Life in Boulder, part dieux

This more or less recaps a conversation between my wife and I as we ate breakfast this morning while looking though a window at the Court House lawn in Boulder:

H: That must be a homeless guy over there. I wonder where he stays at night.

M: Is that a sleeping bag?

H: I wonder how these people can afford to be homeless in Boulder? It’s pretty expensive here.

M: Maybe they take the bus in from Louisville every day.

H: So they ride a bus here to panhandle during the day, and then go back to Louisville at night?

M: Lotta wealthy people here.

H: Yeah – I suppose they could make more money in Boulder.

M: Yeah. Lotta liberal guilt here.

A fun week …

It’s been quite an interesting week, what with arguing with Craig Moore about the Lancet study on Iraq deaths and all. Plus, as Steve points out below, Electric City Weblog has been great fun. A lot of it has to do with Budge being back on beam, but the subject matter and the wide range of personalities have a lot to do with it too.

That is what blogging is about, in my mind. We don’t inform, we are a small community, the world doesn’t care about us, but it is fun.

I did learn one thing, however, something as obvious as the nose on my face; something that, once I realized it, cleared a whole lot of smoke from the air around US foreign policy.

It is the definition of “terrorism”. Here’s what the Army Field Manual says:

the unlawful use–or threat–of force or violence against people or property to coerce or intimidate governments or societies, often to achieve political, religious, or ideological objectives.”

Here is what it means in actual practice as the U.S. patrols the world:

Shooting back.

Adventures in private health care …

My mother was diagnosed with a form of skin cancer. Her doctor decided to treat it by applying Aldara cream over a period of time. 24 tubes of the cream cost $658.50.

Mom’s Medicare D provider, Humana, refused to cover the claim. I got a letter of medical necessity from Mom’s doctor, and then spoke to a Humana representative.

I was told that Humana only allows doctors to prescribe half the amount of cream that her doctor prescribed.

I suggested that they at least consider paying half the claim, the half they would have paid for had it been prescribed according to Hoyle.

I was told that since the claim was for the wrong quantity, the whole claim was rejected, and that was that.

Striaght to DVD

This is really interesting … if you’ve ever wondered how much authors make on books. Dan Brown probably pays for a pack of cigarettes with a million dollar bill, but not so much the others.

Lynn Viehl wrote a book called Twilight Fall. It made the New York Times best seller list (news to this snooty liberal). But she’s promised readers of her blog that she would show them the inside part of the book publishing business.

She did so, revenue statement and everything.

It is very interesting. She only made about thirty grand. I have a book deep inside me, wanting to get out. If my book were a movie script, it would be called “Straight to DVD”.

Inside me. That’s where the book will stay.

You’re welcome.

We sink lower still into banality

Carol at her very interesting Missoulapolis blog broaches a subject that intrigues me – tweeting. She references another blogger (making this a blog circle-jerk) who says that, oh my gosh, President Obama doesn’t write his own tweets.

I would be so disappointed if he did. I find nothing in our society more illustrative of our shallowness than the tweet culture. I once thought of them as haikus, a form of poetry. People were compressing large thoughts down to a few ethereally transmissible words. Since I am not capable of reading or writing poetry, or of compressing thoughts, I thought that the twitter culture was a good thing, or at least would lead to some useful literature.

Of course it’s not and hasn’t led to anything interesting or useful. It’s pop culture made even poppier and banal. There is only one further step downward – the elimination of language as a vehicle for complex thought, or Wordspeak.

BS

All of my blogging energy for a week got used up in one day today. Craig Moore wanted to have it out with me over the “Lancet 2” report from 2006, the one that said that 655,000 Iraqis had died in that war. Gregg set up a special thread over at Electric City Weblog, and I spent some time reading material referenced by Craig, and writing my own summary of the pros and cons of Lancet and the implications of the theater around it.

So I wrote it up, and tried to be thorough and fair, though I could not resist using the expression “Vichy Iraq” for the new government the U.S. installed.

Craig’s response was classic: “BS”. That was it.

Last anyone heard of him, Craig Moore was farming cattle around Ryegate, Montana. He never again entered a blog site.

Sharia Economics

The Muslim faith is widely scourged here in the land of the free, as people are inclined to be provincial and project their own evil onto others. (I’m way above that sort of thing myself, mind you.) But if you set aside the jihads and seven virgins waiting (just as Christians should set aside virgin births and Revelations), it has some appealing features.

Among these features are avoidance of alcohol, daily prayer rituals, and a severe mandate that those who accumulate wealth must share with those who are less fortunate.

They also have some weird stuff, just as other religions do, concerning diet, clothing and travel. Food restrictions probably came from a time when they made sense, as with Jews who avoided crustacean seafood, which could be deadly poisonous. And the pilgrimage to Mecca is a wasted vacation, as far as I am concerned. I’d much rather go to Arizona and watch spring training.

What set me off on this was some reading I did this morning by Loretta Napoleoni in her book Rogue Economics. I’ve just been triggered to learn more about it, and can’t begin to be useful here, but she was writing about Sharia Economics, which has its roots in the Qur’an.

The concept of “interest”, or money making money on money, is outlawed in Islamic societies, though in practice they cannot avoid it, since western economics sets the table for them.

The ideal behind the concept is that wealth is the product of labor, and that payment of money must be done in return for good or services, and not merely because someone holds financial investments. It is so foreign to Westerners that we automatically dismiss the idea as impractical. But events are leading many of the Islamic faith down a non-western path.

Napoleoni specifically writes about two events: The Asian collapse of 1996, and the aftermath of 9/11/2001.

The former was brought about by flight of capital from South Korea, Thailand, Philippines, Indonesia, and Malaysia. (The latter two are heavily Muslim.) It is a classic example of too much power in too few hands, and the inability ot nation states to control the flow of capital. Those countries were devastated by the collapse, and are yet to recover. One country, Malaysia, decided to abandon Western economics, and turn to the Sharia form. It limped along for a while, and of course was shunned by the IMF, which waited for it to regain its senses. In recent years, it has attracted Muslim capital, and the country is performing quite well.

The other event was 9/11, and the ominous “War on Terror”, which many Muslims regarded as a mere witch hunt. It caused many wealthy Muslims to withdraw from the world scene, and seek to close the walls and build their own economies, free of Adam Smith, Alan Greenspan, and the IMF.

The brief chapter I read this morning was just a trigger, and it’s a whole new area for me – I invite readers here to spill their knowledge on us – if you can add some expertise to these ramblings, I can simply put up a post under your name and let you have at it.

Please add your two bits. In the meantime, it’s a whole new avenue for me.

The Old Left and the New Democrats and other tedium

I’ve had some rumblings that point to yet another awakening, meaning that it is time to move on.

We have a young relative who is in the advertising business, and who is currently faced with the choice of working for an agency in a new city, Chicago, or working for an old employer whom he has left twice for greener pastures, or venturing out and forming a new ad agency with some like-minded cohorts.

I don’t know what his future holds. But when we sit with him, he talks about it, pesters us with questions, asks for our input. We are careful not to offer advice. We only ask him to consider this or that, to ferret out his own thoughts.

His thought processes are intertwined around conversations with others. That’s how he processes information.

For others, it is a ruminative process. Thinking is hard work, but some can do it while sitting in a chair looking out the window. They organize thoughts, create strategies, and then act. It’s quite a gift, but doesn’t come about by accident. These people are usually highly educated and have worked very hard at learning how to think. While education for most of us is a tool of enslavement, for these people, it is a path to freedom.

For myself, I’m an odd duck. I think with my fingers. I sit down to write and most times do not know what awaits. Often it is a revelation to myself. That’s why I regard writing not as labor, but rather as recreation. Our old and departed friend Bob Garner had a blog for a while, and was tortured by the thought that he had to write something every day. He quickly gave it up. For me, it is a privilege, and even if I have 300 readers or sixty (which is where it currently sits), I love doing it.

Here are the rumblings:

I was down at Pearl Street Mall here in Boulder last week, and remembered a place I had long forgotten: Left Hand Book Store. It’s down a flight of stairs, nested away. I was there when we visited some years ago, and thought it would be a privilege to live in a town that had such a store. Back then, I walked out with an armload of books. Last week, I could not find one book that even remotely grabbed me. I have no use for the Buddha, am not interested in the slaughter of the Native American population. Michael Parenti is a pseudo if ever there was one. Left wing economics is Utopian nonsense. And Chomsky … well, I admire the man and thank him for his many volumes, but he is old and his time has passed.

(Chomsky’s most important work, that I beleive should be read and digested by all, is The Responsibility of Intellectuals. (I do not presume to be one. I offer that up because most of that breed spend their lives in service of power. Their efforts do not serve human freedom, which is the proper function of education.))

The other incident was some volunteer work I do. Bob McChesney hosts a program on public radio in Urbana, Illinois called Media Matters. He’s a well known author, and consequently gets the most incredible guests, from Chomsky to Richard Dawkins Glenn Greenwald to Naomi Klein to … Albert to Zinn, I guess. I transcribe the program that airs on the fourth Sunday of each month. I’ve been very lucky – I have gotten Wendell Potter and Gore Vidal and Chris Hedges, and each was fun.

Last time I got Michael Albert. He’s an old lefty, and went on and on about a new society he dreams about, with empowered workers and shared wealth, free minds and free bodies. I first ran into Albert in the early nineties, and found him boring then. Here he is, two decades later, no closer to fruition, and unchanged. He still thinks it’s gonna happen. He still doesn’t understand people.

How can so much life pass by without learning a thing or two?

I take some pride in knowing that my life has been movement … from nothing to right-winger-states-rights to Reagan Republican to nothing to Chomsky leftist to Naderite to what I am now: nothing. The list of things I do not believe in is long. I focus my attention on my latest romantic breakup. In relationships we do not go from love to friendship. We go from love to anger to hatred to disinterest.

I’ve been focused on Democrats for a long time. It’s time to treat them with the disinterest they so richly deserve. Things are going to change here at this blog. No more dwelling on the futility of two parties or imagining an enlightened populace. I choose to run in interesting circles, read interesting books, and write about things that fascinate me, learning with every peck of the keyboard.

And no more health care or election fraud or agitprop or body counts. Those battles are long lost (and election fraud itself is so pointless, as even clean elections give us shit). And there is so much more to explore. Life is so much more interesting than that.

I am thankful that I encountered Michael Albert, as he reminds me of how bad (and boring) it can be to be an idealist. There is so much more to life than trying to lift people out of the trenches. Leave them be. I plan from this day forward to do two things: Try to focus on new and interesting stuff while at the same time making fun of right wingers.

It’s my calling.

Do you feel lucky? Well, do ya, punk?

After this, no more body counts. But I was startled not to feel the full impact of something in my own writings down below. It is an accounting summary of “terrorist” attacks against Western Civilization, 1970 to present. These are official numbers – there are people in our government whose job it is to count such things. Bean counters. I could do this. I could work for the Pentagon!

In total, “terrorists” have engaged in 2,953 incidents of violence resulting in 4,947 deaths. Remove on incident, 9/11, and you have 2,952 incidents resulting in 1,974 deaths.

The U.S. (under King George the First) killed that many people with one bomb in one incident in a barrio in Panama City in 1989.

The difference is, of course, that the 4,947 people are people that matter, people who count. And so we count them when they die. Ask the Pentagon bean counters how many people died in that Panama City barrio, and you’ll get a disinterested shrug. Those we do not count. Those people, working men and women with families who dance and sing and love one another just as we do – their removal from the planet elicits hardly a blink of the eye here in the civilized US of A.

This is all old news to me. I know what’s up. I know why certain people matter and others don’t. I know why we are menaced by one evil demon after another, from Hitler to Osama. For the Panama barrio, the justification for our murder spree was Manuel Noriega, and man who is currently rotting away in a jail in Florida, about as harmful as Fred Rogers. But he became the face of the enemy.

We are but sheep given knives and led to slaughter other sheep. The game is old, and interestingly, has come full circle now. The U.S. is in Afghanistan – Central Asia, where the original “Great Game” was played.

Can’t do anything about it. People are as they are. Israelis are murdering and enslaving Palestinians, but if the tables were turned, if the U.S. had armed the Palestinians instead, then Palestinians would be murdering and enslaving Jews (and dropping white prosperous on them).

Life goes on. Only a few of us ever get our heads out of the trenches to see the game at play and understand the rules. That’s all we can hope for – some understanding. Imagine being a football fan for life and yet never knowing the rules of the game. That is what it is like for the ordinary American citizen.

I feel lucky. I escaped from the trench, found the rule book, and now have a sense of empowerment that comes from knowledge. I think this is what it means to be free.

How about you? Do you feel lucky? Well, do ya, punk?