DemiOrator

Random 10 Songs: Petty Little Brother

2011-03-12T00:26:00.005-05:00

Lacking the brain cells to create a coherent narrative or assay an essay, I default to randomizing songs.

Iggy Pop - Shades
Rob Zombie - What Lurks on Channel X? [XXX Mix]
Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers - Rockin' Around (With You)
White Denim - Mess Your Hair Up
John Mayall - Bernard Jenkins
The Infidels featuring Juliette Lewis - Bad Brother
Earl Hooker - Hot 'n' Heavy
Spinal Tap - Break Like the Wind
White Stripes - Little Cream Soda
Yo La Tengo - Little Honda

Bonus track: Evil Stig - Drinking Song

Random 10 Songs: Zombie Clash

2010-06-24T22:13:00.004-04:00

Thus breathes a slight return of life from the recumbent, yet slightly somnambulant blog host. A dream of music, a muse of dreams speaks in whispers. Let me listen a while...

White Zombie - Electric Head, Pt. 2 [Sexational After Dark Mix]
Clash - What's My Name
Bob Mould - Black Sheets of Rain
The Cure - Out Of This World
British Sea Power - Fear Of Drowning-2002
John Mayall - Me And My Woman
J. Geils Band - Hard Drivin' Man
Live - Top
Todd Snider - Play A Train Song
Deftones - Can't Even Breathe

Bonus track: Rory Gallagher - Garbage Man [Live]

James Arthur Ray Upbeat and Full of Positive Affirmations about Killing and Hospitalizing People

2009-10-16T20:59:00.005-04:00

Ah, the ability to deny all responsibility for deaths and injury, despite the fact they happened under your direct orders and supervision.

James Arthur Ray seems clear that people died of their own volition in his "sweat lodge" not, for example, because of being denied food or water for 36+ hours beforehand.

examiner.com has an initial story (2 dead after hours in Ariz. sweat lodge identified) but much more interesting are a pair of posts by a columnist named Cassandra Yorgey.

Transcript of private call between James Ray and sweat lodge victims has plenty of disturbing quotes from Ray. Better yet is the quote in this section from Barb, a member of Ray's staff:

This, I think, is the worst part of the entire conference call. Barb is one of James Ray’s staff members and she goes on to talk “of the two that had passed and they left their bodies during the ceremony and had so much fun they chose not to come back and that was their choice that they made.” This is going to be really hard for James Ray and his people to explain when the autopsy results are released, because people do not cook themselves to death. They just don’t. Barb implying they do is asserting James Ray’s innocence and falsely supporting that the survivors are alive because they chose to live. In actuality, James Ray had to be interrupted and the participants were physically removed from the sweat lodge because they were not capable of transporting themselves.

Read the whole thing. Cassandra Yorgey has another piece which also deserves some attention: Inside accounts of James Ray sweat lodge tragedy and retreat.

I'd like to see Ray and his positive vibes in prison.

James Arthur Ray and Deaths by Fake "Sweat Lodge"

2009-10-14T22:43:00.005-04:00

So what happens when a Newage "guru" named James Arthur Ray kills two people and puts a bunch more in the hospital from a "sweat lodge" he led? So far, nothing.

Oprah put Mr. Ray on her show several times so he must be important. He was profiled in the bestselling book The Secret.

I highly recommend reading the posts over on Pàganachd Bhandia for some insight on the situation:

Plastic Death Sweat - 2 Dead, 3 Critical, 16 More Hospitalized
New Age Death Sweat II - NYT Editorial by Dr. Al Carroll
New Age Death Sweat III - Response by Arvol Lookinghorse (Lakota)

Celebrating The Progressive Magazine

2009-04-20T13:41:00.001-04:00

Over a month ago, I was going to write a piece in praise of The Progressive magazine. Their 100th anniversary issue had come out and I was duly impressed by the contents sampling their entire 100 year history.

While I've been reading The Progressive off and on for my entire adult life, I really was not aware of the history of the magazine and its pretty consistent, ah, progressive editorial perspective.

For example, in 1925 they took a stand against the attempts to eradicate Indian/Native American culture through the boarding school system.

This got me to thinking about the role of truly left-of-center magazines in US culture. (I use the qualifier "truly" because I don't particularly count, say, The Nation or The Atlantic. Mags like those are examples of the very conventional establishment talking to itself and not significantly challenging the status quo.)

I look at the newsstands packed with lifestyle mags, entertainment and celebrity pablum, and I wonder why people are so easily distracted from the central issues in their lives. We seem so helpless and hopeless, acted upon rather than actors.

I try to remember that revolution is always an option.

You should too.

25 Radical Ways to Change Society

2009-04-02T00:41:00.003-04:00

On Politicoholic, I came across a post on 25 Ways to use your blog and social media to create change.

I was struck by the weakly Liberal tone of many of the suggestions. Perhaps it's just the self-congratulatory attitude of self-importance permeating it that annoys me. The whole list reeks of "Look at me! I'm making a big change in the world! And I'm telling you all about it!"

While educating people has value, it isn't the same as actually effecting change with sweat and physical action. Most blogs are the equivalent of parlor pontification.

I started to wonder what a more radical version might look like, a version that put more emphasis on doing things in the world rather than just blogging about doing things. So here is my first attempt at such a list. It's repetitious in places but it's intended to mirror the original list linked above. I just re-wrote each numbered point as I came to it. It's not perfect but it's mine.

1. Start simple: Steal from large corporations.

2. Join an activist group, a group that performs direct action.

3. Or if there isn't a group with politics or an activist philosophy you agree with, create your own. Form a small group of trusted people and collectively decide on goals and actions.

4. Videoblog an interview with someone with radical political views. Ask them about strategies to transform society.

5. Share a meal with a stranger, someone not like you.

6. Has someone you love been affected by class warfare or capitalism's indifference to individual suffering?? Share your story and raise awareness.

7. Demand change from government and corporations. Be specific.

8. Petitions are rarely effective at changing institutions or governments. Do not delude yourself that they are useful.

9. Vlog a political demonstration. If there is a strong police presence, show it.

10. Twitter is a distraction. Don't mistake it for action.

11. Write about your experiences and concrete methods for transforming society, not in the future but now, today.

12. Instead of writing on how global human rights issues can be alleviated, volunteer at a soup kitchen, a homeless shelter, a free medical clinic. Find out how human rights are being violated in your neighborhood.

13. Participate in a political demonstration or protest. Get arrested.

14. Invite someone who is a political radical to mentor you.

15. Discuss how direct action can change society more than blogging.

16. Instead of correcting injustice through the proxies of non-profit and advocacy organizations, see if there is anything you can do in person. Be a participant, not a donor.

17. Highlight grassroots organizations.

18. Be involved in social justice/human rights efforts.

19. Create an effective means to implement social justice.

20. Discuss how school curricula stifles and suppresses citizen responsibility in students. Start independent student-led and student-run organizations. Empower students, don't patronize them.

21. Find out who profits from wars. Develop an analysis of imperialism and how it relates to colonialism. Apply it to the United States foreign policy over the last century.

22. Ask your readers to create a revolution, even a small one.

23. Spend less time blogging and reading blogs. Spend more time acting, deliberately and radically.

24. Participate.

25. Blogging has limited influence, on you and others. Acting transforms you and society deeply. Never mistake theory for practice. Do it. Do it now.

Random 10 Songs: "T.V. Scars, Glass Balls" Edition

2009-03-26T23:20:00.006-04:00

Tonight is eclipsed by memory, moon visions drifting in from the edges. I am hollow and enervated, sustained by letters of little import. These songs provide the soundtrack to my memory palace. See them...

Jesse Malin - Scars of Love
Richard Thompson - Johnny's Far Away
Small Faces - Donkey Rides, Penny A Glass
Savoy Brown Blues Band - Cold Blooded Woman
Shudder to Think - Take the Child
Cramps - She's Got Balls
Filter - Columind
Nils Lofgren - Rock And Roll Crook
Holy Bulls - T.V. Eye
Placebo - Centrefolds

Bonus track: Bob Dylan - Desolation Row

Historical Revisionism of the Weather Underground

2009-03-05T13:50:00.005-05:00

While watching an episode of the American remake of Life on Mars on TV, I was intrigued by a plotline that supposedly involved the Weather Underground. One bomb in the show killed three policemen and several civilians. A few other people were killed in subsequent bombings.

Now, Life on Mars is set in 1973 in New York City. At least part of the appeal of the show is it inhabits a real point in American history, a very specific milieu. Real historic events are often used as "color" for the characters' interactions and, in this particular case, a plot device.

In point of fact, as far as I know, only one death is attributed to a deliberate Weatherman bombing and even that one may not have been the Weathermen. The case was never solved and the Weathermen never claimed credit for it.

The manipulation or distortion of documented factual truth in service of drama is nothing new or unusual. TV shows are entertainment, not documentaries. Yet there is something to be learned here about historical memes and control of populations.

Today, signing an online petition to bring back a Victory garden to the White House is considered an important form of activism. Contributing money to MoveOn.com for lobbying and advertising is considered radical activism in some circles. Actually, these activities are merely normal, conventional and long-established ways of appealing to government for change. There is nothing remotely "radical" about such tactics. They are "feel-good" tactics, unlikely to significantly change things but, rather, to make the individual feel like they are demanding important change.

It's difficult to imaging a time when such mild tactics were sneered at by a sizable percentage of 16 to 30 year olds. Yet in a period where over a million Vietnamese had been killed in a "preemptive" war* and tens of thousands of US soldiers had been killed or maimed, it was considered very urgent to stop the US government from continuing the war in Vietnam. Anti-war protests seemed to be having no effect on US policy in 1970 when the Weatherman organization was at its peak activity level.

In the late 1960s and early '70s, political radicals were being arrested and some were being shot dead. For example, Fred Hampton of the Black Panthers was drugged, probably by a police informant, and killed in a police raid. The FBI's COINTELPRO was actively attacking leftist groups, usually by covert means but also through local police departments.

There isn't a lot of popular support today in the USA for the tactics of the Weatherman Underground, for the bombing of military recruitment offices and police stations. Yet there is almost always a context for such actions, a philosophy behind the tactics. The Weathermen didn't spring out of nowhere, a mad radical group flailing wildly without goals or reason.

I personally wouldn't endorse such actions but I'm also not unsympathetic to the impulse. Our political establishment is ponderous, difficult to affect, massively influenced by corporate money and lobbyists. Petitions and rallies don't change things. Elections rarely change things significantly or quickly.

This brings me back to the issue of historic revisionism in popular culture. Life on Mars writers opted to rearrange actual events. The motive behind the bombings in the episode isn't political, it's a personal vendetta. Superficial political trappings fall aside to reveal simple personal revenge, and misdirected revenge at that. In one fell swoop, the episode discredits the Weathermen as petty, misinformed and misdirected. It attributes historically inaccurate killings to the Weathermen, boosting the boogeyman factor of the group. Because if the group is illogical and murderous, people won't look too deeply at the historic record.

There is a strongly articulated view today saying all that '60s protest stuff was just silly self-indulgence by pampered white college kids. It wasn't important. It wasn't significant. It was immaturity run rampant.

I don't believe this view. I highly recommend reading some of the manifestos that came out of the time period in the USA. You might be surprised and inspired.

The Black Panther Party - Ten Point Platform & Program (October 1966)

Port Huron Statement, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), (June 1962)

------
*The Domino Theory foreign policy rationale of the 1950s-1960s is roughly equivalent to the "Stop the terrorists there so we don't have to stop them here" rationale for US intervention in Iraq.

Basic Economics: Necessities

2009-02-09T12:47:00.003-05:00

With all the talk about stimulating the "consumer" economy, I can't help but question the basic assumptions behind this approach.

At heart, modern capitalism is designed to devour the lower tiers of society without mercy. Capitalism only cares if you have money, materials or labor. This can be simplified as the ability to create products or to purchase them. The needs of society and its members are moot, literally inconsequential to the process of acquiring capital resources. Or rather it is only important as it affects labor or the consumer ends of the equation.

Humans have a few very basic needs to merely survive from day-to-day: nourishing food, clean water, adequate shelter. Coming close on those is social interaction/community, basic health care, meaningful work and some leisure time. (Some might contest the necessity of leisure time but I'd argue that without it many people lose something intrinsic to their humanity.)

US society is exceptionally artificial and alienated from the natural world in many ways. The vast majority of Americans live in urban centers or the sub-urban communities surrounding these centers. This affects those basic needs.

A prime example of is food. No urban center is able to feed itself. Think about that for a moment. There is no farmland to speak of in an urban center. No significant livestock. Because of this, if there was a significant disruption of our transportation system, cities would begin starving almost immediately. I'm not talking a terrorist attack. Just an increase in the price of gas to affect truckers would do it. The peak price of gas last summer created a crisis for truckers.

While the Cold Warriors have been busy congratulating themselves about the collapse of the Soviet Union, we've been placid about the problems of capitalism. No society or economic system is so prosperous and perfect that it can't collapse catastrophically.

I'd like to see a society that provides for the basic needs of its people. The USA isn't doing this.

Random 10 Songs: "Godfathers Love Rattlesnake Ashes" Edition

2009-02-08T00:31:00.005-05:00

Apparently unclear on the casual nature of blogging, I neglect this corner storefront. So here is another relatively empty post of music titles.

Bowie, David - Ashes to Ashes
Teenage Fanclub - Your Love Is the Place Where I Come From
Fleetwood Mac/Peter Green - Rattlesnake Shake [Live]
Rú-Rá - Two Pence Worth
The Caravans - Know Your Rights
Lightnin' Hopkins - Woman, Woman
Talking Heads - Crosseyed and Painless
Placebo - My Sweet Prince
Godfathers - Just Like You
The Donnas - You Don't Wanna Call

Bonus track: Fleetwood Mac - Oh Well

Nixon v Bush

2009-01-22T18:49:00.004-05:00

In 2005, I created this image from the iconic photo of Richard Nixon leaving the White House after his resignation.

At that time, I had the hope that Bush 43 would leave in disgrace, forced from office by scandal and massive popular sentiment. I didn't expect it, but I hoped nonetheless. Now he's gone and it seems appropriate to revisit the picture. Good riddance to bad rubbish.

Gone, Bush, Gone!

2009-01-22T18:26:00.003-05:00

Like a "farewell to arms," I see Bush 43 in my rear view mirror, receding into the distance. As a tribute to my various cruel renderings of him, I'm going to re-post a few.

How sweet was the mocking of Bush! The jagged distortion, the manifest ugliness of his soul blooming and festering in images as he was morphed into monkey and goblin faces for my pleasure and amusement.

Now the birds have begun to sing as he limps resentfully into decline and oblivion. If only early dementia could find him in the public eye.

At risk on Facebook

2009-01-10T15:35:00.004-05:00

I've recently joined Facebook (FB). I'm busy reconnecting with old friends there. There are all sorts of little applications on FB, often with admirable goals. One called (Lil) Green Patch contributes money to "save" rainforest areas from deforestation. Quite how it does this isn't exactly clear to me.

There are "causes" you can join and "gifts" you can give and all of these little apps require that you give consent to allow them access to your profile and your friends list. I followed up on a few of the "privacy policies" and found the usual bafflegab and legal doublespeak designed less to explain things clearly to users and rather more to protect the companies from consequences. Of course they say the info they collect will be kept anonymous. Uh-huh. Sure. I trust you...

Now here's an interesting thing about Facebook that may be totally obvious to people but I think is worth exploring: FB is for reconnecting with people from your past or current classmates or whatever. Because it is used as an online version of a real-world social network, people usually use their real names. That is, their legal names. To do otherwise sort of defeats the central purpose of the site.

In most online sites or fora elsewhere on the internet, real names are optional. People pick handles of various sorts for these fora: variants of their name with birth year, a Star Wars character, etc. On FB, however, your central account will be tied to you as an identifiable person with an online resume of sorts.

Now the settings seem to default to only allowing your "friends" access to your information. It's not really that Google-able in this mode. But when you allow one of these numerous apps/companies to work with your FB account, you are allowing access to this same information. Where it goes from there is anybody's guess.

While this raw info may be anonymous and stripped of a real name, I suspect the info in these exported accounts is close to real and accurate personal data. I also suspect that cross-referencing this data with other public info could create a rather more detailed than usual file on someone.

Is this happening? Probably not but I don't know. If you trust online companies to protect your personal data from misdirection or misuse, you've got more faith in human nature than I do.

So I've been very cautious about this on FB. I tend to not use my legal name in most online fora and perhaps I'm feeling a little twitchy about dangers of FB than is necessary. Everything ends up on the public internet eventually but I'd really like to limit what's available.

Recent Documentaries

2008-12-27T22:17:00.003-05:00

I'm a bit of a documentary lover so a fair number of docs make their way into my DVD player. Here are a few I've seen recently.

A series called "Speaking Freely" has five volumes so far. Some may find them boring because the format has the subject talking for fifty minutes at a pop. There are a few edits to break it up into subject sections but that's it. No questions, no on-screen interviewer. At least, not in the two I've seen.

Speaking Freely Volume 4: Chalmers Johnson is excellent. Mr. Chalmers has a fascinating history including a stint as a CIA analyst. During the Cold War, he was a hawkish Cold Warrior. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the failure of the US to draw down their military in the aftermath led him to view the US as an imperialist power. Quite a change in perspective. He's an engaging speaker (he's a professor) and his analysis is clear and understandable. Five out of five spies in from the cold.

Speaking Freely Volume 3: Ray McGovern is a little less engaging but still very educational. Mr. McGovern was a CIA analyst for a long time but became disillusioned by the politicization of the agency. His familiarity with the intelligence community give added weight to his perspective. 4 out of 5 spies.

I had high expectations for Standard Operating Procedure (IMDb listing) by Errol Morris. While I enjoyed it, I was a little underwhelmed. I was particularly interested in seeing the uncensored photos and videos from Abu Ghraib. I'm sure these can be found online but I've never looked. The doc puts them into context and perspective and give a bit of a timeline for them. Memorable appalling moment: Lynndie England speaking about the infamous image of the hooded detainee on a box with his arms spread and wires attached to him. The detainee was told that if he fell off the box, he would be electrocuted. (The wires were not hooked up to any power source.) Ms. England says it was just words, not torture. How can only words be torture? Overall, though, it was a rather narrow perspective, rarely surfacing beyond the immediate group of MPs blamed for the events. 2.5 out of 5.

The Mirage of the American Dream

2008-12-25T17:30:00.003-05:00

The week between Christmas and the turning of the calendar on New Year's Day is often a time of reflection, of gathering the strands of the past year, of planning for the future. It is a time of resolutions, a time of renewed determination, a time to envision change.

The inexorable collapse of the US financial system is perhaps a sign for us, all Americans, to rethink our priorities on a personal basis. As a society, we're used to consuming impulsively, to reflexive pleasure-seeking.

Our economy is not predicated on the well-being and health of the citizens or meaningful security of food and shelter. Instead, our capitalism consumes us, selling us fantasies on TV, entrancing us with empty celebrity news. We live other people's lives on "unscripted dramas" and we give little thought to creating a sustainable way of life. The captains of industry grow rich and use us, discarding the vast majority of Americans in the name of profit.

One report I saw recently estimated that half of the US bailout dispensed to banks so far went to shareholders of the banks, not to increase reserves or loans. Of course it's difficult to know because there is no way to check how the money is used. No requirement for the institutions to report how they are using the bailout money. Now the banks are saying they have no way of tracking how the money is used. Banks that don't have a way of tracking money that comes in and goes out? Now there's a fable for modern America.

Qui bono? Who benefits? It doesn't take a brilliant flash of "Eureka!" to see that the wealthy benefit. The system is set up that way. The poor-but-patriotic go off to fight a war and the majority of workers live in fear of job loss in an instant.

As usual, the supporters of the financial bailout say the benefits will trickle down to the workers, to "Main Street," eventually. I've heard this before. Actually, it is the continual refrain of American capitalism to the vast majority of workers: "You'll get yours in the sweet by-and-by."

So we are learning to watch the scrambling, the sliding of wealth down the drain. We are waking up to a new vision, a new awareness of where our money comes from, who our work benefits.

There's a bumper sticker that reads "Think Globally, Act Locally." There is a wisdom in that epigraph.

Winter Soldiers and War Machines

2008-12-12T17:51:00.006-05:00

Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) sponsored Winter Soldier in March, 2008, an eyewitness indictment of atrocities committed by US troops during the ongoing occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan. For the most part, this event and the testimony offered has been ignored by the mainstream press. The story was #9 in the Top 25 Censored Stories for 2009.

The myth of the "clean" war and the uniformly honorable behavior of US soldiers in times of war is a persistent one. War is never waged honorably. Perhaps it has never been so. Civilians are always killed and those viewed as the enemy are regularly brutalized, maimed, and killed even when weaponless and in custody. Their status as the "enemy" makes them subhuman or non-human.

For soldiers, war is often a maelstrom of situational ethics and mission orders, of tribal oaths against evil outsiders, of hate and fear.

Because of the intimate intertwining of individual soldiers with a fantastically strong and monolithic command structure, it becomes difficult to separate opposition to a war from so-called support for the troops.

That there is a strong sense of honor and patriotism among most individual US soldiers is a given. The bonds of loyalty squad or platoon members have for each other are strong. Tests of courage, of life and death under fire, reach deep. This is the special domain of the warrior's experience and it is difficult for most civilians to really grasp what it is like.

If this seems like I'm contradicting what I've written further up, the relevant factor is the command structure itself. While soldiers and field commanders have some latitude on how to accomplish "objectives" logistically on the ground, often they are constrained by other standing commands or lack of particular resources.

For example, lack of adequate translators leads to an inability of troops to communicate with civilians or prisoners. When compounded by opposition forces without readily visible uniforms to identify them using unconventional tactics like IEDs, this leads to a self-protective attitude of universal suspicion.

Questioning the War in Iraq is not remotely like questioning the integrity or courage of individual soldiers. Yet the proponents of the war consistently accuse those against the war of doing just that. This is a classic instance of misdirection, false blame, and the use of a straw man argument.

Yet here we are, many years into the war, still hearing these calumnies and "Why do you hate America?"

Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss

2008-12-07T11:22:00.004-05:00

As Prez-Elect Obama fills out his cabinet and administration positions I'm reminded of the inevitable strength of the "establishment" in maintaining consistency of policy.

Many people are (justly) dazzled and proud of the achievement of electing Obama President. Cynical me, I try to look beyond symbolism and appearance. National politics is more about advertising than substance, collective vision/illusion more than policy, about aspirational hopes more than reality.

Despite Obama's claim that he will set the tone and agenda of his administration, the number of conservatives praising his cabinet choices seems curious and discouraging to me.

We seem to be a nation easily impressed by surface appearances and symbolic narratives. The strong celebrity worship nurtured by Hollywood and TV is part of it but it's more than that. We are prone to collective self-delusion when it comes to political leaders.

Already the signs are there from Obama: Reneging on campaign promises, compromise on US troop withdrawal from Iraq, a weaker approach to economic problems, and the list goes on.

Since Franklin D. Roosevelt, our political process has basically been a very conservative one. We do not like big changes despite the slogan of the past election. Obama was the face of change, but actual change? Not so much by the indications so far.

Radicals do not get to be party nominees. Hell, Liberals can barely be heard in the debates. The winnowing process starts long before it ever get to the conventions, by the media and by the party brokers. Candidates who really desire to change things do not get to the end of the process.

I hope I'm wrong. I see the small telltale signs and my heart begins to sink. Symbolism is not policy.

This is all preliminary impressions, though, and from indirect signs. Obama is not yet in office. We haven't seen what he'll do in the first 100 days.

So we wait and we watch.

Debtor Suicides

2008-12-01T23:02:00.005-05:00

With foreclosures and overwhelming personal debt ravaging American society, I was surprised that I had not come across more about rising suicide rates. Apparently this is because few people want to know about it. "The Rising Body Count on Main Street: The Human Fallout from the Financial Crisis" By Nick Turse examines some of these stories that peek out behind the better-covered macro view.

I've personally experienced the depths of desperation evoked by rising debt. It is an ugly, dead-end feeling, hopeless and bottomless. It's not like I'm an extravagant spender. I'm childless and my vices are few: used books (not rare books), magazines, and used CDs (yes, I still buy music CDs; is my age showing?) I don't buy gadgets or console/computer games. My cell phone is 7 years old. So here are some excerpts from the article.

In February, when a sheriff's deputy went to serve an eviction notice on a home owner in Greeley, Colorado, he found the man had slashed his wrists and was lying in a pool of blood. Rushed to a nearby hospital, the man survived, while the Sheriff's office tried to downplay economic reasons for the incident, saying, according to the Denver Post, that "it wasn't linking the suicide attempt to the eviction because the man had known for a week that he was to be kicked out."

In March, Ocala, Florida resident Roland Gore killed his dog and his wife, set fire to his home which was in foreclosure, and then killed himself.

In April, Robert McGuinness, a 24-year-old process server, arrived at the Marion County, Florida doorstep of Frank W. Conrad. According to an article in the local Star Banner, the 82-year-old Conrad was reportedly "cordial" at first. When McGuinness produced the foreclosure notice, however, Conrad got angry and left the room. He returned with a .38 caliber pistol and announced, "You have two seconds to get off my property or you will go to the hospital." Marion County sheriff's deputies later arrested Conrad....

Pinellas Park, Florida resident Dallas Dwayne Carter was a 44-year-old disabled, single dad who lost his job, fell into debt, and was faced with eviction. "He always talked about needing help -- financially and help with the kids," neighbor Kevin Luster told the St. Petersburg Times. On July 19th, Carter apparently called the police to say he was armed and disturbed. When they arrived, Carter fired his pistol and rifle inside the apartment, before emerging and pointing his weapons at the officers on the scene. Police say they ordered him to drop them. When he didn't, they killed him in a 10-round fusillade.

On July 23d, about 90 minutes before her foreclosed Taunton, Massachusetts home was scheduled to be sold at auction, Carlene Balderrama faxed a letter to her mortgage company, letting them know that "by the time they foreclosed on the house today she'd be dead." She continued, "I hope you're more compassionate with my husband and son than you were with me." After that, she took a high-powered rifle and, according to the Boston Globe, shot herself. In an interview with the Associated Press, Balderrama's husband John said, "I had no clue." His wife handled the finances and had been intercepting letters from the mortgage company for months. "She put in her suicide note that it got overwhelming for her," he said. In the letter, she wrote, "take the [life] insurance money and pay for the house."

Self-Reflective Tautology

2008-12-01T18:34:00.002-05:00

I'm once again entering one of my periodic phases of wondering what point or goal I'm pursuing with this blog. While I'm moderately entertained by crafting some of my individual posts, it remains rather random in scope and intent. One post will be relatively serious analysis with original synthesis of sources and the next might be a complete piece of fluff.

I've never really defined DemiOrator other than orienting it generally toward political subjects with some social commentary. Even that has often gone by the wayside in the last couple of years, with long stretches of very shallow content or no content at all.

My participation in the wider blogging community has also been completely non-existent for many months, leading to a reduction in my site traffic from other forums. While fame or a wide readership has never been my primary reason for blogging, I admit that my current traffic stats are a discouraging factor in continuing the project.

So I'm thinking of either abandoning this blog entirely in favor of one of my other online venues or seriously focusing and retooling it. The effort of such an overhaul seems daunting to me. I'm not that thrilled with Blogger anymore but I'm really not skilled enough at HTML to easily redesign it for another blogging site.

Truthfully, the name "DemiOrator" has begun to feel like a drag on me. It's a created word that feels awkward and difficult to use. I long to have some easily understandable blog name like "The Culture Ghost" or "Dark Wraith". OK, maybe those aren't the best examples but you probably get what I'm saying.

So I'm wondering and thinking about these things.

Over One Million Iraqi Deaths Caused by US Occupation

2008-11-28T20:37:00.005-05:00

Every year I await the arrival of Project Censored's Top 25 Censored Stories. I like to get the book version even though the basic stories are online. There's a fair amount of extra material in the book version not available online, making it worth the price in my opinion.

Their number one story was "Over One Million Iraqi Deaths Caused by US Occupation". These figures are consistently glossed over by the American press. I was shocked by this:

"...an Associated Press poll conducted in February 2007, which asked a representative sample of US residents how many Iraqis had died as a result of the war. The average respondent thought the number was under 10,000, about 2 percent of the actual total at that time."

The whole "we don't do body counts" attitude by the US military seems clearly designed to trivialize and marginalize the Iraqi dead and displaced.

Interviewers from the Lancet report of October 2006 (Censored 2006, #2) asked Iraqi respondents how their loved ones died. Of deaths for which families were certain of the perpetrator, 56 percent were attributable to US forces or their allies. Schwartz suggests that if a low pro rata share of half the unattributed deaths were caused by US forces, a total of approximately 80 percent of Iraqi deaths are directly US perpetrated.

Even with the lower confirmed figures, by the end of 2006, an average of 5,000 Iraqis had been killed every month by US forces since the beginning of the occupation. However, the rate of fatalities in 2006 was twice as high as the overall average, meaning that the American average in 2006 was well over 10,000 per month, or over 300 Iraqis every day. With the surge that began in 2007, the current figure is likely even higher.

A Day Without a Gay?

2008-11-26T23:23:00.005-05:00

I'm not really sure this will work but the rationales are good and the timing seems appropriate. So on 10 December 2008 (International Human Rights Day), call in "gay." Invisibility is one reason why people think they don't know anyone who is gay or lesbian. Even if you're not "out," I think participation is easy and won't necessarily force you out. It's early winter; lots of people get sick this time of year.

For more info, go to http://www.daywithoutagay.org/.

National Day of Mourning

2008-11-26T11:20:00.003-05:00

This is late but people around the Northeast may be interested in this event in Plymouth, Massachusetts.

UNITED AMERICAN INDIANS OF NEW ENGLAND
284 Amory Street Jamaica Plain, MA 02130
(617) 522-6626
E-mail: info@uaine.org
Website: www.uaine.org
ORIENTATION FOR 2008 NATIONAL DAY OF MOURNING

WHAT IS NATIONAL DAY OF MOURNING?
An annual tradition since 1970, Day of Mourning is a solemn, spiritual and highly political day. Many of us fast from sundown the day before through the afternoon of that day (and have a social after Day of Mourning so that participants in DOM can break their fasts). We are mourning our ancestors and the genocide of our peoples and the theft of our lands. NDOM is a day when we mourn, but we also feel our strength in political action. Over the years, participants in Day of Mourning have buried Plymouth Rock a number of times, boarded the Mayflower replica, and placed ku klux klan sheets on the statue of William Bradford, etc.

WHEN AND WHERE IS DAY OF MOURNING?
Thursday, November 27, 2008 (U.S. "thanksgiving" day) at Cole's Hill, Plymouth, Massachusetts, 12 noon SHARP. Cole's Hill is the hill above Plymouth Rock in the Plymouth historic waterfront area.

WILL THERE BE A MARCH?
There will be a march through the historic district of Plymouth. Plymouth has agreed, as part of the settlement of 10/19/98, that UAINE may march on Day of Mourning without the need for a permit as long as we give the town advance notice.
PROGRAM: Although we very much welcome our non-Native allies to stand with us at NDOM, it is a day when Native people only speak about our history and what is going on with us now and the struggles that are taking place throughout the Americas. Speakers will be by invitation only. This year's NDOM is once again dedicated to our brother Leonard Peltier.
SOCIAL: There will be a social held after the National Day of Mourning speak-out and march this year. It is possible that the hall that we have obtained is not large enough to seat everyone at once. We may have to do two seatings. Preference for the first seating will be given to Elders, children and their mother/caretaker, pregnant women, Disabled people, and people who have traveled a long distance to join National Day of Mourning. Please respect our culture and our wish to ensure that these guests will be the first to be able to sit and eat. With this understanding in mind, please bring non-alcoholic beverages, desserts, fresh fruit & vegetables, and pre-cooked items (turkeys, hams, stuffing, vegetables, casseroles, rice & beans, etc.) that can be easily re-warmed at the social hall. Thank you.
TRANSPORTATION: Limited carpool transportation may be available from Boston. Contact the Boston IAC Office at (617) 522-6626. There is transportation from New York City via the International Action Center, for more information call 212-633-6646.

Directions: National Day of Mourning is held by the statue of Massasoit at Cole's Hill. Cole's Hill is the hill rising above Plymouth Rock on the Plymouth waterfront. If you need directions, use Water Street and Leyden Street in Plymouth, MA as your destination at mapquest.com. That will bring you to within a few hundred feet of Plymouth Rock and Cole's Hill. You can probably find a place to park down on Water Street.

Donations: Monetary donations are gratefully accepted. Please make checks payable to the Metacom Education Project and mail to Metacom Education Project/UAINE at 284 Amory Street, Boston, MA 02130.

I am the Bitterness Amid Celebration

2008-11-05T11:59:00.003-05:00

Perhaps the reality of Obama's win is unhinging me. I should be, if not jubilantly happy, at least satisfied with the outcome. Yet I remain somewhat gloomy about it.

While everyone celebrates the milestone of Obama's win, I look at the things he probably will not do.

Troops will not be withdrawn from Iraq with any speed.

Troop levels in Afghanistan will probably be increased.

While Obama has said he will pursue diplomacy more actively, I very much doubt that will significantly decrease U.S. military interventions over the next four years. I suspect that realpolitik will be a central consideration rather than compassionate or idealistic generosity.

Whatever actions he takes on the economic front won't happen until after his inauguration. And whatever he does will probably take a long time to take effect.

As I've said, Obama is inheriting a huge pile of problems from Bush: systemic de-regulation, ideological politicization of science, demoralization of career civil servants, etc. The list is extensive and Obama will be hard pressed just to correct the shambles left by the Bushies, much less advance a positive agenda.

To be blunt, I haven't heard anything to lead me to believe Obama is anything but a centrist. While this is an enormously refreshing change from the extreme bellicose hard-heartedness of Bush, I remain unconvinced we will actually see substantive changes quickly in an Obama administration. I may be wrong. I hope I'm wrong.

"But," you sputter, "This is a historic moment, a shining beacon of achievement that renounces racism in America and affirms the highest aspirations of our Constitution! We have shown that America has moved beyond racial divisions!"

Uh-huh. That and US$3.50 will get you a latte. (For now.)

Even with the "mandate" Obama received from a large majority of the voters, his path will be enormously hard. He's an excellent rhetorician, an eloquent speaker who clearly articulates the desires of many Americans but it's difficult to judge how effective he will be.

However much I want Obama to succeed and accomplish a re-invigorated liberal agenda, he will be constrained by enormously powerful economic and political forces. I am certainly not pointing a finger at some vague free-floating racism but at the resistance of the system itself to change.

I hope for change but my expectations are exceedingly low.

If he doesn't accomplish some major items quickly, I strongly expect all that wonderful goodwill flowing from the electorate in these celebratory moments will turn to resentment.

No one falls faster than a hero.

I'm sorry if this all comes across as harsh or overly judgmental of a man who hasn't been President-elect for even 24 hours. I'm sorry to rain on this golden parade of optimism and bright visions of the future I see blooming everywhere. I'm sorry to cast doubt on accomplishments yet to come.

My contrarian nature has emerged to spoil the party and I am sorry.

Rashid Khalidi's Connections to Obama... And McCain

2008-11-03T15:02:00.002-05:00

This item was on Democracy Now! on 10/30/08 and the sheer gall behind the "accusation" made me laugh aloud. The contradiction is ineffably amusing. [All emphasis mine]:

McCain Faults Obama for Ties to Professor He Once Funded

On the Republican side, Senator McCain has revived an old attack on Obama by bringing up his alleged ties to Palestinian American professor Rashid Khalidi. Khalidi teaches Arab Studies at Columbia University, where he also heads the Middle East Institute. The McCain campaign has cited few allegations against Khalidi aside from the fact that he is a Palestinian and supports Palestinians’ right to resist Israeli military occupation. Speaking last night on CNN’s Larry King Live, McCain criticized the LA Times for refusing to release a video of Obama appearing at a 2003 event honoring Khalidi.

Larry King: “Speaking of newspapers, there is the LA Times.”

Sen. John McCain: “Yeah.”

King: “They apparently—your campaign says that they’re suppressing videotape of a 2003 banquet when Barack Obama praised Palestinian activist and scholar Rashid Khalidi. What’s this all—what is this?”

Sen. McCain: “Why shouldn’t they—”

King: “Why would the paper suppress this?”

Sen. McCain: “I have no idea. If they have the tape, they ought to make the American people aware of it, let them see it and make their own judgment. Frankly, I’ve been in a lot of political campaigns, a whole lot. I’ve never seen anything like this, where a major media outlet has information and a tape of some occasion—maybe it means nothing. Maybe it’s just a social event. I don’t know. But why should they not release it? And why shouldn’t the Obama campaign want it released?”

King: “Is this Palestinian some sort of terrorist?”

Sen. McCain: “We know that at that time, the PLO was a terrorist organization.”

King: “He was PLO?”

Sen. McCain: “Yeah, yeah—that’s what the allegation is, Larry. I haven’t seen the tape. So—but we should see the tape to make it—the American people make a judgment.”

McCain went on to compare Obama’s appearance at the dinner to appearing at a “Neo-Nazi” event. The LA Times says it won’t release the tape because of a promise made to the source who provided it. Khalidi has never worked as a spokesperson for the PLO. McCain’s attack on Khalidi marks the latest in a series of efforts to disparage Obama because of real or concocted ties to Arabs and Muslims. Khalidi is a respected scholar who has called for a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict in accordance with a majority of public opinion in the US and worldwide. The so-called Khalidi “controversy” also comes as a surprise in light of McCain’s own previous ties to Khalidi’s work on behalf of Palestinian rights. During the 1990s, McCain chaired the International Republican Institute when it gave several grants to Khalidi’s Center for Palestine Research and Studies.

Is Palin the Future of the GOP?

2008-10-29T10:32:00.004-04:00

I'm not so much interested in the question as how many news stories are talking about it.

It's not much of a surprise though; Palin is the current golden girl because of her VP run. McCain is obviously not going to run again if he loses and all those folks from the primaries are just memories at the moment. This will change after the election, assuming McCain/Palin lose the election.

The New York Times says:

Brent Bozell, president of the Media Research Center, a conservative group, called it a “top order of business” to determine Ms. Palin’s future role. “Conservatives have been looking for leadership, and she has proven that she can electrify the grass roots like few people have in the last 20 years,” Mr. Bozell said. “No matter what she decides to do, there will be a small mother lode of financial support behind her.”

Unless Palin is really developing her skills, it's difficult for me to see her in the Presidency except as a front for other interests/power brokers. She may be top dog in Alaska but that is not saying much compared to a broader political stage.

The superficial similarities to the current Bush are difficult to ignore. (Although I think Palin comes by her "folksy" mannerisms more honestly than Bush.) The appeal of the "shucks, I'm just like you" factor isn't to be discounted but I don't think it really plays well in these times. Even four years from now, it's unlikely that our economy will be in great shape. The "drill, baby, drill" motto won't solve our longterm energy problems. Her foreign policy approach until now has been shallow and naive. Unless she (or her team) can work up a more nuanced approach to issues, she remains all surface and no depth. Undoubtedly, those who will try to educate her will be the Neocons.

I don't think she's stupid. It's possible she will get up to speed, particularly if she has four years to prepare, but I personally think it's a losing proposition for the GOP to go with her as the future. Just because she "galvanized" the GOP base this time around doesn't mean she's a good candidate. The longer you look at her positions and responses, the less there is to her appeal. Smiles and winks are not substantive positions.

The Death of Long Form Blogging and My Mild Protest

2008-10-28T15:47:00.002-04:00

Wired has an Op-ed piece that basically says essay-type blogging is an outdated form. for common people. Really, you should be doing the Twitter and Flickr. Ain'tcha burning with Web 4.0 passion to haiku-ize your life in microbursts?

My amusement is showing. And radio killed newspapers and TV killed radio and the internet killed all of them. (Well there's a little truth in the last one.)

While haiku-like 160 character messages are fine for some purposes if your main communication tool is the cell phone, it's hardly a nuanced or complete source.

I think this is a reaction to the information overload many people feel from all the myriad sources out there competing for their attention. Instead of learning to evaluate sources and carefully pick which to follow, we now have short notes of dubious value and probably subject to misinterpretation.

This strikes me as a solution for people who don't like to read. Perhaps they feel intimidated by reading. All those different words all strung together in long sentences. It's a lot easier to write or read "im gr8 hw r u?"

I'm still waiting for grunts of pleasure and displeasure to come into the public discourse as debating points.

Floodgates Open on Obama Endorsements So Why am I Unhappy?

2008-10-24T12:56:00.005-04:00

For some reason I was surprised when the New York Times (NYT) endorsed Barack Obama in the Presidential race. This is, to me, both encouraging and dismaying.

In recent days, a number of people and groups have endorsed Obama: Colin Powell, former Massachusetts Gov. William Weld, Scott McClellan as well as a large majority of newspapers.

Now why would I find this dismaying? Endorsements like these certainly won't hurt Obama's chances. The NYT's endorsement in particular emphasizes McCain's responses to the current economic problems as out of touch and lacking in forward vision. Yet it also shows the establishment/elite comfortableness with Obama. In other words, Obama will find solutions within limits acceptable to the political and financial establishment. This doesn't mean the solutions might not be painful for them but they are willing to accept the probable parameters and limits of the actions.

If you read about these opinions in the newspaper or see it on the TV, you will be looking at elite opinion, not the opinions of working-class people. Studies have shown that the views aired in these forums are from an incredibly narrow political and social spectrum.

I don't mean to belittle Obama's accomplishments or his ability to inspire. Yet despite all that, my expectations for substantive change after his election remains low and muted.

Part of me wonders if this is some unconscious racism on my part seeking justification but I think not. It's my cynicism about the US political process over the last 45 years. The process is intended to winnow out candidates unacceptable to the established order, not to provide change. Slogans are not change.

Perhaps my attitude is a result of a lo-o-o-oong string of disappointments in the elective arena over decades of experience. I no longer get my hopes up. Then I'm pleasantly surprised when the elected official even minutely exceeds an exceptionally low bar.

I wish Obama the best. I want him to win. I just don't expect to be remotely satisfied by his actions after taking office. He will not be free to take radical action. This is the reality of Presidential politics: There will be political debts to be paid. No one reaches the White House without being bound by these debts.

The Disease of Libertarianism

2008-10-22T22:48:00.004-04:00

Libertarianism is a political philosophy. All the Libertarians that I've ever known have been white males, often with an income higher than the average American.

I find Libertarianism to be almost pathologically anti-social. I can find a few issues where Libertarians and I share common ground (changing draconian illegal drug laws/penalties, for example.) But in the main, the lack of compassion and insistence on ruthless social Darwinism strikes me as repugnant and selfish.

This is on my mind because there is a question on the ballot this year, undoubtedly promoted by Libertarians, asking whether to abolish the income tax in Massachusetts. (Pros and cons)

I couldn't contain my laughter when the argument "for" the abolition said that this wouldn't make town tax rates go up. Let me name a few of the things state income taxes help subsidize.

Road construction and maintenance
Schools
Police and fire departments

The idea that private enterprise or corporations will step in to provide for the commonwealth and societal needs is remarkably naive, perhaps deliberately so. I can't help but wonder at the possible motivation to capitalize on the "opportunities" inherent in the withdrawal of state organization and resources. The result of this tack is more people falling to the bottom. And it's remarkably easy to take advantage of desperate and poor people willing to do anything to stay afloat.

This is why I doubt Libertarianism will ever become widely popular: It despises poor people.

Election News Sources

2008-10-20T12:51:00.003-04:00

I'm pretty late in attempting to round up some good sources for election news and polls but with the clock ticking down to two weeks, it still might be useful to some folks.

First is FiveThirtyEight.com where a plethora of charts and poll results examine the current state of affairs. I also found this blog entry on Palin titled "The Wikipedian Candidate" an interesting read.

Out of time now but I plan to come back and expand this entry.

The Battle of Cynicism and Hope

2008-10-19T22:39:00.004-04:00

Fierce Celt, my housemate, steadfastly refrains from investing too much in the outcome of the Presidential election. Given the outcome of the last few elections, she maintains there is no telling what will happen so why get your hopes up? I'm a reluctant realist when it comes to politics: Voters don't always have the clear say over the results on election day.

Republican political fixers certainly influenced the outcome of 2000 and the 2004 results doesn't seem all that clear either considering the numerous problems with "caging" voters and voter roll purges.

Like the X-Files tagline, I want to believe in fair elections in the USA but manipulators work hard to affect the final count. I don't mean the normal heat of elections, accusations and self-praise flowing in abundance from both camps. That's just the normal political jockeying for position and to be expected.

Our voting system is so flawed in execution that I sometimes wonder why impartial international observers don't monitor the vote counting. Electronic voting machines are still astonishingly problematic and so full of glitches I can't believe they are used at all. There is no guarantees of their accuracy and the companies manufacturing them have documented close ties to the Republican Party, something that doesn't exactly generate confidence in the impartiality of their programming.

It's obvious my cynicism is ascendant and rampant.

I just can't believe in a system that continually tries to deny access to many citizen voters. It is the Republicans who seem to have mastered the art of constricting access in their favor. No one tries to deny voters in well-off neighborhoods their franchise. It's always the poor and working class who suffer the attention of self-styled gatekeepers crying "voter fraud" to exclude them.

Democracy is supposed to be built on the basic right of citizens to vote politicians into and out of office. Once this is circumvented, we are left at the mercy of white collar thieves and professional manipulators. We lose faith in the basic credibility of the election system. This leads to a sense of powerlessness and of being helpless pawns.

In the face of my cynicism, I'm left with hope that the system isn't anywhere as corrupt as it seems. But hope isn't much of a comfort in these dark times. It feels more like a crutch, an illusion best ignored.

Yet I still hope.

The Fraud of Voter Registration Fraud

2008-10-17T12:34:00.004-04:00

It seems particularly lame and disingenuous for the Republican/McCain camps to cry "foul" over voter registration fraud. Despite studies that show that such fraud isn't extensive or exceptionally organized beyond very local levels, they keep hammering ACORN.

ACORN (The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now), which is at the center of the current allegations, has a factsheet on the issue which is worth reading.

This Washington Post article examined the issue in 2007 during the blow-up over the Attorney General firings.

By contrast, the efforts by Republicans to exclude eligible voters under the pretext of voter fraud is both persistent and very well documented.

These are the technical tactics of politics: making sure the right people are able to vote.

Now is the Time When I Curse My Blog Coding...

2008-10-12T15:59:00.003-04:00

When I first started blogging, I settled into Blogger because it was easy and fast to set up.

That was over four years ago and 1,100 posts ago.

Since then, I've added a few customizations to the code, sitemeters and such. Then I began noticing that DemiOrator was throwing up pop-ups when it loaded. I ignored it for a long time but I just figured out it was one of the site statistics scripts so I've deleted it from the code. This seems to have solved the annoying problem. And I'm kind of pissed about it. I should have known that they would take the opportunity to make some money but I still don't like it and particularly not the use of pop-up ads.

This brings me to the current rub: I've made noises before about switching to different blogging software and I think the time is ripe now. You know, get a domain and host it myself.

My web host has Wordpress as an automatic install. It seems like a good platform but if anyone has input, I'd love to hear from you.

I've only the most rudimentary of HTML coding skills and still have trouble keeping CSS coding straight. I need to get better sometime so why not now? Hardly a resounding carpe diem but that's life.

Death-throes of My Reasoned Discourse

2008-10-08T21:00:00.003-04:00

I find myself feeling distinctly irrational tonight. The calm marshaling of argument, the ordering of points in support of a thesis, the use of supportive documentation and links... These are all tools beyond me at the moment.

Bleak cynicism grips me. American democracy strikes me as casino gambling, the odds always inevitably weighed in favor of the House. Structured to resist drastic change, we still pretend that the outcome of elections will bring substantial change.

It. Will. Not. Bring. Change.

I genuinely believe an Obama/Biden administration will be better for the country than McCain/Palin. Co-existing with this belief is my fundamental certainty that Obama's hands will be tied in many different ways if/when he gets into office. Many rhetorical and political promises will come up empty in the ensuing years. "Change" will turn to the long wait, to delay, to the study of myriad options. Congress will balk, always with reasonable explanations as to why action is ill-advised.

These are the days of dust and tears.

These are the days of terrible lies.

These are the days of political abuse coated with sugared words.

I'm tired of pretending that rational public discussion and debate will change the actions of politicians. In the vast majority of cases, it does not.

Constituent calls to Congresscritters on the US$700 billion economic bailout bill ran hundreds to one against passing it. (One Representative I heard actually said it was 1000:1 against it in his office.) Yet, despite this enormous public outcry, five days later it was passed.

America runs on money and power and influence in lofty circles. The vast majority of us live in the land of the screwed, the scrimping and scrounging wage-slave beggars, at the mercy of the vast economic forces of Capitalism. Those in power need only put on the appearance of care and concern. Only exceptionally overreaching illegality is caught at that level.

So tonight I'm just bitter at the whole degenerate mess of politics. Reason is lost to disgust and distrust.

The impulse to foment revolution begins to seem attractive and desirable.

Cosmetic change is not real change; it is the illusion of change that placates, calms, gentles the populace.

Someday, the hypnotized will wake on fire and wonder when it began. I don't want to wait that long.

Vacant Debates: My Blank Response

2008-10-08T12:20:00.003-04:00

Another Presidential candidate debate down, one more to go. I'm left without sharp edges or persistently lingering points of exceptional import.

Living in the age of opinionators rather than analyzers, factoid reporters rather than fact checkers, we are left without clear understanding of truth. Claims are presented without contrast, without context, leaving loudness and aggression as the clearest memory.

I look for follow-up analysis and find only partisan cheerleading or carefully balanced gray reportage. All this is carefully choreographed to create the iconic representations of the candidates. War hero maverick. Calm assured diplomat. Rainbow Brite frontier woman w/ maverick highlights. (I've got nothing for Biden except experienced but occasionally gaffe-prone white guy which seems thin even to me.)

Winners of a particular debate are variously declared using specific or specious criteria: polls, style, audience, expectations. Because there has to be a winner and a loser. There are no stark contradictions. There are no lies, no misrepresentations in the mainstream reports. They leave those to be presented by the campaigns.

What would it be like if every campaign claim and counterclaim were strictly analyzed for verifiable facts? For a candidate's historical positions? Deconstruct the assertions with clarity and without bias and see what comes out the other end.

Instead we are tribes battling, shouting taunts and incoherent epithets back and forth, caught up in the identity politics and issues cleaving the body politic.

Color me blank.

The Camden 28

2008-10-06T00:16:00.003-04:00

As I watched The Camden 28 tonight, I was reminded that war and protests against war in the USA have shifted.

This action in 1971 was a shrewd tactical protest against the war with very specific concrete and achievable goals. While there were flaws in the planning (notably infiltration by an agent provocateur for the FBI), it was in the tradition of the previous Catholic "left" actions such as the events around the Catonsville Nine.

Do actions like this still happen? If they do, they don't seem to get much press.

Odds and Ends post-VP Debate

2008-10-03T09:50:00.004-04:00

Sarah Palin easily exceeded expectations for her in the VP debate. Or at least the parts I saw. Her "folksy" style began to grate on me after a while and I left for significant portions after the first half hour.

Whether a deliberately developed persona or not, Palin's "I'm one of you" public face is the result of Ronald Reagan's influence on politics. Much as I despise almost the entirety of Reagan's policies, many Americans apparently liked his easy manner and communication style. He lied, deliberately misrepresented, or forgot facts and events but, shucks, he made it seem like he just forgot to pick up the milk on the way home from work rather than distorting critical information and decisions related to his Presidency. In the latter years, it's possible that Alzheimer's was affecting him but that hardly accounts for the vast majority.

The real question is whether many Americans will think that style is preferable to substance and competence. Palin's responses were often full of deliberately self-conscious "hockey mom" references, catchphrases and isolated facts obviously prepared for her. Biden had some moments like that but he also showed comfortable comprehension of the information for the most part.

I admit I'm biased toward the Obama/Biden side but I also have to say I'm not inclined to believe what either Dems or Repubs say. At the national level, both represent elite money interests to a greater or lesser degree. Yet I heard the most incredible things from Palin, statements that obviously contradicted McCain's long record and beliefs up to that point. The clearest pandering I saw from the stage easily came from Palin.

In most other election years, a VP candidate is hardly an important factor to consider. Considering McCain's history of serious illness and his age at 72, Palin becomes more of a factor on their ticket. The odds of her ascending to the Presidency if elected are higher than usual. This is why she is being scrutinized so thoroughly.

I'm not impressed by her abilities so far and I've seen much that worries me.

Palin vs. Biden: Hilarious Hijinx or Serious Debate?

2008-10-02T13:20:00.004-04:00

I'm looking forward to the Palin/Biden debate tonight. I don't know if I'm expecting a train wreck or a skillful rhetorical dance.

There's been a lot of advice to each side in the media lately so I doubt whether either side will be surprised. The big question is whether Palin can think on her feet after undoubtedly being drilled endlessly on her responses on major issues. The few interviews she's done since her nomination indicate she's a poor study so far but I suspect the campaign handlers have taken these lessons to heart. They will do everything they can to compensate and make sure she knows basic policy answers cold.

I still don't know the contract details of the event but the format of short, 90 second answers, will curtail meanderings from both. Palin has shown a tendency to sometimes flail wildly to very specific questions when she is uncertain of the answer. Extensive rehearsals will probably reduce that response.

My understanding is that Biden tends to wander and elaborate too much, probably a much easier habit to curtail and focus into the time period than Palin's previous gaps in policy knowledge.

I suspect at this point many people are looking for big gaffes on Palin's end. She's done poorly at some spontaneous answers. We'll see

The Authoritarian Dynamic

2008-10-01T12:48:00.001-04:00

Across time and place, we find that those inclined to discriminate against members of other racial and ethnic groups also rush to protect the "common good" by "stamping out" offensive ideas and "cracking down" on misbehavior, and show unusual interest in making public policy about what other people might be up to in private. At the other end of this spectrum are those who interact eagerly and respectfully with all manner of people, who think the common good mostly a chimera best served by letting "a thousand flowers bloom," and who cannot imagine being bothered about, let alone bothering lawmakers about, what others do behind closed doors. The rest of us fall somewhere in between: not openly averse to other peoples but usually favoring our own, uneasy about restricting what individuals may say but less so how and when and where they say it, generally wanting to keep private moral choices out of the public realm but at some point "drawing the line."

Karen Stenner, The Authoritarian Dynamic. New York:Cambridge University Press, 2005. 1-2.

Palin, Muthee, Dominionism and Witchcraft, Part 2

2008-09-28T13:04:00.007-04:00

My previous post barely touched the surface of the problems with the intersection of Palin, Dominionism and Witchcraft. At this point, however, Palin's connection to the good Bishop Thomas Muthee is relatively old news.

Moving beyond the obvious bald Palin/Muthee facts leads to the question of using prayer to affect politics. The particular worldview of Dominionism is an intensely righteous and judgmental one. There is no problem with clearly defining battle lines for their "spiritual warfare." There is also little separation between personal spiritual and secular political goals since the widespread institution of Biblical law in secular government is a central tenet.

At core, Dominionism is a profoundly anti-democratic philosophy, rejecting pluralism for a rigid and strictly homogeneous society, kept that way through intimidation and severe punishments. People who didn't conform in such a society would be harshly reformed or eliminated.

Now, Bishop Muthee's Word of Faith Church website has a number of interesting phrases. Some of this may be attributed to poor English skills but I'm struck by this one: "Our Vision: Touching lives for total community transformation thereby taking cities and nations."

"...taking cities and nations," presumably for Christ in this instance, has this conquering tone of overpowering the non-believers, converting where possible and destroying or driving out when necessary. Also of interest is what seems to be a kind of motto for Word of Faith Church: "'we preach christ crucified' 1cor. 1:23." [sic capitalization] The full passage reads: "But we preach Christ crucified, unto the Jews a stumblingblock, and unto the Greeks foolishness;" (King James version, here for different translation versions/comparisons.)

This is borne out in the story of Bishop Muthee driving the "witch" Mama (or Mamma) Jane out of the Kiambu, Kenya. According to sources, this was where Bishop Muthee founded his first Kenyan church. Note also that almost twenty years after those events, witch hunting and killing continues to happen in Kenya.

Muthee's website claims he has 400 churches currently. By the way, I can't find a source for Muthee's "Bishop" title since no source I've found tells if it was conferred to him by some organized hierarchy or organization. I suspect he granted it to himself.

I have to note that the details of the story of Mama Jane seem to come entirely from Muthee or his supporters. The earliest independent news story on the events is the 1999 Christian Science Monitor story. Most information on the events surrounding Mama Jane seems to come from a DVD called Transformations rather than investigative reporting.

Once again I've run out of time for this story and I admit what I've written in this post is rather disjointed. There were several other points I was going to include but I think I'll just briefly list links to connected stories I found.

"Why are intercessors sometimes referred to as armor bearers? Please explain the role that they fulfill in this capacity."

Palin's Churches and the Third Wave

Praying Down God's Power

Christian Fundamentalism Permeates the Republican Party: Sarah Palin’s links to the Christian Right

The Republicans' Subliminal Ticket: Will American Voters Be Hoodwinked?

Palin, Dominionism and Witchcraft

2008-09-26T14:41:00.003-04:00

While I find the story of Sarah Palin's blessing by Thomas Muthee a less-than-compelling reason to condemn her or her beliefs, it does bring to the fore certain lines of Evangelical thinking. (For background on the Palin/Muthee brouhaha, see "Targeting cities with 'spiritual mapping,' prayer", "Palin under fire over African pastor friend who waged witch-hunt against woman he believed caused car crashes" and "Palin linked electoral success to prayer of Kenyan witchhunter" for a small selection of news stories.)

The whole "spiritual warfare" concept seems a dangerous philosophical practice. No matter how much the "spiritual" aspects are emphasized, couching it as "warfare" leads to a general perception of a life-or-death struggle. In that context, justification of the most horrible tactics becomes easy. If you are part of a war between Good and Evil and you consider yourself on the side of Good, what won't you do to vanquish all opposition? And what keeps you from lumping all those that oppose you into the Evil category?

There's a saying (the source escapes me at the moment) that what people do in the name of evil pales beside the atrocities people are willing do in the name of good, God or country. I don't mean this to damn all efforts to fight injustice but to point out the pitfalls of such extreme dichotomies of view, allowing no areas of grey and diversity of opinion. Believing only in absolutes is a poor match with a pluralistic democracy like the USA.

On a wider level, we can see this playing out in US politics. Rank and file political partisans are encouraged to demonize the opposition, to use flagrant insult and taunts in place of political discussion of positions and options. Classical debating styles are viewed as too intellectual, too boring, too forgiving of differences.

I had much more to say on this subject but time has run short tonight. I may return to it later.

Starhawk: Collapse and Elections: My Lessons from Katrina

2008-09-25T19:54:00.005-04:00

The following essay from Starhawk neatly sums up some of my own doubts and thoughts about the coming election. I've taken the liberty of linking some of the people and groups she mentioned to websites and Wikipedia entries but these links did not exist in the copy I got through email. --DemiOrator

Collapse and Elections: My Lessons from Katrina
by Starhawk

I’ve been meaning to write this essay for three years, since I went down to New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina to volunteer with a grassroots organization called Common Ground Relief. I went to New Orleans because for decades I’ve been part of groups holding a few key beliefs, among them, that this current system is unsustainable and will eventually come crashing down, and the other—that small scale, directly democratic grassroots organizing is the most empowering and effective way to take action. I wanted to see what it was like in a place where the crash had come, and to see if our grassroots, do-it-yourself mode of organizing could work in that situation.

Now, with the Gulf Coast battered by a new round of storms, Wall Street deconstructing and capitalism in meltdown mode, that prediction is coming true. It seems a good time to review those lessons.

In New Orleans, the crash had come. Not just the devastation left by the storm—every major system that was supposed to offer protection, succor or relief had failed. Starting with the faulty levees built by the Army Corps of Engineers, moving on to an evacuation plan that was no plan at all for those without means, to completely inadequate shelter facilities for those who remained, to disorganized and punitive responses for those who survived, nothing official was working.

What I arrived, a month after the hurricane, the only systems that were functioning were the decentralized, autonomous relief efforts. Common Ground Relief was started by a local organizer, Malik Rahim, who lived in Algiers, a neighborhood that had not flooded. He sent out a call that made its way into activist circles.

And people responded. Nurses, doctors and street medics who had honed their skills setting up emergency clinics for street actions went down and set up a functioning clinic long before the Red Cross arrived. Others helped set up distribution for relief supplies, and later, as residents began to filter back, organized groups of volunteers to gut houses contaminated with toxic black mold and to offer other forms of service. I worked on a bioremediation project, using natural methods to decontaminate soil.

The experienced deepened my commitment to decentralized, grassroots organizing. Our ability to move swiftly, without being hampered by red tape, to respond to immediate need and to call on thousands of people to volunteer their time, efforts and money was impressive.

But I also saw our limitations. I remember sitting in one early meeting where we were discussing whether to send supplies across the river to the main part of town, still without power, or out to Houma in the bayou country, or to focus where we were. “What about Mississippi?” someone said. “I hear there’s no relief in Biloxi at all!” The discussion spun down a vortex of overwhelming need, and I remember thinking, “There should be someone or something who could send a team into every county and parish, assess the need, set up distribution…”and then…”There is an agency that’s supposed to do that. It’s called FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or failing that, the National Guard.”

The National Guard was partly in Iraq, partly in Florida moving military equipment out of the way of the storm. While the military had searched every house in the city for bodies in the aftermath of the flood, they were providing more harassment than relief to those who remained. FEMA was under the control of a Bush political appointee who has become a famous symbol of utter mismanagement. And I couldn’t help thinking, “There are people dead today who would still be alive if we had had somebody even minimally competent in charge.”

Our grassroots efforts were effective, but they couldn’t begin to match the enormous need. Eventually, Common Ground Relief had centers in several different neighborhoods in New Orleans, and along with many other relief efforts, drew on thousands of volunteers who came down over the next year. College students came down on breaks, communities sent down convoys of supplies and helpers, but there was no way we could respond on the scale of the disaster.

Our volunteer efforts were also difficult to sustain over time. While many, many people made personal sacrifices in order to come, and some stayed for a year or more doing unpaid and extremely difficult work, not many people could afford to do that. Efforts like our bioremediation project suffered from lack of consistency. When a person who had enthusiasm for it was there, it flourished. When they left, it died.

Volunteer efforts also depend on people getting along well together. Direct democracy means people make decisions together, and that can be tremendously empowering or tremendously frustrating. Stress, trauma and overwhelming need do not further good group process. Common Ground’s efforts often felt the strain of interpersonal conflicts, which also drained energy and enthusiasm from volunteers.

I came away from the experience with profoundly mixed feelings. On the one hand, I see even more strongly the power of positive, creative direct action—that is, directly solving our own problems, organizing to provide for needs and to exemplify solutions, and doing it in groups where every person involved has a say in decisions. I feel called to help plant the seeds of that kind of organizing in every neighborhood, town and bioregion of the land, and to help further refine our skills in making decisions and handling conflicts.

But I also see the need for big systems. There are problems that need to be addressed on a massive scale, and we face some crucial ones at this moment in history. While my long-term vision is a world of empowered, decentralized communities in charge of their own destinies, there’s a short term problem we desperately need to address: completely transforming our technology, our energy infrastructure, our economy, our food, manufacturing and transportation systems to a zero carbon basis, and doing it in a way that furthers social justice.

I call this a short term problem because we need to begin this transition now, not in some distant, utopian future, not even in fifty years or fifteen or ten. Jim Hansen, the world’s leading climate change scientist, says we are already past the tipping point for irreversible, runaway climate change. That means potentially billions of deaths, from drought, from thirst, from increased and frequent storms like Katrina and like the hurricanes currently battering the Caribbean and the Gulf Coast, the potential rise of sea levels, billions more left homeless refugees, major extinctions and huge losses of biodiversity. Trust me, we don’t want to go there if we don’t have to.

And we don’t have to. We have the technology and knowledge we need to make the shift—possibly with less personal sacrifice than we think. You don’t have to trust me on this, check out the resources at the end of this post and read the folks who have crunched the numbers for us.

But we do need to make the shift on the big scale as well as the small. Changing our individual lightbulbs won’t do it. Organizing our own communities to plan and implement the transition will be a big step, but it won’t be enough. We need massive investment in new infrastructure and major shifts in the policies that have subsidized the current fossil fuel economy along with the failed global casino economy. In short, we need intervention on the scale of government.

If we’re going to have government, it should be well-run, honest, and accountable. Its police powers should be limited and it should serve as a way for us to pool our resources and address issues that are too big to solve individually. It should protect the weak from the strong, the poor from the rich, the honest from the greedy, and use its resources to help mitigate the suffering of individuals from the misfortunes of loss, disease and disaster which can afflict us all.

Instead, we’ve had eight years and more of the opposite—government that has increased police and military power at the expense of every nurturing function, inflated police power and undermined our freedoms, waged illegal wars, favored the rich over the poor and middle class and encouraged such unbridled greed that the whole system is now collapsing. Unfortunately, in such a crash those at the bottom get crushed under the most weight.

We have the Republicans chanting ‘Drill, Baby Drill!” while blocking the extension of tax credits for solar, wind and renewables. If the question is, “Which candidate is more likely to lead us to a solar future”, there’s simply no contest.

Let me just say here that, in the circles I run in, the question is not, “Should I vote for Obama or McCain.” The dilemma is “Should I bother to vote at all, when even Obama’s policies are not nearly progressive enough. Won’t he just sell out and betray us, like every other politician?”

Obama won’t save us. His policies do fall short, for me, in many respects. But he is headed in the right direction, toward the future while McCain and Palin want to drag us back into a feudal, fossil-fueled, fundamentalist past.

If Obama did represent my position, on say, Palestine, he would be unelectable.

Asking politicians to take unelectable positions is like asking ducks to sink. If we want those positions represented, we need to build popular support for them. And we need to make that support mean something in terms of votes, funds and volunteers.

On some issues, progressives have done that. The fact that Obama is running at all is a tribute to the civil rights organizing over decades. No, we haven’t ended racism, but we’ve moved in my lifetime from being a country where Obama and I could not have drunk from the same water fountain in many states to a country where he can run for President. That is an extremely meaningful change, and his election will have a powerful, symbolic meaning that will shift the ground of racism in ways we cannot fully anticipate.

We’ve built powerful opposition to the War in Iraq. Or maybe, the war itself has done that for us. Obama is the candidate because of that opposition. Had Hillary Clinton opposed the war more strongly, she would most likely be the Democratic candidate. Nonetheless, her candidacy, and the fact that conservative Republican strategists turned to a woman to bolster their faltering campaign, are a tribute to the decades of feminist organizing that have changed our collective sense of what women’s roles should be.

On other issues, like justice for Palestine, we have not yet shifted public opinion or built enough support for a truly progressive solution even to be on the table. Why not? In part, because for the last eight years trying to organize in this country has been like trying to walk to the left with a gale force wind pushing us to the right. We’ve done well even to hold our ground and make some small headway.

I don’t think Obama will be our savior. But if he’s elected, the wind will shift. The breeze will be at our backs, pushing us further and faster toward destinations we otherwise cannot reach.

If McCain wins, or steals the election, the right will claim a popular mandate that will propel their destructive programs onward. Progressive causes and movements will suffer.

I sometimes hear the argument that it has to get worse before it gets better, that people will become radicalized when it gets really awful. I’ve been hearing that since Nixon was elected in ‘Sixty-eight, and I’ve yet to see it happen. It is already really awful, and we’ll be lucky if we can persuade most of the people to simply not vote the architects of the awfulness back into power.

People do not become empowered by constantly having their powerlessness rubbed in their faces. In the United States, at least, where the worst possible thing you can be is a ‘loser’, people like to be on the winning side. Increased repression does not tend to make people more radical—if it did, we’d see our movements growing over the last eight years instead of shrinking. It tends to make people give up, or turn their energies toward smaller efforts where they feel they can make some impact. A McCain win would reward the machinery of lies and corruption and cement the power of the police state.

For Obama to win, and to assure that this election does not get stolen like the last two, he needs to win big. To have some hope of implementing progressive changes, he needs to have a supportive Congress and Senate win with him.

I hear arguments from some of my dear friends that voting doesn’t matter, that it’s not empowering or revolutionary. But for the vast majority of people in this country, elections are the only place where they interface with politics or attempt to exercise power, and if we sneer at that, we lose the chance to link together and open up broader channels for change. And for the kids I’ve worked with in the Bayview, who have never seen a flowing river and whose career options range from crack dealer to murder-for-hire, voting would be a big step upwards.

I’m a registered member of the Green Party. I vote Green often, and on a local level, I think the Green Party can have an enormous impact. I also love Cynthia McKinney, whose policies are much closer to those I hold dear. But I hold no illusions that she can win. A Green Party can provide a counterweight on the left to the many pulls to the center and the right that play on candidates. But I would prefer to see the Green Party concentrate on the local issues and candidates that can make a difference, rather than make a weak showing on the national front.

Policy is only one aspect of what we need in a President. A President must be able to garner the power and the backing to get policies enacted.

And on an energetic level, a President embodies a national mood, a zeitgeist, an energetic field. Obama has that magic charisma, that ability to inspire a mood of hope and optimism. In spite of all the attempts by both Clinton and the Republicans to diminish his appeal, he retains that great gift. In these times when so much of what ordinary people have depended on is crashing down around us, mood might actually be more important than specific points of policy. Because if we have no hope, if we spiral downwards into cynicism, despair and apathy, we will lose any power we might otherwise wield.

Obama may or may not be all we hope. But this election, we actually have a clear choice between candidates who represent very different approaches to the huge crises that we face. For the people who’ve lost their homes or pensions in the last months, for the people under fire in Iraq, for the companies struggling to start up solar or wind installations, for the millions without health insurance, for the billions of people around the world at risk from climate meltdown, the decision we make in the next weeks is crucial.

I will continue to work and organize and teach with the vision of a thousand, a million Common Ground-style organizations everywhere. I won’t give up my vision of an ideal world of shared and decentralized power, and the bulk of my efforts will always go into envisioning that world, teaching the skills and understandings we need to bring it about, and agitating to make it happen.

But I’m also going to vote, and to encourage others to do so, to engage with this election, to register the disenfranchised, work in the swing states, volunteer to monitor to assure fair elections, and talk to your friends and neighbors.

And when I cast my ballot for President, it will be for Obama.

Starhawk
www.starhawk.org

Addendum: If you are looking for good, solid, number crunching around energy policy and the transition to a carbon-free society, check out: Arjun Makhijani. Carbon-Free and Nuclear-Free: A Roadmap for U.S. Energy Policy. Takoma Park, MD. Institute for Energy and Environmental Research www.ieer.org.

It’s not sexy writing, but it’s vital information, very technical and well researched. Makhijani was skeptical that the transition could be done economically, then did the research (funded by Helen Caldicott) and found that indeed we could. I’ll be writing more on this later.

(Feel free to forward and repost this—just let me know where if you post it.)
-----------------
This post has been sent to you from Starhawk@lists.riseup.net. This is an announce-only listserve that allows Starhawk to post her writings occasionally to those who wish to receive them. To subscribe to this list, send an email to Starhawk-subscribe@lists.riseup.net.

Starhawk is a lifelong activist in peace and global justice movements, a leader in the feminist and earth-based spirituality movements, author or coauthor of ten books, including The Spiral Dance, The Fifth Sacred Thing, Webs of Power: Notes from the Global Uprising, and her latest, The Earth Path. Starhawk's website is www.starhawk.org, and more of her writings and information on her schedule and activities can be found there.

Personal Economics

2008-09-24T21:00:00.003-04:00

The bleak economic news continues to rattle around. Investment firms falling like dominos, stock market quakes, the US$700 billion to prop up Wall St., etc.

I'm somewhat removed from direct effect of these events (no investments, no retirement fund, minimal savings, an annual salary barely above poverty level) but it strikes fear into me. A crisis of such enormous proportions will eventually hit me where I live. My mother has some investments and I have no idea what's happening to them.

I'm reminded of the Great Depression. I think of expanding our garden but that won't do much good as we head into the Fall season in New England. What would it take to have chickens here? What is the minimal amount of electricity needed to run our household necessities?

The fear reminds me what is important and essential: food and shelter. Everything beyond that can be let go if necessary. I look toward dropping my minor acquisitive vices: books, CDs, and magazines. Satellite TV? I'd probably be better off without it. I start to view the internet as a tool, not a form of entertainment.

What grows is not quite an ascetic view but certainly a leaner approach to my life.

Will things get as bad as the Depression? No telling at this point but it wouldn't surprise me. On the whole, Americans have gotten too used to prosperity, too used to disposable income, too used to abundant shallow entertainment. "It couldn't happen here!" is the saddest of refrains, the ejaculation of the stunned and disbelieving. Yet we are being reminded that there is so much out of our control, that oligarchy is the true governing system of the US and the corporate elite live fat on the sweat of the majority of American workers/people.

I suggest you start planning now for a new future. The old one is looking shaky.

The Shallowness of American Politics

2008-09-22T12:21:00.003-04:00

I continue to be amazed at the limitations of US politics and the narrowness of acceptable solutions by politicians. To use an entirely overworn metaphor, our political options remain in a box controlled tightly by the media and "elites".* Solutions "outside the box" are usually dismissed without serious consideration and usually without ever even seeing the media light of day.

So it is with our current economic crisis. Instead of acknowledging the flaws in our policies that led to our current problems and acting to correct them, we are left with applying emergency fixes in a crisis. Thus we have bailouts of huge private economic linchpins allowed to grow unregulated until our economy is dependent on them. De-regulation of areas of financial markets turns into the sub-prime fiasco.

Yet we hear from many pundits that it is those people who got these sub-prime loans who are to blame for poor fiscal responsibility, for getting loans they knew they couldn't pay back. What's lacking in this analysis is the economic optimism encouraged by American society since WWII. Until relatively recently, Americans were used to thinking of themselves as continually moving up the economic ladder. Hard work leads to advancement and increased pay.

This hasn't been true for a long time but the attitude remains a core value and assumption for many American workers. Never mind that wage stagnation has been the rule for many years, the future's so bright I need sunglasses, right?

So what solutions do we hear proposed? Crisis band-aids and studiously forgetting the role money managers might have played in creating the problem. Top management keeps its billions of dollars in pay and bonuses despite their evident culpability while homeowners lose homes for want of a few thousand dollars.

We live in a kind of pyramid scheme called Capitalism. Where do those wealthy top 1% get their money? Conventional thought is that it comes from their bold investment of money with the risk of loss on a large scale. In other words, what most people do all the time when they make large purchases like an automobile or a home. The difference is that when those at the bottom of the pyramid make a poor decision, it is personally catastrophic.

One pundit recently said when some people end up defaulting on mortgages, they just put the keys in the mailbox and walk away, leaving the bank with the problem. I find that a fascinating perspective. I have to wonder how many people in today's society can actually just "walk away" from a bad debt. Unless they somehow have a new identity waiting, debt tends to follow someone around for a long time in one form or another. People don't just get disapproving looks for bad debt; they get phone harassment, revoking of credit lines, raising of credit card interest rates, and much more.

I seem to have strayed far from my initial subject but perhaps not too far. Our politicians seem bound by political expediency and fear of upsetting the big ticket contributors to their campaign coffers. So don't say the problem is de-regulation and overdependence on complex shuffling of paper money. The problem is the borrowers because the borrowers have all the power in the situation, right?

When the house of cards comes down, we are left wondering why our politicians didn't see it coming years ago. In a way, they did. Their solution was to focus on the "War on Terror". Iraq. Afghanistan. Because we still live with the post-WWII prosperity idea that wars benefit our economy. And wars did help our economy when we produced real goods. In a services economy like we've got today, not so much.

Wars do distract the population, though, keeping them from demanding too much or the right things.

*I use "elites" here to mean practically all national politicians and 98% of the "authorities" seen on any TV news or commentary.

I Heart Frameshop

2008-09-19T21:07:00.004-04:00

My other commitments have been sucking at my time so I admit my reading of blogs has been severely limited over the last year or two. I'm trying to sample some of my old favorites as well as reach out to some new ones.

This has brought me back to Frameshop and a renewed appreciation of the analysis provided there. I never leave Frameshop without substance to chew over. Some may find it a little abstract but I never do. For example, his recent post Frameshop: The Winning Frame has Emerged examines the various frames used by various candidates in the campaign.

Here's his take on the Democrats' frames:

Opening Frames: 'American Dream' and 'Hope'
The 2008 election started out with multiple competing frames from Democrats and Republicans. The largest opening frames, however, came from the Clinton campaign and the Obama Campaign.

From the start, Clinton set the idea of restoring the 'American Dream,' and idea that was fundamentally economic. During the course of the primary, Clinton arrived at a new way to express her opening frame by talking about 'the invisible.' It was a very convincing idea, particularly as the economy went south. Despite the ideological statements of the Republicans, a majority of Americans felt that the economy had left them behind and that nobody cared about their troubles. The 'American Dream' frame became 'the invisible' and Hillary Clinton won millions of votes as a result.

The Obama campaign offered a different opening frame in the idea of 'Hope.' In many ways, 'Hope' was a much stronger frame than 'American dream' because it spoke to larger questions about the future of the country as a whole. By talking about 'Hope,' Obama was talking about American idealism beyond the mechanics of building family wealth. 'Hope' was also a more forward looking frame because it implicitly acknowledged new challenges that Americans face--such as global warming, conservation, technology, international interdependence, and so forth. The 'American Dream,' was more nostalgic. The problem with 'Hope' as we discovered in the primary, was that it was difficult to re-emphasize in terms of the economy when that became the key issue in the primaries. The middle ground framing of 'more people participating' that was so successful for Obama in Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina, became less successful for his campaign in Pennsylvania. The better frame in idealistic terms, 'Hope' did not readily present a way to ground that idealism in the concrete issues that contingency was forcing into the election.

Obama won the nomination, but the sense coming out of that long contest was that he was left with a very big challenge of finding an economic foundation for his 'hope' frame. And even by the time of the DNC, it did not seem like that new frame had emerged quite yet.

Dominionism, Part 4: Broad Application of the Death Penalty

2008-09-17T23:04:00.004-04:00

While researching Dominionism/Christian Reconstructionism for my last post, I came across this tidbit:

However, in some areas the application of theonomy could increase the authority of the civil government; prominent advocates of Christian Reconstructionism have written that according to their understanding, God's law approves of the death penalty not only for murder, but also for propagators of idolatry[3][4][5], active homosexuals[6], adulterers, practitioners of witchcraft, and blasphemers[7], and perhaps even recalcitrant youths[8] (see the List of capital crimes in the bible).

And that List of capital crimes in the Bible article came up with this:

According to the Torah (or Mosaic Law), these are the offenses which may merit the death penalty in a Jewish major court of 23 judges.
Murder, applies to Noachides as well (Genesis 9:6, Exodus 21:12-14, Leviticus 24:17-23, Numbers 35:9-34)
Striking a parent (Exodus 21:15)
Cursing a parent (Exodus 21:17, Leviticus 20:9)
The "degenerate son" (Deuteronomy 21:18-21)
Kidnapping (Exodus 21:16, Deuteronomy 24:7)
Negligent homicide, specifically by ox-goring (Exodus 21:28-32)
Sorcery and Augury (Exodus 22:18, Leviticus 20:27)
Bestiality (Exodus 22:19, Leviticus 20:15-16)
Sacrificing to gods other than God alone (Exodus 22:20, Leviticus 27:29)
Sabbath breaking (Exodus 31:12-17, 35:2, Numbers 15:32-36)
Sacrificing to Molech, probably Human sacrifice (Leviticus 20:1-5)
Adultery (Leviticus 20:10)
Incest (Leviticus 20:11-12)
Male homosexual sexual relations (Leviticus 20:13, Leviticus 18:22, see also Leviticus 18)
Marrying your wife's mother (Leviticus 20:14)
Prostitution by the daughter of a priest (Leviticus 21:9)
Blasphemy (Leviticus 24:10-16)
Worshipping Baal Peor (Numbers 25:1-9)
False prophecy (Deuteronomy 13:1-10, 17:2-7, 18:20-22)
Contempt of court (Deuteronomy 17:8-13)
False witness to a capital crime (Deuteronomy 19:15-21)
Unchastity among those engaged to marry (Deuteronomy 22:13-29)

I just love Wikipedia.

My Pitifully Weak Resolve Concerning Sarah Palin

2008-09-17T18:36:00.005-04:00

Now I give lie to my previous post where I called for a cessation of Palin bashing. I sincerely think that she's not a very good focus for critical examination leading up to the election. Her flaws and lacks in relation to the VP position are myriad and are being hashed out quite thoroughly in the public arena. I think it serves little good purpose to continue to thrash her beliefs, views, skills, etc.

Yet... I still shamefully feel the urge. As a target, she's stunningly easy to find fault with. While there are some false stories floating around, there's still plenty of substance. Pharyngula has a nice post from a scientific perspective on some of Palin's beliefs.

Related is an opinion piece by Chris Hedges: "For Palin, It’s a (Christian) Man’s World". I think some of Mr. Hedges' points are a bit off, not the least being taking a starkly black and white absolutist view of Ms. Palin's denomination while accusing them of exactly that. Then again, Hedges has much greater knowledge of the subject matter than I can possibly lay claim to. I do know that Dominionism or Christian Reconstructionism shouldn't be dismissed casually. It is a very serious religious movement with strong fascistic elements. If Palin is involved in a denomination affiliated with Dominionism, that is quite disturbing.

Here's a quote from the current Wikipedia article on Christian Rconstructionism:

While many Christians believe that biblical law is a guide to morality and public ethics, when interpreted in faith, Reconstructionism is unique in advocating that civil law should be derived from and limited by biblical law. For example, they support the recriminalization of acts of abortion and homosexuality, but also oppose confiscatory taxation, conscription, and most aspects of the welfare state. Protection of property and life needs grounding in biblical law, according to Reconstructionism, or the state set free from the restraint of God's law will take what it wishes at a whim. Accordingly, Reconstructionists advocate biblically derived measures of restitution, a definite limit upon the powers of taxation, and a gold standard or equivalent fixed unit for currency. (all emphasis mine.)

Normally, of course, what a candidate believes religiously is not particularly relevant to their election and ability to serve in office. However, when the beliefs explicitly call for bringing civil law into line with Biblical law, then there is a problem for everyone. Even most Christians wouldn't want the imposition of Biblical law which includes slavery among its tenets. Read the Old Testament; the laws and punishments would horrify the vast majority of Americans. The quote above is a little evasive. Re-criminalization of abortion and homosexuality means execution for the perpetrators of these acts, not mere jail time. At least it means that if you're going to strictly follow those Biblical laws.

I have no idea what goes on the the heart and mind of Sarah Palin. I don't know enough to predict what she would do in the Vice-Presidency. Most of the info I've seen indicates she is much like George W. Bush in her certainty levels: Act first and let others deal with the fallout. A decider, not necessarily a thinker.

Personally, I think we've had enough of that kind of leadership style in the last eight years. Between McCain's quick-to-anger moods and Palin's breezy don't-let-facts-get-in-the-way-of-decisions approach, I'm not eager to see the results of their administration.

Parting from Palin Bashing

2008-09-16T15:49:00.005-04:00

While it appears the sport of Palin bashing remains quite popular, I'm really of the opinion it should be given a rest. At this point I think it unlikely that anyone will change their opinions about her abilities and competency for being VP (with a strong possibility of being President).

I did come across this blog post I found interesting: 'Alaska Women Reject Palin' Rally is HUGE:

Never, have I seen anything like it in my 17 and a half years living in Anchorage. The organizers had someone walk the rally with a counter, and they clicked off well over 1400 people (not including the 90 counter-demonstrators). This was the biggest political rally ever, in the history of the state. I was absolutely stunned. The second most amazing thing is how many people honked and gave the thumbs up as they drove by. And even those that didn’t honk looked wide-eyed and awe-struck at the huge crowd that was growing by the minute. This just doesn’t happen here.

I like hearing personal stories like this. Such observations don't paint the whole picture but they do provide impressionistic color, bits of a mosaic. Particularly interesting is that this rally was in her home state.

Aside: I was going to write a piece comparing the most recent positions of Obama and McCain but stalled out on the research. One progressive magazine I saw recently spoke of the strong rightward drift of Obama's positions since the time when he became the nominee apparent back in the Spring of 2008. It's always been clear that, despite Obama's rhetoric of change, there are many things he will NOT change or will change only superficially.

In that vein, I think Obama is probably a Bill Clinton-type centrist. Lest you forget, Clinton wasn't a boon friend to civil liberties or working-to-middle class people. He was a friend to business and, it could be argued, left much of Reagan's legacy in place after taking office as well as forcing more people into deep poverty through some of his programs.

Aside aside: The following is a poor argument but it is something that has run through my mind on occasion. The US Presidency has almost become dynastic in the last twenty years: 4 years of GHW Bush as President; 8 years of Bill Clinton; 8 years of GWBush. For 20 years, a Bush or a Clinton has been in the Presidency. Sometimes I wonder if this played a part in the rejection/failure of Hillary to become the Dem's nominee. Sexism, personal antipathy, historical baggage, etc. played parts as well but I don't recall anyone speaking to the dynastic aspect. 24-28 years of two families to control the Presidency seems exceptionally antidemocratic. Yes, I know, we should look at qualifications, not familial connections but still...

Blogs of Interest in Five Part Harmony

2008-09-13T15:06:00.004-04:00

Nothing shows bloggy love like finding new blogs to share. Some of these are old faves, others are new to me. The DemiOrator sez: Visit them and spread the love.

Celebrating the September 11, 2001 Anniversary

2008-09-11T18:26:00.004-04:00

Celebrating? Is that really the word I should use? Probably not. There is nothing to "celebrate." It was a horrible series of events with a staggering death toll.

Yet when I look at the titles of the many programs on TV today commemorating the events, I'm astonished at the static nature of the descriptions. It's like the USA has never moved beyond the events at all. Seven years later, we are still recounting the details of that day in 2001. Images of chaos, smoke, fire, ash and staggering people. The second plane hitting. The Pennsylvania field. The Pentagon strike site smoldering.

Today, the media treat it like it is surgically isolated from events before and after, a tragedy without cause and effect. For example, the use of those events as a major justification for the 2003 Iraq invasion by the US and subsequent occupation. This despite there being no evidence that I'm aware of that there was any connection whatsoever.

Fear of enemies has always been a prime rationale for government theft of civil liberties. "We're protecting you! Bad people are out there! Be afraid! Be resolute! Be angrily patriotic! These colors don't run!"

Some of the worst aspects of xenophobia, racism, and blind chauvinism bloom unquestioned when the 9/11 banner is waved. This is why the event continues to be de-contextualized, removed from the continuum of historic events and held as an encapsulated example. This way it remains a red flag to the bull of the collective US citizenry, inflaming unresolved trauma and inciting a blind urge for retribution. We are held hostage to the memory and misdirected to blame the wrong people over and over. This is the way power brokers and politicians manipulate us.

A responsible media wouldn't just replay these events in more and more detail every year. But it does. Does a new voiceover narration make the events different or improve our understanding? Do we learn anything new? Or are we doomed to be consistently reactive, our kneejerk responses as predictable as the ticking clock?

At some point, mourning must end. These events can't be used to justify even worse atrocities on the part of the USA. That is an unacceptable and immoral course of action.

----------------
Listening to: Take Me to the River by Talking Heads

Starhawk's RNC post 10: The Last March

2008-09-06T18:33:00.004-04:00

UPDATE: All our cluster is out of jail, the bus is back on the street, and I’m home in my own bed! But some of the young organizers who put together food, housing, and meeting spaces for the direct actions are facing trumped up charges of conspiracy to riot and ‘terrorism’ under Minnesota’s version of the Patriot Act. This is one of the clearest uses of this post 911 legislation to target dissent. The Welcoming Committee members are not accused of actually doing any rioting—indeed, they were all in jail during the convention, nor was any physical evidence found to corroborate the fabricated statements of the paid informants who infiltrated meetings. It’s vitally important for progressives to stand behind these young people who have been targeted mostly because they proclaim themselves ‘anarchists.’ If they can be targeted for their beliefs, so can any of us. If they can be held responsible for the actions of people over whom they have no control, so can anyone who organizes a march, a rally, a civil disobedience, or a protest where a provocateur breaks a window. The lawyers are estimating that to fight their charges may take $250,000 over the next several years. Hey, that’s only 1000 people who can donate $250 each. I’ll be one of them, will you? To donate any amount, go to:
http://www.nornc.org/

And thanks again to all of you who have been so supportive and generous during this last week. Here’s my final post, my previous posts can be read at: www.starhawk.org

The Last March
By Starhawk

Thursday, September 4: This is the final night of the convention, the night that John McCain is scheduled to speak. There’s also an antiwar march scheduled to begin on the steps of the Capitol—an unpermitted march. We make our way there through a city that has become an occupied zone. There are rumors that police are blocking the bridges, that the whole city will be under curfew from 5 pm on.

We gather up our cluster—only about ten of us. The Capitol is surrounded by clumps of riot cops and the tension is throbbing as speakers on the stage rile up the crowd. Jason and Riyanna are fresh out of jail, and not eager to go back, so they will stay on a safe edge and not put themselves into danger. At least, not if Lisa has anything to say about it—she’s snapping at them like a mother dog correcting her pups. She, of course, will snap equally hard at anyone who suggests that she ought to stay out of danger. Juniper and I together can sometimes corral her enough to let us watch her back—but not always. Andy and I have been remarking about how, even though our tactic of choice is to wade into danger and stolidly obstruct it, nothing seems to happen to us. This has held true for both of us, separately and together, in situations much more dangerous than this one. Is it something we do? Will naming it jinx it? How far can we trust it?

A few people in our group are having a moment of panic. Nothing’s happened, yet, but all our intuition tells us that something could, at any moment. They decide to go back, and be our support if something does.

I’m feeling the fear, but it’s a little bit outside of me. I’m trying to drop down below it, to the calm place where I can get information, or at least, a clear hunch. Is this going to go really badly? If so, do I want to be out of it, or in it, to try and make it less bad?

There are two great instincts that war in the human breast; not sex and death, as Freud maintained, but these: the urge to stay safe, and the urge to get into the action or at least, see what’s going on.

For the moment, the second urge is dominant in all of us who remain. The march starts off, and we join it. But we’re extra alert. We’re looking for the exits and the escape routes, positioning ourselves always so there is somewhere to go.

The march heads up the street alongside the Capitol lawn, and then tries to turn across one of the bridges leading into downtown. The police move in, and block us.

There’s a tense crowd of people on the bridge and filling the intersection. Around us are police in full riot gear and gas masks. There’s also a group of bike cops, looking slightly underdressed in shorts and gas masks. They’ve brought in the Minnesota specials—a line of snowplows across the bridge. On them are perched black-masked cops in heavy leathers holding thick-muzzled rifles that shoot rubber bullets.

The energy is unfocused. Nobody knows quite what to do. It could all fall apart, in a moment, with the cops attacking the crowd, or it could remain a standoff for a long time. I am softly drumming, not quite sure what to do, when a young, African American woman with long curls and a ring in her lip comes up and says, “Do you know how to sing, ‘Aint’ Gonna Study War No More?”

I shift the beat, we begin singing, and soon gather a small chorus that forms around us. A tiny, round, young black woman in spectacles steps in front. She has a large voice, and she takes over as lead singer. The chorus grows and a space opens up in the center of the intersection, that is soon filled with riders on bikes, circling around and around, counterclockwise. A young man turns a cartwheel. A clown on stilts appears, out of nowhere, and joins the ride. Suddenly, it’s a circus in the street. The mood shifts and becomes almost festive.

My own mood has shifted, too. I’ve been practicing a more Buddhist-style meditation lately, just watching my breath in odd moments and being present to what’s happening. I’m doing that now, breathing and drumming with the bikes and the song and the riot cops, and for no rational reason whatsoever I feel a surge of pure joy.

Two of the cyclists are punk kids covered with patches and graphics that I’ve seen at spokescouncil. One of them is named Maggot, and I’ve seen him sitting with his head down, mumbling his comments which always make sense. Now he’s on a bike, his head up, smiling.

The young woman in front of me turns and taps my elbow. “Let’s sing, ‘We Shall Overcome’”, she says.

I drum and the others join hands and sing.

“We shall overcome, we shall overcome,
We shall over come, someday…”

There’s some piece of magic at work here. The circling bikes remind me of our dragon-clad cyclists from the ritual that began this week. Now, after all the pain and the ugliness, the tension and the snatch squads and the media lies, after all the arguments and conversations about violence and nonviolence and tactics and accountability, after the splits between Obama and Hillary and the fruitless arguments about which is more crucial, gender or race, it seems deeply and oddly wonderful to be asked by two young black women to sing the old Civil Rights songs of the sixties here in the face of the riot cops. As if something is truly welling up from the earth, some spirit that knows and values rage but persists in remembering the power in acting out of love.

It’s a spell. For just one moment, in one place, we sing in spite of our fear, and the violence abates.

“Deep in my heart, I do believe, we shall overcome some day.”

It’s been a hard week. We’ve seen the full machinery of the violence of the state called out to quell any semblance of dissent. I’ve seen friends arrested, beaten, shoved, nearly trampled by horses, tasered, pepper sprayed, beaten and literally tortured in jail. We’ve seen organizers targeted for ‘terrorism’ and media lies paint a totally warped picture of what has happened here. They’ve tried to make us feel powerless and afraid, and at times, they’ve succeeded.

But we’re here, at the end, still singing.
-----
Below are all of the DemiOrator posts containing Starhawk's reports from the 2008 Republican National Convention:
Starhawk's RNC post 1: On the Bad Side of Town
Starhawk's RNC post 2: Raid on the Convergence Center
Starhawk's RNC post 3: New Moon Ritual
Starhawk's RNC post 4: Police Seize Permibus
Starhawk's RNC post 5: A Spiral Dance in the Streets
Starhawk's RNC post 6: Emergency Calls Requested
Starhawk's RNC post 7: Dancing with Delegates
Starhawk's RNC post 8: Peace Island and Poor Peoples’ March
Starhawk's RNC post 9: Updates on Thurs, 4 Sept 2008
General Info about Starhawk's RNC Posts

McCain: His Military Voting Record

2008-09-06T16:43:00.003-04:00

A recent In These Times article caught my attention: "John McCain: Dereliction of Duty" by Cliff Schecter. It's reproduced a few places but notably at the Veterans Today website.

In an election season, I have great doubts about reportage but something I find easy to grasp is McCain's voting record in the Senate. A voting record provides practical guidance about what programs McCain actually puts his vote behind or ignores. For me, it provides a counterpoint to his rhetoric and a check on his version of the truth. All national level politicians are prone to exaggerating and minimizing, promises and deliberate silences on particular subjects. It's part of the breed standard.

Here are some excerpts from the article but there's more meat to it:

Because McCain is running for president almost solely on his biography as a war hero, he can't - and won't - allow the slightest doubt to linger about his dedication to soldiers both past and present. It didn't matter that the vet simply wanted to know how McCain - himself a former soldier and prisoner of war - could oppose important healthcare legislation for veterans. In fact, he didn't even ask McCain about the GI Bill that he opposed, which had been supported by a bipartisan group of 75 senators, including Republican veterans Chuck Hagel (Neb.) and John Warner (Va.).

Most notably, McCain also testily responded to his inquisitor that he had "received every award from every vets organization."

The problem is, not only is that assertion not true, but McCain's record on veterans' issues paints a picture of a man who has been willfully negligent when it comes to providing for his former brothers and sisters in arms....

In 2005, Sen. Daniel Akaka (D-Hawaii), now chair of the Veterans' Affairs Committee, introduced legislation that would have increased veterans' medical care by $2.8 billion in 2006. He also introduced another bill that would have set aside $10 million for "readjustment counseling services" - a program to provide a wide range of counseling, outreach and referral services for those returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, to ease their readjustment back into society. (This program was started in 1979 for Vietnam veterans, so one would think McCain is quite familiar with it.)

But McCain - and other Republicans who are more concerned with using government funds for tax cuts for multimillionaires or for corporate subsidies to oil and gas companies - voted this effort down....

The Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America (IAVA), the country's largest Iraq veterans' group, looked at 155 Senate votes since Sept. 11, 2001, on legislation that "affected troops, veterans or military families." It then awarded each senator a grade by comparing his or her votes to IAVA's view of what constitutes effective support for active troops, veterans and their families.

No senator received an "A" grade. Thirteen senators - all Democrats - received an "A-." The worst grade received by a Senate Democrat was higher than the best grade granted to a Republican. Obama, for his part, got a B+.

McCain received a "D."

In fact, IAVA founder and Executive Director Paul Rieckhoff says that "there has been no bigger obstacle to passage of the GI Bill than Senator McCain. Even though he'd now like to claim credit for it, he didn't even show up. He thought it was more important to be in California for a fundraiser."

Background on Sarah Palin

2008-09-05T14:49:00.003-04:00

While I'm sure there are plenty of critiques of Mrs. Palin, the Republican Vice-President candidate, I haven't read many of them. I was, however, drawn to About Sarah Palin: an e-mail from Wasilla because of its informed firsthand content and tone.

Assuming it is authentic (in an election season I take nothing for granted,) it provides a picture of her that focuses on her local accomplishments and the tenor of her administration skills. I prefer this kind of evaluation to more polished punditry.

What interests me as well is whether people will ignore her qualification shortcomings to support her because of particular identity issues: Anti-choice, Christian, woman, authoritarian, "soccer mom," etc.

Not the least of her apparent qualifications is her conventional attractiveness. When my mother, a dyed in the wool Republican her whole life, described McCain's pick she didn't once mention Palin's qualifications. Instead my mother described Palin: her hair, her clothes, her energy. I asked about Palin's skills and my mother brushed that aside as if it were insignificant and unimportant. I admit I was a little shocked. It seemed like a "cult of personality" attitude, except my mother didn't even know Palin's public persona well on that first day.

I'm actually looking forward to how the Republicans are going to present her and, more importantly, whether people will accept the image uncritically.

Starhawk's RNC post 9: Updates on Thurs, 4 Sept 2008

2008-09-04T11:09:00.008-04:00

Hey friends, here’s some quick updates on the various legal issues, including our bus, our friends in jail, and more.

Thanks for all your calls and emails—they have been tremendously effective, as you’ll see below!

My full accounts of the actions can be found at www.starhawk.org.

UPDATE: First, the good news: Elliot Hughes, who was badly beaten, tasered and maced in jail, is out now, with all charges dropped. He’s with our Pagan Cluster, getting lots of healing, good food and a bath, and this morning will go to a hospital for a CT scan as he has head injuries. His spirit is amazingly strong, and it’s really good to have him back and see him smiling and laughing.

Riyanna is also out of jail, with all charges dropped, and back with us. She’s unharmed and doing well.

Jason Scarecrow is still in jail, still as far as we know has not received medical treatment for his wounds, including a gash in his foot and remaining bits of copper from the taser in his hip, but sounds in good spirits and we hope to see him get out today. He was tasered seven times by the police in the street when he was not resisting their unprovoked arrest, and beaten up badly for no evident reason.

Over a hundred activists were released uncharged throughout the night. Police were driving them far away from the jail and their waiting supporters and dropping them off in lonely places with no phone access.

UPDATE ON THE BUS:

The City Attorney’s office in Minneapolis has now said that seizing the bus was “a regrettable misunderstanding”. The bus will be released today, and while the Wilsons will still have to have it towed from the lot because of some clauses in the city’s insurance policies, they are free to drive it, do workshops and trainings from it, and stay in the state of Minnesota as long as they like. One of the National Lawyers’ Guild lawyers is a former truck driver and has offered to help them fix the mechanical issues with the bus that were found in the inspections. So the PermiBus may soon be on the road again. Thanks so much for all the support, and thanks to all of you who have donated money. Any funds left after they pay for towing, impound, and repairs will go to help pay for gas and food for the crew as they carry on their journey of teaching and training the skills we need for survival and change. Oh yeah—and for starting a lawsuit that will help deter the authorities from doing this sort of thing again.

See their blogs and journals at permibus.livejournal.com.

Information on Earth Activist Trainings can be found at www.earthactivisttraining.org.

BAD NEWS:

Eight members of the RNC Welcoming Committee have been charged with criminal conspiracy to riot in furtherance of terrorism, under the Minnesota version of the Patriot Act. The Welcoming Committee organized the food, logistics, housing, and meeting spaces for protestors coming to the Twin Cities. No actual acts of violence were committed or alleged to be committed by any of them. No weapons or physical evidence of any conspiracy were found. The entire case against them is built on the testimony of three paid informants who infiltrated meetings. Such testimony has been proven, over and over again, to be notoriously unreliable—as the informants have a vested interest in fabricating plots and plans that can justify their pay and a disproportionate police response, which we have seen.

This is exactly what we’ve always feared the various anti-terrorist laws would be used for: not to stop another September 11, but to target dissent.

I’ll have more information later on this—a press conference is scheduled for this morning. But let’s just be clear—when people can be charged with ‘conspiracy’ for things they have not actually done, we are all at risk. Almost all the protestors arrested in this last week were charged with ‘conspiracy’: ‘conspiracy to riot’, Riyanna was charged with ‘conspiracy to use poisonous substances’ (???) although no evidence of any poisonous substances were found anywhere on or around her. (Those charges were dropped.) When we can be arrested, tasered, beaten, have our property seized and illegally searched on no evidence that we’ve actually done something but only on suspicion that we might have thought about or spoken about the possibility of doing something or be somehow associated with a group that someone else thinks might be thinking of doing something—whoa, no one is safe.

Thanks again, everyone, for standing so strongly with us through all of this! Starhawk
-----
Below are all of the DemiOrator posts containing Starhawk's reports from the 2008 Republican National Convention:
Starhawk's RNC post 1: On the Bad Side of Town
Starhawk's RNC post 2: Raid on the Convergence Center
Starhawk's RNC post 3: New Moon Ritual
Starhawk's RNC post 4: Police Seize Permibus
Starhawk's RNC post 5: A Spiral Dance in the Streets
Starhawk's RNC post 6: Emergency Calls Requested
Starhawk's RNC post 7: Dancing with Delegates
Starhawk's RNC post 8: Peace Island and Poor Peoples’ March
Starhawk's RNC post 9: Updates on Thurs, 4 Sept 2008
General Info about Starhawk's RNC Posts

About Starhawk's RNC Posts

2008-09-03T21:06:00.007-04:00

In case it's not obvious, I'm reproducing these reports pretty much as I get them by email. I've stripped the listserve and her bio info after the first couple in this series but you can find it below in this post. I've done some very light corrections (spelling) and spiffed up the formatting (bolding the titles, adding hyperlinks where needed for convenience, etc.). My apologies to Starhawk for changing her words but I can tell these pieces are often a little rushed. I can't really count correcting obvious spelling errors as "editing" but the writer in me quails a little at altering another writer's work without express permission. I figure the important thing is getting this info onto the web.

I've also numbered them differently because I'm counting the emergency posts as well. (She's on 6, I'm up to 8)

I'm willing to be taken to task by her for my liberties when she has the time. (Hahahaha! Sure, like that will happen soon!)

Listserv sub info and bio
This post has been sent to you from Starhawk@lists.riseup.net. This is an announce-only listserve that allows Starhawk to post her writings occasionally to those who wish to receive them. To subscribe to this list, send an email to Starhawk-subscribe@lists.riseup.net.

Starhawk is a lifelong activist in peace and global justice movements, a leader in the feminist and earth-based spirituality movements, author or coauthor of ten books, including The Spiral Dance, The Fifth Sacred Thing, Webs of Power: Notes from the Global Uprising, and her latest, The Earth Path. Starhawk's website is www.starhawk.org, and more of her writings and information on her schedule and activities can be found there.
-----
Below are all of the DemiOrator posts containing Starhawk's reports from the 2008 Republican National Convention:
Starhawk's RNC post 1: On the Bad Side of Town
Starhawk's RNC post 2: Raid on the Convergence Center
Starhawk's RNC post 3: New Moon Ritual
Starhawk's RNC post 4: Police Seize Permibus
Starhawk's RNC post 5: A Spiral Dance in the Streets
Starhawk's RNC post 6: Emergency Calls Requested
Starhawk's RNC post 7: Dancing with Delegates
Starhawk's RNC post 8: Peace Island and Poor Peoples’ March
Starhawk's RNC post 9: Updates on Thurs, 4 Sept 2008
General Info about Starhawk's RNC Posts

Starhawk's RNC post 8: Peace Island and Poor Peoples’ March

2008-09-03T20:51:00.005-04:00

UPDATE: Hi folks—not so much action today, but lots of really bad stuff is happening in the jail.

We’re asking people to continue to call three people:

Mayor Chris Coleman 651-266-8510
Sheriff Bob Fletcher 651-266-9333
Ramsey County Chief Judge Gearin 651-266-8266
Head of the Ramsey County Jail: Ryan O’Neill 651-266-9350

On the good side, some progress is being made toward getting the bus back. Update on all that later. Thanks for all the calls and support, Starhawk

More updates on my website, www.starhawk.org . If you want off my personal listserve, directions on how to unsubscribe yourself are on the bottom of every post. Don’t bother me right now and ask me to do it for you. If you want on, email starhawk-subscribe@lists.riseup.net and put ‘subscribe’ in the subject line. Thanks.

Peace Island and Poor Peoples’ March

Tuesday, September 2:

I begin the day at a very different kind of action, the conference called Peace Island, for which my old friend Susu is a major organizer. The conference aims to bring together the peace and environmental communities to look at solutions to our problems. I’m speaking on the panel about transforming our food system. The main speaker, Jim Harkness of the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, does a great job of tying the current food crisis to two overarching systems—the industrial agriculture that destroys soil and local subsistence farming, and global trade policies and institutions that have forced developing countries to sell their food reserves and produce for export, not for home consumption. China, with its history of famine, resisted these pressures, subsidizes its own grain production and maintains deep reserves, and it has not seen huge rises in the price of grain.

I speak about soil as sacred, and as a potential sink for carbon. When we compost, when we manage grasslands holistically and graze them skillfully, when we plant and nurture forests, we can actually sequester carbon and create healthy, resilient systems that can provide the basis for real prosperity. It felt good to step out of the chaos of the streets for a bit, and think about the world that can be, and all the other forms of activism and organizing that can bring it about. I also talked about the Transition Town movement in Britain and similar movements in the U.S. where people are getting together to organize their communities, making energy descent plans, strategizing on how to use the resources we have today to prepare for a zero-carbon future. While these accounts focus on the actions in the streets (because, frankly, it just makes much more exciting reading!) I’m actually spending most of my time these days in efforts to build the world we want and to teach the skills of sustainability, and that’s the focus of my longer-term writing.

In the afternoon, I listened to my old friend Terry Gips from the Alliance for Sustainability speak about the Natural Step Program, and the ways he is working with businesses and cities to plan for sustainability. He was very encouraging about the efforts being made by even huge corporations to shift, and the speed of change which has been rapid in the last year.

I’m glad to hear his talk, because I have come to believe that we need rapid, large-scale change as well as grassroots empowerment. It’s something I learned from the last hurricane to hit the Gulf, when I went to New Orleans to volunteer after Katrina. I went partly to see if our directly democratic organizing style had anything to offer in a crisis. I found that it did—indeed, in the first weeks after the hurricane, all the official systems were dysfunctional, the National Guard and military either absent or oppressive, FEMA disastrously incompetent, the Red Cross bound up in red tape. But the activist group Common Ground Relief, drawing on the skills of many of these people I see in the streets around me, and many of the same medics who staff our clinic here, was up and functioning within days, seeing patients, offering medical care and counseling and doing it all in a warm and welcoming way. Common Ground Relief organized distribution of supplies, volunteers to gut houses and clean out toxic mold, a bioremediation project to help heal soil, and many other programs. I found that our activist organizing style had a lot to offer in emergencies.

But I could also see its lacks. We were a tiny effort, compared to what needed to be done. We could have used a thousand Common Ground Reliefs, or some big agency that could go into every parish, every county, assess the damage, bring in help and medical care and resources. And I found myself thinking, hmmn, we’re supposed to have such an agency—it’s called FEMA. We’re supposed to have such an institution, it’s called government, which we the people are supposed to control. And for a problem on this scale, we need an answer on a large scale. So I do believe we need government—that works, that’s accountable to the people, and that helps us to collectively provide for each others’ needs and mitigate the losses and wounds of life.

Tuesday afternoon: I leave the conference to go meet our cluster, to walk together in the March for Our Lives organized by the Poor People’s Movement. The March had been permitted originally, has had its permit withdrawn, reissued and changed so many times I’d lost track of whether it was going to be legal or illegal. We gather in a small park, and the organizers ask everyone there to commit to honoring their nonviolent principles. Everyone raises their hand and promises to act nonviolently.

Just after that, there’s a disturbance in one corner of the park. We run over, and someone runs toward us and tells us that Jason and Riyanna, two of our cluster, have been arrested. They were scouting, roaming the edges of the crowd, when an undercover cop grabbed Jason and threw him on the ground. Later we get the full story: he was tasered seven times with several different devices. Barbs from one of the tasers were left in his hip until he reached the jail, much later, and today, a day later, he’s still removing pieces of copper. He has a deep gash on his leg which has only now, after twenty-four hours, stopped bleeding. He was beaten up—we have a cell phone recording of it, and his face is bruised, he has a black eye and his mouth is hurt. Video of his arrest is at:

http://www.kare11.com/video/player.aspx?aid=81605

I’m going to just jump to the jail stuff and just say that the march was lively, completely nonviolent, but for us, tense. Undercover cops were everywhere, and I was especially concerned for Lisa who we know is on their lists. Several of us stuck close to her throughout the march. At the end, near dark, we left while many people went into the caged area near the convention that was designated the Free Speech Zone. Shortly after we left, the police fired flash bombs, pepper spray and tear gas into the crowd which included women and children.

He was badly beaten when the cops knocked him off his bicycle. They stepped on his chest, and he was coughing blood all night but received no medical treatment. The guards were calling him ‘Princess’ and making homophobic remarks. We heard from Jason that last night, Elliot was making noises to protest not receiving any food for more than twelve hours. Twelve officers entered his cell. Screams were heard for over five minutes. He was tasered three times, maced, and beaten, then removed and the men were told he was being taken to a restraint chair. We have heard, now, that he is being released and are trying to confirm this. Riyanna is still in jail—when last we heard, she was okay and with the other women. Many others have been arrested and are being badly treated and denied medical care—so please include them all in your prayers and energy.

Good news now—Elliot has been released, and is being taken to the wellness center. We’re off to a march against police brutality—I will write more later, Starhawk
-----
Below are all of the DemiOrator posts containing Starhawk's reports from the 2008 Republican National Convention:
Starhawk's RNC post 1: On the Bad Side of Town
Starhawk's RNC post 2: Raid on the Convergence Center
Starhawk's RNC post 3: New Moon Ritual
Starhawk's RNC post 4: Police Seize Permibus
Starhawk's RNC post 5: A Spiral Dance in the Streets
Starhawk's RNC post 6: Emergency Calls Requested
Starhawk's RNC post 7: Dancing with Delegates
Starhawk's RNC post 8: Peace Island and Poor Peoples’ March
Starhawk's RNC post 9: Updates on Thurs, 4 Sept 2008
General Info about Starhawk's RNC Posts

Starhawk's RNC post 7: Dancing with Delegates

2008-09-03T12:42:00.006-04:00

UPDATES:
Emergency Note: Yesterday, Tuesday, two of our cluster were arrested before the start of the March for Our Lives organized by the Poor People’s Movement. Riyanna and Jason were standing at the edge of the park where the rally was happening when they were attacked by police. Witnesses reported to us that Jason was tasered while he was lying on the ground, not resisting, and was refused medical aid. Somehow, later, he managed to get a call through to us on his cell phone, to report that the two taser barbs were still in his hip and the police were refusing to take them out. His phone remained on while we could hear what sounds like the cops beating him up. In a later call, he reported that he has a black eye and multiple abrasions on his head and torso, but is basically okay, and that the taser barbs have been removed. We also heard from Riyanna who is also okay. I just talked to her, and she sounds fine and strong and worried about other prisoners who are being denied needed medication. Arraignments and release are now going very slowly, and she could be held as long as 36 hours, or more. . A good person to call today would be the St. Paul mayor, Chris Coleman, 651-266-8510 demand that he end the targeting of protestors, the abuse of prisoners, and the confiscation of property.

Our PermiBus has been officially ‘released’, but its owners are being told there are 23 violations against it and they are not being allowed to drive it away. They have not received copies of any of the violations except for one: ‘no proof of insurance’. In reality, Stan Wilson has proof of insurance on the bus but was never allowed to produce it. The authorities claim that all searches and seizures over the last week have been done legally, with warrants and judicial review. But the bus was seized illegally with no charges and searched illegally, without a warrant and without the presence of the owners. This is a violation of the Bill of Rights. For the PermiBus, call the Mayor Rybek of Minneapolis,

(612) 673-2100 (His office)

Complaints to Mayor Rybek can be directed by email to dsicomplaints@ci.stpaul.mn.us.

Thanks to all who have made calls—they’ve been very effective If you can’t get through—that’s probably because so many of us are calling!

This account will also be up on my website, as are my stories from the first few days: www.starhawk.org

And don’t worry—after this week I won’t be posting so often!

Dancing with Delegates
by Starhawk

Monday, September 1:

We find ourselves on a wide street that leads into the enclosure where delegates are being allowed into the convention. I look over the river, which winds below us, and when I look up, Lisa and Juniper are in the street, holding back a bus with their hands. The bus driver is inside, looking down at them, and the rest of us run out and join them, until a line of police comes over and, in a fairly gentle manner, pushes us away.

We regroup on the sidewalk, and realize that we have found one of the key sites where delegates are being admitted. Another bus pulls out, and we run out in front of it, forming a spiral which the police again push back.

Across the street, we see a group of delegates walking in on foot. We rush over, and form a line, interfering with their progress and attempting to talk to them. They are attempting to push through us, and one gent in a business suit begins pushing, shoving and shouting at us until the police jump in, push us back and let them through.

…Now there are several hundred of us, Funk the War has joined us with their sound system. We swarm into the street and become a dance party that blocks buses from coming in. We dance our way back up to the enclosure by the convention center.

Groups of delegates are coming through but they’ve got to make their way through hordes of expressive youth and a barrier of rumbling bass. I see one flying wedge of riot cops push a group of delegates through the crowd, These are new cops, much harder edged and more angry than the first ones we encountered.

The swarm still fills the street, and the busses can’t get through. A line of riot cops forms up and begins pushing us back with batons, chanting “Move! Back! Move! Back!”

I’ve gone into the state I think of as the Zone of Deadly Calm—alert, aware, grounded just like I train everyone to do, but strangely emotionless. A lot of truly frightening things are happening all around me, but I’m not feeling fear. That can be a good thing or a bad thing—fear, like pain, is useful information. I’ve done stupid things, in this state, as well as brave ones. But I’ve been through a lot of these actions, and I’ve been in Palestine, supporting nonviolent resistance to the occupation, where we were standing in front of tanks and reasoning with soldiers who shoot real bullets, and the tension never eases up. I understand more now about what exposure to violence does to a person. Yeats has a poem, “The Easter Rising”, I found myself reading over and over after my first tour in the West Bank. It has a line in it that stuck in my head like a mantra:

Too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart.

Down the way, at the point where the bridge comes into the street, I see a line of cops on horseback forming up. They move into the swarm and begin pushing us onto the sidewalk with the horses.

We fall back, staying as close to the horses as we can, talking to the cops on their backs. “Don’t do this to your horse,” Andy is saying over and over again.

More delegates arrive, and the horses block us. Then a way opens up and we take the street again, pushing forward to the entrance, a small gate in the barricades. The horses are trotting after us and shoulder us aside, then they fall back to regroup and we move forward. Our cluster brings out balls of yarn and we begin tossing them back and forth, weaving a web. Lisa keeps tying it onto the fence, blocking the entrance, and a cop with a knife keeps cutting it.

The web is a soft deterrent to the horses—but it also could easily entangle us. At a certain point, we let it drop. The horse cops have called for reinforcements, and there are more of them now. Suddenly they charge into us, pushing us back into the curb in a panicky crush. Elizabeth yells out—her foot has been caught under a hoof. I am squeezed between the horses and the crowd, and I stumble. But strong hands lift me onto the curb, up to safety. I turn and see David Solnit, an old friend from back home in San Francisco. My rescuer! I thank him and he just grins.

Elizabeth, it turns out, is not hurt, just grazed. But we all regroup on the sidewalk, where all along a vendor has been selling hot dogs. Seeds of Peace arrives with sandwiches and carrots, and we grab a bite of lunch.

A young woman in a motorized wheelchair rolls up near our group. She’s speaking to me, but her voice is so soft I have to lean over to hear her. Her head is large and her limbs are shrunken and twisted, and I can’t help but wonder what will happen to her if the police bring out chemical weapons. I put my head next to hers, and she says, “I’m sorry that this is the image you’re getting of our town. It’s really a very nice place to live.”

She seems very brave, alone in her wheelchair, so vulnerable, but with undaunted curiosity. I thank her for coming out, and she rolls away.

A young man sitting on the wall looks up at me. “Pagan cluster, you rock!” he says. “You guys were holding back horses with your bare hands!”

I smile at him. That’s the true reason I’m still willing to put myself out here on the streets, at an age when I probably should know better. Nonviolence isn’t something that can just be preached. It must be practiced. Show, don’t tell. It’s hard to persuade people of its power—because it goes against all of our deepest instincts and the assumptions we’ve internalized from our violent culture: that power comes from the weapon, from physical strength and the willingness to use it to hurt and destroy, that force works. No sane person wants to stand against horses and clubs and more lethal weapons with only our soft bodies and hands. Yet when we do, a different sort of power arises.

Elsewhere in the city windows have been broken. I don’t have patience for long, philosophical discussions about what constitutes violence or nonviolence, or whether inanimate objects have feelings. I don’t agree with those tactics, because, for me, what gets shattered are webs of relationships—the trust and support given to us by the ordinary people of this city where I have friends and relatives and long-standing ties. It’s those relationships we need to truly transform this country. Small groups of isolated activists, however passionate and ideologically pure, aren’t going to do it alone. We need to honor the courage and win the trust of all those people who are never going to see broken windows as anything but vandalism, but who struggle every day against huge forces just to hold their lives together as the system crumbles around us all. And to do that, I believe we have to embody the kind of power we want as a base for our lives: the power of compassion, creativity and love.

Lunch is over. The temper of the cops is worsening with the day, and as more and more demonstrators appear in the streets, they get rougher. A bus moves down the street, and we surge forward to block it. The police form a line and begin driving us back, pretty roughly. We’re forming up our cluster on the sidewalk when the police jump on a protestor and pull him down. A young man is standing nearby, writing down the legal information, and suddenly the cops lunge for him. He’s alert, and runs beyond their reach. They grab Aaron, who is standing holding our flag. They rip the flag out of his hands, throw him down on the ground, and kneel on him. I run forward trying to get to him, but I’m blocked by a cop and his motorcycle and I can only watch as they kneel on his back and jerk his hands up to be cuffed. One of his hands is bleeding.

They’ve got him surrounded, and we can’t get to him. We can only call out, “Aaron, Aaron we love you! We’ve got your back!”

Then the police push us out, further down the road. Their mood is getting uglier. They’re spraying pepper spray, from big canisters, shooting it out before them into the crowd. The mood of the crowd is starting to get angrier, too. Behind us now are not horses but lines of riot cops in gas masks—a bad sign.

We’re moving away when we catch the acrid scent of tear gas on the wind behind us. I have asthma, and though its very mild I feel an obligation to myself to at least try to stay out of tear gas, when I can. So we move faster.

We’re rounding a corner of a building when a cop goes berserk. He lunges at soft-spoken Deborah, whacks her on the arm with his nightstick and knocks her to the ground. Elizabeth runs back and grabs her away as Andy and I move toward the cops and slow them down, talking to them calmly. “We’re leaving,” I say. “We’re doing what you’re telling us to do.”

Deborah is bruised, but okay. We’re moving back up the streets, away from the convention center. We sit down on a lawn to regroup and rest for a moment.

A young man in black, with a Nikon camera, comes running into our group, with two cops on bikes behind us. He rushes through us—they drive into us but can’t get through. He looks around like a cornered rabbit, sees us caught in the melee and turns back, his hands up.

“I’m giving myself up!” he calls to them. He could have gotten away, but I believe that he makes his choice because he feared the cops pursuing him were hurting us. He’s shaking, trying not to cry. “I was only taking pictures. I’m only seventeen. I live here!”

The cops frisk him and search him while we get his name and his mothers’ phone number. We try to get his camera, to keep it safe, but the police won’t release it. “We’ve got your back! We love you. Stay strong!” we call to him. The police lead him away, and Lisa phones his mother.

It’s been a long, tense day and hard to assess its success. But I believe I’ve met my goal—to hold the Republicans accountable in the streets, since the Democrats and the media and the institutions of conventional politics have failed to do it elsewhere. And tomorrow is another day.
-----
Below are all of the DemiOrator posts containing Starhawk's reports from the 2008 Republican National Convention:
Starhawk's RNC post 1: On the Bad Side of Town
Starhawk's RNC post 2: Raid on the Convergence Center
Starhawk's RNC post 3: New Moon Ritual
Starhawk's RNC post 4: Police Seize Permibus
Starhawk's RNC post 5: A Spiral Dance in the Streets
Starhawk's RNC post 6: Emergency Calls Requested
Starhawk's RNC post 7: Dancing with Delegates
Starhawk's RNC post 8: Peace Island and Poor Peoples’ March
Starhawk's RNC post 9: Updates on Thurs, 4 Sept 2008
General Info about Starhawk's RNC Posts

Another Nail into Civil Liberties

2008-09-03T10:18:00.007-04:00

The usual overwhelming displays of force have been on parade at the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minnesota. The excuse of some individuals committing property damage is used to justify excesses on a much wider range of people. Preemptive arrests of people in non-violent groups is the order of the day.

A case could be made that the shunting off of legitimate protests to a "free speech area" several blocks away from the convention contributes to the need of people to make themselves heard. When voicing a critical opinion becomes impossible to hear through deliberate suppression, people will find a way to express their dissatisfaction.

It's difficult for me to blame the police. They are following orders and they have all these nice shiny "non-lethal" weapons at their disposal. The military/police mindset is to meet resistance/protest with overwhelming force to subdue it quickly. If some protesters do illegal things, all protesters are lumped together and treated with the same hard fist.

The modus operandi of the law enforcement branches appears to be a variation on "Kill 'em all and let God sort them out." In this case, "Arrest 'em all and release them when they can't participate in protests." Subtleties like due and proper legal processes are left behind when the situation is viewed through the lens of a 24 episode.

The lesson? Civil liberties are disposable when they are inconvenient. Authority and power always trumps rights and free speech. Distinctions between violence and lawful protest are immaterial because both are the same from their viewpoint.

The irony, of course, is this use of force to silence dissenting opinions in our loudly declared prime example of democracy. This dissonance apparently does not trouble many people.

Here are a few stories:

Starhawk's RNC post 6: Emergency Calls Requested

2008-09-02T17:55:00.008-04:00

Hey friends, again, thanks for all the calls you’ve been making about our bus, progress is being made, slowly. But I just got word that a young man who was scouting for us yesterday was riding his bike when a police officer tackled him and knocked him off his bike. The stepped on his chest, and he spent the night coughing up blood. When he was seen this morning by a jail medical officer, he was told ‘that was normal’. Please call and demand that he get medical treatment. He’s also reported being harassed by the jail guards for his perceived sexual orientation—he’s a soft, sweet spiritual youth who came to our magical activism day camp—apparently they think he is gay. By the way he was charged with ‘assault on an officer’. His name is Elliot Hughes—ask that he receive medical treatment and that the harassment stop. What’s most important is that they know he is not alone and has support. Thanks, Starhawk

Complaint Number for the jail: 651-266-8989
-----
Below are all of the DemiOrator posts containing Starhawk's reports from the 2008 Republican National Convention:
Starhawk's RNC post 1: On the Bad Side of Town
Starhawk's RNC post 2: Raid on the Convergence Center
Starhawk's RNC post 3: New Moon Ritual
Starhawk's RNC post 4: Police Seize Permibus
Starhawk's RNC post 5: A Spiral Dance in the Streets
Starhawk's RNC post 6: Emergency Calls Requested
Starhawk's RNC post 7: Dancing with Delegates
Starhawk's RNC post 8: Peace Island and Poor Peoples’ March
Starhawk's RNC post 9: Updates on Thurs, 4 Sept 2008
General Info about Starhawk's RNC Posts

Starhawk's RNC post 5: A Spiral Dance in the Streets

2008-09-02T06:46:00.004-04:00

by Starhawk (Tue Sep 2 06:46:54 2008)

Hey friends, first, thanks for all the support you’ve been giving us. For those who have made calls about the permibus, thank you! They’ve been very effective and we’re making some progress toward getting it back. Keep them coming! If you’ve tried to donate and can’t get through, here’s a corrected link: http://www.earthactivisttraining.org/donate.html

The phone info, again, is:
Phone: (612) 673-2100 or
call 311 or call (612) 673-3000 outside Minneapolis.
Also call the Ramsey County Sheriff
Sheriff - Bob Fletcher 651-266-9300

and demand the immediate release of the Permibus.

Our whole cluster is safe—one person was arrested but is out of jail. My account begins below and will continue later today when I get a bit of time to write.
love Starhawk

A Spiral Dance in the Streets

Monday morning: we gather up with the cluster at the beginning of the march. We meet early, on a quiet space near the Korean War Memorial at the Capital, where ghost soldiers hover around us, reminding us why we are there to protest war.

We had planned to march as a cluster and then, after, join the blockades in the streets that would attempt to disrupt the beginning of the convention. But all plans have changed, as Hurricane Gustav bears down on the Gulf Coast. The Republicans have condensed their convention, canceled Bush and Cheney’s planned speeches, and moved the timing to earlier in the day. We have moved up our timing as well, in order to intercept the delegates.

Why do we want to interrupt their convention? For me, the answer is simply this: Bush, Cheney and by extension the party that supports them have violated their public trust. They lied to bring us into a war that has cost thousands of American lives and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives. And no one has held them accountable. The Democrats refused to even consider impeachment, although both of them have committed grave offenses. The Democrats have continued funding the war even while speaking against it. The political process has not brought reckoning for the lives they have destroyed and the resources they have squandered. So we will, directly, by putting our own bodies in the way of their immediate ends and goals.

Our cluster is deeply committed to nonviolence. We see nonviolent direct action as a powerful form of magic, of consciousness change. When we commit to nonviolence, we say, “Violence stops with me. I might receive it, but I won’t pass it on. I won’t inflict it, or resort to it to make my point.” When we commit to direct action, we say that we won’t wait for someone else to redress a wrong for us—we will do it ourselves in some way, if only by interposing our bodies into its operations and interfering with its ends.

But we’re also aware that not everyone who will be in the streets shares our philosophy or our goals. The police, and the Republicans, certainly have no commitment to nonviolence. So we are very tightly organized. We each have a buddy. We have scouts who can roam around and bring us back information. We have a medic and a person who will compile any needed information for the legal team. We have a flag to follow, for those willing to enter situations of more danger, and another flag for those who want to stay more safe. Those who do not want to risk either arrest or the other consequences of action will stay with the march.

We circle up, sing, put protective circles around us, bless each other. Then a small group heads off for the march, and about twenty of us head into the streets.

Ahead of us Funk the War, a group of several hundred young people who roam the streets with portable sound machines--direct action by dancing and sheer exuberance. We want to stay a bit away from them—love the kids, hate the sound system, which makes it impossible for us to drum or sing or do the things we do to raise power. Following on their tail, we find ourselves on the edge of a mass of people trapped in an intersection, with riot cops closing in behind. We see an escape route, but we also see an open space in front of the line, and decide to run in and begin a spiral dance. We’re singing “Rising, rising, the earth is rising, turning, turning, the tide is turning” and spiraling in front of the bemused cops, weaving in and out with some of the kids joining us and a hundred cameras clicking away, and when I look up, the riot cops have moved off. Just like magic.

It’s the first victory of many—but now the tension between living life and writing about it has reached crisis point, and I’ve got to go off and play with the grownups today at the Peace Island Conference. So this account will resume later.
-----
Below are all of the DemiOrator posts containing Starhawk's reports from the 2008 Republican National Convention:
Starhawk's RNC post 1: On the Bad Side of Town
Starhawk's RNC post 2: Raid on the Convergence Center
Starhawk's RNC post 3: New Moon Ritual
Starhawk's RNC post 4: Police Seize Permibus
Starhawk's RNC post 5: A Spiral Dance in the Streets
Starhawk's RNC post 6: Emergency Calls Requested
Starhawk's RNC post 7: Dancing with Delegates
Starhawk's RNC post 8: Peace Island and Poor Peoples’ March
Starhawk's RNC post 9: Updates on Thurs, 4 Sept 2008
General Info about Starhawk's RNC Posts

Starhawk's RNC post 4: Police Seize Permibus

2008-08-31T14:00:00.000-04:00

by Starhawk (Sun Aug 31 10:10:31 2008)

Hey friends, we need your help! Our Earth Activist Training Sustainable Skills Bus has been seized without cause by the police. Below is an account from the Wilsons, who have been travelling in the bus for the last seven months doing trainings in permaculture and sustainability, including ways you can help. My own accounts from the action can be found on www.starhawk.org and I’ll be posting daily as long as I can—or sign on to my own list by emailing starhawk-subscribe@lists.riseup.net. If you’re on that list, my own account follows. Please support these folks who have been doing such good work for us all. Thanks!

Police Seize Permibus

Please Post Far and Wide including any Media Contacts You May Have

At approximately 6:25 pm on August 30, 2008 Minneapolis Police, Minnesota State Troopers, Ramsey County Sheriffs, Saint Paul Police, and University of Minnesota Police pulled over the Earth Activist Training Permaculture Demonstration Bus (Permibus) by exit 237 on Interstate 94. Initially the police told the people on the bus to exit. When the people on the bus asked if they were being detained they were told that they were but police were unable to provide justification. When asked why they pulled the bus over they refused to answer. After repeated requests to explain why the bus had been stopped Officer Honican of the Minneapolis Police explained that this was just a routine traffic stop though he did not explain the reason for the traffic stop. The police then told Stan Wilson, the driver and registered owner of the Permibus, that they were going to impound the bus in case they wanted to execute a search warrant later. After more than an hour of being questioned by Stan and Delyla Wilson as to the legalities of their detainment and the impoundment of the Permibus, the police then informed Stan that the bus, which is legally registered as a passenger vehicle in the state of Montana, was being impounded for a commercial vehicle inspection. Shortly afterward Sergeant Paul Davis, a commercial vehicle inspector arrived on scene. Despite the polices insistence that the reason for impoundment was for a commercial vehicle inspection the Permibus crew were not allowed to remove anything from the bus including computers, toiletries, and 17-year-old Megan Wilson's shoes. The police finally allowed the animals to be removed from the Permibus before it was towed, leaving the Permibus family standing beside their chickens and dogs, homeless on the highway.

The Permibus was relocating from the Bedlam Theatre in Minneapolis, where they had spent the day teaching Urban Permaculture, to a friend's house in Saint Paul for a well deserved break. The Permibus has been in the Minneapolis area since August 2nd when the crew appeared at the Midtown Farmers Market for a morning of Permaculture education including Permaculture 101, chicken care, seed ball making for kids, and the Permi-puppet show. During the past month the Permibus has parked at several local businesses and, as a neighborly gesture of respect for local police, Mr. Wilson contacted the appropriate precincts just to let them know the Permibus was in the area and had permission from the business owners to be parked on their lot. Through this, as well as other casual discussions with Minneapolis and Saint Paul police officers, the Permibus crew found the local police to be interested and respectful. However on August 30th all that changed when, for no apparent valid reason the police pulled over and seized the Permibus. After the incident Stan Wilson said, "If the combined law enforcement of Minneapolis, Saint Paul, Ramsey County, and the State of Minnesota can pull over and impound a vehicle and home used to teach organic gardening and sustainability, one has to wonder what it is our government really fears. After all, we seek to teach people that the real meaning of homeland security is local food, fuel and energy production. For that we have had our lives stolen by government men with guns."

As of now, after repeated requests to be present at any vehicle inspection, with an list of what they are inspecting for, as well as requests to be served any warrants for searches of the vehicles prior to a search and to be present during the search the Permi-family has been unable to ascertain the current status of the Permibus. On site Mr. Wilson was told that Officer Palmerranky was the inspector in charge of the case and would determine if the Permi-family's rights protecting them from unreasonable search and seizure would be respected. Neither Officer Palmerranky nor his supervisor has yet to return Mr. Wilson's calls. The loss of her home and possessions is particularly difficult on seventeen-year-old Megan Wilson. Megan, a shining example of what this country asks of today's youth, has dedicated herself to making positive changes in the world. She was the youth keynote speaker at the Local to Global conference in Phoenix AZ, has taught conflict resolution at youth shelters and is the outreach coordinator for the Skills for a New Millennium Tour, the family traveling educational project. Megan believes that, "While I understand that the world we live in is not as it should be I strive to live and teach in a way that shows the world how life could be. What I don't understand is why I can't get dressed for an evening out with friends in my own home without armed men stealing my life out from under me." The Permi-family, along with their dogs and Permaculture super-hero chickens are currently being housed by folks in the Twin Cities.

The Skills for a New Millennium Tour is a family education project that travels around the United States teaching homesteading, citizenship, and life skills at farmers markets, community gardens, churches, intentional communities, schools, and in people's living rooms. The Skills Tour is a donation supported project dedicated to providing tools for sustainable living, including Permaculture, to anyone who is interested, regardless of income. "We believe that any solution that is not accessible to the poor and urban areas is not a real solution for the future," states Delyla Wilson. Permaculture is a design system with ethics and principles that can be applied to food production, home design, and community building in order to increase sustainability in food production, energy production, and social systems. The Permibus is a rolling demonstration of small scale sustainable living with three people, three dogs, three chickens, and a box of worms as permanent residence. The chickens and worms are part of a closed-loop food productions composting system that supports the Permibus's traveling garden. For more information on the seizure of the Permibus, the Skills for the New Millennium Tour, or Permaculture, the Wilson's can be reached at 406-721-8427 or through email at skillstour@gmail.com. You can also see pictures and read stories about the last six months of their educational adventures at permibus.livejournal.com.

To our supporters: First we ask that as many people as possible contact precinct one in Minneapolis, MN at 612-673-5701 and Mayor Rybak at

Phone: (612) 673-2100 or
call 311 or call (612) 673-3000 outside Minneapolis.
Also call the Ramsey County Sheriff
Sheriff - Bob Fletcher 651-266-9300
and demand the immediate release of the Permibus.

We are also in desperate need of donations. Though we do not yet know the full cost of getting the permibus returned we know that it will include tow fee, impound fees, and legal fees. To donate contact us directly for a local address or...

Donate On-line:
Go to: http://www.earthactivisttraining.org/donate.html
Click on: Donate Now!
Under "Gift Information" write: Permibus
Under "Please send acknowledgment of this gift to" write: skillstour@gmail.com

Donate by Mail:
Make check payable to: A.C.T.
On the "For" line write: Permibus
Send check to: A.C.T. 1405 Hillmount St. Austin, TX 78704

This post has been sent to you from Starhawk@lists.riseup.net. This is an announce-only listserve that allows Starhawk to post her writings occasionally to those who wish to receive them. To subscribe to this list, send an email to Starhawk-subscribe@lists.riseup.net.

Below are all of the DemiOrator posts containing Starhawk's reports from the 2008 Republican National Convention:
Starhawk's RNC post 1: On the Bad Side of Town
Starhawk's RNC post 2: Raid on the Convergence Center
Starhawk's RNC post 3: New Moon Ritual
Starhawk's RNC post 4: Police Seize Permibus
Starhawk's RNC post 5: A Spiral Dance in the Streets
Starhawk's RNC post 6: Emergency Calls Requested

Starhawk's RNC post 3: New Moon Ritual

2008-08-31T13:14:00.002-04:00

I'm a fan of well-executed non-violent actions such as the ones Starhawk often participates in. Sadly, the police remain woefully ignorant about the difference between violent and non-violent actions. Or perhaps they just don't care: a disruption is a disruption is a disruption, and free speech only belongs in a Free Speech ~~Cage~~ Area, far away from the convention. Preemptive action against all planned protests always seems to be the order of the day by authorities at these conventions. --DemiOrator

Feel free to forward or repost this—thanks to all who have made calls already—it really helps! We got the convergence space reopened—but the raids continue!

New Moon Ritual
By Starhawk
(Sun Aug 31 10:14:12 2008)

This is how magic works:

We are gathered on sacred ground overlooking the Mississippi to celebrate the new moon and to begin this week of demonstrations and actions outside the Republican National Convention. We have an intention for the ritual, an intention the planners have been working with here in the Twin Cities for months: to court an upwelling of earth wisdom.

Magic, we say, is the art of changing consciousness at will—that’s Dion Fortune’s definition. Implicit in that is ‘art’, imagery, poetry, and we’ve been looking for the imagery that will embody our intention. The most powerful rituals are built around one clear image and one clear intention.

But we keep getting multiple images: webs, crystals, bedrock, surging water. The hurricane, roaring toward the Gulf, back toward New Orleans where many of us volunteered after Katrina. And dragons.

“Oh please Goddess not dragons!” I’m saying silently inside my own mind. “With or without dungeons—high wince factor. Overused. Disneyesque.” But dragons it is—protective Chinese dragons, ancient earth serpent powers, water dragons, fierce, fire-breathing guardians.

Many years ago, I had a friend who lived in a group house in San Francisco. He used to say that every collective needed a dragon who lived in the basement, someone really ill tempered who will emerge from time to time and drive off those people who come to visit for a night and end up staying for a month, eating up all your sweet pickle chips and losing your bicycle.

And so, when we do ritual in a public place, we always name some people as ‘dragons’, to guard the boundaries of the circle. This ritual coincides with the arrival of a group who has biked from a conference in Madison, Wisconsin all the way to the Twin Cities. Paul has contacted them, and asked them to be our dragons.

I am having a lot of trouble shifting my own consciousness as the ritual begins. It’s been a hard, tense day. All day we’ve been getting news that the police have been raiding houses, breaking down doors, arresting people, with or without warrants or warnings. We hold the morning meeting in a public park, because our Convergence Space has been raided and closed the night before. Someone says, “We’re a community that includes children—we can’t clear them out of their own living spaces. Remember if the police raid your space it’s important to have someone negotiate with them to get the children out.”

I am a tough person. I’ve been through a lot of these things and in spite of all my efforts to stay open I’ve grown something of my own protective scales. But those words pierce through them, and I find tears welling up in my eyes. It just hits me, that we’re standing here in the United States of America, in the liberal city of my birth, talking about how to protect children from armed police.

So this is on my mind as I try to center for the ritual, and then comes the news that our PermiBus has been pulled over and our friends in it are being arrested. My own organization, Earth Activist Trainings, has helped to build and fund this bus, and our dear friends Delyla and Stan Wilson and their daughter Megan have been traveling in it for seven months, offering trainings in Sustainable Skills, and tours of the bus itself as a living example. It has solar panels and graywater systems, a worm bin, hydroponic herb garden, composting toilet and three resident chickens. Megan, a gifted poet at sixteen, says: “We know the world is not as it should be: we want to live in a way that shows people what could be.”

So I’m trying to wrench my mind away from worrying about them, using all my magical tools to try to get calm and grounded and centered, and not having great success. I’m responsible for a major part of the ritual, and though I’ve been meditating on it and thinking about it for days, my mind is still pretty much a blank and now, as the ritual begins, I still don’t know exactly what I’m going to do.

And then the dragons ride in. Paul signals to them, and they ride down the hill and around and around the circle on their bikes, while we cheer and laugh with delight. For each of them has made a dragon costume. They have long snouts of painted cardboard and foam spikes in their helmets and wild wings of wire and gauze and webbing. They ride around and around, and just for a moment, the clouds of stress and worry roll away and I’m filled with wonder and delight. Three bald eagles circle above us. Magic.

As the ritual begins, I know what I am going to say, what images and energies are asking to be expressed. We honor the ancestors, and ask permission to do our work on that sacred land. We cast a circle, call in the elements of earth, air, fire, water. A young woman from the biking group has asked to spin fire, and her dance with twirling balls of fire on chains lights up all our hearts. All the while, the dragons stand guard around us, calm and still in their snouts and wings.

Susu, who is a poet, calls the Mississippi by having us all chant the letters of the mother river’s name, spelling a spell. We call in the earth spirits, and we call protection, for the circle, for all our friends in the street, and for our friends and all those in the path of the hurricane heading toward the Gulf.

My turn comes. Right away, I abandon my plans. This circle needs to move, to sing and dance, so I call in the drummers and we sing a chant to Spider Woman and to change.

“Spiders and webs are positive images for us,” I tell the group when the chant dies down. “The web is a symbol for the web of life, the web of connection. But there are other sorts of webs, too. Sticky webs. Webs of lies. Webs of entrapment. There’s a web of negative energy that has been covering this country, media webs that whisper to you day and night that you’re not good enough, not good looking enough, webs of scorn and judgment. And those webs get inside us.”

I ask people to turn to each other, to draw out the threads of those webs and let them sink into the ground as pure energy. To open up a space for something new.

If there’s a core belief in the Goddess religion, it’s this: that each of us is part of the web of life, and precious, bringing our own unique gifts to the world. We don’t ask people to believe in things, not even the Goddess who is simply our term for the great creative mystery that weaves the world. But we do ask people to believe in yourself, in your own deep work, in your sacred purpose. You are here for a reason.

And then I ask people to sink down into that web of life, to feel it beneath our feet, in the soil, in the web of waters that flow beneath us, in the very bedrock below us which was once living things and which in the fullness of time will return to life as soil and root and growing thing. To listen to that web of life, and to know that all we really need to do to court its upwelling is to open up a space for it, and listen.

Eagles circle, and then as the sun sets, so do helicopters, circling around us, their thrum making it nearly impossible to hear. But we begin to dance and drum, to weave a spiral and raise a roaring cone of power, and the helicopters finally move away. Energy pours through us, roaring upwards like dragon fire.

At the end of the ritual, someone calls for anyone who was in the convergence center when it was raided to come forward. A young woman steps into the center of the circle. She was in the building the night before, with her five year old son, who was scared and crying as the police drew their guns on his mother, handcuffed her, patted her down. Now we lay soft hands on her, chant and sing and send her healing. When it is done, she’s glowing; and immediately begins organizing housing for all the people who have been displaced by the raids.

I sit down, spent. A man and a woman come over to talk. They are thinking of offering housing, but worried. What about the anarchists? Won’t they destroy things, or bring down the police on their home? If they march with us, will they be in danger? They’ve heard that anarchists like to provoke the police to attack peaceful demonstrators, to radicalize them.

I explain gently that anarchism is many things—a political philosophy with widely varying strands, from nihilists to pacifists. But mostly a way of organizing, a stress on personal responsibility, on taking action oneself and not waiting for the government or someone else to do it for you.

A young woman from the biker’s group comes over. She’s dressed all in black—if ever someone looked the part of an anarchist, it’s her.

“We were just talking about you,” says the man, and soon they are deep in discussion. She tells him that yes, she is an anarchist, and so are pretty much all of the group with the bikes. And that for her, it’s about building community, looking out for each other, making decisions together, mutual aid and respect. They have a long discussion, in which magic is happening: consciousness is changing.

I talk with her and with some of the other dragons as we share food made by Seeds of Peace. A tall young man with golden curls tells me how much it meant to them to be dragons. “We really got into it,” he says. “We spent a whole day making our costumes, and getting into that guardian, protective energy. And now I don’t want to let it go. I’m going to keep my foam spikes in my helmet when I’m doing deliveries. We want to be guardians for the marches, for the city. For the world.”

This is how magic works.

The bikers are all hugging each other in a circle, reluctant to leave each other now that the ride is over. They have fulfilled their intention, built their community, spread their message, and brought us a gift of wonder and delight.

And as we prepare to leave, I get a new message. Our friends with the bus have not been arrested, although the bus itself has been impounded. They are free, although their home and all their possessions, computers, permaculture displays, worms and the contents of their composting toilet are now locked up somewhere in a police yard, with no explanation or reason. The police had no search warrant—indeed, they did not search the bus, but explained that they were impounding it in case they wanted to search it later. They did, however, release the people, the two exuberant Australian shepherd dogs, and the three chickens, with whom we are reunited back at our home.

Magic. Like so many things, it doesn’t work perfectly. But it works.

www.starhawk.org
www.earthactivisttraining.org
permibus.livejournal.com
-----
This post has been sent to you from Starhawk@lists.riseup.net. This is an announce-only listserve that allows Starhawk to post her writings occasionally to those who wish to receive them.
To subscribe to this list, send an email to Starhawk-subscribe@lists.riseup.net.
To unsubscribe, send an email to Starhawk-unsubscribe@lists.riseup.net.
Starhawk is a lifelong activist in peace and global justice movements, a leader in the feminist and earth-based spirituality movements, author or coauthor of ten books, including The Spiral Dance, The Fifth Sacred Thing, Webs of Power: Notes from the Global Uprising, and her latest, The Earth Path
.
Starhawk's website is www.starhawk.org, and more of her writings and information on her schedule and activities can be found there.
-----
Below are all of the DemiOrator posts containing Starhawk's reports from the 2008 Republican National Convention:
Starhawk's RNC post 1: On the Bad Side of Town
Starhawk's RNC post 2: Raid on the Convergence Center
Starhawk's RNC post 3: New Moon Ritual
Starhawk's RNC post 4: Police Seize Permibus
Starhawk's RNC post 5: A Spiral Dance in the Streets
Starhawk's RNC post 6: Emergency Calls Requested

Cynical Smile: Four Years of Blogging

2008-08-30T15:38:00.006-04:00

I've come full circle: It was over four years ago, during the Democratic National Convention of 2004, that I began this erratic blog called DemiOrator. I've slacked off blogging here during the last year or so, my attention focused elsewhere. Still, I have affection for this tatty and ratty personal expression of mine despite the recent neglect.

I started this blog with a cynical eye but with hope that things could be improved. This seems less and less likely, despite Obama's nomination. Superficially, Obama seems like a sign of progress, his nomination by a major party to run for president practically unimaginable just a generation ago. Yet I have seen little evidence of substantial change coming if he is elected. Oh, his administration will probably be head and shoulders above the current administration or McCain's but these are exceptionally low bars to clear.

I've always had little confidence in the US political system above the very local level of participation. Democracy does not thrive well beyond the local representative level where you can actually talk with your rep or attend meetings with them. At a national level, the corruption of power, money and ruling class values dominates discussion and influence. Lobbyists write legislation to benefit their clients/special interests and money talks louder than the voices of constituents.

This is Labor Day weekend and I suspect large numbers of people under 30 have little clear idea what it originally represented. Today, unions have been losing members for decades and the percentage of unionized US workers is at its lowest ebb. The idea of banding together with other workers even seems bizarre to many because we're now acclimated to the idea that we're competing with everyone else.

"Collective bargaining? Solidarity? Aren't those commie ideas? Commies are bad, right? We won the Cold war and I don't want no truck with commies."

So politicians continue to pull our strings to get votes. There are no guarantees that the promises made before the election will be kept after the election. They'll claim new facts and a fuller understanding/briefing on the situation means that there are other factors in the balance.

I'm willing to give Obama the benefit of the doubt but I also expect nothing more from him than I expect from any politician: reversals of positions, inaction on many pre-election promises, and equivications when confronted on this pattern.

I never believe slogans or promises; I only believe in actions. I recommend you do as well.

Starhawk's RNC post 2: Raid on the Convergence Center

2008-08-30T08:00:00.002-04:00

By Starhawk (Sat Aug 30 08:00:09 2008)

It’s Friday night. Our Pagan Cluster is sitting on the bluff of the Mississippi having our first real meeting, when Lisa gets a call. The cops are raiding the Convergence Center, where we’re organizing meetings and trainings for the protests against the Republican National Convention. It’s not a role play, the caller says. It’s real.

Instantly, we jump up and hurry back the six or eight blocks to the old theater we are using for meetings, trainings and social gatherings. I've spent the last two days doing magical activism trainings, teaching people how to stay calm and grounded in emergency situations and when things get chaotic. Now it’s time to put the training into practice. Aaron, a tall, red-headed young man who could be one of my nephews strides along beside me. “Are you grounded?” I ask him. He nods, and runs ahead.

Nobody can keep up with Lisa, who speeds ahead like an arrow, walking, not running, but still covering the ground quickly. Andy and I trail behind. We’re often street buddies, because we’re both big, slow, and supremely calm and stubborn, willing to wade into almost any situation and become the immovable object.

We’re stopped by a line of cops just before we reach the building. They refuse to let us through, or to move their van which is blocking Scarecrow’s car. There’s an investigation underway, they say, and won’t say more.

Brush, our dear friend, is inside, having gone to a jail solidarity meeting, ironically enough. So are two very young people who had just joined our cluster that night. I try calling Brush’s cell phone, but get no reply.

We wait. That’s what you do when the cops have guns trained on kids inside a building. You wait, and witness, and make phone calls, and try to think of useful things to do.

We call lawyers. We call politicians. We try to call media. We call friends who might know politicians and media.

Through the kitchen door, we can see young kids sitting on the floor, handcuffed. We walk across the street, back, made more phone calls. An ambulance is parked in front, and the paramedics head into the building, leaving a gurney ready. Susu, from her car around the corner, reports that the cops have been grabbing pedestrians from the street, forcing them down to the ground, handcuffing them.

Song, one of the local organizers, calls her City Council member. She wants to call the Mayor, Chris Coleman, who has promised that St. Paul will be as welcoming to protesters as to delegates, but no one has his home number.

What I have forgotten to tell people at the training is how much of an action is just this: tense, boring waiting, with a knot of anxiety in your stomach and your feet starting to hurt. Song talks to a helpful neighbor, who’s come over to find out what’s happening. He knows where the mayor lives, says it’s just a few blocks away, and draws us a map.

We decide to go and call on the Mayor, who could call off the cops. About five of us troop down there, through the soft night and a neighborhood of comfortable homes and wide lawns on the bluffs above the Mississippi. The Mayor’s house is a comfortable Dutch Colonial, and lights were on inside. We decide that just a few of us will go to the door, so as not to look intimidating. Song is a round, soft-bodied middle-aged woman with a sweet face. Ellen is a tiny brunette with a gap-toothed smile, and Lisa, formidable organizer though she is, looks slight and unthreatening. The rest of us hang back. Someone opens the door. Our friends have a conversation with the mayors’ wife, who is not pleased to be visited by constituents late at night, and who tells us we should call the office. The Mayor, she says, is asleep, and she will not wake him up.

We think a mayor who was doing his job would get up and go see what’s going on. Nonetheless, we head back to the convergence space.

A protester has been released from the building. A small crowd has gathered across the street, and Fox News has arrived. They interview Song, who does her first ever Fox media spot. She tells them the truth—that people were in there watching movies—a documentary about Meridel Le Seuer. Meridel would be proud, and I’m glad she is with us in some form.

One by one, protesters trickle out. Now we get more pieces of the story. The cops burst in, with no warning. They pulled drew their guns on everyone—including a five year old child who was there with his mother, forced everyone down on the floor. It was terrifying.

They had a warrant, apparently, from the county, not the city, to search for ‘bomb making materials.’ They were searching everyone in the building, then one by one releasing them as they found nothing.

They continue to find nothing, as we wait through long hours. Meanwhile, more and more media arrives. These cops are not as creative as the DC cops during our first mobilization there against the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Those cops confiscated the lunchtime soup—which included onions and chili powder, claiming they were materials for home made pepper spray.

We wait until the last person gets out. He’s a twenty year old who the cops have accused of stealing his own backpack—but apparently they relented.

And now it’s morning. I wake up to the news that cops have been raiding houses where activists are staying, bursting in with the same bogus warrant and arresting people, including a four year old child. They’ve arrested people at the Food Not Bombs house—a group dedicated to feeding protesters and the homeless. They’ve arrested others, presumably just for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The Poor Peoples’ Campaign, which had set up camp at Harriet Island, a park in the middle of the Mississippi, has also been harassed, its participants ordered to disperse and its organizers arrested.

Let me be perfectly clear here—all of us here are planning nonviolent protests against an administration which is responsible for immense violence, bombs that have destroyed whole countries, and hundreds of thousands of deaths.

This is the America that eight years of the Bush administration have brought us, a place where dissent is no longer tolerated, where preemptive strikes have become the strategy of choice for those who hold power, where any group can be accused of ‘bombmaking’ or ‘terrorism’ on no evidence whatsoever in order to deter dissent.

Please stand with us. Because it could be your home they are raiding, next.

Call the Mayors of St. Paul and Minneapolis. Tell them you are outraged by these attacks on dissent. Urge them to let Poor People encamp and to let dissent be heard.

FLOOD THE MAYORS' OFFICES ASAP

St. Paul Mayor Chris Coleman
651-266-8510

Minneapolis Mayor RT Rybak
(612) 673-2100
(612) 673-3000 outside Minneapolis

This post has been sent to you from Starhawk@lists.riseup.net. This is an announce-only listserve that allows Starhawk to post her writings occasionally to those who wish to receive them. To subscribe to this list, send an email to Starhawk-subscribe@lists.riseup.net.
-----
Below are all of the DemiOrator posts containing Starhawk's reports from the 2008 Republican National Convention:
Starhawk's RNC post 1: On the Bad Side of Town
Starhawk's RNC post 2: Raid on the Convergence Center
Starhawk's RNC post 3: New Moon Ritual
Starhawk's RNC post 4: Police Seize Permibus
Starhawk's RNC post 5: A Spiral Dance in the Streets
Starhawk's RNC post 6: Emergency Calls Requested

Starhawk's RNC post 1: On the Bad Side of Town

2008-08-30T06:35:00.006-04:00

By Starhawk (Sat Aug 30 06:34:58 2008)

If they wrote country songs about organizing mobilizations, they might sing something like this:

“It’s just one more earnest meeting…
How do we turn this country ‘round?
In one more dusty warehouse,
On the bad side of town…”

I’m here at the preparations for the protests against the RNC, the Republican National Convention, in the Twin Cities of St. Paul and Minneapolis. It’s a familiar scene: half a dozen of us early arrivals and locals huddled around a giant map of the downtown area. Twenty seven years ago, when I took my first nonviolence training in preparation for my first nonviolent direct action at Diablo Canyon in central Californai. The thing that most impressed me was the maps.

“They had maps!” I told everyone when I got home. “We never had maps in the ‘sixties! We just showed up—the cops chased us, sometimes we chased the cops, and that was that!”

The RNC Welcoming Committee has the best maps—larger than life, and laminated—and the least dusty warehouse I’ve seen in a while. Actually, it’s not a warehouse but an old theater, with a fully-equipped commercial kitchen, and such dust as there might have been has been cleaned before I got here, for which I’m devoutly grateful. I’ve cleaned up more than my share of pigeon dung from abandoned warehouses in preparation for one mobilization or another, and instead of coming weeks early to this one, I stayed home with an urgent mission to evict the mice from my desk drawers and clear the wood rat’s nests out of my battery box after a summer away from home.

I am here at the RNC for reasons both strategic and personal. “Why didn’t you go to the DNC?” some of my friends asked. The two conventions were timed so close together that even I, with my tendency to be obsessive and driven, felt I couldn’t really plan and train and organize for the RNC and do both. Moreover, it was clear to me that the only real drama at the DNC was going to be inside, with Obama. While the Democrats sorely need to be taken to task for many failings—funding the war while railing against it, voting for immunity for wiretapping for AT & T while proclaiming their allegiance to our civil liberties, failing to impeach Bush when they had the chance, just to name a few—if I had to make a choice it seemed to me that the sins of the Republicans were far greater, and the chance of having an impact slightly higher.

And I’m not immune to Obama’s appeal, and the historic significance of his nomination. When I was born, Obama and I could not have had a sandwich together at a lunch counter in the South, nor sat next to each other on a bus ride. His parents could not have married in many states. I was just a couple of years too young to be part of the civil rights movement—I remember watching it on TV at thirteen in L.A., begging my mother to let me go to the South. But the courage and sacrifices I saw, the struggles and successes of that movement profoundly shaped my own life and changed our country forever.

That today, Obama can run for President is something progressives should be celebrating. It’s a tribute, not to the Democrats, but to decades of grass-roots organizing and agitating that we can trace back to the days of abolitionists and slave rebellions and the underground railway. It’s the powerful people’s movements that pressured Democrats and Republicans into ending segregation, and the ongoing work of decades of challenges to more subtle forms of racism that have opened this door.

And we need to own and celebrate our victories. It’s always easy to focus on the lacks, the betrayals, the faults and failures. Our successes will never be perfect—and as progressives, we tend to be perectionists, always demanding more of ooursleves, and the world. This is something I noticed about myself after I downloaded a Solitaire widget to my computer—how easily I can be addicted to frustration. Alcohol, I can take or leave. Drugs were fun in my youth but fortunately none of them stuck, and I was blithely convinced I just did not have an addictive personality until I realized how strongly frustration can hook me. Give me a lost cause, a hopeless endeavor, an impossible task—as Gimli says at some point in Lord of the Rings: “Almost certain death, small chance of success--What are we waiting for?”

My mother used to tell me how she’d watched me, as a baby, trying to cross a threshold, tripping and falling, getting up, and trying again, over and over. So I guess the predilection is inborn.

Frustration addiction—where is the twelve step program for that and how do you go cold turkey? I don’t know, but it explains a lot about me and I suspect that progressives as a whole are subject to it. Yet if we don’t acknowledge and honor our victories, we lose heart and burn out.

And I want to celebrate this one, not protest against it. Obama will certainly not be our savior nor fulfill all our hopes. But let’s just take one moment and recognize that he is an extraordinary human being, and to honor all those who marched and spoke out, who took risks and went to jail, who suffered beatings and who died, to clear a path before him.

But back to the RNC. Draconian police forces, world class security with infinite resources, FBI, Secret Service, Homeland Security all on full alert; small band of intrepid protesters—What are we waiting for?

I’m here really just to bring home to the Republicans the truth that wrecking the country might have some negative consequences. The Democrats have failed to hold them accountable. Most of the country is wrapped in a sullen, smoldering anger that does not yet lead to action. But some of us are here, plotting and planning our marches and counter conventions and direct actions. And while it may prove to be a major slip in my ongoing struggle with F.A., I’m glad to be here with a crew of old and new friends, those buddies I’m bonded with in the way you only get to be when you’ve stood shoulder to shoulder as some cop shoots you in the face with pepper spray.

And, on a personal note, I was drawn to the Twin Cities because this is where I was born—in St. Joseph’s Hospital, a few blocks away from where the Republicans will meet. Although we left here when I was nine months old, my father’s family is from here, and they have roots in the radical community here that go back to the communist movements of the ‘Thirties. My father himself died when I was five—like Obama my life was also marked by a fathers’ absence. But my Uncle Hi and Aunt Ruthie carried on the tradition. They beamed approval at all my political endeavors. My Aunt Ruthie loved to sing the satiric political ditties of the ‘forties and ‘fifties, filling me in on the now almost forgotten events they memorialized. They were friends with people like the great author and activist Meridel Le Seuer. When my Uncle Don-Don was in the hospital recovering from a heart attack, we went to visit him, closed the doors, and regaled him with a rousing chorus of the Internationale.

Aside from their politics, they lived otherwise utterly conventional and blameless lives, dull, really. They had a small tract house in St. Paul, and worked at the V.A., my aunt as a secretary, my uncle as a recreation therapist. Aunt Ruthie said she liked the V.A. because it was the closest thing we had to socialized medicine. My father and his brothers, like virtually all the men of their generation, were veterans of World War Two. My Uncle Hi always said that he joined the navy because it was a clean life, but he never knew who cleaned it until he got in. As he slipped into the fog of Alzheimer’s, he said it over and over again. He was fond of recounting how many situps he had done, and how many miles he had jogged.

So I’m here, maybe, because they would have wanted me to be here. They’re gone, now, and I miss them. Were they alive, they’d undoubtedly be hosting the entire Pagan Cluster camped out in their back yard, my Aunt Ruthie whipping up little treats of Ritz cracker and peanut butter sandwiches dipped in chocolate.

And I’m here because I have good friends here, and because this city has a tradition of nonviolent direct action organizing that goes back decades. When we were blockading Livermore Labs in the ‘eighties, protesting nuclear weapons, they were organizing in the same way against Honeywell. There’s a spectrum of events being planned, from legal marches to nonviolent direct action, and a wide range of people planning.

Okay, more later.
------
This post has been sent to you from Starhawk@lists.riseup.net. This is an announce-only listserve that allows Starhawk to post her writings occasionally to those who wish to receive them. To subscribe to this list, send an email to Starhawk-subscribe@lists.riseup.net.
Starhawk is a lifelong activist in peace and global justice movements, a leader in the feminist and earth-based spirituality movements, author or coauthor of ten books, including The Spiral Dance, The Fifth Sacred Thing, Webs of Power: Notes from the Global Uprising, and her latest, The Earth Path. Starhawk's website is www.starhawk.org, and more of her writings and information on her schedule and activities can be found there.
-----
Below are all of the DemiOrator posts containing Starhawk's reports from the 2008 Republican National Convention:

John McCain on Women's Issues

2008-08-04T10:49:00.006-04:00

A recent article in In These Times highlights some of the positions McCain has taken over the years on women's issues. With a title like McSexist: McCain’s War on Women you may be able to guess the general tenor of it.

A selection of McCain's comments over the last year make it clear that he isn't remotely pro-choice. Actually, he doesn't really like any contraception, being firmly in the abstinence-only camp. Better still is his record of opposing accuracy in these programs: "He opposed legislation requiring that abstinence-only programs be medically accurate and based in science. He voted to abolish funding for birth control and gynecological care for low-income women..."

Planned Parenthood and NARAL have each given him a zero for his record on women’s health issues. (The record dates back to his days in the House of Representatives, between 1983 and 1986, and carries through to his career in the U.S. Senate, which began in 1987.) Of the 130 congressional votes related to reproductive freedom that McCain has cast, 125 have been anti-choice, according to NARAL.

I have a theory, not specifically about McCain but the general anti-choice movement. While I completely understand and empathize with the moral/ethical underpinnings of the anti-abortion movement, I also find it interesting that the end result is to create more births/people in an underclass with inadequate education and limited employment options, usually in an unhealthy and crime-ridden environment because of those factors.

Exploitation of the lower class is really the basic building block of "natural" free market capitalism where wealth flows up the pyramid to the few people at the top. The larger the number of people who are desperate and struggling at the bottom, the more the workers/peasants are willing to viciously focus their rage at their peers. This is called "horizontal hostility" and it works in favor of those in power. Quo bono? Who benefits?

There's a level where I'm very cynical about the so-called "right to life" movement even while respecting individual opinions/morals/ethics in the matter. I think there is an undercurrent, perhaps even completely unacknowledged, of hypocrisy and self-deception in the movement. I note that I very rarely hear of a concerted effort on the part of anti-choice activists/organizations to aggressively adopt the orphaned or unwanted children inevitably resulting from lack of birth control or legal abortion. I'm sure it happens but it certainly doesn't appear to be a co-equal or integrated part of the movement. If these children are truly innocent in the eyes of anti-choice activists, I would expect an outpouring of personal compassion to succor and nurture them.

I suspect that the so-called "pro-family values" aspect means that the putatively innocent children are partially held to blame for their parents' actions (e.g. sex without intended procreation) and thus deserve misery and hardship. If someone can show me large-scale evidence that I'm wrong, I will gladly recant this opinion.

Since McCain has said on more than one occasion that he would like to see Roe v Wade overturned and would appoint Supreme Court Justices to that end, his election will undoubtedly result in the increase of deaths of women and more orphans.

Conservatives are compassionate. Except, sometimes, when it involves inconvenience and concrete application of personal principles in daily life.

A Tyranny of Blogging, A Dearth of Sensation

2008-07-26T23:40:00.004-04:00

While spending a few months breathing the fresh air and studiously neglecting my online world, I discovered that I felt much better in general.

This bears emphatic declaration: The online world is not in any way a proper substitute for the Real World.

There is enormous appeal to online community and the relationships we develop in our chosen communities. While I would not advocate complete abandonment of blogs and online news sources, there is good reason to recommend taking a hiatus from it for a period of time.

Humans are social animals, used to living in communities with lots of face to face communication. Historically, until rather recently, most of your human interaction would be with people you knew (and who knew you) all your life, from birth to death.

Although teh internets provide an excellent way of exchanging information and networking, it remains an alienating medium at base. It lacks smells, body language, vocal inflection and intonation, etc. Emoticons, lol, (smile) and *hugs* are poor stand-ins for a much richer communication vocabulary available in meatspace.

So, go take a walk. Strike up a conversation with a total stranger and see where it goes. Don't go online for a week or two. Attend a physical protest or rally instead of signing an online petition.

As the saying goes, stop and smell the roses.

Random 10 Songs: "Silent Undertones Freeze the Renaissance Fool" Edition

2008-07-25T11:55:00.008-04:00

While other things have been occupying my time for several months, I still plan to post here more. Really.

"Mama's Boy" by Suzi Quatro
"Can You Understand" by Renaissance
"Two Soldiers" by David Byrne
"Baby You're Not Going to Make a Fool Out of Me" by Lightning Hopkins
"Silent Telephone" by the 101'ers
"Lipstick Vogue by Elvis Costello & the Attractions
"Girls Don't Like It" by the Undertones
"White Rabbit" by Jefferson Airplane
"The Freeze" by Albert Collins and His Rhythm Rockers
"We All Sung Together" by Grin

Bonus track: "Funny in My Mind (I Believe I'm Fixin' to Die)" by Robert Plant

Into everyone's life, a little RAINN may fall

2008-07-25T10:47:00.006-04:00

Because of recent events, I'd just like to post a link to the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network (RAINN) and their number: 1-800-656-HOPE.

I'm not going into the details at the moment but suffice to say that I have personal reasons for wanting to make this resource better known.

Symbolism and Meaning in Politics

2008-07-01T11:48:00.006-04:00

As usual I'm cynical about the USA political scene, particularly at the Presidential race level. Without wanting to malign the candidates, I think the distance between people's perceptions of them and their actual positions is a chasm.

Politics is as much about advertising as it is about accomplishments, skills, and character. It's a race to see which candidate appeals to the largest numbers of people. Once elected, they don't have to do anything they promised or what constituents ask them to do. This is called representative democracy and the reality of the vicious political circus of election shows it is not democratic at all.

When Mr. Bush or Cheney says it doesn't matter what people want them to do, they're going to do what they want, they have a point. Once elected, they don't have to follow the "will of the people." That's the beauty of representative democracy: They are only accountable to their oath of office and even that can often be violated without serious problems or repercussions. Again, witness Bush and Cheney.

So don't hold your breath for big change with Obama. Hope instead for fewer violations of the public trust. Then your expectations may be met.

Random 10 Songs: "Berlin and Havana Care for Kids" Edition

2008-03-28T13:54:00.004-04:00

This perfect day, these random songs, proving again that my tastes are practically Antediluvian, ancient and almost decrepit by today's pop music standards. Eh? Whotcha say, sonny? M'uh hearing ain't so good these days. Comes from listening to blistering loud music leaning agin the speakers in clubs and bars. Yep, that Sinatra fella sure was a rebel with wild music, pushing the boundaries. By gum.

Bonus track: "Berlin" by Lou Reed

Slaughtering Irish Heritage at Tara

2008-03-13T20:54:00.003-04:00

Squeak on the ramparts at Rath Lugh, before entering the tunnels below the proposed roadway

As we come up on St. Patrick's Day, I'm minded to speak of the current events at Tara in Ireland.

Tara includes "...a number of ancient monuments, and, according to tradition, was the seat of Árd Rí na hÉireann, or the High King of Ireland." Pre-Celtic monuments and structures dating back to the Neolithic period around 5,000 years ago are thick through this area. The archaeological sites are so extensive around the Hill of Tara they've never been completely mapped or examined. Currently, a major roadway is being built through the area, threatening to irrevocably destroy artifacts and structures which are without peer.

Kathryn NicDhàna has written extensively about this recently on her blog at Pàganachd Bhandia and I really suggest you take a look at three of her recent posts which are full of excellent links to videos and support info.

And who, you might ask, is "Squeak" in the picture above? She's an activist who is probably at the bottom of a narrow and deep tunnel near the construction area right now. If heavy equipment comes too near the tunnel it will probably collapse and kill her. That's the idea. The soil is weak. Since the current location of the roadwork is illegal, this is a tactic to keep them from proceeding. Otherwise, the contractor/construction crews will create a de facto roadway before the courts can catch up with them. That's how this kind of thing works. "Oops" they'll say, "A real shame about the destruction of that old stuff but we need a new roadway. And, hey, we've already done some damage so what's a little more? Right? Now get the fuck out of the way of Progress, you stupid gits!"

Today Squeak D-locked herself by the neck to a jack holding up the roof of the tunnel, making it impossible to remove her without bringing down the tunnel. It kind of puts things like signing petitions of protest online into perspective. I've got the utmost respect for her. You can see a video of her down in the tunnel which is immensely inspiring and I highly recommend it.

Never underestimate the power of activism to change society. The question is: How far are you willing to go achieve your goals?

----------------
Listening to: "The Battle of Evermore" by Led Zeppelin

#*$% and $!&@: Aspects of Socially Forbidden Language

2008-03-10T14:13:00.004-04:00

A few days ago, I found myself using the word "poop" instead of my more common "shit". I have no children and was not in mixed company where anyone would be offended by my choice of words. Where had this word come from?

What I realized was I had been watching too much television, where the word "poop" had every chance of escaping the censor's bleep but "shit" was rarely heard outside of premium channels. This got me wondering about the social and environmental influences on word choice and expression.

Long-time readers of my blog will know I have a fascination with language, from word origins to obscure definitions of common words. Despite my expansive vocabulary, I'm just as prone as the next person to use expletives for emphasis in my speech. I try to not overuse such words because they become useless with massive repetition, meaningless verbal tics like "um" and "you know." Any "curse" word becomes colorless and lacking in impact when used more than three times in a single sentence, something I've often seen on MTV and various reality shows.

I have no objection to these fricative and plosive words on moral grounds. All words have their place in communication and expression. Shouting "Fuck!" is an excellent tension release when you accidentally hit your finger with a hammer. (Linguists have studied the reasons why some words combine sound, meaning and social taboo to form a "curse" word that is a satisfying expression on more than one level but I won't bore you with this info right now.) Many of our most common curse words have long histories. ("Fuck," I believe, was first written down in the 13th century and undoubtedly was spoken before that instance.) Their usage is hallowed by time and convention even if they are frowned on in certain circles and circumstances.

I'm a big fan of using appropriate and simple words when possible. For example, when describing excrement, I prefer using "shit" to "feces" because shit is more common and widely used and understood. I suspect I'm like everyone else when it comes to speaking or writing to my audience: I tailor my vocabulary to suit the person/people I'm talking to. This is part courtesy and part intelligent communication technique. I do not use curse words unless the other person uses them first and even then I may be cautious or decide to refrain from such expressions anyway.

This brings me back to "poop." This is not a word I commonly use. While there are occasions where I might use it if necessary (perhaps around young children,) it isn't part of my regular speech patterns. Yet here it was, tripping off my tongue and out of my mouth when I least expected it. It was a puzzlement.

TV has been bleeping certain words for quite a long time. At one point not too long ago, you wouldn't even have heard the censorious bleeps very often on TV; such language was routinely edited out entirely. Whole scenes and interviews were eliminated merely because of the "bad" language content. The rise of unscripted dramas ("reality" shows) have put more "non-professional" people in front of the camera speaking with their normal everyday speech patterns. Previously, TV shows consisted almost entirely of actors, TV journalists, talk show hosts, pundits, etc. and these people either had scripted lines or they were trained to never say these sorts of words on air. They would very probably be fired for uttering them on air even once.

TV has become a form of social interaction. We, as passive consumers of TV, are encouraged to emulate our favourite stars. Entertainment news shows and magazines often lead us to refer to celebrities by their first names as if the celebs were our friends. If I say the name Britney in the USA, the vast majority of people will assume I'm referring to Britney Spears. The speech patterns of the semi-famous on TV, even if only on a reality show, are communicated to us, with emotions and "unscripted" situations that provide context and examples of usage. The shows are rerun over and over, then there are the spinoffs and new seasons. These shows provide a tutorial of socially acceptable and appropriate language and communication for the viewing public, even when the words are bleeped out.

So, what did I learn from my uncharacteristic utterance of "poop?" Apparently, on some unconscious level, I noticed that the word "poop" was not bleeped on TV, that it was an "allowed" word. My long-standing pattern of using "shit" in almost all circumstances, from descriptive to expletive, was changed at least for a moment without my awareness until it had happened.

Bingo, I am a victim of the pasteurization of language by censors. What is glaringly obvious to me is this: TV is not real life.

"Oh," you say, "what are you, an idiot? Of course TV isn't real. (I'm really worried about you. Do you need professional psychiatric help or an intervention?)"

(Thank you for your concern but no to both.) If you spend a significant part of your day watching TV, over time you begin to adapt the attitudes, the values, the ethic of TVworld. Not wholesale, of course, not unless you're a very suggestable person. Little bits seep into your mind, little bits of TV logic, TV language, TV politics. These things begin to seem like reasonable ways of looking at the world. Soon you've spend 30 hours of your life watching American Idol as if the outcome was actually important or significant. Or you watch the evening news and begin to believe the only important events/stories in the world are ones on American TV.

I try hard to be aware and conscious of this process and yet I still uttered this strange and uncharacteristic "poop". It's a moment of feeling like I'm a Manchurian Candidate or something. OK, I'm not programmed to kill (as far as I know) but finding something not-me, even as small and minor as a single word choice, is a little disturbing. I begin to wonder what else is lurking under the surface, what alien thought patterns have I absorbed without thinking? How can I block this invasion of my mind?

Oops, gotta go. Idol will be on soon. Or is it The Biggest Loser? I forget. Why should I worry about this? It's not important, is it? Whatever, dude.

Ennui vs Obama vs Clinton

2008-03-08T14:19:00.006-05:00

This election season is boring me to tears. In terms of mainstream electoral preferences (ie, the two major parties), I'm firmly in the Dem camp. It should be said, however, that I think national elections in the USA are generally at the bottom of the electorate's ability to change society, the absolute minimum responsibility a voter/citizen can take.

Despite the hoopla about how wonderful it is that Dems have a choice between a Black man and a white woman, how amazing and wonderful it is that the US has reached a point where these groups can aspire to and probably achieve the White House, it remains a sorry indictment of our society that this happens in 2008.

And what of those Dem two candidates? I'd estimate that the actual difference between their stated positions is minimal, probably under 5%. They are much more alike than different, representative of the right-centrist positions of the Dems. Once you delve beyond the surface excitement of their unique identities, there is little for me to be excited about.

Obama is wonderfully charismatic. My housemate, Fierce Celt, had the premonition that Obama would run when she saw him speak at the 2004 Dem convention. His charisma and ability to speak to people's aspirations was apparent and obvious.

And Clinton? It's been obvious at least since the Clintons left the White House in 2001 that she was positioning herself for the Prez run. (Even earlier to some people but I'm speaking about myself.)

But I'm left with a violent antipathy towards both of them. Beyond the words and promises, the substance of their positions remains rather less than radical. Oh, much better than Bush II across the board or McCain but these Dems still generally support the status quo of corporate Amerika.

Health care? Force people to buy insurance, whether they can afford it or not. (Government will tell you if you can afford it.) And if you don't buy it, face penalties, probably including jail in extreme circumstances. At the least, financial penalties. How compassionate, how generous, how uplifting for people struggling to survive.

Iraq? Yeah, we'll get the troops out, sometime, as long as it suits our foreign policy. The US can't just abandon Iraq, right? We've got responsibilities and commitments to the people of Iraq.

Don't get me wrong: I will probably vote Dem in November '08. That doesn't mean I'm happy with them.

Random 20 Songs: International Women's Day 2008 Edition

2008-03-07T15:01:00.006-05:00

March 8th is International Women's Day. (Wikipedia) OK, this is not much of a tribute to IWD but it's the best I can do at the moment with several other things on my agenda. Sadly, I actually had to go through 300 randomly selected songs on my computer to get this list. There were more I could have chosen but they duplicated people/groups or didn't meet my criteria or I just wasn't inspired to include them.

Random 10 Songs: "Wicked Cure for Teenage Hives" Edition

2008-02-29T18:20:00.005-05:00

Random songs to amuse myself and perhaps others but, really, I mostly have great fun making up the blog post title from the songs and artists. Other possibilities: "Division Fanclub Tears Elvis Apart" and "Valentine's Bragg Faces Small Joy." Or "I Drown Runaway Soul Love" is a peculiarly creepy variation and I chastise my mind for even constructing it. Bad mind! Very bad mind!

Bonus track: "Runaway" by Small Faces

Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72

2008-02-22T20:36:00.002-05:00

The more things change, the more they stay the same. No matter which candidate you love or hate, remember the following words, still pertinent and applicable 36 years on. From Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72 by Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, p. 162:

Total candor with the press--or anyone else, for that matter--is not one the traits most presidential candidates find entirely desirable in their key staff people. Skilled professional liars are as much in demand in politics as they are in the advertising business... and the main function of any candidate's press secretary is to make sure the press gets nothing but Upbeat news. There is no point, after all, in calling a press conference to announce that nobody on the staff will be paid this month because three or four of your largest financial bankers just called to say they are pulling out and abandoning all hope of victory.

When something like this happens to you quickly lock all the doors and send your press secretary out to start whispering, off the record, that your opponent's California campaign coordinator just called to ask for a job.

Random 10 Songs: "Shriekback to the Planet of Sound" Edition

2008-02-22T15:54:00.005-05:00

Still hunting for regular subjects to blog about. Brain rust is slowing me down. And other writing projects are taking up space in my mind as usual. As the saying goes, "I'm going to make you suffer for my art." Not that my lack of blogging is really a tortuous prospect for you, dear readers. It's a metaphor. Or perhaps a symbolic transferal of perspective between us and our mingled desires. Or some delicate transmogrification of impulse into concrete form by way of interactive art, a re-visioning of conventional form into the insubstantial spirit essence of the divine. Somesuch vacant artcrit analysis should apply to the process.

Huh? What? Did I say something?

Bonus track: "Under My Thumb" by Social Distortion

Tactics of Mistake

2008-02-20T20:11:00.003-05:00

I'm finding the current widespread slagging of John McCain by Conservative pundits to be passing strange. This from a group that has had remarkable discipline and ability to stay on message to the benefit of the Republican Party for at least 16 years.

Gordon Dickson wrote a Science Fiction novel called Tactics of Mistake. The title is used to describe a military tactic (supposedly lifted/borrowed from fencing for the purpose of the novel) which seeks to use a series of small feints or skirmishes to cumulatively draw an opponent into overreaching or over-committing through the mistaken impression that your side is in a disadvantaged position.

Of course, like any good gaming tactic, it can be applied in other situations. I suspect this may be the case with this so-called rejection of the almost-certain-to-be-nominee for the Repubs, Sen. McCain because of his failure to meet "true" Conservative standards.

Exactly how this is of benefit to the Repubs is difficult to gauge. And that's why it's called tactics of mistake: You never see it coming until the trap is sprung, until you are already completely and irrevocably committed to a wrong course of action.

For example, Dems might get a positive thrill/charge from this seeming dissension among the Conservative ranks. If they believe it to be real, they might become overconfident of the contest ahead. They might assume that there is no significant support for their nominal opponent and thus commit to focusing on the wrong areas for the election. They might be blindsided by a totally unexpected surge and unity on the Right.

Just a thought.

Random 10 Songs: "Twisted Heart's Gonna Kill Me" Edition

2008-02-14T20:05:00.005-05:00

I'm still not dead and considering a return to regular blogging. My brain needs it. (uh, the "not dead" reference is to a Monty Python movie, and does not refer to any life-threatening health crisis on my part.) Happy post-Valentine's Day.

Bonus track: "City of Light" by 801/Phil Manzanera

DemiOrator on Hiatus

2007-11-10T13:41:00.000-05:00

Yeah, it's obvious I've been busy elsewhere rather than here blogging. I think that will be the case for at least another month. I admit I'm uncertain I'll return to regular posting to this blog but I think it will depend on whether my political/cultural outrage begins to need this outlet.

Just so you know. Not dead yet, just in uneasy slumber.

Random 10 Songs: "Placebo of Human Sexual Response" Edition

2007-09-28T17:40:00.000-04:00

Songs of interest but perhaps more interesting is the title of the post. No, I don't know what it means but it's provocative, n'est pas? (Don't bother trying to talk me in French; my French is atrocious and very limited.)

Bonus track: "Test Pilot Blues" by Black Francis

Random 10 Songs: "Hot Eyes on Mr. Self Destruct" Edition

2007-09-21T20:19:00.000-04:00

In the fine ongoing tradition I've recently established of avoiding posts of substance, here is another Random Ten Songs, spewed from my hard drive for your amusement. Readers should applaud my bravery in admitting to having the Lovin' Spoonful on my computer. This is only partially redeemed by Nine Inch Nails. Some types of cheery and cloying pop music are better left to specialized soft rock radio stations. (Then he went mad with bolded phrases...)

Bonus track: "Hitchhiking" by Willie Alexander and the Boom Boom Band

Condoleezza: Is She or Isn't She?

2007-09-16T13:26:00.000-04:00

Nothing definitive here but I'm as susceptible as the next blogger to rumors, particularly if the circumstantial evidence seems suggestive.

Via Pam's House Blend:

I'm posting on the Blend today from Birmingham, Alabama -- the birthplace of Condi Rice. I wonder if folks here are buzzing about this news about her. Via Mike Signorile, who spoke with Glenn Kessler, whose new book is The Confidante: Condoleezza Rice and the Creation of the Bush Legacy:
In the book and on the show, Kessler described how Rice's "closest male friend" is openly gay, a man by the name of Coit D. Blacker, a Stanford professor (Rice served as the provost as Stanford in the late 1990s for six years) and a Democrat who served in the Clinton administration. Blacker, whose partner is also mentioned, advised Al Gore's campaign in 2000, while his close friend Rice served as a chief confidante for a president who has tried to make gays into second class citizens in the U.S. Constitution. But wait, it gets better.

Rice's "closest female friend" is a woman named Randy Bean (pictured here), who is unmarried and whose sexual orientation is not stated. She is described as a "liberal progressive;" she's a documentary filmmaker who works at Standford University and once worked for Bill Moyers. She and Rice and Blacker (again, who has a partner) are discussed as a "second family," a term Bean uses, also saying that, "on friends, [Rice] goes narrow and deep."
There's much more, including the fact that Rice owns a home with Bean and shares a line of credit with her. Not that this means anything, right? Go read the rest.
What if Condi was a lesbian -- and came out? Would that quell the right wing "Draft Condi in 2008" movement driven by the Freeper set?

If it weren't for Ms. Rice's support of an administration that has consistently opposed any gay equal rights, I wouldn't bother to spread this. But I sorrowfully admit to a little bit of malicious glee at the prospect of her having to face conservatives if it is true. I am not always a charitable and forgiving person. Still, guiltily gleeful.
----------------
Listening to: "Last Song" by Marianne Faithfull

Trauma Reinforcement as Political Tactic

2007-09-11T16:06:00.000-04:00

One small segment of psychology posits that some conventional and widely accepted therapies may actually worsen the effects of trauma and neurosis, providing reinforcement rather than understanding and resolving of the issues involved. In other words, etching the trauma deeper and deeper and making it more difficult to heal.

I'm reminded of this as we witness the spectacle of 9/11 mourning. Anger, sorrow and reliving the event all mingle together, often topped by the cherry of jingoistic militarism and righteous desire to make someone, anyone, pay for the tragedy and lost lives.

It should be superfluous for me to mention that more American soldier's lives have been lost in Iraq than were lost in the 9/11 attack. Iraq who had nothing to do with the event. And Osama bin Laden, who had a great deal to do with the attack, remains uncaught. And Saudi Arabia, whose nationals made up 16 of the 19 hijackers, remains a close ally of the USA. It should be superfluous to mention these facts, to gather them together as an indictment of the Bush Administration; sadly, it's not.

Every year at this time I'm amazed, bemused, appalled, and disgusted at much of the rhetoric spewing forth around this event. I see reinforcement of trauma, revision of history, reinterpretation of events.

One particular thing bothers me: Labeling all the people who died on 9/11 "heroes". It's a misapplication of the word, a form of pseudo-canonization intended to feed and foster feelings of revenge. Against who? Apparently not the real architects behind the event.

Let me be clear: to be a hero, one has to have done something heroic. Look it up in a dictionary. Were some of the people who died on 9/11 heroic? Undoubtedly. Many of the emergency responders in particular come to mind. And I'm sure there were many acts of heroism performed by ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances, acts we'll never know. I'm not trying to deny or degrade those actions. I'm just saying that indiscriminately calling everyone there a hero is, in effect, a lie.

Yet inflating the lives lost into national heroes serves certain purposes and groups. There's an advantage to goading the public into expecting action and demanding retaliation. And perhaps the public won't look too closely at the actual effectiveness and appropriateness of the actions taken. A little preemptive war in Iraq, a 72 hour bombing run on Iran, whatever. Oops, the Iran thing hasn't happened yet. My mistake.

The deaths of 9/11 are tragic. Yet I feel it would be smart to keep our eyes clear and not be misdirected by those who would use them to mask ulterior motivations.

And in closing, just one last thought: Where's Osama?

Shiny, Shiny White House News

2007-09-10T11:53:00.000-04:00

I get the White House rss news feed though I rarely look at it. When I do, I'm mostly looking for humor and satire fodder. Because the view consistently presented in these press releases is so sunny it could cause blindness, I have to be cautious. If one believed these items, the world would appear to be the USA's oyster and every citizen should bow down in gratitude to the wisdom and beneficence of the Bush administration. There are no problems just wonderfully effective solutions by the heroic and glorious Team Bush. Is this markedly different from any other administration? I don't know.

Of course the White House isn't going to be eager to list problems but it still overpoweringly reeks of PR rather than any remotely accurate reality. Try these recent stories:

Fact Sheet: Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) 2007 Bonus quote from the page: "Our challenge is to strengthen the forces of freedom and prosperity in this region. One of the most important ways we can do so is through the expansion of trade and investment." - President George W. Bush, Remarks at APEC Business Summit, 9/7/07

Fact Sheet: More Than 8.2 Million Jobs Created Since August 2003 Including this factoid: "Real After-Tax Per Capita Personal Income Has Risen By 11.9 Percent – An Average Of Over $3,500 Per Person – Since President Bush Took Office." The question is whether "average" is used here to mean average or median, two very different things. "For example, in the odd series 1, 4, 9, 12 and 33, 9 is the median. In the even series 1, 4, 10, 12, 33 and 88, 11 is the median (halfway between 9 and 12). Note, the median is not necessarily the same as the AVERAGE (or mean). For example, the median of 2, 6, 10, 22 and 40 is 10 but the average is 18." (Source for "median") In other words, with the number of US billionaires skyrocketing the average probably moves up but the median might actually be declining. (Note: I'm not a economist, just speculating here.)

Fact Sheet: Strengthening the Forces of Freedom and Prosperity in the Asia Pacific ties in nicely to the quote in the first example I listed.

All of this does nothing to inspire confidence in me. I'm so used to the Bushies lying and misrepresenting... well, everything, I would revise my view of the world if they said water was wet.

Blogs of Interest 1

2007-09-09T18:08:00.000-04:00

As I was reminded when Skippy the Bush Kangaroo mentioned me in a post, part of blogging is passing on the love to other blogs. Although I just did a post scouting some other blogs, I am compelled to do it again.

Today, we are all bloggers. Or something like that.

Cruising through Feministing's blogroll, I rounded up the following blogs of interest: (Er, um, not cruising... uh, not like that, really. Oh, no! My recurring foot-in-mouth disease!)

Feminista! A Journal of Feminist Construction appears to be an online journal with articles such as Who's Co-opting Feminism? by Christy Burbidge and A Challenge to the Feminist Community by Laura Kamienski.

Feminist Law Professors is a mix of stuff, from news stories to conference announcements to letters.

Radical Doula says "Let’s start with a list of things that I identify with which led me to use this classification: doula, pro-choice, lesbian, latina, birth activist, progressive, gender non-conformist." She posts on all these issues.

Racialicious is a group blog concerned with stories on race and racism.

Pseudo-Adrienne's Liberal-Feminist Bias will entertain you and drive you to tears. (Hyperbolic? Me? Never!) She has an extensive blogroll which I'm itching to explore.

Our Bodies, Our Blog is focused on birth control and health info. From their About Us page:

Our Bodies Ourselves (OBOS), also known as the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective (BWHBC), is a nonprofit, public interest women’s health education, advocacy, and consulting organization. Beginning in 1970 with the publication of the first edition of Our Bodies, Ourselves, OBOS has inspired the women’s health movement by:
* Producing books that makes accurate health and medical information accessible to a broad audience by weaving women’s stories into a framework of practical, clearly written text;
* Identifying and collaborating with exemplary individuals and organizations that provide services, generate research and policy analysis, and organize for social change;
* Inspiring and empowering women to become engaged in the political aspects of sustaining good health for themselves and their communities.

Dru Blood is a blog with a little of this and that, environmental concerns, personal stuff, parenting. Check her out.

And if any of the above bloggers are unhappy with my characterizations of their blogs, I plead laziness and ADD. It's a tough world for bloggers.

----------------
Listening to: "Must Have More" by L7

Ululating Lament of the Blogroll

2007-09-08T18:53:00.000-04:00

I recently took a hard look at my blogroll and culled the deadwood out. Deadwood means blogs which haven't had posts for months, either on hiatus or obviously abandoned. I was embarrassed to find quite a few of these, some dead since 2006. I've obviously not being keeping up on my blog reading.

Time to do a little exploration and begin adding some fun new links.

The Wild Hunt is a sort of Neopagan newswire and commentary blog. "A modern Pagan perspective" is the subtitle. The reporting and links seem to be of high quality. Recommended. The blogroll on it led me to the following.

A Heathen Blog which hasn't been updated since April 2007 but has lots of links. "The purpose of this project is to provide visibility and exposure for Heathen/Asatru perspectives. In this regard, it is meant to inform and even entertain people from all walks - from the ‘old-school’ Heathens, to those who are getting their first real look at this religious path."

Blog o' Gnosis has long posts, thoughful and expansive.

Letter from Hardscrabble Creek - A Pagan Writer's Blog by Chas S. Clifton ruminates on The Occult Experience, a documentary from the late 1980s here.

That's enough for now. Go now and blog-hop in peace.

----------------
Listening to: "I Don't Need No Doctor" by Humble Pie

Push Bush Back: An Illustrated Screed

2007-09-07T16:37:00.001-04:00

Prez. Bush:

I hate you.

Perhaps you know this already, with the powers assigned to many government law enforcement agencies under your watch. Then again, you might not since you seem both blissfully ignorant and viciously arrogant in your isolated White House perch.

I thought no one could surpass the blunderful Prez. Reagan, destructor of so much in my estimation. Your lack of compassion, your obvious contempt of just about everyone, your sullen swagger, and your posse of bullies all declare your basic predatory nature.

I've never been sure whether to blame you or the people you surround yourself with. Now I realize it's all the same: They all act in your name and their loyalty carries out atrocities.

The wide social, economic and ecological blight you've caused and set in motion will reverberate for years. Perhaps for decades. Yet I sense your arrogance and pride see a different picture, an illusion of creating a better world (at least for the powerful elites.) Still the multitudes fall to disease, famine and bombs, victims of your administration's visions.

I long for the day I will be able to dance. Perhaps I will dance naked in the rain on your grave. I will not be alone.

----------------
Listening to: "Double Dare" by Bauhaus

Silencing Voices, Devouring Communities

2007-09-04T20:14:00.000-04:00

A recent Boston Phoenix editorial ("In praise of four-letter words") reminded me the depth of the FCC's chilling of speech:

And now filmmaker Ken Burns, who tackles apple-pie subjects with uncommon grit and intelligence, is caught up in a controversy about whether four words — two “fucks,” one “shit,” and an “asshole” — in his 14-hour documentary about World War II, The War, will land broadcasters who air his work in trouble. That trouble could cost stations up to $1.3 million in fines each time they broadcast an uncut and uncensored version of Burns’s work.

It's easy to say "who cares?" about these few rude words: Who cares whether they are cut out of the documentary and/or who cares whether these words are broadcast and heard? The answer, of course, is you should care.

We are indoctrinated to believe that people who want to be heard and taken seriously should express themselves without using these verbal vulgarities and intensifiers. Yet this attitude is designed to exclude vast numbers of people, to ensure some voices are never heard widely, never reach the broadcast airwaves.

"Oh, no one really wants to hear those people who can't be bothered to speak politely and with a civil tongue!" And that's the point: Using these words doesn't invalidate someone's humanity or ideas and concerns. I have a strong feeling this is the very point of not allowing certain language on broadcast TV and radio, to censor culture and expression. Much is made of protecting children from the influence of these words but it strikes me as a weak excuse to cover control of ideas and people.

"The pigs keep fucking with us." Or "The police engage in constant harassment of our community." The first example lacks some specifics but I think the meaning is clearly parallel to the second example. (Yes, these are examples that I made up from whole cloth; it's my post and I'll fucking write it the way that makes sense to me.)

It's obvious that I prefer a nuanced voice with a vocabulary that eschews vulgar words for the most part, particularly in the written form. But I also don't imagine myself as an arbiter of culture or a dictator of everyone else's public voice. That's what bothers me about the FCC's recent ramping up of fines and penalties for "obscenity" on the air, the sense that words used regularly in daily conversation and expression by vast numbers of people are taboo in broadcast public discourse. What it creates is a disconnect, a split between the language of everyday and the so-called "civilized" level of broadcast media. Does it create a better, more truthful and accurate presentation of our world in the media? Unsurprisingly, I think the bullshit still flies thick on TV and radio. Of course, no one can call it bullshit because that's a forbidden word.

Umph. No strong ending here. Might I suggest you hie yourself over to this nice little article on the word "Fuck" at the Ireland Information Guide? It's fun and educational.

----------------
Listening to: "Is This Where You Live" by Church, The

Sketches Toward a Death Mask of George W. Bush

2007-09-03T21:32:00.000-04:00

I actually think my title is wittier than the realization of the subject matter. Still, there's a certain Warholesque homage to the repeated image processed in different ways.

I'm glad I live in the USA where I have the freedom to express this particular vision, yet I feel obliged to state that I have no intent, plans or urge to assassinate the current President.

Um, well, that's not strictly true: I do have urges. However, I also have many desires and urges that I recognize as (how to put it?) poor life choices for myself. Life in prison? Not the consequence or life plan I want to follow. And, as is sometimes said, how is putting Cheney in the Presidency much different from the current situation?

----------------
Listening to: "In My Time of Dying" by Led Zeppelin

Forgotten Saints

2007-08-30T15:15:00.000-04:00

As the second anniversary of Hurricane Katrina's devastation swings through, my bittersweet memories continue to rise unbidden. I remain full of anger at the Bush administration for its incompetence and its abnegation of duty to the US citizens in the afflicted areas. More specifically, I remain angry at Bush for his stupid callousness and affectless expressions of concern and sympathy.

If you've got a mind, take a look at my posts and pictures after my visit to New Orleans (my birthplace) in August of 2006.

Permanent Bathtub Ring Around New Orleans
A Small Tour of a New Orleans Neighborhood, Part 1
A Small Tour of a New Orleans Neighborhood, Part 2
A Small Tour of a New Orleans Neighborhood, Part 3

Some additional photos and slight commentary from me can be found on this flickr page.

The post title? It's a reference to a popular song in New Orleans: When the Saints Come Marchin' In.

Buh Bye, Mr. Gonzales!

2007-08-27T21:20:00.000-04:00

He fought the good fight for freedom and justice as Attorney General.

Right.

----------------
Listening to: "Penetration" by Iggy & The Stooges

Money and Early Primaries

2007-08-26T11:15:00.000-04:00

Perhaps it's been covered but it seems to me the states seeking to have the earliest primaries are doing so for the money.

Sure, there's the prestige but I think it's no coincidence that these are poorer or lower population states. If tourism is a big income for some states, I'm curious about what the impact financially is of an influx of reporters, political campaign workers, consultants, etc. does for a state. I'm sure this is a significant factor.

A state like New Hampshire which loses its place as an early primary would probably also lose a great deal of money. Yes, this would be true anywhere but I'm suggesting that the percentage of money the primary brings into the state might be more than a slight boost; it might be significantly warping the motivations of the pols.

Is this wrong or bad? I don't know, but it feels like bipartisan decision-making for cash rather than for the good of the body politic. I just have difficultly grasping the usefulness of this extended period between primaries and conventions.

Random 10 Songs: "4 Ever Hoochie Coochie" Edition

2007-08-24T13:35:00.000-04:00

Cue the music:

Bonus track: "People Have the Power" by Patti Smith

The CR FAQ: The Book That Ate My Mind...

2007-08-22T22:35:00.000-04:00

Finally, the dead tree version of the book-that-ate-my-mind is finished and available for purchase. A small preview is here. The Lulu.com purchase page is here. And just for fun here is a button to there as well:

The name of this nemesis-book? The CR FAQ - An Introduction to Celtic Reconstructionist Paganism.

Despite years of experience in publishing, this was a difficult project to get out the door. Part of it was the nature of the source material which was written on a Wiki by 8-10 people. This meant there were myriad inconsistencies in the text which needed to be standardized. Plus a hefty dose of non-English words needing to be quadruply-checked and italicized. Plus a glossary and an index. All in all, lots of detail and things to go wrong.

However, it looks great and I'm happy at the quality of the text as well as the graphics. Now if it will just sell...
----------------
Listening to: "Without You" by Robin Lane & The Chartbusters