Sowing the Seeds of Love

We have a few local newsletters and news blogs out here in the rural parts of NH.  Most of the content is town oriented, with news about school board and selectperson meetings.  One online newsletter has been generating some rather heated conversations as a local pastor has taken to the pages to spread his version of the gospel.  Interestingly, to me anyway, Pastor Ted is condemning the US Senate for apparently allowing sex with animals in the armed services.  I can't really pull anything out of the incoherent babbling so if you're really interested in what religious bigots think up here in NH, go check it out.

Wide Screen TeeVee New GOP Measure of Poverty

According to a new census report, 50% of Americans are living in or near poverty, underscoring the rapid decline of the middle class in the US.  It's really an untenable situation - people do not starve gracefully.


The good news, for the GOP anyway, is that many of new downtrodden put into these circumstances by the worst economic conditions since the Great Depression own big television sets and drive cars.  From the newspaper article:


Robert Rector, a senior research fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation, questioned whether some people classified as poor or low-income actually suffer material hardship. He said that while safety-net programs have helped many Americans, they have gone too far, citing poor people who live in decent-size homes, drive cars and own wide-screen TVs.


I have to think that the reporter added this comment to demonstrate the intransigence of the GOP.  It cannot be resonating with many Americans, particularly this time of year.  I'm really on outrage overload - I just can't keep up.

Keep Harping

The Nottingham Community Church puts on some great musical events.  Last night we went with our friends Cathi and Mel to see the New England Irish Harp Orchestra at the church.  The acoustics are phenomenal and when the house is packed as it was last night, the spirit comes to you in so many ways.  The session was being filmed and they hope to have it up on YouTube soon.  In the meantime, enjoy this session that I found on the Tube:

Why I'm a UU

I'm a UU because I like being offended. I enjoy the learning experience that comes from sermons that strike nerves with me, fellow members who have very different answers and questions than I do, and folks who know little about UU who think they have it all figured out.

I get a kick out of holding the complex and somewhat contradictory concept of being intolerant of intolerance. You know you're a UU at heart when you understand that. And I love being able to be myself here...and to be accepted and loved for that.

I'd like to tell you that I had a long and arduous road to get to our church. I'd like to say that the UU church came to me after a spiritual awakening. I'd like to say that I'm a religious refugee struggling for answers. But I can't say any of those things. Although I was born to an Irish/Italian Catholic family, we were not very pious and only occasionally attended Mass. My wife and I had a civil marriage, and although we later had our vows blessed in the Catholic Church, we were intermittent worshipers. By the way, an intermittent worshiper is not much different from an intermittent wiper, where you can never get the intermittance to align just right with the need.

Looking back, it seems likely that we never felt like we belonged to the various churches that we attended. Nothing really fit. The truth is that we weren't looking for answers because we didn't know what the questions were. I heard many wonderful messages during the years from many excellent priests and pastors. But they were all too certain for what I've always felt was an uncertain world.

This reminds me of something Somerset Maugham once wrote:

"Sometimes, people hit upon a place to which they mysteriously feel that they belong. Here is the home they sought, and they will settle amid scenes that they have never seen before, among people they have never known, as though they were familiar to them from their birth. Here, at last, do they find rest."

And then I stumbled into a UU church. And you really do have to stumble into one because there's almost no such thing as an evangelical UU. And I knew that I had "hit upon a place to which" I "mysteriously felt that I belonged." And it felt right. Everyone struggling to find answers and questions were welcomed. There is no dogma, but faith overflows. A church where you'll find no Saints and plenty of humans.

The Nottingham UU church was also a serendipitous finding. Kelli and I had belonged to the Concord UU church, but, you know, for pragmatic UU members, driving 45 minutes during snow storms to attend church was not reasonable. Heck, driving 45 minutes in nice weather to attend church was not reasonable.

Then we saw a flyer for an event at the Nottingham church. We came to the event and then to a service. Again, I felt like I belonged and welcomed. And what a wonderful group of people to belong with. And this is very powerful, because religion is far too big a job for any one person. It takes a team and we use that teamwork to amplify our voices in song and in our efforts to make our community a more just place for all people. The great systems thinker, Peter Senge once wrote of this experience:

"When you ask people about what it is like being part of a great team, what is most striking is the meaningfulness of the experience. People talk about being part of something larger than themselves, of being connected, of being generative. It become quite clear that, for many, their experiences as part of truly great teams stand out as singular periods of life lived to the fullest. Some spend the rest of their lives looking for ways to recapture that spirit."

That's what keeps me coming back. This sense of being connected and generative and weaving a common fabric of life. I hope to never let this collective spirit escape me so that I don't have to search for it again.

Government Sanctioned Sterilization

If we needed any more reason to despise the 1% in the US, and I'm not sure that we do, look no further than than the report in the NYT today that describes the sterilization program that was widespread in the US from the 1930s to the 1970s.  The report specifically covers the aggressive program conducted in North Carolina, but 31 other states also had programs.  You have to read the whole article to believe even a sentence of it.

The 1% have always been trying to screw the 99%.  From the article:

Wealthy businessmen, among them James Hanes, the hosiery magnate, and Dr. Clarence Gamble, heir to the Procter & Gamble fortune, drove the eugenics movement. They helped form the Human Betterment League of North Carolina in 1947, and found a sympathetic bureaucrat in Wallace Kuralt, the father of the television journalist Charles Kuralt.

Picked a bad decade to quit drinking

News that has me depressed today:

NH will receive less than half the amount received last year for fuel assistance from the feds, even though the need is greater.  Only 25% of those requesting assistance to receive it.

Not satisfied with installing FIRE sector technocrats as heads-of-state, the EU is attempting to codify control of  individual member nation budgets into their compact.  In my view, this is the interim step between national sovereignty and Goldman-Sachs run countries.

Fox News is taking The Muppets to the woodshed for supporting an anti-capitalist agenda.  I refuse to link to Fox, but your google machine should find it nicely for you if you're so inclined.

That is all.

Death by Austerity

There's just no way that the financial crisis in Europe ends well.  All the central bank action designed to ease bank liquidity by providing billions in loans and guarantees would be great if the Euro zone economies were tuning up.  But they're not.  And diving GDP is creating bigger deficits (tax revenues go down while automatic stabilizers kick in to increase government spending) leading austerity cheerleaders to call for more cuts.  In Ireland, where they have been chasing their tail for months, the government is set to announce another round of austerity, this time taking almost 4 billion eu out of the economy.

The British government is warning embassies all across Europe to be on the watch for social unrest, and have created advisories for helping British citizens escape a Eurozone collapse.  Can I point out that the ruling elite in Europe have a pretty crappy record of handling crisis?

Dog Shoots Man

That was the headline today, giving canines in Gary Larson's world hope.  Apparently, some fool left his loaded shotgun laying in a boat, pointed at him, while he attended something at the bow.  The dog steps on the shotgun (right on the trigger it must be pointed out) and boom goes the man's buttocks.  It's a wonder how some people make it through life.

"So Called"

By now, if you're from NH anyway, you've heard that the state legislature (the House) sustained the governor's veto on HB 474 (Right to Work for Less).  It was an incredible victory for Democrats and working people facing long odds in a very skewed legislature.  Democrats have approximately 25% of the seats in the 400+ member body, and needed 35 - 40 GOP colleagues to join with them in a sustain vote.  Kudos to Labor and Dem leadership for holding this coalition together.

I sacrificed most of my summer to help Bob Perry win a House special election in our county.  Bob is an amazing guy - knowledgeable about the issues, hard-working, and a great, great progressive who just happens to be a Democrat.  I add that because it's not always enough just to be a Democrat.  I know from very close conversations with people in union leadership that they are not thrilled with NH Dems, 474 notwithstanding.

So imagine my delight to see this headline in my local newspaper this morning:

NH House kills so-called right-to-work bill

Just doesn't get any better than that!

All Too Familiar

The folks over at Naked Capitalism are hosting an interview series conducted by Andrew Dittmer entitled Journey into a Libertarian Future.  Before I talk more about the interview, let me provide a little background on my home state of New Hampshire.  In 2002, our then governor, Craig Benson, invited a group of libertarian-thinking folks to select NH as the target of their Free State Project.  Essentially, and without wasting a lot of your precious time, the aims of this project were to get like-minded, libertarian-thinking people to move to a state en masse in order to influence (or take over) local and state government.

The founder of this movement, Jason Sorens, has written and said some very radical things.  Radical to me, anyway.  The Free State Project itself understands that explaining and persuading the masses of their righteousness is a lost cause, which justifies their efforts to infiltrate the NH GOP, disguise their ideology, co-opt issues, and push an extreme agenda.  Foolishly, I mostly ignored these folks when they first started, and mocked them when I wasn't ignoring them.  It's pretty hard to read this: Once we've taken over the state government, we can slash state and local budgets, which make up a sizeable proportion of the tax and regulatory burden we face every day. Furthermore, we can eliminate substantial federal interference by refusing to take highway funds and the strings attached to them. Once we've accomplished these things, we can bargain with the national government over reducing the role of the national government in our state. We can use the threat of secession as leverage to do this.  and not mock the movement.  A big mistake, as they have been quite successful at pushing the extreme agenda here in NH.  It will take us years to undo the damage done in the past year, and we have another 12 months left before we can make any electoral changes.


So, back to Mr. Dittmer and his interview.  I no longer ignore the Libertarians who hold these contrarian views because I now realize that with their true intentions hidden or disguised, they are quite able use the system against those unwilling or unable to spend the time needed to wade through and see them for what they are.  Here in the second part of Dittmer's interview, his subject (using a pseudonym) lays it out (text in red indicates exact quotes from Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s 2001 book “Democracy: The God That Failed.”:

ANDREW: Even if you do it secretly, convincing the masses that they are inferior sounds tricky.

CNC: That’s true, but you don’t have to convince Joe the Plumber that he is a brute. You can convince him instead that he is a hardworking, productive individual, and that other people are brutes who are making it so Joe has no control over his life.

ANDREW: I see.

CNC: Still, you’re right. Convincing the masses of the superiority of the natural elite is not the most important part of our communications strategy. The central task of those wanting to turn the tide… is the “delegitimation” of the idea of democracy… [103] It is not enough to focus onspecific policies or personalities… Every critic and criticism deserving of support must proceed to explain each and every particular government failing as an underlying flaw in the very idea of government itself (and of democratic government in particular). [94]

It's been my position that the idea of delegitimizing government is dangerous to democracy.  Little did I know that that is exactly the point.  

Rats Jumping Sinking Ship

The SS Herman Cain is taking on big water.  New allegations of a long-term affair with the married Cain are sinking him in the eyes of moral GOP primary voters.  Say what you want about the GOP value system, they don't like philanderers.  And who can blame them?  If you cheat on the single-most important relationship in your life, how can anyone else trust you?  


In related news, in the wake of the new allegations against Cain, two NH representatives have switched endorsements to Newt Gingrich.  One of the reps, William Panek, said that Cain's infidelity was the proverbial straw:


Panek said he initially "didn't take [the] allegations at face value," but that once the woman presented evidence of the affair "I pretty much just had had enough."


Apparently, for Panek anyway, there is somewhat of a scorecard when tallying affairs and harassment charges.  "It was bad enough when it was 1 or 2 women," although not quite enough to get Panek to drop Cain at that point.  After all, all Cain did was gently push a female employee's head towards his crotch.  We all have our own ideas about fun in workplace, don't you know.


We haven't touched on the outrageous hypocrisy of the reps switching from one philanderer to another, but it has the makings of a great Monty Python skit.

Speaking of Tragedy

This news story from Vermont is distressful.  Apparently, a hunter accidentally shoots his friend (while hunting) who dies.  Distraught, the shooter then turns his rifle on himself and, well, you know how that ends.  Amping up the tragedy of all this is that the 18 year-old daughter of the shooter was killed in a freak snowmobiling accident just last year.

The family must think they are cursed.  I just can't imagine.

"Being Irish,

he had an abiding sense of tragedy, which sustained him through temporary periods of joy."  W.B. Yeats

I guess we're all Irishmen these days.  People often don't believe me when I inform them about how much money the Fed/Treasury has used to backstop the global financial system since the onset of the financial crisis.  It's a staggering number, and sometimes to even type it causes me second thoughts.  Just the other night, as I was talking to a friend about this, he looked at me like I had two heads, one of which covered in tin foil.

When you point people to the General Accounting Office website and to the audit of the Fed/Treasury, eyes begin to glaze over.  Bad enough that the report is long and tedious, but then you have to wade through the appendices to tally up the all the money lent/spent/guaranteed since 2008.  How much, you ask?  Try $28 Trillion.  It's almost unbelievable.  Yet it's true.

Keeping this in mind, you can imagine my delight to see former Rep Alan Grayson talking about this very thing on Monday evening.  Via Mike Norman Economics, here's Mr. Grayson:  

SEC Smackdown

Despite the best efforts of the Obama administration to sweep the financial crisis under the rug (along with trillions of dollars in aid to the banks) there are still officials who care.  Judge Jed Rakoff slapped the SEC silly with a ruling on Monday refusing to sign-off on a cozy arrangement between the SEC and Citibank.  The judge was sweeping in his remarks, reminding the SEC that "of all agencies, has a duty, inherent in its statutory mission, to see that the truth emerges; and if it fails to do so, this court must not, in the name of deference or convenience, grant judicial enforcement to the agency’s contrivances…. for otherwise, the court becomes a mere handmaiden to a settlement privately negotiated on the basis of unknown facts, while the public is deprived of ever knowing the truth in a matter of obvious public importance.”

Sometimes the deck seems so stacked against us that I just don't see a way out of this mess.  I remain convinced that we've reached the limits of three critically important systems that rule our lives - the environmental system is teetering, the economic system is completely corrupted, leaving billions of people in abject poverty, and the political systems are woefully inadequate to deal with any of it.  But, just when I think we are doomed, along comes someone like Judge Rakoff, although it remains to be seen if these objections are straws that break a camel's back, or if they are simply nuisance speed bumps on the road to serfdom.  

This post also gives me the opportunity to share a video of Matt Taibbi, who explains the ruling to Keith Olbermann's viewers.  Matt is an interesting guy - he's a terrific writer doing pretty good investigative journalism for Rolling Stone magazine.  His profanity-laced pieces push him to the peripheral of accepted journalism, however, and as much as I dig that about him (see my post about Winnebago Man!) I think he'd be doing the cause a service to limit his vocabulary to the parlance of the day.

Mostly Dead

You have to give the GOP credit.  Only the GOP and their echo chamber can make several news cycles out of Newt Gingrich being endorsed by the Manchester Union Leader.  The only state newspaper in NH has an unearned reputation for driving the agenda in NH politics, and their endorsement set the national media atwitter.

In the final analysis, I'm not sure what it means, if anything.  Newt still has no money, no organization and it's pretty difficult to see him more than just a traveling sham artist.  If Gingrich had been born 150 years ago, he'd be traveling the country with a large suitcase filled with Dr. Newt's Elixir, cure for everything.

So, what's next?  It seems obvious that nearly a majority of GOP voters are rejecting Romney.  So obvious, in fact, that it's hard to overlook the cartoon characters that they have embraced atop their preference list instead of the former governor.  Michele Bachmann has spent time surging and then imploding her way down the charts.  Then we had Rick Perry, for whom I'm convinced the question, "Is he as dumb as he looks?" was crafted.  Perry, btw, is referred to in Texas as "GW without the brains."  Low standards in Texas.  Then we had the pizza CEO, Herman Cain, who likes to say outrageous things to distract folks from examining his unethical and possibly illegal treatment of female employees.  It was only a matter of time for Cain, as I suspect he has the same birth certificate problem with GOP crazies that Obama has.

Now we have the Newt.  It's inconceivable to think that he could win the nomination.  The GOP establishment has done a fairly efficient job of knocking off Romney challengers, one at a time.  But the chore was quite simple - give each of the previously mentioned challengers enough time and exposure and they basically do the job for you.  Gingrich presents a more difficult challenge.  He's been around long enough to know where the bodies are buried and he can express himself in complete sentences.  That's not to say he won't say something really stupid - last week he said the CBO was a reactionary institute - but I think that the GOP is going to have to get real personal, real soon, to knock Gingrich back a peg or two.

That leaves....I think by default, Romney.  But I'm convinced that Rick Perry is only mostly dead.

Winnebago Man

Chances are that if you're reading my silly blog, you're on the computer enough to have caught the Winnebago Man on YouTube.  This is the guy who channels his frustration through a profanity laced stream of consciousness while filming an industrial video for Winnebago.  There's something quite entertaining about the video - watch for yourself, and remember, this isn't a family blog, and I did say the video was profanity laced:



This clip was interesting enough to grab the attention of a young film maker, Ben Steinbauer, who wondered what ever became of Jack Rebney.  So Ben begins a journey to discover who and where Jack Rebney is.  The result is a tug of war documentary where the more young Ben probes into Jack's persona, the more the cantankerous pitchman resists with his quick acerbic tongue.

Interestingly, Jack holds a very low opinion of his YouTube fans, of which there are legions.  In Jack's words, he expected these folks to be of "room temperature intelligence, with the IQ of a refrigerator."  In the final scene, Jack meets his fans during a Found Film festival and happily discovers that they are more like him than he could have expected.

This is an excellent documentary - I was riveted.

SuperFail

It's bothered me from day 1 that we assembled a committee to study and fix a problem that does not exist (debt) while we ignore the problem that does exist (no jobs).  Many are seeing the failure of the committee (I refuse to call this group of idiots "super") in cutting $1.2 Trillion from the US budget as a sign of political gridlock.  I just don't see it that way.

Remember, if the committee could not come up with their own plan to cut $1.2 T, the automatic cuts would kick in.  This means that there will still be $1.2 T cut, but from a pre-set list of cuts, including about half from the Pentagon.  Of course, I'll believe that when I see it.

The GOP knows full well that they can bludgeon the country into submission the minute we begin cutting the military.  In fact, the gnashing of teeth has already begun, with SecDef Leon Pannetta already screaming about how vulnerable the US will be if we cut defense.  The Russians are getting in on some of the action, threatening to deploy missiles to target the "missile shield" in Europe.  It's almost a Monty Python farce at this point.

I'm betting a dollar to a doughnut that not a penny gets taken from Defense.  Takers?

Post Thanksgiving Blues

There's a bit of a buildup to Thanksgiving for me.  It's my favorite holiday for all the same reasons as it is yours.  The expectations are pretty low - enjoy time with family and remember what it is you should be thankful for.  You don't need to stop by your local Lexus dealer on the way to dinner - it really is a holiday that corporate America hasn't completely co-opted quite yet.  Although it seems like it's just a matter of time.

This year, Black Friday began on Thursday as the big retailers pushed to provide a new experience for crazy fucking shoppers.  It must have worked because I read this morning that a woman out in California used pepper spray to gain a competitive shopping advantage at WallyWorld.  She must be related to one of the cops up at UC-Davis.

The day after Thanksgiving signals that the Festival of Unholy Consumption is indeed upon us.  The entire month of December is essentially lost to a craze of materialism - my sister-in-law and nephew left their house last night at 11p to go to Best Buy.  When they arrived, the line to enter was around the building.  This makes me sad for so many reasons.

What's happening?

Nearer to poor

The Census bureau began a new method to identify the poor and near poor in the US this year.  It's a bit controversial but it takes a wide variety of demographic and geographic information into consideration.  For example, $18 per hour might be enough to keep you out of the poor house in Fargo, ND, but you better have a second job to make it in San Francisco.

The data points to more than 100 million Americans who are either poor or near poor.  That's 1 in 3 Americans who struggle on a daily basis to put food on the table and pay for medical care and life-saving prescriptions.  The GOP answer:  How bad can it be when they own a TeeVee?

What if?

I mentioned that I'm reading Stephen King's new book, 11/22/63.  The plot revolves around the main character who discovers a time portal that transports him back in time to a September day in 1958.  He takes it upon himself to prevent some local catastrophes and discovers how difficult it is to change history.  As King writes throughout the book, "History is obdurate."

I have not yet finished the book, but that hasn't stopped me from wondering how the world would be different today had Oswald missed the president that fateful November day in 1963.  Oswald's wife, Marina, testified to the Warren Commission that Oswald was the person who attempted to assassinate the bigot, segregationist, jingoistic, John Bircher General Edwin Walker in Dallas in April, 1963.  He missed - and from a range much closer than his shot at the president a few months later.  What if?

What if Oswald had succeeded in killing Walker?  Surely he could not then have shot at President Kennedy 7 months later in Dallas, right?  What if he had missed both times?  How would the world be different today?

Would Kennedy have escalated the war in Vietnam as Johnson did?  How many lives hung in the balance of those shots that Oswald took?  Surely, RFK would not have been running for election in 1968, right?  How would the world be different if he had lived?  And how did Kennedy's death affect the arc of MLK's life and death?  And the impact on our country?

Gently Weeping

Great cover of Harrison's great hit, While My Guitar Gently Weeps by Tom Petty and friends.  I was surprised by the appearance of, and then the performance of Prince.  An amazing guitarist.  Period.

Pre Revolutionary

Regardless of how you feel about the Occupy protesters, it's quite clear that the establishment is mishandling the assemblies.  The Cal Davis campus police indiscriminately beat and pepper sprayed student and faculty protesters on Saturday.  Many were hospitalized for exercising their Constitutional rights of free assembly.  There have been numerous calls for the chancellor's resignation and it's hard to see how she survives this with her job.

Professor Michael Hudson discusses the latest poverty figures and OWS with RT News.

11/22/1963

I'm reading Stephen King's new novel about a guy who can enter a time portal that takes him back to a September day in 1958.  From here, the fellow can do any number of things that can change the course of history.  There are historical references throughout the book that allow you to think back on an era past and wonder how we ever made it through a day without cell phones or our google machines.

The story line is pretty good, although I get a little hung up on probability and paradoxes.  King's writing is adequate, but, really, it's the story that is carrying the book.  So far.

More later - it's a chore of a book.  Almost 900 pages.

Military State

It's frustrating trying to get accurate information about the protests taking place here in the US.  The corporate media is bending over backwards to skew the coverage or not cover it at all.  The UK Guardian, on the other hand, has had excellent coverage.  Non biased and detailed, even, in my opinion, outclassing the NY Times, which one could find hard to believe given that the OWS New York protest is in their backyard.

The Guardian ran a story about Dorli Rainey, an 84 year old activist who was pepper sprayed by police who viewed her as a threat.

We're rapidly approaching a tipping point with the protests as the establishment continues to overreact to the movement.  Every attempt to break up the protesters is met with a larger group soon after.  The establishment continues to use tactics from the 1930s to battle peaceful citizens demanding redress in the 21st Century.  It's not working.

NH IS NUMBER 1!

At drinking alcohol.

According to this report, we double the national average in alcohol consumption.

What state came out on top of the tap? New Hampshire had the most widespread booze consumption in the poll. The average adult in that state doubled the national per capita average, gulping an average of 6.7 gallons of wine each and 3.8 gallons of liquor in 2010. Some in the health industry attribute this to the state’s popularity for both winter and summer vacations.

Popularity for both winter and summer vacations?  I always knew that tourists annoyed the hell out full-time residents, but never would have guessed the extent of it.

There is no national debt.

I get a kick out of all these US debt clocks.  I mean, jumpin' jeebus, what do people think these folks used to buy the US Treasuries that they are holding?  They used US dollars.  What's the difference in debt obligation to a holder of dollars compared to a holder of Treasuries?  Nothing.

The US has a sovereign, fiat currency.  Our federal government is an issuer of currency and, as such, can never go broke.  Ever.  We simply print the money we need to pay the debts.  Couldn't be more simple.  If you want to discuss the inflationary concerns about this, that is a different topic entirely.  Let's first all agree that the US can never go broke.