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By Tom on
3/28/2010 9:45 AM
You’ll have noticed that in its effort to trigger a flood of comment and consequent mass action, this blog tends towards pontification and polemic. Sorry about that, as I would prefer a lighter touch. But I’m over-educated, and my paternal grandfather was head of the Congregational Church, two obstacles to poesy. Today the noted tendency is in full force due to a pair of articles floated across Puget Sound by Stand Up Seattle and caught by Maryrose Asher. The combined effect is devastating. Socialist Barry Grey writes of the health bill (death pill) that in essence it is a means for mass impoverishment, a regressive law rammed through congress in spite of scattered opposition and aided by total confusion. Canadian Chris Benjamin has totted up pandemic and irreversible health, yea even survival, problems caused by US wars in Indo China, the Middle East, and South Asia. Images of deformed babies, ruined crop lands, and anarchy at home torment my hours. And surely as they do for some islanders. As for example...
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By Tom on
3/26/2010 8:45 AM
As the aftershocks of healthcare deform continue, the truth of the matter seems to have emerged. According to letters from Ralph Nader and Jon Walker, president Obama last year had cut a deal with the insurance industry to prevent a public option. According to these letters, president Obama has lied to us. Let’s say you and I accept as true that unthinkable travesty because I want to pile on some more bad news in order to make a seamless case for my point today. Here’s the pile: One learns in today’s news that the recent loss of bee hives in fact is due to pesticides, that US funded death squads operate in Indonesia, that the Senate is taking recess without funding unemployment insurance, that Colombia’s US funded drug operation is poisoning the fields of peasants who are out of line, and that Alan Simpson has been called up from the political trash heap to whittle away at Medicare and Social Security.
The pile was heating itself up last evening as I watched the “Nature” show on a PBS fundraiser. It was...
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By Tom on
3/23/2010 7:46 AM
For about two years now it has become apparent to some that all attempts by progressives , whether on the street or at the ballot box, to rein in the malfeasance of US administrations will continue to fail. It has become apparent that the process should in a sense be reversed, that the attempts should be directed by locals at localities: united locals will be the only survivors and the better protestors. Rhetoric! It's me, it's me, oh lord, standin' in the need of prayer. Do I believe that things are that bad? Chris Hedges does, get a load of this excerpt: Zero Point Of Systemic Collapse By Chris Hedges 19 March, 2010 "Aleksandr Herzen, speaking a century ago to a group of anarchists about how to overthrow the czar, reminded his listeners that it was not their job to save a dying system but to replace it: “We think we are the doctors. We are the disease.” All resistance must recognize that the body politic and global capitalism are dead. We should stop wasting energy trying to reform or appeal to it. This...
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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...
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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.
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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.
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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....
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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?
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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...
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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...
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