By Tom on 9/21/2008 12:31 PM

  All it took to make me hit the epiphany button was one look at Kevin Phillips’ face last Friday on television. Now, before listening to me belabor the epiphany, permit a correction: the “stock market” is just the portion of the financial sector you can smell. What Phillips was trying to swallow was the entire enchilada. I’ll now labor to rise above mismetaphor in order to think on survival of the consumers in the feed lot. No cutting nor slicing of the current financial salami makes it comprehensible to me the public. Both pundits and fundits mislead us into thinking that there is a financial explanation of, if not solution to, this uh, let’s face it, tsulami. There isn’t. What masquerades as explanation is a laundry list of symptoms. The true explanation is that when we went off the wampum standard we set off on a “dark and unknown road” (Steve Fraser). Okay it was gold, but I’m trying to make a point. What passes for a dollar these days is somewhere between a memory and a figment. If you want to read the...

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By Tom on 9/20/2008 5:53 PM

Rachael Carson had spun a silken trap when she exposed the danger of pesticides, the trap of the Ten Commandments, the trap of thou shalt not. Rachael Carson died before she could envision a positive way to stop pesticide use. For the context and actual wording of that judgement read Adam Werbach’s 2004 speech titled Is Environmentalism Dead?. In this he chronicles the birth (by Carson) and death (by Commandment) of the environmental movement. Inherently negative, the trap also narrowed the environmentalist view in the way that a medical specialist begins a diagnosis narrowed to that specialty. And narrowness was double trouble for it not only took problems out of context but invited corporations to label environmentalism a special interest. The result has been ever-expanding aggrandizement by the establishment and ever-blind scooping of establishment poop by the movement. The initial victories of the Clean Air and Water Acts, the Endangered Species Act, and the EPA, are being reversed. Praise Carson and pray...

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By Tom on 9/9/2008 6:27 AM

This is the first of a hoped-for study of all US elections that asks whether the will of the people had any effect on the result. Thanks to Gore Vidal, 1876 was picked to start the series.

The Election of 1876 In the fall of 1876, three years after having shot itself in the foot, the Establishment called in witch doctors to fix the festering sore of the worst depression in US history. Fix to Establishment satisfaction is what developed, but the turnaround did soon follow. The initial phase of the fix was to get the Democratic House to vote against the Democratic winner of the popular vote for president. The shot in the foot was the panic of 1873, triggered by over-expansion of graft in railroad development. The situation in 1876 has been described as follows: “It was a depression year, the worst year of the severest depression yet experienced. In the East labor and the unemployed were in a bitter and violent temper…Out West a tide of agrarian radicalism was rising…. From both East and West came threats...

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By Tom on 9/7/2008 7:19 AM

From Greener Times September 7, 2008 In the old days a man catching up with the news would pluck the early edition from under his left arm and after a quick check above the fold flip to an inside page. There he would do a “commuter” fold that reduced the newspaper to a quarter of a page, tuck in his elbows, and read. His seat neighbor was doing the same and their elbows never bumped. Neither was driving, of course, for where I grew up everybody took the train to work. Today I catch up on this screen here and compare what it says with what Brian Williams said last night, a comparison made difficult by origination in different planets. I tuck in my elbows to still the vertigo. A boatload of sympathizers returned from Gaza safely having run the Israeli blockade; a nearby Palestinian boat was not so fortunate. The US has turned the Anbar Province back to the Iraqis, explaining that it is now peaceful, implying a trend. (No oil there?) Five e-mails from the police, city, county and RNC have responded to my signing...

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By Tom on 8/28/2008 7:47 PM

Thank you, thank you, thank you. I didn’t think I’d make it -- thank you. I bring a report card for the American people, for us Democrats, and for Congress. It may come as a surprise, but that cannot be helped. The United States is being destroyed. This is the work of a force as old as history that is both human and not-human, a force expressed by humans but without human conscience. It grieves me to report that against this force the land of the free has proven to be defenseless. Let me explain. The declaration of independence from England was written by businessmen, and the ensuing war was sustained by the emotional strength of one man. Following the war the South brought slaves to conquer swamps that whites would not enter, while the North nearly enslaved children in factories and tenants on land holdings. Slavery gave the south an unfair economic advantage which irritated the North so that when the West opened war became inevitable. Reconstruction of the South sought markets for the North but brought lasting...

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By Tom on 8/17/2008 10:52 AM

The  2008 Context:

China 3,897,000 sq mi    US 3,022,000 sq mi China has no oil. The US intends to have all the oil. Solomon, where are you? The stable limit of atmospheric carbon dioxide is 380 ppm. Germany has reduced emissions. The US has not. China is increasing its emissions. Meanwhile the stable limit has been reached and the world drives on the brink. The US corporation-police complex is arming with an array of new crowd control weapons. Prison incarceration is at world record heights. The Democratic convention is putting in place special measures to detain protestors. American flags are being printed on solid surfaces and embroidered into our clothing. Is the flag fireproof now? Breast cancer strikes most US families yet the only countermeasure is mammogram/surgery/chemo. There is no concerted effort on cause and prevention. Does it occur to anyone that industry is profiting by pressing upon us poisons in food, poisons in clothing, poisons in packaging, poisons in personal care?...

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By Tom on 8/17/2008 9:28 AM

From Greener Times Aug 17, 2008.  Cat on a hot tin roof is an exaggeration of this column's state of mind, but it's the right image. After reading the day's "outed truth", I want to get off. What am I supposed to do about the US sending provocoteurs to the Republic of Georgia? About America's biggest union being service workers? About the Forest Service knocking 23% off our protected forest acreage? About the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan upholding a 2006 dismissal of a claim against Saudi Arabia for providing material support to al Qaeda before the September 11 attacks? Keep track? Does the cat have a map of that roof?

Willy nilly, Jan Lundberg dropped a hint in last weeks GT: “Loss of commumity cohesion and mutual support is the fatal self-inflicted wound of the dominant culture.”

I take that to mean we don't have any culture. If we had some culture we would know which outed truths are important and which are just wrinkles on an old hat. Sending provocoteurs to a Russian neighbor...

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By Tom on 8/17/2008 9:20 AM

From "Greener Times" Aug 10, 2008. This week’s Thought is a frustrated sigh over tacit acceptance of a failed government. Attempts to get rid of it seem like, well, like towing a ship with a rowboat.

  “Making an ash breeze” was the last resort of sailing ships becalmed in the doldrums. In the eighteen hundreds trade with the orient and Australia was carried out with consummate skill by the captains of sailing ships. Speed and cargo capacity evolved rapidly under intense competition, In their heyday the “extreme clippers” could average eighteen miles an hour in a trade wind. Trade winds are easterlies angled towards the equator from north and south. At the equator there is a shifting band of nothing known as the doldrums. Ships could get stuck there for weeks, in which events a ship would put out hiserher boats and the crew would tow the ship, or at least lift the lines out of the water. The analogy between an ash breeze and attempts to get rid of this government is close, but at closer look breaks down...

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By Tom on 8/15/2008 8:04 PM

This is the story of the second life of an IBM Selectric typewriter. You young people out there possibly do not remember the machine that ended the use of typewritten character uniqueness to solve murders. I sure remember it, for IBM in its several manisfestations was practically synomonous with my career at Boeing. In the fifties for example, like the faithful to Mecca, The Boeing Company got to sending its engineers back to Endicott, NY, for training. There, IBM's cloned competence proved to be a little tiresome for the supplicants. Some weeks into one of those sessions a Boeing guy muttered "what do you do in this town if you are tired of movies and hate men?" The IBM brand of competence was indeed legendary and was announced by its dress code and the ubiquitous framed THINK. That and more aside, the Selectric, twenty pounds of swiss watch precision, was a great machine. The crisp jet black type it produced set a new standard for manuscripts. Until a week ago I had one sitting on my workbench waiting for exploratory...

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By Tom on 7/29/2008 8:29 PM

CHAPTER 1 – Transportation

Eco-Commuting is Walk-to-Work. Significant reduction of commuting car traffic will not happen as long as it is necessary to commute. What minor reductions are possible should by all means be done if only because of the logic of doing something, but the priority should be on taking the first step toward significant reduction. That step is to produce a charter for the City of Vashon-Maury. That will serve ad-hoc while I explain what I mean. Getting out of cars is to end car culture. That means undoing a hundred years of incorporation of cars into every aspect of life. That means total re-organization of employment and that’s the same as re-making society. For a bedroom island that means make a living here, or leave. By any similar line of reasoning the result is that untrammeled mobility must be terminated. The goal is a cohesive community. Such a community is able to take a responsible stand on matters of world survival. Life on Vashon-Maury presently limited by rainfall will then...

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