not by might

We just expedited a hanging. The hangee was by all accounts as well deserving of such a fate as anyone you could name. He was a defiant nuisance in court, audaciously claiming the court's illegitimacy while ignoring the recounting of the murders he committed or had others commit. Except a few of his tribesmen from Tikrit, not many wanted to hear his vile bluster.

Even so, when is a hanging the right way to silence a party line? Are the forces that made some people join the Baath party weakened or strengthened by this hanging? Are there any political positions or agendas so toxic that they fall outside the bounds not only of free speech but of the sanctity of life? As a common criminal, Saddam would have been guilty as hell anyway so this is not really the case in which to seek my answer. As a politcal criminal, would his tactics for maintaining stability in Iraq have killed more people than the Bush administration's tactics? Want to play a game of "surge roulette"?

In looking about for a better instance from which to answer the question of whether killing people is ever a legitimate political tool, I need not go as far as Iraq. We have, for instance, the wilted wonder of manufactured outrage-as-marketing-ploy: Ann Coulter. Talk about abusing freedom of speech! She variously hints or openly suggests that particular persons or categories of persons with whom she disagrees be killed. Well, I don't agree with her. Nor do I agree with most of what is said by most of the conservative talk radio personalities who gargle the same sewage as Ann. But I don't think it better to shoot Ann Coulter or Rush Limbaugh or Mike Savage when they can be discredited by holding their exagerations and mistakes, selfishness and self promotion in clear juxtaposition with the facts they omit and the norms of decency they violate. If we insist no government and no corporate media monopoly have the power to control what we can know, then a potent remedy is available far superior to inadvertantly proving the importance of an unimportant person by killing them: we just need to make sure that collectively, we have a long and detailed memory. Death is memorable so it is a favored tool of those who want to make their point stay in mind but don't want to spend a lot of time proving their point. Go back. Dig up the claims and the bogus inferences and out-of-context facts. Remind your friends and readers they were lied to or fed simplistic or biased interpretations that have served us ill. The instances are many and mounting. Yes, it is more work to check facts and refute the lies...and you don't listen to them anyway so why give yourself a headache honoring this nonsense with a rebuttal? But imagine what our democracy would be like if the average voter could recite the five most inaccurate things any prominent wingnut had fed their listeners. Far better than a corpse and a headline would be the laughter...and the anger. In some cases, the work has been done and you only need to read it. And it is not work done by hacks. And it can be fun. But in general, it is the business of anyone who wants to have an opinion to have done their homework. In your quest to be part of our society's long memory, you can just drop Reuters from your reading list..you will not miss much truth that way.

Is it worth the trouble? We have some evidence that if you don't do the gruntwork citizenship of double checking your pundits and leaders, eventually there is a hanging.

UPDATE I: here is a particulary clear and tidy example of the discrediting work: we don't need to shoot Mr. Hitchens...but it would be nice if someone buried the stinking remains of his humanity.
UPDATE II: Not all these odious fools are the same but clearly, I could make a whole blog out of calling BS on these sycophants who must now find a food source to replace the son of a Bush.

modern problems with simple solutions

The more inefficient the supply chain is, the greater your positive impact on global resources will be when you just quit buying their crap.

Peak oil does not mean a literal shut-off of supply. It is not like you will hear a sucking noise as if your soda straw had finally and suddenly pulled the last of your drink out of the glass. The gradual and inevitable process, now in full swing, will be that the amount of oil that it takes to fetch a barrel of oil to your local pump will increase steadily. The efficiency of the supply chain is up against a hard and declining physical limit. The worst danger is the years-long gradualness of the process. That creeping change will let our over-adaptive brains revise the threshold of alarm. We tip-toed past the alarms of 1973 and then sped up again. We don't hear those alarms any more. We don't hear anything but advertisements for cars.

Crappy New Year, Dubya and Darth Veep

So, son of a Bush, you got your Iraqi. What decency dear leader, that you refrain from taking to the airwaves to bray about your success...uh it is decency at work here, no? Congratulations, Georgie boy! We knew you were man enough to tough it out, to bear any burden of discontented voters and unpopularity to see your mission through. You are so brave and good that you could bear to sacrifce thousands of lives, cast your predecessor's budget surpluses to the dogs, immolate the tattered vestiges of hope and good will the world held for the US and squander the mandate of fear you and your corrupt party had amassed...all that and more only you had the character to do for the sacred mission to stomp out weapons of mass destruction root out Al Qaida bring Democracy to Iraq kill one rotten oil-rich human being who's rottenness was amplified by American support when he first came to power. Whats that? You say there really is democracy in Iraq now? Glad to hear it. That must mean our job there is done and we can pull out. Its a very special kind of democracy we have given the Iraqis....it kills more innocent people per day than their old dictatorship was killing on its slow days. The record number of execution orders you signed while you governed in Texas seems to be your one genuine character trait, the one act you can actually keep up: getting people killed, letting people kill other people. You are a piker, of course: there have been leaders far more efficient at your little skill. But none of them were ever leaders of Americans.

The Iraqis got their man today. Losing a bit fewer than two American soldiers per day since we began bombing in March 2003 must seem a small price to pay for the great triumph you have led us to this week, Mr. President. Far more die rolling their SUV into a ditch every day. Whats all the fuss, huh? On average, in our country, there are more women beaten to death by their male partners each day than there are soldiers killed in Iraq...only a liberal would see anything to complain about here, wouldn't you say, Dubya?

But I doubt the president will be reading this, I might as well put a cork in it. Still, I am at my wits end trying to see how we Americans can clean up the mess we have made. Nor can I see any way in which any one except Halliburton and other defense contractors have come out ahead in this fiasco. I have not blogged much lately, thinking there was more good gotten by working to strenghten the resolve of our green congress to overturn the laws and mispent monies that have underwritten the damned fool neocon dreams of empire. The doing is more important than the denouncing but I won't let it silence me. Stupid arrogance that orders up sloppy death, look for no comfort in these posts nor even the lull of silence. None. Ever. Ford bestowed his silence on you until he died and that was no favor to anyone.

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Happy New Year to everyone else!

I turn to popping corks now. My new years resolution is to blog more. Done right, forcing yourself to think a bit every day is good for you. I was challenged to put my thoughts about the peculiar aspects of our times in verse and happened to have left the task until the hour before it was to be delivered. The practice of blogging can leave you a lot of material ready-to-use:

For a time capsule addressed to whomever is living in the year 3006:

Please do not curse me, you who find these words.
What fares well when left in the care of herds?
Who we are I'll try to say to you a millenium on, but there is a contradiction here.
For nothing so much marks the present race as fixation on goods and times quite near.
To write this draws the mind far out of stifling horizons on which our lives are focused
But we'll forget you, future and purpose of our being, and resume munching like locust.
In the first species that could have them, regret and responsibility enjoyed a long divorce
The planet had been ample to tolerate that course.

Snow fell today, this shortest darkest day, for the first time this year.

Exhausted and diseased, the last forests shade the last few brooks where you'd dare drink
Our sky still blue, the poles and peaks still wear a little ice, not for long, we think,

Until now, progress measured and celebrated, meant less hindered commerce.
We were so proud when first we talked via lightning.
Now, 2006, we are past vanity and complacently dominate time and space,
For advantages confered, we are fond of all that quickens the pace
Beat the market, beat the clock. he who knows most may get an accolade
but he who knows certain things first has got it made.
There was good and bad to living in a world that walked and was humbled by vastness
Tell me 3006, do you have deliberation?
Our seconds divided in millionth parts but to centuries we are averse.

Until now, progress measured and celebrated, meant less diseased.
We don't know what to do with our old, condemning many to socially disconnected "ease".
Most of us don't even want our own old age, a genteel plague, a prospect of fears.
Some patch and stitch and color themselves younger than their years
We let the last few years, unquestioned until unfunded, beggar us to prolong what always has ended
Far past child bearing years we prop up a kind of living nature may never have intended.
But our own will, not natures, is now supreme. There are no fates.
There was good and bad to living with natural frailties
Tell me 3006, are you at peace with mortality?
We scope the second when death occurs, then say it never happened
And all the years it punctuates collapse to a query residue: "was god pleased?"

Until now, progress measured and celebrated, meant ability to know more and yet more.
We wired ourselves together and the promise hangs from that wire
If we won't pay for the news, then news must conspire
To grip us, to concern us, yet to assure us we are good and not to challenge or disoncert.
We now watch three hours a day or more of just what we choose.
The promise was a planet where reporters swarmed
Yet ever less are we bound together by our news,
growing more fearful rather than more informed.
Tell me 3006, do you really want to know more?

The word emerging in our leading minds is modest, its root: "sustain"
The word that leads the great mass of us as if it were a simple goodness is "gain".
This year Darwin's thought was upheld in court but still not learned.
"Competative" is our favored fitness, a reputation obvious and earned .
Tell me 3006, how do you value "cooperative"?

Of all the problems we cannot collectively face,
The worst yet least addressable: the mere numbers of our race.

You see there, all thoughts I have tooled and fooled with here before.

BTW, I admit my champaigne flows a bit early....in some time zones. This is why it is so important to have friends in Australia: you simply can't let your mates drink alone.

2006: A fond farewell to the year of "we CAN DO this"

It really has been a good year in some ways. We introduced a morally dead and mentally challenged tyrant to his walking papers. Our little progress and ray of hope comes too late for all the people who died in Iraq, for the species that exist no more, for the thousands of islanders and shore dwellers whose homes and livelihoods have gone under the waves. So, for many more of us, it was also a year in hell. But I have had good guides and companions who help us rail at our sewage tides. To fellow bloggers who have enlivened my tenure on this sinking ship of humanity, my gratitude for your company. As the violinist said to his quartet when the Titanic began to tilt and slip toward the deep: "It has been an honor and a privilege to play with you." Above all, personally, it has been a year where I turned somewhat from the complaining that is the staple of my blogging toward the doing, in which I joined many though with what effect we can't yet say.

And, though the weather was far from conducive for photography or much of anything else, my son and I did make it all the way to the summit of Mt Washington. A more satisfying if less educational result than last year's attempt.


Note that rime encrusted structures are typical of Mt. Washington summit this time of year and those are NOT my eyebrows! Underneath that ice, the sign says "Mt. Washington Summit". Trust me, or check out the anemometers, just visible in the background through the ice fog, appearing just above my left glove which rests on the sign.

Darwin's Revenge

A species that becomes resistant to most of the selection pressures that the environment can apply will itself become the most drastic pressure on every other species in that environment...and enjoy a freedom to degenerate unknown to any other creature nature ever fashioned.

Theory and Practice

Ignorance is the theory that you already know enough to get by. Bigotry is the social and political practice of this theory.

What could keep me away from my blog?

Yes, I have been busy. I had spare time before I took up blogging. Lately all that time has gone elsewhere:

If you are within a short ride of Newton Massachusetts, consider joining us tomorrow evening.

You might think the recent election would get the attention of our congress. But now we want to keep their attention on our issues. Come meet the kind of people who turned the election: people like you! The Operation Democracy council serving the western suburbs of Boston is holding an open House [and open Senate is planned] meeting to kick off our "Mandate for Change" campaign to make the congress work as we voted for them to work. Come to a one hour meeting at the John M Barry Boys & Girls Club of Newton at 675 Watertown St. on Tuesday December 5th. Sign-in is at 7:pm. Come see how much fun grass roots politics is. Operation Democracy is affiliated with MoveOn.org but council members are strictly volunteers and make decisions locally. If interested and likely to attend, please let us know by registering for the event via this MoveOn page.

Novemeber 7th should not be the last time your wishes counted so come on down and help us shake things up. We have an in-your-face kind of petition drive that will let you get a lot more impact than just puting your John Henry on a plea to fix healthcare or the environement or get out of Iraq...though we will tackle all those things over the coming months.