Little boxes on the hillside,
Little boxes made of ticky tacky,
Little boxes on the hillside,
Little boxes all the same.
There’s a green one and a pink one
And a blue one and a yellow one,
And they’re all made out of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same.

And the people in the houses
All went to the university,
Where they were put in boxes
And they came out all the same,
And there’s doctors and lawyers,
And business executives,
And they’re all made out of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same.

I was all of eleven years old in 1961 as I lay on my bed listening to a GE radio and first heard this song. It certainly got my attention, as when I saw it quoted in a book I’m reading that moment came right back to me. The writer, Malvina Reynolds, as I learned today, has roots in the anti-war movement of World War I (her parents were activists) and was married to a labor organizer. Could it be that even at age eleven I was in harmony with dissidents?*
Continue reading “American education: Ticky tacky little boxes” →

My middle daughter graduated high school in 2000, and we went through all of the mindless graduation rigmarole, including a breakfast where the class valedictorian spoke. Such events are showcases, and also serve to remind the parents of ordinary kids that their kids are ordinary.

But this talk we heard, by a young lady, was deplorable. It was a Catholic school, I should add, but for ten minutes this kid did nothing but regurgitate her lessons and speak Christian mush. She presented not one original thought. She reflected back on her teachers so well that she got straight A’s.

My daughter, an ordinary student, later caught fire, getting a good liberal arts background in college. With that in place, she then got career training and now works for a ‘respected’ corporation in Portland doing respectable work in exchange for a respectable salary. I have told her that her job will pay her bills, but her English degree, which did nothing more than to teach her how to think and to broaden her horizons, will make her life full and rich.

Had she absorbed everything that Billings Central Catholic High School was teaching, she might now, like the class valedictorian, be boring. She’s anything but.

We went car shopping for our daughter over the weekend. She and our son-in-law (married to a different daughter) came along, as he’s very smart about cars and a good negotiator to boot. I am neither of those things, but having me there created a bit of a quandary for the sales people. They did not know who exactly they were trying to screw.

But they’re very good at it. It’s not like they don’t know all the angles. We made a bottom line offer at one dealership, cash on the line, take it or leave it. They said “No.” I was under the impression that if they know that you are going to walk, they will come down. Not so. They let you walk.

At another place we found a very nice car, a Legacy with low miles in good condition. We looked at it, expressed some interest, and then came back later in the day. Son-in-law and daughter drove it, liked it, and we proceeded to negotiate. The initial asking price was $14,700, and we came back with $13,000. The salesman, let’s call him Dick, did the old routine where he wrote it down on a piece of paper, had my daughter sign it, and then left the room.
Continue reading “Things to do in Denver when you’re dense” →

From Dave Budge:

For example, if the Fed and the Treasury had not offered a doctrine of too-big-to-fail since the late 1970s financial institutions would, in part, not engage in risky behavior that results in private gains/public losses. That’s not to say that certain other aspects of the finance sector don’t deserve strict regulation (although I’m not in the mood to debate what those are right now) but certain “self-policing” has all the incentive necessary to protect the public from wide-spread abuse.

I guess we’ll have to wait until he’s in a better mood for clarification, but his counting system apparently goes like this: 2004, 2005, 2006, 2009, 2010… *
________________

On a less snarky note, one might ask why people are not swayed by physical evidence? We nearly imploded in 2007-09, and even Greenspan admitted to being surprised that markets actors would act in a self-destructive manner. I don’t know where he’s at now, but he did have a lucid interval.

Some time last year I tuned in to C-SPAN to hear what was meant to be a debate between Ralph Nader and Ted Turner and some other guy, only Turner did not know that it was to be a debate. Ralph had more or less trapped him into coming on false pretenses, but Turner is resilient and smart. I roughly quote Turner, who told Nader right off that he had tried kicking the system, and all he got was a broken toe. He asked Ralph what he had accomplished in his presidential runs besides a broken foot?

That was it for me. I knew that Turner was right. The two men are similar and different – in the face of futility, Turner moved on to other pursuits, while Nader keeps kicking, kicking, kicking.
Continue reading “Counting, Budge style” →

“Guess what?” [Democratic strategist Hillary] Rosen said. “[Mitt Romney’s] wife has actually never worked a day in her life. She’s never really dealt with the kinds of economic issues that a majority of the women in this country are facing.”

WASHINGTON — President Obama disappointed and vexed gay supporters on Wednesday with his decision, conveyed to activists by a senior adviser, not to sign an executive order banning discrimination by employers with federal contracts.

Mealy explanations are currently in formulation stage

The purpose of elections is to put people in office with whom we hold common views. To get elected these people have to buy TV time, and to do that they have to accept money from wealthy people, usually corporate executives.

That means that even though they side with us on the ground on important issues, our people can’t actively work for our issues while in office, or they will lose their corporate funding to an opponent.

But still, it is important to have our people in office, as the opposition are even worse people!

This is American politics in a nutshell. It is important to get your candidate in office. If that person is liberal or progressive, she cannot be effective while in office for fear of losing funding to an opponent. The only important thing is to keep her on office. Right wing candidates, on the other hand, are free while in office to be as wacky as they want to be, and never suffer loss of funding.

If you don’t vote, you don’t matter. If you do vote, you still don’t matter.

This comes from WarIsACrime.org – I started reading it with the usual “Yeah, yeah, do go on” attitude, as if something new were about to be revealed. Turned out to be much better than I thought.

Top 10 Genius Reasons to Keep Troops in Afghanistan

1. When you’re setting a record for the longest modern war, cutting it short just increases the chances of somebody breaking your record some day.

2. When Newt Gingrich and Cal Thomas turn against a war, keeping it going will really confuse Republicans.

3. If we pull U.S. troops out after they have shot children from helicopters, kicked in doors at night, waved Nazi flags, urinated on corpses, massacred villages, and burned Korans it will look like we’re sorry they did those things.

4. U.S. tax dollars have been funding our troops, and through-payments for safe passage on roads have also been the top source of income for the Taliban. Unilaterally withdrawing that funding from both sides of a war at the same time would be unprecedented and could devastate the booming Afghan economy.

5. The government we’ve installed in Afghanistan is making progress on its torture program and drug running and now supports wife beating. But it has not yet mandated invasive ultrasounds. We cannot leave with a job half-finished.

6. We have an enormous prison full of prisoners in Afghanistan, and closing it down would distract us from our essential concentration on pretending to close Guantanamo.

7. Unless we keep “winning” in Afghanistan it will be very hard to generate enthusiasm for our wars in Syria and Iran. And with suicide the top killer of our troops, we cannot allow our men and women to be killing themselves in vain.

8. If we ended the war that created the 2001 authorization to use military force, how would we justify our special forces operations in over 100 other countries, the elimination of habeas corpus, or the legalization of murdering U.S. citizens? Besides, if we stay a few more years we might find an al Qaeda member.

9. A few hundred billion dollars a year is a small price to pay for weapons bases, a gas pipeline, huge profits for generous campaign funders, and a perfect testing ground for weapons that will be absolutely essential in our next pointless war.

10. Terror hasn’t conceded defeat yet.

Typical of the way we do things here in our fake democracy, even as officials talk about US military involvement in Syria, we’ve long been involved. Syria claims it is not fighting internal rebellion, but rather a military operation financed and armed by western powers. If the Syrian government is anything like the American government, only one thing three things can be safely said: They lie, they lie, they lie.

The American news media is highly unreliable in matters of US military operations, along with just about everything else except celebrity culture. Syrian media is also suspect. Al Jazeera might be a useful source, but has drawn complaints of complicity with western forces. Has it too been compromised?

Continue reading “American fairy dust” →

In February 1990, a group of British relatives [of Lockerbie victims] went to the American embassy in London for a meeting with the seven members of the President’s commission on aviation security and terrorism. Martin Cadman remembers: ‘After we’d had our say, the meeting broke up and we moved towards the door. As we got there, I found myself talking to two members of the Commission – I think they were senators. One of them said “Your government and our government know exactly what happened at Lockerbie. But they are not going to tell you.” (Paul Foot (1937-2004), Private Eye, May, 2001)

In Shakespearean tragedy a small incident often leads, step by step, to major tragedy. Although the shooting down by the US warship Vincennes of an Iran Air Flight 655 on July 3, 1988, killing all of its 290 passengers and crew, was not a small incident, by comparison to the tragedy that it initiated, is seems as such. The US claimed it was an accident, but as the Vincennes was in Iranian waters and the event precipitated an Iranian stand-down against US ally Saddam Hussein, it can at least be said that it was … convenient.

Imagine the aftermath:

Officials in the Iranian and Syrian governments, incensed by the event and the arrogance by which a major power like the US can commit such a crime with impunity, seek revenge.

Using Palestinians not connected to the PLO, they arrange for a bomb to be placed aboard a Pan Am flight from London to New York on December 21, 1988. The plane blows up over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing all 259 aboard and 11 people on the ground.
Continue reading “Justice, Bush League variety” →

Obama won’t hesitate to use force to “defend US.”

C’mon people, please. How is this guy in any way different from his predecessor?

That aside, we know now, due to some real journalism, that Isreali insider sources say that Iran’s nuclear program is compromised. Secondly, countries do not commit suicide, so that Iran’s only intent in procuring a bomb is as a deterrent.

We have our share of lunatics in power, as does Israel. But more and more as time goes on I am thinking that the whole purpose of the current war scare is to stop Iran from doing something that might seriously jeopardize the interests of our Mullahs, our Wall Street overlords. And the only thing that comes to mind is preservation of the dollar as the reserve currency for trading world oil – the petrodollar.

But it is about a real threat to power, so that an unprovoked attack on Iran is not out of the question. The most frightening aspect is that to achieve a quick and decisive victory, the War Department might decide that nukes are in order. They would use Israel for that purpose, of course, but there are so many unknown unknowns in such a strategy that civilization might be in serious jeopardy.

Or not. Who really knows?