Dirty Wars

Have you seen Jeremy Scahill's Dirty Wars yet? This is a powerful, engaging, mind-blowing documentary, sure to get an Oscar for best documentary of the year. The cinematography is incredible, especially considering where it was shot. Scahill, like Daniel Ellsberg, Bradley Manning, and Edward Snowden, is standing up to lead us even if we don't follow. But if we love our country, follow we will! Until you've seen Dirty Wars, there's a very good chance you don't really know your own country. (You can stream it on NetFlix. Click here for other ways to see it.)

You won't believe how insanely brave Scahill is. He's constantly at risk of being blown up, shot, or kidnapped by one Afghan warlord or another. How he ever got a camera crew to accompany him into one insanely dangerous situation after another I'll never understand!

I hope that after you've seen this movie, you'll turn other people on to it!

Edward Snowden's Christmas Message to the World - 2013

Check it out!

http://readersupportednews.org/off-site-news-section/422-national-security/21171-edward-snowdens-christmas-message-to-the-world-2013

Russell Brand: Revolution 2 Has Begun!

Have you seen this Russell Brand interview yet?  I was amazed by Brand's skill in handling Jeremy Paxman, a hard-core British interviewer. Just this one little 10-minute exchange has opened my eyes and actually changed my position on the chessboard a bit. It's actually transformative! What a surprise to hear Noam Chomsky-like brilliance from the mouth of Russell Brand. This former drug addict, former husband of Katy Perry, and actor in junk movies is amazingly articulate and a true revolutionary.

This is some evil king and queen shit: "Gingerbread White House" WTF??!!

Wow, this has got to be the best use of taxpayers money ever! It's like a king or queen having artisans make them a new crown or some jeweled eggs within eggs.

"We put together a time-lapse to show you how it came together -- and to get you in the holiday spirit."

Yeah, spending thousands of dollars to make a gingerbread White House that no one will even eat equals getting into the holiday spirit. Man, I fucking hate this. Barry sent me this link in an email today. He must think Amerika is a country of retarded people.

Check it out:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/share/gingerbread-white-house

Japan, Guest at Your Party

I was walking around in Berkeley last week and an analogy for the Fukushima problem popped into my head. As I walked, I dictated it into my iPhone's digital recorder (and almost got creamed by a bicyclist riding about 30 mph on the wrong side of the road through a red light--he came so close to hitting me that his clothes touched my clothes!). At the time, I really believed in my idea--I thought it was a brilliant analogy. But I lost faith in it a few days later after I'd dictated it into my computer and edited it. (Macs have an awesome voice recognition capability, but few people use it. You just talk normally and say "period," "comma," etc. when needed, and it types what you say with almost perfect accuracy!)  It sounded too crude and stupid to use.

However, in an email conversation with a friend about Fukushima, I did use it, and I was pleasantly surprised that she liked it. She wrote, "I like your analogy. It really hits the nail on the head. It's crude and weird in a way that people can actually relate to. I think that is the problem. Fukushima is SUCH a big problem that no one can relate . . . can get their mind around the seriousness of it." So now I feel a bit more confident to publish it. It's not like many people read this blog anyway!

By the way, I just added a way (on the upper right of this page) you can sign up for email notification of new blog posts, and I plan to make this blog active again. If this post isn't your cup of tea, please don't give up on me. There are a lot more where this one came from . . .

I think about Fukushima every day. If you study Fukushima, you get more and more and more freaked out. It's like when Dorothy's dog pulled the curtain aside and you could see the Wizard of Oz for what he really was. Millions of people have been given a chance to see the soul of raw capitalism: what kind of human beings would stuff thousands of hot radioactive fuel rods in a swimming pool atop a flimsy little building on the beach of a country known for earthquakes and tsunamis? I've been looking at radiation maps, and I heard Canada's top nuclear scientist on the NBC Nightly News say that just one more sizeable earthquake "and it's bye-bye Japan. People on the west coast of North America [including Jeff Syrop and his family, who can actually see the friggin' Pacific Ocean from their back yard] will have to evacuate." So basically we're playing Russian Roulette. Japan's TEPCO is running around doing clown-car half measures while Japan and the rest of the world are pretending everything is hunky-dory.

I feel an urgency to somehow do my part in sounding the alarm. People need to wake up! The major countries need to work together on the largest scale project every attempted by humankind and solve the problem of Fukushima!

So, without further ado, here is my crude analogy:

Japan, Guest at Your Party

Japan is like somebody who comes to your party and shits in his pants, and the shit is dripping down his leg and getting on your carpet. Some of your guests are already stepping in it! The room is just beginning to stink. But the this Japanese guy is excessively prideful and he can't bear to lose face, so he tries to ignore the problem and refuses to do anything significant about it.

It's a pity, too, because there are several professional janitors at your party, and there are some workers from a professional laundry here as well; their laundry facility is right across the hall from your apartment! Also attending are some of the best doctors in the world. But this fucking Japanese guy won't say anything about his obvious problem. Instead he insists on talking about his favorite subjects: cars and high tech. How shiny my Toyotas are and how sleek are my Lexuses! As surreptitiously as possible, he uses tissues to dab his shoes off each time more shit drips on them, and he keeps hiding the used tissue in his pockets and up his sleeves. It's really fucked up.

Clearly Japan is distressed. People at your party are losing interest in Japanese cars and game stations, and they're all considering canceling their invitations to the big sporting event Japan is having soon at his house (the fucking Olympics!).

The host and the other important guests at the party know that Japan is very distressed, but they are too busy and too greedy to help him because they don't want to impede the flow of conversation and fun at their party. They're making all kinds of deals with one another and enjoying the pretty girls and good scotch! Hardly an offer of help for poor inconvenienced Japan can be heard!

It's likely Japan has food poisoning, which might cause every organ of his body to shut down. He might die! Stupidly and selfishly, the host and the most important guests aren't acknowledging this. If Japan dies, it could destroy the livelihood and safety of all the guests at your party; almost all of them do business with him. And some of the guests are already getting sick! Soon Taiwan and the Philippians might start shitting on themselves. Maybe next it will be your good friends Hawaii, Alaska, and California! It's possible that if he doesn't get treatment soon, Japan could infect everyone in the room with his disease!

Why won't Japan make a serious effort to help himself? Why won't we make a serious effort to help him? What the fuck are we waiting for?

Please click on the comment link below and let me know what you think we can do to get our country seriously involved in this project. Also, are you personally worried about it or is it not a concern for you? A panel of UC Berkeley scientists recently published a paper stating that not much radiation has actually reached us yet, and while they didn't try to diminish the seriousness of the problem, they found that at this point, we're not in any danger of ingesting or breathing dangerous amounts of radiation. Still, every time I eat a tuna sandwich, I think twice now!

Joni Mitchell Sings "Woodstock"

Have you ever heard Joni sing "Woodstock"? I think people are more familiar with the Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young cover of Joni's song, which is awesome in it's own right.

Even if you're familiar with her popular version of this song, this is a version you've probably never heard, recorded in 1970, Joni at the piano with no accompaniment. It's beautiful. What cool chords she comes up with!

Yesterday I showed this video to my 14-year-old daughter Eileen, who plays piano and practices on an electronic keyboard in her room, after listening to her tell me about how great Lady Gaga's new album is. I said, "When you have a moment, I'll show you somebody who is really great."

She totally dug it and thought Joni was beautiful inside and out. While listening with Eileen, the phrase that stuck in my head was, "We've got to get ourselves back to the Garden."

When Joni Mitchell wrote this song in 1969, I think millions of young people and progressive people of all ages believed that it was actually possible to get back to "the Garden," that is, to live in harmony with our beautiful Eden-like all-providing planet and at peace with one another.

I went for a long walk and pondered what getting back to the Garden would actually entail.

Speaking simply, it would be wonderful to quickly change the world so that everybody had enough to eat, decent shelter, access to healthcare, quality kindergarten-through-college education for girls and boys, and even fast Internet for all! War would be taboo and peacemakers heroes. But when you think about the real world, how could it possibly work? People are at so many different levels of cultural development. Hundreds of millions of humans are barely past the Stone Age, while literally billions still function with Iron Age or medieval mindsets. Look at this map of clitorectomies! This is happening right now!



I think each new generation will be more and more open to socialism. But World War 2 vets, who saw it in person, Russians who suffered in the Gulag or lived in fear of being sent there, and the generation of Americans who came of age during the Cold War, have what I think is a healthy fear of socialism and communism. How does it work? Why, in our lifetimes, does it always seem to require a police state, heavy propaganda, and curtailed freedoms in order to function? Why are China, Cuba, North Korea, and Vietnam such crappy places to live?

If we suddenly, by some miracle, had progressive, charismatic leaders spring up in powerful countries worldwide, and if humans really did ban war and redistribute wealth and resources, what would the fucking idiots who are stuck in Iron Age or medieval mindsets DO with these resources? Have more kids? Raise them to believe that Iron Age "holy" books (Bible, Koran, Bhagavadgita, etc.) were actually written by God and hate people who believe in the wrong book? Continue to perform clitorectomies on their daughters?

How would you control family size and population? How could you stop people from polluting? How would you compel people to do the less pleasant (but nonetheless important to maintaining a good planet) jobs? How would you keep humans from having wars, something that, especially men, seem to need and love. Humans can't seem to get enough of wars!

To all but the most stubborn Cold War holdouts, it's quite clear that the economic reality of each country isn't as simple as black-and-white, as either communism or capitalism. Every country has it's own unique balance of socialistic and capitalistic aspects to its economic behavior. There are thousands of shades of gray. For example, in America, the present balance goes something like this: socialism for billionaires and neo-feudalism for the rest of us.

A recent paper by astrophysicists says that there are approximately 8.8 billion Earth-like planets in the known universe. I think the point of trying to get back to the Garden is to see if we can be one of the only planets to get it right. I think the intelligent beings on most inhabited planets probably nuke themselves back to the stone age again and again. The reason for fixing our world is that we have to live here anyway. Not fixing it is like sitting in a house with a leaky roof and allowing water to drip on your head, when you have the option of fixing the roof and being comfortable.

I hate to think of my dear daughter Eileen trying to raise a family someday in a world with poisoned water tables, poisoned air, radioactivity everywhere, and rife with corruption, violence, poverty, and war, a world where people live in sadness and fear. Perhaps even a world where, as Nikita Khrushchev said, "The living will envy the dead." Think about fracking and about building new nuclear power plants, and think about how eager our president is to do both!

Here is the popular version of Joni's song, which you're probably familiar with, played on electric piano with a little vocal accompaniment, to listen to, and here it is for you to download and keep.

Why Are Liberals So Rude to the Right?

This article brings up an interesting question and makes some good points, but I sure don't like its conclusion. It calls for more civility from liberals toward conservatives, but the writer forgets that it is rude to kill millions of people, rude to steal their resources, rude to destroy the environment, rude to fleece taxpaying citizens, etc. When someone voted for Bush Jr a second time, or voted for McCain or Romney, they were committing an act of rudeness that would persist for decades and result in immense suffering for millions of people. It's not like cutting me off in traffic or stealing my parking place at the supermarket or interrupting me in the middle of a sentence, something that's over in a moment.

After becoming aware of how Bush Jr and his administration twisted language, lied, and manipulated the public in order to create a "war" against a pathetically weak and broken country (which happened to be sitting atop vast pools of oil), a country that had nothing to do with the 19 Saudis who supposedly perpetrated the 9/11 attacks, to have voted for him a second time was an act of profound rudeness. I would go further and say it was an incremental war crime, each Bush vote a grain of sand weighing down a lever that re-opened the White House door to a bona fide criminal, a mass murderer and thief.

My Libertarian friend Tony of course will argue that I was just as rude to vote for the war criminal Barak Obama. But that wouldn't be fair. There were no good choices in 2008, but there were a lot of less-crappy choices that at least weren't acts of BLATANT rudeness. When I voted for Obama the first time, he wasn't yet a war criminal. McCain, who supported 95 percent of Bush's policies, represented the status quo, the elite .001 percent, not we the people. He was the chosen figurehead for the most dangerous and destructive enemy facing our nation: the transnational oligarchs who now rule and oppress us. So to actually have voted FOR that clown was profoundly rude and selfish, not to mention stupid and evil. But to have voted for Ron Paul or Obama or not to have voted at all--those were at least tries at ameliorating a bad situation that was statistically guaranteed to happen if some action wasn't taken. And while I have zero respect for non-voters, at least they didn't (directly) have blood on their hands from choosing one of the two corporate-stooge war criminals set out for us in a rigged election, an election, it has now become clear, the elites couldn't lose.

By my own arguments, though, Tony would have some grounds to be rude to me for voting for Obama the second time. Still, it was only voting for Romney that was BLATANTLY rude, because Romney was so blatantly emblematic of everything that is wrong in our world today. Romney the billionaire was a symbol for capital being more valuable than people. If given a choice between Nixon and Stalin, anybody in their right mind would chose Nixon.

Should we exhibit our best manners to rapists? To thieves? To murderers? For thousands of years humans have shamed, shunned, and made fun of bad rude humans.

John Lennon's Son Finally Surfaces

I've been waiting a long time for Sean Lennon, John Lennon's son, to surface. He finally has, with a short (1 page long) beautifully written essay about fracking (hydraulic fracturing of shale for natural gas) near his parents' farm. I hope you enjoy it.

Happy Labor Day!

Jeff

The Lesser Evil? Seriously?

If your only 2 choices for president of the USA were handsome Jeffrey Dahmer, who tortured, killed, and ate 17 boys (between 1978 and 1991), or his (hypothetical) handsome twin brother, Timothy Dahmer, who tortured, killed, and ate only 5 boys, and who had actually been known to help boys from time to time, for whom would you vote?

What if we had a third choice, their ugly older brother, Ron Dahmer, who was a little bit crazy and had been a strong Reagan supporter back in the day, but who was strongly opposed to torturing, killing, and eating boys and who had never done so? Would you vote for Ron, knowing from statistically conclusive polls that almost everybody would be voting for one or the other of the handsome Dahmer twins? Or would you be doing your best to make sure that at least we didn't get stuck with the worst of the Dahmers?

Usually when I post something on my blog, I feel pretty sure about the inherent logical self-evident "alien sociologist" objectivity of what I'm writing. But this time, I'm writing about how confused I am.

Chris Hedges, author and foreign war correspondent, is a hero to me. He was recently the lead plaintiff in a suit against the government regarding the military detention law included in the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), signed by Obama on New Year's Eve, 2011, that allows the government to charge Americans as terrorists, arrest them, and hold them indefinitely without a trial "until hostilities cease." Perhaps for 20 years in some dank offshore prison, even Gitmo. Chris Hedges knew that he and his supporters were likely to lose the lawsuit, but his patriotism and love of liberty impelled him to try. Thanks to a brave district court judge in New York, Katherine Forrest, who ruled it unconstitutional, Hedges won. So at least for now, the government has been barred from enforcing the military detention law, although Forrest's judgement will probably be appealed. And this brilliant, brave man, Chris Hedges, says that we should vote for a third-party candidate. 

When a man this great, a man whose every word I have always (well, almost always) agreed with, says, "Go ahead and vote this November. But don’t waste any more time or energy on the presidential election than it takes to get to your polling station and pull a lever for a third-party candidate--just enough to register your obstruction and defiance," what am I supposed to do? 

The thing that makes me feel justified in my predictable stance--I believe we all should vote for Obama--is that so very many of our fellow citizens are going to vote for Romney. In a democracy, you have to accept the will of the majority, right? Even if you think their ideas and plans are stupid. If the election were held today, perhaps a majority, or at least a very large percentage of voters, would chose Romney. We're stuck with these Romney voters. We can't just wish them away. Just because we want a more ideal government, one that doesn't borrow money from China to fight fake wars while our schools and highways crumble, one that doesn't bail out criminal banking organizations while hardworking Americans lose their homes and go without health care, doesn't mean we can have one. As long as the peasants (which includes upper-middle-class educated Americans as well as trailer trash and hillbillies) keep voting Republican, we are doomed to the status quo, which any thinking person knows is unsustainable. 

Like Hedges says, we have been colonized. WE ARE COLONIZED. When Americans vote for Romney, they'll be voting for a more oppressive, more total colonization. They'll be voting for an extension of Bush's presidency, for a proxy McCain/Palin presidency. So, in the real world, since so many of our fellow citizens will freely go to the polls this November and freely choose to turn UP the volume on the dictatorship and increase the level of our oppression, doesn't it somehow justify my stance, that we should do the only thing that we can do to grab onto their arms and try to hold them back as they turn up the volume? The louder the volume, the more it hurts! It would seem that we don't have the luxury of voting for a more perfect candidate, since in our particular democracy, which includes so many ignorant, provincial, scared, simpleminded people, we can't HAVE a more perfect candidate. 

AND YET, if I vote for Obama, I'm going against the will of my dear Chris Hedges! Plus, I am voting for evil. Obama has licensed 4 new nuclear power plants in the South, the first president to allow new nuclear plant construction since the 1970's! How many Chernobyls and Fukushimas here in America will be acceptable to Obama? One a decade? Two? He quadrupled Bush's drone strikes and doubled the size of our fake war in Afghanistan! He has strengthened the anti-Constitution Patriot Act! I am really confused! Hedges makes it sound so easy and so right to register our protest by simply pulling the lever for a third-party candidate. But basic math, simple real-world thinking and real-world statistics, dictate that if we vote third party or don't vote, Romney will be our next president. 

When you let a retarded child into your antique shop full of ancient Ming Dynasty vases, even for only 4 minutes or possibly for 8 minutes, is that a prudent and patriotic thing to do? Does allowing bad guys to break things valuable and precious to us really help our cause in the long run? Do we really need to let criminals take our money and break our stuff before we can finally get mad enough to start fighting to take our country back? Is allowing an invisible committee of global billionaires to rape us (even harder than they already are) for the next 4 or 8 years what a smart revolutionary would do? I honestly don't know, but it sounds somewhat illogical to me.

My friend Tony has been kind and clear, and yet persuasive, in arguing that after the failure of the Obama administration to deliver "change we can believe in," and after his proving to us that, actually, "NO, we can't," should we finally be done voting for evil, even if it's the lesser evil? Tony has made such a wonderful case for not voting for evil ever again. For example, he sent me this chart:




So I am writing to you, my loyal readers and to anyone you forward this to. I hope you will help me make sense of the quandary I'm in.

Before you render your judgment, I remind you to keep in mind that we're a democracy, not some utopia or even potential utopia that can be just the way Ron Paul supporters want it to be. In the real world, 57% of all white male Amerikan voters recently chose to give the keys to our nuclear arsenal to insane McCain and stupid Palin. Since our fellow citizens are choosing to ratchet UP dictatorship, that is the will of our democracy! Since none of us seem to have the guts, at least at this point in time, for real revolution, or for risking many years in prison like Chris Hedges just did in fighting the military detention law (that damned terrorist!), it would seem that in accord with our being democracy, we should make compromises that are doable and workable and realistic. 

Even if half of our voters are dumbasses, who would vote for a lifelong business failure, war dodger, recently reformed alcoholic (who had been behind bars 3 times for drunk driving), simpleminded inarticulate fundamentalist Christian guy (Bush Jr.), we either have to accept their will or we must impose some kind of dictatorship on them, which would be counterproductive for those of us who value democracy. More recently, these same dumbasses voted for for a guy who graduated 894th out of 899 at Annapolis, crashed 4 American airplanes, was a liability, not a hero, in Vietnam, and who was a prominent member of the Keating Five, a gang that cost American taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars during the Savings and Loan Scandal. This man bragged about supporting 95 percent of Bush's policies (which brought our great country to its knees), and he joked about "bomb, bomb, bombing Iran" (sung to the tune of a Beach Boys song). These fools voted for McCain even though that meant they were voting for greater subjugation from nameless, faceless billionaires, and that their votes might even translate into the deeds to their own homes being on the line, and even, for many of them, their own sons' very lives on the line!

Just think about that last point. Remember, we are not living in some perfect experiment that has suddenly gone awry. We are living in Amerika, a land where a large percentage of the people are ignorant peasants who believe the creator of the universe wrote the Bible, who hate gays, who want to control what people do in their bedrooms, who don't mind blowing up people in foreign countries that have oil, and who want to prevent women from terminating unwanted pregnancies. They want to perpetuate our barbaric health care situation, that puts us 34th in infant mortality statistics, right below Cuba and Cyprus! They call the successful health care systems of Germany, France, and Taiwan socialism. But look at where those countries appear on this list! And look at the CIA list right next to it, where we appear 39th.

There's one more aspect to my voting problem that I need to mention, and I think it will be very useful for you to consider. If you don't have children, it might not come naturally to you to think about this issue like I do. I think that in America, there are two very basic tiers of reality: for adults, there is the adult "real world," and for children there is the somewhat ideal world of childhood. Adults here have a pretty good life relative to most people in the world, but there are serious difficulties we face--a scary economy, high divorce rates, health care worries, mortgage payments, medical bills, etc. But children here, especially comfortably middle- and upper-middle-class children, have amazing, almost magically charmed lives. And regardless of how fkd up the world actually is, their lives are almost identical to lives they would live in a perfect world! They are insulated from pain, danger, and disease. Their lives are enriched with cultural experiences, high tech learning and playing devices, good food, and travel. (My children have travelled overseas many times. They get to sail around in the San Francisco Bay on my brother's new 45' sailboat (2 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms), and they've had thousand-dollar Mac laptops since they could walk. And they get all this while being almost completely insulated from political guilt and political worry and even from political danger.) In many poor and unstable countries children don't have the luxury of living in a separate tier of reality, because they do have to step over dead bodies in the street, they do have to experience bomb blasts in the marketplace, and they do have to watch their mother shrieking in agony when her husband has been taken away by the authorities to be tortured.

So, when I vote for Obama, I'm prolonging, measurably prolonging, the insulation that my children enjoy from the harsh reality of life on this planet, and allowing them the best odds possible to better themselves, to strengthen themselves, to remain idealistic, and to keep believing in the possibility of a better world. I saw my daughter's transcript yesterday, and she's number 1 out of all 321 people in her 7th grade class. My son was number 1 in his high school, and now he goes to UC Berkeley and is doing very well there and in his side business of designing local advertising. He's a second-degree black belt while my daughter will soon be testing for her provisional black belt. They speak Chinese. They're the kind of people who will help build a good future. And I was able to nurture their lives and their personalities free from backpacks blowing up in cafes and free from radiation falling on their skin. 

My revolutionary act of not voting for Obama and instead voting for Ron Paul or whoever the Green Party candidate turns out to be (they're considering Roseanne Barr!), in the real world, would narrow their opportunities, because that's what happens when a BLATANT tool of corporations such as Bush, McCain, or Romney comes to power. Admittedly it's almost as bad under Obama, but it's certainly not AS bad. Obama stopped the Keystone Pipeline from traversing the Oglala Aquifer, prevented the dumping of nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain, allowed 26-year-olds to stay on their parents' medical policies, saved the American auto industry, and much more. Obama might be a selfish egotist, but some of his actions indicate that he has a heart. Romney's history and his demeanor indicate that he might actually be an automaton.

What gain will my children obtain if I allow their buffer zone to be diminished? If all I get out of voting for a third party is to feel good about myself--"Jeff is such a smart revolutionary!"--would that be worth it?

Please respond to this post here by clicking on the "Comments" link at the bottom of this post. Anonymous responses are fine and will ensure that you don't end up on the no-fly list.

Jesus in My Oatmeal

I dreamed that I was casually talking to Jesus, like people do, like, "Jesus, please help me pass this goddamned history test today!" I don't remember what I was asking him to do for me. I noticed something moving in a little area of my oatmeal, like a bug moving around just under the surface. I looked at it more closely and it turned into a perfect image of Jesus. "Oh fuck!" I thought. "Nobody has been more outspoken about how primitive and pathological typical fundamentalist Christian belief is, and yet now I know--it's all real! Jesus really is God, and I really do have to tell people about him!" 

I realized that my recently deceased biological father, a smart guy who had already graduated from a good college at the age that most kids were just finishing high school, was not an idiot after all. I had never understood how someone like him, with a high IQ and a quick mind, could believe nonsense that was as absurd as believing in Santa Claus. He had been right all along! 

Still skeptical, though, I stared at the image, and it transformed into an image of the famous "praying hands" painting, and then it was just oatmeal again. So I decided not to become a believer after all, but I felt rattled by having had such a close call with becoming a Jesus freak.

Drones

The other night I spoke with an 18-year-old University of California student and was shocked to learn that she didn't know what a drone was. An A student having just finished her first semester in college, she certainly had not stayed up on the news. What upset me wasn't that she didn't know about drones, but that her not knowing is indicative of MILLIONS of young American adults not knowing.

She didn't know that our government is deploying drones in several countries, that a third of the people killed by drones are innocent bystanders, that Obama has ordered more drone strikes than Bush ever dreamed of, or that the drones are operated by normal suburban military personnel who work in comfortable command-and-control rooms at a military base outside Las Vegas, killing people 8,000 miles away, then flying their drones back around to see clear video of the carnage they have just wreaked, including little kids missing legs or heads, a bride and groom accidentally blown away, a grandmother face down in a pool of blood. I told her how after a hard day of work, one of these drone controllers might stop at a 7-11 to buy a gallon of milk or make it just in time to watch his child play in a Little League baseball game.

She was receptive to my criticism. She realizes that in a few months she'll be voting to decide who our next president will be. I told her that it was a simple matter to go on line and read the main international, national, and local stories of the day, and that if she would do this every day, not only would she know what was going on in her world, but it would all start to make a lot more sense to her.

After our conversation about drones, I put this little photo essay together and e-mailed it to her. I wrote: "3 pictures worth a million words."

Romney's Religion Makes Him Unfit to Lead
This letter of mine was published the other day in my local newspaper. They kind of butchered it--their editor broke the logic of a good sentence by removing a sentence that went with it, and added some very bad commas, but at least they kept my idea intact!

9/11 Conspiracy Theory

You will love this 5 Minute video. What do you think?

Fukushima Cleanup is Job One

This video, compared to all the videos I've watched about Fukushima, is the best bottom-line report I've seen. It's impressive to me that they admit all this stuff on a mainstream show on CBS. Physicist Michio Kaku has gotten pretty big as a scientific spokesman, too big to risk saying something that is scientifically untrue, and his comments are both interesting and frightening. From a quick glance at the headlines in the paper and the news headlines on CNN.com, the average Amerikan is probably thinking that everything at Fukushima is pretty stabilized by now. Wow, I didn't know that there were still unusable pastures in England from the Chernobyl meltdown!

I think Job One on this planet right now is for all countries to work together to solve Fukushima to the highest level humanly possible. I was thinking that an international coalition should build the largest barge ever, each section of it the largest floating thing ever built. The barge could be insulated with lead and cement, loaded with the parts of the Fukushima power plants by gigantic front loaders, and sunk in the Mariana Trench, 7 miles deep, in a hole dug by a nuclear blast, and then capped by cement, lead, etc. I don't know shit about things like this, but our top scientists and engineers should be able to come up with some scenario for a gigantic international-scale project that could put this problem to rest.

Here are two things from Russia: the famous Chernobyl ghost Ferris wheel and Maria Sharapova.

Money

I've been thinking about money a lot. It's an amazing thing! I think that on every planet with intelligent beings, money is eventually invented to facilitate trading across distances.

It starts out as bits of rare metal, becomes coins, then bills. Some brilliant one invents interest. Eventually you have complex financial "instruments": credit default swaps, equity derivatives, etc. Karl Marx writes that there is a certain grace that comes with capital, but that ultimately "it becomes a monster with a mind of its own", and humans become its slave rather than its master. Corporations evolve by the rules of natural selection, and corporations with boards of directors that look to the future and towards sustainability are weeded out, because MY 401(k) retirement fund wants profit NOW. Only the immediate bottom line determines survival of corporations, and only the ones that promote war (a great business because its products quickly become obsolete or get destroyed) or otherwise rape the Earth (e.g., mountaintop coal removal or overfishing the world's great fisheries) prevail.

Money is like a very simple, elegantly written computer virus. Somehow it spawns more and more complicated destruction, even though the actual code for the virus was simply the concept that this pretty shell or this shiny piece of metal can stand for the value of your water buffalo or my basket of corn. The virus completely changes the way of life for a species and hugely affects the way it lives on its planet. If you flew over a large Native American village 1,000 years ago, it blended in with the planet so well that you might not even notice it. Compare that to New York City, an example of human habitation after the money computer virus starts to reach its complicated, destructive potential!

Democracy is like a fruit that is good for a while, but then goes rotten. At first it allows for stability, peace, and cooperation: the perfect ingredients for businesses to thrive and for a large middle class to grow. But when the businesses thrive TOO much and start to conglomerate, the trouble begins. The media then become corporatized and conglomerated as well, so now the messages telling us how and what to think are almost seamless. And that's how democracy rots.

We don't know what comes next because humans in the past have never really taken democracy as far as we have.  Compare Lady Gaga fun but politically empty songs to Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young's "Ohio", about the students shot and killed by the National Guard at Kent State during the Vietnam War protests: "Four Dead in Ohio". "Gotta get down to it / Soldiers are gunning us down ..." The hippies listened to that song, which was a call to revolution, and decided, "Nah, too messy. Let's just get stoned".

I love capitalism because it comes up with the coolest stuff, but it needs to be treated with great care, like a highly radioactive material, and there needs to be a prime directive in its use: Every moneymaking enterprise or endeavor must help ALL people, be benign or beneficial to the environment, and must be sustainable indefinitely.

Thank you for reading my essay! Now here's a little video about  what gives a dollar bill its value. If you think it's strange that many modern people believe that a holy book was dictated by the creator of the Universe during the Bronze Age, you'll be surprised to realize that you yourself have an almost religious faith in money. Kurt Vonnegut says money's value is all in your head. This is really amazing stuff. Please click the comment link at the bottom of this post and weigh in on what you think about money. 

Go God Go

I had a long conversation with a young man in a book store about how dangerous and dysfunctional religion is on this crowded, contentious planet. He stood his ground and forced me to see his side of it -- that while fundamentalist religions ARE ludicrous and dangerous, ridding the world of them won't make much difference in solving humanity's biggest problems. He urged me to watch a two-part South Park ("Go God Go" and "Go God Go XII"), in which Cartman (second from right, below) uses a time machine to go into the future to get a new video game console, and sees how people live in a world without religion. Cartman notices that the future world, which had by this time jettisoned religion, is still just as fucked up and violent as our world is now.

I thought of this when I read a very interesting Chris Hedges essay, "Religious Institutions Are Ruled By the Morally Bankrupt -- But Should We Be Cheering Religion's Demise?" the other day, which deals with the same topic. Though Hedges is as sickened and repulsed by everyday fundamentalist religions as I am, in this essay he defends the existence of religion. His prose is beautiful, and he can nail religion better than anybody, but he is leery about throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

Hedges writes that religions in their early forms "challenged the power of the tribe, the closed society. They offered up the possibility that human beings, although limited by circumstance and human weakness, could shape and give direction to society and their own lives. [The early] religious thinkers were our first ethicists. And it is perhaps not accidental that the current pope, as well as the last one, drove out of the Catholic Church thousands of clergy and religious leaders who embodied these qualities, elevating the dregs to positions of leadership and leaving the pedophiles to run the Sunday schools."

Unlike me, Hedges is not in a big hurry to eradicate religion. After reading his beautifully written short essay, I definitely see his point. Although intellectuals blame religion for arbitrarily dividing people into oppositional groups, thereby leading to persecution, ethnic cleansing, and wars, it is likely simply a matter of human nature to be territorial and divisive and have wars against others, with or without religion.

Of course I still think religion has got to go. But now I realize that I've been acting as if eliminating fundamentalist religion was THE solution to fixing the human condition, when in fact, elimination of fundamentalism is just one of the main ingredients of the solution.

Humans will do really bad things completely outside of religious influence--for money, to have sex with the more attractive woman, for pride. Just to pick one problem out of the air, a problem as huge as religious fundamentalism, it is this: humans lack reverence for nature and the environment. The BP oil spill doesn't have anything to do with religion.

According to Chris Hedges (and me), Americans are already incredibly immoral. Hedges writes:

The consumer culture, as Nietzsche feared, has turned us into what Chalmers Johnson calls a "consumerist Sparta." The immigrants and the poor, all but invisible to us, work as serfs in this new temple of greed and imperialism. Curtis White in "The Middle Mind" argues that most Americans are aware of the brutality and injustice used to maintain the excesses of their consumer society and empire. He suspects they do not care. They don’t want to see what is done in their name. They do not want to look at the rows of flag-draped coffins or the horribly maimed bodies and faces of veterans or the human suffering in the blighted and deserted former manufacturing centers. It is too upsetting. Government and corporate censorship is welcomed and appreciated. It ensures that we remain [Nietzsche's] Last Men. And the death of religious institutions will only cement into place the new secular religion of the Last Man, the one that worships military power, personal advancement, hedonism and greed, the one that justifies our callousness toward the weak and the poor.

Hedges thinks that without religion, we will get even more callous. That seems plausible to me. Every Southern plantation owner had a Bible in his home, as the plantation owners brutalized millions of African slaves. Almost every family that supported Hitler had a Bible in their home, and Germany had beautiful cathedrals and churches everywhere. If cultures STEEPED in the loving teachings of Jesus could be so cruel, imagine what it might be like when the stupid among us no longer fear God. Maybe things would get worse!

Some of you are wondering: Why does Jeff hate religion so much? Well, I've got millions of good anti religion quotes, including these great ones from our Founding Fathers, but here's a new one from SF Chronicle columnist Mark Morford that says it all:

"The Bible? Cute cluster bomb of childish oral-tradition mythology told by angry, sexless white men and then translated from multiple dead languages and re-written and re-edited countless times throughout history for the sake of power and political gain and to control the ignorant masses via guilt, shame and fear. Oh, and also a lie. But, you know, a well-intentioned one. Sort of."

I went to a protest at Ocean Beach in San Francisco last week (see several pictures below), and I really felt like I was wasting my time. Why protest to get the attention of our representatives, when we don't even HAVE any representatives. We are living in a fascist state, period. I've been doing zen meditation for years, and coping very well with the cruel insanity of our empire. My kids are happy and healthy and both are the at the top of their classes. But I'm losing it. I just can't believe how horrible it is to be an American. (Ah, I know that line will rub some people the wrong way, but that's because they're ignoring the 7 million people we've murdered starting with the 3 million in the Vietnam War, plus a million Cambodians, a half million Laotians, a half million Central Americans (under Reagan), and under Bush 1, Clinton, and Bush 2, a good 2 million Iraqis.)

We either have to engage in violent revolution (which I don't have the stomach for) or start engaging in totally focused boycotts and strikes. We cannot tolerate any crossing of the picket line, so to speak. Or else we just have to suck it up and accept it that we live in a corporate-run state (the definition of fascism) with a puppet "president" named Barrack and a puppet Congress comprised mainly of prostitutes.

The American colonists used to tar and feather any neighbor who supported the British. If we ALL boycotted BP or GM or whoever we wanted to fuck with, they would be ruined quickly and they would start to see who their real bosses were and what America is really supposed to be about. Or if we bombed their assets, destroyed their data, and imprisoned their criminal CEO's, they'd start to see where the power in America really lives: We the People. Otherwise, we just have to bend over and take it. Protesting isn't going to work unless the crowds are in the millions. We had about 600 at our beach protest. Maybe the oil spill will wake people up, but I'm not holding my breath.

After you look at the cute protest pictures below, scroll all the way down for a tiny article called "Human Extinction." What do you think? Are these two prominent scientists right?

What To Do?

This is a very strange time in my life because it is completely unclear to me what my next political move should be. When Bush 2 was president, it was so obvious. Every American who was a good human being automatically wanted to push for impeachment of this self-confessed criminal and to end our violent, costly, failed occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. But now, with Obama at the helm, we are still feeling a bit lucky to have dodged the McCain/Palin bullet by electing a man who seemed to be a quantum leap above those two losers in wisdom and humanity, so it is not a simple matter to decide whether or not we want to support his insane 2,700-page health bill and allow him to gain some political momentum, or fight for something better. We're afraid to make him look bad because that would give the Republicans more momentum. Should we fight him on this because of what it objectively is--a broken, convoluted plan that allows the insurance companies to continue screwing us over, or support him because what the Republicans would do would be far worse?

What's right is as clear to me as ever. It is obvious to any sane, loving person that it is nothing less than barbaric to fail to provide health care to any child simply because his or her parent(s) don't make enough money or don't have a health plan at work. How dare anyone against single-payer health care celebrate Christmas!

When 36 countries, including Cyprus and Cuba, are ahead of us in infant mortality, and with all 36 of them having a strong public option or single-payer health insurance, how dare our leaders continue to let insurance companies run the show! To add insult to injury, all of these countries pulling ahead of us in public health are using our goddamned technology!

Yes, what's right is clear to me. But what to do next? I haven't a clue. The clear path for our country should be to end the violent occupations in the Middle East, establish an excellent modern health care system like Taiwan's, build a modern power grid and a renewable energy infrastructure, and revitalize education. But in a nation run by We the Corporations, making headway on achieving these goals is just about impossible.

Obviously, we need to wake people up, but that's just about impossible, too. The more ignorant and wrong people are, the more entrenched they are in their views. Regardless of what I do or don't do in my civic life, this commercial offers a great solution. Just do nothing! Even though this humorous/grim video commercial contains some goofy Illuminati stuff, the end result of our inactivity won't be much different than what is portrayed in it.

A Harvard study found that 44,789 Americans die every year for lack of health care. That's close to our death toll during the whole Vietnam War, every year. What kind of "Christian" would let a child go to school with an ear infection or rotten teeth? And do you ever think about how obscene it is that our representatives have government paid health care while we don't?

According to the study, an uninsured twin, with a lifestyle identical to her insured twin, is 40 percent more likely to die, in any given year, than her twin.

Please respond below by clicking the little comments link at the bottom of this post.

Thanks!

Earth is Spherical and Religion is Over

Various cultures have had conceptions of a flat Earth, including ancient Babylon, Ancient Egypt, pre-Classical Greece, and pre-17th century China. This view contrasts with the realization first recorded around the 4th century BC by natural philosophers of Classical Greece and later proved by brave seafarers, that Earth is spherical. Many Americans still believe the myth that it wasn't until Columbus sailed to the New World that Europeans knew Earth was round, but even in medieval Europe, it was already too late to write an "even-handed" Time magazine-style article about the flat vs. round issue. Even in 16th century China, a culture holding a seemingly immutable belief in a flat Earth, the whole mental paradigm shifted almost instantly once the evidence for a spherical world became overwhelming.

By the same token, evidence from the sciences of biology, chemistry, genetics, astrophysics, geology, etc. has piled up so high as to be overwhelming regarding the fact of evolution. Plus, for the first time ever in America, books against blind religious fundamentalism have hit the mainstream, with authors such as Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Chris Hedges, and Christopher Hitchens writing NYT Bestsellers taking on religion. So again, major segments of humanity, including the whole developed world, are on the edge of another huge and almost instantaneous paradigm shift. Like the belief in a flat Earth in 16th century China, fundamentalist religion is just about over. Unfortunately, most people don't know it yet.

Eighty percent of the world's people still believe that the creator of the Universe dictated a book. Many believe this so strongly that they will kill other people who believe that a different creator dictated a different book. Many Americans reading this would immediately think, "Yeah, those damned Muslims, blowing people up over religious differences," forgetting that a large percentage of Americans in the 1960's and 70's, mostly "Christian" at the time, had little problem with their government killing hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese people ("godless communists"), almost as casually as if they were ants at a picnic. If we had information about a domestic terrorist, such as Tim McVeigh, and we knew that he was hiding, in the Bronx for example, would we take out an entire block in order to get to him? The answer is no, we wouldn't. People in this country would be outraged if we bombed a block and killed civilians to get to this guy, and yet that's what we're doing every day with our killer drones to non-Christians in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

But already, especially in the developed world, we're seeing more and more "Christians" believing in evolution. In 2009, it's almost impossible not to believe in evolution and still be sane, with so many scientific disciplines seamlessly proving it. For the "holy book" idolizers, knowledge of evolution seems to diminish the majesty of God. Yet with a slightly open mind, evolution and all the other amazing laws of the Universe should only lead us to feel more awe in the face of Creation!

What has been diminished is the stature of the primitive mythology books, written by superstitious, perhaps even insane men, at the dawn of the Iron Age, that people have dragged into modern times as literal guides to cosmology and correct human behavior. Literally billions of people still base their lives on the stories in these books, a pathological, dysfunctional behavior that imperils all of humankind.

I've had "Christian"-deprogramming Web sites for 15 years (check out my vintage early-1990's web page design!--and click on the picture). Why do I bother? It's not just some pet peeve of mine. Fundamentalist religion is like a computer virus, which cripples the function of a computer. Teaching fundamentalist religion to a child is a serious type of child abuse. Sexual child abuse damages a child's self image, confidence, and attitude about sexuality, but teaching fundamentalist religion often damages a child's thinking capability for life. Fundamentalist religion is not a benign thing, like somebody's preference of one professional baseball team over another. President Reagan invited televangelists Hal Lindsey and Jerry Falwell into the Pentagon to advise him on nuclear weapons policy! Sarah Palin, chosen by almost half of us Americans to be second in command of our nuclear arsenal, would have gladly started World War Three in the name of Jesus Christ.

Perhaps in one or two more generations, fundamentalist religion in America will become a harmless hobby, like astrology. There won't be any need for laws or prohibitions against it because it will become conversationally inappropriate, and no one who adheres to it would ever be trusted with any kind of power or serious responsibility. It might take several more generations for people in some other countries to realize the absurdity of fundamentalist religion, just as it took centuries for the Chinese to comprehend what the ancient Greek mathematicians had discovered about Earth's shape.

If any of you take exception to anything I've written here, please read these very few Sam Harris quotes, carefully selected from two of his books I've read, before you respond. If you still feel like responding, I will of course answer every comment. I ask that you please comment by clicking the "Comments" link right below this post, so that others can see your comment and perhaps comment on your ideas. Posting anonymously is fine.

From The End of Faith:

"How is it that the absurdity of this idea [that certain books were written by God] does not bring us, hourly, to our knees? It is safe to say that few of us would have thought so many people could believe such a thing, if they didn't actually believe it. Imagine a world in which generations of human beings come to believe that certain films were made by God or that specific software was coded by him. Imagine a future in which millions of our descendants murder each other over rival interpretations of Star Wars or Windows 98. Could anything--anything--be more ridiculous? And yet, this would be no more ridiculous than the world we are living in."

From The End of Faith:

"Our situation is this: most of the people in this world believe that the Creator of the universe has written a book. We have the misfortune of having many such books on hand, each making an exclusive claim as to its infallibility. People tend to organize themselves into factions according to which of these incompatible claims they accept--rather than on the basis of language, skin color, location of birth, or any other criterion of tribalism. Each of these texts urges its readers to adopt a variety of beliefs and practices, some of which are benign, many of which are not. All are in perverse agreement on one point of fundamental importance, however: "respect" for other faiths, or for the views of unbelievers, is not an attitude that God endorses. While all faiths have been touched, here and there by the spirit of ecumenicalism, the central tenet of every religious tradition is that all others are mere repositories of error, or, at best, dangerously incomplete. Intolerance is thus intrinsic to every creed. Once a person believes--really believes--that certain ideas can lead to eternal happiness, or to its antithesis, he cannot tolerate the possibility that the people he loves might be led astray by the blandishments of unbelievers. Certainty about the next life is simply incompatible with tolerance in this one."

From The End of Faith:

"While Christianity has few living inquisitors today, Islam has many. In the next chapter we will see that in our opposition to the world view of Islam, we confront a civilization with an arrested history. It is as though a portal in time has opened, and fourteenth-century hordes are pouring into our world. Unfortunately, they are now armed with twenty-first-century weapons."

From Letter to a Christian Nation:

"Your qualms about embryonic stem-cell research are similarly obscene. Here are the facts: stem-cell research is one of the most promising developments in the last century of medicine. It could offer therapeutic breakthroughs for every disease or injury process that human beings suffer--for the simple reason that embryonic stem cells can become any tissue in the human body. This research may also be essential for our understanding of cancer, along with a wide variety of developmental disorders. Given these facts, it is almost impossible to exaggerate the promise of stem-cell research. It is true, of course, that research on embryonic stem cells entails the destruction of three-day-old human embryos. This is what worries you.

"Let us look at the details. A three-day-old human embryo is a collection of 150 cells called a blastocyst. There are, for the sake of comparison, more than 100,000 cells in the brain of a fly. The human embryos that are destroyed in stem-cell research do not have brains, or even neurons. Consequently, there is no reason to believe they can suffer their destruction in any way at all. It is worth remembering, in this context, that when a person's brain has died, we currently deem it acceptable to harvest his organs (provided he has donated them for this purpose) and bury him in the ground. If it is acceptable to treat a person whose brain has died as something less than a human being, it should be acceptable to treat a blastocyst as such. If you are concerned about suffering in this universe, killing a fly should present you with greater moral difficulties than killing a human blastocyst."

From the conclusion of Letter to a Christian Nation (this quote spoken to a typical American Christian):

"Nonbelievers like myself stand beside you, dumbstruck by the Muslim hordes who chant death to whole nations of the living. But we stand dumbstruck by you as well--by your denial of tangible reality, by the suffering you create in service to your religious myths, and by your attachment to an imaginary God. This letter has been an expression of that amazement--and, perhaps, of a little hope."