The One About...

The One About... Troy Davis Is Easy. It's Lawrence Russell Brewer That's Hard.

2011-09-21T23:41:00.000-05:00

Two men died today. One was black. One was white. One was in Texas. The other in Georgia. The one was convicted of a crime that most likely he did not commit. There is no doubt at all about the guilt of the other man. Despite all of their differences, these two men share one sad commonality. They were both murdered by the state.

There is a great outpouring of grief over the wrongful execution of Troy Davis. And rightly so. This entire situation is disgusting beyond measure.

The problem is that so long as we allow the state to hold the power to execute even so much as one single person we leave ourselves open to a never ending moral quagmire.

I understand how hard of a challenge this is. Unless you are superhuman, you are always going to hit serious challenges to your belief that the death penalty is wrong in every case. It is a very human thing to wish for exceptions. Just this once. Just this once, we say to ourselves, it's okay to cheer the state murdering another human being. Just this once, the person who was executed really and truly deserved it. Just. This. Once.

You know what? I'm not going to sit here and make an argument against executing someone like Lawrence Russell Brewer based on anything to do with him. I personally don't subscribe to the notion that we are all special little snowflakes. Some of us are simply pieces of shit wearing a human suit. And I won't argue from the notion of what his execution might do to his family. Because frankly I think that's just a weak argument.

Instead I'm going to simply ask anyone who might be for the death penalty in any conceivable situation to ask themselves one deceptively simple question. "What kind of society do I want to live in?"

Do you want to live in a society where people, prideful, imperfect, deceivable people reserve unto themselves the right to kill other people?

Because I guarantee you that so long as we think that people en masse under the guise of The State have the right to kill they are going to find ways to exercise that power. Now it would be a comforting fantasy to believe that they tend to more often than not be executing the Lawrence Brewers. But the facts don't bear that fantasy out.

The simple truth is that so long as we continue to permit the death penalty to exist anywhere in this country using Lawrence Brewer as our excuse we are going to continue to end up executing a lot of Troy Davis's.

I know it's not fair, and it's not right. But it is what it is.

It's time that we stand up and say No More Killing! No ifs. No ands. No buts. No Lawrence Russell Brewers. No Troy Davis's.

Keep The Faith My Brothers And Sisters!

The One About... It's A Poor Carpenter Who Blames His Tools.

2011-09-19T18:34:00.000-05:00

I happened to catch the following exchange on Twitter the other day...

"I thought 2000 had taught liberals a lesson about making the perfect the enemy of the good. But maybe not."

"it taught this liberal a lesson I'll never forget."

Since one of the participants in this exchange is someone I follow on Twitter and respect even if I often don't agree with them, I thought perhaps they would be so kind as to respond to a question that has long been bugging me. So I tweeted...

"Serious ?. y do U & so many others cont 2 downplay or ignore the role the SCOTUS played in helping Jr steal the 2000 election?"

(Translated from Twit-speak it reads, "Serious question. Why do you and so many others continue to downplay or ignore the role the Supreme Court of The United States played in helping Bush junior steal the two thousand election?")

This persons reply was...

"because SCOTUS would not have been involved at all, had Nader not peeled off millions of votes."

I sat at my keyboard stunned.

Now to be honest this is not the first time that I've encountered this reasoning. Ironically it was a very similar kind of reasoning that Republicans used to explain Bush Sr.'s loss to Bill Clinton in ninety two, when Ross Perot ran as an independent candidate for President.

Now from a pure math standpoint of course it's inarguable. Let me reduce the numbers to make it easy to talk about for purposes of this article.

Lets say you have two candidates for dog catcher and there are fifty nine people casting their votes.

Well one person can conceivably end up with twenty nine votes and the other person can possibly end up with thirty.

Now what would happen if a third candidate was on the ballot?

Well now it's conceivable that two of the candidates could get twenty votes and a third one gets nineteen.

Bottom line the votes have to go somewhere.

But the problem is that statements like the one I cited above about Nader are never made in the spirit of mathematical accuracy. No they are made in a spirit of blame. With an implied tone of "How dare they?" As if there is only one possible right choice. And anyone who has the audacity not to choose correctly is an idiot or a simpleton, or must be deranged or damaged in one way or another.

It's a presumptuous and arrogant argument and it's one that it sickens me to hear Liberals in general and Progressives in particular make.

It is an argument that lines up very nicely with the narrative that the GOP has been trying to shove down our throats all these years. Oh they talk a good game, the GOP does. About the "Will Of The People" and all that. But the truth of the matter is that the Republicans don't want to be bothered with the will of the people unless it's in alignment with the will of the Republican party, and therefore in alignment with the will of the Corporatocracy.

It is an argument that says that the system is just fine and that there is no need for anything other than the two parties that have anointed themselves perpetual Kings and Queens on alternating Tuesdays.

It is an argument that insists that anyone who does not get in line and vote with the majority is an idiot. A dreamer who honestly probably doesn't even deserve the vote they are wasting.

It is an argument that they are trotting out again to use against anyone who dares to talk about the idea of a Primary challenger to Obama.

Now I've gone on record as saying in this very blog that I think that trying to Primary Obama is a bad idea. When I wrote that I was speaking tactically and I still believe that tactically that is the case. But here's a bit of news that will shock some people. A lot of people don't vote tactically. Instead they vote their conscience.

What idiots. What fools. How dare they? Don't they know what's at stake? If Obama were to lose because of such nonsense it would be all their fault.

But you see it wouldn't. Because here's another shocking bit of news. Voting your conscience, is, ideally, what you are supposed to do.

You are supposed to look at the candidates on offer and choose the one who most shares your values. Not the one with the best chance of winning that you find the least despiseable.

Now if you want to vote based on who you indeed believe has the best chance of winning and doesn't totally make your skin crawl you are entitled to do exactly that. It doesn't make you a fool or an idiot for doing so. It just makes your conscience calibrated a little differently from the person who votes based purely on which candidate they believe best represents their views on a wide array of issues.

But if Obama cannot successfully convince those kind of people to vote for him in two thousand and twelve it will not be their fault. It will not be because they were stupid, or naive. It will be because Obama did not offer them something they felt was worth their vote.

So perhaps Obama and his supporters would be well advised to find ways for him to become worth voting for instead of finding ways to blame those who so far hold their vote as too valuable to ransom for petty trinkets.

Keep The Faith My Brothers And Sisters!

The One About... I Have Met The Enemy. And He Is Us.

2011-09-11T11:27:00.000-05:00

Ten years ago, September Eleventh was a weekday work day for my wife and I. Her mother was visiting, getting ready to go back to work driving truck cross country. She was waiting on a call from her dispatcher telling her they had a load for her. Her dispatcher called and told her to turn on the television. In an event that Americans haven't seen the like of, probably since Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald, the whole of the nations attention was glued to their televisions. After picking our jaws up off the floor, and not fully understanding the depth of what was taking place, my wife and I went to work.

(To read the full article for free just click here.)

As word of what all was happening spread and updates came in, I got to experience the American people at something less than their finest. From the moment that it was first reported that Muslim extremists were responsible for the attacks the racist bullshit comments started. But that wasn't what most horrified me on that day. It was listening to people make disparaging comments about the people who had been on the planes, or in the towers and died. The most heart breaking and gut wrenching was hearing our co-worker who prior to that day we would both have characterized as a "sweet old lady" carry on about how all those people died because "They weren't right with God." Then there was the inevitable talk about how this was the first sign of "The End Times". And this was spoken in a tone that can only be called celebratory.

If all this had only been confined to that day I suppose it would eventually fade in my memory.

But in many ways things have only gotten worse. In the decade since The Date we have seen this country quickstep towards becoming a fascist police state in the name of keeping us "safe" from terrorism. The problem being that Terrorism by its very nature is not something you can defend against. Not really. No matter what security measures you have in place there are always going to be loopholes that aren't obvious until they are exploited.

While certainly reasonable measures should be taken, the idea that we should be able to tap the phones or emails of anyone who we think "might" be somehow distantly involved with terrorists, without there being any kind of due process, the idea that we should detain people indefinitely without them having any recourse, or even being told what they are being charged with, the notion that we should ever execute an American Citizen because of their actions, with no trial, with no safeguards to ensure that they are guilty of what they've been accused of is frankly horrifying.

Meanwhile politicians on both the Left and the Right wrap themselves up in the flag and proclaim their love for this country and its people when it suits them. But as we've seen in the last year that love doesn't extend to giving the people who were on the scene at the World Trade Center trying to save what lives they could, the medical care they deserve. It doesn't extend to making certain that all people are treated equally under the law regardless of skin color, or religion.

The official title for the day to memorialize the events of The Date is Patriot Day. But it's a very narrow minded and shallow kind of Patriotism that is being celebrated. It is the kind of Patriotism that sees the war monger as a Patriot and the war protester as a Traitor. It is the kind of Patriotism that declares that it is not enough to secure our country from invasion, we must in the name of our safety go forth and invade any country that might possibly represent a threat to us, either now or in the future.

If the terrorists attacked us on The Date, because they "Envy our freedom", well we should be safe from ever being attacked for that reason again, because since then we've got a lot less freedom to be envied for.

Keep The Faith My Brothers And Sisters!

The One About... I've Got Twenty Pounds In The Game. How About You?

2011-09-07T00:25:00.000-05:00

Well, a day without a rich asshole whining about paying too much in taxes, is like a day without burning rectal itching. It's a real popular Wrong Wing talking point lately. The Rich, and Super Rich, in an attempt to appear just a little bit less like assholes, are almost universally stepping away from out and out saying, "Fuck the poor! If they want more money they can go and screw over some brown people in a third world country like I did.", and instead carefully shading their words. "Oh well I don't mind that those who have more money pay more. But it's not fair that so many people pay no taxes at all. Everyone should have some skin in the game." With the notable exception of Warren Buffet, (...And, hey, Warren? Nothing personal, but you're still an asshole. You're just less of an asshole than the rest of them....) pretty much anytime you hear anything from a millionaire, or billionaire, it's for them to seek to perpetrate two major bullshit notions.

One, that the only tax of any consequence is income tax. And two, that if you don't pay income tax than you have absolutely nothing invested in how things are run in this country.

(To read the rest of this article for free just click here.)

Now the first one is of course fairly obviously bullshit. Setting aside all kinds of other non-income taxes that largely affect only the rich, and that they love paying about as much as they love paying their income tax, there is also one major tax that quite frankly the poor and Working Class get stuck with time after time, and the rich have a lot easier time avoiding. Namely, Sales Tax.

Let's face it, most of us don't have many, if any, options when it comes to sales tax. If we are really, really, lucky our state will be having a tax free weekend, and we can manage to wait to buy some of the higher end goods (like computers) until then. But that's pretty much it. Every time we buy something there's most likely a tax on it. The rich however, have a whole host of options, ranging from going to where there's little to no sales tax, be it within this country or outside of it, to getting the tax exempted by falsely claiming that they are buying something for resale, or some other purpose that allows a sales tax exemption, and then using it for personal use.

As for the second claim? Well there's an old saying, "To a man with a hammer, every problem looks like a nail." Perhaps that's true of the very rich as well. Maybe to them every problem looks like it's about money. But it's just not so.

Ask the black man getting pulled over by the cops because he's in a predominantly white neighborhood late at night, whether he has anything invested in the laws that are passed in this country, regardless of how much he does or does not pay in taxes.

Or, maybe, the single mother working two jobs, to try and keep a roof over her and her sons head. Why don't you ask her, if since she doesn't pay any taxes, she doesn't feel she has anything invested in whether or not there is money for her sons school to have enough text books for all the kids.

Oh, oh, I know. Why don't you ask the people shopping at places like Walmart Super centers, if they don't feel they have any investment in whether or not the meat and produce they are buying is going to make them sick or not?

The bottom line is very simple. From the moment most of us are born we are affected by the things that the Government does, and does not do. Since most of us will never have enough money to have private schools, private chefs, private means of food production, or, well pretty much private anything, that means that we do not have any way of protecting ourselves except through the Government.

You worry about your money? You worry about that you might have a little bit less this year, than you did last year? Well I worry about getting sick, without any kind of meaningful healthcare. I worry, that if I have a child, a true education, not just indoctrination into serving the Corporatocracy, is beyond their grasp. I worry about whether or not the food I eat is going to make me sick or kill me. My ass is on the line every day in this country, yet I have to fight like a wildcat to get my voice heard, even a little bit. Meanwhile, all you've got at stake is some money. Of which you have plenty. So I'll say it again. I've got all twenty pounds in the game. What the fuck have you got?

Keep The Faith My Brothers And Sisters!

The One About... You've Called Down The Thunder GOP! Well Now You've Got It!

2011-09-06T10:41:00.000-05:00

So James Hoffa called the Tea Party (...A wholly owned subsidiary of the GOP...) "sons of bitches" and told them we are going to take them out. And of course they are hurt and shocked and outraged, and all the other phony bullshit they claim to be when anyone dares to speak the truth to them.

Well I've got some news for everyone on the Right. Get used to it! The Radical Left is here and we are done playing nice.

(To read the entire article for free just click here!)

You are going to see a transformation, from the bottom up. It's going to start in our rhetoric. There is no more "honorable" this or that. There is no more calling you "friend" let alone pretending for even a moment that you are. When you speak bullshit we are going to call it bullshit. When you say or do things that are racist, or sexist, or homophobic we are going to call racist, and sexist, and homophobic. When you serve to help keep the perpetual war machine running full tilt while telling not only civilians but the very soldiers whose service you are wasting that there is no money for healthcare, or roads, or education then we are going to call you warmongers. And when you attempt to sell the American Working Class into lives of perpetual wage slavery to benefit the Corporatocracy, we are going to stand up and call you the slave traders that you are.

But this isn't going to just stop with the Right. Consider your compromises very very carefully Democrats. Because if all you keep doing is capitulating to the Right then you are in for the exact same treatment. If you keep helping laws to be passed that benefit the top twenty percent and hurt the Workers and the Poor then we will call you our enemy just like we will do to the Reptiles on the Right.

There's no free lunch some of you like to say? Well there's no free pass. Not any more.

Get used to it. This is what both sides have been asking for, with your over thirty years of selling us out for your own benefit and the benefit of the Corporatocracy.

You are being watched. And there will be consequences for your actions going forward. You have been warned.

Keep The Faith My Brothers And Sisters!

The One About... It's Time We All Accept That It's The 21st Century Not The 18th.

2011-09-04T02:27:00.000-05:00

So Matthew Vadum has a problem with the idea of people working to help the poor to vote. He carries on at great length about the evils of Welfare, and as most Professional Conservatives like to do, he invokes the Founding Fathers as some sort of quasi deities.

For some time now, it has been very popular on the Right to suggest, both directly and indirectly, that some people are more worthy of the right to vote than others. In times past this idea was propagated against African Americans in forms such as poll taxes, and on the spot literacy tests. Today the idea is applied more broadly against anyone who is poor or Working Class through ridiculously strict voter identification laws, or in some cases campaigns of outright disinformation about when polls are open, where one is to vote etc.

This all seems to stem from a problem that many in the Professional Right seem have around accepting a very simple, irreversible fact.

This is not the 1700's. Nor is it the 1800's. And for over a decade now it's also not been the 1900's. In fact right now, at this very moment (you may want to brace yourself) it is the year Two Thousand and Eleven.

(Click here to read the full article for free)

In the last nearly three hundred years, we have seen incredible changes to the way life is lived, both in the world in general, and the United States of America in specific.

The Founders, were a great many things. Some were visionaries, some were more on the order of small minded politicos. But even the best of them were products of their time. They tended to be inherently racist, sexist, and to a great extent classist. Most of them could not quite envision a world where a woman, a black man, or even a non land owner was really their equal. So in the beginning voting rights were held to be for a very, very few.

This was in an age where it was much more likely that if one were able bodied, male and white, that one would indeed hold at least a bit of property.

The founders were also generally against the Federal Government being in the business of taking care of the indigent. But this was in a time when for many people their entire world was most likely the township where they were born. There were local organs of charity, and because the scale was small it was usually easy to meet peoples needs.

But then came industrialization, and mechanization. More and more people, many of them immigrants, some of them women, went to work in factories. In short things changed.

Now the founders, whatever their flaws may have been, had a singular genius seldom seen before them, as regards one very particular part of the creation of the Government of The United States of America. They recognized that the challenges the people of the United States and their government would face in the 1700's, would most likely not be the exact same challenges that people would face in centuries yet to come. So they crafted a Constitution that was a dynamic and changeable document, and they created a system whereby the Constitution was meant to be interpreted and reinterpreted down through the years to meet the challenges of today, rather than to try and force society to fit itself into the patterns of ages gone bye.

This brings us to today. An age in which, excepting those serving time for being convicted of a crime, everyone age eighteen or older is eligible to register and vote.

But Matthew Vadum, doesn't seem to like that idea. He seems to wish that the poor wouldn't exercise that right. And he especially seems to wish that no one would help them to do so. His reason for this? Well it largely seems to boil down to hating the idea that the poor might vote in line with their own self interest. This strikes me as more than a bit hypocritical since that is exactly everyone else does with their vote, especially the very rich.

But here's something to consider, the idea that there is more than one kind of self interest. There is direct self interest, and there is indirect self interest.

Direct self interest, is, quite literally, seeking to vote for candidates and measures, that only directly benefit oneself or people like oneself. This is what many of the top twenty percent, who hold roughly eighty five percent of the wealth, tend to do. This leads to measures like privatization of pretty much everything including education, policing, healthcare etc. It also tends to lead to opposition to measures that would regulate pollution, food safety, and a great many other things that the rich are insulated from having to worry about thanks to their wealth.

Indirect self interest, is a great deal more complex. It is based on the notion, that that which benefits the greatest number directly, will ultimately benefit me indirectly, even if I am not also benefited directly as well. Take for example public education. Even if I were able to send my child to a private school, it would still benefit me to pay my taxes, and to have those taxes go towards robust public schools offering a well rounded education, because it would mean that the people going to such schools would come out of them better people, more likely to feel a sense of responsibility to the welfare of their community, and their country. Plus, such people would make better employees, and would require less training.

The same idea is at the heart of things like welfare, or jobs programs. If the people around me have at best gainful, (ideally meaningful) employment, and at worst at least have their basic needs to food, shelter, and healthcare met, then I am at a lessened risk to be the victim of a crime by someone who is jobless and hungry. If I pay my taxes I am helping to subsidize a public police force, which, while it benefits people who aren't me, it also means that I do not have to pay for a cadre of private security forces to stand around and wait for an attack on my person or property that may never come.

Ultimately it's a question of what kind of society do we want to be? A "Me" society, or a "We" society?

It seems to me that every time we have tried to turn this country into a survival of the fittest, I've got mine and devil take the hindmost, kind of zero sum game, we have been stricken with things like the Great Depression in the 1930's, and the current Neo-Depression we are enduring now. It is at times like this that many who once thought themselves insulated from the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune discover just how wrong they were.

It is only when we decide that the only moral choice is to make certain that all people regardless of situation have lives of reasonable quality and unassailable dignity that we see the kind of amazing progress on all fronts that we enjoyed throughout the 1960's and into the 70's, especially technological and social. And it is the only way that we are going to have any hope of creating a new golden age of peace and prosperity for all.

Keep The Faith My Brothers And Sisters!

The One About... Sometimes It's A Question Of Timing.

2011-08-24T15:55:00.001-05:00

The situation in Libya while not completed yet does appear at the moment to be moving in a fairly positive direction. Personally I don't think anything remotely like victory can be declared until Quadaffi and sons are either dead, or in custody (I'd like to think we've learned our lesson from Napoleon that exile is no substitute for either of the other two) but there certainly are some positive signs.

A great many of the more vocal Pro-Obama Progressives are using this situation as it stands now to declare that Obama was right to involve us in Libya, and that he did it in the right way, and for the right reasons. However there are a great many who are still deeply uncomfortable with this situation for a great many reasons. I will touch briefly on a few of them and then focus on the main one alluded to in this articles title.

(To read the full article just click here!)

First of all there is the fact that historically this country tends to support whatever group in a country that will benefit our interests. If that group is the one in power then we will help them suppress rebellions, painting them as Democratic, and benevolent. If the group is the one out of power then we will help them overthrow the existing government, painting them as plucky underdogs who only want throw off the shackles of tyranny. Now I'm not saying that this is automatically the case in Libya, but more than a few people in the Hard Left media have noted Libya's resources and how quickly we were to intervene there, and how we have gone out of our way to avoid intervening in other places that aren't as resource rich.

Second of all there is the almost Clintonesque obfuscation that Obama engaged in to keep us involved in Libya. When he ran up against the ceiling established in the War Powers Act, Obama glibly stated that the Act did not apply since we had no troops on the ground. A statement that is open for debate since we do appear to have special forces teams on the ground in Libya.

But I think that the most important point against involving ourselves in Libya, or most anywhere else in the world excepting to deal with credible immediate threats to our domestic security is one of timing.

If this country were stable economically, and we had not spent the last decade engaged in ongoing and fruitless conflicts in both Afghanistan and Iraq, then even though many would still be troubled by our involvement in Libya I think there would be less resistance and less vocal resistance.

But neither of the aforementioned circumstances are the case. Instead we have a country that seems to barely be able to take care of its infrastructure, has no meaningful social safety net, and is now casting a hairy eyeball upon things once thought not only beyond touching but beyond even beyond thinking about touching like Social Security.

Meanwhile we are told time and time again that not only is military spending sacrosanct but must be increased.

Resultantly we are becoming a country that not only cannot feed, and house, and educate it's people, nor help them to move into a position to do it themselves eventually but with the refusal to tax the rich and super rich it is becoming less a matter of can't and more a matter of won't.

So bottom line until our problems here in the US are being dealt with and not just ignored, we must resist the urge to involve ourselves in other countries conflicts. No matter how urgent the problem, no matter how pure our motives, and no matter how clever and effective our strategy.

It's bit like someone who has spent almost all their money on two clunkers and now have found the perfect car. But that would leave them nothing to pay the rent or buy food. The Right, and increasingly many on the Left like to hold the government up to the standards by which a family must live. But it only shows their constant and consistent hypocrisy that they do not extend this admittedly shaky metaphor to the realm of paying for foreign wars.

Keep The Faith My Brothers And Sisters!

The One About... Beyond Tolerance.

2011-07-06T21:59:00.001-05:00

There is a tendency among many people, to assume that only their way of looking at the world is valid. This kind of thinking is pervasive among many groups, but it seems to be most pernicious, where spiritual matters are concerned. The divisiveness is so bad that it leads a great many Christians on the Right, to act as if theirs is the only belief set worthy of consideration, while at the same time, you have far too many Atheists, Secularists, and Materialist Reductionists, on the Left who seem determined to stick their noses in the air and sniff disdainfully at the idea that Liberals, who are also people of faith, should have a place at the table right beside them.

Both positions, are to put it quite simply, asinine. Especially in light of something that I learned a long time ago. The simple truth, is that there are decent people in this world and there are horrid people. The decent people are Christians, and Buddhists, Atheists, and Pagans. And the horrid people? They are Christians, and Buddhists, Atheists, and Pagans. In short, it is the practitioner, not the practice, that is of paramount importance.

(Click here to read the full article)

Now I'm not saying that someone who is drawn to say Islam, gets nothing of value from the particulars of that faith. Nor that one belief system, could be substituted for another. Rather, what I'm saying, is that a generally good person, will usually focus on taking what is good from their beliefs, and doing good with them. While someone who is damaged, and diseased, in their way of viewing the world, will latch on to anything negative in an ideology.

To be honest, I think that most decent people are closer to one another then they realize. The only thing really separating them are details of ideology. These details are honestly no more relevant than details of hair color, age, sexual orientation or any of a hundred other details. It's all well and good to know these things, about ourselves, and others, but when they become the basis for divisiveness then we must move past them.

That's a big part of the problem right now I think. People are stuck. We have been led to believe that "tolerance" is the be all and end all of relating to people of different ways and beliefs from our own.

But tolerance is actually merely a pit stop. Mind you, I'm not saying that it's not been an important step in our development. It certainly beats all hell out of what came first, namely constantly trying to kill anyone who was different.

If we stop at tolerance though it will mean that we have not actually matured. We will be in a state of arrested development (...the bad kind, not the really funny television show...).

So, what, you may ask, is the next step after tolerance? Simply put, Celebration.

Diane Duane in her excellent Star Trek novel Spock's World, put it best...

"How delightful to be so different from something: how wonderful that there should be creatures so huge in the world, so strange! No need to understand them, particularly: that might come with time, and would be an added delight. But it was enough to accept their difference, to celebrate just that, without anything added. Creation, in itself, was joy. The difference was joy, the celebration of it was joy. There was nothing that could stand against that joy: sooner or later it would triumph. All evil, all death, was a tiny, fretting, posturing thing that knew its own defeat was coming, and might rage and destroy as it liked. It was doomed. Celebration would win, was winning, had won now. Everything was one moment, and the moment was nothing but triumph and joy."

It will not be easy, nor will it happen over night. But we can start, right here, right now. All it takes, is a willing heart, and practice. Practice letting go of judging, and simply, as much as it's possible, accept.

Accept people, for who and what they are. Even if sometimes you may not "like" those things. Accept, that what may make another person content in their life, might make no sense to you. Accept, that at the end of the day you can only decide what is best, for yourself.

If more and more of us can manage that, then maybe we really can begin to become one people, instead of a bunch of sad little tribes, constantly at war with each other over things that when all is said and done make no real difference, like the color of our skin, or whether or not we eat our toast butter side up.

Keep The Faith My Brothers And Sisters!

The One About... Independence? There Is No Such Thing.

2011-07-03T23:56:00.002-05:00

Today is July Fourth. In the United States it is a holiday to celebrate the founding of the country. Now almost every other country out there calls their version of this day, (insert name of country) Day. For example our neighbor to the north just recently celebrated Canada Day.

But we Americans love to celebrate holidays that are based on total fictions. For example we celebrate Easter, which is either about a giant bunny bringing chocolate eggs, or the resurrection of Jesus. We celebrate Christmas, which is either about a jolly fat man who can break into your house regardless of what security methods you use, or the birth of Jesus (...a prequel to Easter I guess...). We also celebrate slightly more high concept holidays, like Thanksgiving, which is either about the fantasy that the Pilgrims liked the Indians and didn't consider them a new form of vermin, or it's about preparing to make human sacrifices to the Gods of Shopping on the next day known as "Black Friday". July Fourth continues that proud tradition. We use the day to celebrate a fiction that is so powerful that we even named the day after it.

(To read the full article click here)

That's right kids we call it "Independence Day!".

The only problem is that there is no such thing. There never has been such a thing. And there never will be such a thing.

Everything that each of us does has an impact on everyone and everything else. From obviously major things like how much we consume. To seemingly minor things like whether we are friendly and smile at the person taking our order at McDonald's, or treat them like they are nothing but servile trash.

This is a truth that has been known, and expressed in myriad ways for centuries. You can see it in Buddhism, and other spiritual traditions. Today, you can read about our interconnectedness in fields like Chaos Theory.

The problem is, that it simplifies our lives to believe that we are independent. Because that means that we can do whatever we please and there are no repercussions beyond (...perhaps...) the immediate. It means that we can have as much of anything as we want. And if others don't have enough? Well surely that's not our fault. No, it's got to be their fault. And the state of the planet? Well we couldn't possibly be responsible for that. Right? RIGHT????

Everything we do matters. Everything that corporations do matter. Everything that governments do matter. In short, everything matters. In all things. All the time. This doesn't mean that we should simply sit on our hands and do nothing. Because that's not really going to help. "Nobody move and nobody gets hurt" is a fine thing to shout out during a bank robbery but it's not much of a philosophy of life.

Rather, the best thing to do is to go forward but slowly. To act, cautiously, thoughtfully. To keep upper most in our minds, the fact that what we do has an impact. Maybe it means that we try to plan our trips a little more carefully, to cut back on how much we drive. Perhaps we decide not to belittle the person waiting on us because we've had to repeat our order three times.

So to my Brothers and Sisters in the US, happy Independence Day. Enjoy the day, have a hot dog and go see some fireworks (...those of you that are allowed to have fireworks...), celebrate the fantasy that America is some how magically "Independent". And then tomorrow we can all get back to dealing with the fact of our interdependence.

Keep The Faith My Brothers And Sisters!

The One About... Let Me Know How That Works Out For You.

2011-07-01T01:02:00.003-05:00

Well, you can now add post natal abortion candidate, Michele Bachmann, to the list of Wrong Wing Nut Jobs, who are firmly convinced that everything in this country would be just fine and dandy, if only it weren't for that evil evil Federal Minimum Wage.

I tend to suspect that the anti-FMW talk is largely a ploy, to demonstrate to their Corporate Masters how compliant they are to the Corporatist agenda. Kind of the way that a dog will show it's belly, as a sign of submission to the lead dog. But frankly I'm more than a little bit sick and tired of it. At this point it's abusive.

(To read the full article just click here.)

I refer to their persistent rhetoric against the FMW as abusive for this reason... It's like living with someone who is physically abusive. You know that this person has beaten you before. You know that in all likelihood they will beat you again. And their idea of great fun, is to raise their fist from time to time to watch you flinch. That is also a form of abuse. Just like passing so many horrific laws that have the cumulative effect of turning people into little more than bond chattel, and then threatening even worse regressive laws, just to watch people flinch.

There was a time when we all assumed (...mistakenly so...) that the Republicans were essentially sane decent people, and for all I know the average citizen still is, even if I personally find the very idea of voting for a Republican, or supporting their policies, as distasteful as licking a dirty ashtray. But the politicians who fill the GOP have long been a fairly unpleasant lot. Something though, seemed to keep them at least somewhat restrained. That restraint is now gone, and they are enacting, and seeking to enact, policies that are so fundamentally anti worker, anti human, anti woman, and anti reason that they cannot be trusted not to act on their rhetoric, no matter how insane or vile.

Like most abusers the Right assumes that their position is so untouchable, so superior that nothing they have done, are doing, or will do, could possibly change that. And also like most abusers, they are completely blind to exactly how close to the edge their victims are. Right now there is an epic storm of rage and despair in this country. There are precious few structures left keeping this rage and despair from turning into a flood, the likes of which not seen since Noah woke up one morning with a major hard on to build an ark.

But here's the thing... There is a part of me, that honestly wishes the bastards would actually go ahead and do it. Try and end the Federal Minimum Wage. Because if anything could get Working Class Americans to wake the fuck up in a hurry, and go after these Wrong Wing Fuckernutters like angry villagers after Frankenstein's monster it would be that. In some ways it would be worth the RWNJ doing it, just to watch them quickly get torn limb from limb.

Right now, they are trying to destroy Medicare, and Social Security, and most depressing of all it seems like they might succeed. If they do, then the last bulwark against all out revolution is the Federal Minimum Wage. A minimum wage which is still far too low for people to truly have any kind of real quality of life. There are some people like myself who live in a depressed area where the cost of living is low enough that it is possible (...if one doesn't have kids...) to live on the minimum or a bit above and be relatively comfortable. Not safe mind you. But for life to at least have some enjoyment to it, to be more than mere survival.

Get rid of the minimum wage though? Let companies try to pay people five dollars an hour? Three? Two? For back breaking, mind numbing, soul destroying work, with all the meaning and value of a gerbil on an exercise wheel? Well, all I'm going to say, is that if you are going to participate in a betting pool on how long it will take before there's open revolt, and rioting in the streets, I'd not put my money on anything in the month or more category.

So, GOP, go ahead. Abolish the Federal Minimum Wage. You claim you want to see people take their country back? Well I can guarantee you that you'll see that happen one hell of a hurry. Although you might be more than a little bit surprised to discover that it's you and your Corporate Masters that we're taking it back from.

Don't say you weren't warned.

Keep The Faith My Brothers And Sisters!

The One About... The Audacity Of Failure.

2011-06-30T05:44:00.001-05:00

Back in nineteen ninety nine, I was living in Seattle Washington. In Seattle was a glorious old theater that had recently been renovated called the Cinerama. It only had one screen, but oh man, what a screen. It was as tall as the side of a building. This thing had been originally conceived and built back in a time well before anyone had ever thought of, let alone heard of Imax.

It was at the Cinerama that I saw several showings of George Lucas' Star Wars: Episode One: The Phantom Menace. I loved seeing that movie at that theater so much that I made a point of looking out for what the next movie showing was, once Star Wars had ended its very long run.

It was a movie starring Anthony Hopkins called "Titus". I knew nothing of the movie's source material, one of Shakespeare's lesser plays, called "Titus Andronicus", and knew less than nothing about the films director, a woman named Julie Taymor.

I went and watched the movie and was in awe. It was one of the most amazing, most visually arresting movies I had ever seen. I became an instant fan of Ms. Taymor's work and resolved to learn all I could about her.

I quickly found out that while Titus was her first movie ever, she had long been active in the theater, and that she was best known for adapting Disney's "The Lion King" for the stage.

Throughout the following years, any time I learned of a new movie by her I made a point of seeing it. While there have not been anywhere near as many as I'd like I have treasured each one.

It was not long after the release of "Across The Universe", her incredible musical about the wonder and turmoil of the sixties, featuring the music of the Beatles, that I heard about a new stage musical she was mounting along with Bono, and the Edge of U2. It was called "Spiderman: Turn Off The Dark".

Even though I knew I'd most likely never get to see it, I followed the shows development quite closely. Unfortunately it would turn out to be a very troubled development. It went through multiple setbacks, ranging from technical difficulties involving on stage wire work, to test audiences who didn't seem to really understand, or quite care for Ms. Taymor's very grand, almost mythic approach to Spiderman and his world.

After several delays the production and Ms. Taymor parted company. She was for all intents and purposes let go, the show was retooled to be simpler in terms of both story and technical production.

By most any reasonable estimation Ms. Taymor's efforts on Spiderman: Turn Off The Dark were a failure.

I think that is the most wonderful thing in the world.

(To read the full article click here...)

Here's a simple truth that far too many people in this country have lost sight of. The only people who never fail, are the ones who never try.

That used to be a motivational statement in this country. A goad to encourage people to be bold, and daring, to risk failure by trying to do new, and bigger, and better things.

But somewhere, somehow, we lost sight of that. We slowly started to create a climate wherein the core ethos is not failing at any cost.

Well the cost turns out to be never ever risking.

In storytelling it means taking and rehashing stories, characters, and ideas that are already well known and popular. This has led to things like the endless remakes and reboots of popular movies and television shows. To things like George Lucas and his obsessive mining of his creation Star Wars, as if he were afraid to step outside of its confines.

In art it results in work that is geared towards being easy on the eyes without any attempts in either its subject or execution to challenge the viewer.

If it had only affected the arts, this fear of failure would be horrific enough. But it has become so pervasive that it has affected almost every aspect of American life.

Take politics for example. Politicians by their very natures are usually fairly cautious individuals. But there was a time, when there were some who were willing to, within the boundaries of that caution, attempt some pretty amazing and audacious things. Sometimes at the risk of upsetting people both within the opposition party, as well as their own party. This tended to especially be the case with the President of the United States. Most Presidents, during their first term, tended to be a bit more cautious, because they were mindful of their desire to be re-elected. But those who achieved that second term tended to go for broke, trying to push their agenda through.

This all changed with Bill Clinton. To this day I remember watching him during his second term and the timidity of most of his policies and wondering what exactly he thought he was running for now? Dog catcher? In the years since it's only gotten worse. Most politicians are so unwilling to even attempt any legislation that is truly groundbreaking, that when one does, even if what he is attempting something incredibly stupid like destroying Medicare and Social Security he is called a bold visionary.

The national fear of failure extends even to people's personal lives. We have gone from the idea that people should follow their dreams, back to the thinking that characterized the Great Depression. Get a job as quickly as you can, no matter how menial it might be. Then keep your head down and hope like hell that you don't lose it. Gone are the days when you heard stories of average people taking their lifes savings and starting a new business, or some other bold endeavor. We have been told in a thousand ways that such ideas belong to a time past. That only those already successful are likely to succeed. On top of that in a country with a social safety net that has gone from shaky, to pretty much non-existent, the price of failure for most of us is just too high.

I for one hope, and work for a return to being a nation and a people who revel in failure. Who see it as something grand and glorious rather than shameful. Because we will be celebrating the idea that if someone has failed, it is because they tried to do something bold and spectacular.

Keep The Faith My Brothers And Sisters!

The One About... The Problem Of Our Addiction To Action.

2011-06-29T01:04:00.001-05:00

"Don't just stand there! Do Something!" "Idle hands are the devil's playthings" "The best defense is a good offense."

How many times have we heard those? The Western Ideal, especially the American edition of it, is to take action. Always. Even when those taking action don't really know what action to take. It has been our driving ethos for at least the last two hundred years and perhaps even longer. In some ways it is not a horrible idea. To be certain there comes a point in many situations where action of some kind must be taken. The problem however is that far to many have come to believe that only direct, visible action is of value. This has resulted in an imbalance that has played a large role in the disastrous state of affairs we find ourselves in. This is most clearly seen and keenly felt in three areas of American life. In business. In national defense. And in our personal relationships. (To read the full article click Here)

In Business:

American business is if not the worst action addict, then certainly among the worst. It is so bad that companies are constantly launching new initiatives, often at great cost. Not merely things to make minor changes either. Often these are vast sweeping changes, that take significant time and money to implement. I work for a major fast food company and I can't tell you the number of times that they have changed everything from the uniforms, to the procedures, to the products, all at once. What is the most ridiculous is that if one stays with any particular company long enough you'll see them make changes, undo the changes, and then a few years, sometimes months later they will re-implement the changes that they had not so long ago undone. Why? Because the mid and upper level executives live in a constant state of fear of being seen as "Not Doing Anything". If you are newly promoted then you cannot let the things done by your predecessor stand even if they are successful (especially if they are successful) and simply make minor adjustments. No you must make bold and sweeping changes, so you can prove your value to the company, in the hopes of at most getting more raises and more promotions and at least keeping your job. Meanwhile the changes instituted from the top down often result in extra work for the rank and file. Truth be told in most companies busywork is perhaps the only constant. God forbid that people be seen to be relaxing for a moment, perhaps interacting with each other. This indicates sloth, and surely that means that the employee who is not constantly in motion must be bad and lazy.

The addiction to constant extreme growth is an offshoot of the addiction to action. The idea that a company that is not doubling its profits or more every year is a failure is to put it simply, ludicrous. It is in pursuit of these kind of profits that we have all but destroyed the planets ability to sustain most life as we know it today.

In National Defense:

Most reasonable people would be willing to agree that we should take sensible steps to protect ourselves from threats. Gathering intelligence on those that might seek to harm us and preparing to thwart them is not really all that radical an idea. But as we so often do America has carried this to a level that defies reason and sanity. Any country that might pose the least little threat to us is attacked either via drone strikes, air attack, or by invasion and occupation. Once we are in a country we almost never leave. We have military bases in Japan, Germany, Korea, etc. Why? How many German military bases are there on US soil? Hmm let me check the map real quick. Well gee, nothing from nothing, carry the nothing. Looks like none.

To highlight the absurdity of our national defense policies think about it like this. One day you hear a rumor that your next door neighbor is planning on breaking into your house, stealing all your stuff, and killing you and your family. Now a reasonable response would be to get better locks for your doors. Maybe bars on your windows. Perhaps a guard dog, or even a gun. If you wanted to be really aggressive you could even leave a note on their front door explaining what will happen to them if they try anything. All of that could be considered if not entirely wise, at least not totally out of proportion to the potential danger. Now imagine that instead of doing that you decide to go over to your neighbors house, kick down his door and just move right in and take right over. Then you make a nice speech about how he was abusive to his wife and children and you are there to liberate them from his tyranny. Well congratulations, you've just gone from the defender to the aggressor and for those who wish to think in such simplistic terms "The Bad Guy". All because you weren't content to simply be prepared to defend yourself but instead decided that you had to take action.

Something similar is seen domestically with groups that the government considers dangerous or subversive. When those groups are not acting radically enough for the liking of the government they use what are known as "Agent Provocateurs". Infiltrators who's purpose is to join a group under false pretenses, gain their confidence, and then goad them into doing something stupid. Then those in power can feel fully justified in acting to arrest the groups members. This is instead of the longer, more tedious and less publicly flashy route of simply monitoring the group and unless they begin to of their own accord commit acts of violence, refrain from intervening.

The problem is that all this furious action at home and abroad has left our resources both human and monetary stretched dangerously thin. The simple truth is that we cannot be everywhere at once. We try to cut corners by using things like drones but because of their imprecise nature they often create more enemies than they stop. And by expending energy focusing on groups that have an ideology at odds with the Imperialist policies of the US, and seeking to goad them into actions that they may very well have eschewed if left alone, we run the very real risk of not having enough eyes and ears open and ready to catch those who are ready, willing, and able to do real harm to this country and its citizens without any encouragement.

In Personal Relationships:

The addiction to action is usually combined with an addiction to happiness, where relationships are concerned. Whether it is a friendship, a parent/child relationship, or a marriage, people are far too willing to walk away from a relationship the instant that it becomes less than fun, never mind uncomfortable. Friendships between people have become increasingly casual. The kind of deep and lasting bonds that people used to forge with one another are largely absent. Ideas such as waiting to see if a less than perfect situation improves is almost totally unthinkable to most people.

What is worse still is that people act without really thinking their actions through. In fact if truth be told all to often in all three of the situations under discussion, it could be said that people are re-acting rather than acting.

The bottom line is that unless we force ourselves, our elected officials, and our country to stop and look at what's goin' down we will quickly find that we are on the eve of destruction.

Keep The Faith My Brothers And Sisters!

The One About... The Triumphant Return Of The One About...!

2011-06-28T00:33:00.001-05:00

It's Baaaack!

When I started this blog over two years ago I was living in an old mining company house enduring one of the worst winters ever. I was trying to live as cheaply as possible because of the impending move to Texas. So I didn't do a lot of movie going, book buying, etc. I felt fairly out of the loop with actually getting to experience entertainment related things. Plus with the impending exit from the Whitehouse of Bush jr. I was feeling a resurgence of interest in politics.

So this blog quickly went from a fairly broad blog covering entertainment, and pop culture, and art, and science, and literature, as well as politics, to pretty much exclusively politics.

Meanwhile, even though I've never really had any illusions about making money with my blog I did want people to read it. So I signed up for every possible referral service, and also used several traffic exchange programs.

This all worked for a time. But then between the move, and my wife's mother dying from cancer, and getting a job etc etc etc I got more than a little bit burned out.

For a while the burnout was near total and I just didn't blog at all. Then for the last year I've tried to get back into it. But I kept trying to re-invent the wheel. Trying scheme after scheme. And then last week I realized something.

I'm bored. (To read the full article click Here)

Don't get me wrong I love my blog. And to be honest I do love writing about politics (okay "love" might not be the right word but I think you understand what I mean). But I am also a comic book geek, and a TV geek, and a movie geek, and on and on and on. So I thought it over and decided that it was time to take this blog back to its roots. To make it about more than just politics.

So here's the thing. The fundamental mission of The One About... has not changed and will never change. My goal is to offer a fresh perspective on things. To take a topic that everyone is talking about and hopefully say something that no one else (or almost no one else) is saying. In short, "Not more of 'that'".

Now besides a change in focus I have also made some changes to the blogs design. The main layout is largely the same, but I have tweaked the sidebar extensively. I've gotten rid of a lot of the clutter. Also I've tried to group things in what I think is a logical way.

There are a few options that I'm really excited to offer and I wanted to draw your attention to, because I think they make this blog a little different from a lot of what's out there.

One of my favorites is under the heading The One About... Turning This Blog Into A Podcast. It's powered by Odiogo. If one wanted to listen to a very excellent text to speech translation on the site there is a button on each post. But if you click the button on the sidebar it will take you to a list of options for podcasting this blog. So if you are someone who prefers to listen rather than read, you can easily add The One About... to your podcast line up.

Another feature I'm very excited about is The One About...'s Facebook page which can be liked from a sidebar widget, plus there is a link to the page. Check it out and you will get to see special content exclusive to the Facebook page. Including behind the scenes information about each article.

I am really looking forward to sharing the new The One About... with you all. I hope you enjoy it as much as I enjoy bringing it to you.

Keep The Faith My Brothers And Sisters!

The One About... They Are Everywhere!

2011-06-26T11:17:00.000-05:00

Look around you and you will see them. Sometimes you can tell but most of the time you can't. They may be your neighbor. Your co-worker. Your boss. When you go shopping they may be ringing you up, or shopping along side you. When you are on the road they could be one of the road construction crew, or the cop pulling over a speeder. Hell they could even be the jerk that just cut you off. They are teachers, and parents, and children. Doctors, and nurses, lawyers, and garbage collectors. They are all races, ages, and belief systems. They have hopes, and dreams, fears, and angers. If you prick them, they do indeed bleed. They are Lesbian, Gay, Bi, and Transgendered human beings and they are just like you and me.

Happy Pride Day From The One About...

The One About We Are Waging War On The Wrong Terror.

2011-05-05T23:59:00.003-05:00

"Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate... Leads to suffering."
Yoda - Star Wars: Episode One: The Phantom Menace

I was born on December Tenth Nineteen Seventy Three. Much of my young life was shaped by two very important things. The Soviet Union, and Nuclear Armageddon. The truth is, that those two things, were really just one thing. My life, was shaped by fear. To read the full article click here

I didn't really know anything of substance about Russia, or Russians, or as they were more commonly called back then "The Soviets". But I knew two things for certain. They were the enemy. And they had "The Bomb".

Likewise I knew very little, nothing really, about nuclear warfare. But I knew that it was bad, and I knew that if it ever happened, everyone I cared about (which included myself) would suffer and die.

Oh, and one other trivial little detail. I knew that a nuclear bomb exploding, would be announced by a mushroom cloud.

In May of nineteen eighty, I was six years, five months, and eighteen days old. I lived with my parents, and little brother in the Western half of Washington state. My paternal grandparents lived just a couple of roads away.

My parents had gone away for the weekend. The daughter of my T-Ball coach had stayed at the house babysitting me and my brother over the weekend. It was Sunday morning. My parents were supposed to be home that evening. I was excited, in that subliminal way that kids have. I didn't know I was excited, but I was. Because with them gone it meant that things weren't normal. Like most kids, I craved normal the way a drunk craves his next drink.

Television on a Sunday morning before cable, was frankly the very definition of boring. Especially compared to the thrill fest that was Saturday morning cartoons. But, I was a kid, and it was tv, so it was on. Suddenly, it got horribly staticy and I didn't know why. Everything got very, very quiet, and it started to get dark. And I didn't know why.

Then I saw it. A mushroom cloud. Suddenly I knew why. The Soviets had dropped the bomb.
Every one, and every thing, I loved was going to die. Not just die, but die horribly. Die in ways that my young intellect could not really grasp, but a more visceral part of me understood all too well. In that moment I was more afraid than I had ever been in my life. More afraid, than perhaps I have ever been since.

If, in that moment, someone came to me and said, "Son, you just say the word and we will take the might of the American Military, and we will make those Soviet sons of bitches pay for murdering you and your family." I can guarantee you, I would have said that word. I would have given my soul, my sight, and my future to make the ones who had dropped that bomb pay.

But there was no bomb. On May eighteenth, Nineteen Eighty, the formerly inactive volcano known as Mount Saint Helens erupted.

Fun fact, when a volcano erupts, especially a really big eruption it often throws up a mushroom cloud, just like a nuclear bomb does.

Time moved forward. I made it through the scariest day of my life. My parents made it home safely. A few year later we moved, and the Soviet Union Collapsed. To the best of my knowledge the two events are not directly connected in any way. Like most people, as I grew up, I forgot those childhood fears. With the Soviet Union now the "Former" Soviet Union, I forgot how terrifying they were.

Until I saw a movie called, "Charlie Wilson's War". The movie details how, thanks to the persistence of one man, the United States ended up supplying arms, and training, to tribal forces in Afghanistan, who were attempting to remove the Soviet Union from their country.

In the course of the movie was some footage, most likely stock footage, of the Soviet Army marching. It was an impressive sight. These looked like some people who truly had their shit together. Suddenly, I remembered how terrifying we all found the Soviets. Not only because they seemed so intense, not only because they were our enemy, but because they had the bomb.

We were afraid of them.

Because of that fear, there were people in our government who felt that anything that might help to bring down the Soviet Union was an avenue worth pursuing.

Including arming, and training, religious fundamentalists.

One of those fundamentalists, was a man named Osama Bin Laden.

Time goes on, the Afghans harry the Soviet Union, until it is too costly for them to stay in Afghanistan. Not long after that, the Soviet Union collapses. People in America, start to breathe easier. To forget how afraid they were.

While there were moments now and again when the fear would seem to return, it didn't take root the way it had before. It was a fleeting thing.

Then came the morning of September Eleventh Two Thousand and One.

And the fear returned.

Suddenly, out of that fear we were ready to all but turn over every last ounce of self governance, every aspect of our lives, cede control to... Who? God? The President? Santa Claus maybe? All of them, and none of them.

The who really didn't matter. What we wanted, what we really wanted was for someone to show up and say to us, "Folks, you just say the word, and we will take the might of the American Military, and we will make those terrorist sons of bitches pay for murdering all those people."

And someone did show up and in essence say that. His name was George W. Bush.

Remember that price I mentioned before? The price that I would have paid, no matter what it was? Well we did indeed pay it, and gladly. Warrantless wire tapping? No problem. Indefinite detention of "suspects", with their having no recourse of any kind? Sure. Wage war in a country that had no direct link to the 9/11 attacks, because they might, definitely, probably, maybe have weapons of mass destruction? You betcha.

And who was to blame for all of this fear? Well here's a funny twist, it was the same freedom lover who a couple of decades ago we were arming and training to help him in his fight against the Soviets.

Osama Bin Laden.

And how do I know that this is all Osama Bin Laden's fault? Why because Brian Williams, anchor of NBC Nightly News told me so...

"Osama bin Laden is dead. The man who killed thousands of innocent people, the man who launched the United States into two wars in the name of that attack, the man who changed the way we have to live in this country; the man who did all of this..."

It wasn't our fault in any way shape or form. It was all Osama's fault. His fault, that we allowed our elected officials to make choices that have left us in a state of perpetual war. His fault, that we are so afraid of ever having another day like 9/11, that we will attack anyone, anywhere, who might conceivably, some day, some how, do something that might hurt us.

Before that, it wasn't our fault either, but rather the Soviet Union's fault. Their fault, that we spent billions on nuclear weapons. Their fault, that in attempting to protect our system of Capitalism, from their system of Communism we allowed one Senator to hold hearings that, through innuendo destroyed the lives, and livelihoods of a great many people. Some, for holding the wrong views. Many, for simply not being co-operative with the destruction of others.

Everything, since roughly forever, has been someone else's fault it seems.

But, now, we come to a unique moment in time.

The Soviet Union is collapsed. Osama Bin Laden is dead.

It's time to start taking responsibility for our choices.

I know that we all just want to be safe. We just want everything to make sense. We want the bad guys punished and our loved ones either kept safe or avenged.

I completely understand that feeling. I had it once. I was six years, five months, and eighteen days old. I've grown up since then.

I've learned that sometimes, no matter what you do, no matter how hard you try, bad things happen.
Sometimes, the bad guys go unpunished. Even more frustratingly, sometimes, there are no bad guys. Just people. Acting and reacting. All too often out of fear.

But we have a choice.

"A choice, right now, between fear and love. The eyes of fear want you to put bigger locks on your doors, buy guns, close yourselves off. The eyes of love, instead, see all of us as one."
William Melvin (Bill) Hicks

So maybe it's time to make some different choices.

We've given fear an honest try. It really doesn't seem to have worked out all that well for us.

Maybe it's time to try choosing something else. Maybe not "Love", at least not at first. That may be something to work our way up to. For a start, let's just try choosing "Not Fear" and see where things go from there.

Keep The Faith My Brothers And Sisters!

The following resources were used in the creation of this article:

From End Evil.com's Bill Hicks quotes page
From transcript of NBC Nightly News for 05/02/2011 from LexisNexis News

Posted via email from The One About...

Are You Sure About That?

2011-04-27T15:00:00.001-05:00

Senator Blowhard Wants The Truth!

Today (04/27/2011) President Obama handed out copies of his birth certificate and the original has been on display, and yet it still does not satisfy these whack jobs. I figure that once they finally give up on the whole birth certificate thing, they'll find something else to obsess over. Senator Blowhard being a foreward thinking sort is merely ahead of his time.

And for anyone who has any doubts yes I am both a sci-fi and Star Trek geek.

Posted via email from The One About...

Are You Sure About That?

2011-04-26T19:42:00.001-05:00

It Depends On How You Define It.

This strip was inspired by seeing a very garish truck and trailer (camper type) that was done up as if it were a rolling billboard for jingoism. On it was some blather about "supporting" the troops. A phrase that I am past tired of. I'd love to hear one of these war mongers explain to me how wanting more soldiers to kill and die for nothing is "supporting" them.

Posted via email from The One About...

Are You Sure About That?

2011-04-25T20:50:00.001-05:00

Senator Blowhard Tells The Ugly Truth.

Posted via email from The One About...

The One About A New Feature!

2011-04-24T17:45:00.001-05:00

Thanks to Stripgenerator.com even someone like myself who cannot draw a straight line can do a web comic. It's called Are You Sure About That? and will focus mostly on politics but will also branch out into pop culture and other weirdness. I will post the strip itself here and a link to it's presence on Strip Generator.

So without further ado...

Are You Sure About That?

It's A Real Rush.

To see the strip in its original location check here.

Posted via email from The One About...

The One About The Hidden Victims Of Sexual Violence.

2011-04-22T01:06:00.004-05:00

Sexual violence. It's not usually the sort of thing that makes the lead of the nightly network news shows. But for those of us who cast our news gathering nets just a bit wider it's been on the radar quite a bit lately. There's been talk of the culture of sexual violence in the military against female soldiers, and of increasing incidents of rape on college campuses to name just two of the most recent.

Such news, is to any compassionate person, always disturbing. And the natural and understandable impulse when faced with such news is to place most, if not all of our focus on the very obvious and visible victims of sexual violence. To find ways to keep them "safe". But all too often we do not take the time to step back and consider the larger systemic problems that need addressed if we are ever to have any real hope of creating a meaningful and lasting diminishment in the incidents of sexual violence.

While there are a great many factors that go into creating a person who engages in sexual violence against another, I believe there is one factor that is primary, and in fact facilitates any others.

Extreme objectification. (Click here to read more)

To be honest I believe that a certain amount of objectification in the course of our interactions with others is normal. Some of it comes about because our contact with another person is fleeting and distant. For example you are walking down a busy sidewalk and a jogger passes you. As he is running past and the back of him enters into your view, you may notice his legs, or his butt, (if you're into guys) but you probably aren't wondering what his stance on free trade versus fair trade is. This is normal, and not to my mind unhealthy.

It is when one is unable to move past such thinking when dealing with someone in a more direct manner, that there is a possibility that one may have problems that require professional help to deal with. This is even more true when one cannot view people one interacts with regularly as people, and not merely as objects placed in one's path to be utilized in one fashion or another.

To consider that a person could objectify another to the degree needed to be able to assault them sexually is horrifying indeed.

But for the perpetrator of such a crime, the person they've assaulted is not the only victim, even though they may are the most obvious, their victimization the easiest to understand and accept.

Rather the perpetrator themselves is their own earliest victim, of a kind of self-inflicted assault.

Much of this I believe is societal in nature.

While it is certainly true that not all perpetrators of sexual violence are men, and not all victims are women, the greater numbers of each group are indeed divided along those gender lines.

And the culture that surrounds and overwhelms men is a culture that teaches self objectification.
Almost from birth men are taught to view themselves almost the way one would view a machine. It is reinforced by sports culture, and military culture. Sub cultures which celebrate a kind of resiliency that goes beyond the heroic into the pathological. Slogans range from, "No pain, no gain" to "Pain is just weakness leaving the body". Almost all aspects of male culture encourages, nay demands, that a "real" man ignore any thing that may stop them from taking, not getting, not earning, but taking what they want.

Then to make matters even worse is the pathological attitude that is indoctrinated in men towards sex. If women are socialized to not seek sex for its own sake, then the socialization of men is a dark twisted mirror of that message. Men are encouraged by popular culture, by the media, and by their own peers to do exactly what women are "forbidden" from doing. They are pushed to view every woman they see as a potential conquest. And to consider their masculinity in terms of how many women they've fucked.

Even worse still is that the whole of our society is almost incapable of dealing with nuance and complexity when it comes to talking about much of anything, and this is true tenfold where sex is concerned.
Sexual impulses are a conflicting swamp of desires and drives. The violent and aggressive, co-existing with the tender and compassionate. But all too often even the most forward thinking of people fail to find the will to grapple with this complexity, so they fall back on the oldest of stereotypes.

The result is that even the best men are left in an untenable situation. Some simply go along with the unbridled current of male culture. They buy into the myths of what a "real man" is supposed to be, and any impulses they might have that run contrary to those myths are buried.

Then there are those who attempt to figure things out for themselves, try to find their own way of being a man in the world today.

While there is more support for this now than there was thirty some years ago, it is still not an easy road. Far too often one is treated as if one is somehow defective for not viewing things as every other male does. Ironically enough this thinking is often just as prevalent in females as in other males. The stereotype of the woman who has one disastrous relationship after another with men who are dismissive of her as a person, and even abusive, all the while leaning on her "nice guy" friend for support, never considering that perhaps that is the type of man she should be with, is not completely without basis in fact.

The simple truth is that both males and females are so deeply indoctrinated as to what a "man" is supposed to be, that neither party is really engaging in the kind of questioning of gender assumptions that needs to take place before any kind of real change can start to happen.

There are bright spots, many more now than even a couple of decades ago. Men and women in greater and greater numbers are beginning to realize that until everyone, male and female are free to be their truest selves without being bound by arbitrary restrictions, then no one is free.

It is my hope that part of this awakening will include a desire to help heal all the victims of sexual violence, both the obvious ones, and the hidden ones.

Keep The Faith My Brothers And Sisters!

Posted via email from The One About...

The One About Reagan's Anti-Union Chickens Coming Home To Roost.

2011-04-19T01:40:00.001-05:00

There has recently been a tidal wave of Air Traffic Controllers falling asleep on the job, during late night shifts, when often staying awake presents the single most daunting challenge they'll face all shift.

This has happened in places as diverse as Seattle, Washington; Reno, Nevada; Lubbock, Texas; Knoxville, Tennessee; Washington, D.C. and Miami, Florida.

Needless to say every one is VERY CONCERNED. They are busily harumphing, talking about responsibility, and accountability, and their "watch", and all the usual things that they talk about whenever something big enough, and bad enough happens long enough to enter into the little bit of the American people's brainspace not taken over by obsession with what celebrity has a sex tape "leaked" this week, or who is going to win on American Idol.

Some are even actually talking about the underlying cause. Namely that the over night shifts are understaffed (all too often by only one person), and that there are not nearly enough air traffic controllers to go around.

But it seems that almost no one, (and certainly not the main stream media) has the guts to stand up and speak the truth about where the real root of many of these problems lay.

To put it simply, it's Ronald Reagan's fault.

In August of 1981, the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization declared a strike, seeking things like better working conditions, and a shorter work week.

That's right the air traffic controllers wanted to work LESS. Because they knew even back then that there was entirely too much risk of an overly tired controller falling asleep.

So Reagan simply ordered the controllers back to work and those that did not comply were fired and blacklisted from Federal jobs in the future.

PATCO was destroyed, and a new, neutered union was born, the National Air Traffic Controllers Association.

I would imagine that the situation for NATCA is a bit like being Henry the Eighths second wife. I'm sure they have done the best they can to look after their members best interests, but when almost all of the power and leverage is on the side of the FAA, and the airlines and airports such as the ability to summarily implement changes regardless of whether there is any challenge from the union, it means that they are really there more for the illusion of advocating for the Controllers than for the reality of it.

Meanwhile, you have the entire aviation industry being guided by profit motivation above any other, including or perhaps especially safety.

And what happens when these misguided motivations result in mishaps like the recent spate of sleeping controllers? Why spin doctoring and blame placing of course. The head of the FAA going on Fox news and offering no defense while the shows host insinuates that the problem is the Union.

There will be fevered hunts for the cause of the problem for a bit. Until a new problem comes along. All the while the facts will not have changed.

Ronald Reagan destroyed Unions in this country. It's just that simple.

And today, the Wrong Wing is proudly trying to finish what he started, making it so that there is simply no such thing as a Union, in any meaningful sense. Making it impossible to form or join one.

If they have their way, there will come a day when there is no one speaking up for the workers. A day when no matter what the job, no matter how important it might be, we will be presented with the only choice our self-appointed Corporate Masters wish us to have. Namely, Like It, or Lump It.

Keep The Faith My Brothers And Sisters!

The following resources were used in the creation of this article:

From DickMeister.com: Ronald Reagan's War on Labor

From PoliticusUSA: Fox News Twists Sleeping Air Traffic Controllers Into An Attack On Unions

From NATCA.com: NATCA Statement on Safe Staffing for Air Traffic Control Shifts

From Wikipedia: Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization: August 1981 strike

National Air Traffic Controllers Association

From Politicol News: FAA Air Traffic-Roy LaHood Asleep on the Job

Posted via email from The One About...

The One About Why We Need More Federal Regulation Not Less.

2011-04-17T21:41:00.001-05:00

Let me ask you a question. What are you an expert on? Seriously what is it that you know forwards and backwards? Personal finance? Personal computing? Picking out the right wine to go with a meal? Fixing a car, rewiring a house, training a dog? Almost everyone is at least good, often very very good, at something. Some are even good, sometimes very very good, at many somethings. But if you are like most people, I'd be willing to bet that you aren't good at everything.

The simple fact is that no one is. Every day, most of us make decisions about things that we know very little about. Many of us try to research these things as best we are able, but even with the internet to help, some of the topics with which we may have to deal are so complex that only someone with years of training and experience can really steer us in the right direction. Sadly all too often such a person is not available to us, for reasons ranging from said person simply not existing near us, to said person existing but charging fees that, while not unreasonable, are still far higher than what we can afford to pay.

This is just one of the many reasons why we need strong government regulations.

There is another reason, one that is perhaps even more important than the first. American business, as it has been framed for at least the last hundred plus years is designed to be completely amoral. There is quite literally, all things being equal, no incentive for businesses to care about doing the right thing, any more than they feel they absolutely have to. All too often their default position is to do what they like, and on the far too few occasions that a person or group of people manage to sue them, they then will often tie things up in litigation hoping that the ability of the aggrieved party will falter before the cost of defending themselves outstrips what it would have taken to simply have made things right, or even better yet to have prevented the problem in the first place.

Once again the redress for this is regulation.

Regulation has been demonized, by the Right, and by Big Business, for as long as the idea has been around. Sadly, it has become all too common today, for average people to have bought into the web of bullshit that those two spin, about how onerous even the lightest and most reasonable of regulation is. Even sadder still is the fact that Democrats who are supposed to be the voice for regulation have either jumped on the "Deregulation" band wagon as Clinton did, or failed to fight effectively against it as was the case with Carter.

But regulation is good, and decent, and noble and right.

When you buy milk at the grocery, stamped with its use by date, you can trust that the milk in that container will not be spoiled, and if it is, then you can trust that you can return it and get your money back thanks to regulation.

When you go to buy a house, or a used car, the reason why the seller must state up front anything they know of that is wrong with either, in some cases having to put it in writing is because of regulation.

When a business is kept from making claims that they either, do not know for certain to be true, or even worse know for certain to be untrue, the reason for that is regulation.

When you have to deal with the final disposition of the remains of a loved one, a time when people are often at their most vulnerable and least clear-headed, the funeral home MUST list everything they are charging you for before you sign anything, because of regulation.

It is regulation that assures that people get fair treatment, and quality products and services.

There are always those who want to whine and cry about how awful it is that "No one trusts anyone any more!" insinuating that we should just go on faith unless someone does something bad. These are usually the same people who interestingly enough want to limit a persons right to sue if they are defrauded in a business transaction. Personally they've nothing to say that I've any interest in hearing since I'd be willing to lay good money down on the table to bet that they are all hypocrites. Unless they don't own or use locks on their doors, then I'd say their "trust" is pretty much a one way street.

Then there are the ones (usually the same ones as mentioned above) who complain about how Regulation only increases the cost of doing business. Sometimes this is true. Often the increase is, over the long-term, fairly miniscule. Sometimes admittedly the cost is fairly high, but this is most often in those businesses that have managed to go unregulated for far too long. The irony that many businesses do not wish to acknowledge is that sometimes regulation will SAVE them money, because in forbidding them from engaging in one type of potentially risky behavior or another, they are saved from taking a chance, having it go badly, and being successfully sued for far more than the cost of following the regulations.

However there is a problem abroad in the land.

During the 80's Ronald Reagan brought the spirit of deregulation with him and passed that spirit on to Bill Clinton. Over time though the support for massive deregulation seemed to start to wane. And so a program, active to this day of back door deregulation was stepped up. The best example of this can be seen with regards to the Food and Drug Administration. It is just one of many government agencies that is so horribly underfunded on top of laws being passed that all but strip it of the power to take action that it cannot effectively enforce the regulations that do exist. It is thanks to situations like this, that the salmonella tainted peanut epidemic of a couple of years ago was allowed to happen.

Back door deregulation is what allowed the horrible disaster caused by BP last year to happen.

But writing regulation, and funding its enforcement is not by themselves enough. There is an important third component, that even the most strident Progressives all too often fail to acknowledge, let alone articulate. For regulation to be effective much of it Must be at the Federal not the state level.

Once upon a time when it was possible for a person to be born, live and die without leaving their home town, never mind their home state, nor really have their lives directly impacted by what happened in other areas, it made a certain amount of sense to have Federal regulations be fairly minimal, almost like an outline and let the states have more control. That time is passed. If you need a clear proof of what a disaster weak Federal regulation and deference to the will of the states is I have just three words for you... Credit Card Companies.

Despite doing business all over the country these companies set up their "official" headquarters in states that have little to no regulation of their practices, meaning that unless a card holder is lucky enough to live in a state with laws that have been written in such a way as to regulate the transaction at the cardholders end, regardless of the laws where the card provider is based they have little to no protection.

Recently there has been some attempts to change some of this as regards credit cards thanks in no small part to the tireless efforts of Elizabeth Warren. But like almost all regulation of any kind it has been fought tooth and nail by the Right and Big Business. A huge shock I know.

The bottom line is that no matter what free market fantasies the Right might spin, businesses are loath to put what is right above what is profitable. And in this day and age thanks to the Interstate and the Internet, we are no longer a loosely affiliated collection of somewhat united states. We are one country and it's high time that our regulation and enforcement of that regulation accepted and reflected these facts.

Keep The Faith My Brothers And Sisters!

The following resources were consulted in the creation of this article:

From AlcatrazHistory.com: Al Capone At Alcatraz

From ConsumerAffairs.com: Life Alert Emergency Response

Special thanks to @Shoq

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The One About A Follow Up To France's Law Banning The Burqa Is Anti-Woman.

2011-04-16T00:37:00.001-05:00

The other day I offered my thoughts on France's recently implemented law making certain kinds of facial covering garments including those commonly associated with some of the more extreme practitioners of the Muslim religion.

There were a great many comments, but the most cogent came to me from a person named Casey.

I asked and received their permission to repost their remarks. Following that I'll offer up a few thoughts on what they had to say.

So without further mildew, I'll turn the floor over to Casey...

"You're condeming this legislation for all the wrong reasons.

The primary impetus for the prohibition of wearing the burqa in public is not a woman's rights issue, but a question of national identity and secularity. You can't think of French systems, laws, and definitions of freedom within a North American framework because the deep history of France and the philosophies that underpin the French brand of freedom are completely foreign and unrelated to the United States, despite that France is a "western" culture. American rules simply don't apply.

France employed a policy of <<la laïcité>>, or secularity, in the early 20th century. This means you can practice whatever you want privately, but as far as education and the public sector go, all is secular. The French state is far more influential in the daily lives of French citizens than the American government is- and it isn't necessarily a negative thing. The secularity laws provide a protection to the nonreligious and those practicing minority religions, a system that the United States should surely emulate in some fashion. In the early 20th century any ostentatious religious garments were prohibited from being worn in schools. This includes crucifixes, stars of david, and the like. The burqa is as ostentatious as a religious garment gets. To show such strong religious affiliation in the public sector is inconsistent with the French value of secularity and is seen to compromise French national identity. North Americans can't really relate to this issue of "national identity" that so plagues French society - what does it mean to be French? It is kind of rooted in the discrepancy between those who are ethnically French and those who live as French citizens in the modern French state. According to Sarkozy and many others, the burqa defies French ideals - that being secularity, principally, and equality between the sexes, also, yes. Sarkozy asserts that the French state should stop asking how they can accommodate the customs of immigrants, but rather how the immigrants can express loyalty to the French state that will be providing them with the life they will live.

Note also that the legislation prohibits not a hijab or headscarf, but only the full, face covering burqa. The legislation also prohibits any other face covering mask, not only religious garments. This brings up the security issue. Burqas are a security threat, plain and simple. There was a suicide bombing executed by a someone in a full burqa just recently in Pakistan. It is also an identity issue. How can someone picking their child up from school in a full burqa assert their identity, or withdrawal from a bank, etc. etc.

It is also true that many experts on Islam have said that there is no basis for the burqa in the Quran, and that most factions of Islam do not require women to wear the burqa. Forced burqa application occurs in the most radical sects of the religion. To force a woman to wear a burqa, covering her face, is stripping a woman of her identity, her sense of self, her individualism, and all because women are the "embodiment of temptation" and, of course, men shouldn't be bothered to control their impulses.

For a woman wearing a burqa in public, the fine is minimal and they may require some patriotism classes or something. If a man is found out to be forcing a woman to wear a burqa, the consequences include hefty fines and a prison sentence. This seems appropriate, to me. If a woman is choosing to wear a burqa, fine, you choose Allah over the French state or whatever. If the latter situation, a man is infringing upon a woman's civil rights. You call it "unenforceable", but keep in mind that the French have a different type of judicial system that is "inquisitorial", not "accusatory" like the American system. This allows for more, freer investigation by judges, even, if they are so inclined.

I am not completely defending the legislation, but you can see from where it arose in French culture. The law affects maybe 2,000 people, not that many. It is moreso to prove a point and perhaps further ostracize Muslims, maybe. It is my opinion that perhaps Sarkozy is stirring up this secularity/national identity conversation in order to garner votes from the far-right anti-immigration radical voters, away from the FN party.

I understand where one may think the legislation oppressive, but quite frankly, infringing on rights when it comes to religion in favor of the common good is extremely progressive- and in a good way. Why should such fairy tales as these huge, oppressive religions dictate how societies live, instead of equality and the truth of science and the tolerance and objectivity of secularity? A significant factor in the subordinate status of women worldwide is due to religion. Also, I highly doubt that the vast majority of these women want to wear a full burqa. They would never be allowed to say so- how can you ask the VEILED if they are oppressed? The veil is the embodiment of oppression! It would be frightening because it is probably all they have ever known, and many may want to wear a hijab for religious purposes, as hair often represents sexuality, but to cover the face and surrender identity for men? Oppressive. I don't know that some French legislation will cure all of these ills, of course, but an attempt is being made here. The legislation has been emulated in some other parts of Europe, like Germany, but not on such a large scale.

You don't have to worry about the US emulating this legislation, that would never happen. The United States systemizes freedom in a completely different way, and, as we know, the US has absolutely no commitment to secularity. The burqa ban is flawed, certainly, but I feel like people are failing to see a lot of the benefits. We could all do with a little more secularity in government."

First of all I'd like to thank Casey for their very thoughtful and well articulated points. Many of which I agree with, and others while I may not exactly agree I can understand the logic of.

One of my objections is that to a certain extent French Nationalism merely seems like religion by other means. So to an extent it almost seems like a kind of forced conversion to require an individual to surrender so much of what they may view as the core of their identity.

Beyond that however is the issue of whether or not one can be liberated from an opressive religion or practice at what amounts to the point of a sword.

I can more than understand how distasteful people find the opression of women that is part and parcel of Islamic extremism. But I do not see how a law that is likely to result in more opression not less is going to do anything meaningful to address the problem.

As to the security arguments, those I find much more compelling although only up to a point. Since I would imagine that in Pakistan veiled women are a much more common sight, they are not an illogical agent for terroristic actions. Whereas since such a woman (law or no law) would stand out like the proverbial sore thumb, in France, she would not make an effective terrorist agent because there'd be too much scrutiny.

Ultimately the world in many ways always has been a very small place and it continues to grow smaller. Whether Secularists like it or not religions like Islam and Christianity are not going away any time soon. And I'm not certain that crafting laws that seem to be aimed largely at supressing a particular group is in any nations best interests.

Keep The Faith My Brothers And Sisters!

Posted via email from The One About...

The One About Doublethinking About Education.

2011-04-15T02:23:00.001-05:00

[[posterous-content:pid___2]]"Forty-five percent of people who go to college, four-year colleges, don't get a bachelor's degree within six years. Those people often have met with disappointment and their investment isn't particularly good, necessarily. Another group of people graduate from college and then have trouble getting jobs and end up taking jobs for which a college education is not really a prerequisite. Twelve percent of the mail carriers in the United States today have college degrees. And I have nothing against mail carriers with college degrees, but I don't think it's an absolute necessity to have a college degree to deliver the mail. "

Professor RICHARD VEDDER (Ohio University)

Once upon a time there was a much clearer divide between "Education" and "Training".

The former was about gaining a set of skills to help one gather information about the world in which one lived and then filter, understand, and act upon that information. The latter about gaining very specific skills necessary to do a particular task or set of tasks.

While the two were considered in many ways equally important, they were not confused for each other.

There was a time when an education was something you took. It was a right. A human right. Whereas training was something you were given. It was bestowed upon you.

The purpose of training was to help you get or keep a job.

The purpose of education was so that you could be a fully participating citizen, of the world, not just the little piece of it where you happened to have been born, happened to be living.

There was also a time when Universities while considered Foci of education, were not thought of as the sole repositories of same. There were many who had no formal schooling at all. Yet they took great pride in being educated, even if it was self-education. They read voraciously, engaged in lively intellectual debate with others. And while this was greatly satisfying to them, they conceived of something more for their children.

So they worked and fought to see a formal education transformed from something only for the scions of the privileged, to a basic human right available to all.

But as happens all to often the seductive serpent of Radical Capitalism slithered into what should have been the grounds of Eden and turned it into a kind of hell.

Bit by bit a poison has spread in the veins of our ambitions. We have been encouraged to view everything through a horribly distorted lens. A lens called, "But how does this get me paid."

Everything has been reduced to the lowest common denominator of cold hard cash.

If an "education" does not result in one getting a job, securing one's economic future, then clearly it must be a waste of time has become the conventional wisdom.

Those who go to school without a clear plan of how what they are studying will result in a big payday at some point are viewed as frivolous.

We have been taught that the subtler, intangible values of what was once called a "classic" education, are meaningless if they can not result in a bigger house, a better car, in short if they do not result in having more things.

This is why they have tried so hard to make everything about passing standardized tests and we treat teachers as if they were doing a job no more complicated than collecting the trash, and infinitely less valuable.

Modern life has become much like being on a long conveyor belt, the end of which dumps us into a charnel pit. No matter how much we might struggle there seems to be no getting off, no avoiding the terrible fate we've seen all the ones before us consigned to. Or at least this is what we've been told by the ones operating the conveyor. At one point along they way there is a door marked "EXIT". However when we inquire about what lies behind that door, we are told, "Oh you don't want to go through that door. You'll never get to the end of the conveyor if you do."

But here's the secret they are keeping from you. That conveyor belt? It only seems like it's moving. In truth you only get to the pit if you choose to walk forward all the way to the end. And that door, the one marked "EXIT"? It's not closed, in fact it's wide open, and a lot easier to reach then they would have you believe. You only need to find the courage to walk through it. Once you do you'll be in a whole new place. It has its own challenges and dangers but the rewards are far greater than anything that conveyor belt you left behind has to offer.

Keep The Faith My Brothers And Sisters!

The following resources were used in the creation of this article:

From TechCrunch: We’re in a Bubble and It’s Not the Internet. It’s Higher Education.

From Chris Hedges at Truthout: Why the United States Is Destroying Its Education System

From Tell Me More on NPR: Is A College Education Worth The Debt?

Posted via email from The One About...

The One About "Bad Idea" Doesn't Even Begin To Cover It.

2011-04-13T21:36:00.001-05:00

There are a lot of people who are sorely disappointed in Barack Obama. I'm one of them.

The person who seemed like the second coming of FDR has turned out to be more like the second coming of Clinton instead. Excelling at talking a good game, but far to eager to appease the corporations and the Republican extremists who have taken control of the GOP.

Obama is constantly seeking the "Center" from the beginning of any political action, which pretty much guarantees that he'll end up on the "Right" every time.

On issues ranging from financial reform, to healthcare for all, he has time and time again let the Progressive Left down.

As a result, there are a lot of people calling for Obama to face a Primary Challenge. I am Not one of them.

The kind of thinking that leads Progressives to believe that a Primary Challenge to Obama is a good idea is a classic example of the many ways that all to often we are unwilling, or unable to accept and grapple with some of the simple, brutal truths of politics in America, in this day and age.

1: No president will ever be Progressive enough.

This has been a fact of political life going back at least as far as Franklin Roosevelt. (I limit myself thusly because I'm honestly not sure if Progressivism as the distinct entity we know it as today really existed prior to the twentieth century) The amount of politicking, and compromise required to be elected President usually saps even the best persons purity. Even if someone were to mount a successful Primary Challenge to Obama, win the Democratic nomination and win the Presidency, there is no guarantee that once in office that person wouldn't turn out to be as bad a compromiser as we fault Obama for being.

2: It's far easier to lose momentum than to build it.

One of the things that Obama at this stage in the game has going for him is that he's a known commodity. This helps to get past some of the natural suspicions people have of the unknown. This increases his chances of winning. A successful challenger while perhaps well-known to Progressives, would be a virtual stranger to most Americans. Besides that, most Americans would not even be "seeing" the candidate but rather the infighting and divisiveness that he would symbolize. Leaving the Republicans free to do what they do best, present the appearance of a united front, which can be very reassuring to voters.

3: Anything that might allow a Republican to get back into the White House is an unacceptable risk.

And I do mean ANYTHING! The Republicans have always largely been pro military, pro corporation, anti regulation, and anti reform. But once upon a time they did have some self-imposed limits. Lines that at least in public they assured us they would not cross. Those days are OVER. At this point I have no faith at all in the Republicans to be even remotely sane. Destroy Medicare? End Social Security? Kill the Post Office? Repeal the minimum wage laws? If the headlines tomorrow said the GOP was going to do all those things and more it would not surprise me one bit. The majority of Democrats may be fairly weak, and very beholden to corporations, but at least they still have a shred of compassion and common sense. The Republicans not only have none, but they have made a point of proclaiming that lack as a virtue.

4: You cannot build the roof before you build the foundation.

A big part of the problem in politics in America is that far too many people are fixated on the office of the President as the be all and end all of political power. In some ways it is. But in many other ways it really isn't. Power for real change often lies in the lower levels. State, even often cities and towns. If Progressives really do want to someday have a President that reflects our values we need to start by building a solid Progressive infrastructure. We need to remember that no position is too small, to not be worth seeking to put a Progressive there. Town dog catcher, city auditor, and on up. Once we have the lowest most humble levels of government filled with Progressives, then we can seek to build on that. Working up to Progressive mayors, and governors, and senators. Until finally there will come a day when a true Progressive is sitting in the oval office.

This however is the work of years, decades really. It is not going to happen over night. And the way to start is not by trying to field a Hail Mary Pass of a candidate to challenge Obama in the Democratic Primary.

Keep The Faith My Brothers And Sisters!

The following resources were used in the creation of this article:

From Newsweek: War on the Weak

From Truthout: Government by People Who Hate You

From The Wall Street Journal: Obama Puts Taxes on Table

From The Progressive: Why a Primary Challenge to Obama Is a Bad Idea

Posted via email from The One About...

The One About Even The Strongest Have A Breaking Point.

2011-04-13T01:50:00.001-05:00

"It’s all right to tell a man to lift himself by his own bootstraps, but it is cruel jest to say to a bootless man that he ought to lift himself by his own bootstraps."
— Martin Luther King Jr.

There was a time in this country when the dream of America was so strongly felt, so powerfully dreamt, and so completely believed that there were many who could not even begin to imagine that it might be a false dream. It was the dream that anyone could be a material success if only they worked hard enough. The dream that, that same material success indicated spiritual success. It was the dream that nothing separated the common man from the Rockefellers except a little luck to go with the aforementioned hard work. That at any moment one might rise above even the humblest of circumstances and "make something of oneself".

But then came the horrible awakening known as The Great Depression. A time that saw unbelievable numbers of people go from prosperity, to poverty, in one fell swoop.

The nation was gripped by a spirit of hopelessness, and helplessness.

The timid, tepid answer advanced by those in government was to stay the course. To trust in the Masters of commerce and let them have their head in all things.

The callous, cold answer from those Masters of business and finance was to not look to them for your well-being. They were in business to do business, not to take care of those who couldn't take care of themselves.

All the while, people starved, and froze, and sickened, and died.

Finally, there came some people who understood, even if often imperfectly, what people were going through. They understood how angry, and mournful, and horribly, horribly frightened people were.

These people conceived of a plan. Not just one plan in fact but a plan of plans.

Regulation for the banks that had helped cause the crisis. Help for the farmers that were among the first and hardest hit by the problems of outmoded methods of food production. Laws that would force businesses of all kinds to give workers safe conditions, an honest wage, and a measure of real security. On top of that they realized that people needed to be able to live their lives relatively free from fear. Both fear of the here and now, and fear of the future.

So a safety net was created.

That net was designed to ensure that those who lost jobs would still be able to live decent dignified lives while looking for work. To make certain that even those who could not work for whatever reason would not be destitute. And to guarantee that when people were simply too old to do for themselves that they would still be able to have some kind of quality of life.

These were promises made to the American people. And we put our faith in them.

Today we stand at the brink of seeing the last of those promises betrayed.

Today this country, the United States Of America exists in a state of perpetual war.

No sooner does one war slow down then we find another one to take its place.

We send men and women to distant regions, to kill and die. There's always a good excuse. It's always in the name of freedom and liberty, but all too often the truth is that it is merely to facilitate the agenda of one corporation or another. But even if the wars we are embroiled in were truly for the reasons we've been told, it would not change a fundamental truth.

Everything that exists has a breaking point. Be it a bridge, a building, a person or a country.

One recent example of this is Clay Hunt. A twenty-eight year old Marine from Houston Texas. Clay was a spokesperson for the military's suicide prevention program. Unlike far too many soldiers he did not keep his pain and confusion to himself. He sought and received help. Sadly just like far far too many soldiers in the end there just wasn't enough help to outweigh the pain and Clay took his own life.

But one doesn't have to be a soldier to know pain, confusion and despair.

There are people who have been out of work for so long now that they have stopped even bothering to look. No matter how much they might wish they could, they simply don't have the strength any more to face the endless rejection.

There are others, who thanks to tactics ranging from legal trickery to outright fraud have been forced from their homes. The lucky ones manage to find friends or family to live with. The unlucky ones end up out on the street.

But even having a job these days for far too many people offers scant protection from a life of unending pain. Whether it is someone who is working themselves to exhaustion in a subsistence level job, hoping and praying every day that they don't get too sick to work. Or that they aren't simply the next to be fired while the company searches for greater and greater profits. Or someone who works, and sacrifices, knowing full well that the likelihood of their children having a better life than theirs is growing increasingly slim.

People are tired. They are scared. They are angry. Most of them don't want to be kept like animals in a cage. Rather what they want is to know that if hard times find them they will have the help they need to be able to continue to live like human beings. To live lives of decency and dignity.

But that's not what's being offered to them.

Instead they watch as the rich grow even richer. They see these millionaires and billionaires feasting, and enjoying the best that life has to offer.

And when any of us dare to ask for even the merest crumb from our presumptive "betters"? We are told that we are lazy, and selfish. How dare we ask them to give up even so much as an iota of their wealth? Who are we to suggest even obliquely that they don't have a god given right to every last cent they can lay their hands on?

So the rich get richer. The poor get poorer. But there's something else we get as we get poorer. We get angrier, and more desperate.

There will come a day, and I think that it is not too far off, where enough people will be desperate enough to stop fearing the consequences of standing up to the hoarders who fancy themselves the Masters of the earth.

If we are lucky, the revolution will be a peaceful one.

But I'm not holding my breath.

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The Last Supper Of A Desperate Man:

Gun in my hand.
So heavy and cool.
So real.
More real than the job i lost six months ago.
More real than the home i had stolen from me by the bank.
More real than the wife who left me because she just couldn't take it any more.

Gun in my heart.
So much anger. Rage. Self loathing. And fear.
Did "they" do this to me?
i played the game by the rules.
Got an education. Got job. Got a wife. A car. A house. A couple of kids. Did everything right and still lost.
Did i do this to me?
Too much spending. Too much credit. Not enough savings. I couldn't believe that it would ever, could ever turn out like this.

Gun in my mouth.
The taste is bitter but inviting.
To a mouth that's been more empty than full these last few weeks, any meal's a treat.
Even a meal of metal and gun oil.
Take a deep breath.
Gather the last of my courage.
Be a man just one last time.
Pull the trigger.

CLICK!

Maybe tomorrow i can scrounge enough money for a bullet.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Keep The Faith My Brothers And Sisters!

The following sources were used in the creation of this article:

From The Houston Chronicle: War casualty on the home front

From The Washington Independent: Death and Joblessness

From Newsweek: War on the Weak

From Truthout: Government by People Who Hate You

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The One About France's Law Banning The Burqa Is Anti-Woman.

2011-04-11T23:23:00.001-05:00

Say, did you hear the one about France caring so much about the freedom of women that they passed a law that is almost certain to result in some of them not being able to leave their homes?

If you say that the joke isn't very funny you're right. But sadly with the recently enacted law against women wearing the traditional head and face covering garments associated with members of the Muslim religion it is likely to have exactly that effect.

The proponents want to carry on about how it is out of respect for women, but the simple truth of the matter is that the law is not only anti-Muslim as others have pointed out, but it is also anti-woman.

Regardless of how many of us in what is broadly termed "The West" may think of many Muslim practices, the simple fact is that passing incredibly restrictive laws like this one is not going to cause Muslim women to suddenly throw off their cloth shackles and embrace liberation. Instead it is going to result in women who despite believing they have to go about with their head and face covered, at least are still able to be out and about amongst other people. Being exposed to other ideas, and other ways of thinking about things. But now women who wear the banned garments will be forced to choose between staying indoors, or breaking the law.

Meanwhile, I can't help but notice that there does not seem to be any law on the books criminalizing Muslim men who wear the dress and facial hair traditional for their religion.

While I am certain that proponents of the law would try to defend it as non sexist by pointing out the much stiffer penalty for men found to be "forcing a woman to wear the burqa", personally I call bullshit, as that part of the law is highly unlikely to be enforced. In fact it is nearly unenforceable. If a woman is veiled in public that is pretty cut and dried. Easy to spot, easy to prove. How pray tell does one spot, let alone prove that she was being "forced" to?

The simple truth of the matter is that one of the prices of living in a free and open society is accepting that some people are going to have ways of acting and dressing that at best make no sense, and at worst are mildly distasteful. Such things are often deeply bound up in the persons culture and traditions and change only slowly, if at all. Attempting to change them at the point of sword, gun, or legislation usually backfires and results in those so threatened digging in their heels and making a point of resisting change. Resulting in a change, that had it been allowed to happen naturally, may have took place in a matter of years, instead taking decades, or even longer.

Bottom line the law is stupid, and will prove I think to cause much more harm than good. I sincerely hope that America will not seek to emulate it, and by doing so add to the already lengthy list of extremely poor ideas we have been guilty of in our attempts to interact with Muslims both at home and abroad.

Keep The Faith My Brothers And Sisters!

The following resource was consulted in creating this article:

Via Newser: 2 Arrested Under France's Burka Ban

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The One About The Price Of Being A Progressive.

2011-04-11T04:13:00.001-05:00

There are times when I wonder if political orientation isn't, for some of us at least, like race or sexual orientation. Some may choose, to be Republican, or Democrat, Conservative, or Liberal. But I am beginning to suspect that for others we are quite literally born a certain way and are not likely to change.

For me, as I indicated back in an article about my journey in growing politically aware, my ideology was pretty much set in my early teens, when I articulated the belief that "Everyone should be free to go as far as their talent and willingness to work will take them, but no one should be allowed to fall below the level of human dignity."

It took me several more years of searching before I was able to figure out that holding such a belief pretty much puts me right smack in the middle of the Progressive camp.

I would not change being a Progressive for anything. It's quite simply the only political ideology that makes any sense to me. Sometimes I do wonder if I did feel it was a matter of choice how likely I would be to "choose" Progressivism. It seems to me that of all the four best known (to Americans anyway) ideologies it is the one that exacts the highest price from its adherents. All too often though that price goes unarticulated. I think that sometimes this results in people getting into Progressivism having no idea what they are in for, and then once they learn, if it is for them a choice rather than a compulsion, they head for the nearest exit.

So it is in the interest of full disclosure that I am going to attempt to sum up the costs as I've learned of them, that one may have to bear in the course of being a Progressive.

1: Get used to thinking for yourself. Even when you don't want to.

There are times when it would be so much simpler to simply be able to turn to a single trusted source, and be told what the truth is, and what we should do about it. But despite the insistence to the contrary of Rush Limbaugh and FOX News, there is no central authority from which Progressives get their marching orders. While there are some sources that are almost universally trusted by Progressives such as Democracy NOW!, even they are not going to provide you with easy answers. You are still going to have to decide for yourself what you believe and how to act upon those beliefs. Which brings us to...

2: Get used to constantly being told how wrong, foolish, naive, etc you are. By other Progressives.

There may be no more contentious group in America. Far too quick to condemn each other for failing to hew to some unspoken party line, yet refusing to hew to that same line themselves if they feel it's contrary to what they view as Progressive values. While this does give each Progressive a great deal of autonomy it makes getting any kind of real mass movement going more than just a bit challenging.

3: Get used to pretty much ALWAYS having only evil to choose from lesser evil though it may be.

Oh sure there are exceptions. Al Franken is one that springs to mind. But over all, generally none of the candidates for office are going to come even close to being in line with Progressive values except, maybe, if you're lucky, on one or two issues. Often not even then. All too often you will be forced to look at things in terms of what candidate would potentially do the most damage if elected and then try to make sure they don't.

4: Get used to people accusing you of judging them. Even when you really aren't.

Vegan? I can guarantee you that the second you discuss how much healthier you feel since making the switch someone will claim that you are judging their choice to eat meat. Anti-war? Trust me you'll be accused sooner or later of hating soldiers. The list goes on and on. Bottom line anytime you take a stand that is outside of the very narrow confines of what many people understand and can accept, no matter how non-judgementally you try to articulate that stand, some people will insist that you are judging them.

5: Get used to always being outgunned.

One of the biggest challenges that Progressives face is mounting effective campaigns against opponents, both Republican and Democrat who are usually getting a lot of corporate cash. The simple truth is that corporations despise Progressives, and they always will. This leaves us forced to depend on grassroots movements, which while certainly can be effective, require a lot more work, and all too often can easily be robbed of momentum at a moments notice. Meanwhile we will constantly be forced to survive situations that feel like the equivelant of a guy with a bb gun going up against someone in a tank.

6: Get used to there being no end in sight.

I think this one above all the others is what finally hits people hard enough that they just give up on Progressivism. Because there will never come a day (at least not until after first contact) when we get to sit back, put our feet up and bask in the glory of a job well done. If we needed proof of that fact the last few years has given it to us in spades. Nearly everything that Progressives accomplished back in the first half of the twentieth century has been undone, or drastically weakened, in either the last half or the first part of the twenty first.

Frankly I think the rewards of Progressivism far outweigh any price. But at the same time I think that people should know what they are getting into so they can make an informed choice. That to me is one of the most fundamental aspects of what it means to be a Progressive.

Keep The Faith My Brothers And Sisters!

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The One About How Bad Does The Abuse Have To Get?

2011-04-07T19:40:00.001-05:00

In the past I've spoken about the fact that I am a survivor of partner abuse. I know from the inside what it is like to be with someone who claims to care about you and yet is abusing you mentally, physically and emotionally. I understand how it is possible to defend that person even truly believe that they really do care, despite all evidence to the contrary. I also know with a certainty that borders on faith that if a person living in such a situation does not eventually wake up and realize the true nature of the reality in which they are living, they will either wind up dead, or so destroyed mentally and emotionally that they may as well be dead.

My question is what exactly is it going to take for the majority of American's to realize this about the Republican party?

Setting aside the history of the Republicans (the fact that they have largely been pro big business and anti worker for most of the twentieth century) and just focusing on what they are up to in the last year is enough to make it abundantly clear that they have anything but the best interests of the whole of the American people driving their agenda.

They are seeking to wholly destroy the social safety net that generations of Americans worked so hard to build in dismantling unemployment benefits, nutrition assistance, Medicaid, and disability benefits.

They are seeking to remove any late life security from people by destroying Social Security, and Medicare.

They are seeking to destroy one of the most secure means by which people might advance from the Working Class into the Middle Class, namely educational opportunity. And they are working to gut the efficacy of Unions, by either simply denying the right to Unionization to public sector workers, or making it next to impossible for private sector workers to form one.

They are lately even seeking to destroy things once thought of as unassailable bastions of life in America, such as the minimum wage, child labor laws, and public police, and fire departments.

Add to this their ongoing attempts to undo protections against discrimination based on race, gender, religion etc. and what you have is a very ugly picture of where they would seek to take this country. Namely back to the '80's and with all due respect to David Sirota I mean the 1880's not the 1980's.

All of this would be bad enough but then there is the psychological warfare that they are engaged in. A relentless assault on people's minds to convince them that any government is bad government. To convince them that the kind of people who programs like welfare, Medicaid, nutrition assistance, and such are meant to help aren't people like them. Oh no it all goes to cheats and chislers and shiftless layabouts.

And taxing the super rich? Well we don't want that now do we? After all this is America where anyone can become anything they want if only they work long enough and hard enough. And some day when you're super rich do YOU want to pay those burdensome taxes? Of course not!

It goes on and on and on. The most mind-boggling part is that people fall for it time and time again. They have been so thoroughly brainwashed against the Progressive agenda that most of them can't even begin to think straight long enough to realize that everything that Government is not doing now, some corporation is doing instead, or it just isn't getting done.

Once upon a time this wasn't too awful. The basic idea was that government secured the basics (the so-called social safety net) and everything above that was left up to businesses.

But American business is about growth, and many seemed to view what government was doing as an ideal growth area. So through lobbying they convinced many in government to give more and more of the things it was running over to business. Like prisons, and power distribution to name just a couple. This would not have been such a terrible thing necessarily if there had been strong regulation and oversight. But of course the instant that businesses came up against even the weakest of regulation they began to lobby to have them removed.

This is a bit like letting the town rapist guard your virgin daughter and then agreeing that those pesky locks on her door will only get in the way of his ability to do his job effectively.

Now we come to the point where the Republicans are preparing to through a thrilling game of chicken with Democrats see the government shut down. All because the Democrats have not capitulated to their Corporatist anti people agenda fast enough and completely enough. The Republicans are zealotous political terrorists willing to hold the country hostage until they get their own way. Compromise is a dirty word and if they can't have it all they'll make sure no one has anything. Kind of a modern-day scorched earth policy.

And as I'm seeing all this take place I have to wonder will there be a final straw? Will people continue to slumber in apathy? Or will there be a final blow that snaps people out of their fatal revery? More importantly perhaps is the question of whether or not after that blow our country will be even remotely salvageable.

Keep The Faith My Brothers And Sisters!

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The One About Terry Jones Being A Distasteful Ass Clown Doesn't Automatically Make Those Opposed To Him Right.

2011-04-04T00:04:00.001-05:00

Not quite a year ago a preacher down in Florida by the name of Terry Jones made headlines by threatening to burn a Qur’an, well-known by now as the holy book of the Muslim faith. Well recently he's been back in the news thanks to his publicly putting said holy book "On Trial", finding it guilty, and as it's "punishment" burning it up in a fire.

In a move that surprised no one with an age or IQ over about ten, a small group of Muslim extremists used the action as an excuse to commit violence and murder.

Sadly the response to the whole situation from a great many pseudo Progressives is equally unsurprising. Said response pretty much boiling down to "It's all Terry Jones' fault."

The response not only emboldens terrorist organizations, but also serves to completely delegitimize the Progressive movement in the eyes of most Americans.

Is there any question that Jones' is a publicity seeking asshole, with no respect for any view other than his own? Of course not. Nor is there any doubt that burning any groups "Holy Book" is in execrable taste. Personally to me book burning always has, and always will be a disgusting reminder of the kind of narrow-minded thinking that comes out of places like Nazi Germany. There is absolutely no doubt in the mind of any rational person that Jones' would be the first to rail against anyone deciding to burn a copy of the book that he considers sacred.

The problem is that something being in poor taste, or ill-considered, or just plain stupid doesn't automatically make it "wrong". And further more even if it were in either the legal or moral sense wrong, that does not make the decision by a group of radical religious nuts to use his actions as an excuse to commit murder, in any way shape or form, rational, right, or even remotely defensible.

Rather, what the Afghani mob, incited by Mullah Mohammed Shah Adeli did, is text-book terrorism. They used violence against people who were not even remotely related to the person who committed an act they did not like, to attempt to send a message.

That message has been heard loud and clear. The message is a fairly simple and disgusting one. "Say or do anything that we do not like and we will murder as many people as we can get our hands on in retaliation."

And do Progressives stand tall and proud and reply with a message of our own, saying that there is never any justification for the murder of innocents, least of all the fact that someone made a statement or committed a symbolic act that you happen to disagree with?

We do not.

Instead we simper about how awful Terry Jones is, and how he shouldn't have done that, and how he's endangering our troops, and a trillion and one other hoary old clichés.

Well here's the simple brutal truth of the matter. Terry Jones Did Not Kill Any ONE. Those Afghans did. Period.

To lose sight of that fact, to suggest even indirectly that we should capitulate to those who seek to use terroristic violence to achieve their goals is in fact to abandon true Progressive principles. To carry on about the wrongs done to someone like Liu Xiaobo because of his governments denial of his right to free speech (a right that most Progressives believe should be held as universal) while insisting that Terry Jones was in the wrong for exercising his, is quite simply two-faced.

And to make matters worse it further distances Progressivism from making any kind of real common cause with the very people we most need to reach out to. Mainstream, working class Americans. It gives us the appearance of caring more about not upsetting a bunch of Muslim extremists than we care about true freedom for all. Freedom to speak one's mind, and freedom to live, free from the fear of the kind of violence those extremists perpetrated.

The extremists have sent their message. And now we must send ours. That even though we may disagree with Jones actions we defend his right to commit them. That we do not view the actions of the Afghans who murdered those people as legitimate in any way, shape, or form. And that there is never any justification of any kind for mass murder. To do any less is to give aid and comfort to the enemies of true freedom abroad, and the enemies of Progressivism here at home.

Keep The Faith My Brothers And Sisters!

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Obama The "Secret Muslim"

2011-04-01T17:39:00.001-05:00

The One About Seven Reasons Some Republicans Keep Insisting Obama Is A "Secret Muslim"

Say did you know that Obama is actually a secret agent of the Muslim Brotherhood? Groomed, so as to be able to pass in American society... and become a United States Senator... and become President. Damn those towelheaded motherfuckers Plan AHEAD. You've got to admire that.

Seriously though this is a line of bullshit that many Republicans (especially those who have allied themselves with the tea party) seem to spout at the drop of a hat. What's truly pathetic is that so many people fall for it without even thinking twice.

And what about the Republiecans? Surely they aren't just saying that in an attempt to undermine Obama's effectiveness as President. Surely they must have solid, logical reasons for claiming that he's a "Secret Muslim". Since most Republinuts decline to enumerate their reasons for holding such an odd belief I've taken the liberty of trying to think like a Republican (It was easy after breathing into a plastic bag until I passed out from lack of oxygen, but boy is it hard to type with a plastic bag over your head) and come up with a list of possible explanations. And without further ado, here they are.

7: It's to keep him from realizing they know he's a Secret Jew.

6: They actually meant it as a compliment because he talks so much more intelligently and dresses so much nicer than those obvious Muslims.

5: Obama? They were talking about another black leader of a major superpower. They do kind of all look alike you know.

4: They just can't find any other rational explanation for why he's not going after the white women.

3: They get all tingly in their special places when they say, "Secret Muslim".

2: The ones who insist he is, are in fact themselves, "Secret Muslims" and they are just trying to keep the suspicion off, so they can continue to subvert the citizens of the Great Satan, America.

1: They know he's not. They're only saying that to keep people from realizing that he's a fucking corporate shill just like they are.

Keep The Faith My Brothers And Sisters!

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In Honor Of Bill Hicks Day

2011-03-31T22:33:00.001-05:00

The One About Not Only Can't You Handle The Truth But You Don't Even Really Want It.

"I want the truth!"

"You can't handle the truth!"

From the movie A Few Good Men

Truth. Everyone claims to want it. But in fact precious few do. Most people are more often than not searching to have their opinions, illusions, and deeply cherished beliefs re-enforced, rather than challenged. To hear someone speak truths that are contrary to our views is very difficult.

Part of the problem is that all of us perceive through such limited and limiting senses. As a result, truth can change sometimes, as we find new and better ways of finding things out. This is what has often resulted in explorers at the forefront of the sciences being punished for daring to speak of a truth different from what the religious leaders of the day held to be true.

Other times however, the truth has not changed one iota. But rather what has happened is that certain people have found it personally inconvenient for the real truth to be acknowledged. So they engage in that most ancient of arts, the one known as "Spin Doctoring". Trying to convince us that what is true is a lie and what is a lie is actually the truth.

Take the current situation in Libya. One that has come about in part because of the world's refusal for at least the past decade to do anything about that country's dictatorial leader. And now that he has given up any pretense of restraint in his actions against the very people that he is supposed to lead, we now act as if we didn't just months ago treat him as if he was a stellar part of the international community and always had been. To make matters even more bizarre in our attempts to back the anti Qadhafi forces now we are considering arming those in rebellion against him. To hear the news media tell it the rebels are a simple heartful people, unschooled in the ways of modern warfare. A good-natured, well-meaning, if slightly backwards bunch. Does this rhetoric sound familiar? Did they dust off the scripts used when they were trying to justify arming the Afghan people in their struggle against the Soviet Union?

The simple ugly truth is that the United States is becoming the kind of nightmare that one once thought only existed in well-meaning but overly earnest science fiction stories. A country in a state of perpetual warfare, where a narrow class of elites enjoy peace and plenty while the rest of us toil so as to permit them to continue to enjoy the standard of living to which they have become accustomed.

Once in a while someone will appear. Someone who speaks up and says the truly true things. The things that we do not want to hear. Not because they are not true, but rather precisely because they are.

And how do we thank such a person?

Do we kill him?

Oh goodness no. We have gotten ever so much smarter than that. We have learned that a big messy death, or even a seemingly quiet one, leaves too much potential risk for the deceased to become a martyr and from martyr to become an icon. So now we simply marginalize them. We ignore what they are saying to the best of our ability. And when they manage to become unignorable we ridicule them, or we claim that they are a dangerously delusional zealot. Or in some cases we simply jail them, or silence them in other ways.

But the important thing is that we are able to get them off the stage as quickly and cleanly as possible. So that we are able to return to our tiny little lives secure in the knowledge that all will be well, and all will be well, and all manner of things will be well.

One such person whom I wrote about earlier in the week was Joe Bageant. But another person who passed seventeen years ago now was Bill Hicks.

Bill spoke out against commercialism, and materialism, and the futility of politics as usual. He spoke of the potential locked within the human race and how to possibly unleash it. But more than speak of it he lived it. There exist no commercials of Bill hawking products, nor wacky sitcoms with him as the star. And how did we thank him for it? We ignored him. While attention was being lavished on the bland, safe, inoffensive comedy stylings of Jay Leno, Bill was left to languish. Eking out an existence, the major saving grace being his popularity in places like England, Australia, and Scotland.

Finally after an uphill struggle for recognition Bill made a fundamental mistake of being openly anti-Clinton, which further alienated people, since in the simple-minded dualities of the day there must be a bad guy and there must be a good guy, and many people had decided that Clinton was the good guy.

Finally far too early Bill died from cancer.

But now thanks to the internet and word of mouth the truth that he shared is truly finding the audience that it should have found well over a decade ago. Some might opine that it's too little too late. But I'm hoping it will turn out to be more a case of better late than never. I'm hoping that things like the quote below will be heard and truly paid attention to. And maybe, just maybe, even acted upon.

Keep The Faith My Brothers And Sisters and Happy Bill Hicks' Day!

"The world is like a ride at an amusement park. And when you choose to go on it, you think that it's real because that's how powerful our minds are. And the ride goes up and down and round and round. It has thrills and chills, and it's very brightly coloured, and it's very loud and it's fun, for a while.

Some people have been on the ride for a long time, and they begin to question - is this real, or is this just a ride? And other people have remembered, and they come back to us. They say 'Hey! Don't worry, don't be afraid, ever, because, this is just a ride.'

And we...kill those people. Ha ha ha. 'Shut him up! We have a lot invested in this ride. SHUT HIM UP! Look at my furrows of worry. Look at my big bank account and family. This just has to be real.' It's just a ride. But we always kill those good guys who try and tell us that, you ever notice that? And let the demons run amok.

But it doesn't matter because: it's just a ride. And we can change it anytime we want. It's only a choice. No effort, no work, no job, no savings, and money. A choice, right now, between fear and love.

The eyes of fear want you to put bigger locks on your doors, buy guns, close yourselves off.

The eyes of love, instead, see all of us as one.

Here's what you can do to change the world, right now, to a better ride. Take all that money that we spend on weapons and defence each year, and instead spend it feeding, clothing and educating the poor of the world, which it would many times over, not one human being excluded, and we could explore space, together, both inner and outer, for ever, in peace."

William Melvin "Bill" Hicks (December 16, 1961 – February 26, 1994)

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The One About for 03/30/2011

2011-03-30T21:47:00.001-05:00

The One About Compassion For The Affluent.

"It is preoccupation with possessions, more than anything else, that prevents us from living freely and nobly."

Bertrand Russell

"I guarantee that I have more debt than all of you. With 6 kids, I still pay off my student loans. I still pay my mortgage. I drive a used minivan. If you think I’m living high off the hog, I’ve got one paycheck. So I..I struggle to meet my bills right now. Would it be easier for me if I get more paychecks? Maybe, but at this point I’m not living high off the hog."

Sean Duffy

It seems like lately we hear quotes like the one from Representative Duffy a lot from those on the Right. Especially when they are seeking to defend budget cuts, and austerity measures, and other ploys and plans that adversely affect the working classes. Understandably the standard reaction from Progressives is to mock and deride people who say such things. Call them clueless, and heartless, and out of touch and greedy.

I not only understand such reactions but I've had them myself.

But I'd like to suggest that we take a step back and look a little deeper. Because I think that such statements point to a deeper truth. An ugly truth that we are all loathe to grapple forthrightly with.

We are a nation addicted to consumption.

Every last one of us. We are kept in a state of perpetual false need. Through advertising, and through peer pressure. We are sold want, and desire, and fear of not having.

We are convinced that with just one more thing our lives will be complete. A better job, a lover, more friends, a spouse, an I-Pad, a new car, bigger boobs, things, Things, THINGS!

The worst part of this sickness is that it is cruelly deceptive. "I'll be happy once I get a raise... Oh man I wish I had a new boat like Bob's, I know I'd be happy with a new boat... My life will finally be complete when I meet the man of my dreams and he marries me..." But there is no end to it.

Not unless we choose to end it.

Now don't mis-take me here. I'm not some knucklehead carrying on about the nobility of the destitute, nor am I suggesting that wanting and having "things" is inherently bad.

What I am saying is that when you filter everything in your life through a materialistic lense, your view of the world, your fellow humans, and yourself will be forever distorted, quite probably irrevocably.

So now I bet you're wondering what is to be done about those who are not only infected with this sickness but seem to be bound and determined to spread it.

Well clearly they must be stopped. Their message of materialismus uber alles must be shown up for what it is. An effort to spread a very dangerous virus of the mind and spirit.

But I think it best if we do not do it from a place of hatred. But rather from a place of compassion. Like dealing with a rabid animal. The animal must be stopped, kept from infecting anyone else. But we don't hate the animal. Rather we pity it and wish to keep anyone else from sharing its fate. Likewise should we pity anyone who when confronted with the suffering of those who have less than them, can only enumerate all the ways in which they think of themselves as having the worse situation. Pity them and pray that we ourselves never become so deeply afflicted.

Keep The Faith My Brothers And Sisters!

See this Amp at http://amplify.com/u/bx8ym

Joe Bageant And The Dirty "W"'s

2011-03-28T20:45:00.001-05:00

The One About Joe Bageant And The Dirty "W"'s.

If you fancy yourself a Progressive, and are not a neo-Luddite, then you have probably already been informed via Facebook, or Twitter, or some other wonderful info sharing service about the passing of Joe Bageant over the weekend.

There have been and will be a lot of heartfelt articles written about Joe, by people who knew him. People who counted him as friend, or mentor, or inspiration. I wish I could count myself as amongst the former two, but will have to content myself with belonging among the latter one.

There is a great deal about Joe that is praiseworthy. The honesty of his writing. The warmth and humor and humanity that shone through his work. These are good things for a writer and for a human being to have.

But there was something specific to his work that touched me deeply and has been a large influence both on the way I think and the way I write about Progressive issues.

It was the fact that Joe was not afraid to talk about the two dirty "W"'s. Words that all too often Progressives seem unable or unwilling to talk about. Oh sure they might discuss them obliquely, but seldom if ever directly.

The dirty "W"'s to which I refer are two words.

The first is "Working Class".

I am I couldn't say how many generations of that class. I saw my father obtain the trappings of the middle class life, only to watch as he was crushed when it was all snatched away from him by a country that was rapidly changing. A country that was moving from an economy of industry and manufacturing to an economy that seems to export bullshit as its primary product.

So when the members of the Corporatocracy decided they didn't have enough wealth and turned their hungry gaze on the middle class and began to strip them of their mediocre share of the money pie before the first decade of the twenty-first century was even near done I will not lie, I shed no tears. I've known for the last twenty years that this time was coming. Meanwhile everyone from the most centrist pseudo Liberal to the truest far Left Progressive seemed to be talking in panicked tones about what could be done, "To Save The Middle Class." Oh so well-meaning all of them. And all so fucking blind. Even one's that I have enormous respect and affection for like Elizabeth Warren. Blind. Well allow me to open your eyes. Here's the secret. The one that almost no one seems to want to talk about. Without tadpoles, there are no frogs. Likewise without a healthy and prospering working class There Is NO Middle Class. It's just that simple. This is the way it is supposed to work. The poor dream of being working poor, the working poor dream of being working class, the working class dream of being middle class, and the middle class dream of being rich. The ideal, the admitted fantasy was that if you worked, and saved, and did the right things and the smart things then it was possible for you to move ahead, to make a better life for yourself and your family. Then through education and a certain amount of reasonable assistance to level the playing field your children would be able to do a little better than you.

But the Master class in the seventies didn't feel they had enough. Not enough money. Not enough drugs and toys. Not enough whores and sycophants. And worst of all they made themselves as insulated and isolated as possible from any potential wrath. In the thirties, people were hungry, and angry, and miserable. Miserable enough to act up and just possibly make life equally miserable for their Masters, or for some of the less pacifistic to even end those lives of privilege. It had the Master class scared. Just scared enough to decide that it was better, safer, for them to play ball with Roosevelt's New Deal than to take their chances with the serving classes.

But then came the boom of the war years and those in the starving classes saw things get just a little bit better. Better enough that they started to worry about keeping what they had. And so while the mass of Working Class Americans went to bed satisfied enough they stopped keeping a close eye on the doings of the Corporate Fuckpigs. And while they weren't looking those same Fuckpigs with gradual swiftness silently undid every bit of protection put in place for the average working person. Financial protection? Gone. Social safety net? Cut to shreds. Now there are even those who would do away with things that were once considered the unassailable bedrock of this country. Things like the minimum wage, Social Security, and public fire fighting departments. They seek to return us to a time when we all drew breath at the pleasure of our "betters"

And while there are some who talk about these things, far too often still all the talk even in the most Progressive of venues is of the middle class, the middle class, the middle class.

But read Joe's writings, a concern for, a love for, and an identification with The Working Class permeates every thing he writes. He understood that without a healthy, thriving working class, the middle class is nothing but a drunken delusion. And he understood that the country was staggering towards sobriety like a drunk staggers towards wakefulness after a month-long bender.

Someone else might have injected a tone of hope into his prose. But not Joe. He spoke his truth no matter what anyone felt about it. Sometimes I think that even included himself. I think he wanted to have hope, hope for a great Progressive awakening. Kind of the way one hopes a loved one will get off the booze and into sobriety. But Joe was a keen observer and he knew that America was more likely to hunt up the bottle, even if there was only dregs and take a long deep pull in the hopes of getting drunk enough to escape back into the sweet delusions that held so many of us in thrall all these years.

But Working Class wasn't the only dirty "W" that Joe was brave enough to talk about. He also was the master of talking about "White People".

Is there any group of people that Progressives are more afraid to speak of? And who can blame them. Far too often the ones who would speak up to defend poor and working class whites will not talk of the perpetually shitty deal that the system has given them right along with people of color, but rather continue the poisonously delusional bullshit of insisting that the working and poor whites only suffer because of the programs created to help poor and working people of color.

But not Joe.

Joe was the only writer I have found so far that was able to articulate the stinky donkey shit deal that poor and working class whites have been given in terms that made central a simple truth. When the Master Class gazes upon one of us from the lower classes, they don't see black, or white, or male or female. They see us only as objects, to be used or made useful and if we cannot fulfill those two purposes then we are to be discarded. Joe understood that the only time that the color of a poor person's skin matters to the Master Class is when they want to fool that poor dumb white sumbitch into making common cause with the oppressor against those with whom they actually have the most in common.

I will tell you now that I am as white as they come, but I would be a lot quicker to trust a black man I've never met who looked like he knew what a days work was than a white man in a suit who looked like his idea of struggle is deciding whether to summer in France, or on the Cape.

It was from Joe that I learned to have as much sympathy for working class and poor white people as I do for anyone else. because we have all been handed the shit end of the stick. The shape of the stick might be different from group to group, and the smell of the shit might vary, but in the end there is only one "Us" and only one "Them" if you have eyes to see beneath the crap they've stuffed into our heads for the last couple hundred years.

The only other person I've come across who managed to make any of the above truth evident was Howard Zinn. Another hero in the Progressive struggle whose loss is very keenly felt.

In the end, I can't claim to know what kind of person Joe Bageant was. For all I know he was a card cheating, wife stealing, horse rustling son of a bitch. I only know him through his writing. But that writing made a change in me more profound than anything I've known in some time. So I figure that's good enough.

Rest easy Brother Joe, you will be remembered and you will be missed.

Keep The Faith My Brothers And Sisters!

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The One About I Have Met The Enemy And He Is Not Us.

2010-10-05T21:36:00.000-05:00

It's angry hour at The One About... Just when I thought I had swallowed all the sick fucked up shit that the Republicants could possibly dish out. Just when I figured that the Right Wing Scum Suckers could not sink any lower. Just when I thought that there were a few areas of life that were just universal common sense, off limits to debate. That's when I have to go and find out shit like this...

As his Tennessee home burned to the ground last week, Gene Cranick didn't have to watch the tragedy unfold alone: He was flanked by his local firefighters. The firefighters initially refused to come to the scene as the fire raged—because Cranick had failed to pay a $75 annual service fee. As the fire, which began in some barrels, inched toward his home, Cranick claims he offered to pay them any amount to extinguish the blaze, to no avail. Hours later, his home, three dogs, and a cat were gone.

I honestly thought that we had moved past this sort of thing. I thought we had left it discarded in the dust bin of history marked 1800's, along with shit like slavery, and child labor. But apparently not.

But there's more to this than just this one incident. Because there is a false narrative abroad in the land, and while it is most at home in the mainstream media increasingly it is finding a foot hold even in what had once seemed more Progressive environs. This false narrative goes something like this.

"Both the Left and the Right have some extremists but generally they are people of good will and good faith"

FUCKING BULLSHIT!

First of all, first of all if you support in any way shape or form any law, policy, etc., that allows, or even worse requires people to stand by and let someone's house burn to the ground, and innocent living things BURN TO DEATH, then you are not a person of good will and good faith in fact you are not a person. You are a fucking monster.

Just that simple. If you support, defend, apologize for, this sort of inhuman, monstrous bullshit than YOU ARE A FUCKING MONSTER and you should be hunted to the ends of the earth and destroyed.

But more than that, for those middle grounders that want to try and claim that the Left is as bad as the Right, tell me, what has anyone on the Left as it exists today done that is even close to what happened in this town? How many people have had their lives taken from them because of Left Wing Rhetoric? How many murders have happened because someone put into action what a bile spewing Left Wing hate monger put into words?

How many countries have been invaded to give people decent jobs at a living wage, and health care, and a quality education, and assurance of a decent standard of living even if they don't have a job at the moment?

Not sure? Searching your memory? Well let me settle it for you.

NOT A FUCKING ONE!

Because while Progressives might have some flaws, such as a tendency to value peoples long term well being over their freedom to disregard that same well being, or a tendency to attack symptoms rather than causes, we are nothing like the kind of hateful murderous pieces of disease riddled shit that think it's just fine and fucking dandy to let people starve, or freeze, or die of treatable diseases, or have their home burned to the ground and their animal companions burnt to death just because "They didn't pay."

Keep The Faith My Brothers And Sisters!

Don't want to fuck all the time? There's a pill for that.

2010-09-27T19:33:00.001-05:00

http://blogs.alternet.org/speakeasy/2010/09/22/is-female-sexua...

This Interview with Sex, Lies, and Pharmaceuticals author Ray Moynihan is well worth reading. It's not terribly long, and it talks not only about the attempts to create and market a drug for women with "abnormally" low sexual desire, but alos generally about how the drug companies have taken the myth from high school (my metaphor not the authors) that a "normal" sex drive means you want to fuck all the time, packaged, and sold it.

See this Amp at http://amplify.com/u/bb0l

The One About Some Words That Need Said.

2010-09-05T14:15:00.000-05:00

There is a phrase that is commonly said on Memorial Day and Veterans Day, to the people whom those holidays are meant to honor. “Thank you for your service.” And do you know what, I think that is a fine and wonderful thing to say to those who have served in the military. After all when it is used the right way military service is not only important but honorable (and in the spirit of peace and brotherhood I won’t suggest that the last time our military was not largely used as hired thugs for the Corporatocracy was right around World War Two).

But tomorrow is not about the military. No tomorrow is Labor Day. Ostensibly a day to honor the myriad of working people in America.

And frankly it’s a joke.

Because no one gives a flying fuck about the working class. Our Corporate Masters do their level best to keep us stupefied and apathetic with an endless treadmill of work at subsistence level wages, while their entertrainment, keeps most of us in a constant state of want for things we don't need, so that we will be good little consumers. Meanwhile the Religious Wrong moves forward with its' perpetual brain washing campaign drilling into people how good and right and holy and wonderful it is to be brood animals for their horrific caricature of God. So most people even if they might have enough money to live a comfortable if spare existence on their own have no hope of that with one, two, three, four, sometimes more mouths to feed.
At the same time the rich will happily making full use of any public program they can, decry even the most reasonable of taxes to support those same programs. When they get in a jam they come with their hat in hand. Meanwhile their fully owned puppets stall and kill legislation to do things like create public healthcare, or provide unemployment benefit extensions.

So we know the score. But hey this is America, land of the little white lie. So let's play a game. Let’s play make believe like we did when we were kids.

So those of you in that rarefied air of the rich and the upper middle class tomorrow pretend for a few seconds you actually give a shit about the Working Classes, and when you come across one of the myriad people who make your comfortable existence possible, shake their hand, look them in the eye (don’t worry you won’t catch anything. *sadly*) and say “Thank you for your service.”

And in return I promise we'll pretend that we don't despise you and everything that you stand for. Really I promise.

Oh and just in case you are so out of touch that you forget who is in the Working Class and who's NOT? Here's a handy little list. While it’s not all inclusive it should give you a rough idea.

WORKING CLASS:

Teachers
Nurses
Garbage Collectors
Wait People
Cooks
Nannies
Convenience Store Clerks
Janitors
Policemen
Firemen
EMTs
Fast Food Restaurant Employees

NOT WORKING CLASS:

Major Celebrities
State and Federal Legislators
The President
Plastic Surgeons
CEO's
Stock Brokers
Celebrity Chefs
Steve Jobs
High Priced Call Girls (or Boys)

I hope you found this wee list helpful. After all I can understand how easily you could get confused seeing as how you know so many people on the latter list, and so few on the former.

Keep The Faith And Happy Labor Day My Brothers And Sisters!

The One About I Am For Genetically Modified Food In Theory, But Not In Practice.

2010-06-27T14:32:00.000-05:00

It has recently been in the news that there may soon be available farm grown salmon that grows at a greatly accelerated rate.

As is so often the case in these matters, there appears to be a strong division along political lines. On the Right this is seen as a wonderful idea, and to them there is no possible reason why it should not be implemented. On the left this is seen as a terrible idea, and to them there is no possible reason why it should be implemented.

And then there's me. I think it's great. In theory.

You see I grew up on Star Trek, both in reruns of it's The Original Series, and also the movies and The Next Generation. I saw a fictional world where there was no hunger, because through science we had found ways to provide enough food for everyone. I personally believe that the use of applied science is going to be our best hope if we have any left at all of making a better life for people.

The problem comes in the practice. Specifically in the fetishization of Free Market Capitalism, and the Demonization of reasonable Government oversight.

The current BP situation is a perfect example of this.

In essence we are on the cusp of realizing Ronald Reagan's stated goal. We have indeed starved the beast. Government as a viable organ for managing our day to day affairs is dying. The only problem is that it seems like none of the Reaganites, nor Reagan himself every put much thought into what would replace it.

So while one beast was being starved, another was growing fat and sassy. Namely The Corporatocracy. The Corporatocracy has grown in strength to the point that it's adherents routinely ignore any and all government directives, and They Get Away With It. They have been aided and abetted by politicians on both the Right and the Left. So now if these salmon are approved, you can pretty much bet that there has been little to no truly independent study of the potential risks. And I'd be willing to bet that a lot of the information comes from the company or companies that want approval to go ahead, much like it has been discovered that the approval for BP's deep water drilling was given based on documents they wrote, which were merely rubber stamped by the agency that was supposed to be regulating them. And of course if the salmon turn out in any way to be dangerous it will be about as easy to get the project halted as it has been for BP to deal with the catastrophe resulting from their placing profit as being of singular importance, far above safety, or human lives.

If there comes a day that our government gets back to doing what it is supposed to be doing, and agencies meant to look out for our common welfare get back to doing their jobs, then maybe we can go forward confidently with exploring a great many things, from Genetically Modified food, to Nuclear Energy.

I'd like that a lot. I for one would love to live in the future posited by Star Trek. But the way things are going I fear that it’s probably going to look a lot more like the ones shown in Waterworld or Mad Max.

Keep The Faith My Brothers And Sisters!

The One About As Ye Sow So Shall Ye Reap

2010-06-20T20:46:00.000-05:00

It seems that Bob Etheridge's attack of a couple of Right leaning college students with a video camera has become as Sheriff Bart might say, an underground sensation. Everyone who's not in the Mainstream Media is talking about it. The one's on the Right are gloating, and the one's on the Left are either rushing to defend him, or to distance himself from them. But it seems to me that everyone is talking as if all of this is happening in a vacuum, completely isolated from anything else going on right now in the world of politics. But the truth is that nothing, and I mean Nothing happens in a vacuum. So let me offer the friends of Progressivism a little food for thought, and connect a few dots for you.

First of all let me make it clear that there is absolutely no question to any rational person that what Congressman Etheridge did was wrong. There is absolutely NO excuse for laying hands on another human being simply for asking a question. And if you are a regular listener to The Young Turks (and if you aren't you should be) then you heard the show's creator and host Cenk Uygur ask the rather sensible question of what exactly was Etheridge doing that he had such a flip out to be video taped and asked a question in public. But even Cenk, who I have enormous respect for seems to have missed the chance to ask some pointed questions of those on the Right.

Namely, what kind of reaction other than fear and paranoia in politicians of the Left were you expecting when members of the Right, most notably Sarah Palin, offer up rhetoric, that suggests if not outright advocates the use of violence against Left wing politicians?

Frankly this whole situation stinks more than just a little bit. Now I'm not suggesting for even a second that what happened to Etheridge was part of any kind of organized conspiracy. I am fairly sure that the kids are just what they seem to be, and that Etheridge over reacted of his own free will. However I do think that the whole situation could be seen as resulting from what I call a Conspiracy Of Bad Intent. First Right wingers, both politicians, and media figures use rhetoric suggesting, inciting, and celebrating violence against Left wing politicians, and against government institutions. Then a few people usually separately but occasionally collectively take action inspired, incited, and encouraged by this rhetoric. And then as a climate of fear and paranoia is created among politicians on the Left, and the inevitable results of that climate start to make themselves felt (disproportionate, and inappropriate reactions being the primary ones) the Right Wingers step up and excoriate the Left, all the while doing their best ignore and obfuscate their actions of the recent past and the part they most likely have played in all of this.

It’s a bit like the way that a person might torment a sibling behind their parents back, doing things to incite them, and then once the sibling retaliates they act the part of the innocent victim.

But here's a fact Right Wingers, you are not innocent. And while you may have managed to get some people to forget or ignore the part that you and your pro violence rhetoric may play in this and other potentially worse situations to come in the future, not all of us have such short memories.

Keep The Faith My Brothers And Sisters!

The One About Aw Crap You Mean He's Not Dead!

2010-05-25T14:26:00.000-05:00

GOOD MORNING INTERTUBES!

Okay. Here's the thing. I wanted to leave. I tried to leave. I've gotten a job. It's not a great job, but the work environment doesn't suck, and let's face it a job is a damn site better than no job. And thanks to the recently raised minimum wage it is at least possible to make a living if you are lucky enough to live in a place like I do that has a fairly low cost of living. (On a side note if you are reading this and are against the Federal Minimum Wage, allow me to take a moment to tell you to go fuck yourself. No seriously, get a big black dildo and go to it. I'll wait. I don't mind.)

So, in the meantime I have been doing my very very best to give up politics. Why? Well geez I don't know. How about the fact that Obama has turned into Clinton Lite? Or the fact that you have politician assholes crafting cop out laws that don't actually fix a Goddamn thing and then cumming all over each others backs about what a great thing they've done for the American People. Or the fact that we live in a universe in which BP is allowed to call the shots of the clean up, after they fucked up the drilling by cutting corners, because heavens fucking forfend that we should regulate any business ever.

Letting BP or any company that has fucked up as badly as they have, have a voice in anything is akin to letting the person who has openly raped somebody be in charge of the investigation.

Meanwhile and in other news we have Rand Paul. You know Rand Paul right? Living proof that the "If you think his dad was bad" idea doesn't stop with the Bush family.

I love Rand Paul. Because he is the ideal example of why once you get Libertarians away from Drugs, and Prostitution, they are pretty much deep into the woods of fantasyland.

Rand Paul basically would have preferred that there not have been legislation forcing private businesses to not discriminate in who they serve. He's fine with anti discrimination laws regarding Federal Government stuff. But not for private businesses.

Now of course on a purely mundane level he's just really shitty at being interviewed. I mean I don't agree with the man and i could do a better job articulating his position than he did.

But on a philosophical level Libertarianism (Which is essentially the political expression of Objectivism) is pretty much bullshit when it comes to dealing with things like racism, sexism, etc. Because Libertarianism is based on a fantasy that if you leave everyone alone to seek their own best interests those individual interests well somehow magically at the same time bring about what is best for society as a whole.

In Rand Paul's Libertarian fantasy I imagine that a refusal to serve a black person in the sixties probably looks something like this...

Black Person: "Good day sir. I was attempting to choose from the vast number of diners wherein a person of my dusky hue might obtain a repast and this one looked quite inviting. Might I take a seat?"

Business Owner: "No. I'd really prefer it if you didn't."

Black Person: "Very well then. I shall take my disposable income elsewhere. May the lord bless and keep you."

Wow. Isn't that a lovely fantasy. If only it had worked that way. Instead it went a bit more like this.

Black Person: "Hi. I'd like a baloney sandwich and a glass of water please."

Business Owner: "Ain't got no sammiches for no Negroes. Best you get a move on boy."

Black Person: "So my money isn't welcome here?"

Guy with gun: "You're money ain't welcome here, and your uppity attitude ain't welcome here." (Proceeds to pistol whip black person)

Black Person: "You know just because I'm black doesn't give you a right to assault me. I'm calling the police."

Guy with gun: "Heh. I am the police you dumb nigger."

Frankly this is just one fictional tableau out of many that we could use. The bottom line is that Libertarianism always sounds like such a plausible idea, but because it refuses, really is incapable of addressing things like greed, violence etc. it is in the end a limited and limiting philosophy. It's fine for dealing with so called victimless crimes like voluntary drug use, voluntary prostitution, etc. But get into much murkier waters? And it's a bit like attempting to cross the Atlantic Ocean in a paper boat.

But I digress.

The point is that no matter how much I want to get out of this world I can't. Because so long as the Conservative/Libertarian voice is so loud as to drown out thought and common sense I am going to have to continue to scream at the top of my lungs.

However having said that I will be doing less screaming. I have a job. I also have another project that includes a blog that is more spiritually inclined called The Threefold Path. So I don't know right now how often I'll be posting. I'm hoping for at least once a week maybe twice.

But I am not gone, and I never will be.

Keep The Faith My Brothers And Sisters!

The One About According To Harry Reid I Don’t Really Exist.

2010-03-04T01:31:00.000-06:00

Hello. If you are a regular reader of this blog then you know that I am openly and proudly Liberal Progressive. Most of the time the things I write are both influenced by politics and intended to advocate for a particular way of thinking on current events. However today although I easily could, I'm not going to do that. The reason being is that the issue I’m going to present is in my opinion much, much too important to play politics with.

The other day Senate majority leader Harry Reid, in attempting to make an emotional appeal on behalf of a bill to extend unemployment benefits said the following,

“Men when they're out of work tend to become abusive. I met with some people while I was home dealing with domestic abuse. It has gotten out of hand. Why? Men don’t have jobs. Women don’t have jobs either, but women aren’t abusive, most of the time. Men, when they’re out of work, tend to become abusive. Our domestic crisis shelters in Nevada are jammed.”

His concerns are valid and justifiable. But in just one sentence he downplayed, in truth dismissed the experiences of a number of men who are believed to be in the millions. These are men who are survivors of partner abuse.

I am one of them.

When I was in my early twenties I was room mates with a woman who was around ten years older than myself. I'll call her Grace here, which is not her real name. I had met Grace as a co-worker, and was friends with her fiancee. They needed a third to share rent and it seemed like a great situation. It was my first time being on my own and I thought it would give me independence but at the same time people to share space with so it wouldn't be quite such a jarring transition. At first things were great. But because of circumstances I knew nothing about Grace's fiancee left her. What went from a three way split became a two way split. But we both had decent jobs and so it worked out alright. We became friends and in time we became more. Unfortunately there was an aspect to Grace that I really didn't understand how important it would be to me. Grace was an alcoholic.

Grace had been sober for some time, but as her life grew more stressful she turned back to an old comfort, namely alcohol. At first it was a time or two, then every weekend. Then almost nightly. I was young and fairly naive, and if I wasn't in love with her, I certainly did care about her. I wanted to be someone good in her life. Someone she could depend on. When she started to grow abusive I did my best to ignore it. It's just the stress, or the alcohol, or any of a host of excuses I'd tell myself. At first it was just verbal abuse, cutting remarks, belittling etc. But over time it grew beyond the verbal. Sometimes she would hit or scratch. The stress grew increasingly hard to bear. I tried to leave on more than one occasion. Each time she would apologize and promise that she would not do it any more. And I'd feel for her, not want to abandon her, so I'd stay. There’d be a few weeks of peace and harmony, and gradually things would go back to the way they were.

One of the ways that Grace kept control of me and our relationship was by constantly reminding me that if I talked to anyone, or tried to leave she'd tell people I hit her, or tell them that I had raped her. Sometimes she would promise to kill her two dogs knowing that I was emotionally attached to them. I felt trapped and powerless. I desperately wanted to talk to somebody about what I was going through, but I was ashamed. I believed that if I talked to my friends (most of whom were women) that they would at best think I was over reacting, and at worst they would think I was lying. After all abuse is something men do to women, not something they experience at the hands of women. So I tried harder to be a good person. To not let it bother me. But my self esteem kept getting worse and worse. Finally in the midst of some very messed up thinking I wrote a set of “rules” that I would look at to remind myself how to keep what Grace said and did from hurting quite so badly. I honestly don’t remember them all, but the first one I created is burned into my memory.

1: Nobody cares about you.

I honestly had convinced myself that if I could just stop feeling anything, just stop caring, then when she ridiculed me, or when she hit me trying to get a reaction out of me that it wouldn’t hurt so much deep inside.

Finally it got to be more than I could stand. I was close to my breaking point. Finally in desperation I reached out to someone who had been Grace's classmate at a local college, with whom I had become friends. I told her everything, and when I was done she had tears in her eyes. Very softly she said, “Do you realize that most men would have probably beaten the shit out of her if she'd treated them the way she's treated you?” I don't know to this day if it's true or not. But just having someone after hearing my story not only say they believed me but that they understood felt like the biggest weight off my shoulders. My reply to her was that I had not retaliated because I did not want to become a bad person. I also confided in her that I felt like my ability to deal with the situation was exhausted. She said very simply, “You have to leave, and leave now.”

I resisted, I came up with excuse after excuse. But a few days later I packed up what I could with the aid of an acquaintances truck and moved into a motel room until I could find an apartment. Then I began a healing process that is ongoing.

I'm much stronger now. I have a wonderful partner who loves me with all her heart and is very good to me. We've had challenges but what couple doesn't. But there are still moments where something will spark a memory. And it's usually not predictable. Just all of the sudden with no real warning I'll have emotional reactions that are just like the ones I had when I was back in the worst of that situation. Sometimes, not very often these days, I will hear like a bell in my head a voice that sounds like mine repeating, “Rule number one: Nobody cares about you.” It does not happen very often and I look forward to a day when it doesn’t happen at all.

If you are a man, and you have or are being abused by your partner there are some things I’d like you to keep in mind.

1: You are not alone.

There are men all over the country who have been and are being abused by women they share their lives with.

2: There is no less bad abuse.

Some people will tell themselves that it's not so bad because it's only verbal abuse, or that since it's not physical they are being wimps for feeling as hurt as they do. But abuse is abuse.

3: Women, can and do sexually abuse, physically abuse, and even kill men.

Even men that are bigger and stronger than them. If you are in an abusive relationship and the abuse hasn't turned physical don't make the mistake of assuming it won't. If it has turned physical, don’t make the mistake of assuming that it won’t get so bad that you end up dead.

4: It is not your fault.

The abuser has sole responsibility for their actions. Telling you that it’s because you are out of work, or they’re out of work, or because they had a bad day, or because you didn’t say the right thing at the right time, or anything like that is them rationalizing behavior that is just plain wrong.

5: Most people are more understanding than you might think.

One of the things that surprised and touched me over and over again was talking with my friends who were women and them sharing their stories of abusive relationships they had survived. Not a single one of them judged me. Instead they all believed that abuse is abuse and that a man can be victimized by it just as much as a woman.

6: It is not going to get better on it’s own.

Things got so bad between Grace and I that I did not feel emotionally safe reconnecting with her. Perhaps if I had taken action when things first got bad it might have been different. I kept waiting, thinking that I was being noble. I wasn't. I am lucky in that I did not end up dead, in an institution or in jail. The next man who chooses nobility over action may not be so lucky.

If you are friends with a man who admits to you that he is a victim of partner abuse, listen to him without judging him. Help him find the resources he needs. If he needs counseling, or if he needs somewhere else to go to get out of the situation. Please, whatever you do, do not dismiss what he says, do not assume that it is just the normal friction that can happen in even the healthiest of relationships. Do not assume that it will get better in time. Do not assume that just because the persons female partner is physically smaller or weaker that there’s no way she could not be abusive physically.

The facts are simply this. Women are human beings no different than men. Women get stressed and overwhelmed. Women sometimes act out towards those they are closest to, saying and doing hurtful things. Women can be abusers. Gender does not keep one from being physically, mentally, emotionally or sexually abusive, nor does it keep one from being abused.

I want to thank you for taking the time to read this. I hope maybe it will do someone, somewhere, some good.

Keep The Faith My Brothers And Sisters!

The One About The Right Wing Hypocrisy Watch! Legacy And Justice Edition!

2010-03-03T21:15:00.000-06:00

Hello again my Brothers And Sisters. Today I've been musing on the hypocrisy that we so often see from the Right Wing of American politics. Now one of the best hypocrisy busters out there is Rachel Maddow. She along with Jon Stewart, Keith Olbermann, and Stephen Colbert, are routinely pointing out the number of things said by specific Republicans out of one side of their mouth, only to later be contradicted by what they say out of the other side.

However there are on occasion examples of hypocrisy that are not necessarily attributable to any one specific individual, but rather to Republicans as a whole. Today I want to discuss two recent examples.

The One About The World Republicans Want To Hand To Our Grand Children.

Recently a lot of Republicans have claimed that their objections to things like offering health care to millions of Americans, or extending unemployment benefits to those that in this incredibly harsh job market still have not been able to find work, is based on principle. They worry about what kind of a country will we be handing to our children and grand children if we increase the deficit to enact these programs. The most recent person to proclaim this concern was Senator Jim Bunning. He stated it was his reason for blocking the bill that would have extended both unemployment benefits, and COBRA, which allows people to keep the health care plan they had at their previous employment if they quit or are fired. Another notable who has used the future of our kids and grand kids as their reason for objecting to pretty much any even remotely Progressive legislation is Senator John McCain.

Now if I were the kind of person who enjoyed shooting fish in a barrel I'd go for the easy hypocrisy and stop there. You know things like the fact that Republicans didn't seemed to terribly worried about the deficit and it's impact on the future when they were passing everything on Jr.'s wish list with absolutely no attempt what so ever to pay for it up front. With no concern at all for how they were growing the deficit. Or there's the hypocrisy of their part in growing military spending with nary a concern for the domestic situation. But no I’m not one to shoot fish in a barrel (It shreds the fish and you keep having to pick bird shot out of your filet) rather I’m going to talk about an even larger hypocrisy.

Republicans are wringing their hands now worrying about the state of the countries future finances, but the state of the livability of the planet, not so much.

That’s right I’m talking about that old bugaboo “Climate Change.”

I know that this is a hotly debated topic, even amongst many on the Left. And I certainly am open to debate about how much effects humans have, and what has the worst effects etc. And I do not doubt that some of the things we are seeing are at their core natural, and cyclical in nature. Having said that however, human beings in the last hundred and fifty years, have been doing an awful lot of polluting. And it's really only been in the last fifty years that we started to make any efforts at all to clean up our act. And that's just in the industrialized "First World" nations like the US and Europe. There are places like China and India that are starting to catch up to us, and there are many so called "Third World" nations that are beginning to head toward being part of the problem, usually not of their own accord but because a corporation has set up a factory or ten there, because there are few if any standards of any kind that can't be gotten around with money. Given all those facts to proclaim that there is no climate change, and to further proclaim that even if there is humans have nothing what so ever to do with it, is frankly ludicrous. I'm no ecobiologist, but as I understand it the earth is a sealed system. That means that nothing comes in or goes out except for radiation. So all that pollution? It's not going to magically disappear. Pollution from the beginning of the Industrial Revolution might conceivably still be having some kind of an impact. So even if things aren't as dire as some predict, why wait until they are that dire to do something about it? Here, let me offer you a little joke to basically sum up my feelings on the situation.

"Charlie decided to go and have a night out with the boys which he hadn't done in a long time. So he went out with four other friends and they well and truly tied one on. Having drunk up most of their money they had pooled to share a cab to his house as it was the most centrally located figuring they’d sleep it off and worry about getting to their respective homes when they woke up. Finally sloshing home at four in the morning Charlie cautioned everyone to be very quiet as they walked in the door. After being shushed for the fifth time one of Charlie’s friends said in exasperation, ‘Jesus Charlie what do you keep shushing us for?’ Blearily Charlie replied, ‘My wife hates it when I drink and if she catches me coming home at four in the morning drunk as a skunk she’ll never let me hear the end of it.’ The friend looked at him quizzically, ‘But Charlie your wife has been dead for three years now, we all went to her funeral.’ Without missing a beat Charlie said, 'I know. But I’m not taking any chances.'"

Well that pretty much sums up my feelings on Climate Change. Why take chances? Why not enact policies now, that start to get the problem under control? If things aren’t at the total catastrophe level why wait until they are?

But the Republicans don't seem interested in doing anything at all. Primarily because some of the solutions of necessity would have to involve more closely regulating corporations and their many processes especially manufacturing. It would also mean accepting that we are one part of a greater whole and adopting some policies that would benefit the whole world not just us. Republicans are categorically unwilling to do that.

So while they fret and worry about the financial state of the country, they apparently are not the least bit worried about whether or not that country will exist on a planet that is capable of making human life bearable or sustaining it at all.

I can just picture little Pizza Delivery Boy Jr. choking out his last as the two hundred degree summer temperature gives him his final fatal heatstroke. And as he dies he thinks to himself, “Thank God that my grandparents generation didn’t burden us with national health care.”

Keep Reading My Brothers And Sisters!

The One About In The World In Their Head That The Republicans Live In Breaking The Senate Finance Rules Or Calling Someone A Bad Name Is A Far Greater Wrong Than Torture (Which Isn’t Wrong At All.)

Apparently Charles Rangel of New York has been a naughty Legislator. It seems that he went on trips, paid for by corporations without disclosing where the funding for the trips came from. Amongst a great many other things. The Right is of course having a field day with this. They dearly love it when a Democrat is proven to be as corrupt as many Republicans have been proven to be. I suppose it makes them feel less alone.

Then of course there was the recent flap around Rahm Emanual showing his incredible lack of class, or sense by referring to Progressives who disagreed with Obama as "Fucking Retards". Well Sarah Palin who is raising a child with Downs Syndrome was outraged. She proclaimed that anyone who used that term should be summarily dismissed from their position.

Now I could point out the free pass she just a day later gave to Rush Limbaugh. But that’s already common knowledge.

What I don’t understand, is how do the Republicans think that they have any authority, any high ground from which to expound about matters of morality when members, not just members but leaders of their own party, namely George W. Bush and Dick Cheney committed crimes of the highest order? From the theft of the 2000 Presidential election, to involving this country in a war in Iraq, based on lies, to approving the torture of suspected terrorists, the things that were done under Bushco. were not just ethically questionable, they were flat out criminal.

Now I’m not saying that what Rangel and Rahm did wasn’t wrong. And in Rangel's case certainly deserving of some kind of punishment. But to get so het up about things that have not even a fraction of the moral debt that Bushco. accrued? Further more to have gone to incredible lengths to make certain that there is not any kind of investigation, that no responsibility or culpability is assigned, let alone actual litigation, and then to carry on about acts that did not involve us in a war, did not result in people being tortured, did not result in people being killed?

Perhaps you Right Wingers should pause briefly from thumping your bibles and actually open them and read. Because there’s this whole thing about motes and beams and getting the latter out of your own eye before worrying about the former in everyone else’s that you might do well to pay attention to.

Keep The Faith My Brothers And Sisters!

The One About Verbal Jiujitsu Stops Right Wing Attacks!

2010-03-02T15:45:00.000-06:00

Many people mistakenly believe that the Eastern Martial Arts like Karate, and Jiujitsu They are really not. Rather they are about the application, direction, and management of force. Whether it is physical, mental, or in some cases political.

One of the best and easiest to learn lessons of martial arts is that if you are being attacked, it is often for the best to not meet force with force. In fact what is best is if you can just move out of the way of the enemies attack, and let their excessive force cause them to over balance, leaving them vulnerable to your attack. What is even better is if they have put so much energy into attacking that they end up damaging themselves without you having to lift a finger.

Now I hear you asking, “How does this apply to politics?” Well consider this exchange between President Obama and Arizona Senator (and Not The President) John McCain,

"MCCAIN: I would just make one comment. Why in the world, then, would we carve out 800,000 people in Florida that would not be -- have their Medicare Advantage cut? Now, I proposed an amendment on the floor to say everybody would be treated the same. Mr. President, why should we carve out 800,000 people because they live in Florida to keep the Medicare Advantage program, and then want to do away with it?

OBAMA: I think you make a legitimate point.

MCCAIN: Well, maybe….

OBAMA: I think you do.

MCCAIN: Thank you very much."

And there you have it my Brothers and Sisters. Right there in that brief exchange is the symbol and symptom of everything that is wrong with the Republican party.

They are so consumed with being obstructionist and resisting even the least little common sense idea from Democrats, that McCain quite literally does not know how to respond when Obama, not agrees with him mind, but when he does not resist him. When Obama does not meet rhetorical force with force of his own McCain quite simply does not know what to do next and so he just stops.

Sometimes this can be our best tactic when engaging with Republicans. Don’t meet force with force, but rather be fluid like water and let them simply speed past you into the brick wall their own obstinate obstructionism has built for them.

Keep The Faith My Brothers And Sisters!

The One About Turn To ESPN To Learn How To Handle The Re-Death Of The Public Option.

2010-03-01T14:41:00.001-06:00

Alright my Brothers And Sisters, the word has come down, and I doubt if many, if any of us are surprised. Once again the public option has been sacrificed, in the hopes of getting enough votes to pass Some kind of health care reform bill. And I can hear the sounds of outrage and betrayal from the ones out there who have more hope than sense. And I'm sure that there will be renewed calls to kill the bill etc. Well you know what? It’s time to look to a new source for inspiration about how Progressives should proceed.

Athletes.

(To read the full article just click the link.)

Yep you heard me right. Athletes

I mean let's face it, athletes are kind of by the very nature of what they do, not real bright. They play in the rain, the snow, the blistering heat. They play their hearts out even when they are down by such a vast margin that they have seemingly no hope of winning. Hell they play hurt. And I don't just mean stitch in your side, stubbed your toe hurt. These dumb mother fuckers play with concussions, and broken bones. But they do not quit. They do not wait until conditions are just perfect to play. They do not stop playing when Everything seems against them. They Just Don’t Stop!

And that's what Progressives need to start doing. We need to reserve talk of bill killing for those times that there is absolutely nothing to be gained from a bill passing. Most of the time we are going to have to accept that pretty much every bill that is created is not going to go far enough, be Progressive enough to suit us. And that's fine, there's nothing wrong with that. But what we need to do is support the most Progressive bills we can find, even if it is only one percent Progressive. And then when it’s passed we keep the pressure on to make it better.

Believe me, I understand how awful the final bill is likely to be. And I'm not dismissing the possibility that in the end we will still need to mobilize to get it killed depending on what other concessions Democrats make to the Regressives. But if we advocate for the final bill to die, we need to understand that means that we start all the way back at the beginning. It's not going to be easier next time. In fact it will be harder next time, because nothing fails like failure. And frankly as awful as the final bill might be, right now there is one powerful reason to support it.

THE REPUBLICANTS WANT IT DEAD!

I mean seriously, think about it for a moment. Now everyone with eyes to see knows that Democrats are largely in the hip pocket of the corporations. The much hated individual mandate proves that. But if Democrats are in the hip pocket well Republicants are deep in the crotch, working the shaft and cradling the balls.

Democrats for all their sins and failings do want to see exclusions for pre existing conditions ended, they do want ceilings on fees, they do want an end to coverage caps and gaps. But because they are in bed with corporations they want to entice the insurance companies into going along by offering them up a juicy gift. Us. Well it sucks, to be sure. But consider the alternative.

The Republicants Don't Give A FLYING FUCK about us. You see they don't want an individual mandate, not because they care about the people not being burdened but because they don't care, Period! Because they don't want there to be Any Reform At All! Limits on rates? They don't want them! An end to the use of preexisting conditions to deny coverage? They don't want it! An end to annual or yearly caps on coverage? They don't want it! Plus they'd be more than thrilled to dismantle Medicare and Medicaid. And if they get their way, we will be left with nothing. Understand that. We won't be left with a crappy and imperfect bill. We won't be left with weak reforms that we have to bust our asses to improve. No, we will be left with JACK SHIT! If the Republicants have their way.

There's a great moment in Star Trek Three: The Search For Spock that is apropos. Captain Kirk has rigged the Enterprise to self destruct and transported down to a top secret experimental planet known as Genesis. The Klingon Commander Kruge has discovered this and has been taunted by Kirk into beaming him up. Kirk tries to get Kruge to beam up Spock who has been freshly re-incarnated without his essence. Kruge says no, and Kirk asks why, and Kruge responds simply. “Because you wish it.”

Well when asked why you still support Health Care Reform simply say, “because The Republicans Want To Kill It.”

Keep The Faith My Brothers And Sisters!

The One About Book Club: The 48 Laws Of Power: Laws 9 and 10

2010-02-28T18:22:00.001-06:00

Hello again. Well yesterday we took a look at laws seven and eight, of The 48 Laws Of Power. Today we look at the next two laws, one of which is incredibly important for Progressives to start following.

(To read the full article just click here.)

LAW NINE: Win through your Actions, Never through Argument

Any momentary triumph you think gained through argument is really a Pyrrhic victory: The resentment and ill will you stir up is stronger and lasts longer than any momentary change of opinion. It is much more powerful to get others to agree with you through your actions, without saying a word. Demonstrate, do not explicate.

Wow. This one is huge. And it’s one that Progressives often have a hard time with.

We often have a tendency to think that if we can just keep talking we will get people to see the sense of our ideas. Generally speaking all that does is make people tired of listening to you. While there is nothing wrong with talking, we must also make certain we are acting. Now the ideal action would be to get Progressive legislation passed and have people see how successful it is. But that is problematic since we are usually out of power more often than we are in. Fortunately that does not mean that we have no other options.

One of our best options is the formation and usage of Non Governmental Organizations or NGO's. Now this is tricky since central to the Progressive message is that reasonable responsible government is a good thing. However if our message is one of reluctant warriors we have the potential to go far. If we are constantly reminding people that if government were doing what it's supposed to do in protecting the people and ensuring their well being their would be lessened need for NGO's. The main thing is that any extra-governmental steps we take must be presented as not a refutation of government but rather as a criticism of governments failure to act.

Another problem we have regards those who oppose us and our seeming disability to disengage with them. So often I see Liberals and Progressives who will debate with a Conservative until they are blue in the face. This is always a losing proposition. I'm not saying we should not engage. But we should do so in the manner or, and to the degree of our choosing. It is easier to do that if you keep a couple of key facts in mind.

1: YOU ARE NOT COMMUNICATING TO ATTEMPT TO EDUCATE A CONSERVATIVE PARTISAN.

Here's the thing, broadly speaking Conservatives are our enemy, ideologically speaking. They may be good people, love their kids, hug puppies etc. But never forget that their entire world view is based on the idea that people should stand on their own unless they have absolutely no other recourse, and then dependence on private charity is preferable to government intervention. They reject the notion that government ever helps. They believe it always and only hurts. They believe that businesses if left unregulated will generally do the "right" thing and that government regulation again only makes things worse never better, etc. etc. They are fanatically devoted to this mindset and message. So strictly speaking on such matters there really is no point in even talking to a Conservative is there? But you are not talking with them for their sake. Rather the point is to get the Progressive message out there to those who have not made up their minds yet. This is why it is important for Progressives to comment on Conservative blogs, call conservative talks shows, write letters to the editors of Conservative newspaper and magazines etc. But it is important to put forth our message or talking point, and then to disengage. Now you may sometimes feel like follow up debate, and that's fine, but be selective where and how you engage. Most of the time you will only be expending time and energy that is better spent elsewhere. Also keep in mind that the window of open mindedness can be rather small. So a reader of a Conservative blog reads the comments section and sees your point and they think about it. But if you keep coming back to defend yourself they will see you as weak, and defensive. Now they disregard your original point, hell they don't even remember it. The window is gone and instead of lodging a Progressive point in their heads they now are even more filled with Right Wing ideology.

2: PICK YOUR MAIN POINT AND THEN HIT AND RUN.

Progressives often want to refute every point that a Conservative makes, but most people find that tedious, especially from a responder. If you want to make a point by point refutation save it for your venue that YOU control, be it blog, TV show, what have you. When you are in the realm of someone else’s control, the briefer and more to the point your message is, the harder a time they are going to have distorting it.

REVERSAL OF THE LAW:

It's not precisely a reversal, but the fact is that in this day and age, there is not getting away from talking. Ours is not an age where it is generally possible to have one's enemies killed, or exiled etc. without running into a large number of problems, and you can't do it publicly. So we talk, which is why they call it a war of words. And while there is strength in silence we must be careful about what message the silence communicates. It must be a dignified silence that says, "I've said all that needs to be said and I trust the people to understand what I'm saying." rather than the fretful fearful silence that conveys a message of weakness and fear. Often times once you have disengaged on a particular point with a particular opponent the worst thing you can do is reengage. It will make you look weak. I understand that no one likes it when your words are twisted around but the truth is that is something Conservatives excel at. So you break your silence to explain yourself, to clarify, and they twist that, so you break silence again. Quickly it becomes clear to everyone who is really in control, and it’s not you.

LAW TEN: INFECTION; AVOID THE UNHAPPY AND UNLUCKY!

You can die from someone else’s misery – emotional states are as infectious as disease. You may feel you are helping the drowning man but you are only precipitating your own disaster. The unfortunate sometimes draw misfortune on themselves; they will also draw it on you. Associate with the happy and fortunate instead.

This is one of the ugly realities of politics and it is one that as much as we might wish were otherwise no one, not even Progressives can escape. It is the reason why even though we know the circumstances beyond his control that led to Jimmy Carter's presidency being perceived as a failure, we also know how he is perceived and generally hold him at arms length. It is why no Progressive gets too close to Ralph Nader. It's the reason why Howard Dean after getting his message across about his fundamental problems with the current Health Care Reform bills, stepped back from saying that it would be best to start over. He wanted to make certain he was no identified with Jane Hamsher of FireDogLake who in the eyes of the general public, and a great many Progressives has destroyed her credibility. Now obviously we don't want to cut people loose the first time they have a defeat or suffer a reversal. But ultimately there comes a point, like it or not that we have to be ruthlessly pragmatic, and when the very mention of someones name taints the Progressive Movement, we've got no choice but to distance ourselves from that person. If we do not, then it hampers our ability to do anything worthwhile.

REVERSAL OF THE LAW:

As The 48 Laws Of Power, says there simply is no reversal of this law. However I think for both our image, and for our spiritual well being, we should be careful in how we apply this law. We must not become a group that cuts someone out the first time they run afoul of circumstances (generally speaking obviously there could be a situation that a person has done or said something so horrible that to be seen supporting them for even one instant more would be destructive to our goals) and we should usually try not to be seen demonizing former allies and leaders who have fallen from glory. Again Carter and Nader are great examples. We are more than happy to allow with Carter on things like Habitat For Humanity etc, but we are careful to make certain that he is not seen as influencing either the directions our policies take, nor the reactions we have to current events. Nader is a popular columnist, and a very intelligent person but any time the subject of his making another Presidential run comes up most smart Progressives find a way to say something nice that amounts to either “Well it would be nice if he could win, but in the current climate I don't think it's a good idea.” Or even better, a nice sounding statement that amounts to “No comment.”

Alright everyone, that's it for this installment of The One About Book Club and for this weekend. Check back next weekend when we'll be diving into laws 11 and 12, and 13/14. Plus remember to check in every day for the weekly edition of The One About…. This week I'll be looking at topics ranging from the problem with religious exemptions, to the Conservative double standard around Obama engaging with "Religious Extremists", and I'll even have tips on how to use martial arts to stop a Republican dead in their tracks. Until next time….

Keep The Faith My Brothers And Sisters!

The One About Book Club: The 48 Laws Of Power: Laws 7 and 8

2010-02-28T00:00:00.001-06:00

Hi all. Welcome back to The One About….'s special weekend feature, The One About Book Club. For those of you who are new readers to The One About…., let me recap for you. On the weekends I write in depth about a book that I feel is of significance to Progressives, looking at one or more chapters per post. For the complete introduction to the project you can go here. My pick to inaugurate this project is The 48 Laws Of Power. So far I've offered an introduction and overview of the book, and written about Chapters(or in keeping with the tone of the book Laws) 1 and 2, 3 and 4, and 5 and 6. So I bet you can guess what comes next.

(Click here to read the full article)

LAW SEVEN: Get others to do the Work for you, but Always Take the Credit

Use the wisdom, knowledge, and legwork of other people to further your own cause. Not only will such assistance save you valuable time and energy, it will give you a godlike aura of efficiency and speed. In the end your helpers will be forgotten and you will be remembered. Never do yourself what others can do for you.

Now so far I, taking a fairly pragmatic view have made suggestions for ways that Progressives could, one might even say should, be using the prior laws of power. This law however is one that I must strongly caution we must avoid being seen using at All Costs!

Progressivism should be, and more importantly must be seen to be, a populist movement, and a largely egalitarian one. While no one expects every single person who might play a minor role to receive some huge acknowledgment, there is a general expectation that credit will be given where it is due. It is by eschewing and being seen to eschew this law and it's adherents that we can better establish our core identity and values. Hogging the spotlight, hoarding the power, that's what "They" do. Sharing the glory, empowering everyone, that’s what “We” do.

REVERSAL OF THE LAW:

For Progressives the thing we have to watch out for are Fame Whores. People who wish to be famous, and have no real investment in our cause. Such people when they are found out should be kept as much out of the limelight, and as far away from power as possible and they should quickly move on to the next venue to fame.

LAW EIGHT: Make other People come to you – use Bait if Necessary

When you force the other person to act, you are the one in control. It is always better to make your opponent come to you, abandoning his own plans in the process. Lure him with fabulous gains – then attack. You hold the cards.

This law is a hard one, practically speaking for Progressives to follow right now. We have precious little real power so it is difficult to be attractive enough to have others come to us. However we would be well advised to get to work on changing that. One very simple step is to stop whining about not being included. I heard this repeated over the last couple of days with some Progressives complaining about there not being any advocates for Single Payer speaking at the recent Health Care Summit. Such whining makes us look weak and is not attractive. Rather the official Progressive position should be one disdaining the Summit as just another example of the Right and Left arms of The Corporatocracy getting together to foul the atmosphere with hot air in hopes of fooling the people that they are actually doing something. It should be the same for anything we are not allowed to take part in. In the meantime we absolutely must continue to get organized, and we should be forming PAC's that are large enough and strong enough to suggest that we could deliver a sizable block of votes. Then the first time that Democrat leaders or the President call upon us to meet with them, we should politely decline. Then on the second invite we should graciously but grudgingly accept.

Now of course the above is merely an example. Politics is a dynamic situation and we need to always be on the look out for how best to act and react in any given situation. The important thing is that we must be seen Not running to the beck and call of non Progressives in power simply because they’ve snapped their fingers.

REVERSAL OF THE LAW:

Basically we must be sensitive to the situation and our position at any given moment. Once we have managed to get some unity and some effective PAC's formed we will be in a better position to make people come to us. Until then we should be careful not to over play things. Again the recent summit is a great example. Since we were not invited we should be seen to disdain the event, but had we been invited, we should have gone.

Alright gadies and lentlemen, that's it for today's installment. Check back tomorrow when I'll be looking at Laws 9 and 10. Until then….

Keep The Faith My Brothers And Sisters!

The One About Tom Coburn’s “Under Cover Patients”.

2010-02-26T23:44:00.001-06:00

One of the few Republican ideas brought up at Thursday's Health Care Reform summit that seemed to be really popular with both parties was suggested by Senator Tom Coburn. The idea basically is to have people go and visit doctors, and try to get them to break Medicare rules. I presume that if they created such a program for Medicare they would try to see to it that it was applied to Medicaid as well. It has been compared to the practice that many fast food restaurants and retail clothing stores have been employing for a while now, commonly known as "Mystery Shopping". This is a horrible idea for several reasons, and the comparison to the Mystery Shopper, is frankly weak and ultimately inaccurate. More importantly I have a suggestion that contains none of the yuck factor of Under Cover Patients, and could potentially play a significant role in changing the way that doctors and patients relate to one another.

(To read the full article just click here.)

WHY UNDERCOVER PATIENTS ARE A HORRIBLE IDEA….

The primary reason is that the practice will create a climate of fear in doctors. They will be looking at every new patient wondering, “Is this person sincere or are they here with a hidden agenda?” Further more it runs the risk of warping the doctors focus. Instead of focusing on how well they are treating the patient, they will instead be more likely to focus on whether or not they are following all the rules so as to not risk getting in trouble. In short order doctors will come to resent their patients and it will increase the likelihood that more doctors will be unwilling to go through the hassle of seeing Medicare or Medicaid patients. The idea is also a terrible one, because it is highly unlikely to be all that effective. Good doctors will either try to continue to focus on doing what is best for their patients, and so might be caught because of not having an encyclopedic knowledge of Medicare rules. Bad doctors, will be in a state of heightened alert and will most likely mind their P's and Q's around new patients until they feel they have weeded out the undercover agents. It is also massively disrespectful to doctors. It says that essentially they are not to be trusted and that their time is not valuable, since every time they have to see one of these undercover patients is time they will not be spending with someone who truly needs to be seen. And finally on the list of reasons why this is a piss poor idea, is the fact that it seems like ultimately it would expend money on hiring, training, and employing these agents, some of whom would just about have to be sent on long term missions to have even the slightest hope of effectiveness, without there being much hope of the expense really being justified by what ever slight "savings" there might be from the relatively low number of doctors that you might catch. And even if you did catch some it would not surprise me if a high proportion of cases were thrown out of court for breaking laws against entrapment.

UNDER COVER PATIENTS AND MYSTERY SHOPPERS ARE VERY DIFFERENT THINGS….

One of the things that is being used to sell the undercover patient idea, is comparing to the practice of employing "Mystery Shoppers" engaged in by many in the retail and service industry. The mystery shopper idea in brief is to take an ordinary person, give them a check list to fill out, and then send them to a store or restaurant to act as a customer, fill out the form and report their impressions. It can be an effective tool to help a business discover areas in which they could be performing better. But the undercover patient idea is similar in only the most minimal of ways, and there is one very important difference. Mystery shoppers are not attempting to get anyone to break the law. Whereas the undercover patients would be.

MAYBE I’M PARANOID BUT….

I honestly have to wonder how sincere the Republicans even are with this suggestion. Frankly it sounds like something that they came up with figuring that it would so outrage the Democrats that they would reject it immediately and so they could continue to push their, "The Democrats won't listen to any of our ideas." meme. Further more, what better way if such an idea was put into practice, to continue their campaign of destroying people's confidence in government as the legitimate organ of managing the people's well being. How much do you want to bet that if the undercover patient program came to be, that the Republicans would quickly denounce it and demonize it as “Your government spying on you!”, making certain of course to distance themselves from being the ones to originally suggest it. Obfuscating the fact that they are part of that very same government.

THERE IS HOWEVER A BETTER POSSIBLE WAY….

I am not unaware of the need to not only ferret out actual fraud, and other misdeeds, but also to make it easier for patients voices to be heard. So instead of doing it in a way that breeds fear and suspicion, let’s do it in a way that is honest and open, while still protecting patient privacy.

We can use websites designed for customer reviews as a model. The idea behind such sites is that people go and rate on a scale (usually one to ten) how the service they received, and they leave messages discussing what was good or bad. A similar site attached to the main White House site could be created. Furthermore doctors and hospitals who take Medicare patients could be required to distribute surveys that could be sent postage paid to a department tasked with collecting, reading them and tabulating the results. There could also be an 800 number available. Then if a pattern was noticed there could be a follow up investigation. But why just use it to weed out the bad? It could also be used to reward the good. Doctors who were consistently getting excellent ratings could be rewarded some way.

This would be totally above board since doctors would know that all patients were empowered to utilize the PERN (Patient Experience Reporting Network) they would strive to give excellent service to all patients, but would not have to live in perpetual fear that new patients were in reality undercover government stoolies. Any wrong doing on the part of doctors that was discovered would be a great deal more likely to stand up in a court of law since there would not be the taint of entrapment. The cost to benefit ratio would be considerably higher I suspect than if one attempted to maintain a network of what are to put it bluntly spies. Plus it would help patients feel like they truly had a channel for sharing their experiences both good and bad, and that their voice was being heard. I myself would call that a win for doctors, a win for patients, and a win for the bottom line.

Keep The Faith My Brothers And Sisters!

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