One of my favorite writers is Jennifer Michael Hecht – I’ve only read two of her five books. She brings to me thoughts that I don’t or can’t access on my own. She highlights the wisdom of others in her books Doubt: A History and The Happiness Myth.

In Happiness she highlights an important point: Our brains have allowed us to survive and prosper on this planet, but not by all-encompassing vision. Rather, it is limited vision that focuses us on a few things while we ignore things that do not aid survival. We survive attacks by beasts and by each other, and threatening weather and climate. Quoting William James from Varieties of Religious Experience:

…our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the flimsiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. We may go though life without suspecting their existence; but apply the requisite stimulus , and at a touch they are there in all their completeness….No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded.

From Aldous Huxley’s Doors of Perception:

The function of the brain and nervous system is to protect us from being overwhelmed and confused by this mass of largely useless and irrelevant knowledge, but shutting out most of what we should otherwise perceive or remember at any moment, and leaving only that very small and special selection which is likely to be practically useful.

Continue reading “On knowing nothing and seeing even less” →

We are finishing our time in Arizona. The last week was with Bozeman friends who stayed with us. That week just blew by. We are also friends with two other couples from Bozeman who own houses down here, and have spent time with them as well.

We thought briefly about the snowbird life, and even looked at some houses, as they are ridiculously cheap down here. Then we realized that owning a house here carries with it an obligation to come here, and that would foreclose other possibilities. We quickly backed off, thanked the realtor and will probably head back to Colorado before our time in this house is up.

Continue reading “Arizona charm” →

Comments by participants in the My Lai massacre during the Vietnam War claimed that the incident, though grisly, was not that unusual. “Free fire zones” meant that anyone breathing oxygen was a target, so that soldiers landing in the villages that day were free to kill anyone they saw, no questions asked. Only after a low-level GI, Ron Ridenhour, finally got Seymour Hersh to report on the matter did it become a scandal. And again, it must be noted, Hersh’s report includes comments from participants that the incident simply was not that unusual.

Afghan people are furious that Sgt, Bales was extradited from there to stand trial at home. Afghanistan news media is alive with reports that Bales did not act alone, was part of a coordinated effort, complete with helicopter landings and burned corpses. Could it be that that Sgt. Bale’s unit had free fire authority, and that on landing and finding no “militants” that they simply killed everyone there, My Lai style?

If so, there are many possible outcomes. One is the Calley scenario, where Bales would be allowed to take the fall, stay in jail long enough to escape public memory, and then quietly fade away. In this outcome, Bales sits quietly on trial as he is convicted, apparently penitent. News reports circulate that he was troubled, a loner, had combat stress, maybe even find high school buddies who uncover dark secrets about pornography and drugs.

What if Bales wants to put the Army on trial? That could be nasty, as the Army will not allow itself to be exposed (should the Afghan media be giving us accurate reporting). There would be no public trial, and he would be convicted, possibly executed, certainly put in solitary confinement.

Or, he might commit “suicide.” That would be the Joe Stalin solution: No person, no problem.

Hard to know what is true or factual right now. It would be wise of all of us to watch all reporting on this matter from all sources.

According to Democracy Now, there appears to be a sealed indictment against Julian Assange coming out of the highly secretive Obama Administration. This from Rolling Stone magazine, a few issues ago:

Assange recently spoke to someone he calls a Western “intelligence source,” and he asked the official about his fate. Will he ever be a free man again, allowed to return to his native Australia, to come and go as he pleases? “He told me I was fucked,” Assange says.

The Obama Administration has been far worse in the privacy/free speech area than any administration before, and gets away with it because are happy to support any policy so long as the person who puts it in place is a Democrat.

This from DN:

The whistleblowing website WikiLeaks has published an internal email from the private intelligence firm Stratfor that suggests the U.S. Justice Department has obtained a sealed indictment against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. The email is one of around five million obtained from Stratfor’s servers by the hacker group, Anonymous. “Somehow you have a private intelligence company, Stratfor, a ‘shadow CIA,’ as people have called it, having information about this sealed indictment—secret again—that Julian Assange doesn’t have, that WikiLeaks doesn’t have, that his lawyers don’t have,” says Michael Ratner of the Center for Constitutional Rights, who is a legal adviser to both Assange and to WikiLeaks. “What you see here is secrecy, secrecy, secrecy.” News of the indictment comes less than a week after Army Private Bradley Manning was arraigned for allegedly leaking classified U.S. military and State Department documents to WikiLeaks.

Isn’t it interesting that a private corporation has this information, presumably leaked, and bears no scrutiny, while Julian Assange, who has done the very same thing, is “fucked?”

Afghan villagers who witnessed the recent massacre in Kandahar province say that it was not a lone marine, but rather a group of drunken marines.”They were all drunk and shooting all over the place,” Reuters cites Agha Lala, a villager in Kandahar’s Panjwayi district.

Lala’s neighbor Haji Samad lost all of his 11 relatives in the rampage, including children and grandchildren. He claims Marines “poured chemicals over their dead bodies and burned them.”

The Pentagon reflexively lies about these things, and will spend far more money and time covering up the incident than investigating. The “lone gunman” notion is quaint.
Continue reading “USA: The planet’s lone nut” →