View From The Left Coast

So Long and Thanks for all the Fish

2008-05-30T13:25:28Z

A couple of years ago a friend who is an artist and writer came out with a book about Pacific Lumber and what Maxxam had done to Humboldt County. The book was well written and sold briskly, but it occurred to me that a person who had her talent as an artist, the power to bring something positive and uplifting to all people, would be better off putting that creative ability to work than writing something political. Partly it’s supply and demand: there are a lot more Bill O’Reillys than Alan Sanborns. Partly it was because even I can write political things, and have no artistic ability, so making art seems to have more value.

]]> Another friend suggested that people reading newspapers or blogs were not seeking education, but affirmation of their beliefs. Maybe that’s the difference between the blogosphere and the world of journalism: originally, anyway, the idea of journalism was to present the facts. . .the reporter was the fly on the wall, watching what happened and reporting it. He or she wasn’t embedded, wasn’t paid to represent a particular point of view. Now, of course, that’s changed: corporate media owners like Rupert Murdoch are making sure the “news” their employees put out furthers their own political agenda. Blogs don’t even pretend to be objective, and people generally read the ones they agree with, or read the ones they don’t like only to send “flame” comments.

All that said, this has never been a “blog” in the true sense, like the Humboldt Herald. Heraldo has a stable of fans, enemies and tipsters who seem to spend all their time acting, reacting or interacting. It’s very immediate, very. . .well, millennial. There’s a lot of information, some disinformation, and a lot of aggro interchange, which seems to sell well in any format. This has always been more like a column: mollosciform, spondaic, verbose, plodding. Opinion without the argument. I’ve never enjoyed violence, visual or verbal.

But the more opinion I see, the more I value art. I still don’t have any talent in that direction, but I can educate myself about history, about computers, about books. I can volunteer my time to help public institutions like the library to continue as a source of public education and entertainment. These I think are positive things I can and should do. They improve me and they improve my world, and that’s a form of art as well. Too often opinion begins to sound like an endless, depressing song (I saw a whole concert of that when Cowboy Junkies played the Van Duzer last month: music to commit seppuku by). We don’t need more of that.

That’s why I’m closing shop here. I’m not happy about the political situation, and the folks who have caused the deaths of a million Iraqis, made torture legal, instilled fear in the western world to excuse their suspension of the Constitution and international treaties, these people are still firmly in control. As in Europe 70 years ago, those bucking the fascist trend can only hope to save themselves and maybe a few others, at least until this reich falls. A change in direction is clearly “not on the table.”

But the people who know this is the case don’t need me to rub their noses in it, and those who listen to Rush, O’Reilly or Lynn Cheney wouldn’t pay attention anyway.

As Eubie Blake said: Be grateful for luck. Pay the thunder no mind. Listen to the birds, and don’t hate nobody.

Circling the Drain

2008-04-18T04:43:12Z

I’ve long suspected that the only way anything in American politics is going to change, REALLY change, is when a whole lot of people start getting hungry. Not when they have to give up their 4 X 4’s, big screen TV’s, botox injections or Viagra prescriptions, but when a lot of them start missing meals. And it's starting to look like famine will get here a lot sooner than those Al Qaida guys George says are going to follow our troops home.

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In the meantime, we are told to choose between Hillary (the $109 million-dollar woman) and McCain (Cheney II), because Obama doesn’t wear an American flag lapel pin. He's toast. We focus our attention on Britney Spears, the Olympics and how much Oprah weighs rather than thinking about global warming, genocide in Iraq, and how using corn to make ethanol rather than food is threatening to depopulate the third world.

Two things that are happening now would indicate all the money being spent to helo us pretend we really have a choice about who rules America is really just money down the toilet: growing numbers of food riots in foreign countries and the seemingly endless rise in fuel prices. Like rising oceans or falling fish populations, these are not problems that will just fix themselves if we let the markets be. Unlike rising oceans and falling fish populations, these problems are THIS YEAR. They’re here now.

Yet Hillary’s idea to end uninsured Americans is to force them to buy it, Cheney’s defense of his orders to torture is to say “WE don’t call it torture, so it isn’t”, and both parties think there’s nothing wrong with elected officials accepting bribes, everyone is pretending there’s no limit to how much drugs or health care can cost, no limit to how much price rises the market for corn, wheat and rice will bear, and no limit to how much money can go from corporations to politicians (or the favors they receive in return).

ABC, Fox News and Rush Limbaugh say everything is fine and getting better, and America swallows it (“reality” TV DID beat the debate in ratings). So, not surprisingly, nothing will be done about more people not being able to afford to eat or drive delivery trucks or get medical care or heat next winter. But those hungry people in Haiti, Egypt and Sudan won’t be buying Dell computers or double lattes at Starbucks. And the hungry people in those other countries will become hungry people in THIS country.

And that’s when things will change: just shut off the tube and watch.

"Bitter"? Wait til you try "hungry".

Comparitive Reality 101

2008-04-01T14:35:23Z

I started out Saturday morning trying to find some information about a new machine I had gotten, and ended up learning that the world I live in is being depopulated. . .voluntarily.

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Last fall I had heard about a thing called One Laptop per Child, a laptop computer designed for children, specifically Third World children who don’t have access to books and classrooms, much less computers. A man named Negroponte had designed this little gem, and, long with a group of other like-minded people, set out to create a $100 laptop that allows kids to play and learn in a surprisingly vast number of ways. It’s a non-profit company competing with the likes of Intel and Microsoft, and uses Linux-based “open source” software, which is one of the main reasons the price is so low.

OLPC was having a promotion where, if a person donated to the company twice the cost of the computer, one would be sent to you and another would be provided free to children in, say, Afghanistan or Zimbabwe. I bought in, and enough other people did that OLPC couldn’t keep up with demand: four months after I ordered it, my little green and white laptop arrived.

The XO (as it is called) I received did not come with instructions. Like most things electronic, if you want to find out how to run it, you have to “go online”. I did so, downloaded instructions, and then visited an online forum to see what other XO users had to say about it. I’m pretty new to online mass communication, so when it asked for my user name, and then my real name, I wondered why people wouldn’t just use their real name. I’ve wondered the same thing about the blogosphere: you were given a name by your parents, it’s what people have called you since you were an infant, why would you need another?

Now I know: it turns out there are alternate Worlds.

The second step in yesterday’s journey into tomorrow was attending a presentation about a thing called Second Life, which has one of those little “registered trade mark” bugs flying after it.

Second Life, says Wikipedia, is an internet-based virtual world launched in 2003, developed by Linden Research, Inc, which came to international attention via mainstream news media in 2006 and early 2007. A downloadable client program enables its users, called “Residents”, to interact with each other through motional avatars, providing an advanced level of social network service combined with general aspects of a metaverse. Residents can explore, meet other Residents, socialize, participate in individual or group activities, have virtual sex, and create and trade items (virtual property) and services with one another.

Second Life is one of several virtual worlds that have been created by the cyberpunk literary movement, and particularly by Neal Stephenson’s novel “Snow Crash.” There is no fee for registering an account or participating in Second Life, however registration of “payment information” (i.e. a credit card) is mandatory to participate in some functions, such as owning land or islands, as well as access to certain support features such as Second Life’s support portal and online forums.

Among the Real World (no trademark) organizations that can and do relate to their employees, at least in part, through Second Life are IBM, NASA, the National Weather Service and the State Department.

Something about all this sets off little warning bells for me (well, virtually). I’ve long feared that more and more, with the pervasiveness of media-based human programming, the line between reality and fantasy is becoming blurred, to the point where the Simpsons have more room in people’s minds than their families, their jobs or their bodies.

Ours has become a world where people are sitting at computer screens or televisions weaving dreams. It’s getting easier to confuse reality TV with reality, but then to have virtual worlds as the connection to work seems another step in the direction of some bizarre dystopia, where vast armies of First World people are opting out of the real world with caffeine, prozac, meth, the internet and Viagra. They are enticed by prose like this, from the Second Life website: “From the moment you enter The World you’ll discover a vast digital continent, teeming with people, entertainment, experiences and opportunity. Once you’ve explored a bit, perhaps you’ll find a perfect parcel of land to build your house or business.”

Apparently there are now at least six Virtual Worlds, where people can live, work, and have virtual sex, all without being exposed to actual humans.

One is left to wonder--Is our Real World that boring and hopeless, and is the prospect of fixing it only another pipe dream? And if corporations are persons, with constitutional rights, why not virtual persons?

Our Terminal Classic period

2008-03-23T17:41:03Z

In reading about ritual sacrifices made by the Maya and Aztecs in Latin America in pre-columbian days, I was struck by the thought that these deaths made to ensure the gods sent good hunting, bountiful harvests and victory in battle were really more about political theater than placating bloodthirsty deities. In murdering virgins or children, those who actually put them to death became the demons they were ostensibly seeking to keep at bay. We now know, of course, that all those deaths really had nothing to do with whether the rains came on time, the birds and deer were more plentiful, or the foes easier to vanquish.

Don’t we?

]]> The same is true to those holy people now governing us: they’ve sacrificed tens of thousands of their own young countrymen, 4,000 by killing and many, many more by psychological or physical maiming, at the altar of OIL.

Now, as in the days before Columbus and Cortez brought Christianity, slavery and death to the savages, there are those who believe our modern sacrifice is keeping the stock market healthy, our women and churches free of Moslem stains, and our country free of terrorism. They truly believe, and will not be moved. With Bill O’Reilly, Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh to encourage them, and almost all of our elected officials of both parties defending the priest-executioners, the sacrifices have gone one for five years unabated. . .last year even increased with a “surge.”

Dr. Jaime Awe, in his book “Maya Cities and Ancient Caves”, notes that many of thousands of caves in Central America contain offerings from the ancient Maya civilizations. These include agricultural produce, farm tools, hunting implements . . .and human remains. “The ultimate gift was the offering one’s blood or human lives,” writes Awe. “Many cave sites contain skeletal remains of victims who were offered in sacrifice to the powerful denizens of the underworld. More often than not, the skeletons are those of young children, a preferred victim of Chac the rain god.”

Awe goes on the say that these sacrifices appear to have increased during what is called the Terminal Classic Period, AD 800 to 1000. This is significant, he says, because it was during this period that ancient Maya civilization eventually declined, and that the cities in Belize, Guatemala and the Yucatan peninsula in Mexico declined. It has been suggested that overpopulation and deforestation, exacerbated by drought, spelled disaster for the Maya. Despite the apparent increase in sacrifices, “their socio-economic system eventually failed, and the surviving Maya gradually abandoned the once-thriving cities that extended across the lowland Maya world.”

So it is with us: the more frequent and frenzied our sacrifices become, the more the gods ignore us, and the closer we are to the end of our empire. I have to wonder, though, when our civilization ends, our cities are abandoned and our alphabet forgotten, will people in millennia to come speculate about how and why the people survived, but the civilization ended?

Running with the Dogs

2008-03-15T15:35:58Z

Telemarketing (home invasion by telephone) is a hot-button issue with me. I pay for the phone to allow me to connect to my friends and family and people with whom I choose to do business. It’s mine. The idea that somebody out there thinks they can invade my life anytime they want (usually when I’m eating dinner) to try to separate me from my money, using an instrument I paid for, is outrageous.

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But our corporate-owned society condones it. All the more reason I and a few other contrarians are trying to think about ourselves and our society outside the box of the corporatocracy. Some things, like torture, mass murder, and a whole political system based on bribery, are not OK with us, so we’re trying to live our lives differently.

And that’s why I was more than a little shocked yesterday to get a phone call from Democracy Unlimited of Humboldt County. The computerized voice of DUHC Director Kaitlin Sopoci-Belknap was telling me that if it was not OK for her computer to call me when it felt like it, I had to wait until she was finished talking to push a button saying so.

To me, this was like a midwife doing a c-section.

Alright, she wasn’t asking for money: it was an update on the schedule of what DUHC was doing in the coming week. But for an organization that is doing its best to wean people away from corporate-owned technological control to use one of the most pernicious weapons their foes have is hypocritical at least. It reminds me of another “progressive” organization, until recently called Working Assets Long Distance or WALD, which offers credit cards through one of the more regressive and pro-Bush companies in the US. The idea is that WALD gets to wet its beak while the regressive corporation profits bigtime, and gets all this personal, highly-marketable information about you, and the profits go to UNDO everything WALD-supporters back.

Come on, people, you can’t practice the same methodology your opponents practice without becoming them. If the Democrats practice the same bribery and support the same inhuman and fascist causes the Republicans do, how are they any different? Let’s have “progressive” organizations that practice what they preach, not ones that say “It works for the bad guys, but if WE do it, it’s holy.”

Doesn’t work that way folks: if you run your organization like a regressive, invasive corporation, it IS one.

Forget the trains

2008-02-08T00:36:41Z

The struggle over the train tracks in Humboldt County really is over. I drive past the old engines in Eureka almost every day, and it’s pretty clear that, like everything else made of metal that’s left out in the rain for ten years, they’re past saving. The same is true of the trestles, the track, and any other rolling stock that doesn’t have trees growing through them. Few people would love to have trains running here more than me, but it’s pretty obvious they’re toast.

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Twenty years ago I was in a small town in northern Wales, where there used to be a train that carried slate from the mines up the mountains 12 miles or so down to the harbor. As the market for slate declined, the rolling stock wore out, was sold, or just left to rust in peace. By the 1960s, the company had folded and the rights of way were being sold off, but the Blaenau-Ffestiniog Railway wasn’t dead yet. Brits love their railroads, and a group of ex-railroad men and their supporters organized. . .and organized. Within a few years, they’d formed a group from all over Great Britain, and not only bought the right of way, relaid the roadbed and tracks, reconditioned the engines and cars that were left, but tracked down every engine and car the old company had owned from all over Europe.

By the time I rode the train in 1985, the cars were beautifully carpeted, signs over the doors advised “Mind Your Head” (always good advice), the steam engines shone, and volunteer engineers, conductors, oilers and mechanics had the trains running perfectly, filled with train lovers from all over the world, riding (and dining) from Portmadog to Blaenau-Ffestiniog and back.

Local train enthusiasts have dreamed of doing something similar here since God was a little girl, but they’ve never had the hordes of money or legions of volunteers needed to do it, and they haven’t gotten any help from those who think the commercial railroad could make a profit hauling now-absent logs or fish from one side of the county to the other. It might make some sense to try and redo the track from, say, southern Eureka to Scotia, and the steam trains the timber association has could be a real tourist draw where there is some scenery. But the lines from Eureka to Arcata or Samoa would be much better used as trails, and ultimately an extension of the Hammond Trail. To try to pretend they could be anything else is just a waste of a potential resource.

The Case for Voting Your Conscience

2008-01-21T18:04:37Z

I’m a little puzzled as to why people would allow the press or the political pro’s to dictate who they vote for. Amazingly, most Democrats seem reconciled to the fact that they have a choice between Clinton and Obama. The argument is that if you vote for somebody who isn’t a front runner, because they were able to raise $500 million from corporations like Exxon and Pfizer, you’re wasting your vote.

]]> But if you think about it, agreeing to vote for the lesser of two weevils is self-disenfranchisement. In this case, both these people voted twice for the so-called Patriot Act, for funding for the war, and did nothing to put Bush and Cheney behind bars, where they belong. Both support invading Iran, and both support mandatory payments by all Americans to insurance companies. They enabled Cheney for the past seven years, so how are they any better? Besides, Karl Rove and Co are praying (and paying) for Hillary to be nominated, knowing she is so hated by the right she has no chance of winning the general election.

Seven years ago I took a lot of flack for voting for Ralph Nader, which allowed Cheney and Bush to win. Turned out later Cheney didn’t need my help. . .he made sure he’d win regardless of how the “voting” went. Last election I voted for Kerry, but Cheney had other ways of winning. I have this weird idea that voting is about expressing yourself, about supporting those you trust to represent you. If people are allowed to “vote” only for people they don’t trust or support, how is that democracy? Why would anyone participate in a system like that?

No, I’ll be voting for another longshot: Dennis Kucinich. He’s as close as our political system will come to a real choice. He opposed the war from day one, has voted consistently against suspension of the Constitution, favors a single-payer healthcare system, and is the only candidate supporting impeachment.

I’ll be voting my conscience, win or lose. It may be crazy, but I think that’s my duty as an American. If I can’t vote to end mass murder, punish war crimes, institute real, non-corporate health care and protect the rights of Americans, what’s the point of voting at all?

How Bad Is It?

2008-01-12T04:21:56Z

An email from the Dennis Kucinich campaign today mentioned an interesting thing: there are some who think the New Hampshire upset for Hillary was something less than an expression of the will of the voters.

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I hadn’t really thought about it, and I’ll bet you hadn’t either, but the fact that the polls that said Obama was pulling away from Hillary just prior to the primary turned out to be way wrong. Then all the pollsters were covering their butts and saying people changed their minds. Suddenly, I was reminded of the “election” of 2000, when Gore beat Bush. There was all the dimpled chad stuff in Florida, the dumping of black voters from the rolls in Ohio, etc etc, but there was also the BIG difference between the exit polls and the final tallies.

Because of the unexplained disparities between hand-counted and machine-counted ballots in New Hampshire, Dennis has asked for a recount. “I am not making this request with the expectation that a recount will significantly affect the number of votes that were cast on my behalf,” Dennis said in his letter to the Secretary of State of New Hampshire. But he cited “serious and credible reports, allegations and rumors” that question the integrity of the machine-controlled process.

And here again is an example of one set of figures not agreeing with another.

So who do you believe? If you watch Faux News, you believe one thing, and if watch DepressMe Now, you believe another.

And if, like me, you tend to believe Amy and Michael and Dennis, what does that say about elections in America? Is the voting rigged AND they blew up the World Trade Center AND they killed Paul Wellstone? Or just A and B, but not C?

And will we ever know, or will it always be a question of Who do you believe?

One Man's Beef is Another Man's Pork

2008-01-12T04:18:41Z

There’s a long tradition in Washington of pork barrel politics: when one member votes for another’s federal dollar giveaway, he gets to call in one of his own. When you read the “newsletters” of our politicians, they’re filled with self-congratulation for the pork that they’ve “brought home.” In a little place like Humboldt County, a couple of million is considered a lot of money. In Washington, it is, as Everett Dirkson used to say: “A million here, a million there, and pretty soon you’re talking real money.”

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In the Northcoast Journal this past week, there was an article about Congressman Mike Thompson, or rather, about three people who want to run against him for voting in favor the war, the “Patriot” Act, domestic spying and a bunch of other things Democrats don’t usually support. One of Thompson’s detractors, however, was forced to “give the devil his due” and praised him for helping get $3.7 million in federal funds for the Redwoods Rural Health Center. Not being in SoHum, I know nothing about the Health Center, but I do know that people from, say, Poughkeepsie or Walla Walla would consider it pork.

Then there’s the money that might or might not be available for something like the rail and port improvement project that promises to connect the metropolis of South Fork with the booming port city of Samoa. The Railroad Authority has asked the State for $19 million to work on this project, while the State is closing parks. Shrewd.

The other side of the equation, that we’ll never know, was what did Mike support to get $3.7 million for the Health Center? Was it voting to fund the “surge” in Iraq? Voting for the Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act? Everyone in Washington says the same thing: “There was no quid pro quo.” And they’re lying.

Populists Win, People Happy, Film at 11

2008-01-05T18:40:05Z

"But the dictionary definition of populist is: 'A member or adherent of a political party seeking to represent the interests of ordinary people; a person who holds or who is concerned with the views of ordinary people.'

--R. Limbaugh

The Times-Standard Editorial this morning trumpeted “Populism is back in America”.The editorial talked about how the Iowa caucuses showed how “populist” candidates had done so well. Sen. Barack Obama, who so far has collected $80 million in his race for the presidency, and Rev. Mike Huckbee are considered populists.
Actually Obama and Huckabee won because they had money and/or organization. Huckabee won because there are a lot of Christians in Iowa, and the Christian right is VERY well organized and very rich. And he’s their guy.

Obama won because he has spent even more money than Hillary: $44 million to her paltry $40 million. The $64 million question is: where did that money come from? If you know who paid it, you know who owns him. And I know it wasn’t me or other people putting in $25 here and $25 there. Opensecrets.org points out that 47,643 people donated more than $200 to Obama. By contrast, Dennis Kucinich has raised a little over $1 million, he has 908 $200 plus donors, and 69% of his donors gave less than $200.

]]> It’s my old mantra: Follow the money. Only in this case, it’s follow the mullahs, too: the Christian mullahs and, in Oprah’s case, the celeb mullahs. Just listen to the Fox, ABC, NBC and CBS minarets calling the faithful to prayer. Allah akbar!

I would argue the only real populist candidates are Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich, neither of whom, we are told, has a snowball’s chance in hell. And why is that? Because we are told neither has a chance. We believe what we are told (and told and told. . .the essence of advertising). That’s where the $44 million went, and it was spent judiciously.

And did it work? Who won the Iowa caucuses?

The Center for Responsive Politics estimates a billion dollars will be donated in this presidential campaign, and the winners will get around $500 million each. That won’t be Ron Paul and it won’t be Dennis Kucinich.

That isn’t populism in my book. Rush's either.

The Lesser of Two Weevils is Still a Weevil

2007-12-29T04:11:05Z

Seven years ago, when Dick Cheney seized power, I had a funny feeling that something was wrong. Bill Clinton, with his support of NAFTA, lies about Monica and amnesty to Mafia donors, didn’t do much for me, but like most Americans, I was becoming accustomed to crooks in power. But I thought there were still honest reporters, honest members of Congress, and honest judges to see that the Constitution protected us.

I was wrong.

]]> I also grossly overestimated the ability of the American public to think for themselves, and not be stampeded like sheep to their own destruction. I had no idea that Cheney, Addington and Perle could so completely control the media, the Congress, and use fear to control a majority of Americans.

For six years, even congressional Democrats were only too happy to give Cheney carte blanche to lie, steal, murder, and turn the system of law on its head. In the seventh year, having gotten a mandate to put the brakes on this slide into fascism, Congress continued to roll over, approving domestic spying, torture, the slaughter of Iraqis for their oil, the abrogation of treaties. They did NOTHING on their own, and continued to collude in Cheney’s crimes.

Yet, amazingly, even many people I know, who oppose the so-called Patriot Act, oppose torture, oppose the Iraqi genocide, AND the murder of 3,900 Americans AND the disabling of tens of thousands more. . .these people are willing to vote for the very people who sold them down the river. Obama, Clinton and Edwards voted TWICE for the Patriot Act, for the legalization of Guantanamo, for domestic spying, and who are perfectly willing to invade Iran to take THEIR oil and kill a million of THEIR people, yet they lead the Democratic race for President. Dennis Kucinich, who voted twice AGAINST the Patriot Act is not considered worth troubling with, because he hasn’t gotten millions of dollars from corporate sponsors.

HUH?

That’s right. The guy who was one of six members of the house to vote against the New HUAC—the “Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act”. . .six out of 412. . .is not worth voting for, or even considering because “he can’t win.”

Now, I can understand Republicans, maybe even Libertarians, going along with the suspension of the Constitution indefinitely to “protect” us from the heathen hoards that threaten our women. But Democrats? I can understand ignorant, illiterate people watching Faux News, the official organ of the Cheney administration, and thinking “These liberal SOBs are undermining our President’s ability to fight terrorism.” But the rest?

If you don’t support the Patriot Act, domestic spying, suspension of habeas corpus, torture, mass murder and the wasting of trillions of dollars and tens of thousands of American lives, why would you vote for someone who DID support these things?

If Stalin had a chance to beat Hitler, and Lincoln was a longshot, would you back the favorite, so your vote would “count”?

Who Would JesusTorture?

2007-12-24T03:20:25Z

In an apparent attempt to prove they can keep up with the ER, the TS ran a column by Morton Kondracke that was right up there with O’Reilly at his raving best. The headline calls Democrats Bush haters, and does the usual equating freedom of speech with treason. He goes on to note that Bin Laden is still at large, and worries that the Democrats’ irrational doubting of Bush means planes are aimed at skyscrapers in Keokuk and Long Beach at this moment.

And this guy is the editor of Roll Call, the newspaper of Capital Hill. No wonder Congress is so screwed up.

]]> But the Democrats, as he points out, have the temerity to ask that only methods of interrogation approved in the Army Field Manual can be used by the CIA. This would make “Waterboarding” (torture by drowning) illegal. Kondracke thinks banning this form of torture is an engraved invitation to Bin Laden to come and kill his wife and kids. His argument, and apparently Nancy Pelosi’s, since she approved waterboarding before, and voted for the “Patriot Act”, is that when it comes to the war on terror, any method of battle is not only justified, but required.

My question is, if waterboarding and other forms of “enhanced interrogation” are OK, where WOULD Kondracke and his ilk draw the line? Would bamboo shoots under the fingernails be fine? Chopsticks in the eardrums? The iron maiden? The rack? And when we’ve done all these things to get the evil SOBs to tell us who their friends are, remind me: how are we BETTER than they are?

Words of the Profits

2007-12-22T16:06:18Z

The article in the Times-Standard, accompanied by a nice “grip and grin” photo, credited the owners of the Bear River Casino in Loleta with a $17,000 donation to the Salvation Army. But the thanks really should go to the locals who left many times that with the casino.

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I don’t know how much the casinos make, or how much the local Indians give to the Mafia for helping them build and run them, but it’s more than you or I make in a year. “We had some extra funds,” said the rancheria chairman, “so we decided to donate it.” I’ve never been a big fan of gambling and lotteries, because it seems like the most regressive tax possible. Has anyone seen John Campbell or Rob Arkley at Cherae Heights lately? No, I think John and Rob have demonstrated they’ve got better things to do with their money than flush it down the toilet.

Like the War in Iraq that’s really about oil, but is supposed to be about freedom (for the one million dead Iraqis?) or the “medical” marijuana shops that are supposed to be about providing care for the sick or dying, but are really about big bucks from peddling dope, casinos on (or off) the reservations have nothing to do with Native American culture and everything to do with exploiting human weakness. The same with TPZs: those who don’t want the laws tightened know there’s a loophole they can turn to profit, so they’ll fight to protect it. They want to keep the tax break AND the right to subdivide. Follow the money.

So Merry Christmas to those who left their money at the casinos, enabling the Bear River Band to give a little back to several worthy charities that DON’T make profits.

Next time, though, why not skip the middle man?

If You're in a Hole, You Need a Ladder, Not a Shovel

2007-12-15T01:01:26Z

One would think that members of Congress who are Democrats would support peace, human rights, and the Consititution. But no.

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Mike Thompson recently voted for a measure aimed at doing more spying on American citizens, has voted in favor of continued funding for the illegal occupation of Iraq, and has voted in favor of bills to enable the Bush administration to keep Guantanamo prison/torture camp open. Even though the Courts have ruled it is a violation of US law to do so. Last month Mike voted for a little thing called the “Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act” (Look it up. If you liked HUAC, you’ll love this) It was written by another Blue Dog Democrat, Jane Harman. While Mike SAYS he’s against the war, against torture, against spying on Americans, his voting record says otherwise. So why would Democrats vote for a guy who talks Democratic but votes (and works, as treasurer of the Blue Dog PAC) against Democratic values? Beats me.

On the other side of the spectrum is Dennis Kucinich. He’s a Democratic Congressman too, from Ohio. He was one of six Congress members (out of 406) to vote against the New HUAC. Kucinich hasn’t gotten a lot of press (he was just excluded from the Democratic debate in Iowa because his campaign manager had the gall to work out of his home) because he doesn’t have millions of dollars, isn’t a TV star, and had the effrontery to sponsor a measure to impeach Dick Cheney. Under our system, that means he’s toast politically. But if you want to take the trouble, look up Kucinich’s record, and compare it to Thompson’s. Then ask yourself who more closely reflects your values.

Kucinich is also the ONLY Democratic candidate who has consistently voted against the war, against domestic spying, against torture and against NAFTA and the WTO. Hillary and Obama have voted FOR the war, FOR domestic spying, and are in favor of invading Iran. Mike too.

And in the past seven years, can you name ANY humanitarian, human rights or peace measures that have passed through Congress? And how many Attorneys General who pushed for torture, how many invasions, surges, violations of treaties and kidnappings, murders and tortures have been committed in our name? Plenty.

So Mike and his friends are getting SERIOUS money from people who profit from war, drugs, and keeping health care unaffordable because they are all on the same team. And Kucinich gets to sit out the debate.

And the hole gets deeper and deeper.

Ho Ho Hurl

2007-12-13T13:11:39Z

It was damage control time at Baywood these past two weeks after some 900 people were exposed to Norwalk virus there, over five days and a passel of gatherings of movers and shakers in HumCo. While the TS was making nice, it did seem odd to hear Baywood management trying to blame the customers for bringing this dread disease to them. As though that could happen for five days and a dozen or so banquets.

]]> Obviously somebody in the kitchen was sick, and, being the Christmas season and not having sick leave, he or she played hurt and shared. And shared. There were a couple who ended up in the ER, but mostly it was 166 people just being miserably sick. It could have been a lot worse.

The NCJ was critical of the Health Department for not coming out earlier with the source of the sickness, but the only thing that could have been done differently would have been to start canceling banquets at least one day earlier when it became obvious the problem WASN’T going away. One or two days, especially on a weekend, is understandable, but as foodservice workers get hungrier, they’re going to work sick more, and this is going to happen again.