As The Cookie Crumbles: Corpses

Whenever there's some new revelation or fresh evidence of human stupidity, depravity, intolerance and/or other ugliness--especially if it's our countryfolk who appear to have committed it, there are veritable GALES of messages desperately, beseechingly wailing "Aren't we better than this?"

To even a novice student of history such as I, the answer, based on our record--which includes atrocities of varying scope and scale as far back as the colonization of the continent--obviously is "No. We are NOT "better than this," our vaunted exceptionality notwithstanding.

But NO ONE is.

This discussion became germane last week, in view of the flurry of emotion and outrage unleashed with the fotos of some Marines pissing on the corpses of Afghans they'd recently killed. The howls were as loud as they were predictable. How can we descend to "their" level, the plaintive cries demand? We're AMERICANS, they proclaim, exceptionally. We are better than that...

I want to ask, "better than what?" USer soldiers have committed far worse atrocities than merely urinating on the bodies of the fallen. Col. Chivington's Colorado militia cut the breasts off living Cheyenne women after raping and murdering their children.

More recently, nearly 60 percent of the remains of Japanese soldiers repatriated after the war from the battle zones in the Marianna Islands--Guadalcanal is one of them--were returned withOUT skulls. The war in the Pacific was fought almost entirely under the unspoken order to take no prisoners; only one in about 50 combat vets of the period report having killed prisoners, but more than 60 percent reported having witnessed it.

In Vietnam, US troops pretty routinely took ears off their kills; also, fingers. Some took penises, I've been told. We all heard about My Lai, and the massacre there. It was NOT an isolated or a unique incident, by the accounts I've heard.

You gotta understand. In war, there is no "better" way; there are no rules. And soldiers have desecrated the corpses of their fallen enemies as long there have been victorious soldiers and fallen enemy corpses to defile. Warfare REQUIRES soldiers to dehumanize their enemies. You can't get fired u enough if there is a shred of their humanity still to be considered.

Though I'm a vet, I served only on the periphery of the Vietnam war. I was never in a combat situation--"in the SHIT" as they called it... My 'evidence' is all hear-say, but the way I heard folks tell it who have been, when the guy or guys trying to kill YOU, lies dead at your feet, and you killed him instead, you wanna dance on his face, cut off his head and shit in his throat. That's how it was described to me.

It's NOT 'un-natural,' except to the extent that WAR itself is unnatrural. It's primal. Why do you think Achilles dragged poor, dead Hector around the walls of Troy? Homer wasn't just making shit up to make his poem spicier or more popular with the Greeks. He was describing a common, existential fact.

Only the names of the killers and their victims change.

What you should be upset about is that the guys doing the pissing were there doing the KILLING in the first place, and they were doing it in YOUR and OUR names. Still, after 10 years.

How can citizens demand extraordinary compassion of our soldiers when we do not extend it to our own citizens?

We are not a "civilized" nation, and will NEVER be, as long as the State encourages taking private profit from the immiseration (the imprisonment, illness, injury, disability or death) of its citizens.

When we cannot or will not take proper care of our own, will not protect the most vulnerable from the predations of profit in their darkest and weakest hours, where do we get the chutzpah to complain when OUR soldiers behave inhumanely to their adversaries corpses?

They did no more to those corpses than our own gummint does to the weakest of us, pissing on us when we're down...

[This post is my most visited, so far, on the Worldwide Hippies YouTube page. Last time I looked, there were more than 200 hits! Woohoo!]

January 18, 2012: Stop PIPA/SOPA Day

January 18, 2012: Stop PIPA/SOPA Day

It is probably unrealistic in the EXTREME to imagine that a functioning oligarchy in full cry might permit the continued, unmodified, uninterfered operation of so fundamentally liberating a technology as the Intertubez has become, and still remains. We need only regard how television was co-opted, and its liberatory poitential was turned aside, to become--along with the rest of its flickering-screened scions--the most POTENT agent of propaganda promulgation ever invented.

I regard the present structure of the Intertubez as I regard the Constitution: It works pretty well as it stands, and fucking around with it pretty much invites the bullies in, so leave it the fuck alone.

--Woody, Jan 18, 2012

PROTECT IP / SOPA Breaks The Internet from Fight for the Future on Vimeo.

Hippie News * Stuff, Jan. 16, 2012: Soft Energy

About 35 years ago, a woman about my mother's age, appeared at my newspaper desk in Santa Fe with a disturbing tale about the coming, inevitable changes which loomed on our energy horizons like storms at sea. It was 75 or 76, not long AFTER the first gas shortage, of '73, and the issue had already faded in Public Mind.

She told me of her son, who had a book coming out which foretold how crises in cost, price and sustainability of our current fuels--which he called "hard" energy--would threaten the whole productive economy of the planet.

The proverbial two roads diverged, her son said in his book, and there was a clear opportunity to implement necessary reforms. The alternative, she said, was sensibly called a "soft" energy path. And her son, Amory Lovins and his bride, Hunter were going to be coming to NM for a visit and wouldn't I--meaning, of course, me--like to do a story about them and it?

But the gas crisis of '73 hadn't hardly touched me, a callow, know-it-all, cocky veteran, recent college-graduate, and world traveler, and I blew it off. I still kick myself at the recollection, because, of course, the Lovins' were absolutely CORRECT! The path we're on leads to disaster.

One of the consequences of hard energy which we DO NOT usually see revealed appeared in reports recently that the "hard" oil industry was in effect threatening to blackmail brave Sir Barry and Lady Clenis into peremptorily approving the proposed oil/slurry pipeline from the Alberta tar sands to refineries on the Gulf of Mexico--where it my more easily and more profitably join the international flow of fungible oil supplying energy (above all else) profitably for the people who "own" the resource, to an increasingly energy-ravenous world.

Apparently, the decision is still on hold, until after election day. But you can imagine how the exchange might have gone, between an some Oiligarch's gunsel and an Energy Dept, or Interior Dept flunky:

"Psst. Hey! Boy! Yeah you! Tell yer Bosses to approve the pipeline. Nice little deal you got goin, here. It'd be a SHAME if gasoline went to $7 bucks a gallon a week before election day, wootnit?. Knowwaddamean, boy?"

The Oiligarchs won't abandon their monopoly until the last dollar is squeezed out of the last possible barrel of oil, and fashioned a NEW monopoly, too. And they won't stop drilling til they've processed it ALL...

And what the current economic slow-down shows is that there isn't ANY interest out in the "private" sector for the kind of investment which would bring "soft" energy into the mainstream.

These are the vicissitudes of the 'hard' energy path we're on...

Amory Lovins, who with then-wife Hunter, went on to found Rocky Mouontain Institute, in '76 published that book, called "Soft Energy Paths." Check it out at the link on the bottom of the screen. Maybe, if we are VERY VERY lucky, it is not yet too late.

Hell, we can even get energy from the tides, at the beach, hippies...

Back to you in hippie-central, Winstone...


(Run this URL at least the last minute or so, please:
Rocky Mountain Institute, http://www.rmi.org/



*****************************

One particularly thorny problem, if you stop and really THINK about it, is the challenge of completely REFITTING the whole, complex, interwoven "grids" which took the last 100 years to build, without tearing it down before the new infrastructure is in place to replace it. At some point, there will be redundancy, and economic forces--private reluctance and public gridlock--to constrain the expenditure of much capital on investment in alternative, "soft" energy solutions, especially while there is still so much unamortized 'capital' in the "cheap" energy infrastructure.

As The Cookie Crumbles: Quack-Thump

Hola Hippies! Paz in el Barrio! I hope you have a good day in view.

Imho: The GOPhux are throwing the presidential race to Obamster. It's still too toxic in the Oval Office...The taint of the Bushevik years did NOT go out with the old carpet. The Owners installed O'bambster to absorb the remaining soilage...It's why I call him President Shamwow.

In any case, they --the GOPhux-- don't fucking WANT it. No, no, no, no...

Back in the Boardroomm they're patient. It took 'em 60 years to get this far. They haver BOTH money AND time (unless the earth's climactic systems collapse). Satisfied with the knowledge that, as the legendary economist J.M. Keynes once remarked, "In the long run, we're all dead," the Owners/Oners appear content to hold the fort til 2016, when they're gonna resuscitate that popular, old Buck Owens standard, Together Again....Yessir, Ladeez an' Genemuns, Bush/Cheney, back together for the the FIRST TIME! Featuring Jebbie and Lizzie...(the crowd roars)

I mean, in other words, I think the fix is in (as I thought in 08, when the GOPhux waited to see if the economic crisis was going to abate and then, when it didn't, named Palin to the ticket), and the whole GOPhux primary campaign is nothing but another installment of the National Kabuki Theatre, performed mainly to attract campaign contributions..

Therefore, none of the "candidates" in the GOPhux Candidate Clown Car--the GOP CCC--is any more than a place-holder, a cypher, acting in a pedantic little drama meant to discipline the rambunctious Rightoids, as the McGovern campaign did to the fractious Left of the 1972 Dims.

McGovern, running against an unpopular, indeed mainly despised Richard Nixon lost 49 states. It struck such a blow against the nascent, and aspiring Left in and of the mainstream Dim "party" that they never recovered, and probably never will, if Sir Barry, the Capitulator, is the apposite case of the fruits of its evolution...

Be honest: NOBODY can possibly believe that either Pistol-packin' Rick Perry, or Neut "the Scoot" Gingrich, nor the ever-frothy Rick Santorum, with the pickled fetus on the mantel-piece, can survive the primaries with any public cred intact.

(Parenthetically: One of the genuinely glorious moments of this campaign occurred recently when Merriam-Webster, the dictionary folks, announced that they had added "/santorum/", a frothy mixture...to their next book. No, really! There's a link...It's just so right I don't even CARE if it's true...)

Perry and Santorum cancel each other ouit, since both are both trying to win ONE faction--the wacktoid 'faithful'--and they'll split 'em. Neut "Til Illness Do Us Part" Gingrich, the stupid person's idea of a smart person, just too dirty, too compromised. Hunstman is still unknown, AND is a Mormon who worked for Shamwwow's State Dept.. Romney has the "Bain" of his existence to explain, if any dares pin him down on it. Many, even on the "left," seem drawn to Ron Paul, inexplicably. Paul is no less a creature of the corpoRat state than any of the rest of them in the GoPhux clown car, the creaky ol' GOP CCC; or Shamwow either, for that matter.

But Paul is particularly toxic, especially for his views on regulating (really, deregulating) industrial polluters--remember the good old days when industries regulated themselves for the public good and the safety of the environment? Neither do I, nr does anobody else...and turning the issue of rights BACK over to the States...I recall we already had a little dust-up, about 150myears ago over that last point, and the States' Rights folks were decisively and bloodily beaten. If anyone's wanna go back and try again, please suck sewage and expire.

But in the end, I don't think it is going to matter, too much. Because of the continuing, lingering stench of the previous 30 years as the Oligarchy eroded and corroded the powers of the People, and in light of the probability of future toxic spills, I think Shamwow's a lock; gonna need his absorptive capabilities.

I wouldn't however say the same about the Senate, which I think the GOPhux can and want to and probably WILL take, whilst holding the House.

Which will leave brave Sir Barry to carry the mantel forward, a 4-year, lame duck.

So follow me to the beach, hippies! Line up! Forward, march. Quack thump quack thump quack thump...

Hippie News * Stuff, Jan. 16, 2012: Soft Energy

About 35 years ago, a woman about my mother's age, appeared at my newspaper desk in Santa Fe with a disturbing tale about the coming, inevitable changes which loomed on our energy horizons like storms at sea. It was 75 or 76, not long AFTER the first gas shortage, of '73, and the issue had already faded in Public Mind.

She told me of her son, who had a book coming out which foretold how crises in cost, price and sustainability of our current fuels--which he called "hard" energy--would threaten the whole productive economy of the planet.

The proverbial two roads diverged, her son said in his book, and there was a clear opportunity to implement necessary reforms. The alternative, she said, was sensibly called a "soft" energy path. And her son, Amory Lovins and his bride, Hunter were going to be coming to NM for a visit and wouldn't I--meaning, of course, me--like to do a story about them and it?

But the gas crisis of '73 hadn't hardly touched me, a callow, know-it-all, cocky veteran, recent college-graduate, and world traveler, and I blew it off. I still kick myself at the recollection, because, of course, the Lovins' were absolutely CORRECT! The path we're on leads to disaster.

One of the consequences of hard energy which we DO NOT usually see revealed appeared in reports recently that the "hard" oil industry was in effect threatening to blackmail brave Sir Barry and Lady Clenis into peremptorily approving the proposed oil/slurry pipeline from the Alberta tar sands to refineries on the Gulf of Mexico--where it my more easily and more profitably join the international flow of fungible oil supplying energy (above all else) profitably for the people who "own" the resource, to an increasingly energy-ravenous world.

Apparently, the decision is still on hold, until after election day. But you can imagine how the exchange might have gone, between an some Oiligarch's gunsel and an Energy Dept, or Interior Dept flunky:

"Psst. Hey! Boy! Yeah you! Tell yer Bosses to approve the pipeline. Nice little deal you got goin, here. It'd be a SHAME if gasoline went to $7 bucks a gallon a week before election day, wootnit?. Knowwaddamean, boy?"

The Oiligarchs won't abandon their monopoly until the last dollar is squeezed out of the last possible barrel of oil, and fashioned a NEW monopoly, too. And they won't stop drilling til they've processed it ALL...

And what the current economic slow-down shows is that there isn't ANY interest out in the "private" sector for the kind of investment which would bring "soft" energy into the mainstream.

These are the vicissitudes of the 'hard' energy path we're on...

Amory Lovins, who with then-wife Hunter, went on to found Rocky Mouontain Institute, in '76 published that book, called "Soft Energy Paths." Check it out at the link on the bottom of the screen. Maybe, if we are VERY VERY lucky, it is not yet too late.

Hell, we can even get energy from the tides, at the beach, hippies...

Back to you in hippie-central, Winstone...


(Run this URL at least the last minute or so, please:
Rocky Mountain Institute, http://www.rmi.org/



*****************************

One particularly thorny problem, if you stop and really THINK about it, is the challenge of completely REFITTING the whole, complex, interwoven "grids" which took the last 100 years to build, without tearing it down before the new infrastructure is in place to replace it. At some point, there will be redundancy, and economic forces--private reluctance and public gridlock--to constrain the expenditure of much capital on investment in alternative, "soft" energy solutions, especially while there is still so much unamortized 'capital' in the "cheap" energy infrastructure.

Hippie News & Stuff, Jan 10, 12: Bothered

You pretty much cannot go into the blogosphere--that seething, churning cauldron of hegemonically mis-directed rage, contempt and general loathing--without reading some variant on the following:

"What HAPPENED to "the America I thought it was," when I was growing up?"

If it's not just misplaced nostalgia, not just empty longing for times that never were, then when DID things start going wrong?

Well, the other day, amid musings on the Pledge(s) of Allegiance, I think I may have accidentally stumbled upon, if not the answer, then at least the date from which I think you can reliably date the recognizable configuration of the decline:

July 11, 1954.

That was the date on which an act of Congress inserted two words--a preposition, and a noun--into a non-binding, sentimental paean written by a radical Socialist minister to the (already transparently mythological) values of the Country.

I think the insertion of those words into that document opened the theistic floodgates and pretty much forever changed the balance of power between the Church and the State.

I think at that moment, the balance tipped, and the Billy Grahams of the world gained ascendancy, and the "noble Experiment" that was our secular democracy was mortally wounded, when that essential barrier was fatally and forever breached...

The two words were "under God," and the document was the Pledge of Allegiance.

It's true that it isn't one of the "founding" documents, but--by virtue of the precise summary of it that it offers--it is undeniably PART of the founding mythology. It also bears the Presidential and congressional imprimaturs. (Which isn't bad for a bit of writing meant to both increase magazine consumption AND the loyalty of immigrant children).

Unnoticed at the time--like the first faint lump of a tumor--in retrospect it seems to betray a really disturbing symptom of a failure of confidence by a country which had emerged from the worst wars in the history of the world as the greatest POWER in the history of the world, and had done so under the banner "E Pluribus Unum"--From the many, One." That put the power in and with the people. With the introduction of the Deity, the power is withdrawn from the people and replaced with "trust" in some absent, unaccountable, probably imaginary Being.

And in that moment, I think you see the origins of the ideological conflicts which now beset and bother and bewilder us almost into paralytic distraction, today.

So, hippies, if anybody asks you where the decline of America began, tell 'em God started it. See ya at the beach...


***********************************************************************
Written by Francis Bellamy, for inclusion in a propaganda campaign to win immigrants' loyalties, it appeared in magazine being marketed to school children "in honor of" the 400th Anniversary of Columbus landing. Before the last addition, the Pledge had been modified three times previously: In 1923, the National Flag Conference called for the words "my Flag" to be changed to "the Flag of the United States", so that new immigrants would not confuse loyalties between their birth countries and the United States.

The words "of America" were added a year later. The United States Congress officially recognized the Pledge for the first time, in the following form, on June 22, 1942:
I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands, one nation indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.


It is required that it be recited in every classroom in New Mexico once per day. Most schools have a different kid every day recite it over the intercom. Most states have similar laws. Some states require each student to recite it: Texas, Tennessee, Illinois, Maryland and Mass. ‎"in God We Trust" was foisted off in the Cold War to replace the ancient national slogan, E Pluribus Unum," in almosthe same year "Under God" was stuffed into the Pledge, and for the same reasons: the Red Scare. This is an early example of how a skillful manipulation can turn the national fear into political advantage. We'll NEVER return to "E Pluribus Unum," and it signifies, really the first evidence of the "failure" of the Amercan dream....

HN&S (1/3/12): "Dear Barry..."

A New Year's message to "My President":

You know the legend that on Xmas Eve, the 'mute" animals are supposed to be able to talk? Part of the same legend is that on New Year's Day we're ALL on First Name BASIS. This is my New Year's Letter to the President.

Dear Barry:

Man, I gotta tella ya, you really, RILLY pissed me off last weekend.

It wasn't so much you signing that NDAA like you did, even though it enshrines in law the NEVER-BEFORE granted 'right' of the President to imprison folks--even your fellow citizens--without trial or appeal...

Or HOW you signed it, in the (metaphorical_) "dark of night," in the news hole on New Year's Eve, on a fucking SATURDAY, no less, when the CorpoRat/SCUM "press" was doing the traditional, ritual bullshit that the CorpoRat/SCUM "press" does this time of year, that they'd had in the can for months so they could go home, too...(Shrewd, bubba!)

AND it wasn't just the 'reservations' which you expressed in signing it--What the fuck, you resisted signing it cuz it didn't give you ENOUGH???Really? It's what you said!

I'll even pass on the "signing statement" when you did it--for which tactic you and all the REST of the gutless fucking Dims routinely and stertorously condemned the PREVIOUS crew of Fucktard Fascisti--

IT wasn't really all that that REALLY pissed ME RIGHT the fuck off.

Though it does.

What cranks MY jaws the MOST is that you not only arrogated that power for yourself which is bad enough, cuz I don't really trust you to use it justly--But GODDAM, MAN! THINK!

You ALSO gave THAT POWER--to indefinitely detain so-called "enemies"--to whatsoever OTHER, future, jack-booted, crypto-fascist fuckwitted fucknozzle who NEXT manages to exploit the system and gain the White House after you're gone. You have delivered all of US to THEM.

No--unless it comes from YOU, yourself, sir--the occasion may not arise in the immediate aftermath of your latest disappointment and betrayal of the people whom you alleged yourself in sympathy with.

It comes into play NEXT term, after you've exhausted your welcome, Sir Barry, and are peacefully contemplating your LONG, serene, comfortable retirement--certainly, nobody in your family will ever have to work ever again--and the GOPhux/Owners have installed Bush/Cheney, Redux"--Jeb Bush and Lizzie Cheney--behind their campaign slogans, blaming YOU for the fall and demanding bellicosely to "Restore America" (along with a whole plethora of other, similarly (and fiercely) nostalgic phrases extolling America's "past glories?"

Why, one might ask, would the GOP rallying cry be ferociously bemoaning the "fall" of the Nation and YOUR part in it?

That's because, sometime in the course of your LAST term--between now and 2016, the PRC will "officially" surpass the USofA in GNP/GDP, and the "End of the American Empire" will be loudly and popularly proclaimed, world wide, in the CorpoRat/SCUM "press" and the blame for it will fall SQUARELY on YOUR greying head (and drip down onto the REST of your "wing" of the Party) and you will be roundly and soundly blamed for it.

And that power you seized, last week?? It verges pretty damn close to preventative detention, which I don't ANYONE to use justly??? It will fall, all juicy, ripe and useful, into the hands of people who don't even care if they LOOK like criminals, thugs, and gunsels, by using it, and they WILL use it, gladly.

So, Barry, mah mayn, I gotta say: HAPPY FUCKING NEW YEAR, and thanks a fucking LOT! Ya done us AGAIN, you cheap-jack, punk-ass tool.