about a pending threat is not released to the public lightly, because such information could well compromise the source of the intelligence and endanger the investigation into the people behind the plot. This would only be done in situations where one has little or no control over the potential threat. There are numerous factors that would influence the decision to release such information.

Perhaps one of the first is that in a democracy, where public officials and their parties can be held responsible for failure to prevent an attack — as the Aznar government in Spain was following the Madrid train bombings — information pertaining to pending threats may also be released to protect governments from future liability. Following every major attack in a democratic nation, there is always an investigation that seeks to determine who knew what about the threat and when. Making threat information public can spare politicians from falling victim to a witch hunt.

Alternatively, some suggest that French authorities are being pressured to make such warnings to distract the public from domestic problems and Sarkozy’s low popularity. Many also believe the French government has been using its campaign against the Roma as such a distraction. Sarkozy, widely perceived as law-and-order oriented and tough on crime and terrorism, is indeed struggling politically. While the current warnings may provide such a beneficial distraction for Sarkozy, it is our assessment that the terrorist threat to France is very real, and is not being fabricated for political purposes.

Warnings also can be issued in an effort to pre-empt an attack. In cases in which authorities have intelligence that a plot is in the works, but insufficient information to identify the plotters or make arrests, announcing that a plot has been uncovered and security has been increased is seen as a way to discourage a planned attack. With the devolution of the jihadist threat from one based upon a central al Qaeda group to one based upon regional franchises, small cells and lone wolves, it is more difficult to gather intelligence that indicates the existence of these diverse actors, much less information pertaining to their intent and capabilities. In such a murky environment, threat information is often incomplete at best.

Whatever Squarcini’s motive, his warning should serve to shake the French public out of the alert fatigue associated with spending five years at the red level. This should cause the public (and cops on the beat) to increase their situational awareness and report suspicious behavior. The suspicious package seen at the Gare Saint-Lazare on Monday may well have been reported as a result of this increased awareness.

As the jihadist threat becomes almost as diffuse as the criminal threat, ordinary citizens who practice good situational awareness are an increasingly important national security resource — a complex network of eyeballs and brains that Squarcini may have been attempting to activate with his warning. With the burqa ban scheduled to begin next spring, French troops in Afghanistan and the ongoing conflict with AQIM, the threats are likely to continue for the near term — meaning France will remain on alert.

This was quite interesting:

Squarcini has noted in recent interviews that the combination of France’s history as a colonial power, its military involvement in Afghanistan and the impending French ban on veils that cover the full face and body (niqabs and burqas) combined to influence this threat environment.

making it sound as if France were to pull its troops out of Afghanistan and repeal its ban on nigabs and burqas, the terrorist threat would be reduced. But, sigh, if France were to do that, then the terrorists would win.

But, if the French government deemed that the lives of French citizens were of more value than the "victory" that would be claimed by "the terrorists" for getting a country to repeal it's nationally mandated dress code (and while they were at it, to let girls wear head scarves in schools again) then rescinding the ban would make sense.

Supposedly the French equivalents of the Rush Limbaughs and Charles Krauthammers who would go apoplectic, and that wouldn't do. And heaven forbid that a nation remove its military from a country of one of America's many chosen wars, why, that would mean loss of face and disgrace for the U.S.A. even though it would make French soldiers safer.

In the final analysis, France is clearly overdue for a successful jihadist attack, and has been overdue for several years now. Perhaps the only thing that has spared the country has been a combination of proactive, skillful police and intelligence work — the kind that resulted in the thwarted attempts discussed above — and a little bit of luck.

Then too, perhaps the only things making France "clearly overdue for a successful jihadist attack" have been the decisions of the French government to support the U.S. long war against Muslim nations and to stir up anger and resentment amongst its Muslim populations by banning dress codes expressing a deep and abiding belief in the traditions of Islam.

Consider the reaction of French citizens to a law that banned the wearing of crosses.

And this:

France has a significant Muslim minority largely segregated in slums known in French as “banlieues” outside France’s major cities. A significant proportion of the young Muslim men who live in these areas are unemployed and disaffected.

To be an unemployed Muslim is to be in violation of the Koran's strictures. Perhaps the French government ought to seek solutions to this particular unemployment situation. That too might go a long ways towards lessening the terrorist threat.

Sexual Politics

The spring cleaning, 1992 project continues. Within the past 12 months, I watched Doris Day and David Niven starring in the Movie Please Don't Eat the Daisies. Heard these interesting bits of conversation that I transcribed:

DD: Interesting people don't want to meet housewives.

DN: Oh darling, you're so much more than a housewife.

DD: I know darling. So is every housewife.

That was 1960, merely 50 years ago. Things were different then, in so many many ways. For example, Joe Baegent notes:

Social Security is a raw deal for most women who have worked and paid into it all their lives.

The trouble is that the program was designed to serve 1930s-style households, where two-thirds of wives stayed home while their husbands worked. Yet nowadays, only one in five wives stays home, and two-thirds of couples are "dual earners," most likely because it takes two jobs to pay for housing, or to live the Martha Steward pie-in-the-sky lifestyle -- or at least nibble around the edges. You might think that a woman who retires after punching the time clock and paying into Social Security year after year would come out better, or at least not worse, than a stay-at-home ife who has hit retirement age. You wold be wrong though: Married working women who pay Social Security taxes receive no more benefits from Soci8al Security than women who have never paid a dime into the program.

Here's how it plays out: A stay-at-home wife who retires can claim "spousals benefits" amounting to 50 percent of the benefits of her husband. The system treats her decently because it was created in 1935, when her situation was the norm. The married working woman has a choice when she retires. She can claim benefits based on her own lifetime earnings or she can choose the spousal benefit, whichever is higher. More likely than not, because she earned less than her husband, she will choose to claim half of her husbands benefits -- the same benefit as the married woman who didn't work. ... Researchers at the National Center for Policy Analysis have come up with some startling numbers: "If the second spouse in a couple comprised of two high school educated twenty-five-year-olds enters the workforce and works full-time, the couple's expected lifetime taxes increase 74 percent, but their benefits will increase only 17 percent."

Older women depend on Social Security more than men ... They represent 67 percent of all people drawing Social Security, 27 million altogether. Twenty-four million of them live entirely on a Social Security check that is often below the official poverty level, especially those entering the program after living their entire lives below the poverty level. Only 13 percent of older women who draw Social Security have additional income...

But, let us return to Don't Eat the Daisies:

DD: Cheer up darling, The worst is over.

DD: How about you Maggie? [Maggie is their maid / housekeeper / domestic] Do you think the worst is over?

MAGGIE: It hasn't even begun.

In order for FDR to get support of Southern Senators to pass the initial Social Security, he had to agree that the program would NOT cover domestics and farm laborers. After all, they were mostly ... well, of a different skin pigmentation than the general population.

But back a bit of back and forth banter between David Niven and Doris Day serving as a harbinger for the present era of the McMansion:

DD: How come it's so big?

DN: Because we couldn't afford anything smaller.

Here's the lyrics to a Herbert Magidson (lyrics) Harold Sigmon (music writer) song popularized by Guy Lombardo: Enjoy Yourself (It's Later Than You Think), that ought to cheer us all up, while simultaneously providing food for thought. The Guy Lombardo version was on the Billboard chart (as it was then known) for 19 weeks. Ironically, Doris Day too made a recording of this tune in 1950/

You work and work for years and years, you're always on the go
You never take a minute off, too busy makin' dough
Someday, you say, you'll have your fun, when you're a millionaire
Imagine all the fun you'll have in your old rockin' chair

Enjoy yourself, it's later than you think
Enjoy yourself, while you're still in the pink
The years go by, as quickly as a wink
Enjoy yourself, enjoy yourself, it's later than you think

You're gonna take that ocean trip, no matter, come what may
You've got your reservations made, but you just can't get away
Next year for sure, you'll see the world, you'll really get around
But how far can you travel when you're six feet underground?

Your heart of hearts, your dream of dreams, your ravishing brunette
She's left you and she's now become somebody else's pet
Lay down that gun, don't try, my friend, to reach the great beyond
You'll have more fun by reaching for a redhead or a blonde

Enjoy yourself, it's later than you think
Enjoy yourself, while you're still in the pink
The years go by, as quickly as a wink
Enjoy yourself, enjoy yourself, it's later than you think

That which we all should know

After all, war is murder you know
George Seldes

Give us this day, our daily buttered bread

All of my favorite writers, Dave Somersby, Larry Pinkney, Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn and Joe Baegent have made this point: There are no substantial differences between the Republican and Democratic parties.

I just finished reading Deer Hunting With Jesus: Dispatches from America's Class War by Joe Baegent. Here's how Joe poingniantly puts it:

Republican or Democrat, this nation's affluent urban and suburban classes understand their bread is buttered on the corporate side. The primary difference between the two parties is that the Republicans pretty much admit that they grasp and even endorse some of the nastiest facts of life in America. Republicans honestly tell the world: "listen in on my phone calls, piss-test me until I'm blind, kill and eat all of my neighbors right in front of my eyes, but show me the money! Let me escape with ever cent I can kick out of the suckers, the taxpayers, and anybody else I can get a headlock on, legally or otherwise." Democrats, in contrast, seem content to catalog the GOP's outrages against the Republic, showing proper indignation while laughing at episodes of The Daily Show. But they stand behind the American brand: imperialism. They "support our troops," though you will be hard put to find any of them who have served alongside them or who would send one of their own kids off to lose and eye or an arm in Iraq. They play the imperial game, maintain their credit ratings, and plan to keep the beach house and the retirement investments if it means sacrificing every damned Lynndie England in West Virginia.

Yes, I'll have some of that corporate-buttered bread too, please. Some jam would be nice also.

As an actuary, my job was: to count the sick, to count the dead, to raise the premium rates on the aged and the infirm, and to help design and price manipulative products to be sold by the unscrupulous to the unwary. Or, at least that's how I have come to tell my story, because it makes the swallowing the pill of the lost financial fortune that could have been mine easier to swallow.

Portents of the End of the World as We Know it

Sometimes, you read something and say to yourself, "What's this world coming to?"

Until you remember hearing a legendary story involving a teen aged boy "shooting the moon" and dropping the load out the window of a moving vehicle. That story came from your high school days, and you also know that, if the story is true, the moon-shooting-load-dropper also grew up to be an attorney.

So, what else is new?

As reported in a local pioneer press article:

Police: Woman relieved herself, hit car


September 21, 2010

By MATT KIEFER mkiefer@pioneerlocal.com

Deerfield police are investigating a strange case of public indecency and a hit-and-run crash reported Sept. 13 at Takeda Pharmaceuticals.

At 6:23 a.m., rooftop surveillance cameras recorded an unidentified woman drive into the front parking lot of the company property, 1 Takeda Parkway, then get out of her car and then defecate and urinate on company property.

Two security guards who responded said they parked their vehicle behind the woman's car, but that she put the car into reverse and struck their car before driving to the Lake-Cook Road exit. Company security reported she disobeyed two red lights on her way to the Interstate 294 tollway southbound entrance.

Reports describe the car as a red 2002 Jeep Liberty.

If arrested, the woman could be charged with public indecency, leaving the scene of a vehicle damage crash, disorderly conduct and failure to obey a traffic control device, according to reports.

The attention grabbing aspect here is that this was done by a WOMAN! Just what IS it they use in those Takeda Pharmaceuticals?

Does this story dampen the impact of one of Jerry Lembke's arguments that the stories of returning Vietnam Veterans being spat upon by anti-war protesters are more urban legend than actual fact? (He states that the only instances of Vietnam Veterans being spat upon occurred when they were walking in anti-war marches, although Ron Kovic writes of being spat upon at the 1972 Republican National Convention in Miami when he and several other wheel-chair bound veterans tried to take the stage during Nixon's inauguration.)

Lembke's rebuttal is short. In most of these stories, a dirty hippie chick does the spitting. Lembke says "girls don't spit."

Interestingly, former Secretary of Defense Robert MacNamara writes that he too was spat on at a Washington D.C. restuarant during the days of the protest.

So it comes down to who do you believe? The real living hero, John Rambo, or some skinny sociologist?

Valley of the Gun -- an 11 percent error rate

Got a phone call today from some opinion taker. Should probably never answer these in that I don't know who is paying for the questions to be asked, nor to what use will be put the answers. The man did have my name, however. Lord only knows where he got it.

Three questions:

(1) Are you registered to vote? YES
(2) With what party do you identify yourself, Democratic, Republican, Independent? SOCIALIST
(3) Are you pro-choice or pro-life. Well, since it ain't never gonna be a choice I personally have to make, I go for "pro-choice." [And I've got several stories where the issue arose, and I was not an entirely disaffected party.]

More and more, I've come to view self-anointed "liberals" as feckless. Some rare exceptions in the political arena - Dennis Kucinich, Alan Grayson, Barbara Boxer, Cynthia McKinney.

Am presently reading, among other books, Deer Hunting With Jesus: Dispatches From America's Class War by my favorite socialist, Joe Baegent.

When it comes to gun control, even credible sources such as the Government Accounting Office cannot get media coverage. What never makes the news are facts such as these from the National Institute of Justice (the research arm of the Department of Justice) and GAO reports on firearms:

Citizens use guns to defend themselves against criminals as many as 2.5 million times every year -- or about 6,850 times a day. Eachy year firearms are used sixty times more often to protect the lives of citizens than to take lives. The majority of these citzens defend themselves by brandishing their wepons or firing a warning shot. Citizens shoot and kill twice as many criminals as police do every year (1,527 to 606). Only two percent of civilian shootings involved an innocent person mistakenly identified as a criminal. By contrast, the error rate for the police officers is eleven percent.

Walked again late tonight

(edited this on October 24)


Walked again, late tonight.
Up the road, northbound, past the elementary grade school
where Carnival weekend ended earlier, at 6 p.m.,
Except for the carnies, who must take it all down,
and pack it all up, before they can trek South.

Could almost swear I heard the mysterious sounds
of the spirit voices of teenagers, too old now
to be seen at a carnival for "the little" kids.
But sensed that the spirit voices still had
a tiny longing to be there once again,
to experience the wonderment and joy that carnivals bring
to young boys maybe young girls too, when first they ride
those oh so big machines, not the least embarrassed
to be clutching very close to the side
of dad; probably even mom too would do.
Or maybe it's just me I heard - missing the days
when Adam was younger, and smaller, and I might loomed
large, like Homer Simpson, a pretty big presence in his life.

Farther north, farther beyond the school, things got
eerily quiet. No dogs barking, no cars driving by,
no skunks, no coyotes, no raccoons - to be seen,
nor to be heard. Lights out save for the occasional
home with a TV light glowing in an otherwise dark room.

Turned around to come back.
And I wondered why the Ferris Wheel is missing?
Can it really be a carnival with no Ferris Wheel?

Cloudy skies, didn't even glimmer the moon until
I got back to the school. No tangerine moon tonight,
no way no how. Chalk white moon, moon beams barely
peeking through but when they do, eerily slipping through
the darkness of cloud cover. Saw one star only.

Is it always like this when summer slips away?

In Rockford, irony was once alive

One of life's wonderful pleasure is to have friends whose company you enjoy. I first met Tom and Raeanne when they were students in one of my bridge classes. They had come with another couple, Lynne and Bill. After going through several of my eight week programs, Tom spoke this complaint to me - that they were all the worst card holders in the world. I said "this is impossible," but he persisted, so I took the bait: "How about if I come over and watch to see if this is true." They eagerly agreed, and so I observed them the very next Friday night.

Tom dropped an "F" bomb, but that just meant, I was among my own kind. What was stunning was that Tom had spoken truth: they all were individually and collectively the worst card holders I had ever seen, and I had to tell them as much. Which somehow soothed and reaffirmed their convictions. Thus, continued to sign up for my classes. Tom particularly loved the class on preemptive bidding - or, how to bid a lot with a little.

"It's all about shape," Tom was fond of saying (and still is). "Fits take tricks baby." Yes, that too.

After Raeanne and Bill retired, and they invited me to play a regular weekly afternoon home game with them and a partner of my choosing. Thus I had an opportunity to invite many of my students to join us.

After Bill and Lynne split up, I was the logical replacement for their regular Friday night game and leaped at opportunity; we had a lot in common, and as wonderful as it was being a weekend warrior dad to my son and his three cousins, I needed to expand my social horizons. Tom and I decided that in our health interests (and acknowledging the lack of will power we both shared) the snacks had to go, so, it was just bridge, beverage, competition, and laughter.

Three of Tom's stories have become my favorites, and I periodically asked him to retell them because he does it so well, even though Raeanne eyes invariably roll. One is about the Christmas tree his fraternity commandeered one year. There is another fraternity story, the specifics of which I can't divulge, other than to say that as outgoing fraternity treasurer in his senior year, after a boisterous toga party, Tom left a short memo to the incoming treasurer to faithfully pay a certain $5.00 monthly bill, and to ask no questions about it.

My favorite is the story about how Tom and a buddy got the idea (and almost had it implemented) to pay for putting up a sign on the West Jefferson Street Bridge, in Rockford, Illinois. The sign, initially approved by the "powers-that-be," contained this warning: In Rockford, suicide is redundant.

Eventually, someone must have determined that this was not an anti-suicide slogan. But if nothing else, we know that for one brief shining moment: In Rockford, irony was alive.

Went a'walkin' tonight

Went a'walkin' tonight
And the moon looked just like
A tangerine slice
Standing ripe and upright
on a phantom table top
above the house tops
and the tree line
in the Western sky

Meditation: We always have the choice

We always have the choice:

To let life's circumstances
make us hard,
make us increasingly resentful
and afraid,
or to let them soften us,
and make us kinder.

This wisdom is always available
but we often block it out
with habitual patterns
rooted in fear.
Beyond that fear lies
a state of open-heartedness
and tenderness.

Awaken innate basic goodness
and connect with others;
cultivate loving-kindness,
compassion, joy and equanimity.
Accept all complete with their
faults and imperfections.
Stay in the present moment.
Confess your hidden faults.
Approach that which repulses you.
Help those you think
cannot be helped.
Those things you are attached to,
let them go.
Go to places that scare you.

Why democratic candidates are allowed to sometimes hold the office of POTUS

Phil Rockstroh has written an elegant, poetic, beautiful must read piece titled, Part Tinker Bell, Part Predator Drone: The Fantasy of the Presidency as Deus ex Machina which explains and indicts the presidencies of Obama and Clinton and their embrace of their true constituencies - the corporate oligarchs.

Obama and the Democrats do not move. They do not act. They do not govern. They do not serve their constituents.

Although, in reality, they do serve their true constituents ... the corporate elite -- the forces behind the rising level of authoritarian control over the lives of the people of the nation, both of ordinary citizens and the political class.

In situations of veiled coercion, where unspoken threats to one's economic security and social standing are the primary motivating factors determining an individual's response to an exploitive system, there is no need to threaten potential dissenters with crude, old school totalitarian methods of repression such as forced deportment to labor and reeducation camps. In the class stratified, debt shackled US work force, where the personal consequences of financial upheaval are devastating, the implicit threat of being cast into the nation's urban gulag archipelago of homelessness coerces most into compliance with the dictates of the corporate oligarchs.

The effects are insidious. In such an environment, there is no call for the Sturm und Drang of mass spectacle, replete with blazing torches and blown banners hoisted by serried ranks of jut jawed, jack-booted ubermensch: corporatism establishes an authoritarian order by way of a series of overt bribes and tacit threats. This social and cultural criteria causes an individual to become cautious. A Triumph of the bland reigns. Obama's bland, non-threatening charm was cultivated in this hybrid, corporate soil.

As is the case with Obama, corporatism demands employees (and Obama is first among us underlings) render themselves fecklessly pleasant. This is the mandatory mode of being demanded of corporate hires -- self-annihilation by habitual amiability. And Barack Obama has perfected the form.

In his memoir, Dreams From My Father, Obama stated that he learned early: Never scare old, white people ... that is a good description of how he has dealt with BP and the banksters, and all the other old white men in their perches of privilege and power.

Obama, as was the case with Bill Clinton, will not challenge the corporate oligarchs. Both he and Clinton are gifted, intelligent men, but are products of their time. They are men of, what was once termed, "modest birth" who -- out necessity to rise past the circumstances of their origins -- studied, internalized, and made allegiance to the corporate structure. Why? Because, in the age of corporate oligarchy, they knew the only way to rise to power would be to serve its interests. In contrast, FDR came from the ruling class; he knew their ways ... wasn't tempted by the rewards and adulation that come with privilege. He was born into it, could never lose its advantages, and it held no novelty for him.

I'm not positing Clinton was simply a shallow narcissist, as was a fashionable invective aimed at his hulking frame and over-sized persona during his tenure as POTUS ... such palaver was so much shadow projection on the part of the vampiric careerists of the Washington-New York nexus of blood-sucking media undead. Rather, Clinton was a big talent. He was Byronic in his expansive nature. And like Byron he could claim, in all honesty, he could love a thousand women (and not only women, but varieties of constituents) in a thousand different ways, all at once. He was a romantic at heart in an age of crackpot realists. He was a large presence in a small-minded time. And this is how his trouble in the 1990s, and ours, in the present time, began.

When the Cold War ended, and the arrogant fantasies of neoliberal capitalism were ascendant, virtuoso of the zeitgeist that Clinton was, his prodigious wings caught those heady updrafts and he took the nation on an Icarian flight of Reaganesque economic deregulation, that would, later, contribute to the spiraling fall -- known, at present, as "the economic downturn."

Clinton could have used some saturnine apprehension regarding the dark side of capitalism, rather than the intoxication gained from the provisional, mutually serving alliances he made with his Wall Street bubble salesmen buddies, Rubin, Summers, and Geithner.

For anyone with eyes to see, the reason democrats are permitted to become presidents is primarily so that they can continue to dismantle the support programs put into place to shore up the poor, the elderly, the disabled, by FDR and LBJ. Watch Obama reduce social security benefits (by raising the age). It's virtually a done deal, whether or not the democrats retain their majorities in the house and senate.

IOKIADDI


It's Okay if a democrat does it.

Setting a dangerous precedent in dealing with non-substantive issues

Writing at Counterpunch, Esam Al-Amin makes some essential points about the current controversy created by a pipsqueak of a pastor of a pipsqeak of a congregation threatening to burn the Qur'an. Al-Amin cites further examples of how insulting acts committed typically by obscure figures of the West have been seized upon and exploited by Muslim leaders to inflame Muslims around the world.

Western officials, from Gen. David Petraeus, NATO and UN Secretary Generals, to Hillary Clinton, Robert Gates and Obama, all rushed to condemn the Qur’an burning threat, further raising the profile of the fanatic pastor. While it’s commendable that such high government officials would issue strong denunciations, their involvement sets a dangerous precedent in dealing with a non-substantive issue.

Muslim leaders need to realize that Obama cannot stop the burning of the Qur’an on constitutional grounds, but surely he can reverse many policies that have been in place since 9/11 that trample on the civil rights of American Muslims. Preemptive prosecutions, government-concocted conspiracies, shutting down legitimate charities, the use of agent provocateurs, infiltration of mosques, and the establishment of fusion centers and communication management units are but few examples of the real war on American Muslims.

...

The U.S. was neither attacked by Islam nor by a global Muslim conspiracy on 9/11.It was attacked by Al-Qaeda, a fringe group condemned by the overwhelming majority of Muslims around the world shortly after the attacks. At least 64 American Muslims died on that day. Their families and friends felt as much pain as every other victim’s relatives. American Muslims have thus been victimized twice, once by Al-Qaeda, but more so every week by the Islamophobes and their political hacks. These political opportunists must be exposed and rejected.

The threat to burn Qur’ans exposed everyone. Muslim leaders must change their approach and not confront every foolish insult coming their way. These are tactical distractions that waste energy and resources. If they have to demonstrate they should protest against policies that target their communities and violate their civil and political rights.

Esam Al-Amin's article reflects an important sense of proportion, similar to that cited by Bob Somersby at the Daily Howler.

Choose your battles wisely. You can't win them all, many you don't even have to fight.