Another damned blog.

"No one's heard a single word I've said
they don't sound as good outside my head"

--Nine Inch Nails 
posted by John Shirley on 6/28/09

HORSES KILLING FOALS, RABBITS EATING OFFSPRING,  PEOPLE WHO...

For several years I've been puzzling about it. Is it just that more reporting offers more statistics--or is it true that more men are killing their own  wives and children? And killing themselves, too, when they're done with their wife and kids. The dad, killing the whole family. Things weren't going well; family about to break up. Money vanishing, failure looming. Children, perhaps, seeming to the depressed head of the family to be defective...because they're an extension of him. Of his blood. His genetics.

Why so much of it now? I'm pretty sure it would have made national news, when I was a kid. But I never heard of such a thing happening, till fairly recently.

Now it happens a good deal. Why?

I've speculated about neurotoxins in our water, our food, affecting people, creating a specialized dementia so that extreme answers to problems seem reasonable. Perhaps that's part of the equation. But the basis of it might be simply increasing instances of animal instinct, going out of control.

Make no mistake--we are, essentially, apes. Sophisticated, tool using, language using, machine making...apes. We have a good deal of savagery in us. Many apes are relatively peace-loving but some apes can be quite violent--a chimp recently attacked and horribly maimed its owner. Babboons can be violent. And we're another species of ape.

But it was horses, not apes, that prompted the notion: a PBS Nature special about wild horses depicted a stallion, the head of his band, trying to encourage a foal to walk. Hours passed and the foal didn't walk--there was something wrong with its back legs. Birth defect or birthing injury. It wasn't going to walk. After awhile, the stallion killed it. Broke its neck, in fairly short order. Why? Presumably--to protect the herd from having to protect the lame colt, and to remove any possibility that it might somehow breed. Natural selection. It had eliminated the defective herd member.

Rabbits and other animals are occasionally known to eat some offspring--often deformed or otherwise unsuitable offspring.

Could these people be giving in to some primitive animal wiring? Perhaps  because population is now so high? Is the crowding, the stress a prompt? Or do toxins play a part in making it difficult for them to fight off primeval impulses?

Not all instincts are good--not for humanity. Some we must struggle with, for a different kind of evolution.  But if we fail in that struggle with the hidden machinery of neural instinct...

Is it the most basic primitive wiring in us, designed for the Great Agenda, that has prompted these killings? The Great Agenda of nature seems to be reproduction, survival, passing on of DNA. And if there's weakness, if the head of a family senses he's failed, defective--then some neurological switch is thrown, by genetic prompt, and he kills his family...and himself. Thinking he knows the reasons. But really--doing it simply because he's told to. By his own DNA...

It's just speculation. But it's the only explanation I've come up with that feels like there might be truth in it, somewhere...

My notion of what the mission of humankind might be. It's okay to think with complexity now, so it can be dual: to reduce human suffering without suppressing human possibility.

Blue Oyster Cult Songs for Which I Wrote the Lyrics; Songs You Probably Haven't Heard. And Some of How I Feel About It.

First of all, here's the link to the albums. The lps are Heaven Forbid and Curse of the Hidden Mirror, principally. You can see what they look like there, get all the necessary info if you're interested. I wrote the lyrics of 18 songs which the Blue Oyster Cult recorded, 16 on their most recent two albums. I knew it was a long shot that these finely tooled songs would get on the radio (some of them did get  airplay here and there) or that the albums would sell hugely. It was a kind of second string metal label and the band was no longer an “A list“ act in the fickle minds of promoters and distributors and radio programmers. They were as good or better than any hard rock band out there, but that doesn't appear to matter. Our two albums weren't going to get much publicity, if any. (The songs are also out there live, on a concert DVD.) 

 Sometimes an older act's albums sell--and still the songs don't get on the radio, if the artist is “past their sell-by date”, in some mysterious way.  Even the Rolling Stones are starting to have trouble getting their newest songs on the radio. The new Bob Dylan album is number one but how often do you hear the single from it on the air? The Who sells out stadiums but can't sell their new songs.

The Blue Oyster Cult is not a culturally iconic band on the celestial level of the Stones or Dylan or The Who-- though the BOC had a number of hit songs,  starting with Don't Fear the Reaper off Agents of Fortune--but they were powerfully original, ironic and dark at once; striking, intricate rockers and ballsy balladeers. They collaborated with Patti Smith, they influenced Metallica and Megadeth. I'm convinced their live album “On Your Feet or On Your Knees“ created modern hard rock. Its' sound was eventually Metallica's sound. The BOC's enigmatic, witty lyrics kept you on your feet, or slapping your knees. They were the thinking man's hard rock band. Still are. Donald “Buck Dharma“ Roeser is still one of the best rock guitarists in the world.

I was a fan--and was thrilled to work with them. But I could feel the zeitgeist wasn't quite there with us. We wrote power ballads that I think would have been hits, given a chance--songs like Live for Me, and Pocket--and I'm proud of the lyrics I wrote for them; proud they worked them into their music. Proud to hear Donald and Eric sing them. And frustrated that the public didn't get a chance to know about the songs, let alone hear them. They were there, in the racks, at CD stores--but most people didn't know they had come out.

A doomed effort? Maybe. It wasn't our fault. I wrote strong lyrics and the band played its heart out. But even their oldtime fans didn't really check the albums out. They were mostly all about hearing Godzilla for the ten thousandth time.

What we created stands. It's out there. Eventually these songs will be more fully appreciated. The songs are on iTunes and Amazon. There are some superb songs on those albums. And it was the fulfillment of a dream, for me, anyway.

For awhile, I was in rocknroll Valhalla...

WHAT IT'S LIKE TO BE PRESIDENT OBAMA RIGHT NOW...and Why I'm Strangely Hopeful About America

He's like a guy who wanted to buy a grand old house. He put in his bid for it and got it. But he wasn't allowed to see inside  before buying it--just a look through a window or two.

Now he enters the house and finds there's trash and garbage to the ceiling in every room and the floors are decayed and falling through and the wiring is so bad there's a major risk of fire if you use the lights and the sewage system is broken and leaking all over everything and the roof needs to be completely rebuilt and the foundations are undermined.

 Just to cart out the garbage and clean the place will take months, probably more than a year to make the old house livable.

The people who wanted to live in the house are saying to him, "Why haven't you got the house livable yet?"

He's doing the best he can--with what the previous owners left him.

They were a couple of guys named Bush and Cheney.

BUT ...I ALSO WANT TO SAY I'M EXPERIENCING A STRANGE SENSATION: HOPE--AND WHAT'S ESPECIALLY WEIRD IS...

What's especially odd about this alien sensation of 'hope' I have is that it issues from getting a new look at the American people.

It's this torture issue. I'm astonished to find that the issue of our use of torture has risen to the top of the welling, somewhat polluted spring of the Mainstream Media. The issue is now out in the open, more than ever. People are seriously considering whether Dick Cheney and Rumsfeld should be prosecuted. It's not just a minority asking the question. It's a great many people.

The President thinks it would be politically destructive to prosecute them and I doubt they will be. But it's being freely talked about. The rightness or efficacy of torture is being frankly discussed in this country.

And it seems clear to me that most Americans are against torture. That seems to be the emerging consensus. Despite the flagrant manipulation of factoids  and the narrow perceptual aperture on Fox News, most Americans are against torture. They're speaking out against it.

And that gives me hope. It makes me feel that the best spirit of Americanism is really and truly alive.

YES IT'S OUR KARMA THAT THEY'RE DOING ALL THIS. BUT WE STILL HAVE TO FIGHT

The Iranians. The Somalian Pirates. The Taliban.

People on the left--often I stand with them, sometimes I don't. And people on the left like to point out that Iran was the creation of the USA. That American intelligence services created the current hostile government there by first overthrowing a legitimate government--because it was working against the greed of American oil companies--and installing the late Shah of Iran. Who was essentially a murderous dictator. Reaction to the Shah and our meddling led to the current anti-American regime: It's our  national KARMA.

The same lefties are currently pointing out that the Somalian pirates are the creation of poverty and misery largely spawned by western corporate elites who stole all the fish that used to be a resource for the Somalians and who created bad feeling by dumping nuclear waste in Somalia. So they hate westerners and prey on them piratically. It's our national KARMA.

The Taliban is based on a militia we funded to counter the USSR in Afghanistan, and its' extremism, along with its relationship to al-Qaeda, is fed by our mindless lockstep support of nearly everything Israel does to the Palestinians. So the Taliban, too, are our national KARMA.

These voices from the left are correct that those things are our “national karma“. We're dealing with the consequences of our actions. We need to learn from that and learn not to overthrow democratically elected governments, not to allow corporations to ruthlessly exploit the third world, and not to support every last thing the Israelis do. For starters.

But. We still have to oppose the Iranian support for terrorists and its oppression of women and gays and we need to discourage it from developing nuclear weapons; we still have to fight the pirates, because they're preying on, and threatening, people caught in the middle and they're breaking international law and we need that law; we still have to oppose the Taliban because they're brutalizing women, they're threatening the best chance the Afghan people have for democracy, and they did provide logistical support for the 9/11 attacks on the USA.

We created these situations--but part of cleaning them up is struggling with the dangerous forces we ourselves have put in place. We're stuck with that. That's the reality.

It's good to point out how we got here--it's right for us to realize, this is our national Karma. But that cannot change President Obama's course on dealing with the fallout from each of these issues.

All we can do is try to learn from our mistakes--so we won't have to fight these people, and people like them, in times to come.

Why Obama is not Prosecuting Bush/Cheney (And How the Poor Guy Can't Catch A Break)

I heard a progressive commentator on the radio today, the man self-righteously complaining that President Obama is not pursuing prosecution of Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld and friends, even though it's apparent, in the legal sense, that they committed a crime in approving torture. Certainly it was a moral crime--maybe it was indeed a crime legally.

We should never torture--and I thank God Obama has ended our use of it. But the commentator forgets two key points:

 1) the historical context of the 9/11 attacks in which it (unfortunately) seemed natural to the nation that the administration should go to extremes to protect us and

2) The stark political realities: ie, Barack Obama can't do any good for the country as President, post 2012, if he's not re-elected; and Congress is still partly Republican. If you polarize the Republicans by prosecuting the guys they put in power for eight years (going so far as to cheat in the Florida election to do it), then you redouble their energy in obstructing the administration's budgets, and new policies.

Obama's advisors are--I'm guessing--advising the President that if he encourages these prosecutions, he could be made to look like he's persecuting people for being tough on terror in the shadow of 9/11.

Of course, 9/11 happened on Bush/Cheney's watch and they had warning about it, and did nothing to prevent it. I repeat: the attack could have been prevented,  and they failed to prevent it. That is their legacy. We can't prosecute them for incompetence--and, politically, in the real world of the big grown up people, President Obama can't push to prosecute them for torture.

Meanwhile, everything President Obama does is perceived as wrong--by someone. If he doesn't wind down the war in Iraq fast enough, then he's a “war monger“ to the left; if he shuts it down, he's ensuring, according to the right, that our soldiers died in vain. If he pursues the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan/Pakistan, he's “no better than Bush“ according to the left; if he fails to protect the current government there and fight the extremists, he's weak on terrorism and he's abandoning our Afghan and Pakistani allies.

When Obama holds back, he's supposedly not showing strong clear-cut leadership in dealing with the economic crisis, as if he's fiddling while Rome burns; but if he goes on television to explain his policies and reassure people, showing strong clear-cut leadership as he tries to push his complex economic agenda, suddenly he's supposedly doing too much; suddenly he's enjoying the limelight in Hollywood when he should be working. He gets it coming and going.

The GOP says he's not serious enough because he went on Leno; the New York Times says he's too serious: “...in his second prime-time news conference from the White House, it was Barack Obama the lecturer, a familiar character from early in the campaign. Placid and unsmiling, he was the professor in chief, offering familiar arguments in long paragraphs — often introduced with the phrase, 'as I said before' — sounding like the teacher speaking in the stillness of a classroom where students are restlessly waiting for the ring of the bell.“

Sometimes they say he's a “rock star“: all inspiration, supposedly, no substance; other times they say he's not rock star enough, he's too professorial.

It's a bitch being President right now. They cheer for you--and then they go into the back rooms and sharpen their knives.

BUSH ADMIN INSIDER: MOST GUANTANAMO DETAINEES ARE INNOCENT

That's something I asserted in this space long ago: the likelihood was that many Guantanamo detainees were entirely innocent. That means NOT terrorists, not part of terrorist support system, just innocent. Only according to a Bush administration assistant to Colin Powell, MOST of them were/are innocent.

Many were “turned in“ for a $5000 fee. Get rid of that neighbor who irritates you and get five grand too.

The two-headed beast Cheney/Rumsfeld knew that they had innocent people in jail for years. They didn't care. More important to cover their asses. Hell, they were just Muslim foreigners, right?

HERE is the article. Read it for yourself.

MY OFF THE CUFF REVIEW OF WATCHMEN:

There is no simple answer to, "Is this a great movie?"

Yes --but...

I understand the incapacity of some very intelligent critics to come to grips with this film--but it's as if it were made by people from another country, speaking in another language, and these critics don't speak the language and there is no subtitling. I understand that they think it's an exercise in grandiose, over the top counter cultural symbology. It is in a way--but that doesn't matter. It's still a masterwork.

I have a deep respect for this film. It is a cinematic artifact of extreme sophistication, within its cultural mindset. You have to be of that cultural mindset--and a great many people are--to appreciate it and the new york times and new yorker reviewers aren't so they don't get it.

There are things in it that annoyed me. I don't know if the scene where the guy in the jail gets his arms cut off is in the comic, can't remember, but it was way over the top in this movie, seemed like a cheasy b horror film moment. I thought the sex was overdone (though that use of Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah was great and the music is superbly used all through) though I kind of like "superheroes get busy", it amuses me. It might have been twenty minutes shorter. I have to re-read the comic's end to see if I hate the new ending. But it seemed to me that this is MOSTLY as close anyone could hope to get to adapting that graphic novel. I was surprised at how close it synced with my memory of the book.

There are so many great lines in it...also some awkward exposition...but there's no doubt this is a commanding, fascinating cinematic experience. I'll see it again at some point.

PROGNOSIS FOR A FEVERISH PLANET: What will Become of Us?

The planet has a fever. It's a creature whose fur is falling out in patches. It is sickened by toxins. Pthalates, mercury toxicity, the Pacific's plastic vortex (introducing PCBs and other toxins into the food chain), sulfites, complicate the fundamental sickness, which arises from greenhouse gases trapping heat in the atmosphere.

The planet will toss and turn, feverish in its sheets, for year after year. Getting sicker and sicker, for a time.The sickness may cause it to lose a few fingers, toes, an ear, as circulation is cut off by toxins; the heat will make it thrash about, and its inner responses will destroy some of the flora causing the fever...

Decades will pass. The colonies of flora on the planet's body will shift about, and compete. They will create swellings, eruptions, open sores...

But eventually the colonies of flora will evolve. The flora that evolve to live without conflict with the planet's body will survive. Other colonies will die out.

The planet will heal. The heat will recede. The benign flora that live within it will flourish; they will not excessively reproduce; they will have evolved, adapted, to cease interfering with the planet's body.

And our descendents, perhaps a few generations hence, will live in a slightly truncated but healthy world.

Until then, well--a bad fever can be hell to live through...

We'll have to sweat it out.

DISAPPOINTED IN OBAMA? THINK HE'S TOO MUCH LIKE BUSH?

People worry that Obama's admin shows Bush-like tendencies in its Justice Dept decisions re national security--and that he's too middle of the road. But comprehend the political realities of the situation...and be optimistic! Here's what I think:

1) About those security concerns, and Obama's supposedly being too Bush-like. I think this concern is exaggerated, but to the extent there's something there, here's what I think is happening: When he first got there, Obama got national security briefings. At least some of this information came from Bush's retinue and may be suspect or badly obtained but Obama doesn't know YET what is reliable and what isn't. He only knows they're telling him the country is in danger. He is sure of one thing--he is NOT GOING TO ALLOW A 9/11 to happen on HIS watch as the Republicans did on theirs. He has to be careful. So he eases things up as much as he can, dialing interrogation way back, ending torture, opening up FOIA access. But he isn't sure about the reliability of dire reports he's getting so he lets the justice department have at least some of the tools Bush put in place out of fear that if he removes them he'll allow a 9/11 type attack. He's being careful. But as time goes on he'll sort through it and figure out what we REALLY need and I expect the more problematic security intrusions to be done away with. And--he hopes to be re-elected. If he seems to weak on security, he won't be. His second four years may be his most effective...

2) some change will come in the next couple of years but MUCH of it will wait till after the next congressional election--the GOP has mis-read America! It thinks it's making points. MOST people though will see the Republicans as obstructionists getting in the way of people at least TRYING to help. And many of these obstructionist Republicans will be thrown out,  and a true Congressional majority will come to the Dems in the next election thus making inroads in health reform and banking reform and global warming initiatives possible.

WE CELEBRATE  DARWIN'S BIRTHDAY BECAUSE HE MADE LIFE MEANINGLESS?

The short answer is - no! We celebrate Darwin's birthday because he gave us truth. Feb 12 is Charles Darwin's birthday. Some complained that he made life “meaningless“ because he showed that not only were we the result of evolutionary processes which did not need a mythology of divine creation, but those processes were, so far as anyone can clearly make out, quite random...

The New York Times observes: “Darwin also had the intellectual toughness to stick with the deeply discomfiting consequences of his theory, that natural selection has no goal or purpose. Alfred Wallace, who independently thought of natural selection, later lost faith in the power of the idea and turned to spiritualism to explain the human mind. 'Darwin had the courage to face the implications of what he had done, but poor Wallace couldn’t bear it,' says William Provine, a historian at Cornell University.“

One can still find spiritual meaning--the Buddhist Ground of Being for example--if one likes, in the context of pure science, in my opinion, but even without that, there's nothing wrong with the purely secular imposition of meaning.

Talking to my children I would say that life has the meaning you impose on it, just as we impose structure on chaos when we build a house on some rock strewn vacant lot. It's secular, purely philosophical meaning. "I can enjoy life with my family and friends and improve things a bit for those that come after" - and that is humanistic meaning. It's superimposed through a desire for improvement of the human condition, yes, but the fact that it is an overlay doesn't make it unreal. Finding dignity in the struggle for a good life brings meaning to what would otherwise seem emptily random.

Other kinds of meanings are not necessary; there are however, patterns of innate orderliness in the universe that arise out of physical laws; the orderinliness of physics, and biology. Death itself can be seen as carried out in an orderly fashion: entropy is a predictable (and therefore orderly in a very real sense ) accretion of  "less order in a system" or increased chaos. But the underlying materials of a decaying body are still physically orderly, at the atomic level. So there's a kind of innate, lawful pattern in the interaction of natural, physical, material forces in the universe, that has an overall elegance, at least, soemthing like musical structure, and that too can be appreciated in place of the old, pre-Darwinian notions of meaningfulness.

Lux Interior has died at age 60.

A great performer and rock artist, the man who chose the stage name  Lux Interior,  lead singer and co-founder of The Cramps, created an alternate self; more than a re-invention, he totally re-created himself, and, within his leopard-fur-lined niche, he re-invented rocknroll. He used humor to take rock'n'roll seriously; he used irony to transcend the ironic.

Lux  took old forms, stuff from the 1950s and 60s (and a bit from the punk era of the 70s), fashion and music and horror films and spy films and drugs, and concocted it into something distinctive even though it was made out of other things; he distilled a new essence, and became it. I admire the fully tricked out, cherried out, completely redesigned, funny-car perfection of that re-invention.

His music was an extension of that re-invention, that ground-up re-creation, was the soundtrack for his endless personal fantasy film...

And the paradox is, that even though it was an amalgamation, it was somehow unique. Lux made himself an art form.

I won't say “rest in peace“--instead I know that he is one of the restless living dead--forever!

“STAY SICK!“

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF CLIMATE CHANGE DENIALISTS

 To me it appears that climate change denialists (and I mean those who say it's not anthropogenic) are akin to Creationists. They are engaging in similar internal denial about scientific proofs. They are as anti-Science as the Bush neocons. They glom onto tiny mounds of data that superficially seems to confirm their hypothesis and ignore the mountains of data that refutes them. The consensus is vast and strong amongst scientists, but they ignore that, and why? I believe it's their psychology, especially amongst libertarians and Reaganites. They make peculiar, idiosyncratic connections, in their minds, without even knowing it, between the climate change issue and their beliefs about economics and freedom. Essentially, they unconsciously connect the idea of a man-caused global warming emergency with what they suppose to be restrictions on their freedom.

The connection is this: climate change emergency suggests, in turn, that the problem can be at least mitigated by reducing particulate and greenhouse gas pollution; this is reduced by restrictions on manufacturing, and demands that manufacturers research and pay for and impliment cleaner manufacturing. Restrictions on manufacturing are technically restrictions on liberty. Restrict that liberty and you may have to restrict others. (Rape is against the law but libertarians don't seem to connect restricting rape with restricting their freedoms--particulate pollution, apart from global warming, causes millions of deaths from cancer and emphysema and asthma so it's an assault too.) They react emotionally against restrictions of any sort and seek rationales to justify their emotional reactions.

Because a global warming emergency implies the need for strong national and international governmental intervention, to enforce pollution standards, and because the libertarian/Reaganites are against any govt intervention (for reasons of personality, more than because of reason itself, despite the ironic name of one of their favorite magazines), they react emotionally against the concept and look for reasons to dispute it. But it's their feeling about intervention they're reacting to--not any real flaw in the science, which they find excuses to ignore, or blur.

Also, MONEY will be spent in dealing with global warming --and some of it will come from TAXES. And libertarian/Reaganites are essentially against taxes (even though they're constantly using infrastructure, like the FAA and roads and watermain repair, paid for by taxes). They twitch when the word TAXES is used. So they twitch away from recognizing global warming.Their emotional response prompts them to ignore what's unpleasant for their self protective philosophy. EG they ignore THIS SCIENCE NEWS Article.

A Quick, Splashy review of MILK

This very good movie, MILK, about the epochally important gay-rights activist and San Francisco supervisor Harvey Milk, murdered by the troubled Dan White, was NOT written by Gus Van Sant, the director, which is part of why it's a good movie. Most of the films he wrote himself aren't very good. I liked Drugstore Cowboy though. Anyway, Sean Penn will get an Academy Award for this, politics will help but there couldn't be a better performance, you totally forget it's Sean Penn, he completely disappears into it. Totally. And the actor is not gay. It's amazing. 

BTW the film does not make Dan White seem like a homophobe, as some have claimed. It does imply that he may have been an in the closet gay. The film suggests though that essentially he killed Milk and Moscone out of a lunatic obsession on betrayal and humiliation, nothing to do with homophobia.
 
This is a very touching and a very engrossing film, I didn't know how tough it was for gays even as late as the 1970s/80s, and it's a real insight into the political activist process. This is an important lesson on what one man can accomplish--yes he had lots of help but much of it wouldn't have happened without his dogged persistence. 
 
Best thing Gus VS will ever do I betcha. 
 
It's a hard movie to look away from. Very important film. They should show it in schools. Maybe with a few *little* cuts if the students are under 18. 
 
Really well cut together, this film, too. Smooth as silk.

ENVISIONING A SIMPLE TECH SOLUTION TO GLOBAL WARMING

Various technological solutions have been put forth to deal with the global warming emergency--one that seems to me especially dangerous is the notion of putting billions of tons of tiny little reflective particals in the atmosphere. Using pollution to reflect sunlight back into space. Pollution to deal with a pollution problem? I don't think so. And I figure I can't do any worse than that idea...So...

Here's my notion: I envision a gigantic engineering project, carried out in thousands of sites around the world, in which we'd create a series of cooling towers in the hottest areas, each tower about two miles high--has to be high enough to get into a consistently cooler layer of the atmosphere so the heat is drawn up to this area, and dispersed spaceward. Ideally the towers would be even higher than two miles. They would be made of materials that are sound for high structures while also good at conducting heat. The heat that is not radiated into space is then routed to a liquid in a circular, enclosing pipe around the tower, exciting the liquid so it doesnt quite steam but expands, exerting pressure that is converted to kinetic energy, so the heat is dispersed in two ways, both up and down--the downward kinetic energy is used to make clean electric power.

Construction of the giant cooling towers would be a group project of industrialized nations, the ones responsible for the mess, employing the otherwise unemployed, giving them training and paychecks. It'd be a crash program, which the world would try to finish in ten years time from the first day of construction. It'd be a planetary effort and there would be probably two or three thousand of these towers at the finish. 

I know, it's all generalities. I'll leave specifics to an engineer. Computer models might tell us if it'll work.

Meanwhile we cut down on greenhouse gases--the real solution over the long term-- and look forward to the day the towers eventually, generations from now, become obsolete.

It's very simple--the will of the people makes itself known in congress. And we make REALLY TOUGH LAWS on pollution. And they give fairly little time to turn things around, to polluters and car manufacturers.

And listen to the howls of outrage!
But say you make a law, industry must cut pollution by 95% in eight years. Car manufacturers too. Electrical generation plants too.

Suppose you had the will to enforce it. You start arresting people who don't start working on it, in, say, SIX MONTHS.

They'd cry out, "Can't be done! Haven't the money, haven't the resources! It'd take a miracle!"

More arrests. And then...

Suddenly...it'd get done. "Miraculously", the technology would be "found" to scrub, to make efficient, to use alternate sources, etc. They would say, "Oh wait, we just figured this out."

Motivated to do it, they'd do it. It would be like a miracle.

And it's not just to stop global warming. It's to stop mercury pollution of the seas (from air pollution), it's to curtail emphysema and lung cancer and acid rain. It's to clean up the air. It's to change our basic, most fundamental point of view on how we relate to our world.

 What I'm talking about is so strict--I mean, we need to be major-crime-prosecution strict...and that's so strict it would be “draconian“. But it's needed.

Libertarians would probably call it a fascist or autocratic ruling. And it almost is. But it's like there's a drunk in your crowded lifeboat, in an ice and treacherous sea, and the drunk is jumping up and down. You have to knock him on the head to save the rest of the people in the lifeboat.

"You change your technology NOW or you go to jail indefinitely".

How would you implement something that harsh, that strict? Be recognizing that literally the fate of billions of people is involved; that catastrophe is the consequence of NOT doing it.

The thing is, if we MADE them--they would "miraculously" do it. I'm using the term miraculous sarcastically.And it'll happen too--after the world is even more egregiously toxified, after the worst effects of global warming, in like 45 years, you'll see laws like this. But it'll take the starvation deaths of a billion or so people; it'll take the displacement of a large segment of the Earth from their homes...

Then ... only THEN...we'll legislate for miracles.

REAGANITES AND LIBERTARIANS: THE SIMPLE THING THEY DON'T UNDERSTAND

 Reaganite Republicans and libertarians share the same illusion--that government is "them" not US. If you asked them if that's the case some would deny it, I suspect--it's a blind spot. They often don't even know they feel that way. (Some admit it, would gleefully say, "Hell yeah it's them and not me!" But they're wrong about that.) A lot of their feeling against "big" government is an emotional response to "intrusiveness"...and to taxation. It is to some extent, perhaps, raw taxation resentment. But resentment is not thinking. In fact, resentment cannot think.

Reaganite Republicans and libertarians seem to view government as something over there, that's intruding here.

They also suffer from a corollary illusion: that government is not significantly qualitatively shaded.

But in America, government doesn't have to be "over there"; it doesn't have to be Them. And it has a wide spectrum of potential qualitative shading.

"Big" American government--that is, government intended to be effective, helpful government--can be wasteful, mindlessly bureaucratic, intrusive, time wasting, overtaxing, war mongering, polluting, and corrupt.

Another "big" American government-- with social safety nets, help for the mentally ill, social security, unemployment insurance, national health care, a reasonable (neither too big or too small) military, an effective FEMA, effective federal law enforcement and enforcement of civil rights, an effective FDA and EPA--can be modulated to be minimally wasteful, only as bureaucratic as need be, minimally intrusive, reasonably efficient, fair with taxes, non polluting and not beholden to special interests. If it's efficient, it's not big. It's the right size. It can be efficient, if we monitor it, and make intelligent rules for it.

The qualitative scale can shift, and "big" government (it should be no bigger than needed--and it needs to be fairly large-scale without being topheavy) can include all those good qualities, if we require it.

The bottom line is, it's not *them* - an effective, regulatory but freedom-preserving government can be US. Can be you and me, can be cultivated by us to be pruned and encouraged as much as an educated public feels it needs to be.

A real government is about *service*--and it is an expression of the will of the people. It *is* the people. So when we trim it too much, trim it mindlessly--we're trimming away our own limbs, our roots, and our possibilities for growth.

A being in the shape of an ordinary man in a nice Italian suit, with a blazing sun for a head entered a room in a higher dimension, the room created just for this purpose. This was God, in an appearance chosen for the occasion. Entering from another door–rising up from a trap door in the floor–was Lucifer, a winged, naked angel, very beautiful, except for the nails driven through his eyes, which streamed blood.

A poker table appeared, with green felt, and a deck of cards.

“Thanks for the game,” Lucifer said, sitting. “I’m caught up in that whole Hold ‘Em Poker craze. I’m a big fan of Doyle Brunson. He’s old school.”

“Okay if Justice Herself deals?” God asked, sitting in the chair opposite the devil.

“Who else could I trust?”

They played head’s-up no-limit Poker. The stakes were all the money that would ever be–which God had–versus all the money that ever was–which Satan had. Finally God won everything, with a better full house than the devil’s. It was one of those terrible suck-outs. The devil had AK and there were two kings on the board (which was KKA2J). But God had AA and there was an ace up there too. So God’s AAAKK beat the devil’s KKKAA. “That’s sick,” God said. “Sorry about that.”

“Tell you what,” the devil said. “I’ll bet you the whole world against all your winnings. I currently control the Earth, pretty much, after all. Most of it. One hand for the world.”

“Ohhhhhhh…okay,” God said. “You’re on.”

The devil got a full house again but this time his hole cards were 66 and the board showed QQ336.

God folded when the devil showed. “Full house! You got me beat, Lucifer. The Earth is yours.”

What? You’re not going to show me your hand?”

“Hm? No, no, I folded. You got it. Your planet. I’m relieved. I’m pulling all my people out. You can do what you want with it. Rains of fire, whatever. Later, man. I got to go. Starting over in the Andromeda galaxy.”

God vanished. Lucifer checked God’s cards. God’s hole cards were two queens. God’d had quads. Four of a kind. He’d have won if he hadn’t folded.

“Damn it, God! You stuck me with the Earth on purpose!” Lucifer shouted.

“Sorry,” God said, just a voice from the air now. “But I gave them free will and they totally loused up the planet. It’s polluted, chock full of nuclear weapons, terrorists, and mostly run by greedheads. They’re destroying all the wildlife, they’re poisoning the seas, and they’re cooking the whole world in greenhouse gases. They permit slavery, they thrive on sweatshops, they allow millions of their own kind to starve every year, and they burn out their creative energies on videogames and the like. You can have them, man. All yours. I’m quitting in disgust. And my folding those cards–that’s within the rules, pal. Ask Justice. Got to go. Won’t be asking you to my new place. Whole new system. Enjoy!”

“Wait! Don't leave me with these people, God! You take 'em back!“

But it was too late. God was gone.

WHEN I'll SUPPORT LIBERTARIANS AND REAGANITES

When people who are now racists or who bully women or who are religious bigots will definitely and surely cease to consider discriminating on the basis of race or gender or religion in business or in the provision of housing.

And it's probably best that criminals stop hurting people and stealing, and that the rest of the world takes a pledge we know we can rely on never to become aggressive. And when businesses stop polluting, all on their own.

As soon as those things happen I'll be a Libertarian because minimizing government, as an idea, sounds good.

ANOTHER REASON TICKETMASTER TOTALLY SUCKS

They sell your email address.

 made the mistake of buying some concert tickets via ticketmaster online a few months back. Apparently buried in the seething wordage of the “I agree“ contract they make you click on before they take their egregious fee, is an agreement to let them do as they please with your email address. I didn't see that part. But it must've been there--and I've heard that's exactly what they do. I don't post my email address, for fear of spam, and until I bought those tickets I got no spam.

Now I get spam all the time, from companies that claim they're sending ads within the limits of the law, and who offer you an out, you can clink on a link and fill out a form taking you off their mailing list “after seven business days“...only, not really. Apparently you only get off the mailing list for the individual franchise trying to sell you insurance or airline discount tickets or whatever. But the company that Ticketmaster sold the email address to, mine along with thousands of others, simply sells the list to another franchise. The spams haven't stopped, no matter how many forms I fill out.

Ticketmaster is ruthless, greedy--and this misuse of our email addresses is underhanded. Despite the considerable inconvenience--I don't live anywhere near the box office--I'll never buy from them again. If you plan to buy from Ticketmaster online...buyer beware.

Of spam.

THEY DON'T HAVE A CLUE WHAT THEIR COMMERCIAL MEANS

People work for long periods of time on films and commercials and yet they often don't know what their imagery really conveys. The latest most obvious example is a TV (and probably internet too) commercial for BMW. In a spectacular demonstration of CGI animation, a car is seen to sprout from an oily black blot; the oily black blot stretches out, extends into the frame of a car, tentacle-like pseudopods forming the steering wheel and engine, organically, in seconds. I suppose what they're trying to convey is something to do with the car's “organic“ wholeness; also they're simply using startling images to get you to watch so you'll see that BMW logo at the end. So that logo will be duly imprinted on your brain.

But it doesn't seem to occur to the commercial's designers that the imagery is actually very negative, slightly repulsive, and suggestive of a system that runs on petroleum--at a time when everyone is concerned about conservation. The animation shows a black oil-like material (they probably weren't thinking of petroleum but that's exactly what it looks like) forming the car, in fast-action mechanical growth spurt. And the shape of the growth, before it becomes a car, is repulsive, Lovecraftian, Cthuluesque, like something from the slime on the deepest trenches of the sea rather than some superb example of engineering. It has the appearance of something monstrous.

The image conveys what the commercial's designers apprehend unconsciously: that our automotive lifestyle is a monster; that petroleum--a pollutant--is pervasive, controlling, ubiquitous. That the oil companies are fundamental to the Machine.

hat something hideous and rapaciously consuming underlies the mechanism of society...

THE TICKING OF THE WORLD'S CLOCK

THE WORLD IS SHRIVELING!

NATURAL WORLD HALF GONE: MORE THAN HALF OF FISH, HALF THE BIRDS, HALF THE CORAL, HALF THE BEES

We've halved our most important natural resources. It's as if the world itself--the biosphere itself--has shrunk by half. As if the world is shrinking around us--but all the while, our population is growing. It's like being in a rubber boat that is losing air even as it picks up more and more people. Let's look at the list: Coral Reefs, songbirds, honeybees, fish:

1) Coral reefs dying. Rows of coral reefs generate billions of dollars a year in tourism spending. But pollution, warming waters from climate change, commercial fishing, development and ship groundings are jeopardizing them. Scientists warn that up to half of the world’s coral reefs could disappear by 2045. The reefs serve as breeding grounds for many commercial fisheries, so without them, an important food source for humans could be lost.

2) Songbirds dying out. “The dramatic decline in songbird populations is a crisis that’s unfolding worldwide, writes York University Professor of biology Bridget Stutchbury [in her new book SILENCE OF THE SONGBIRDS]. While this change may not at first appear as dangerous as global warming, the ozone hole, overpopulation, increasing pollution or massive deforestation, once again, birds — like the canaries used long ago to alert miners of invisible, fatal underground gases where they worked — have become universal biological indicators of rapidly worsening, urgent environmental troubles.

“Some estimates set the songbird population loss during the past four decades alone at almost half. Why should we care? Because, Stutchbury explains, “Their jobs as pollinators, fruit-eaters, insect-eaters, scavengers, and nutrient recyclers will not get done, and this will disrupt ecosystems and affect everyone on the planet.”

3) Honeybees going. Unless someone or something stops it soon, the mysterious killer that is wiping out many of the nation’s honeybees could have a devastating effect on America’s dinner plate, perhaps even reducing us to a glorified bread-and-water diet.

Honeybees don’t just make honey; they pollinate more than 90 of the tastiest flowering crops we have. Among them: apples, nuts, avocados, soybeans, asparagus, broccoli, celery, squash and cucumbers. And lots of the really sweet and tart stuff, too, including citrus fruit, peaches, kiwi, cherries, blueberries, cranberries, strawberries, cantaloupe and other melons.

4) Big fish in ocean--almost GONE! Brian Skerry knows the ocean well. A diver for thirty years, and a photographer for 28, he’s spent decades documenting the magnificence of the sea and its creatures. But over as the years, as man perfected the hunt for fish and pollution poisoned the world’s waters, he began to notice a major decline in the wildlife that once flourished in the sea. His concerns were confirmed by science when he read a study showing 90 percent of the big fish in the ocean were gone.

“I was just blown away by that statistic,” said Skerry, who spearheaded a three-year effort to capture the global fisheries crisis, featured in the April edition of National Geographic. “I felt that it wasn’t on anybody’s radar. So I proposed a story on overfishing, but from an underwater perspective.” …What he found was sobering.

Nearly one billion people around the world, mainly poor, rely on fish as their only source of protein. A 2004 U.N. assessment says nearly a third of the world’s fish stocks are overfished. As this resource diminishes, these people will have to find another way to eat.

New Creation Museum makes a Joke…of Logic

A lot of people are chuckling over the new "Creation Museum", opening today near Cincinnati. The museum claims to explain Creationism, which holds that the world is just 6000 years old, and the story of creation in Genesis is literally true. .

Those amusing Creationists. It's all just a joke, is it? Here's a quote from the AP story: "Adam and Eve fall from grace and Noah survives an epic flood at a new museum that tells the Bible's version of history on a theme-park scale. But the scene near the front lobby might stop a puzzled paleontologist in his tracks: a pair of ancient children frolic just a few feet away from a group of friendly dinosaurs."

It is to laugh, no? No. It's too sad to laugh at. Is racism a joke too? Racism, like Creationism, is based on pseudo-science: it tries to justify itself with fact-challenged notions of eugenics, mis-readings of genetics, garbled statistics. It uses its warped “logic” to justify genocide.

But how is Creationism like racism? They're both destructive—and in both cases it is a destructiveness that thrives on ignorance. Fundamentalism needs a literal interpretation of the Bible to sustain its house-of-cards version of reality. Creationism is part of the ideological net (in Janov's phrase, describing cultism) that keeps people caught up in the web of fundamentalism, which is inherently intolerant, and which is used to justify hate crimes. Christian fundamentalism--which depends on creationist ideas-- foments hatred for gays, and non-Christians; and since it's opposed to scientific rationalism, and is in league with the Republican power-base, most creationists are dismissive of environmentalism and issues like global warming. Many of them actively attempt to "debunk" global warming. That encourages the President, who came to power with the help of Fundamentalist Christians, to drag his heels on controlling greenhouse emissions; it encourages the administration to permit more coal-burning facilities to be built. It encourages egregious damage to the planet.

Creationism, then, is as destructive as racism…

Here's the executive director of the California Academy of Sciences, Gregory Farrington, on the Creation museum (excerpted from his op-ed piece at sfgate.com) :

Of course, the creation story in Genesis is not the same as the Greek and Hindu stories, or as the 50 or so other tales of the mystery of creation. Each claims to explain the origin of the world, but they all are different. Was the world created in one way in Kansas and another in the middle of India? ...

Religions resolve this dilemma through the power of faith. . .Science takes a very different approach. Rather than starting with the "answer" -- in this case, its own story of creation -- science starts with verifiable observations of the natural world and builds its theory on them. . .According to the best and most accurate scientific model we have today, life on Earth is billions of years, not 6,000 years, old; and the Earth is even older; and Darwin's concepts of evolution provide the best explanation of how life has changed over time, and continues to change.

On the other hand, if new evidence were to come to light tomorrow that refuted current views of evolution and the notion of a 4.6 billion-year-old Earth, then the scientists at the California Academy of Sciences and other science-based institutions would be the first to modify their theory of creation. The story would change, not the facts.

That's the key difference between the scientific and religious journeys toward truth.

Fetal “Programming“ Dooms Millions of Children to Sickness and Death

Anti-abortion religious conservatives are very concerned about the safety of a fetus–unless you bring up industrial and agribusiness toxins, then many of them suddenly don’t care about the safety of the fetus.

In league with big business and the GOP, they’re for saving fetuses unless fetal safety involves costing industry money. I have a friend who says that environmentalists are part of a conspiracy to “scare us“ because scaring us is big lucrative, supposedly. He says he's a skeptic. But he's only skeptical about environmental claims--not about claims that our environment is safe and no real regulation is needed come from people with close ideological and business alliances with big business, people like John Stossel and Rush Limbaugh. He never questions those sources; never researches the sources of their claims. His skepticism goes only one way. And meanwhile industrial, plastics and agribusiness toxins put the unborn at risk:

From the Los Angeles Times: In a strongly worded declaration, many of the world’s leading environmental scientists warned Thursday that exposure to common chemicals makes babies more likely to develop an array of health problems later in life, including diabetes, attention deficit disorders, prostate cancer, fertility problems, thyroid disorders and even obesity.