From Barr. Wilson Matata.

With all due respect.   Do accept my sincere apologies if this mail does not meet your personal ethics, My name is Wilson Matata and an attorney by profession, I am contacting you in order to ask for your assistance on this confidential business proposal with full financial benefit for both me and you. Before I go into further details, please be informed that I am writing without any other person(s) pre-knowledge of my contacting you on this transaction. Therefore I will appreciate same attitude to be maintained by you all through. in my quest to find a reliable trustee to manage the assets/estate of my late client valued at only US$11,000,000.00 (Eleven Million United States Dollars), I contacted you and it is the only reason why you are receiving this email from me. I shall be willing to supply you with more detailed information concerning this business project upon hearing back from you.   I have no intention whatsoever to delve into your private life considering the fact that you have never had any communication with me in the past, but due to the nature of this business project based on the fact that I lack the locus-stand to assume the role of the trustee or appoint any of my relation to become the trustee by virtue of the facts and circumstances surrounding this project, I am left with no other choice, but to carry out a discreet search for a reputable person outside the shores of my country and consequently seek your stewardship.   If you wish to render your selfless service, but very rewarding, do provide me with your telephone numbers and home address via email. I shall provide you with more detailed information upon hearing back from you. Thank you, all inconvenience is regretted.   Best regards, Barr Wilson Matata. Principal Partner

It can't be as bad as it seems...

Can it? http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/

http://gg9-tto.blogspot.com/

What I kinda wish was true...

that Obama's tax deal flops and the Bush tax cuts expire. It would be against
our immediate self-interest (not to mention the unemployed), but as Krugman and
others have pointed out (in Daily Kos and elsewhere), the Democrats will be
exchanging present hostages to the Republicans in return for giving up still
more hostages down the line. The Republican plan is to make the tax cuts
permanent in 2012 (and campaign on the issue) and if they secure the tax cuts,
they will then start hollering about the necessity of cutting social security
and other so-called entitlements out of their immense faux concern for the
deficit.

(BTW, as grateful as I am for Krugman's insightful columns, at one point I
believe he supported a payroll social security tax holiday as part of a stimulus
package & for me & that's the real sticking point for me in the Obama tax
deal--now I guess it's one of the sticking points for him too. Back in the
day, Krugman was also a free trade proponent although he now considers such
discussions an academic luxury of sorts. But Krugman is okay. For one thing he
likes my favorite sci fi guy, Charles Stross)

So one partially hopes that Bernie Sanders takes it upon himself to block the
bill until the clock runs out on the tax deal--individual Republican Senators do
it all the time so I don't see why he can't. And the bill is hardly revenue
neutral so it can be filibustered. In the foregoing dream scenario, Bernie
blocks the bill even though he may be risking his Senate career and the
Republicans take the heat from Obama and the other Dems for refusing a
middle-class tax cut, attempting to monkey with social security, and laying
waste to the millions of unemployed. Meanwhile, the economy continues to
improve to the point that the public perception is that things are getting
better and the Republicans are battered again at the polls in 2012. But above
all, it would be nice if the Left in the Democratic Party could demonstrate (for
once) that they cannot be taken for granted by the party leadership. Sometimes
I believe the position of the Left with the Democrats is rather like that of the
anti-abortionists and family values crowd vis a vis the Republicans--useful at
the polls but ignored in practice otherwise.

But, as the Marines say, hope is not a plan. I have finally to believe that
Obama's deal will go through because the unemployed desperately need for it to
go through.

R.

http://gg9-tto.blogspot.com/

Dear Sir / Madam Please read.

Dear Sir / Madam Please read. It is my sincere pleasure at this moment to exhibit my total trust bestowed on you in accordance to my Proposed partnership relationship with you of which I am fully convinced that you will really welcome my partnership with you in this transaction Being very sceptical about dealing with Africans in such transaction, Ranging from the height of fraudulent activities encompassing the African communities. Now it is my Godly nursed intention to prove myself to you that I am very much different from others which you must have come across. I hereby attested my accepted conclusion to take upon my gentle self and to join hands together to cover any unforeseen expenses that may be involved here till the Final Transfer of the Funds to our Correspondent Bank before its Final remittance into your Nominated Bank Account. This is to convince you of my spirited acceptance to have you as a confidant in a business of this magnitude knowing that you will not turn me down come-what-may, regarding this Claim/Transfer to boost my planned establishment of a funding Company out of Africa . In other Words, I went into a more concrete arrangement in couriering to your doorstep, a total of US$10.5Million Dollars through INTER-BANK TRANSFER. This amount of Money belongs to our Deceased Customer as there were no claims over this Dormant Balance Account for a period of many Years. Therefore, I am in need of a Reliable Partner that would come forward to put claims over the Funds for its Transfer into his/her Foreign Bank Account. This is because I am the Director of Foreign Remittance Department of my Bank for secures Transfer of these Funds without any Hindrances. All I am expecting from you, as a matter of greatest urgency and importance is your sincerity and Honesty as I have some of the Needed Legal Documents to prove that this Business is Lawful for its onward Remittance. I urgently want you to send all the demanded Personal Information's below to me as soon as you receive this PROPOSAL in order to show your readiness and Willingness in this Proposed Business. BELOW ARE THE NEEDED PERSONAL INFORMATIONS 1) Your Full Name.......................... ... 2) Your Age........................... ............ 3) Your Mobile and Home Phone Number………….. 4) Your Fax Number………………..... 5) Your Country of Nationality………………............. . 6) Your Occupation.................... ........ 7) Sex........................... ..................... 8) ALTERNATIVE E-MAIL ADDRESS / ........................ Finally, you have to keep this Proposal confidential and secret from your Relations, Partners and Colleagues for our success in this Transaction as the basis of this Business is Secrecy. I promise you that I would protect your Personal Interest as this Business is 100% risk-free.Therefore, I want you to express your interest to engage in this Business with me because your share is 40% of the Funds in Question so that I can send to you the TEXT OF APPLICATION which you have to Fill and send to the E-mail Address of the Bank. I look forward for your immediate Positive response. My regards to you and the family, Haji Azizs Yusuf Tele 0022678430122

Why arsenic in the news made me happy

NASA's announcement of the discovery of a microorganism that can substitute
arsenic for phosphorus in the amino acids that make up DNA thrilled me no end.

There are also extremophiles in the ocean depths that can, for example, harvest
the energy from naturally occurring background radiation from uranium compounds.

Wiki has a extensive article on speculations about the possibility of life based
on elements other than carbon, including, as a matter of fact, certain forms of
uranium and lead, not to mention the old sci fi standby, silicon-based life
forms.

As I have mentioned, I frequently check an astrobiology blog called "What's New
in Cosmic Ancestry"

I betcha that some time during my life they are in fact going to find some
indication--if not outright proof--that there are non-carbon-based life forms.

To paraphrase J.B.S. Haldane, the Universe is not only more fecund than we
imagine, it is more fecund than we *can* imagine.

R.

http://gg9-tto.blogspot.com/

Dammit...

Robert Charles Wilson in his novel, Bios, has anticipated most (though not all)
of my vision of cosmic biogenesis as depicted in MY (perpetually) forthcoming
novel, provisionally titled, SUMMA.
In mine, I posit that there are planets in the cosmos where all life forms are
symbiotic with one another and no life form is obliged to prey upon another.
And in many instances all apparently different species are all different stages
of the same life form. Also, consciousness and life are all coeval with one
another--although the forms of consciousness are so radically different
sometimes that they cannot communicate or even recognize one another. That's
Mr. R.C. Wilson's vision.

Of course, MY vision is even more inclusive than Mr. R.C. Wilson's. I posit
also that there are not only stars and planets that are alive and conscious, but
a spectrum of objects between those two that are also alive and conscious
(Pluto, Jupiter, brown dwarfs, etc.), and not only that, but there are living
beings that consist purely of magnetic fields and other forces on the surfaces
of stars, and also in cloulds of interstellar dust and gases and in
intergalactic space, and the nous of all finite entities that subsist after
their endings in something like the Akashic records. After a while, you see, I
think the cosmos gets kind of complicated.

In nearly unrelated news, Michael Gruber has written a sort of "wisdom" book
based on his interpretation of Nietzche, Heidigger and Rudolf Steiner. Nietzche
and Heidigger are my two least favorite thinkers. Heidigger was a fucking Nazi.
Nietzche probably would not have liked them, but much of his writing works to
give them aid and comfort. Steiner is a tolerably sophisticated thinker who
gave some aspects of theosophy a certain veneer of intellectual respectability
with his "anthroposophy" & he is something of a gnostic Christian as well. He
was decent enough to be persecuted by the Nazis. But some of his teachings
promote (see also Alice Bailey) a sort of racism and some are just plain...odd.
Like his belief that children should not be taught to read until they have
acquired their permanent teeth. Anyway, there are people whom I admire who look
to Nietzche and Heidigger, but those folks' interpretations of Nietzche and
Heidigger seem to make them out as being the very opposite of the impressions
that I have of those two thinkers.

I don't understand Gruber's book very well on first reading. I have the sense
from reading his novels that he speaks from a certain degree of first hand
experience, so I'm inclined to think he has something really important to say.

http://gg9-tto.blogspot.com/

It could have been worse...

Well, it could have been worse.  If Christine O'Donnell had won in Maryland, I think I would have had real doubts about the viability of representative democracy.  But I would have gotten over them.  

I was saddened that Russ Feingold lost in Wisconsin.   That's pretty mysterious to me.  What did Russ Feingold ever do to betray the interests of Wisconsites?  The media are saying that Feingold took some maverick positions against the party--like refusing to support the Iraq War when it was all the rage--& so he didn't get much support from the Democratic Party establishment.  It seems like there's a price to pay about being prematurely right.  Feingold was outspent 4-1 but that still doesn't quite explain it.  So was Jerry Brown.  

Here's hoping Bennet and Murphy hang on in Colorado and Washington.  

And I think of Ma and Pa Ferguson & Pappy Lee O'Daniel, governors of Texas back in the day, who were Tea Party types before their time.  (Blago of Illinois is the only current analog of theirs I can think of...)  (In *O Brother Where Art Thou?* the incumbent Gov. of Mississippi was modeled on Pappy Lee--can't recall if the Coen brothers actually used his name). During the reign of the Fergusons, if you had a relative in the pen you wanted to get pardoned, it was pretty simple.  Just buy some expensive bull semen from the Ferguson's breeding operation...) 

Representative democracy is like an unspecialized amoeba-like organism that lurches through its environment, sending out a pseudopod here and getting burned, another over there and finding good stuff to ingest, far more adaptable than say, koalas, who can only eat eucalpytus and have to rely on an unchanging environment--even though they are a lot cuter. 

I think it will be interesting to see how the presence of the Tea Party folks in the House of Representatives affect Republican Caucus discipline.  Not that much I'm guessing, but I still hope they screw it up.  I know that among the Tea Party types there are  some who genuinely believe in limited government, fiscal conservatism, reining in Wall Street and the big corporations.  My guess is they will be corrupted in the twinkling of an eye.  But I could be wrong.  Some have said that I've been wrong before.  

R. 

 

http://gg9-tto.blogspot.com/

The old days

Yesterday, Allen H., locomotive on the A-train group, posted a handy guide to various Texas geographical & other (Texas) oddities.  It threw me into a state of unregenerate nostalgia.  

http://www.texasescapes.com/TexasGhostTowns/Whiteflat-Texas.htm

I lived in White Flat, TX from the ages of 6 to 7 YO.  I went to school in Matador, Texas, 10 miles to the south.  They are places of primal beauty.  Well, in their own way.  

Oh.  Nearly forgot.  I *started* first grade in Flomot, TX.  

http://www.texasescapes.com/TexasPanhandleTowns/FlomotTexas/FlomotTexas.htm

I remember my first day of school.  What I noticed was that there were Other People there and all the noise bothered me.  I was upset that I was going to have go back the next day.  I threatened to burn the school down.  

I may be possessed of a disposition as sweet, agreeable & generally compliant as a body might ever want to meet, but do not test me.  I had a childhood in the Texas Panhandle. 

Yaaahooo!

R. 
 

http://gg9-tto.blogspot.com/

Process philosophy is good for you...

Alfred North Whitehead lived until the age of 86.  Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss, his two students who became major philosphers in Whitehead's own tradition, lived to 103 and 101 respectively. 

 

Paul Weiss won an age discrimination suit at the age of 91 when his university tried to forcibly retire him. 

 

I am deeply influenced by the process tradition--and I take vitamins. 

 

R.
 

http://gg9-tto.blogspot.com/

Re: Hiraku Murakami

If you don't mind, Roy, I'm gonna go off like a wind-up bird on Murakami, one of the least known, most accomplished writers of the last thirty years. You can start anywhere you like (his work has become considerably more grounded in the last decade or so), but for those unfamiliar, I'd suggest 'Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World', an absolutely brilliant parallel-plot psychological potboiler with an existentialist through-line (as most of Murakami's work has); or 'A Wild Sheep Chase', similarly concerned with existence, with shadings of noir pulp and more than a little Carlos Fuentes or Garcia-Marquez.

He baffles some people, I'm sure. His work almost invariably contains a fair amount of modern Tokyo culture, (invariably jazz clubs, meticulous food preparation and an ongoing domestic crisis), but he uses it like Stephen King uses McDonald's references: a familiar door through which you pass on your way beyond anything like recognizable territory.

He's also done some classic reportage (the Kobe quake, the Aum Shinrikio subway gassing), as meticulous as any of his work, with his own idiosyncratic views. And he's put his more recent novels on an almost purely existential plane, 'Kafka at the Shore' being the best example.

Translators make a big difference with Murakami. I've seen a couple of abysmal ones, each of whose names I've forgotten, but Alfred Birnbaum (or, in a pinch, Jay Rubin) has been with Murakami's work from the beginning, he's colloquially familiar, and is clearly most comfortable with him.

I could go on and on (as if I hadn't already); there's a lot more work. 'Wind-Up Bird' I was reading the day my son was born, and the day after. Quite a memory. I apologize for all of this, Roy, but I so infrequently see anyone mention Murakami, and I think his work is uniformly brilliant, no matter where you start. But I'd highly recommend starting somewhere.

On Aug 26, 2010, at 9:56 AM, Roy Griffin <roygg9@yahoo.com> wrote:

> I've been reading his book, THE WINDUP BIRD CHRONICLES. It's not my usual escapist fare, but a work of real litrachoor--like Michael Caine sez in the movie, *Educating Rita.*
>
> For an ex-English teacher, I have a pretty bad track record for a lot of the classics I'm supposed to have read. It's not that I don't recognize their greatness. I was well into MOBY DICK & was thinking *great stuff*--then I lost the fire, and stopped reading. I don't know why. I wasn't bored exactly, but it just didn't sing to me any more. And I do intend to finish it some day (yeah, yeah, the paving to the Bad Place & all that...)
>
> And frankly, I was worried the same thing would happen with Murakami. But it didn't. And it hasn't. And, somehow, I can tell it won't.
>
> To call Murakami's book "magic realism" is probably a crude description but it gives you an idea...
>
> He's full of quotable remarks that seem to embody a kind of wisdom that straddles the categories of worldly, transcendental and psychological. I'm not sure they have any real application for anyone other than Murakami or his characters. but their spirit is eminently humanist and unobtrusively edifying...somehow.
>
> I believe if I keep reading this sort of thing I will develop a certain capacity for natural human feeling. Oh, well.
>
>
> R.
>
> http://gg9-tto.blogspot.com/
>

Hiraku Murakami

I've been reading his book, THE WINDUP BIRD CHRONICLES.    It's not my usual escapist fare, but a work of real litrachoor--like Michael Caine sez in the movie,  *Educating Rita.*  

 

For an ex-English teacher, I have a pretty bad track record for a lot of the classics I'm supposed to have read.  It's not that I don't recognize their greatness.  I was well into MOBY DICK & was thinking *great stuff*--then I lost the fire, and stopped reading.  I don't know why.  I wasn't bored exactly, but it just didn't sing to me any more.  And I do intend to finish it some day (yeah, yeah, the paving to the Bad Place & all that...)

 

And frankly, I was worried the same thing would happen with Murakami.  But it didn't.  And it hasn't.  And, somehow, I can tell it won't. 

 

To call Murakami's book "magic realism" is probably a crude description but it gives you an idea...

 

He's full of quotable remarks that seem to embody a kind of wisdom that straddles the categories of worldly, transcendental and psychological.   I'm not sure they have any real application for anyone other than Murakami or his characters. but their spirit is eminently humanist and unobtrusively edifying...somehow.

 

I believe if I keep reading this sort of thing I will develop a certain capacity for natural human feeling.  Oh, well.

 

 

R.
 

http://gg9-tto.blogspot.com/

Re: A Glass Not Empty...I guess...

Hi everyone,

 

I just thought you might like to know that this story has made it into the news on the other side of the pond - I heard an article about it on this morning's Today programme on BBC Radio 4. 

 

Best wishes,

 

Catherine

 

 

A Glass Not Empty...I guess...

That's the most optimism I can summon in the aftermath of the Sherrod firing.  She gets an apology from the Obama Administration and her job back, if she wants it.  I mean "optimism" in the context of some kind of response to the right wing lie machine--it's better than nothing at all, but only just.  

 

But you would  think that the Obama Administration (and the Congressional Democrats) would have learned something in the aftermath of the ACORN pseudo-scandal concocted by the proteges of this same creature, Andrew Breitbart, a right-wing, scum-sucking, slime-dwelling, bottom feeding, psychopathic, slug-brained, piece of ambulatory proto-fascist chickenshit, who's already proven himself to be a deliberate purveyer of convoluted wingnut lies & fabrications.  (I don't think "psychopathic" is hyperbole, either.  Breitbart must know he's a lying sack of shit.  No psychologically healthy person could live with that level of cognitive dissonance.  And that applies to all the talking heads on Fox News, with the possible exception of Shep Smith)

 

Keith Olbermann called out the Obama Administration tonight--and everybody else--in his special comment.  It was pretty scathing . 

 

Thing is, this is the first instance that I can recall in the past few years where an injustice of this sort perpetrated by the wingnut media has been rectified in any way at all.  It's understandable that would be the case under George W., but the Obama Administration (and the Congressional Democrats) have already let several go by without much remark at all. Or so it seems to me.   

 

If the Obama Administration wants to stay above the fray, couldn't they at least discreetly encourage the DNC to set up some kind of war room to vet that kind of right wing emesis before they jump on somebody with all four feet?  

 

R.

 

 

 

http://gg9-tto.blogspot.com/

Gol' dangit--he wuz quicker on the draw than me...

But I got some aces up my sleeve I haven't pulled yet

 

But here's an excerpt form Dorn's poem GUNSLINGER.  He's great.  I hate him.

 

 

I held the reins of his horse

while he went into the desert

to pee. Yes, he reflected

when he returned, that's less.

How long, he asked

have you been in this territory.

Years I said. Years.

Then you will know where we can have

a cold drink before sunset and then a bed

will be my desire

if you can find one for me

I have no wish to continue

my debate with men,

my mare lathers with tedium

her hooves are dry

Look they are covered with the alkali

of the enormous space

between here and formerly.

Need I repeat, we have come

without sleep from Nuevo Laredo.

And why do you have such a horse

Gunslinger? I asked. Don't move

he replied

the,sun rests deliberately

on the rim of the sierra.

And where will you now I asked.

Five days northeast of here

depending of course on whether one's horse

is of iron or flesh

there is a city called Boston

and in that city there is a' hotel

whose second floor has been let

to an inscrutable Texan named Hughes

Howard? I asked

The very same.

And what do you mean by inscrutable,

oh Gunslinger?

I mean to say that He

has not been seen since 1833

But when you have found him my Gunslinger

what will you do, oh what will you do?

You would not know

that the souls of old Texans

are in jeopardy in a way not common

to other men, my singular friend.

You would not know

of the long plains night

where they carry on

and arrange their genetic duels

with men of other states

so there is a longhorn bull half mad

half deity

who awaits an account from me

back of the sun you nearly disturbed

just then. I

Lets have that drink.

STRUM

STRUM

And by that sound

we had come there, false fronts

my Gunslinger said make

the people mortal

and give their business

an inward cast. They cause culture.

Honk HONK,Honk HONK Honk

that sound comes

at the end of the dusty street,

where we meet the gaudy Madam

of that very cabaret going in

where our drink is to be drunk

Hello there, Slinger! Long time

no see

what brings you, who's your friend,

to these parts, and where

if you don't mind my asking, Hello,

are you headed...

Boston!? you don't say, Boston

is an actionable town they say

never been there myself

Not that I mean to slight the boys

but I've had some nice girls

from up Boston way

they turned out real spunky!

But you look like you

always did Slinger, you

still make me- shake, I mean

why do you think I've got my hand on

my hip if not to steady myself

and the way I twirl this

Kansas City parasol

if not to keep the dazzle

of them spurs outa my eyes

Miss Lil! I intervened

you musn't slap my

Gunslinger on the back

in such an off hand manner

I think the sun, the moon

and some of the stars are

kept in their tracks

by this Person's equilibrium

or at least I sense some effect

on the perigee and apogee of all

our movements in this, I can't quite say,

man's presence, the setting sun's

attention I would allude to

and the very appearance

of his neurasthenic mare

a genuine Nejdee

lathered, as you can see, with abstract fatigue

Shit, Slinger! you still got that

marvelous creature, and who is this

funny talker, you pick him up

in some sludgy seat of higher

learnin, Creeps! you always did

hang out with some curious refugees.

Anyway come up and see me

and bring your friend, anytime

if you're gonna be in town we

got an awful lot to talk about

Do you know said the Gunslinger

as he held the yellow tequila up

in the waning light of the cabaret

that this liquid is the last

dwindling impulse of the sun

and then he turned and knelt

and faced that charred orb

as it rolled below the swinging doors

as if it were entering yet descending

and he said to me NO!

it is not. It is that

cruelly absolute sign my father 
 

http://gg9-tto.blogspot.com/

Oliver Stone's movie, South of the Border...

I haven't seen it yet, but I am very much looking forward to it. 

 

The mainstream media's vilification of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has never really let up & I'm surprised we don't hear more about what a demon Evo Morales is.  The vilification is especially bad on the cable news shows, even apart from Fox.   (Rick Sanchez has exceeded Chris Matthews as the most irritating avatar of the Instantaneous Conventional Wisdom--but I digress). 

 

While I "enjoyed"--if that's the word--Stone's movie,  JFK, I thought bringing together a mish-mash of conspiracy theories the way he did was a disservice to history.  (Like many armchair political philosophers,  I had my own ideas about who the Bad Guys were and ought to be, but I concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald was pretty much who the Warren Commission said he was.  As for all the apparent anomalies--the incredible marksmanship, for example, well, I would say that sometimes a mediocrity under the pressure of an existential decision to change history can have his (or her) powers focused to a stellar degree that enables the act to proceed as planned..)

 

I became a convinced Chavista after watching the documentary, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.   A group of Irish filmmakers--and they may have had a political agenda, but I don't know precisely what it was--planned to make the documentary simply by following Chavez around during his routines and interviewing him and his associates.  But this was in 2002 and what happened was that the filmmakers were trapped with Chavez in the Presidential Palace during the April coup.  They elected to stay in the palace when they could have left and the result was I think the most riveting political documentary I've ever seen. 

 

All this is by way of an intro to saying that based on what's said below, Stone and his associates have really done their homework on this one. 

 

The New York Times, as per usual  with this sort of thing,  attempted a hatchet job on South of the Border.  Stone and his associates replied: 

 

http://www.cepr.net/index.php/Op-Eds-Columns/Op-Eds-Columns/stone-responds-to-ny-times-attack
 

http://gg9-tto.blogspot.com/

Glenn Beck's novel

is headed for No. 1 on the bestseller list.

I don't think it means much.  Right wing think tanks buy up these protofascist publications in bulk and distribute them free or at cost--although I can see where his audience, whom I suspect are not voracious readers, might make an exception to their rule of thumb that books are "tools of the devil" (Thank you, Max Shulman, circa 1961). 

 

Once it's free at the library or a giveaway at a Half-Price Book sale, I might skim through it...(I know it's quite morbid--it's the intellectual equivalent of fascination with the grislier sequences of CSI or Bones)

 

Interestingly, skeptic Martin Gardner wrote a book comparing Mormonism to the Urantia book. I skimmed through Gardner's book & it seemed pretty convincing--but I'm a lot more tolerant of high weirdness than Gardner.  Harold Bloom's book, Omens at the Millenium (something like that) proposed that the U.S. was a gnostic country, founded on gnostic beliefs.  I think you have to stretch the meaning of gnostic beyond recognition to make the case, but Bloom's account was--well, interesting. Claims that Mormonism and Southern Baptist fundamentalism are the two paradigmatic American gnostic religions.   Scholars of ancient Christianisty have long debated whether or not gnosticism was even a useful term to describe the welter of beliefs in the 1st & 2nd century A.D.

 

Y'all probably know, but I should have mentioned that Beck is a Mormon. 

 

It will be interesting to see if Beck throughs his support to Mitt Romney in 2012. 

 

I don't think I've ever met an individual Mormon that I disliked on a personal level, but if that happens, I'm opting for full-throated paranoia about the Mormon hierarchy. 

 

R.   

 

 

http://gg9-tto.blogspot.com/

The fever is upon me...p.s.

I love it when the fever is upon me.
 

http://gg9-tto.blogspot.com/

The fever is upon me...

Suddenly, I have to know everything there is to know about the poet Charles Olson. 

While looking for something else, I came across an allusion to Alfred North Whitehead's influence on Olson.  Whitehead's is the philosophy that more and more has me in its grip--fused with my idiosyncratic neo-Marxism in a way that I can't quite articulate.  'Cor I haven't been acceptable to other Marxists as One of Them for a long time--but that's okay, since I have but little doubt but that *my* understanding is the absolutely correct version.  {Throw in a little Taoism, Mayahana (sp?) Buddhism & Adoptionist Christianity (univeralist version) and there you have my worldview--well simpler than much of the stuff they brew at Starbuck's}. (No offense intended, Mary P.)

 

Speaking of Buddhism--my FB friend Pat Hartman turned me on to John Burdett's series of mysteries set in Thailand. Quite shocking stuff.  I don't know how Thai people would regard Burdett's view of the Thai (he speaks through the persona of a half-westernized Thai policeman) but it has the feel of authenticity.  

 

R.

 

 

http://gg9-tto.blogspot.com/

Pursuit of Loneliness...

is the title of a book by Philip Slater from the 60's.  It lays out an account of the American psyche expressed in relatively simple terms drawn from psychoanalysis--which is not to say the account is wrong, but that there are other ways to say it. 

 

The book's thesis has to do with the fantasy that many Americans share, a sort of pastoral Jeffersonianism, a community of sturdy, independent yeoman farmers, one I induge in myself & I think a certain wing of the counterculture of the 60's was a clear expression of it--going back to the land, doing your own thing, etc. 

 

It is the ideal of individualism & total self-sufficiency, sometimes with modern technology, more often with "appropriate technology"--it has affinities with libertarian capitalism as well as with Jeffersonian pastoralism, and there is a definitely a certain animus against government and large institutions of any sort. 

 

Slater says, in sum,  that the overriding fear in American culture (and also British) is the fear of dependency. 

 

Professor Bernstein below points out, rather distressingly, how this same strain in the American character finds expression in the "Tea Party" movement.

 

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/13/the-very-angry-tea-party/
 

http://gg9-tto.blogspot.com/

Dog leads...

I'm going to be pretty busy this weekend helping Teresa re-arrange the house to accommodate our student boarder (daughter Claire), who will be staying with us for her first year graduate studies before she goes down to Port Aransas at the UT Marine Science Institute.  But if I have time, I got two dawgs to check out.  There's "Charlie" a pointer/red heeler mix, and "Hampton," a Newfoundland/Lab mix.  (A red heeler, BTW, is a kind of Australian cattle dog--thank God for Wikipedia) 

 

Info about Charlie's originary breeds would suggest that he might be a bit too lively, but his foster mother says that as an individual, he's pretty laid back.  Charlie is sorta off-white with reddish markings here and there.  He weighs about 50 pounds. 

 

Hampton is at the Animal Shelter in Leander, TX.  I was told by shelter staff (who are always brutally honest, of course) that Hampton has the laid-back termperament of the Newfoundland.  I didn't ask, but from the picture it looks like he don't have the drooly mouth.  Size-wise, Hampton  is all a body could hope for in a dawg--and more.  Hampton, in fact, looks like an over-sized black Lab.  In fact, don't ask how much he weighs. 

 

If I get Hampton, I would like to train him to eat the guy who goes around slashing tires in the neighborhood.  Well, we all have our dreams.

 

R.

 

 

http://gg9-tto.blogspot.com/

Hope this isn't TMI...

But I'm like that old sailor having to go on and on about having shot that dang bird. 

 

I have found this to be true: 

 

If you wash your hairs with bar soap, rinse, repeat and rinse, why your hairs come out as squeaky clean as if you had used one of them expensive shampoos with ph & stuff.  Who is with me on this?

 

R.
 

http://gg9-tto.blogspot.com/

Choosing a dawg--the pleasant angst of deliberation

Having been at least tangentially involved in the rearing of two highly adequate children and with retirement looming, I think now I am adequately mature for the awesome responsibility of being au pair for a mutt of my own... 

 

And a mutt is what I want (because of the "hybrid vigor" thing)--but I do think it important to have some sense of the nature of the underlying breeds. 

 

As usual, I am beset with conflicting criteria for choice.  I want an intelligent, easily housebroken (or fait accompli), easy going, medium to large critter who won't eat kitty cats (daughter is likely get one when she comes home), or our invalid shi'tzu, who won't go haring off after birds, or hares, for that matter; who will compel me to take moderately long walks several days a week, but who doesn't need to be entertained by herding sheep or hunting boar; who will stand fast if there's an intruder, who won't yap, whom I can leave alone for much of the day during the week (at least until I retire. 

 

A lot of these goals are in conflict.  Lab & retriever mixes may be a tad too active and too prone to separation anxiety.  Terriers like to kill small things & I think they tend to yap.  Greyhounds, when they're not running, are excellent couch potatos, but they do have a need to hare quite a bit and can't be off leash unless you're an incredibly skillful and compelling trainer. 

 

I'm not really a couch potato, per se, but I am sedentary much of the time.  I do work my butt off out at my "hobby farm" for several hours once every week or two & I do some light gardening in the back yard every week or two also.

 

It seems the best dogs for me, according to the online tests, would be mixes involving the following:  Great Pyrenees, Mastiffs, Newfoundlands, Bernese Mountain dogs, Neapolitian mastiffs...but DAMN--they're HUGE--and they, well, not to put too fine a point on, they SLOBBER.  I'm not too easily grossed out, but there are other humans that live in the house.  Maybe Teresa could work overtime, or something,  so we could pay for the steaks.  But one good thing.  The internets (as G.W. Bush would say) caution against exercising those breeds too much. 

 

Oh, well.  Knowing me, I'll probably choose something completely different on impulse and be as happy as a (non-Gulf-dwelling) clam.

 

R.
 

http://gg9-tto.blogspot.com/

Here's Juan Cole on the Gaza Blockade

& the recent Israeli engagement with the humanitarian flotilla from Turkey. 

 

(Juan Cole is a professor of Mideastern Studies.  He is conversant with the several languages of the area and comes out of the Bahai tradition himself--although he has recently distanced himself from the U.S. Bahai group because the governance of the group has come to be dominated by "fundamentalist" Iranian emigres, who seem to regard Bahai's tradition of universalism as being for lip service only.  Otherwise, the Bahais occupy a position vis a vis Islam somewhat like Unitarians do with respect to Christianity.)

 

http://www.juancole.com/
 

http://gg9-tto.blogspot.com/

Leading Economist: Danger posed by deficit "is zero"

This Galbraith is the son of  John Kenneth Galbraith.  He teaches at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at The University of Texas.  The "CBO" is the Congressional Budget Office that prepares the projections that are generally used in these debates.  IMO, generally speaking, it is a bad idea to rely solely on accounting conventions when creating policy.  When times are good, there's a tendency to extrapolate to wild optimism; when times are bad, ditto to apocalyptic catastrophe...

 

Interview below is quoted in Daily Kos:

 

 

And of course every time Galbraith says this, wingnut heads explode. Ezra Klein interviews economist Jamie Galbraith:

EK: You think the danger posed by the long-term deficit is overstated by most economists and economic commentators.

 

JG: No, I think the danger is zero. It's not overstated. It's completely misstated.

 

EK: Why?

 

JG: What is the nature of the danger? The only possible answer is that this larger deficit would cause a rise in the interest rate. Well, if the markets thought that was a serious risk, the rate on 20-year treasury bonds wouldn't be 4 percent and change now. If the markets thought that the interest rate would be forced up by funding difficulties 10 year from now, it would show up in the 20-year rate. That rate has actually been coming down in the wake of the European crisis.

So there are two possibilities here. One is the theory is wrong. The other is that the market isn't rational. And if the market isn't rational, there's no point in designing policy to accommodate the markets because you can't accommodate an irrational entity.

 

EK: Then why are the bulk of your colleagues so worried about this?

 

JG: Let's push a bit deeper on the CBO forecasts. They publish a baseline set of projections. One of those projections holds the economy will return to a normal high-employment level with low inflation over the next 10 years. If true, that would be wonderful news. Go down a few lines and they also have the short-term interest rate going up to 5 percent. It's that short-term interest rate combined with that low inflation rate that allows them to generate, quite mechanically, these enormous future deficit forecasts. And those forecasts are driven partially by the assumption that health-care costs will rise forever at a faster rate than everything else and by interest payments on the debt will hit 20 or 25 percent of GDP.

At this point, the whole thing is completely incoherent. You cannot write checks to 20 percent to anybody without that money entering the economy and increasing employment and inflation. And if it does that, then debt-to-GDP has to be lower, because inflation figures into how much debt we have. These numbers need to come together in a coherent story, and the CBO's forecast does not give us a coherent story. So everything that is said that is based on the CBO's baseline is, strictly speaking, nonsense.

 

EK: But couldn't there be a space between the CBO being totally correct and the debt not being a problem? It seems certain, for instance, that health-care costs will continue to rise faster than other sectors of the economy.

 

JG: No, it's not reasonable. Share of health-care cost would rise as part of total GDP and the inflation would rise to be nearer to what the rate of health-care inflation is. And if health care does get that expensive, and we're paying 30 percent of GDP while everyone else is paying 12 percent, we could buy Paris and all the doctors and just move our elderly there.

 

EK: But putting inflation aside, the gap between spending and revenues won't have other ill effects?

 

JG: Is there any terrible consequence because we haven't prefunded the defense budget? No. There's only one budget and one borrowing authority and all that matters is what that authority pays. Say I'm the federal government and I wish to pay you, Ezra Klein, a billion dollars to build an aircraft carrier. I put money in your bank account for that. Did the Federal Reserve look into that? Did the IRS sign off on it? Government does not need money to spend just as a bowling alley does not run out of points.

What people worry about is that the federal government won't be able to buy bonds. But there can never be a problem for the federal government selling bonds. It goes the other way. The government's spending creates the bank's demand for bonds, because they want a higher return on the money that the government is putting into the economy. My father said this process is so simple that the mind recoils from it.

 

EK: What are the policy implications of this view?

 

JG: It says that we should be focusing on real problems and not fake ones. We have serious problems. Unemployment is at 10 percent. if we got busy and worked out things for the unemployed to do, we'd be much better off. And we can certainly afford it. We have an impending energy crisis and a climate crisis. We could spend a generation fixing those problems in a way that would rebuild our country, too. On the tax side, what you want to do is reverse the burden on working people. Since the beginning of the crisis, I've supported a payroll tax holiday so everyone gets an increase in their after-tax earnings so they can pay down their mortgages, which would be a good thing. You also want to encourage rich people to recycle their money, which is why I support the estate tax, which has accounted for an enormous number of our great universities and nonprofits and philanthropic organizations. That's one difference between us and Europe.

 

http://gg9-tto.blogspot.com/

Charter schools.

(In all fairness, it should be  noted that some charter schools are actually part of public school districts--but even those, IMO, are stalking horses for the right wing project to vitiate and ultimately destroy public education.  I'm not referring to the well-intentioned parents who participate, of course, but to the political forces behind the charter school movement.  That some charter schools are public doesn't detract from the main thrust of the writer's critique.  In fact, my own views are quite a bit more shrill...)

 

From a diary on the Daily Kos website:

 

Expansion of Charter Schools Puts Public Education in Danger

by hwoodfield

Share this on Twitter - Expansion of Charter Schools Puts Public Education in Danger

Wed May 12, 2010 at 12:21:04 PM PDT

While charter schools are good on some levels, they also cause a lot of damage to our public education system.  If we do not focus our education reform efforts on our current public schools, we will only increase the inequities in the system.

• hwoodfield's diary :: ::

While charter schools are good on some levels, they also cause a lot of damage to our public education system.  

 

It is difficult to determine if the academic performance level at a charter school is due to the teaching, curriculum, and/or administration because the student body of charter schools is selective. Charter schools recruit students whose parents are committed to and involved in their child's education simply by having an application process. Moreover, students who have behavior issues are sent back to the public school. Requiring charter schools to take Special Education students, low-income students, etc., does not change the fact that charter schools enroll the students among those groups who are most likely to succeed academically. Children who end up in charter schools are those whose parents make a concerted effort to apply and an interested parent is a huge indicator of academic achievement regardless of socioeconomic status.

 

In comparing public schools to charter schools or private schools, it is important to acknowledge that Special Education is a huge and mandated part of the budget for public schools. Taking Special Education out of the equation vastly changes the cost per pupil and test results. Evaluating a school without isolating Special Education is simply bad analysis.

 

Charter schools can hire teachers who are not only non-union, but are also not certified teachers. While it is true that some people are innately gifted teachers, knowledge of a subject area does not make someone an educator. Teaching is a science unto itself and its own discipline of study for a reason. Charter schools are often run by business people rather than educators. A school isn't a business. A school should be run by experts who have post-graduate degrees in the field of education administration.

 

Charter schools are experiments in education reform and provide a lab to test new ideas in educational management, but charter schools are not a panacea for our public school system. We need to improve our current public schools, not just cull out the students who have the capacity to work hard in the context of the charter school as well as the support of their parents. Every neighborhood and community should have a good public school without an admission process. We should incentivize seasoned teachers to teach in our most difficult schools through higher pay and extra benefits. Segregating the kids with the skills and the family support needed to perform is not the answer.

 

A million dollars that might be put into a charter school could be put to better use. Public and private funds should be allocated to commission task forces of trained and experienced educational leaders to create short and long-term plans to reform and improve our current public schools. Such a task forces would use the findings of valid current research in educational reform and conduct additional studies tailored to regions and communities.

 

Charter schools are not the panacea to improve public schools. In fact, they may push more students, those who do not gain entrance to the school, towards failure. Charter schools should not be the focus of educational reform. They should be one very small piece of the puzzle. The current intense push to create more charter schools is yet another example of lack of foresight and unwillingness to really tackle difficult policy issues. If we do not focus our education reform efforts on our current public schools, we will only increase the inequities in the system. All students deserve great schools. Increasing the volume of charter schools simply creates a new class of privilege in education.

 

 

http://gg9-tto.blogspot.com/

Worst Case Scenario for 2012

Obama, for whatever reason, is struggling in the polls.  The Republicans come to their senses just enough to nominate somebody who is not a political analog to one of  the characters in the bar scene in Star Wars.  That somebody turns out to be...Mitt Romney. 

 

One of my favorite bloggers & pundits, Josh Marshall, regards Romney as an absolute joke in terms of the purity of his mendaciousness and complete lack of principle.  I think that's a danger.  Given the low expectations the American people have of politicians, it may be all to easy for the electorate to laugh off Romney's hollowness as indeed being merely a kind of joke--but if he were elected, he might be the perfect tool for the Palinite wing of the Republican Party. 

 

R.

 

 

http://gg9-tto.blogspot.com/

Nine myths about the deficit...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lynn-parramore/the-deficit-nine-myths-we_b_553527.html
 

http://gg9-tto.blogspot.com/

Bon mot from Evo Morales: "Coca cola is the poor man's Draino..."

The article below from Time magazine is a bit more sympathetic toward a South American leftist (Morales) than U.S. media usually is--but: 

 

I don't have a settled opinion whether or not reparations to the developing world for the effects of climate change would be an adequate or even a Good Thing, the remark  that $400 billion is an "unrealistic" figure for Third World activists to demand is, I think, way wrong. 

 

Our "crackpot realists," to use C. Wright Mills phrase, are forever trying to postpone the absolutely necessary by smearing it as "unrealistic"--whether reparations is a good idea or not, $400 billion may be more than a drop in the bucket for the developed world, but it's hardly more than a puddle, especially considering the costs of inaction about climate change...

 

R.

 

 

http://news.yahoo.com/s/time/20100423/wl_time/08599198406400
 

http://gg9-tto.blogspot.com/

The Dalai Lama is one of--well, some of us...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddhist_socialism

 

The Dalai Lama's remarks are particularly interesting in the light of Tibet's quite legitimate quarrel with China...
 

http://gg9-tto.blogspot.com/

Panspermia--the manifesto (for anybody who cares)

N.B.  The position neither rules out nor rules in metaphysical or religious presuppositions.

 

http://www.panspermia.org/intro.htm
 

http://gg9-tto.blogspot.com/

Keep Business's Dirty Hands Off the Guvmint!

Particularly the student loan program:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/11/us/politics/11loans.html
 
http://gg9-tto.blogspot.com/

Higher Dimensions

Looking forward to reading Harvard physicist Lisa Randall's new book called WARPED PASSAGES.       It's about gravity and string theory. 

I doubt if I will understand much of it--I didn't her first--but I do remember one thing about the first.  She argued for the possibility that some of the unperceived dimensions as per string theory might actually be rather "large"--instead of being tiny and coiled up, which is how they are usually posited by them such as make such theories.  Hers is the one I want to believe since it seems to invite the possibility that perhaps one day we will really have "warp speed" a la Star Trek, and intergalactic civilizations & stuff as per the science fiction of my youth.  

I particularly like the universe as envisioned by James Schmitz.  See the WITCHES OF KARRES and his short story, "The Second Night of Summer" which for some reason is my favorite sci fi short story of all time. 

R.
 
http://gg9-tto.blogspot.com/

Sympathy for the Tea Party

I don't like the Tea Party and I don't like Wal-Mart,  and it is a good turn of phrase (below) but having the Tea Partiers dissed by effete, snobby pseudo-intellectual  David Brooks is one thing that gives me a little tingle of sympathy for the Tea Party folks...

David Brooks: Tea Partiers are 'Wal-Mart hippies'

Conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks assailed the Tea Party and the extreme nature of today's Republican Party Tuesday on ComedyCentral's The Colbert Report.
"The Tea Party is where the money is at, baby," said Stephen Colbert. "Why aren't you saying crazy stuff your in columns and if you pardon the expression, put some asses in the seats?"
"Well, the Tea Parties they're like the hippies," Brooks responded. "The hippies wanted to stick it to the man and they were anti-establishment. So the Tea Parties are like the Wal-Mart hippies."

Colbert jested that Brooks should be less moderate and shun news organizations that aren't sufficiently conservative.

"You go on PBS," noted Colbert. "That's the enemy camp. You cannot be friends with these people. Okay?"

 
http://gg9-tto.blogspot.com/

SC Lt Gov. Andre Bauer--A Personal Note

In Fall of 1961 I was quixotically enrolled as a freshman at the University of St Thomas in Houston, TX.  My father was stricken with lung cancer and I wound up dropping out.  My father had exhausted all his vacation time and sick leave and had to go on Leave-Without-Pay.   Fortunately, the tiny apartment we lived in was provided for by the City of Houston rent-free, so that was not an issue.  My mother's energies were completely absorbed in caring for my father and in any case I doubt she would have been able to get a job if her life depended on it. (Not a slam against my mother--it was the times and our class situation).    My father survived the operation and managed to live on to damn near the five-year survival mark.   I managed to get on with the U.S. Post Office in January of 1961, but there was a month or two hiatus between becoming employed and actually receiving a check.  It was during this time that we went on the Federal
Commodities program.  Think government cheese and huge generic tins of peanut butter.   I don't know if my parents were ashamed or not--I strongly suspect they were--I was, although not cripplingly so.  (Discussion of feelings was something generally Not Done).
 
Now here is Gov. Bauer's argument for ending government assistance to the poor:
 
"My grandmother was not a highly educated woman, but she told me as a small child to quit feeding stray animals. You know why? Because they breed," he said. "They will reproduce, especially ones that don't think too much further than that. And so what you've got to do is you've got to curtail that type of behavior. They don't know any better."
 
Well, then.  
 
A number of rejoinders spring to mind.  Perhaps it could be argued that if anyone was guilty of wrongful breeding, it was Gov. Bauer's parents, leastways with respect to him.   I also entertained the thought that Gov. Bauer is not worthy of the dirt beneath the shoes of the poorest welfare mother in South Carolina. 
 
I also took a dark pleasure in contemplating these lines from the Prologue to Chaucer's Pardoner's Tale in connection with Bauer:
 
"I wolde I hadde thy coillons in myn hond
In stide of relikes or of seintuarie.
Lat kutte hem of, I wol thee helpe hem carie;
They shul be shryned in an hogges toord."
 
But nah. I'm not serious.  I wouldn't want anything that good to happen to him.
 
R.
 
http://gg9-tto.blogspot.com/

The Value of Nothing

Can't wait to read Raj Patel's THE VALUE OF NOTHING.  i gather it's the ultimate take-down of Milton Friedman and free market fundamentalism...

R.
 
http://gg9-tto.blogspot.com/

Unbelievable turdery...

I just read where Gov. Perry (*ss*ole, TX) refused $700 million in federal grants for Texas schools. 

R.
 
http://gg9-tto.blogspot.com/

Comets and the Origin of Life

Latest post from What's New in Cosmic Ancestry website includes a link to a New Scientist review of the book with the subject name. 

The strong version of panspermia touted by the website maintains that life is a fundamental feature of the universe, as basic as space, time, matter, energy & gravitation.

The review in New Scientist is neutral in tone but open-minded...

I'm pretty sure that somewhere there's something like a Pandora.  Assuming humanity exists long enough to get there, I imagine that greedy corporations themselves will be extinct by then...

We can hope they're not replaced by something worse...

R.
http://www.panspermia.org/whatsnew58.htm

http://gg9-tto.blogspot.com/

"MoDo Wants a Daddy"

I couldn't agree more with  
Tristero, writing in Digby's Blog--

 
MoDo Wants A Daddy

by tristero

Maureen Dowd
No Drama Obama is reticent about displays of emotion. The Spock in him needs to exert mental and emotional control. That is why he stubbornly insists on staying aloof and setting his own deliberate pace for responding — whether it's in a debate or after a debacle."Mental and emotional control."

That sounds like an extraordinary set of virtues to have in a United States president. But they are nothing but problems for the emotionally-troubled NY Times op-ed columnist. Her very next sentence:
But it's not O.K. to be cool about national security when Americans are scared.In fact, being "cool about national security" or other potential emergencies (say, huge, city-wrecking hurricanes) is exactly what I want my government to be. I want - expect - reasoned, intelligent responses from my government to the problems we face. That's what I voted for, not hysteria or phony displays of emotional connection.

The ghastly attack by that double agent in Afghanistan, let alone exploding underpants, really didn't scare me. Here's an example of what does:
He's so sure of himself and his actions that he fails to see that he misses the moment to be president — to be the strong father who protects the home from invaders, who reassures and instructs the public at traumatic moments.I simply can't believe that anyone would need the president of the United States to be their Daddy. I simply can't believe that anyone would write that they need the president of the United States to be their Daddy. I simply can't believe that the New York Times would publish an op-ed columnist who would write that she needs the president of the United States to be her Daddy. I simply can't believe that our public discourse is so debased that someone as unstable as MoDo has regular access to a wide public - not to rise above her psychological problems and inform us, or provide us with sensible opinions, but merely to trot out her deeply weird neuroses because she apparently thinks everyone shares them.

And that - the abysmal level of our public discourse - scares the daylights out of me.
 
http://gg9-tto.blogspot.com/