Postcard

I'm a redrock critter, at least for this month. The beauty of this place seems all the more compelling for being so completely unnecessary, in the human scheme of things. That's an atheist's view, I suppose. It isn't beautiful because of us, or for us; it just is. What better evidence of a benevolent universe could one ask for?

Which makes me not-an-atheist but rather someone who is comforted by a landscape that pays absolutely no attention to me but whose beauty cracks my heart. It draws out my grief and loss and turns them into stone, into a curve of rock that warms in the sun and lies against my hand. I can touch it. This is a good thing.

The canyons comfort me, the sky hard and bright like a jewel. How much easier it is to live in the moment, when you are surrounded by the accumulated moments of millions of years turned into a landscape of grace.

Pardon My Therapy

I will resume blogging to try to pull myself out of this funk I'm in. I'm stuck in Florida in my late mother's condo that I may not be able to sell because the housing market has gone flat and homeowner's insurance is going through the roof, if you can get it. My friends, my heart, my life are elsewhere.

Except I guess my life is here--or at least I 'd better start thinking that way, because feeling as hollowed-out as I do now is no life. At least I have a roof over my head. Some residents of New Orleans still don't have that. The people of south Lebanon certainly don't have that. Hell, there are tens of thousands of people in this country who, shamefully, don't have a roof over their heads on a daily basis. So, dear diary, let us rise above self-pity, at least for tonight.

Meanwhile the ridiculous, the sublime and the stupid/scary continue to call for attention, preventing that turning-inward of self that feels like escape but is not:

What global warming? Giant yellow-jacket nests may be the result of changing climate.

What global warming? New coal-fired plants to increase greenhouse emissions by 10%.

(How many days until the fall election?)

The sublime:








Got to see baby loggerhead turtles being released at the beach. Just a second after touching the sand they were crawling toward the water as fast as their flippers would go. They were, quite simply, beautiful. Only one in a thousand will make it to maturity.

Life goes on, fucked-up as it is. At least for turtles.

(crossposted to/from here)

This Is What Happens Next

Am I back? It's been a tough couple of months. Now I am spending the summer at my mother's house to get her affairs in order. I'm living with ghosts and it's hard to concentrate. It's been raining hard here and everything is wet, finally...tonight the frogs were out in force, so loud you could hear them with the windows closed.

Life goes on, I guess. At least for frogs.

Earth Science Bites the Dust at NASA

The space agency has shelved plans for satellites to more accurately measure weather and soil conditions, and to aid in the understanding of climate change, in order to shift more funds to the space station and a proposed moon re-landing. I guess that's so that we can hold the strategic high ground as we watch over a dying planet.

Hey, somebody's got to get the last drop of oil (clean water, clean air, microchip, order of nachos, what have you)...it might as well be us. Or some of us. You know who you are.

Hildegard Hegger (1925-2006)

Rev. William Sloane Coffin (1924-2006)

Crisis Management

Yesterday's Washington Post has a story that sheds some light on the much-hyped "war on boys" in education. Guess we'll have to go back to the war on Christmas, or the war on the war on Christmas, or something to keep the paranoid right buzzing.

Remember when conservatives decried the "victim mentality" of advocates for women and the poor? Turns out they just wanted to claim the mantle of victimhood for themselves. Or as some in the blogosphere have put it, IOKIYAR (it's OK if you're a Republican). Who knew?

The Doctor Is In

President Bush has committed $500 million to his "Healthy Marriage Initiative", which helps "couples who choose marriage for themselves gain greater access, on a voluntary basis, to services where they can develop the skills and knowledge necessary to form and sustain a healthy marriage."

But it turns out that some of these "services" are (surprise!) religious-based organizations that equate "healthy" marriages with ones in which wives stay home and offer helpful advice to their overworked spouses:

"The married man won't go to work hung over, exhausted or tardy because of fewer bachelor habits, and because he eats better and sees the doctor sooner, thanks to his wife. She is also a good adviser on career decisions, and relieves him of chores, so he can do a better job."

In the meantime, the administration is cutting funding for programs that help women break into non-traditional fields of work with much higher rates of pay than the usual "pink collar" jobs. It seems that a healthily-married woman is a dependent one. Or a poor one, anyway.

Life is Cheap, Part XLVII

Why would women leaving a religious event stampede and crush a bunch of other women and children? Were they so covered up that they could not see properly? Were they made to hurry for some reason so that they couldn't stop? How the hell could something like this happen? Maybe I just don't understand crowd dynamics, but there has got to be some serious negligence going on here.

Bad enough when human beings shoot and blow each other up. But when they kill themselves through mindless herd behavior I really wonder if the human race isn't just too stupid to live.

Update: Qatar's The Peninsula newspaper says that the crush was set off when someone yelling for help with a fallen child set off a panic in the crowd. Of course, having more than one exit for 50,000 people might also have helped:

...Dawat-e-Islami party spokesman Nadeem Qadri blamed the authorities for closing off some exit points to the mosque because of earlier construction work.

“These congregations are nothing new in the city. For the last 15 years we held it every week. The incident took place because the government had closed three entry and exit points because of a newly constructed park,” he said.

So it's not mindless herd behavior but mindless official incompetence....the world makes sense again.

State authorities have ordered an inquiry into the incident.

American Idol

Howard Zinn writes about, among other things, the idea of American exceptionalism--that we are taught to believe that we are the standard-bearers of a new and better politics, a new and better life--either because we were chosen for this task by a superior being or because of our superior western culture. Therefore no one could possibly want to resist having our values and institutions imposed--excuse me, bestowed--on them. Therefore anyone who does resist must be, ipso facto, a terrorist and "dead-ender" and we are justified in blasting them off the face of the earth. God be praised.

A more accurate reading of history might lead us to re-examine this belief and conduct ourselves with a little more humility--but that brings us to another problem, for "we" are not the unified body that conventional history and politics would have us believe. We--that is, you and I--may be humble, may desire humility in foreign affairs, may even benefit from it. But this administration and its backers do not represent you and me and the consequences, good and bad, of their actions do not fall equally on all. The people who benefit from wars and aggression are not the same people who pay the price. Ditto for oil price hikes, political instability, unemployment, deficits....

Our present leaders are not so candid. They bombard us with phrases like “national interest,” “national security,” and “national defense” as if all of these concepts applied equally to all of us, colored or white, rich or poor, as if General Motors and Halliburton have the same interests as the rest of us, as if George Bush has the same interest as the young man or woman he sends to war.

Now we are told that the people of Iran will rise up and overthrow their government once the bombing starts. But will they? And if not, who loses? Who wins?

The Mother of All Hot Flashes

So are we going to nuke Iran?

One former defense official, who still deals with sensitive issues for the Bush Administration, told me [Hersh] that the military planning was premised on a belief that "a sustained bombing campaign in Iran will humiliate the religious leadership and lead the public to rise up and overthrow the government."

And since these guys were so accurate in their predictions on Iraq, we should trust them on this one, right?

It always amazes me when someone expects people in other countries to respond to aggression in ways that we ourselves never would. If we were attacked, would we rise up and overthrow the government? Or would we put aside our feelings about the government (hard as that might be to do) and fight tooth and nail to defend our country, our homes and our families?

Of course we would. And I don't believe that anyone would make this assumption about a westernized society. It is a racist assumption that says that people in Iraq, or in Iran or in Vietnam or in Palestine are cowards. That they are afraid to fight, they have no pride and do not love their countries as we do; therefore, they will give up and do what we want.

Funny how we always turn out to be wrong about that. Funny how we never seem to learn from our mistakes either. Because it's always someone else's fault: the liberals, the media...the French. This would merely be an annoying trait in a ten-year-old. In the men with their fingers on the nuclear trigger, it is dangerous bordering on insane.

The Other Cheek

The late Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater on John McCain's new pal Jerry Falwell, July 1981: "I think every good Christian ought to kick Falwell right in the ass."

-from Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo

Now This I Can Do....

Now this is blogging! In all its glory, copied wholesale from another site:

McCain Embraces Falwell in All His Wingnut Glory

Republican John McCain gives some love to the crazy Reverend:

American military hero and Arizona Sen. John McCain will deliver the Commencement message at Liberty University on May 13, at 9:30 a.m., in the Liberty University Vines Center.

While Sen. McCain and Liberty University Chancellor Jerry Falwell have had their share of political differences through the years, the two men share a common respect for each other and have become good friends in their efforts to preserve what they see as common values. This will mark his first ever appearance at Liberty University.

Ah, a full embrace of the man McCain referred to as "pandering to the outer reaches of American politics and the agents of intolerance." My question: will Tim Russert ask Senator McCain if he agrees with Falwell's comments? If he thought it appropriate to ask Senator Obama about Harry Belafonte's remarks, why not ask McCain about the following, since he has chosen to so closely associate himself with the good Reverend?:

• Senator McCain, do you agree with Jerry Falwell that Muhammed, the prophet is Islam, is a "terrorist"?
  
• Senator McCain, do you agree with Jerry Falwell's statement that "If you're not a born-again Christian, you're a failure as a human being"?
  
• Senator McCain, do you agree with Jerry Falwell's statement tht "Blacks, Hispanics, women, etc. are God-ordained minorities who do indeed deserve minority status"?
  
• Senator McCain, do you agree with Jerry Falwell's statement that "Most of the feminists need a man to tell them what time of day it is and to lead them home"?
  
• Senator McCain, do you agree with Jerry Falwell's statement that if the Antichrist did exist and were alive today, "of course he'll be Jewish"?

Come on Timmy, I hope you're taking notes. Now that McCain and Falwell are peas in a pod, I'd hope that the media can abandon that whole "moderate" myth.

Can't do any better than that. Thanks to georgia10 at Daily Kos.

Mea Culpa (Part Two)

I think that there have always been religious extremists and people who follow them out of some combination of obedience, ignorance and fear. They have always existed, everywhere. But the world is smaller, as the saying goes, and so now we have Muslim fundamentalists in Afghanistan who want to kill a guy for converting, and it's on TV, it's on the internet. Are they devolving? Probably not. I don't know. It's not for me to say. I'd like to think that there are fewer people in Afghanistan who feel this way than there might have been, say twenty years ago. But I have no way of knowing. I do know that I have no respect for a religious interpretation that demands a man be executed for converting to another faith. But it doesn't necessarily mean that Afghan society is being reduced to some lower level of consciousness, thereby lowering the worldwide morality/enlightenment quotient.

Are we in the US devolving? Probably that's the wrong word to use--it implies an organic process that can't be stopped. Are we slipping backwards down a social and political incline because half the population doesn't know or doesn't care or feels paralyzed to do anything about it? I sure think so. I no longer know what it will take to shake people up enough to reverse the process. I would have thought any one of about a dozen things that have happened would do it. But we move on to the next news cycle and we wait...for some pendulum to correct itself, for the next election, for some deus ex machina process from beyond history to set things right. But history is made, not written.

I hear that Americans don't care about history.

Rome is burning. It's not too late. History is made, not written.

Mea Culpa (Part One)

Frack me! Has it been a whole month since I posted?

I've been having health problems of my own lately as well as taking care of my mother...and the dog ate my homework...but I think the main reason is the outrage overload that I've been suffering whenever I read the news.

People get blown up every day in Iraq (and elsewhere); Bush declares that he's not required to follow the law, Congress agrees; abortion is banned; global warming reaches the tipping point. What the hell can you say about any of this? My outrage alert level is stuck at orange. In Afghanistan they want to kill a man for converting to Christianity. What values can I possibly share with people who feel this way? Are we devolving?

It's not that I don't care anymore. Maybe I've just used up all the adjectives.

(OK, that's just an excuse...more later.)

Cruel Idelogy

Massachusetts Congressman Ed Markey is incensed that House Republicans are going to investigate the (Venezuelan government-owned) Citgo program that provides heating oil at reduced prices to low income people in the Northeast.

"As we all know, the oil industry just made more money than any industry in the history of modern commerce.... There has been widespread concern about price gouging, supply manipulation, speculation and profiteering, but the Energy and Commerce Committee has yet to send a single demand letter to any of the companies alleged to be involved in such activity. Instead, it has decided to spend its Committee resources and staff time trying to prevent CITGO from getting any credit for helping the poor."

Maybe it offends their free market sensibilities. Or maybe standing firm against the Venezuelan menace looks good on their political resumes. It is the campaign season, that time of wheedling and posing.

But the main reason may be to stop any heaving-and-cracking of opinion that American oil companies--or the American government--should likewise be prevailed upon to help. Charity is for suckers and socialists, apparently. Everyone else can just turn down their thermostats and shut up.

Sweet... (no really!)

Chocolate lowers your blood pressure? Thank you, gods. Kind of reminds me of that scene in Woody Allen's Sleeper (in the days when Woody Allen was still cool, or maybe it was neurotic self-absorption that was cool?) where we learn that in the society of the future, scientists have discovered that cigarettes are good for you. But since this is real life, and since I am addicted to chocolate and not cigarettes, this is very good news.

...because a picture is worth a thousand words.

...because I need something to cheer me up.

Brownie Points

John Judis writes in The New Republic that scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) are being muzzled to obscure the increasingly self-evident connection between global warming and the frequency of intense hurricanes. Given all that's been written recently about how we may be approaching a disastrous "tipping point" in planetary climate, this would seem almost criminally negligent; instead, it seems to be yet another instance of the Bush administration inserting its ideological enforcers in positions of authority in government agencies. And a heck of a job they're doing too.

Why Elections Matter

“Our local hospital tells me they see 12-20 patients per year, who have already self-induced or had illegal abortions. Some make it, some don’t. They are underage or poor women mostly, and a few daughters of pro-life families...”

I'm not surprised. I'm angry and I'm very sad, but not surprised. Expect to see more of this as reproductive freedom is thrown overboard by both major parties.

Maybe the title of this post should be "Why Elections Don't Matter". I'd like to think that women's reproductive rights were important enough that Democrats would be willing to go down fighting to protect them. But the truth is that the Democratic party is pretty powerless in Washington right now. And in the triage of congressional politics, you have to pick your fights. Government corruption and cronyism; the erosion of civil liberties; the loss of jobs to support families and communities: these issues are every bit as serious as abortion rights and--like it or not-- they matter more to more people. And when you have limited political capital, you have to spend it where it's most effective. That's what happens when you are the minority party in Washington these days. If you want more capital, you need more bodies. Numbers matter. Elections matter.

It ain't a perfect world. Never give up.

Speed of Light

It says something about our present diminished state that the idea of the Bush administration reinventing the wheel seems like a good thing. But apparently federal mine regulators are considering new safety rules, including some that were "in the pipeline" before being scrapped six years ago:

In all, the Bush administration abandoned or delayed implementation of 18 proposed safety rules that were in the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration's regulatory pipeline in early 2001, a review of agency records shows. At least two of the dropped proposals have now been resurrected in the aftermath of deadly accidents at the Sago and Alma mines in West Virginia.

In addition to the proposal to require caches of oxygen tanks, MSHA also is again considering expanding the number of mine rescue teams available to respond to disasters. A similar proposal to beef up rescue teams was scrapped by the agency in 2002, agency records show.

Wouldn't oxygen tanks in mines be a fire hazard? On the other hand, 72 men in a Canadian mine equipped with such tanks were rescued after being trapped underground for 3o hours a few weeks ago. (Another example of Canadian "cultural marxism"? See below.)

Better late than never, I suppose. Too bad those seem to be the only choices we have. American miners deserve better. Come to think of it, so do the rest of us.

Why Mounties Wear Red

Republican strategist Paul Weyrich has his ear to the ground, in Canada anyway. He urged his fellow conservatives not to publicize their support for Big-C Conservative Canadian Prime Minister-elect Stephen Harper during his campaign, because Canadians perceived American small-c conservatives as "scary" and might be put off if Harper were linked with them. (Those wimpy Canadians! We robust Americans, on the other hand, are not so easily frightened by massive deficits, intrusive government and endless war.)

Weyrich goes on to call our neighbors to the north "so liberal and hedonistic" that Harper can't hope to change their philosophy of "cultural Marxism" right away. (Hedonistic...Canadians?? Who knew that under that hockey-loving, Moosehead-drinking exterior lurked a love of excess and debauchery?)

Just wait, hosers. Somewhere out there is a Biblical passage low wage job bright new day of freedom with your name on it.

One Hand Clapping

Turns out the prez was just speaking, um, metaphorically or something when he said in the SOTU that he wants to reduce dependence on Mideast oil by 75% by the year 2025. Energy Secretary Sam Bodman explains that "this was purely an example" and we might still have to import large amounts of oil from these friendly client states in 20 years because, by golly, that's just where the oil is. I mean, what are you gonna do?

Asked why the president used the words "the Middle East" when he didn't really mean them, one administration official said Bush wanted to dramatize the issue in a way that "every American sitting out there listening to the speech understands."

See, he's not lying, he's dramatizing. Suddenly the whole WMD thing makes sense.

"In 2025, net petroleum imports, including both crude oil and refined products, are expected to account for 60 percent of demand ... up from 58 percent in 2004," according to the Energy Information Administration's 2006 Annual Energy Outlook.

Oh no, cognitive dissonance! (I hate when that happens.)...or maybe it's like a Zen koan, and our challenge is to perceive the deeper truth at the heart of the conundrum that is the sound of George Bush talking.

Then we will be rewarded with a flash of insight, like a cudgel to the side of the head, and achieve bliss in a post-oil economy.

Good night and good luck, grasshopper.

Game Theory

Check out Iraq Invasion, a new text adventure game/post (well OK, it's just a post but it's funny as hell) at Defective Yeti:

> EAT PRETZEL.
I don't think the pretzel would agree with you.

If you are old as dirt, like me, and remember playing games like Zork and Trinity late at night when you were supposed to be studying for midterms, this will make you smile. And given what's going on these days in the administration of Lord Dimwit Flathead the Excessive, that is a very good thing.

(For more info on text adventure games-- or to satisfy your inner geek--go to Baf's Guide to the IF Archive.)

Hoiday Greetings

Angryblackbitch examines the legacy of Martin Luther King:

A bitch has been thinking about the Civil Rights Movement. With the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday approaching and Black History Month on the horizon the country has once again turned its gaze brownward. Now, a bitch is always frustrated by the language of these celebrations…love, unity, community, solidarity, dreams and so forth and so on. By mid-February the oration contests will be in full swing and a bitch will tune out.....

The Civil Rights Movement can best be understood by an examination of the citizens who participated in it. King, as a leader and a constant source of inspiration, is an amazing example of the power of one…but he should be evaluated as one of the whole. This bitch understands that folks admire King…a bitch admires him too…but part of my admiration is based on the fact that he is not deified in my mind. When viewed as a man, with all of the faults, insecurities, fears and obligations every human being holds, King’s accomplishments and courage are all the more inspiring.

This is a day to celebrate everyone who works for justice. Pick up your ass, your pen (or whatever), your credit card. Never give up.

The Quality of Mercy, Part II

An article in the Philadelphia Inquirer connects the dots:

Since the Bush administration took office in 2001, it has been more lenient than its predecessors toward mining companies facing serious safety violations, issuing fewer and smaller major fines and collecting less than half of the money that violators owed, a Knight Ridder investigation has found.

At one point last year, the Mine Safety and Health Administration fined a coal company $440 for a "significant and substantial" violation that ended in the death of a Kentucky man. The firm, International Coal Group Inc., is the same company that owns the Sago Mine in West Virginia, where 12 workers died last week.

The $440 fine remains unpaid.

The Quality of Mercy

Much still on the air about the Sago Mine disaster and how miners' families were so cruelly misinformed. It makes for the kind of human story you'd hope we can all relate to.

But at the same time there aren't many of us who know what it's like to walk down into a hole in the ground every day; to work at a job that is so dangerous that the thought that it might kill you is both too awful to grasp and too real to ignore. I sure don't.

And we don't really know what it's like to be the families of those miners. It makes me cringe to watch reporters asking them things like, How did you feel when you heard that your brother/husband/father had died in the mine? Were you angry? Were you devastated? How devastated were you?

Oh, we love tragedy. Shakespeare wasn't the first to figure that out. It makes us feel something, makes us feel alive after too much Dancing With the Stars, or too many hours spent in grinding commutes to our own (if you'll pardon the expression) dead-end jobs. That's not a bad thing. If it breaks through apathy and stirs our outrage at injustice, even better.

That's why I hope someone will ask the owners of the Sago Mine why they had over 270 safety violations in the last two years. Or why their injury rate was three times higher than the national rate. How did you feel when you heard that the miners had died? someone might ask. Did you feel guilty? How guilty did you feel?

Is a $24,000 fine an acceptable price for neglecting the safety of your workers? How about $50,000? How about a million? Give us a number. Then maybe we can figure out how to stop this from happening again. It's a business calculation, fine. Let's do the math.

Whatever it takes.

Maybe I like tragedy as much as the next person. But I like justice better.

Cow Escapes Meat Plant

We should all be so lucky.

Yin and Yang

I don't know what to think about an eight-year-old boy whose parents take him mountain climbing in the Himalayas. Is it really cool or just a projection of dad's (or mom's) ego? Don't kids need, like, oxygen? Says Aidan Gold:

"Boy, a morning at 17,000 feet is cold."

Yeah, I bet.

OTOH it is pretty cool that young Aidan can focus well for long periods on climbs because of Asperger Syndrome, a "high-functioning form of autism":

People with that trait tend to share an intensity of focus on specific goals or processes, and they typically don't do so well in social settings.

Nevertheless, Aidan is an accomplished storyteller and has also written stories and read them to audiences, even winning a story slam last winter at the Paramount Theatre.

He also has a passion for extremely complicated origami -- building moose, bald eagles and many other things.

In a time of loss, I think of unexpected gifts.

My New Years Resolutions

1. I will complain less about stupid things that go on in politics and spend more time trying to do something about it.

(OK, I'll still complain just as much--it's too much fun to give up--but I will take some of the time formerly devoted to complaining and spend it doing something constructive, like writing letters to the editor, attending meetings of the planning commission, registering voters etc.)

(I suppose that means that my complaining will have to be done in a more concentrated manner, in order to fit the same amount of bitching and moaning into a smaller amount of time.)

2. I will learn to bitch more efficiently. Prioritize targets, create bitching talking points to facilitate repetition more effective delivery.

3. I will at least start on the book I have been talking about writing for a year.

4. I will lose weight.

5. I will lose weight.

6. I will lose weight.

7. I will stop interrupting people, even if what they are saying is excruciatingly obvious and what I have to say is brilliant, but I'll forget it if I don't say it right now.

8. I will stay in better touch with the people I care about. I will call more and email less.

9. I will learn to do an eskimo roll (maybe).

10. I will not assume that people I disagree with are evil or idiots, but wait until I am sure.