State of the primaries

Our most recent primary, South Carolina. counties won by Romney in orange, Gingrich in purple. Released in to public domain

New Hampshire primary by town. Orange is Romney, Gold is Paul, Crimson Huntsman. Public Domain

Iowa caucus by county. Orange is Romney, gold is Paul, dark green Santorum, dark blue Perry. Public Domain

At this point in the Primary season, all three primaries thus far were won by separate candidates. Iowa was taken by Santorum, New Hampshire by Romney in a landslide, and South Carolina by Gingrich in a landslide. The number of delegates so far per candidate is 31 Mitt Romney, 26 Newt Gingrich, 10 for Ron Paul and 8 for Santorum. 2nd placers include Romney in South Carolina and Iowa, and Paul in New Hampshire.

Prior to this point, there were a whole bunch of shooting star candidates, starting with Michelle Bachmann at the beginning of the year and continuing with Rick Perry, Herman Cain, and then Newt Gingrich. All of them followed nearly the same trajectory, a steep graphed chart for the RCP Polling Average in all 50 states, reaching a peak, and then coming down with the same velocity that they arose, like a little boy throwing a ball. Then, Gingrich took South Carolina, by a landslide, and all the sudden everything changed. What's more, the very last of these trajectory candidates, Santorum, is still on the map and is looking strong in the Florida Panhandle.

Even before this surprising result of three states in three hands, we should've known we would be in for a very different primary season. The historic nature of this election had forced turnout way up. The Tea Party had greatly changed the Republican Party in the last 2 years. Several major candidates (including Gingrich and Santorum) failed to make the ballot in a couple states. Lastly, RNC rule changes made all early primary states proportional representation out to at least 3rd place, bringing the traditional early state landslide to an end. Now, at this moment, we see not a short primary season of the 2004 or 2000 variety effectively ending on Super Tuesday but a protacted 50 state duel between Gingrich, Romney, Santorum and Paul. Paul inevitably wins Virginia, as he is the only candidate on the ballot besides Romney and 60% of Republicans will not vote for Romney under any condition, and so then Paul too shall be right up there with the victors of our three early states.

So what precisely brought us to this point? There is a growing sense in both parties that the same puppet masters control both, and yet there was always a percentage that either refused to accept this conclusion or was comfortable with it. Add in a few Mormons and a few New England moderates, and you have Mitt Romney, the inevitable one.

But this time around, too much had been done, and the Tea Party was too fully aware that it had rescued the GOP from the dustbin of history. Revenge was desired. Many candidates came forward, and the GOP being a new movement with few experienced members, most of them were of fairly low caliber. As a result, they were catapulted with vengeance, recognized, and then forgotten. Eventually they even took on a member of the establishment who sympathized with them, I believe you the reader can figure out who that is. Then something happened with the very last two, Santorum and Gingrich.

In the case of Gingrich, it was finding his old fire as the glorious speaker of the House of Represntatives from 1994-1998. We saw him, in those last days of the election, command the respect that had made him palatable to the Tea Party to begin with. See, Gingrich was never a natural choice, he had BEEN a member of the establishment, and as a result of this fact had to prove himself. Having proved himself, the voters knew how he had proved himself, and when he proved himself once again, he returned.

In the case of Santorum, many people still did not accept Gingrich. He was still dirty, and lets face it, he made many questionable decisions and pseudo-decisions, including support for the Individual Mandate at the federal level, which he calls "a tactical decision against HillaryCare" [divide and conquer?], his decision to support TARP, which is probably more then anything else his university professor side coming out, and his decision to continue supporting social conservatives despite hardly being a role model for them, which, in Georgia, is called winning your election. Being a real politician, he doesn't come out looking real clean. For these malcontents, Santorum and Paul were the remaining choices, and Paul is considered by many to be of questionable judgement and temperament, leading to a vote by elimination for Santorum. Combine some social conservatives and Iowa farmers, and you have Santorum.

Ron Paul voters, of the typical kind, are simply too unique to be explained in this small space. However, in addition to his regular supporters, Ron Paul has received an edge from both malcontents of the kind that supported Santorum, and states where, in this remarkable election, two of the major candidates did not make the ballot, and Romney is still not accepted.

But aside from all of this there is the simple fact that the election is now on. The trajectory candidates were around when there was still time to find someone new - that time is gone. We, the Tea Party, can't replace shooting stars anymore. We are at our last chance. The time is now, the election has begun.

Pipelines and Spoiled Brats

Obamas decision to reject the Keystone Pipeline was very disturbing in two ways: first, because it was precisely what was not needed right now here in America, and second because it shows our President to have no understanding what he is doing or why. At a time when the number one issue should be jobs, and the Keystone would not only provide these jobs in terms of construction and further development of the new oil shale fields that are Americas fastest growing industry right now, but also provide demand for manufactured goods like steel and foundry items from the suffering East and Midwest, our President, already facing a potentially difficult reelection, has decided that he will give up the last chance he has to make his reelection a cakewalk. If the economy booms, then none of the assorted clowns currently running for GOP candidate will even have a chance against him, but alas for Obama, this is one boat he has missed. His reason for this dismal choice for both himself and his country: the claims of some environmentalists.

Now the ball is in Canadas court. An alternate pipeline could run from the same locations in Alberta westward to a small, undeveloped port on an inlet 70 miles long called Kitimat in British Columbia. Not only would it carry oil to China, but it would also carry oil along the well developed Inside Passage seaway to the Puget Sound for refining at Anacortes, WA and the American market. But here, again, the Greens are not satisfied.

So why, precisely, are they not satisfied? The biggest reason they are not satisfied, though it is not the only reason, is because it will "delay the development of non-carbon energy sources." Now for environmentalists in America today, this means wind and solar. Wind is extremely unreliable, and solar is astronomically expensive. What's more, the fact that solar can operate off-grid gives it a natural niche market outside of the regular electric grid, so if it can't be successful with substantial government subsidies plus a niche market, then you know it really stinks. Wind, of course, is unreliable, and a smart grid that would make it more reliable by sharing power from different geographic points would also be so susceptible to electromagnetic storms from space as to naturally be completely destroyed and take months to rebuild every 8-10 years. The alternative proposition of battery farms would be outlandishly expensive and require constant maintenance. How precisely something that requires constant input of material resources can be "sustainable" is quite beyond me.

Another reason they're not satisfied is because extracting tar sands is energy intensive. This charge is true. However, extracting oil from shale by current methods is not energy intensive, and as shale drilling becomes more and more common (tar sands is slightly older technology) the less expensive energy cost will be a deciding factor in terms of switching away from tar sands production to shale production. Right now, the massive expansion of shale drilling, especially in North Dakota where unemployment is only 3.5% (and lower near Williston) as a result, has driven up the cost of purchasing equipment for shale drilling. This is a good thing in the long run as it means more capacity will be available in the future, but in the short run means that shale is unlikely to replace any existing production until this bottleneck is widened. In the long run, this capital cost will be gone and shale will replace tar sands, especially since just the (much smaller far southern tail) of the Bakken Formation in North Dakota contains at least 3.65 billion barrels of oil, and I suspect that this analysis by the USGS was understated partially by pressure from the Obama administration and paritally by laziness, or as the report puts it: "They also combined their findings with historical exploration and production analyses to determine the undiscovered, technically recoverable oil estimates." The first rule of engineering is if you want to be lazy, always understate your result so that nobody cares.

Then there is simply the old environmentalist hatred of economic development. This is somewhat connected to the very last concern of environmentalists to be listed here, but this really is where I begin doubting the character of environmentalists as people. The reality is that, far from being some Garden of Eden, the third world is a place where illegal loggers destroy rainforests, poachers with machine guns kill off endangered species, massive sprawling cities come up over night and coal plants put mercury and radiation in to the air by the bucket full. It is also a place where in Monrovia, Liberia, the people poop on the beach, allowing untreated human sewage to go straight in to an aquifer while also stinking up the air and despoiling a beautiful 5-mile strip of pristine sand. The problem with environmentalists is they expect the full regulatory ability of a first-world country without the society or, frankly, resources, that made it possible. In short, they are spoiled brats.

And that brings us to our final environmentalist objection: locality. I shall begin by discussing the Canadian pipeline, as it is simply their most egregious abuse. All throughout the internet and journalism, we find various environmentalists and journalists, who know nothing about how development takes place, put up pictures of this pristine, perfect wilderness of tremendous natural beauty (that is, for the record, almost completely contained in an archipelago of Canadian National Parks and Provincial Parks) that supposedly will be completely destroyed by the pipeline and economic development.

To put it bluntly, no it won't. People only think it will because they don't live there. If they did live there, they would know that mountains rise straight out of the sea on both sides of the Kitimat Inlet, making any kind of construction enormously expensive, and that Kitimat is at the eastern end of that inlet and the beginning of a long, and nowhere near as pristine or beautiful, flat typical river valley. It also is located SEVENTY MILES EAST of where most of the wilderness is. In fact, this is why the pipeline is sent so far north instead of simply going to Vancouver - to avoid those eternally annoying in the sense that only an engineer can understand mountains. They would also know that if there's one thing the coastline of British Columbia has an overabundance of, its beautiful, pristine, undeveloped coastline. There are no roads on the coast of British Columbia and Alaska running North-South from the Vancouver Suburbs to Anchorage, Alaska, a distance of 800 miles, the reason why the most common accidental death in Alaska is plane crashes. It also won't because these areas are already protected as parks, both at the provincial and Canadian federal level, and there are far too many flatter, more valuable, riverside pieces of real estate nearer to Kitimat and the pipeline for lobbying by the businesses to even be profitable to them. It is also true that with a tidal range near 20 feet, any oil spill would not last very long but be swept out to sea pretty fast. But environmentalists think their asinine, immature, irrational fears justify the shutting down of an entire part of the world in economic activity, when everything that even can be done to protect that wilderness already is.

The original locality makes somewhat more sense, but only somewhat, to protest. That of course is the lands through the plains that the original Keystone XL would've run through. Of course, unlike BC, there are plenty of roads in the Plains, and even more in Texas. Lots of 2-lane or 4-lane roads going passed corn fields, unused infrastructure, tiny cities and all. This is true. It is also true that the Great Plains aquifer is pretty big, though one could counter that being so big its really not that easy to substantially impurify, and what oil would do is certainly no worse then what farmlands already do with fertilizers and pesticides. Oil also has the advantage over farmlands with their pesticides and fertilizers that it is not generally to the advantage of oil companies for their pipelines to be constantly leaking. It has yet another advantage that increasing land prices may drive the farms with their pesticides and fertilizers out of business. Further, there is the little matter of refining at Wood River, Illinois and Steele, Nebraska, right over the aquifer and the Mississippi River, where oil leaks and all manner of chemical spills are much more likely to happen then at the pipeline, and where the final expansion to Houston and Port Arthur could've eventually replaced those refineries by economies of scale, in the middle of a swamp where bacteria and a chemical-recycling ecosystem already can handle most water purity issues.

Yet even here, the same picture of the environmentalist as a spoiled brat emerges - unshaking, unwilling to compromise, loud, sort of like a toddler. Instead of seeing that some development, even if not constrained by the great mountains of the Kitimat Inlet, is neccesary to finance and safeguard environmental protection, they would rather shout and scream and yell and let everything go to some third world country where no chance exists for proper controls or procedures to prevent what they want to prevent. The result is that for every ton of smog they prevent in Southern California, two tons come across the pacific blown by winds from China, and the prairie starves, and no one even really pays close attention to what they are saying or any way of making a reasonable solution to the problem. There answer is to criticize China, a country doing its best to get out of poverty, who has no special interest in listening to much of anyone who lives on this side of the Pacific. The result also is that eventually, as people become poorer and poorer, the toddler who cried wolf may really get eaten after all.

We'll all be sad that day, just like any parent would be, but it doesn't change the fact that it happened, and that the child is gone forever and not coming back. When you yourself feed on irrationality, don't be too surprised if you eventually get fed to it. Environmentalists with no respect for reason will not be given reasonable attention, and this will be a collective judgement, not an individual one, applied to all environmentalists everywhere, whether they were part of the problem or not. They will not be heard, nor will anyone else about our very real environmental problems.

Meet the Proles

Public Domain image by Pearson Scott Foreman

One thing that never ceases to shock me is the tendency of the electorate to hold on to oft repeated lies, even resfuse to hear statements to the contrary of them, and with no candidate has this been more true then Sarah Palin. What do people get out of speaking venom and lies against her? What is it about Palin that makes people not only swallow the lies about her hook, line and sniker, but then dismiss any challenge to those lies as unworthy of their hearing?

In "1984", there were some, shall we say, non-characters called the Proles. They are humans who are non-people, are so lost in their hate, anger, fear and willful ignorance that they will simply hate upon without question whoever the small elite decides as a target, not even quoting their own memories against it. They can be controlled by a single broadcast of the radio.

I don't know what brought America to the brink of becoming Oceania, but something did. Something made us so thoroughly lose ourselves in hate, anger and political parties that we will ignore all reasoning thereafter. Something made us that lazy, that cowardly, that inhuman. I'll leave you to figure out what it was, but when was the last time that someone attacking Sarah Palin gave a good reason why?

Any particular lies you would like addressed will be handled in the comment section.

UPDATE 10/5/2011: Sarah Palin will not be seeking the highest office in the land. She announced that family concerns have simply become too great. The only person in the world who can defeat Sarahcuda is her own daughter, and it seems that she has proved this adage once again.

The Story of Kenmore

The City logo of Kenmore, WA

All along the lake, east of Seattle, are mighty hills and muggy swamps, but there was one place in the far north, right where the lake ended, where the hills turned in to a plain. This spot had plentiful timber, and since it was the termination of the lake, and also flat, the first roads built eastward and northward ran through it. Further up the Sammamish River, which runs through it, was a great floodplain, but here, at this one place, the floods did not occur. Instead were great strands of timber, 20 feet in diameter and 300 feet in to the air.

A young McMaster from Kenmore, Ontario came to Seattle in 1889. A month after he got there, the city had burned down, and his future looked bleak. Kenmore, Ontario was in turn named for the Scottish village of Kenmore, on the Loch Tay in the highlands, by a McLaren who came there long before, from Kenmore, Scotland, and always had the Highlands in his blood. McMaster was not willing to throw in the towel, and heard tell of the great virgin timbers of the lakes northern shore, and knew of the roads that crossed there and the flat plains. He also knew of a river that, with the taming of the floodplains, was now deep enough for steamboats, and a canal they were building from the lake to the sea.

Not much later, he started a Shingle Mill at this point on the lake. There were many sawmills around, but shingle mills were less common, and greatly in demand as the population grew. He also built a great log boom, that both helped feed his shingle mill when demand was high, and helped feed sawmills on the lake when demand was low. Though the entire logging operation was abandoned in 1920, the growing community of Kenmore, named by McMaster for his former home, preserved the boom, maintaining it as a fishing and swimming dock for the good of all.

The community also took an abandoned barn, and in 1952, made it in to their first library. They built a school, and roadhouses, and restaurants, and expanded the road. They built parks, great ones that are still around, and preserved a beautiful old Mission style Seminary as part of St. Edwards Park. The road they maintained and expanded is now 522 Highway, a "State Route" that is a major eastward path in to Seattle. The road north, however, now runs further West, though the older road is maintained for local traffic as 527. St. Edwards Park is now a State Park.

In 1946, a swamp in Kenmore, unused for anything for many years, attracted the attention of three high school friends united after World War II. Jack Mines, Reg Collins, and Bob Monroe built a hangar in the swamp, and purchased a single plane, an Aeronca Model K. Over the years, service would increase in both volume and respect, and today, Kenmore Air is one of the largest seaplane operators in the world, and they are still based out of Kenmore, WA. The managerie of planes, dozens upon dozens of them, on the lot by the road is one of the richest sights you'll ever see.

In 1978, a science-based naturopathy university named Bastyr built itself in Kenmores southern outskirts. The university was started as extensive new legislation at both the state and federal levels had made times for natural medicine turbulent. With the National College of Naturopathic Medicines departure to Portland, Washington state legislators were threatening to suspend all licensing of naturopathic professionals as no college any longer existed in the state. A series of determined NCNM graduates understood that a school firmly built on scientific principles would not only save licensure in Washington, but grow respect for naturopathy nationwide. In the words of Dr. Mitchell, one of its founding fathers, "It was built on the best visions of what a really high-quality naturopathic institution could be." Far from being a stereotype, Bastyr sought full accredation and a scientific basis, and in my personal experience, also created one of the most helpful and down-to-earth professional climates I have ever found anywhere.

For many years they fared well with no city government, growing in population, wealth and serviceability, though they were recognized by the post office as an address, but in 1990, a bill by the Washington Legislature known as the "Growth Management Act" created development committees. These development committees told Kenmore that they would either start a city government, annex in to a neighbor, or let the county decide. The GMA also created a massive bureaucracy for the rezoning of land that leaves abandoned malls unused for decades and creates a major shortage of land for the kind of manufacturing and industry that any state but Washington would love to have. The GMA even, according to a farmer from Stanwood I spoke to, forces paperwork to be filed and consultation with bureaucracy to be made before any field larger then 10 acres can be tilled or planted. By 1998, against the will of its citizens, Kenmore was a "city," though it had been the size, stature and utility of a city for many years.

Despite the fact that Kenmore was built by individuals doing their thing and giving, voluntarily, to the communty, the State had to slip their greedy hands in to it. They forced Kenmore to do the "right thing" and waste tax dollars that never needed to be spent hiring people who never needed to be hired. And all in the interest of "Growth Management."

Sources: (In order of usage)

The public displays at Log Boom Park, Kenmore, WA

Kenmore Air Harbor Inc., "history"

Bastyr University, "At A Glance: Founding of Bastyr University"

Reagan Dunn, son of former Congresswoman Jennifer Dunn (R-8, till 2006), with regards to Totem Lake Mall and other underdeveloped or abandoned commercial properties. (GMA)

A farmer from Stanwood, WA with approximately 100 acres of vegetable growing land (GMA)

Image: Public Domain, official logo of city of Kenmore, click here for link.

Collectivism Doesn't Exist - The Thomas Friedman Story

300 degree panorama from the summit of Diedamskopf Schoppernau, Bohringer Frederich, c.c.a.s.a 2.0

I have to hand it to Thomas Friedman. Although much of the time his editorials are total partisan fluff, I believe there is a particular contribution he has made to the wealth of human knowledge that could well survive a thousand years: his splendid analysis of the human group and nation. In his magnum opus, "The World is Flat," which it has been many years since I read, he takes the world economy from both the angle of the nation, the producer, and the self-interested customer. Now, just recently, he has returned to what he is truly good at, with his recent editorial about Egypt.

In this editorial, he outlines Google Earth, a black president with Islamic last name, the rapid spread of information by way of the web, the ostentatious televised Beijing Olympics and a Palestinian populist as major influences on Middle East revolts. The bigger message is the notion of individual human beings connected to a plethora of information that teaches them, and causes them to change their decisions.

See, Friedman doesn't engage in abstractions. He doesn't know what a nation is, because he was never so overtaught as to ignore what his eyes and mind were telling him. Instead, looking at the businesses and the governments and the popular uprisings, he sees a pair of green eyes and a dark face, with a story of decades all his own, a family to support, a life to defend, and shame to carry, he sees a tall, confident businessman at the top of his game entrusted with performing well for his board of directors, he sees a top member of the Communist Party in China and a young child with his entire life ahead of him and an old man with his entire life behind him.

As the youngest child of a Minneapolis ballbearing manufacturing vice president and a navy mother in the 1950's, Friedman was always a bit strange. At a time when gender roles were preset, obligations were expected and life was supposed to be peaceful and sweet, Tom instead had a mother who alternated homemaking, bookkeeping, bridge championships, and telling stories about benchpressing on Navy destroyers, and a father who manufactured things that people don't buy in stores and don't usually know are important or in high demand. (The name of the company was "United Bearing.")

Thomas himself wanted to be a professional golfer, though this was not quite so unusual in the days of Bobby Jones and televised bridge, only to discover a love of journalism and the Middle East. What's more, he discovered a Journalism teacher who did a splendid job of keeping him out of Journalism college. She taught him well enough that he "never needed, or [took], another course in journalism since." As Thomas rightly points out, "Hattie was a woman who believed that the secret for success in life was getting the fundamentals right. And boy, she pounded the fundamentals of journalism into her students -- not simply how to write a lead or accurately transcribe a quote, but, more important, how to comport yourself in a professional way and to always do quality work." Now there's a lesson for all of us! Why not, instead of being Grammar Nazis and focusing on all sorts of ridiculous conventions and overtaught nonsense, we actually try to do our jobs? Still, she was no slouch: "Hattie was the toughest teacher I ever had." No one utters those words without meaning them.

Thomas, in college, took a major normally reserved for indecisive spoiled children and football players, and actually made good with it! He earned a BA in "Mediterranean Studies," and probably set a record for most classes towards a BA in Mediterranean Studies taken without falling asleep on a desk. He followed this up with a truly serious M.Phil. in "Middle Eastern Studies" from Oxford, then got a UPI job as a general assignment reporter in London, on Fleet Street. In London, he married an Economist, from Iowa, whose father built an asset-trading company that invested primarily in shopping malls. UPI later sent him to Beirut, where he would play golf next to a Palestinian military firing range.

From strange lives come important realizations, and when you live like Friedman, how can you possibly see people as groups? How can you ever again stereotype Navy sailors, Bookkeepers and Housewives when your mother was all three? How can you dismiss a business as unimportant when your father worked for a business once dismissed that way? Especially when, as it turns out, ball bearings are actually useful for a great many things...

Not surprisingly, many people are upset at Friedman, and the reason always seems to be the same. They drone on and on about corrupt officials, Halliburton, that administration from which only evil can be expected et cetera and so on! Every time, it's a group, a bunch of people, rather then one person making decisions. It's thoughts made long ago, against the efficient and effective clarity of living in the now. It's giving up on people, and in the end, life. We can't expect to achieve anything because the people are evil, and yet, not long ago, someone very different from Friedman suggested a way out:

"Ambition must be made to counteract ambition" -James Madison

Even if someone intends on doing wrong, you can use their actions against them. Thus, you are still an individual, as other people themselves can be used as well as helpful. And I'm not even looking yet at the potential of teaching a person something they didn't know. So many people, however, teach us that you are not an individual, but that some kind of group or category exists, when in all my life, I have spotted many strange things but have never once seen a collective!

Thus, Friedman looks only at individuals, and leaves the stereotypes at home. Sometimes it really is that simple to create something truly great, a single good idea, a single good method. Stephen Marshall was write to label Friedman the scribe of the new revolution. The remarkable thing, however, is just how little Friedman had to do. Think of how short Friedmans career is, and subtract away how much of it he has spent writing shameful propaganda, and we see just how absurd the thing is that Friedman has rebelled against.

As an aside, I love High Tories, even though I will never be one. Why, you ask? Because they get it. They understand that there is no such thing as a collective, only individualisms with hierarchy, and individualisms without it, and any number of gray areas in between. You can say you're part of something bigger, but what THING is it? It can only be a person you owe fealty to, as a person is all that exists.

A Hippie and Me

Walden Pond, MA, where Henry David Thoreau spent two years of his life living as naturally as possible. Work of QuarterCircleS, license: c.c.a.s.a 2.5 gen

One of the great joys of riding Greyhound is all the interesting people you meet along the way.

On my way from Atlanta to Seattle, I believe the Missouri portion of the route, I met a man who lives his principles every day. A radical environmentalist, not of the political sort but the real kind, he was on his way to a commune that his friend had set up in the mountains of Colorado. There they import nearly nothing, live almost totally off the land, and recycle every last thing they can.

They use no electricity and have no modern communications except a single old telegraph line to the ranger station reserved for emergencies. There are no roads near where they live, and they wake up every morning to a Rocky Mountain sunrise and a day of their own maintenance. He has been living this way for 40 years now, and is extremely satisfied with his life, where he eats the fruit of his own hands and sleeps under the roof of his own construction. He works FOR no employer, but rather works WITH his friends. He has little material wealth, but lots of heart, and a high quality of life.

As you probably know by now, I am not a radical environmentalist. Still, of this kind I can very much appreciate as I suspect anyone can who has an open mind. We talked of many things, about how you can catch rainwater on your roof, clean it, and drink it, about how vegetables made at home are better then the ones you buy at the store (which my family, many of whose members still grow their own vegetables, knows very much for certain to be true) and sensible policies towards hunting. We talked about business ideas, and how to bring recycling and good living to the people of the cities.

I brought up recycling human urine, a relatively easy process and one that can render high quality drinking water. He thought it was a great idea, for people like me. Unfortunately its greatest likely customer, California, probably wouldn't agree. They would think of it as icky, even if it makes sense and gives them cleaner, safer water then their own pipes, which it does, as there is not one ounce of open soil in a closed, above ground machine.

Here's another idea: theoretically, you can put nuclear waste in a highly shielded barrel, and then drop it in a large pool of seawater. The result will be that as the barrel absorbs the radiation, it will heat to a tremendous temperature, and then turn the seawater in to steam. The salt and impurities and all uncleanness will be left behind and you will have as close to pure water as can be acquired anywhere deposited in a pool by gravity, just like the earths own rain. This would provide a great practical use for nuclear waste, and lower the price of water throughout the world while saving the earths aquifers and ecosystems from drainage and tampering by urban water systems.

But California wouldn't do that either.

He thought it was interesting to meet someone on the opposite side of the spectrum from him, someone who works with society rather then removing oneself from it. Unlike the hypocritical SUV environmentalists of California, he had no anger, no venom, no dislike, and no insecurity. He knew he was doing what he was able to do, and he needn't do more. The peace he had inside of himself grew outward, and came to include anyone in his presence.

Perhaps the environmental advantages of environmental legislation are overwhelmed by the spiritual malaise they create. No law, no order, no head of state made my friend become a hippie, he did it out of his own heart, and he desired none, but the people of California grow old in a place where every aspect of economic action is dictated by government, where as a utilities company, I don't have the option of saving aquifers by using nuclear waste to desalinize seawater, because the government has a law against that. I don't have the option to recycle my own urine, because I don't have a license for that, and even if I did I couldn't mass produce the machine so I couldn't afford it. I don't have the option of creating a commune near San Simeon, because the land, though cheap, is off-limits to all development heavier then ranching. I can't collect my seawater, because that would be against zoning laws. I can't raise pigs and chickens in my backyard, because that would be uncivilized. Indeed, we are too civilized, far too civilized perhaps even to live.

One of the unsung virtues of the free market is that it actually creates hippies. This is something Jefferson understood as he confronted a form of big government far more minor then todays in the name of a peaceful agrarianism. Men in black ties and suits, unless they are volunteers, must be forced and manufactured, and business does not have the ability to do this by itself. Train systems only become irreparable when an AMTRAK takes over their routes.

The Amish built primitivist towns and small farms in the Midwest centuries before bureaucracy, but bureaucracy today creates Monsanto, Cargill, and other huge agricultural companies that have replaced the small family farmer with legions of Mexican, often illegal, immigrants, who do not even know the language of the land, have no real home or place to call their own, raise their children in a constant, hateful flux, and are entitled to almost none of the fruit of their labors. When they grow too old, they are illegal, so no one can take care of them, and they are illegal because the INS is too big. Monsanto also once patented a new biogenetically engineered seed, and when the wind carried it to a neighboring farm, sued the owner for copyright infringement. The name of that case was Monsanto vs. Schmeiser, a textbook example of the law being right, and the morality being wrong.

The reality is that no matter how we choose to live, like my hippie, we must take responsibility for our lives. If that means recycling our urine to support our urban resources and having factories by our houses, we must take this as the just price for living so well in other ways. The people of California had once seen their standard of living rise, and now that they have stifled their commerce, destroyed their car factories, ruined their peoples creativity, frozen their once dynamic cities and neighborhoods, and plundered their farmland, they demand to keep what they had when they were useful. Not only is this hypocrisy a damnable disgrace, and deserves the very wrath of God, but its consequences are seen in the spirit of the people, now a small, petty people of soft, worthless disagreements, judgmental notions of class, paranoia and hate. I suspect very strongly that these people don't live full lives, and their crime rate indicates a toxic level of personal brokenness. Just like my hippie, we must live with our cities maintained and our nation growing, or leave, with our way of living behind us, to somewhere we can live. Our tenacity is an illusion created by our prosperity, and our prosperity lasts only as long as we work to maintain it.

Guest Post - Roy Sanders is Magic (and other discoveries at the CHoA Autism Conference)

Yet another guest post from our good friend Walt Guthrie on the "social sciences." Enjoy!

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I wasn't expecting much from this year's CHoA Autism Confernce that was held last Saturday.
Boy, was I surprised.
Who knew that Roy Sanders had magical powers?

But I'll get to that.
Let's take the events of the conference in chronological order.

First up was Catherine Rice, a behaviorist from the CDC, who was there to give us the obligatory What-Is-Autism? opening presentation.
The talk actually touched more on issues of classification than anything else I have seen so far in these types of events. In the course of her presentation, she inadvertently raised a couple of interesting points. First, until 1980, the DSM classified autism as a type of schizophrenia.
Now here's a question (one that I didn't actually ask): In 1979, WAS autism actually a type of schizophrenia and in 1981 it WASN'T schizophrenia? The implication from Rice, of course, was that this is an example of how far the understanding of autism has come. But, as my numerous public questions to "experts" make clear, the classification of autism, even today, is divorced completely from empirical evidence. James McPartland, in my questioning of him, admitted that the use of the word "disorder" in the classification of ASDs was purely definitional.
If autism, or any word, is only whatever a designated authority structure says it is, then that's what it is. If autism is defined as schizophrenia, then it's schizophrenia. And if it's defined as a disorder, then it's a disorder. And if it's defined as two parts from this column of symptoms and three parts from that column, then that is what you have.
If you believe that the evidence points to the moon being made of cheese, then upon arriving on it, you may be forced to admit that no, the moon is not made of cheese. If you DEFINE the Moon as being made of cheese, then upon discovering that the orb revolving around our planet is actually composed of a different substance, you may be forced to admit that it is not, in actuality, the Moon.
If autism,as defined, is different from autism as experienced, then it's pragmatic utility as a useful term, even for the "science" of behaviorism, is questionable indeed.
Which was brought more into focus by Rice's second tidbit. She declared that there are those with autistic traits who are not counted as having an Autistic Spectrum Disorder. She compared it as the difference between neuroses and psychoses but then didn't really touch on it again.Yet, given how much of her presentation was related to doing counts of "ASD" cases in the general populace and whether or not the rate of autism is rising, this would seem to be highly pertinent Let's follow this line of reasoning. All autism is a disorder (thus ASD). Some people have autistic traits but, they are not disordered. So now, at least according to Rices' brief explanation, we find out that, a little bit of autism equals no autism at all.
Now, why not the easier explanation of: some people have autism and they're fine with it? Is it because that interpretation would be injurious to the autistic population? Or would the real victim of such an interpretation be the behaviorist money train for whom every diagnosis is a ka-ching?
I asked Rice, what the methodological procedure was for labeling the entire autistic spectrum as disordered (taking into account that she doesn't consider autistic-lites as part of the spectrum). It was at this point that Roy Sanders, the Medical Director of Marcus popped in to shut me off.
Hmm.

Next up was Felissa Goldsmith, a child psychiatrist from Marcus
Dr. Goldsmith treats a PowerPoint presentation like a teleprompter. And that's not a compliment.
There was little new here. However, there was such an underlying contempt for autistic kids in her talk that I had to check with Linda later to confirm that it wasn't just me picking up that vibe.
To give just the most egregious example: Goldsmith suggested more than once that parents should be encouraged to mourn their children's autism like a death. And to do this on special occasions like birthdays and Christmas. This easily was the most sickening thing I've been exposed to all week. ("Daddy will be down in a moment, Timmy. He's mourning the child he wanted that you'll never be.") This is the advice you'd expect to come from a monster and I said as much.
I asked Sanders, if this was the official policy of the Marcus Center. Boos from the audience. He curtly dismissed the question as inappropriate.
Well, it's not like I was the one who brought it up.

Dr. Michael Morrier, from the Emory Autism Center, gave a somewhat uneven presentation on ABA that ended up focusing on how his people do it over there. I want to say some good things somewhere and it might as well be here. As I told Morrier after the presentation, he is the least offensive behaviorist I have ever encountered. When asked about his center's use of aversives, he replied that they don't use any.
Giving Morrier the benefit of the doubt, if I was forced to send a child anywhere for the application of ABA, Morrier would probably be my choice.
Still, even if he seemed more of an actual human being than any other behaviorist that I have ever personally met, he still was, after all, a behaviorist. At one point, talking about instilling eye contact as a habit in children, he observed that one could be TOO successful. If children make eye contact all the time they become creepy staring machines. And Morrier noted that regular run-of-the-mill kids don't make eye contact all the time either. Instead, they do it 63% of the time. (Or something like that number, I neglected to make a note of his actual percentages and all the figures that follow in this paragraph are approximations of his actual numbers.) Morrier was quite explicit that the goal was to get the autistic kids to make eye contact at EXACTLY the same percentage of the time as normal kids. He even talked about making up the gap (as if this were some sort of missile crisis from the 1960s) between the two groups so that children who begin training at age three are 14 percentage points behind in eye contact percentages and those that begin at age 4 are 28% behind.
Morrier never felt the need to explain why a random sampling of non-autistic kid's eye contact percentages (or any other behavior) should serve as the golden mean against which all similar autistic behavior should be measured. There was no suggestion that it might be possible that regular kids might be indulging in too much eye contact and perhaps should receive some therapy to tone it down a bit.
There was no evidence presented that, having trained children to achieve the same percentage of eye contact to non-eye contact, that these children were indeed receiving the same benefits from this activity. Presumably, eye contact is a skill that delivers information to those engaging in it and that the everyday children doing it were themselves benefiting from the activity.
Certainly a question that you might think should be asked is: do autistic children, trained to make eye contact, receive the same benefits as regular children naturally engaged in the same activity? Or are they merely being trained to pretend that they are not autistic? A previous speaker at the AAC made a big deal about how his research has shown that those on the spectrum tend to gain their information about people from studying mouths rather than eyes. Assuming that this is indeed the case, and that all these babies haven't had laser pointers slapped on their heads for nothing, then wouldn't you want to know if forcing a child to shift his primary attention from mouth to eyes will be accompanied by an increasing ability to make use of this information? Or, will the child be left in a worse position, forced to concentrate on areas of the face he is less equipped to easily decipher?

Finally it was Sanders turn.
During his presentation, Sanders literally sat on his hands and continuously kicked out his legs and pointed his feet which might have been adorable if he was a shy, pretty girl in a sundress instead a self-conscious middle-aged introvert seemingly hyper-aware of his own poor public speaking skills.
Sanders attempted to use his own personal situation to illuminate what parents in the audience would face and the things they should do to prepare for raising a child on the autistic spectrum. And, as might be expected, it was the same old, tired checklist, although this time it was wrapped in a droning awkward wallow of self-pity and look-at-me-I'm-a-martyr-for-raising-an-autistic-child self aggrandizement.
At the conclusion of his talk, I asked the question why, in the two years of this particular conference, which seems to be aimed squarely at the parents of autistic children, that they had not chosen to include a single adult or teenager who was actually on the spectrum. Someone who might be able to explain to the parents what their own children were actually experiencing.
Sanders was dismissive of this question as well.
I then asked why, with all the usual suspects that he was recommending parents consult, he had not included actual people on the autistic spectrum who could possibly contribute a valuable understanding as to why their children thought and acted as they did.
His response was that not all people who claim to be on the spectrum actually are.
Well, THAT'S awfully cryptic, Roy.
His meaning became clear soon enough, right after the meeting. And it was at this point that I discovered that Roy Sanders' has magical powers. For he revealed to me, much to my surprise, that I am not on the autistic spectrum.
Wait a minute, I hear some of you saying. Don't you have to take a bunch of intricate expensive tests and pay a bunch of money to get an autistic diagnosis? Well, yeah. That's what I thought. A major part of this whole four hour plus drone-a-thon I had just finished sitting through was about the importance of getting special testing. Nobody said anything about just dropping Roy Sanders into the room and having him magically deduce it.
But his magic didn't end there. He had an even more dazzling trick up his sleeve.
It seems, rather than being on the spectrum I'm a "schizo" something-something-something. I'm afraid I didn't catch the full diagnosis. DSM labels are like your kid's Pokemon monsters. What grown-up with a life really has the time to keep up with them all? But I invite Roy to publicly post his diagnosis to this group so that I might be properly discredited as an autistic advocate in a public forum.
This later part was all relayed to me as he walked briskly to his car, making so little eye contact with me that he practically called out for a session of ABA and Christmas day parental mourning.
I'm sure you can imagine my internal dialogue:
"Huh? What? What are you doing? You can't walk away now after dropping that on me! I'm going to need counseling. YEARS of therapy! Preferably behavioral because that's science! I need to come to terms with this diagnosis! This changes my entire life! I need to know that there's hope for me and that I can live with this schizo-whatever-whatever and still have hope for a happy and productive life!"
Perhaps I'm being unfair. After all, was not the magical diagnosis enough, and, in his quick retreat, he sure seemed like he had some place he needed to be. Perhaps, and I'm only speculating here, Saturday is the day of the week he reserves for mourning his own adopted child's autism.
And, of course, declaring me off the spectrum was probably an easy call. After all, if I am on the spectrum, it's not like Sanders or the Marcus Center are in a position to make a buck off of it.

In reality, his is the game pseudo-scientists play all the time, employing the magical intuitive powers that their credentials supposedly convey to conveniently discredit their adversaries.
Sanders was explicit that if I continue to pursue matters as I have that I will soon find myself barred from meetings such as this one. How much easier that will be if he is in a position to use his special magical insight to claim that his critic doesn't have standing.

I have spent years now arguing just how untenable the behaviorists' and their allies position are. I have shown you how they can't answer the simplest of questions.
Sanders, being the stupid man that he is, thinks that if he bars me from the meetings that he will have won. If it happens it will instead be a complete and total vindication for myself. I have, since my early days in Bob Morris' group, argued that you can't do business with these people. Nonetheless, in the time since then, I have treated them as the scientists I know them not to be. I have asked them to justify their uses of simple words they use everyday like "disorder" and those from our community who have attended these meetings have seen their complete inability to do so. What more do I need to do to show their essential fraudulent nature?
When I am barred (and i think it is a matter of when rather than if) I will have demonstrated, once and for all and for everyone here in the autistic community to see, that the behaviorists and their allies are unwilling to engage the autistic community in any form of real dialogue or debate that does not at first begin with a servile acknowledgment of their superior knowledge and authority in all matters pertaining to us.

I was asked, after the meeting, why it was that I couldn't be nicer. Bob Morris was nice. And they repaid his niceness by treating him with contempt and running the clock out on him.
The people charged with fixing us, hate us. Loathe us. Talk about us as tragedy, a collection of deficits and disorders. They encourage parents to MOURN when their children are identified as us. They think the best that we can ever be is a crude approximation of them. They compare us to animals. They compare us to AIDS. They compare us to cancer. They compare us to death.
And in doing all this they enrich themselves.

The time for nice, from me, or anyone, is past.

Way, way past.

Walt Guthrie

Julian Assange Must Follow the Example of Christ

US Supreme Court Building. By Duncan Lock, license cc asa 3.0 unported

"Whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in Me to sin, it would be better for him if a millstone were hung around his neck, and he were drowned in the depth of the sea." -Matthew 18: 6, the word of our Lord

One of the reasons folks have a hard time understanding espionage laws is they see law as about morality, they see law as about preventing immoral behavior and punishing the wicked. But that is not what government is for, nor has it ever been for that. The purpose of law is to resolve disputes, to settle differences in a manner that is open, transparent, fair, and respectful to the rights of everyone involved.

The fact is that the government has a real difference with Julian Assange. They had secrets, Julian released them, they had protocols, Julian broke them, and now they're friends can't trust them, they can't look at each other, spies and envoys are fleeing, and the worlds mightiest powers and superpower know not how to handle their own states. Right or wrong, this is where things stand.

Now, there are countries that don't utilize Espionage laws much. Israel and Russia both immediately come to mind. Both, instead of finding and prosecuting spies in a court of law, send out secret assasins, with ice picks, guns, poisons, and all manners of traps, destroy the peace, and when they find their victim, leave no trace of him, and give him not a second, not a minute to answer for his sake. If they make a mistake, too bad, the wrong person is dead. They don't tell his or her family either, and all the citizens are left questioning what happened to their fellow man. Without a doubt, if Americas ability to try spies in a court of law is interfered with, they will have to, for the sake of preserving their government, resort to much the same.

Julian, we all know what you stand for, or at least say you do, transparency, but what you fail to see is that this law is also created for transparency, and in fact, the most important kind of transparency, the ability of individual citizens to see what they are charged with, and society to see what happens to them, along with the ability of all to make their decisions in a conscious, responsible manner. You have angered a lot of powerful people, and if you continue to be successful, you will anger only more. If you do not turn yourself in now, you will be bodybagged, and no one will ever hear from you again, but if you do turn yourself in, whether you are imprisoned or killed, you will be so before the common man and all eyes to see, and all minds to know how arguments are settled in a civil society.

Civil Disobedience is a fine and honorable thing, but it involves taking the consequences of your actions, in part so that fights don't get out of hand. Lets face it Julian, if you die the wrong way, something else dies with you, but if you die the right way, transparency only grows, and you can speak for your own defense in court, and stand by your actions, and speak, for all the nation and world to hear, about your values and what you find right. And you will go to jail, and possibly even be put to death, but if you stay out there on your own running, people who are very good at this stuff will get to you, and they will kill you, in a way that destroys everything that you stand for.

There were four Roman soldiers who confessed a faith that their commander could not stand. He had them put in to a freezing lake, and said that if any of them gave up their faith, they would be given a warm bath, but if they didn't, they would be left there to freeze to death. Three of them stayed there, holding hands as brothers, to die the whole night through, but one just couldn't stand it anymore, and came out, and renounced his faith. And yet, all four of them died that night. Tell me Julian, which one will you be? Will you join your brethren of all the other convicts at jail, and spread the light of wisdom and righteousness to the people you are called to, or will you die shamefully at the hands of a foreign spy, possibly even painfully, as a former KGB agent died not long ago.

Two thousand years ago, a visionary far greater then yourself, or anyone now alive, was crucified above a hill in Calvary. He didn't fight the police when they came to get him, and he didn't complain about his fate either, nor did he lie in court to get off easy. He accepted what he had came to do, took his cup of sorrows in Gethsemane, and went up that hill cross in hand for all things to come to pass. Julian, if you really do care about transparency to the extent that you claim, you must do likewise. The worse thing that could happen here is for America, already weakened, to be hamstrung by those who think they know better, and with them, all the world to where espionage laws can no longer truly exist. They are an important part of transparency. Law isn't about what's right or wrong - it's about a peaceful, serene society that is transparent and honorable, and when you accept this, you can have your fate handed to you fittingly, and become the hero you were born to be.

Update 12/6/2010 - It seems, according to AOL News, Assange has done a wicked and cowardly thing. Holding over 1.4 gigabytes of what Assange considers worthy secrets, Assange, rather then turn himself in as he should, is withholding them, and thus his objective, from the public as a bargaining chip to secure his freedom. If this is how it appears, Julian has much to be ashamed of.

Guest Post - "Dr. James McPartland is a Dick (and more)"

I received an email from a friend whose a member of an Autistic Issues student group called SWANSA that made some very valid points about not only autism, but "civilized" society in general, that I felt my readers would very much benefit from taking a gander at. The friends name is Walt Guthrie (he never told me whether or not he was related to Woody and Arlo):

I caught the James McPartland talk at Emory November 8.
Off the bat, three things you need to know about him.
One: he's the Assistant Professor in the Child Study Center.
Two: He's the Associate Director of Developmental Electrophysiology Lab
Three: he's a dick.
He's actually more than that. But we'll get to that.
First, the dick:

In the course of his "research," McPartland makes use of a computer program called "Cyberball," which is a sort of "video game". Now, I have put quote marks around the words "video game" because it is the most primitive-looking thing you can possibly imagine. We are not talking "Gears of War" here. From the brief demonstration, given during the talk, it appeared to be something that might have come out in 1975 just prior to the introduction of "Pong." But what do I know? For all I know it might have just popped out of the MIT Media lab last month. In any case, I cannot emphasize enough how boring this game is.
It is a simulated game of catch between three players. Each player can choose to throw the ball to the person on his left or the person on his right. That's it. That's the game. It doesn't appear that you can miss or that the other person can fail to catch the ball. There is no skill and no chance whatsoever involved. For all intents and purposes, assuming the demonstration of this game was representative of actual "play," the "game" is the equivalent of nothing more than three people with one person calling out the name of one of the two others, and then that person being able to do the same and so on and so on.
Of course no human being would ever willingly choose to waste their time playing such a "game," but McPartland has apparently made countless kids waste irretrievable hours of their childhood at no discernible benefit for themselves "playing" this simulation that simulates nothing.
But this is not what makes McPartland a dick.
This is:
What is the purpose of Cyberball? Well, it turns out it does have a one. According to McPartland, Cyberball is designed to make a player feel excluded and outcast. You see, the other two "players" of Cyberball don't exist. They are just part of the program and what they do is ignore the player and just toss the ball back and forth to each other. Now, McPartland claims that the children he works with are, by the nature of their autism, already shunned and socially mistreated by their peers. So what does he do with them? He experiments on them by making them play games designed to increase their sense of isolation and social ostracism. And these are experiments solely for his benefit since McPartland made no claim during the course of his talk that these sessions would provide any benefit whatsoever for the children playing them.
McPartland tricks ostracized children into performing activities designed solely to further their own sense of ostracism.
Where I come from this sort of person is also technically known as a douchebag.
Oh, and did I mention that he was excited about the prospect of a computer program that might test for empathy.
Let the irony of THAT sink in.

The bulk of his talk is old territory that I've addressed before. More laser-pointer-on-the-head sort of nonsense. This time we learn that autistics take 200 milliseconds or so to process faces. Regular folk take, on average, 180. Noting that that might not seem like a big deal, McPartland admitted as much and then went on to claim that it actually was, without offering the slightest bit of evidence except to note that those 20 milliseconds add up over time (Yeah, he's right Those two percents of a second add up. Work those face recognitions, kids. You only have 86,400,000 milliseconds in a day to work with!) During it all he performed the verbal sleight-of-hand of telling us that some of this was hard science, some was unpublished and some was just speculation. It was almost like a psychic doing a "cold reading" to the room, leaving himself plenty of wiggle room should anyone call him him on any of his claims (The main one being that autistics maybe just aren't properly motivated to have the desire to be social. Or something. As someone who understands the spectrum from living it, listening to McPartland's meandering theory of autism was like listening to my great aunt and her circle describe what goes on in Grand Theft Auto). There was more talk about perceiving upright faces vs inverted faces. If you believe this is relevant to anything on Earth then God love. I won't be dragged into another discussion on it.

Afterwards, in the reception following McPartland's talk, I asked him directly whether or not autism was empirically or definitionally a "disorder." He responded that it was definitional and that ALL people on the autistic spectrum are, by definition, "disordered." Then, having admitted this, he jumped to the it's-only-a-word defense. If I found the word "offensive" (a word I never employed in the course of the discussion) then that was on me. Because who could find any objection to being labeled "disordered?"
I told him what the word "disordered" actually means.
It means "nigger."
It means "faggot." It means "kike."
It performs the same societal function and is derived in PRECISELY the same manner. It is a derogatory classification whose purpose is to dehumanize one arbitrarily grouped and categorized set of humanity. And like the white racist, who feels that he can designate, by his own criteria, any one that he chooses to include into or exclude from the inferior class of "nigger," James McPartland and his intellectually low-functioning behaviorist brood think they are entitled to arbitrarily classify an entire subset of humanity as definitionally "disordered" and then have full power to say who is and who is not in that set. Neither James McPartland nor the typical hardcore white racist feel any need to empirically justify their respective words. Why should he? Just as the word "nigger" empowered and elevated the white power structure, the word 'disorder' gives the behaviorists their power, income, and justification for their very existence.
James Mcpartland is a grinning clown, the moral equivalent of a racist, who experiments on vulnerable socially outcast children to make them feel worse about themselves, all so he can grind out a steady stream of lazy speculation disguised as science.
Fuck him.

Article Critique

Open Clip Art Library. Public Domain.

I am not posting this post to the top of my blog list, as it is not, in my mind, 100% original, even though I have violated no laws and plagarized no one in writing it. Rather, it is a critique, and not wanting to be subservient to anyone, I will not post it, under any condition, to the top of my list.

Update 10/12/2010: CNN writes an inferior version of the same article I am critiquing.

I am normally a huge fan of the Guardian. They are quite possibly the greatest left-wing newspaper in the world, with high quality artistic prose, good summaries of important stories, and honest, intelligent editorials from a rational leftists perspective. However, this particular editorial I cannot endorse.

It executes, among other things, a major "No True Scotsmen" fallacy (LOL, it's from Britain) in deciding that opposing people who made irresponsible decisions with their money IS opposing the working and middle class, when these are the very people that the Tea Party seeks to save from growing government inteference, high taxes, a lack of choice and freedom, and worst of all, the stifling of their very spirit as Americans, the spirit that the working-class and the middle-class love more then anyone, their storge, in their darkest hour, keeps them alive, and like a little girl wanting to throw a wildcat in a cage to "take care of it," people like Obama would deprive them of the thing these people love most. The Tea Party, like the working class, opposes the bailouts to bankers and high-flying corporate aristocrats that steal the futures of working class children.

The Tea Party also opposes the partisan industrial complex that was best summarized by Anarchists 6 years ago who chanted, on the eve of the 2004 election, "Bush, Kerry, are the same, the only difference is the name." The PIC has been a curse to the entire continent of North America for many years now, and, among other things, endorsed the spending, corruption and ruinous habits that have both deprived our working class of their jobs and threatened their say in the workings of our democracy, while ruining the careers of politicians, like the Late Washington Congresswoman Jennifer Dunn, who sought to correct the course of our nation from this horrific treason against democracy.

Many readers of this editorial will excuse the errors by saying, "well, they are a far-right doctrine, just like Fascism," and my response to them will be, "no, actually." Here again we have a fallacy of definition. "Right-wing" has been redefined tremendously since the 1940's, is a term whose meaning changes nearly every year. To correctly assess similarities between the Tea Party and the doctrine of Fascism we would have to use the definition of Right-wing that fit Fascism, a definition that includes a state-endorsed aristocracy and elite, collectivization and tyrannical nationalism, the very things that the Tea Party opposes with a passion.

And again the editorials errs by saying, accusingly, "But polling shows that when it comes to poverty, the elderly and education, if anything people want to do more rather than less." For once in a long time, a Gaurdian article has referenced a Washington Post article that is its superior. While it is true that many Tea Party members would be very pleased if certain measures were taken on behalf of the poor, the elderly, and our education system, it is also true that the Tea Party, as a noncentralized grassroots organization very much of the Anarchist spirit, can change course very quickly, and once those who threaten the ability of government to handle its responsiblities well have been politically destroyed, from Republican Mike Castle in Delaware to Democrat Harry Reid in Nevada, the Tea Party can change course quickly, and wield the same power that put Christine O'Donnell on Delawares ballot to assure that our poor are taken care of reasonably well. Like the Great Hordes of Genghis Khan, maneuvers, formations and armor mean nothing to the Tea Party readying for battle on its grassroots steppe and out of its hundreds of buckskin tents.

The ability to make compromises will prove crucial at such a point in deciding whether the Tea Party can survive such a maneuver, though the public opinion and grassroots apparatus alone assure that an attempt will be made, but here I resort to a great French mathematician named Pascal. The worse thing that could happen is that, after destroying these particular Democrats, the Tea Party splits up, and new Democrats (but new ones) ascend to the congressional leadership. If such happens, we have made a powerful statement of the ability of the American people to hold their politicians accountable, and our new liberals will be more rational and responsible, perhaps more like the Guardian when they haven't gone crazy, when they ascend to congressional leadership. The best thing that could happen, on the other hand, is the people destroying the political party as we know it for good, and replacing it with true civic involvement at all levels of legislation. Perhaps even if they do split, they will proceed to conquer the two American parties and subject them to their barbarian rule.

Thus, either way, a Tea Party member wins his wager. Even the conservatives among them will appreciate a more fair and reasonable liberal hand should that happen, and all will appreciate the people rising to leadership if that should happen. Either one of these would be an acceptable goal of and by itself, and they are the set of possibilities. Thus, my congressional democrats - check... mate.

Alki: Coyote and Raven Talk

Totem Poles at Stanley Park, Vancouver, BC, by Peter Graham. Use permitted under CC 2.0G License

Coyote: Yes we did!

Raven: What did you do?

Coyote: We've done it!

Raven: What have you done?

Coyote: Change is at hand!

Raven: Change to what?

Coyote: We fought the rich!

Raven: You fought for what?

Coyote: We stood up to the special interests!

Raven: Which ones?

Coyote: A new bright era has dawned!

Raven: A bright era for whom?

Coyote: The future looks bright.

Raven: Bright for what?

Pioneer Square, 1907. Public domain, author unknown.

I would recommend Mourning Doves "Coyote Stories" for a traditional Plateau Indian characterization of the character of Coyote. I've read the book myself and loved it. I don't know of a single excellent source like this for Raven, being something I was more raised with, but this site seems to have some reasonable content. Professor Nichols site from Pittsburgh State University also seems to have some solid coyote background.

Al-ki is a traditional Salish statement of skepticism.

The Freedom to Fail - A short reminder

Public Domain. Work of US Army, photographer Alexander Gardner. Antietam.

This short post is a reminder about something that is both very obvious, and very easily forgotten.

Let's say a man guaranteed you everything you would need, your house, your food, all your manufactured goods, healthcare, water, and no death. Now suppose two situations:

1. These things must still be made by human hands - what happens when making soap just isn't a very glamorous job? What happens when everyone decides that they'd rather be lumberjacks or grow food? Who do we get to clean the toilets?

2. All is given to humanity - as all the conflict and hardship of the world slip away, and work becomes pointless, people become formless, and experience does not shape them. With no "salting with fire" as Christ put it, no one learns how to be brave, how to love, how to do, to enjoy life, or to understand who they are. People lose their very names.

Both of these are as far from a utopia as could possibly be imagined. In (1), men are forced through life, and the society comes to eliminate the individual as need after need and want after want slowly scrape away our lives and force all of us in to quiet desperation, and in (2), the individual is eliminated not by tyranny, but by a vast empty space of unworthwhile life, and a world that has no place for him. None of this is technical or complicated, but is just a reminder about why we all must suffer and want - not as punishment, not as depravity, but as the heroism that tragedy brings out of every one of our hearts, and the need for a world where we can belong.

Hope's for Whiners!

Neve Glacier and Snowfield Peak, courtesy of the US Geological Survey. Public Domain

There's something about the traditional name for the Saturday before Easter that kind of gets on my nerves.

I always hear people talk about HOPE, as if it's some kind of penultimate important good. Usually these people think of themselves as victims, people who believe that there hope has been stripped of them by somebody else, people who believe that unless someone else gives them their change back, they won't be able to make enough money to eat. But WHY????

And further, even if we are hopeless, helpless and hapless, (. thank You, the Holy Spirit, for language, thank You for poetry, thank You for song and thank You for beauty and feeling. Amen.) why not just keep breathing and look down the road, and appreciate all the little things in your life? Why don't we take things one step at a time, not looking back, and not really looking forward either? Why don't we just accept those who are before us, and the task and work that is in front of us, and understand that no matter what is done to us, we still have the CHOICE to make the best of it. Further, without hardship, trial and, yes, suffering, you would never grow, you would never learn, you would never become strong and learn the pride and joy that comes from strength, and you could not truly have life. And without goals of YOUR OWN that you've made for YOURSELF to do YOURSELF, you eliminate the best kind!

For me, Easter is not really about Hope, it's about Love. A loving, beautiful God who, not even asking about the cost, took from our shoulders the only thing that could truly break us, the only thing that we have no choice over, the only thing that we CANNOT overcome on our own. The thing that, by it's very definition, is outside of our control. Death, and the imperfection that, by every angle and understanding be it biological, moral or otherwise, caused it. Through Christ, all of us can truly live.

Titian, Ancona Crucifixtion, 1558

Confusion, Clarity and Responsibility

Taken during Heatlhcare Speech. Public Domain, work of Executive Office of the President of the United States employee Lawrence Jackson.

I was talking to a friend over the phone about Mass-Transit today and he just kept on saying, "Expert studies... Expert studies... Expert Studies...." I would ask him questions about the studies and this same refrain would commence again. "I won't debate you." Right, like the kind of Expert Studies that Brain Scientists once used to claim African Americans were too inferior to have equal rights...

There's a problem with the reasoning of trust. Actually, there are several problems:

1) You don't know if the person was actually promoted based on merit.

2) You don't know if the school he was educated at or the circle of friends influencing him has been systematically skewing all who listen to them.

3) You don't know if his intentions are good, and when you give him immense power based on "expertise," you also invite the corruption that comes with power, thus it becomes less likely that his intentions are good. "Perhaps, Maybe, Someday" my friend.

In a democracy, voters are solely responsible for the decision they make at the booth. If an expert cannot back up what their "expert opinion" gives you with reasoning and evidence, we should discard their claims on the grounds that 1) they clearly aren't interested in educating the American people and 2) for all we know, their opinion may be bigoted, biased or corrupt. We are responsible for our decisions, which brings me to another subject.

The democrats wrote a health care bill many hundreds of pages long. Now let me ask you, what voter has time to sort through several hundred pages of revised on a continual basis legal mumbo jumbo? And now, they complain (including Obama[footnote below]) that people have misrepresented what they wrote. They may or may not be true, I don't have time to look at the bill and even if I did I would probably have to read it several times to completely understand it (the Supreme Court perhaps may take two times to understand it) but the fact is, they are the ones who made it too long for the American people to read. Thus they brought these interesting times on to themselves. If they are unwilling to make Washington accessible to the voter who is responsible for it, the voter must hold it against them, or we will have a tyranny of those "in the know." Just like a student who does his homework perfectly but is unable to turn it in must receive a zero from his teacher, regardless of whether the dog ate it or not, for the teacher knows that it would otherwise be in the students best interest to make the homework extra tasty!

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Footnote:

I invite you, my readers, to inspect this piece of evidence yourselves. If you believe I have erred in my use of it (I'm human too believe it or not) feel very free to speak up:

"Some of people's concerns have grown out of bogus claims spread by those whose only agenda is to kill reform at any cost. The best example is the claim, made not just by radio and cable talk show hosts, but prominent politicians, that we plan to set up panels of bureaucrats with the power to kill off senior citizens. Such a charge would be laughable if it weren't so cynical and irresponsible. It is a lie, plain and simple." Paragraph 4 from top-page 4 of Obama Health Care Speech, New York Times reprinting (page 4 given for ease of reader analysis.)



Revision 3/17/2009:

I have decided to remove one of the two images in this post. It wasn't that good.

Family Ties and the Cheapening of Humanity

Vitruvian Man, by Leonardo Da Vinci, public domain

Right now I'm trapped in Fort Collins, CO. Every Greyhound route in to Washington State, to see my parents, is closed. I'm here seeing my grandparents on my way back from Atlanta and desperately want to see them, but mother nature has intervened, so I must spend more time with my grandparents.

I've been thinking about family, among the most natural and essential of human unions. There are fewer relationships that define us more profoundly then family, and family in turn is defined by sex. Man and woman come together, join together two households, give birth to children, who in turn are brothers and sisters, and the brothers and sisters of the man and woman are aunts and uncles. Even if no children are had, sexuality itself is more then powerful enough to create a sacred brotherhood -and sisterhood- among two houses.

The first relationships you have are family. Your parents, your brothers and sisters, your grandparents. There are even very close friends who, after some time, almost become part of the family, adopted brothers and sons, sisters and daughters, but these only carry in themselves - their relatives are still, for the most part, outside. Your family teaches you a way of seeing the world, a way of seeing life, rules, regulations, ways of punishing and regulating yourself, morality, honor, ethics, and the way you categorize all those outside of the family in to your thousands of relationships you keep made for every person in the world in your mind. Family can create, and family can destroy, family can sow love and hate. A peaceful family makes for a more peaceful community, and an unpeaceful family leads to a destructive community. When family members separate themselves from each other, you can see it in the eyes and actions of the victims, both seperated and seperator. And when family roles and rules are broken, the anger and antagonism can carry through town.

Sexuality, also, is a very definitive part of our nature. It's the source of many of our dreams, many of our symbols, much of the way we see the world. It's the basis of many emotions, and it itself can conjure up every feeling, thought, and attitude in the human character. It makes us our best and our worst, and everything in between. When you drown out the emotion related to sex, you drown out the emotions period, harden your heart, deep freeze the world before your eyes in to a palace of ice, with statues of all those near you holding still in front of your eyes.

Adultery divides households, families, people. It is the breaking of a sacred trust between man and wife, or wife and husband, a lie, a betrayal of affections, a stoker of jealousy, a maker of hellfire. It can also pit children against their parents, and make human honor, a vital part of our nature, worthless against the breaking of the most important promise anyone ever makes. It degrades all involved in it, and cheapens sexuality, making it little more then either burden, hyper-personal, or entertainment depending on the attitude of he or she involved. The family is cast out of the mind of the transgressors.

Premarital sex is a cheapener. Those who partake in it will find less loyalty, less love, and less romantic fire with whomever they marry. It too cheapens sexuality, making it hyper-personal, a burden, or entertainment, removing the human face, removing the family ties, cutting away alliegance, loyalty, neighborhood and romantic love.

As you remove the honor, sanctity, and ritual in sexuality, you increasingly convey that a major part of our nature really isn't worth that much.

Note:

Before I even mention homosexuality, I want to point out in anger and all grumpinesss that nothing I say should ever be taken to in any way, shape, or fashion excuse those who hate, murder, destroy, oppress, manipulate, lie, steal, fire on federal agents, be inhospitable or sow the seeds of discontent out of homophobia. These people have done what homosexuality will do, and much more severely, by methods far more abominable, hateful and destructive. They too have broken ties, cheapened relationships, and created a disposable, hypocritical, judgemental attitude towards their fellow man that destroys all real community. The fact that they did it with anger, guns, contempt for all things humane and honorable, and cruel lies makes it, indeed, worse then a simple weakness of the flesh, for with the flesh it is only the ends that are an issue.

Homosexuality is an understandable mistake, like the kind that all of us make as we walk through this life, and though I hope we can work through it with them, and there's always a suspicion that within all of us both desires exist, even if we can't, they still are fellow human beings, every bit as deserving as everyone who has ever screwed up with their finances, raising their child or their education, or anything else that important to your life.

Now then:

Incest is a clear break of family authority, family respect, and proper relationship. It breaks sacred bonds, and mixes one kind of love (Agape) with another kind of love (Eros) that are often contradictory to each other. All of us need a balance of both of these in our life. The love pertaining to sexuality comes with it's own set of conditions, dependencies and expectations that make the love of a mother, father, brother, sister, son, or daughter impossible. Needs bring us close but they also create insecurity - add too many together and the result is oppression and no room to breathe. It creates a dilemma, as love has been cheapened, but the risk of birth defects in an incestious child is very high, and to leave would also cheapen love, relationships, and trust and loyalty in the future. Further it prevents the bond between families, distorts gender roles with a pre-existing status within the family, gets a person more in your mind then they need to be, and creates antagonism and insecurity among relatives.

Homosexuality is a confuser. It creates antagonism and insecurity among relatives. It confuses by breaking the traditional roles of gender, removing the balance of genders that creates clear hierarchy and authority, and balance within the house. It also makes establishes deep bonds within families difficult, as for the males no daughter is gained, and for the females no son is gained, for either house. Sometimes homosexuals seem to take the role of the opposite gender, distorting the individual to balance out the collective. It also leaves the homosexuals in the dilemma of either continuing this clear break of family mandate, or going back to straight sexuality with a cheapened view of erotic love. I'm still not entirely sure what the solution to this issue is, but I see their dilemma, and advise all those considering such a lifestyle to find any way possible of avoiding it.

We, America, are missing family ties. Superficial families make superficial friends, superficial friends make superficial towns, and superficial towns make a world where no one can depend on anyone else, loneliness and silence spread to any space in which they're allowed, and the human being himself is devalued to being an object, an animal, a customer, a worker, a product, a dollar amount. We are made to love, respect, listen, learn, talk, improve, teach, and be our brothers keeper, and yet now we sit in cubicles, even in large offices as apart as can be, and see outsiders as a nuisance. We try to avoid burdening each other in all possible ways, and see only the harm that we do to each other, until finally, we hate humanity itself. With our cheapening of sexuality, we have cheapened ourselves and all of life. The damage is done, but hopefully we can avoid running up the bill further.