Anyone paying close attention to international events over the decades implicitly understands that the United States is not interested in either democratic rule or human rights. Quite the opposite. In addition, the US media only directs our attention to places where the US military industrial complex wants that attention directed.

So when we learn that the US supports the protest movement in Syria, a concerned citizen has to ask the question “Why?” Obviously there are strategic reasons, as generally the US seeks to surround the oil fields of the Mideast. Pervasive anti-US sympathy throughout the region eliminates the possibility of self-rule. Democracy and human rights are not in the best interest of the US. Ergo, dictators like Mubarak, Gaddafi, Saddam Hussein and the House of Saud are installed, supported, and replaced as necessary.

I merrily went along assuming that the answer is that the US doesn’t tolerate independent governments anywhere in the region for any reason, but the following words from Paul Craig Roberts do offer some illumination:

“The United States is bold in stirring up the opposition and in arming it. They used the cover of the Arab Spring and Arab protests as they did in Libya,” he said. “These are not spontaneous protests, and certainly in an authoritarian state like Syria you wouldn’t find people in opposition able to readily supply themselves with arms, with military weapons.”

What’s involved here is that the Russians have a naval base in Syria, and the Americans don’t want a Russian naval presence in the Mediterranean. And, just as in Libya, the problem was the Chinese oil investments. If Syria goes, Iran is in the target sites, and Lebanon.

I started running at age forty, and after working myself up to a five-mile habit, began to notice knee pain. I kept at it, and ended up with sore knees. So I moved indoors, and ran on a treadmill, five miles still my benchmark. That ended in knee surgery and sound advice from a doctor: Stop doing that.

All the while my weight was increasing. It was almost as if there were no correlation between exercise and body fat, because I was surely in the upper percentiles in terms of physical exertion.
Continue reading “Getting off the treadmill” →

I wrote with some trepidation that President Obama, despite public posturing, would sign the Defense Authorization Bill that includes a clause allowing for indefinite detention of Americans without due process. I played a card there, betting that overall I have a good measure of the man. I assumed that his professed opposition was merely a tactic to prevent real opposition from crystallizing. Obama’s got our back, you see.

Well, that turns out to be correct. Obama not only is not opposed to that provision, but according to Senator Carl Levin, the provision was put in the bill at the insistence of the White House.
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I’ll link this later, but I’ve been visiting an English-language Russian web site, rt.com. Some of the best reporting I’ve seen on the web is going on there.
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This link is troubling. But things must be kept in perspective – the compounds used to house Japanese citizens after Pearl Harbor did not materialize out of thin air. People were rounded up by teams of agents who knew who they were after and where they lived. The iron fist under the velvet glove has been there at least since the turn of the twentieth century, when the first professional use of agitprop to send the nation to war was used. There is nothing new under the sun. The only thing different now with the use of “terrorism” as the new “Hun” or “communist” is that the government is openly changing the laws that shield us rather than quietly ignoring them. And that is nothing more than the product of a frightened and dumbed-down population and a non-existent fourth estate. As any psychologist would note, no one can abuse you without your permission.

The most significant piece of union-busting legislation passed in recent years is the Postal Accountability Enhancement Act of 2006. This is the law that is crushing the postal service. It requires them to pre-fund pensions 75 years out by 2016 – to the tune of $5-6 billion per year. No other firm has such stiff requirements. Add this to the other problems it faces – inability to adjust prices where it competes with UPS and FedEx, the subsidy of advertising and other junk mail by first class mail, and the natural slow-down it is facing as people more and more use the Internet to pay bills and correspond, and it’s looking bleak. But take out that pension requirement, and the USPS would be in much better shape, perhaps approaching solvency.
Continue reading “A future bailout in the making” →

From Democracy Now:

Political blogger Glenn Greenwald recently wrote about retired General Wesley Clark’s recollection of an officer telling him in the weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks that the then U.S. Secretary of Defense had issued a memo outlining a plan for regime change within five years in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Iran. We play an excerpt of Clark’s comments and ask Greenwald to respond. “What struck me in listening to that video … is that if you go down that list of seven countries that he said the neocons had planned to basically change the governments of, you pretty much see that that vision, despite the perception that we have a Democratic president and therefore the neo-conservative movement is powerless, is pretty much being fulfilled,” Greenwald says.

In a thought-controlled society, surface features like a change of administration brought about with much excitement seem to indicate change. But only perceptions change. Obama=Bush=Obama. Elections do not matter.

Annual deaths caused in US by tobacco use: 443,000
Annual deaths caused by alcohol abuse: 75,000
Annual deaths due to illegal drug use: 17,000
Annual deaths due to FDA-approved drugs: 64,000
Annual deaths due to marijuana use: 0
Annual deaths due to execution for drug-related offenses: 1,000
Number of tobacco executives executed: 0
Number of pharmaceutical executives executed: Far too few.

All right then, armed with the facts, DEA, go get ’em!

“Black Friday” is an interesting social phenomenon, the product of intense advertising throughout the year leading up to an orgasmic release the day after Thanksgiving. I can only speculate on why people behave this way, but the psychologists who are at the center of every successful advertising agency surely have insights worth sharing. I wish they would do so.

“Christmas” is more rational and less manipulative than Black Friday. It is a celebration of the beginning of return of the sun after the solstice. On the 21st of December it will reach its lowest level on the southern horizon, and for three days it appears not to move. On the 25th of December, barely perceptible, it begins its return. (Should not “on the third day he rose again” be “fourth”? What am I missing?)

Our ancestors, having lots of time, paid close attention to the sun, the moon and the stars. Lacking scientific knowledge, they worshiped them as gods. The sun (Zeus or Ra, Greek and Egyptian, and “Yahweh, from some Jewish tribes) became the supreme god over all, and the female moon Meres (Mary) and male Apollo (Paul) tagged along. The word “son” is used to describe the modern sun-god, Jesus. How can that be coincidental? Continue reading “A black festival” →

Last April I learned something startling, but which has since begun to make far more sense: Prior to the defeat of the Nazis at Stalingrad the US had no plans for confronting Hitler’s Fortress Europe. Our leaders were content to make peace with him.

Stalingrad so weakened his regime that plans were quickly made to invade. The Nazis were so diminished as a fighting force that many we encountered were old men and teenagers in uniform.
Continue reading “The importance of Stalingrad” →

Well, I have quite a bit of time between now and my flight at 11 AM tomorrow. Expect some posting here. I’m in Billings, Montana.

When I went to grade school here, as I learned many years later, the reason we were let out at 2:45 and not at 3:00, like Garfield School down the street, was that the nuns wanted to minimize our contact with public school kids. We did not know this, of course, but I did have the attitude that something bad was going on in that school one block away.
Continue reading “Montana lets out at 2:45 PM” →

Let’s take two examples of government, one where it was responsive to the needs of the majority, and one where it was not. Let’s set aside minor differences. I know that right wingers do not like Franklin Roosevelt for a host of reasons. But I also know they do not like Joe Stalin as well. I’m having a problem now because I just read some comments at 4&20, and as I see it, both Roosevelt and Stalin represent the same thing … government. There is no gradation. Government is, or isn’t, and has no quality other than oppression. It cannot be controlled, and even if we like what it does in minor doses, those small amounts always lead to larger abuse.

That’s fairly typical thinking on the right wing, the missing middle, the inability to think in grays. But I thought it would be interesting to do a thought experiment. Let’s say that, for instance, government hiring people to take away our garbage is good government, and government hiring people to break into our houses and steal our possessions is a bad thing. Is it possible to have one without the other? Of course! One is a public service, one is a criminal enterprise. If, by chance, government comes under control of a criminal enterprise, then indeed we have a problem. We have a problem too if ExxonMobil comes under control of criminals, or Bank of America or the local YMCA. Or the Supreme Court, congress, or the presidency.

So then, the problem is not ExxonMobil or the YMCA or government. it is criminals. Bad people. They are a problem in private society, a problem in government.

FDR was effective. Let’s call what he did “representative government.” Another word for that is rule by “us.” We did good things for ourselves. Stalin was a bad dude. Let’s call what he did “tyranny.” That’s another word for rule by criminals. Does it follow that representative government naturally leads to rule by criminals? Quite the opposite, it appears. The criminals were upset by representative government, and have been working ever since FDR held office to destroy his legacy. They hate unions, minimum wage, child labor laws, import tariffs, high marginal taxes, Social Security. They have countered all of this by corrupting politics with money, stealing elections, launching illegal wars, spending us into a ditch … it seems that the criminals are very much opposed to representative government.

So does good government naturally lead to criminal government? No. Not at all. There are merely reactionaries around us, always waiting to pounce, take advantage, seize the public treasury for their own use. These are criminals, and they are being protected by police right now against people who want representative government.

So I wish to take the phrase “representative government” and set it aside, so that it not be thrown into the same pool with “government,” so that we cannot be told that all “government” is alike. The following words are from Dave Budge at 4&20, my substitution of words used for his in brackets. It’s startling what he is really saying!

But one must remember that no matter how egregious the behavior of cops is it is you, dear voter, who indirectly gave them that power. Many of you, I believe, support federal funding of local and state police. Many of you have called for more enforcement by the legal system for protections against civil rights violations.

It would seem that many only want to have enforced those rules with which they agree. Sorry, you can’t have it both ways. The solution, then, is to work to change the rules….I’m not making a red herring. I’m saying that there is a high correlation between wanting more [representative]government and getting more [representative] government abuse. … If you ask for more [representative] government you’ll get more abuse of power. If you want to level the playing field for the poor you have to reduce the ability for the state to discriminate against them. That means expanding freedom and ridding the law of moralistic nonsense in the name of public health.

You blame spooky big corporate interests? Think of [representative] government as the Federal Bank of Abuse and the (well, some) Corporations as Willie Sutton. Why do they rob the banks, cause that’s where the money is. …But the solution will never be to get business to stop rent-seeking (unless you subscribe to a full [representative] state.) One cannot expect a dog to be anything but a dog. The only limits that are effective are those on the grant of favoritism. If you can show me another way (short of complete [representative government] ) I’m all ears.

I can be accused of putting words in his mouth. I surely am, and yet, am I derailing his words or merely amplifying his message, maybe decoding, or removing the dog whistle aspect? He is the one who cannot distinguish between representative government and rule by criminals. But I think he is saying something much more basic – that we have to learn to live with criminals. We cannot keep them caged up. That harms freedom.

It’s quite a muddled thought process he’s got going there, so there is never going to be a unified theory of government coming from him. What will come from him is more of the same, the notion that we must never interfere with the power of the strong to control the weak (euphemistically referred to as “rent seeking.”) That robs us of our freedom. He’s deep in contradiction. Rand would suggest he examine his underlying assumptions.