I Had a Point When I Started

Sitting above the waves watching the bold ply their skills and the vigorous run along the cliffs I regret my time sequestered from the world that has been this past year.



I find myself thinking dark thoughts and so I am leaving the edge and heading down to the sand and what the new tides will bring. Not cool when the ledge starts to look like a reasonable option.

I find I am unable to release my anger. Impotent rage is the most useless of emotions. "Hate him back", doesn't work for me as I don't believe in "Him", in the first place. It serves no purpose to rage at the Medical Machine. The one doctor's incompetence cost a week of delay at the surgical clinic but didn't alter the outcome in any significant way. The Hospice and their half assed work while the celebrated the birth of Jebus or the death of the year or whatever fetivus they partook of did make the events more traumatic but again altered the outcome not one wit. Family tantrums and hasty decisions take no heed of my anguish as does evolution and its' creation of the oncogenes in the first place.

This most useless of pastimes creeps into my thoughts in idle times when the wind and the the rain are stealing my sleep and the cold grinds into my joints.

Beach Eye Opener

The week at the beach was an eye opener. My joints are not up to winter camping. That was just the beginning of some things I had to face. The car runs up the cost of sites dramatically. $35 a night for tent space works out to $1000 a month. That is more than I was paying for a two-bedroom apartment and beyond the budget for the start up. The state has raised the fees, to help with the budget shortfall I guess. I liked the distraction free environment that camping provided even under the harsh weather conditions but I slept poorly. When the wind is bending the tent pole down and bouncing it off your head it tends to keep you awake.

In addition to the higher fees the services have gone to the dogs. The showers were only working one day out of seven and every morning the toilet was backed up. I have been pretty bummed and starting each day that way was disheartening in the extreme. As a result I am looking for a place to rent. Looked at the outside of a few places and then had to turn in an application to get in to look at the inside of one of them. I went dyslexic on the new phone number so I may have wasted 2 days on that one. It is a unique looking space from the pictures but I want to see the loft before I decide. The places I looked at in old town, 1 rented and the other is not yet vacant. The one was above a restaurant and that would have been cool but it was already gone.

My skills have eroded more with the years and it seems harder and harder to conform to the rules. Have been unable to complete the car paperwork and hence needed to stay in Eureka for a bit longer. Rented a weekly room to try and recover a bit physically at the Royal Inn. Will try to recover over the weekend and go at it again Monday.

The plan will now have to be modified depending on what type of place I end up getting but will be traveling and camping with the bike only and when the weather improves.

My Chemotherapy Romance

Thought it might be time to update the battle. We are trying to build Don up enough to take a course of Gemcitabine. This newest drug for treating pancreatic cancer will with luck provide a little improvement. The drug interrupts the cell division cycle by replacing one of the Base pairs in Dna and in Rna. Tumor cells are actively replicating more than most normal cells in your body so they will be disrupted more. Unfortunately the lining of the intestinal tract also has rapidly dividing cells in normal circumstances so nausea and constipation, already a serious problem may get worse.

We have been succeeding in regulating the pain meds to some extent and he is feeling better as long as we can keep the intestinal track moving.

I have been swamped with the details of moving out of the place and taking Don back to live with his family. The U-haul storage facility is clean and climate controlled so I am moving my art, books and photo albums over now and will move the furniture after Don gets on a plane. I will then clean out and close up the place before heading east to join him.

The timing could not be much worse for beginning my journey but the timing is always bad when a disaster happens. Driving cross country in the middle of winter is a bit dicey and I am not looking forward to it. I think Don is counting on me to keep his sister from controlling him too much so it is important that I get there in a reasonable time frame.

If he can take the first treatment tomorrow we will have a better idea where we will be going next. I fear that if he can’t start he will begin to give up. To the patient all will eventually be revealed

The worst day of your life

Having been around the medical business for most of my adult life as a consumer and provider of services I have seen far too many folks have to confront the Big C. It always sucks. Bummed that Don got stuck in the hospital after being hit with such tough news. I am not a big fan of the number range because they are probabilities that can become an enforced reality but this doctor was very good about not giving hard numbers . Tell someone they have 3 months to live and sometimes they give up at the three month mark. Dr. Pai did make it clear that this was an end game strategy session but what he hoped was the first of a few rather than the last.

“A tragic life”, that is how his sister described Don’s situation. Orphaned at 10, his wife dead from an accident and poor medical skills at a country hospital. A massive heart attack a few years later followed by an aneurysm and now pancreatic cancer. In between he lost his brother Rickey to a logging accident and suffered through osteoporosis.

Sucks to be the one losing all their friends to death but it sucks more to be dead. That is the limit of tonight’s profundity I am afraid. I have tried to live as well as I can for as long as I can and have endeavored to help those around me do the same. In a few months I will be the last of my tribe. More to follow in the days ahead.
The Image is from the Huffington post but I have lost the link to the original creator and for that I apologize.

Lies are Bad, M'kay?

If Alcohol an Tobacco taxes do not offset their social cost that is an argument for raising the taxes on Tobacco and Alcohol. It is not an argument for not taxing Marijuana. The folks making this argument also discount the social cost of prohibition propaganda.

Once it is proven you are willing to lie than everything you say is invalid unless you have proof. I am not so old that I cannot remember the change in world view that came with the realization that people would lie about things that didn’t matter. If you wanted to give me a quarter to make me feel better because my gum is sore where the tooth came out I am on board with that. We have one day a year when we all give each other stuff, sign me up. I don’t need a bullshit story about magic fat guys. Even if the magic fat guy story is not as creepy as the guy nailed to the wood fairytale we didn’t need the lies.

I do not have a spectacular memory but I remember thinking as a child. My thinking was not always very good but I did think. This is not much different than my thinking as an adult and that is kind of my point. The folks in the “Drugs are Bad” Mr. Mackeyverse seemed to have forgotten that.

Being a red headed child of the smart ass variety I was beaten a lot, perhaps that is why I became aware but I find that does not make me unique. There is plenty of evidence for the thinking child in the study of human development, the Piaget types and the like, so why do we ignore the idea when it comes to drugs.

The New Boss Same as the...

The Tea baggers are missing the boat on their tyranny complaint. There was an election and the elected leaders making decisions you don’t like in a representative republic is not tyranny. They either do not understand or the do not care about the concept of equal protection under the law.

Ordering the killing of a citizen without trial, indefinite detention and torture; now that is tyranny. The right has found no problem with the police state that has emerged post 2001 but the evaporation of their 401k has them screaming. They are the right wing of the republican party and they determine every election they lose to be illegitimate.

They claim to want a return to the constitution but they abandon their first principles when they are scared. Private property and the right to do with it what you want without those meddlesome government busy bodies telling you what to do with it. They scream this till they are red in the face when they are not allowed to rip the tops off mountains. When the, “scary other” in the form of a Muslim cultural center can be used to gin up xenophobia with the complicity of our media I worry about us as a society. They love the idea of divided government yet hate the third branch.

I like the idea that anyone that is offended by a church can bitch about it and the church has to go away. If we want that to be the standard I favor it so that I can travel about and protest and stop ignorance factories would be cool. It would however not be very American, but one has to live in the times one is given and work within the system. That is if you actually believe in the rule of law.

My idea doesn’t violate the first amendment because I would treat all churches the same. It also had zero shot of happening because those folks have abandoned the notion of no state religion from the jump. They are the ones claiming that we are a christian nation. The fact that a state religion is specifically outlawed by the constitution again doesn’t bother these principled patriots.
I am in an odd position with the mosque controversy but in the end I have no new solution that will work better than allowing all the ignorant to compete for the worst ideas and trying to educate the world that all superstition is equally evil. once you believe in magic ignorance is all you contribute to the culture.

Eat the Rich

I was reading a diary at the Daily Kos website that both disturbed and intrigued. You can read it here

The Diary itself was interesting but the comment thread was what got me to thinking.

The premise in short was that the top 1% have recovered and while the rest of society is still reeling from the great recession the rich are doing fine.

The comment thread shifted quickly to apocalyptic calls for overthrow hearkening back to the rise of fascism in Europe and the Bolshevik Stalinist revolution in Russia. The term tipping point came up a lot and the dominate sentiment was that all that stood between the rich and the “Terror was the populace's respect for the rule of law and that anarchy was just around the corner.


I do not think so. I look back to the great depression for my evidence that 70 % of the population is all that is necessary for society to continue apace. Even with the bonus wars, bread lines and migration of the, “Okies” civil order never broke down. People rightly fear the anarchy that an Authority represents.

The marchers of the, "Bonus Army" in Washington never believed that MacArthur would have his troops open up on veterans but they were wrong and the Hoover Ville that they had built was burned to the ground as troops opened up on their comrades from the past. The Democracy movement in China experienced a similar miscalculation when the soldiers marched into Tienanmen square. In both instances the true account of the casualties is lost to history.

The status quo is such that inertia is tough to overcome and revolution is a messy business. The anarchists need to look at places like Yemen and Somalia to get an idea of what life is like when things break down.

The Tea bagger right is agitating for revolution as well but they seem to think it is the social safety net that is crashing the economy and if we could just get rid of those pesky bureaucrats life would be paradise. They are ignorant of history but Carlin explains that quite eloquently.



Then I listen to right wingers that want the ten commandments in every wall in the world outraged that some other group would dare to exercise their freedom of religion. The real owners are not going quietly and they are using all of the usual suspects. Racism, religious bigotry, fear of the other in all of its forms. The reptile calling to the lizard brain.

I would like to see the rational triumph and we accept government based on rational principals rather then superstition and ancestor worship but I am a privileged entity, white, male, American and while not in the club that bias colors my desire to avoid total destruction.

The Shirley situation.

This is to give a historical perspective for My comments on the smearing and firing of Shirley Sherrod.

Segregation was fought in the fifties and sixties changing the laws.
In the seventies forced integration was used by the courts to try to do what the forces of society would not and they achieved one of the desired results; young people today have lost the racial prejudice portion of their tribalism in vast numbers.

In the seventies the expansion of women into the work force as well as minorities effectively crushed the upward mobility of labor. The combination of loss of ego structure created a serious backlash in the eighties leading to Reagan being elected and the strange relationship of poor rural people voting for the interests of the rich against themselves in the vain hope that they would regain their superior position.

The nineties presented the one percent at the top with the unprecedented opportunity to pit third world labor against the American working class. As they had pitted the poor blacks against the poor whites. Further reducing the pie for the no longer rising working class now some what integrated.

Allowing the education system to erode was a factor in that ability to shift labor overseas. When the courts forced the schools to integrate in the south the whites fled to private schools. There were similar flights in the north but they created a different style of problem, the suburb. As a result the public school system in the south received inadequate funds as did the city schools in the north and the bottom half of the populace was left with effectively no education.

With the removal of trade protection in the free trade agreements and the ability of computer directed machines to simplify the work requiring one skilled programmer to supervise less and less skilled workers doing more complex tasks.

The speaker at an event for the NAACP, Shirley Sherrod was relating her experiences over this period to demonstrate the evolution of her thinking on economics. I personally find this type of speech a waste of time. I find anecdotes to be bullshit, give me the facts to make the general case. I am not part of the aggrieved class and I understand that lots of people need a narrative.

There is value for the aggrieved to tell their stories. It makes them feel better if nothing else. I think if your father is murdered and you don’t get justice you have the right to at least be heard honestly on the subject. . In this event she was simply abused by the powerful a second time.

The right wing desperately wants to roll back the civil rights movement. They feel that enforcement of the equal protection clause was the beginning of the end of limited government in the modern era. They may or may not be racist in their motivation they simply want all restrictions removed from private property.
To that end they have persons that believe that, “the end justifies the means” and a propaganda piece was created to counter the accusation that there exists a racist element in the far right. The only counter the racist’s seem to be able to muster is that the Obama administration and black people are reverse racists.

I tweeted the other day about the Senator from Virginia and his fail on why blacks should just get over being treated like crap. His earlier works of misogyny were overlooked by many in the attempt to get to 60 votes but he is treading close to Mel Gibson land for my taste. When the propaganda is released this is the type of ignorant mind set that is predisposed to believe it. The Media seem to be predisposed to the same view as they accept this tripe at face value. The disturbing reaction is how afraid the White House and cabinet are of the reverse racism meme.

If you take seriously the idea that the NAACP is part of a wave of oppression washing over white people in America you are divorced from reality to an extent that it is pointless for me to respond. All the data shows that it sucks to be poor but to be nonwhite makes poverty more likely.

The ease with which all those involved accepted the lie points to the sad truth that still have a vast chasm to bridge on the path to equality for all.

The Last Resort

Putting together an omnibus post on the political spectrum to serve as my rant for a while. Then I am going to dive back into fiction. I have one new concept and the Socrates code project that have long term potential. If I spend my time screaming at the corporatists to get off my lawn and shaking my fist it eats up too much of my energy. I will continue to throw the occasional metaphorical brick but this is my parting shot for a while.
I have given my view on theism. I have distilled my view down as simply as my limited language skills allow. Belief in that for which there is no evidence is destructive in all of the forms it takes. This includes pseudo science as well as religion. There are lots of implications from the mathematics of quantum mechanics. One gets many worlds and string theories with 11 dimensions or is it 13. In the hands of well grounded theorists these ideas lead to things like quantum computers and the discovery of dark energy and all kinds of cool things that may or may not pan out in their exact format but that does not excuse the charlatan that hides in the ambiguities. The existence of “Entanglement” does not mean we are all part of a spiritual realm. We all exist as conscious entities and that consciousness is a function of a physical brain conducting chemical processes. In all of the work we have done studying the brain we have seen no evidence for a soul that exists beyond the life of the functioning brain. When you have something get back to us.
Being a rational human requires one to come to grips with the fact that some questions have no answer. That does not mean that anything you make up is possible. We will not be able to tell folks with absolute certainty how the chemical soup that was available to the primordial environment turned into life. That data is simply unavailable. Plate tectonics has recycled that data beyond retrieval. That does not alter the fact that Humans evolved from earlier species through the process broadly known as natural selection. I prefer the term descent with modification as it does less to imply purpose than the other. There is no reasonable, and by that I mean fitting with basic physics, theory for the existence of the universe that requires any god.
By definition the universe formed from a singularity in big bang theory. There for we will never be able to know what happened before that event. We may some day figure out the most likely precursors to life and recreate it from scratch in an update of the Miller experiment. We may even have the opportunity to observe a planet while it is evolving new life over a few million years on another world. We could turn out to be wrong about the singularity and find out something from before the beginning it is just that those chances are infinitesimally small. At a very minimum the idea that there exists an intercessional god is beyond ludicrous as portrayed in any of the sacred texts that reveal all to the snake oil salesman.
As thinking creatures we have the ability to create meaning even if is an artificial construct. I broke my rule in the middle of thinking about this piece and have begun to ramble. As long as your construct allows for others to pursue their construct fine. By definition the dogmatic faiths cannot do this. The word has been revealed and you must remain ignorant of all future developments to remain true to the faith. To Admit that the ravings in Leviticus are not valid is to admit it is all invalid. Either it is all the word of god or none of it is. If you refuse to show us the gold plates or accept the results when your shroud is proven false beyond all reasonable doubt then I say fuck you and your ignorance. I have no time to waste on your ignorant superstition. I will ridicule it at will but not one second of deference or respect. There isn’t anything else I can do but beat the dead idiot and there are already folks making a living at that task.
The course politically is set for the next cycle so I am not going to expend any more efforts in that direction. The centrist has sold us out to oil and pharma interests. The climate bill will be inadequate, the energy bill will include off shore drilling and nuclear energy both disasters. The drift toward a police state will continue as this group is now trying to eliminate rights for citizens while continuing to show contempt for human life around the globe. I won’t vote republican and see little point in continuing to support the rush to compromise of principles that is this failed system. There will be a slaughter in November and then we will get nothing but screwed until 2012 when the right wing will take power once again. This was the best shot at some actual progressive changes to government for the 8 year cycle with the utter destruction of everything the right had been saying and the gutless piece of god wad that won sold us out. I see no point in continuing to point out the obvious for the next two years. It will just serve to make me appear shrill.
Enjoy the break.

Nate's numbers don't add up

Needed more space than twitter provides for this response.
The time has come for the democrats in congress to man up. People are making the argument that BHO. is no FDR. Nate over at 538.com tries to defend Obama but his numbers do not add up. FDR. had 64% of a senate requiring 67% for cloture. BHO. began with 59% of a senate requiring 60% and Nate is claiming advantage FDR. BHO got his 60th vote long before FDR got his 67th. This defense doesn’t hold water.
FDR moved his agenda by writing the bill and sending it to congress. BHO. Has decided to let the legislature legislate. This has proven to be a horrible approach to this point. President Obama has a few months left in which to present an agenda and get it passed before the next election cycle is too far gone to get anything done. When the midterms bring losses this will be interpreted as anti BHO. By the media and we will have a one term president with a failed economy. The window is closing. The question remains are we going to get “Change we can believe in” or hands across the aisle?

My post speech analysis

I gave my prespeech perspective here is my post speech wrap up. Needless to say by my last line you will be sure that I remain unconvinced.

My analysis of the program. The President is planning to increase troop strength by approximately 1/3 in the hopes of reversing the trend in return to Taliban control. 18 months from now having stabilized the situation we will begin to pull out in Jul 2011. We will have trained the Afghan security forces to replace us at providing protection for the local population from said Taliban. We will increase our efforts at creating an economy based on something other than narcotics and root out the corruption in the central government. We will then get completely out of Afghanistan in terms of combat operations at some future date dependent on conditions on the ground.
This I am sure in his opinion is the best of a bad lot of options. He used the usual fear tactics and military props to sell it and he gave a pretty lackluster speech to roll it out. I will leave it for the Daily Show and Jon Stewart to put together the side by side comparison of Bush selling us the Iraq surge with the same rhetoric. He tried to tell us this wasn’t the next Vietnam while trying to fight it like Iraq, another place it is not. Always fighting the last war isn’t that the problem?

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I will begin with point 1. Afghanistan and its’ citizens did not attack us on 9/11. The hijackers were from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Lebanon and the United Arab Emirates. The mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohamed was born in Kuwaiti of Pakistani refugee parents. Osama bin Laden the leader of this criminal band was another Saudi. In case you are not seeing the pattern here there are no Afghans on that list.
The history of The United States drawing all these criminal men to Afghanistan to fight against the Russians and then leaving them trained and heavily armed to prey on the populace should be well known Perhaps that is why the President left it out of his history narrative. I am only bringing it up to give the proper time horizon. Afghanistan has not had a functioning educational system in all that time. They have a 20% literacy rate, very bad but the bulk of the reading is taught at religious schools that instill fundamentalism, even worse.
Looking at the president's claim that a false reading of history leads to the Vietnam analogy. I contend that all analogies to past wars are pointless as no two situations are ever the same but the lessons learned still apply. Then he sets out points that are themselves a false reading of history. We had the entire west bloc from the cold war with us on the Vietnam war when it came to votes in the UN and world opinion. Our partners in the Vietnam war contributed huge numbers of troops. South Korea provided 320,000 troops to the war effort, more than all the contribution of the coalition of the willing in Afghanistan. We are sending 30,000 troops at a cost of roughly 60 billion dollars total, assuming you meet your withdrawal target. The Brits are sending an additional 500 while the Canadians are doing the smart thing and leaving. Half truths when it comes to war are inexcusable. The belief that soviet style communism posed a threat to the world unparalleled in the history of civilization prevailed in the world at the time so again the distinction does not exist.
The South Vietnamese government was deemed illegitimate by the world after the murder of Diem. Who did what isn’t the point so much as now the whole world knows that The current Afghan government is illegitimate. They stole the election and we went along with the Vietnam Coup.
Waving the bloody shirt of 9/11 rings false to me for the reasons I have already stated above but there is again an untruth in the Presidents statement. We had been viciously attacked in the Gulf of Tonkin. Of course that turned out not to be factually accurate as well.
The war lords and the Taliban have been fighting over the area for 30 plus years so the home grown insurgency argument may hold up the best of any of his points. The hero status of Ho Chi Minh among his followers remained intact throughout the war. The terrorism took much of the luster off the freedom fighter image of bin Laden. The war lords were horrible when they were in charge. The Taliban was religious horrible leading to the degradation of women and unbelievers. After 9/11 we hired the warlords as mercenaries and put them back into power. Now we have the war lords losing power once again because they are horribly corrupt and the people hate them again. The possibility exists that can win the people in Afghanistan there was no way in Vietnam.
Now as to why it isn’t like Iraq and Surge 2.0 Af/Pak is the last war. Iraq was a fully functioning nation with lots of educated urban people. The level of entrepreneurship and innovation was much higher even though they operated under a pretty brutal dictatorship. The countries economy weakened by years of sanctions was still much stronger than Afghanistan and with the oil fields able to raise cash rapidly after they were stabilized. The parts of Afghanistan we need to recruit the police forces and security forces from are the least educated portions of a horribly uneducated land. In 8 years we have still been unable to build an effective security force in Iraq, We still do not have all of our combat troops out. How can you expect to have anything like a functioning force in 18 months?
The myth that the Surge worked. The violence that occurred in Iraq post, "mission accomplished" was mostly ethnic cleansing. The once integrated sections segregated over time through violence against a foreground of terrorist Al Qaeda types fighting our troops. They unleashed the pent up hatred of the suppressed majority on the oppressors and unlike South Africa in Iraq we got Liberia.
The violence had already begun to decline before the new troops arrived in Iraq so the idea that they caused the reduction is in question. We have been paying off vast numbers of the players all along in the Afghan operation. In Iraq we began paying them to not fight as a change in strategy. At first we made every effort to ensure that no American monies went to anyone that had fought against our troops. It was not until that policy was changed that we began to have some success. The promise of jobs with the police and security forces. We are running out of patience for paying them off and they are not getting the promised jobs in the Iraq government and violence is ticking back up. In Afghanistan we have been paying bribes to build bases bribes to drive on roads, bribes for information and bribes for safe conduct of our supplies since the very beginning. The development money has been sucked up by corruption much the same as in Iraq but as it was a significantly smaller number the amount that trickled down to the population was correspondingly small.
I have no way to verify all of the rumors about The CIA and their paying off of President Karzai’s brother and how much of the 15 billion we bribed the Pakistani’s with went to the other side so we have no non corrupt partner in the region.
I Give the President some credit for at least trying to put forth arguments and justifications for his plan as opposed to The Bush pattern of the lies about babies being thrown from incubators as Bush 41 did or Lies about Uranium yellow cake and mushroom clouds as Bush 43 did.
He failed to answer what went wrong with his last escalation. He has deployed 31,000 troops to Afghanistan already in his short presidency. Why did that escalation fail and what changed that that makes you think doubling down will work now?
It is important at this point to look at the goal of the other side here. They want to cause us to spend so much money that our system collapses. They believe that this is what they did to the Soviet Empire. I would submit another misreading of history.
There were vague statements about paying for the war. No commitment to pay for it. With this President if it is not explicitly spelled out he will not honor his pledge. Even when it is explicit he will not necessarily honor it as in the case of FISA immunity. The General in charge has been proven to lie to the nation as a propagandist so he cannot be trusted, Google Pat Tillman cover up. It was Gates that was Secretary of Defense when the requested troops were not sent. Rumsfeld had been replaced with the man you kept when McKiernan's requests were denied. You cannot use half truths to lie us further into war you must tell the whole truth.
As in Vietnam we will get more people killed and the end result will be the same failed stalemate we could have gotten 3 years earlier. The other alternative is that we continue to fail at securing the country and three years from now we are force to throw more blood and treasure into a failed enterprise. I will leave you with this question. Hey, Hey LBJ How many Kids will Obama Kill Today?

On the Eve of Destruction.

This was a great old tune by a guy named Barry McGuire

It seemed apropos to today as another Barry is about to give us his decision on pouring more lives down the rat hole of war. The leaked number is 30,000 more troops. I have no reason to believe that number and the actual number is not that important in the long run. The cost of 30,000 troops will be an additional 30 billion dollars. That is thirty billion dollars every year for as long as they are there. In February of this year the President already escalated the war to a total of 34,000 troops. Combat troops with their support units.This was done in a deceptive manner in my opinion but I have made no bones about my opinion of this administration and the truth. Charlie Gibbs and Dana Perino lie with equal alacrity and as Dana’s lying netted her a cushy job in government why not?
I have been working on writing fiction in a furious and frenzied attempt to write a novel in a month and so I may tend to ramble but to the topic at hand. The Graveyard of Empires that is Afghanistan and A deeper issue, what as a nation do we value?
Last year we spent 130 billion on hot wars along with another 750 billion on the military industrial complex. Another 30 billion on top of that seems like chicken feed. It does until you consider that 160 billion is twice what the estimated cost of health care reform will be. 840 billion over ten years.
This does not take into account the fact that we are financing the enemy as well we have to bribe the Taliban to let our convoys through to resupply our soldiers. For a frame of reference The gross domestic product of Afghanistan in 2008 was 11.7 billion dollars.
The escalation of our part in this war not including the money and men contributed by NATO is three times the entire countries economy.

Much like In Iraq no one is counting the number of civilians we are killing on a regular basis. We may never no how many people are dying to keep a corrupt government in charge of a failed nation. We have no more right to murder the citizens of Afghanistan and Pakistan then the terrorists conducting their attacks on 9/11. We could have done it right but we hired the awful scum that were so terrible to their own people that welcomed the Taliban with open arms to get rid of them and are shocked when they screw everything up.
We have the same criminal crony capitalists in charge of the money supply that destroyed our economy impoverishing only those at the bottom. The Rich are doing quite nicely in the same old story.
Now the Same criminals that tortured and lied under Bush are Torturing and Lying under Obama, Gates and McChrystal.
We were told during the campaign that it was foolish to trust those that drove us into the ditch to get us out, Of course we were also told that the guys that screwed up the Financial system and lost all the poor folks money were the only ones that could save us. The scientific approach of a god waddder that thinks prayer will solve everything.
Since you are evidently not the smartest man on the planet I will say it slowly for you.
There are no good wars.
Your are murdering people everyday in these wars and in our own country by wasting resources on the continued American love of killing brown folks.
You are about to do your usual half assed compromise crap and lose politically as well as get a shitload of people killed for no good reason.
You are going to get creamed by the right for not giving the Generals all the tools to win and when you lose it will be your fault. You cant win with the left without ending the war.
You lied about federal wiretaps you lied about Guantanamo you let the war criminals walk with impunity and now you will kill thousands more before you fail again. Hey, hey LBJ how many kids did Obama kill today?
Do I think this screw-up will be the end of the world? Probably not but the folks in the Kremlin probably didn’t think it would destroy their country either.

Why I fight for what I fight for

The answer to the "why are we here question" is not going to make the world a better place because even if you found it most people wouldn't believe it. I say this because we actually have answered it scientifically and around the world people refuse in droves to accept it.
There is no reason behind the beginning and there is nothing after the end. What we have in between, because we are sentient, is the opportunity to create a world in which we can all enjoy the fruits of knowledge. As long as we sell the ignorant on pie in the sky they will never have pie. It is my position that we could all have pie at some point if we stopped being ignorant assholes. There really is a lot of pie. We may need to have fewer people but we definitely need a more equitable pie man.

Pulling something out of my Year End

I hate the arbitrary assessments that come with certain dates. They are obligatory in some sense and as a conventional nonconformist I thought I would chime in. 2008 was alright in the end. More up than down. I was never able to get more than a few hundred miles on the bike trips but the idea of that was laughable just a few years ago.
I had a good year creatively. While I didn’t make much head way on the DJ project I did put out some good short stories, I had some tough nights in the wilderness but the good times more than made up for it. The video front has been fun but I need to put forth more effort in scripting and editing. The Radmul channel has been fun to build on YouTube and is starting to take on a new shape that I like.
I had forgotten how oppressive it is to be depressed when everyone else is happy so the end of the holiday season is always welcome . I still hurt too many days. I have lost any conditioning that I had gotten and have gained too much weight.
The year in politics has been interesting. I have enjoyed my debates on Dkos and Hufpo. I have a post in the works wrapping up my political thoughts for the year. For now I am out for some fun on the last day of the year hope you are doing the same.

Why the sex trade will stay illegal.

Today is the international day to end violence against sex workers day. The key to this in my opinion is to destigmatize and decriminalize these activities. I am sad to say I see neither of these things happening anytime soon.
The rich need to have low cost whores available to the rabble or they will agitate for enough money to have the same access to sex that others have. Once they stigmatize an individual through a criminal record the worker has many fewer options for making a living. They keep the options limited they keep the prices down and prevent the workers from garnering enough resources to change their life in a capitalist system.
The second factor is the prison industrial complex. Many parts of rural America are dependent upon incarceration for their economic development. We lost our manufacturing and built prisons and those cells need to have occupants. The police exploit the poor at all levels forcing them to become informants and extorting the poor workers for favors. This is more control of the underclass.
If legalized the workers would be entitled to police protection like any other commercial enterprise. The policing of the lower classes is punitive not protective for the most part.
The moralists are too wrapped up in their superstition to allow reason to get in the way of punishing sin. These are a powerful constituency and sex workers are not. The patrons that have a modicum of power are shamed into silence so the puritans get their way.

Car wreck economy

I am watching the markets fall again today and the news is reporting another round of government plans for bailouts. There is talk of another stimulus package and a bailout of the big three auto makers. The liberal bloggosphere is now debating how to make the car makers eco-friendly in exchange for the money. More of the too big to fail mentality that is doomed to failure. This will be a horrible boondoggle just as the financial sector bailout is turning into.
The auto industry is not truly in trouble just the American auto industry. Yes all sales are down but in this recession but the big three were tanking long before the downturn. This is a symptom of a larger American attitude that is the root of the problem but first let us look at industry as a whole. Companies like Volkswagen and Toyota are profitable and have been while GM looses billions. If we are going to bail out bad decisions and bad business practices we must abandon the idea that we are a market economy. Rather than pour money down the rat hole let these companies go into bankruptcy and have the government backstop the people at the bottom that will lose out. Don’t hand the idiots running these companies billions to waste instead let them fail and take over the pension and medical insurance payments for the retirees. This should be done as part of a national single payer health care reform that will help to make all American industry more viable and competitive.
The big three have been losing market share due to bad products and poor workmanship. The market does in fact work in cars, make a product people want and it sells. Once you have a reputation for making bad poor quality products it is tough to come back. This brings me back to the larger American attitude that is failing. Marketing will make up for bad product. The big three think polishing a turd is the solution rather than flushing the toilet.
The idea that we are going to bail out these companies seems to no longer be the argument but how the government should determine what they make is the position of the left. The right and let them fail is actually correct but their reasoning as usual is faulty and they do not want to deal with the fallout. Planned economies fail. I have accepted that fact even though I tend toward socialist solutions. The market is pretty good at deciding which types of goods consumers will buy. Badly made poor quality ugly looking boxy hybrids will tank and that is the kind of crap Detroit’s designers will spew forth if the government steps in with mandates in exchange for loan guarantees. The management of the big three are of the same mentality as the American way of life is nonnegotiable wing of the anti environmental party. The automobile is not conducive to a sustainable lifestyle for 6 billion plus people and the sooner we warm up to that concept the sooner we can keep the world from getting too hot.
Let them fail. Force the unions to work out a new deal and let the taxpayers bail out the retirees not the investors. Take the money and spend it on public transportation. There simply are not enough resources in the world for everyone to drive around in their own car. This is the fundamental change that we need to deal with. If we start now we can save lots of pain in the long run.

Election wrap

Slept late today and now over coffee I thought I would take a few minutes to analyze the 08 vote. I am glad Obama beat McCain 4 more years of the same old republican nonsense would have been a disaster but I do not see the huge transformation that the jabbering heads are on about. Yes a black man won and that is historic but the world of the redneck is still full of rednecks. In an election that had the worst economy in my lifetime and two failed wars almost all of fly over country still voted as it always does. If the market collapse had been stalled a few more months who knows? If McCain picks a remotely qualified running mate again we will never know.
I think that because I am of the opinion that people are of a single species and that the variation within the group has been shown to be greater than variations by skin color I just don’t find race very interesting. The invective that I saw in the campaign showed me that racism is still prevalent and that we have a huge number of bigots wandering among us. The failure of all of the progressive ballot initiatives tends to prove my point. Equal rights for gays lost even in California. That should not be that big a surprise as once you get 50 miles inland California has become Alabama in some respects. Even when same sex marriage was legal the folks in Bakersfield tried to prevent couples from getting licenses, just one example.
I am a cynic and do not trust anyone that spews the level of religiosity that Obama professes but he has a mandate. It remains to be seen what he does with it. In the meantime the court battles over rights will begin in California and the corporate scum will begin to delegitamize the left with claims of, “America is center right” while the left pushes back. In the end I will not be surprised when a year from now nothing has changed much. We are still a population that cares more about the caged chicken we are going to slaughter than our neighbors.

Another old man screams at the clouds

Some random things that are irritating me. People sighting the continued ads for credit as evidence that the credit markets are not ready to collapse. The point of the bailout is to prevent the collapse. If you wait until the system has collapsed and jobs are lost and companies fail it is too late. The rich are going to make out better on any bailout put forward. Life is not fair get over it. We can go back later and try to impose some taxes and surcharges to attempt to balance the pain but if we allow the credit system to fail to stick it to the wall street bunch we will all be screwed and it could take a decade to pull out of it. The Paulson plan sucks and I have outlined my ideas to improve it but to argue with nonsense just pisses me off. If you can’t think through your argument and see that they at least are coherent shut up and let the adults in the room deal with it.
People telling Sarah Palin to step down as the republican Veep nominee for the good of the country. This has got to be the dumbest thing I have heard in politics since , well Sarah Palin trying to answer a question. Caribou Barbie meets the constitutional requirements to be the Vice President. Would she be terrible? Is she undereducated and lacking in deliberative judgment? Yes and yes but that is not the issue. If the majority of Americans want a moron to run the government than they have every right to vote for a moron. I am not worried as I think more people value a well run government and will not be fooled by McCain and his blatant pandering. People voted for the dumb one in 2004 and it was a disaster for some poor folks, think New Orleans after Katrina, but life was going to suck for those folks even with a good president. We have the opportunity in this election to change the course of the country for the better but if most people want to vote for someone that shares their views on the imaginary friend nonsense that is their right. If the morons win and the old man dies the country will go on. We have had a moron in the big chair for 8 years and if the voters do not see that that is not a good thing than they get the government they deserve.
The people not taking responsibility for their part in the nations problems. I have no desire to castigate those that seek instant gratification and get what they want damn the consequences. You only get one life and it can go to shit for reasons beyond your control at any time but if that is how you chose to live don’t piss and moan when it blows up. “Live fast die, young and leave a good looking corpse” is a fine philosophy but if you don’t die and your body is screwed it is on you. If you bought a house that you can no longer afford because the interest rates reset it is your fault. Prices do not go up forever. You gambled and lost, there is no shame in that just in trying to blame someone else for it. If you are bankrupt because you lived beyond your means for years buying toys it is your fault. You have your priorities wrong and you need to adjust your lifestyle. Yes it sucks that they advertise things that you can’t have. If you think that the material crap will make you happy than by all means attempt to get it but as I said above life is not fair.

Apocalypse when?

Like all good mushrooms they keep us in the dark and bury us in shit.
I am not always very good at the suspension of disbelief. A necessary talent for watching modern television shows and movies. Also necessary for watching political debates without throwing a shoe through the screen. I am more concerned with what is being said than how they are saying it and this year I am very disappointed in what I heard. Neither Candidate gave any real specifics and both are going to go for the big hand out to the rich investors on Wall street. I cannot stand the way McCain and his ilk have destroyed the country so I am not surprised that he has no clue but again I am disappointed in Obama. If he wanted to actually stand for change rather than hand billions to the same bankers that have boned us a bottom up solution would work better than more trickle down horse shit.
Let the banks eat their bad investments and instead set up a mortgage adjustment fund. Buy up the vacant houses in foreclosure for the pennies on the dollar that the abandoned hulks are worth and bulldoze them. Those that are still livable and haven’t been gutted for the recyclables can be rented to low income people and the homeless to keep them occupied and prevent further devaluation of neighborhoods. Any house that goes into receivership going forward buy it up at the face value of the loan and rent the home to the current resident at a negotiated rate. This will eliminate the further failure of the credit default swaps that are crushing the investment houses. In addition the federal reserve can reset interest rates to prevent A.R.Ms. From resetting to avoid further foreclosures.
Step 2 will require the creation of an emergency lending authority. Existing firms with lines of credit that they are servicing but they cannot get renewed due to the liquidity freeze would be eligible for federal funds for short term operation. These same circumstances could be extended to small farms for 6 month operating budgets. This would fend off the disaster that Ben and Hank have wrought.
Step 3 will involve expanding the social safety net to help those at the bottom that do lose their jobs and can’t find new ones. Increasing the amount of funds available for food stamps and support to food banks. Expanding health insurance benefit programs such as Cobra and SCHIP. I would rather see a single payer system instituted for all but that will probably take more time and political will than the Democrats have. Extending unemployment benefits will also be necessary.
Step 4 the recovery will be more complex but here are a few things to start with. A bipartisan commission to analyze what went wrong and develop new regulations to prevent it from happening again. A serious commitment to investment in public infrastructure. Rebuilding and modernizing the electrical grid. Retrofitting our bridges and public buildings. Research and development of renewable energy to include wind farms and solar collectors. Expanding our public transit in the form of high speed rail and commuter systems.
I am aware that my ideas have zero chance of happening but I wanted to get my thoughts out there before we are screwed by the political class tomorrow morning.

Still in recovery mode from the weekend. I need to get back to into the fitness regime that I was on but I just don’t seem to be able to get motivated. Went out to the woods to think and got some writing done. I am just in a funk that has no seeable end. I am reluctant to make any decisions at this time of year but I am also reluctant to continue to drift in the sludge of my own thoughts. I have started remembering my dreams again. For long periods of time I sleep and wake remembering nothing of the minds battles in the night. Now when the morning comes I am aware of what I have been sorting through and it has been unpleasant. The feeling of oppression, the claustrophobic dreams of being buried or drowned haunt my mornings now as well as my nights. This combined with the ache in my legs each morning now makes it tough just to get my sorry butt out from under the covers each day. It is two separate things that I must deal with. Why am I now remembering the dreams what significant thing has changed. and why are the dreams so negative. Why are dreams of Cary so vivid. I know perhaps why they are here now, a matter of timing.
The chemistry of the mind and whether or not to mess with it, that becomes the larger question of the moment. For now I need to keep riding daily ,plan another trip to the woods and take things in small chunks. Work each day on the writing as well. Even if it is not particularly productive I need to get into better habits. Working will beget better work of that I am confident.