|
|
| Recent Blogs (flitered by selection in "List of Blogs")
|
|
|
By Tom on
3/21/2010 9:32 AM
This morning my wife and I discussed arithmetic. I’d tossed a book on sets and the new math, she’d read about fibonacci numbers, and then of course there is Richard Feynman and his reverence for time as in you cannot count it. Mainly I was thinking about a granddaughter who dislikes “math”, as in a class where you have to do decimals. So I quoted a brother who has pointed out that base ten is not the only scheme for writing down a number. There is for example the binary scheme in which a hundred years would be written 0010011. Wow, just think of a people with one finger on each hand that marked a century with oooneoooneone! Gimme five, for heaven’s sake. And what would the “fifties” be called? Well, okay, the point is that counting with base ten may be as natural as the nose on your face, but it’s entirely arbitrary: take away those two god-given fives and who knows what scheme would evolve for writing a number. Let that sink in a while, good menwomen of Vashon, and then let me remind Fox News and all its bigoted...
Read More »
|
By Tom on
3/19/2010 7:29 AM
A letter signed by the US Attorney General, Secretary of Defense, and head of the CIA in 2004 told the 9/11 Commission it could not interview detained suspects. Dear fellow islanders, we are living a lie. Roughly one quarter of the US population knows that an inconceivable crime had been committed by our own government yet buries that knowledge and daily acts the patriotic role. The letter was obtained by the ACLU under the freedom of information act and posted today on my net by one of the "Truthers". This revelation raises the question of sanity, yours, mine, and every last hapless addict of the good life. I am going to finish out this day as usual, and the next, because if I do not I will make my family miserable. Et tu, Dennis Kucinich, and I'm right behind you.
Read More »
|
By Tom on
3/14/2010 9:55 AM
Jim Page has written a ballad called I'd Rather Be Dancing, subtitled above. It's more hypnotic than musical, but the video that he or somebody tacked onto it is powerful.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pTB1f_EW_Uw
Maybe I just could not catch the words. He mumbles. No matter, at the end I found myself fixed in my seat staring vacantly at the monitor, stunned by a moral sledgehammer to my soul, our complicity in that bulldozer. Getting on this Ides of March, it occurs that upon watching the video Vashon might forget its sushi and high school football long enough to take a long hard look at the moral squeeze we are in. Vashon could make a difference, not only here, but nationally by taking and defending a position of accountability for barbarism in our name. Clumsy words but I hope you get the idea.
...
Read More »
|
By Tom on
3/13/2010 11:29 AM
I think I am still safe on my high moral ground thinking that any improvement in national health care is impossible, that our best course is to invent it here on our hardpan. However this position is continually being undermined by well-regarded progressives and pundits who insist, pound even, on incorporation of a public option. For example, an otherwise excellent post in today's firedoglake by Scarecrow says the PO could eventually force the insurance industry out of healthcare.
http://seminal.firedoglake.com/diary/author/scarecrow
I say the PO, enacted, would fail. Quel doleur! I am shattered. I am made out to be the bowel movement of defeat in the punchbowl of progress. My head spins over the behind trying to figure how anybody could think the industry will let a few dreamers turn off the golden spigot. Up is down, black is white, good people are wrong. People, people, the public option is, was, and will be a red herring that will shoehorn the single payer freight off the rails of progress....
Read More »
|
By Tom on
3/12/2010 10:44 AM
Two week's accumulation got dealt with today between my wake-up coffee and my ten o clock oatmeal. Local news took priority and was spared the prima facie delete. Much of the local news was from our own Bill Moyer, forming a veritable packet, or more elegantly, The Backbone ad hoc was an activist's bulletin board. Surprised and pleased by the strength of local interest in shaping up to live right, I found an odd omission in the neo-PUD called WisEnergy. This local initiative promotes insulation, investment in non-coal energy, and installation of photoelectric panels. Nada solar hot water. I have a solar hot water kit from Ottawa certified by the Canadian govt for rebate that provides 40% of tap water needs while using no heat exchangers, no pumps, and no controller, and is freeze-safe. Cost was $3000. How come? And while I'm at it, how come solar hot water on Vashon is as popular as a state income tax?
Read More »
|
By Tom on
3/10/2010 8:55 AM
Any interest in this subject is welcome, and the current by Dan Schumacher very much so (see March 9 VMIGP agenda). As a disabled veteran of the great non-events of 2008 and 2009 I herewith add two cents. The first is that reading the principal authors of books on the subject gets one ahead much faster than individual journeys into the web. Viz: William Greider, Ellen Brown, Bernard Lietaer, Tom Greco. The second is that the topic is so branching, so bottomless, so, so, uh, sticky, that no amount of study gets one ahead faster than hands on experience. This is why my project at the outset dropped the idea of study and proposed instead a fifty person six month trial of a working currency based in Bellingham. I still think that should be done and that it would be an invaluable contribution to study at Vashon College. Final comment, a bad penny perhaps, be careful with the word currency. To the extent that a narrow meaning is conveyed so is the main benefit of a community currency forgone: the main benefit is a...
Read More »
|
By Tom on
3/9/2010 9:47 AM
While many of you are bravely manwomaning the bully pulpit, the trenches, the streets, or the odd freeway overpass in the cause of salvation I in contrast recede into a morass of despair. I have followed the guidance of Chris Hedges to comprehension yet slacked off on his command to fight anyway. As they say in the shipyard, my purchase on the ascent to salvation is two-blocked. Yep, I’m a late comer to reality. I want off. Like that character in the Michener book, a pottery expert who got wrapped up in Zionism (The Source?). One day she had had it and decided to go back to Chicago and just be a woman. Well, I just want to stay in my workshop helping my wife do stuff. The reason I did not title this post after Michener, some cute phrase combining pottery and sex, is that for years I have been irritated by those freeway advisories for next exit that read “Tourist Activities”. Finally, here’s a chance to ridicule those signs. I need to piddle away some time. I want to pretend for a day or so that everything will...
Read More »
|
By Tom on
2/28/2010 7:42 PM
The following went to the Loop Feb 28 At the present time true healthcare at the national level is impossible because what is called reform is hampered not only by the immense power of the established way but also by a warped idea of what health care is. The following describes the warp and goes on to suggest an about face alternative for Vashon. As now practiced, “healthcare” is insurance against failure of our health. Like auto insurance it pays for repair. Like auto insurance costs rise relentlessly as technology inexorably finds new ways for drugs and surgery to muck about with God’s image. Like auto insurance the primary objective is profit. Consequently, when a community attempts to wrest control from the insurance industry it finds itself a pauper in an expensive hightech system. It dosn’t have to be that way. The community has two powerful concepts with which to bring about sensible healthcare for its members. They are community currency and preventive care. These will be sketched followed by...
Read More »
|
By Tom on
2/24/2010 8:19 AM
As 2010, two-oh, one-oh, rhymes with Apolo Ohno, gropes its way onward my gut revolts. The feeling is somewhat like one gets from television when some inane clip is repeated like a dripping faucet. But the images and words that have me this morning were not on television and were not inane. Nor were they strictly repetitious, as the details were new. I had thought I could read carefully for ever, but my gut revolts. I know that hundreds upon thousands upon hundreds of people are being killed and worse because of high muckety muck planning. I know that children are being thrust into hell not youth. I know that veterans are being discarded like used cars. I know that we are being lied to as a matter of course. I have needed to read the daily versions of these, these, demonic churnings because I was writing a weekly column and could tell myself I was doing my part in protest. And yes, I read before as well, but that was before the full force of the enormity of evil hit me. I would jokingly refer to the unfolding...
Read More »
|
By Tom on
2/23/2010 8:56 AM
The first characterization of nondollar money is that it’s anything but funny. What it is, is endlessly fascinating. Money, as you know, trumps political theory, morals, religion, economics, and gunpowder. Money controls society the way blood controls the body. And that control resides with the issuer, just like the genie in the bottle said. Alternate currency is a poor name, instead try alternate existence. Also, you may want to think twice about entering into a study of money for if you start you will never finish. Take Tom Greco. He’s not finished yet, and I wish he would finish so he can end his serial bookage. Vashon needs funny money primarily for the blood reason and also against hyperinflation. You see, we are already ill, and the flood of corruption from Wall Street, Pentagon and Congress here in Vashon is still a trickle. Illness symptoms divide into the physical and the mental. The long semis carting off wastewater and short semis carting off unprocessed solid waste are prominent lumps in the ferry...
Read More »
|
|
| |
|
|
|
|