Author: Brian

From the LATimes, a story of our grand human family.

“George is the name my mother gave me,” he said.

Billy Goat has hiked more than 32,000 miles — which would have taken him around the world and a third of the way again. He has walked across the South and the Southwest, the Northeast and the West. He has crossed the Rocky Mountains on four occasions, twice in each direction. He has conquered the so-called triple crown of American hiking — the Appalachian, Continental Divide and Pacific Crest trails — multiple times.

He has a wife, his third, and a home in Nevada. That is where George, the 69-year-old retired railroad worker, would live if Billy Goat cared to be George. Billy Goat lives more than 10 months of the year outdoors, drinking unfiltered water from streams, eating vacuum-sealed meals he prepares himself, sleeping under the stars without a tent. He carries what he needs in a backpack weighing less than 10 pounds.

“I’m not on vacation. I’m not out for a weekend,” he said, settling in for the night under a fire-scarred tree next to a gurgling creek and surrounded by the rugged granite outcroppings of the Dome Land Wilderness. “This is where I live. When you do that, all the other trappings of life fade away.”

Coders at Mozilla are in the news because Firefox 3 seems to have set a World Record for downloads in 24 hours. Coders at Google, Facebook, Twitter are in the news because, well, they’re coding. Microsoft is in the news usually defending corporate policy, continuing dominance through acquisitions and monopoly, and general conniving.

We’re accustomed to Windows and many are impressed, though I’ve always felt it’s akin to a dump truck in the 1930s, important and useful and uncomfortable and not truly improved until the 1980s.

When you have time, this will take some weight off your shoulders, seeing that Windows/Microsoft is as kludged as we’ve been ranting about for years. I know I’m not alone in this thinking.

I enjoyed this link:

The “Enron Loophole” that Gramm and McBush took through Congress has truly cost our nation.

Part of the rapid spike of costs recently is the runaway activity of Wall Street – subprime, food commodity and oil prices – that’s aided by Phil Gramm’s and John MCain’s Commodities Futures Modernization Act that stopped regulation of electronic trading.

Obama is acting to close this loophole fast. [news search]

These days, radical jingoist Texas Senator Phil Gramm is the ‘economic brain’ of McBush.

Awhile ago both he and McCain were implicated in America’s largest bankruptcy, the much too forgotten fall of Enron. It was the year 2000 when Enron – “with Gramm’s wife Wendy serving on its board of directors” – was found criminally pushing up electricity costs in California while hoping to rescue itself from cash collapse.

Consortium News published a report on these shenanigans May 19, 2008.

It’s tough to look behind the scenes to learn what seasoned politicians can do with slogans that favor their buddies and shape our opinion rather than reveal the truth.

McBush is stumping for extra billions to pipeline into the coffers of energy giants while, typically, he cuts away at the Farm Bill and many other domestic programs and incentives, because, they say, Phil Gramm is against introducing any “regulatory language” that will spill onto market traders.

It can be done. We can do it. All things can be better.

Up and down the Big Muddy, the Federal Emergency Management Agency is being commended for responding quickly and surely.

“The lessons we learned from Katrina we’ve taken very seriously,” said Glenn Cannon, FEMA assistant administrator for disaster operations.

“We’ve changed the way we do business.

“We don’t wait to react.” [NewsVine]

Seventy-One Percent Say Corporate America Is “Poor” [Harris Poll]

Top 10

1) Google
2) Johnson & Johnson
3) Intel
4) General Mills
5) Kraft
6) Berkshire Hathaway
7) 3M
8) Coca-Cola
9) Honda
10) Microsoft

10 Worst

10) DaimlerChrysler
9) General Motors Corporation
8) ChevronTexaco Corporation
7) Ford
6) Sprint
5) Comcast
4) Exxon
3) Northwest Airlines
2) Citgo
1) Halliburton

Bush has slashed the proposed public broadcasting budget by 56 percent.

Initiative 1000 [pdf],

The proposed Death With Dignity Act

“When death is inevitable, we shouldn’t force people to endure agonizing suffering if we don’t have to,” says Former Gov. Booth Gardner.

“We have all made tough decisions throughout our lives, and we should be trusted to make tough decisions about the end of life. It’s about autonomy, personal choice and respect. I was in control of my life.

“I should be allowed to be in control of my death.” [LA Times]

---

Update:

Washington State is moving ahead with a Death With Dignity Initiative, and these are humane steps. Their link is It’s My Decision.

an open web’s firefox filosophy:

If Mozilla stepped into the movement building game, it would clearly have a head start: 170 million people who use Firefox and a killer track record building community.

However, there is also a critical piece missing: the ability to help large numbers (millions?) of people make the shift from being a consumer to being contributor. Not contributors to Mozilla Project code. Or even to documentation or marketing. Rather, imagine 170 million contributors to the project of making the open web stronger, better understood and more resilient. This would be very cool movement indeed.

Roger Williams is a founder too. The 1680 Massachusetts colony agreed they should design any flag they wanted and, “without exception, they removed the cross from their flags.”

This is the first de facto Massachusetts flag, red with a white canton.

The 1780 Seal of the State of Massachusetts carried the inscription:

Ense petit placidam sub libertate quietem

By the sword we seek peace, but peace only under liberty

[link] [link]

I left a comment at Daniel Burka’s Delta Tango Bravo saying that early flags say so much about the founding of America, but we let creepy pundits and politicians argue until we forget the dedication and strength and hope under these flags.

Flags teach.

This 1816 flag is the oldest flag in Canada.

The Supreme Court granted the right of habeas corpus to detainees in Guantanamo Bay.

John McCain said this is “one of the worst decisions in the history of this country.”

Detention without being charged. Isolation without rights or advocates. Torture. Are these good decisions?

McCain says combatants should not be given the status granted to citizens; “These are enemy combatants, these are people who are not citizens, they are not and never have been given the rights that the citizens of this country have,” he said. “Our first obligation is the safety and security of this nation and the men and women who defend it. This decision will harm our ability to do that.”

I wouldn’t want America harmed nor its forces weakened, but a candidate for President surely must show more than this simplistic view of power. Where’s his vigor and gumption and ambition to solve challenges rather than bellyache to the choir?

McCain offers nothing but pandering, citing “unaccountable judges” at the Supreme Court and mongering that we are about “to be overwhelmed” with cases from detainees.

We have let little men argue small things.

Habeas Corpus is a fundamental thing, only to determine the legality of imprisonment. Where’s the threat McCain trumpets? A qualified candidate would seek to provide this to all the earth!

A new procedure to deter and hold suspects while affirming the humanity of our nation can be developed, perhaps under the judiciary or combined with the military.

Failure to prove our care for dignity and to eagerly seek to protect the innocent has damaged us very much around the world.

We must be proud that we are a civil nation too.

The difference between analysis and ideology:

Obama has said he admires Doris Kearns Goodwin’s wonderful Lincoln biography, Team of Rivals. “He talks about it all the time,” says a top aide. He is particularly intrigued by the notion that Lincoln assembled all the Republicans who had run against him for President in his war Cabinet, some of whom disagreed with him vehemently and persistently. “The lesson is to not let your ego or grudges get in the way of hiring absolutely the best people,” Obama told me. “I don’t think the American people are fundamentally ideological. They’re pragmatic … and so I have an interest in casting a wide net, seeking out people with a wide range of expertise, including Republicans,” for the highest positions in his government. [TIME]

Trends in Japan is an English language new product blog in Tokyo.

It astounds me how many variations are fitted into the Hello Kitty brand, how many sculptures are made from food; there’s a vending machine for an electric car!

It’s time to throw away a drawer full of ‘Approved’ & ‘Top Secret’ stamps….

link to Rubberized Emotion.

More upside-down culture & costs:

An analysis of autopsies in 2007 released this week by the Florida Medical Examiners Commission found that the rate of deaths caused by prescription drugs was three times the rate of deaths caused by all illicit drugs combined. [spotted at Dvorak]

Oh, what we gonna do?

Wonder Drugs That Can Kill by Jeanne Lenzer

Drugmakers: Prepare for a Smackdown by Linda Marsa

Long article about possible shifts in Terrorist fundamental belief though it’s a long time we might wait:

Fadl was one of the first members of Al Qaeda’s top council. Twenty years ago, he wrote two of the most important books in modern Islamist discourse; Al Qaeda used them to indoctrinate recruits and justify killing.

Now Fadl was announcing a new book, rejecting Al Qaeda’s violence. “We are prohibited from committing aggression, even if the enemies of Islam do that,” Fadl wrote in his fax, which was sent from Tora Prison, in Egypt. [from Kottke]

With respect to those who fight for us, but with heavy argument against torture, I’m sad to see our nation blemished not by wit but mere zeal:

The Associated Press
WASHINGTON (AP) – The Pentagon in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks pursued abusive interrogation techniques once used by North Korea and Vietnam on American POWs despite stern warnings by several military lawyers that the methods were cruel….

The ‘origin of harsh methods’ mustn’t be the USA, but that’s not the way it seems:

Update of Senate Hearings at IHT: Mark Fallon, the deputy commander of the Criminal Investigation Task Force at Guantánamo, wrote “Someone needs to be considering how history will look back at this.”

McClatchy newspapers prepared a series called ‘Beyond The Law’ that looks deeply into how torture became accepted practice.

An eight-month McClatchy investigation of the detention system created after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks has found that the U.S. imprisoned innocent men, subjected them to abuse, stripped them of their legal rights and allowed Islamic militants to turn the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba into a school for jihad.

McClatchy investigations are thorough:
WASHINGTON — The Army general who led the investigation into prisoner abuse at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison accused the Bush administration Wednesday of committing “war crimes” and called for those responsible to be held to account.

The remarks by Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba, who’s now retired, came in a new report that found that U.S. personnel tortured and abused detainees in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, using beatings, electrical shocks, sexual humiliation and other cruel practices.

“After years of disclosures by government investigations, media accounts and reports from human rights organizations, there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes.” [empahasis added]

Worry is such a veneer, worse when it’s pumped to sell media. Here’s a thought:

Kevin Surace: Our mission is to reduce CO2 output by a billion tons per year, three percent of all the CO2 produced by mankind. We can do it because the built environment is the play. 52% of all CO2 comes from building: 40% for heating and cooling buildings, and 12% for construction. Nobody wants to do anything about it; I was at the Fortune Brainstorm Green Conference and all anyone wanted to talk about is cars and fuel, when the biggies are cement, metal, glass and drywall.

We are all in the same boat on a stormy sea, and we owe to each other a terrible loyalty. – G. K. Chesterton

Reading from a liveJournal blog, elf_awareness:

Trees
Trees slow fireworks
brown and green
my bones fleshy
condensation
sinews winding with the sun
dreaming with the moon
wordless grammar of groves
and lexicons of sinews

But this is what I was thinking.

Condensing
Trees slow fire
grammar of groves
winding with the sun

Bones slow flesh
lexicon of sinew
dreaming with the moon

I read “Trees slow fireworks” and stopped. I skipped to “fleshy condensation” and stopped. Halted now, I reached “grammar of groves” and stopped. There we are then. Pictures. Distilled. After a long good breath, I can only salute elf awareness. Yo!

Huh. Election Fraud News

The Money Party Series

The Money Party (1). The Essence of Our Political Troubles
The Money Party (2). Lousy Leaders and How to Get Rid of Them
The Money Party (3). Big Lies that You Must Believe

The Money Party (4) Money Party to Citizens: Drop Dead!
The Money Party (5) “Us versus Them” New

Violation of War Crimes Act…. Oh, it goes on and on:

Jason Leopold: Rumsfeld Personally Approved Brutal Interrogations

Kishore Mahbubani says, “I try to distinguish between modernization and Westernization.

“They are not the same thing at all. The paradox that the West hasn’t grasped yet is that you have modernization and de-Westernization taking place at the same time. That is something that doesn’t fit the Western mindset. For them, modernization can only be Westernization.

…
“There is a kind of new cosmopolitan global personality emerging….”

Did you know obituaries are “often more fact filled than things published during someone’s lifetime and sometimes reveal key information that open up whole new areas of inquiry”?

Think about it here, Discovering the dead.

Bill Moyers with Holly Sklar about earning a living:

“Adjusting for inflation, average wages are lower than they were in the 1970s. Our minimum wage, adjusting for inflation, is lower than it was in the 1950s. One of the things going on is that income and wealth inequality have gone back to the 1920s. We are back at levels that we saw right before the Great Depression.”

The American Dream In Reverse?

I’ve just watched this Moyers’ interview and recommend it highly to “calibrate” your view of our economy, brush away propaganda, bugger illusion, and get on with it.

world entertainment news – Thursday, June 12 02:35 pm [Yahoo UK. time deprived link]

Dr. Drew Pinsky “unprofessional” and “unqualified”.

Pinsky, who is a regular on the US reality show, has written an article for Playboy magazine suggesting Cruise might be mentally ill for getting involved with the Church of Scientology. The medical expert also claims the Top Gun star may have suffered some kind of childhood trauma.

He writes: “Why would somebody be drawn into a cultish kind of environment like Scientology? To me, that’s a function of a very deep emptiness and suggests serious neglect in childhood – maybe some abuse, but mostly neglect.”

But Cruise’s attorney, Bert Fields, has slammed the article – insisting Pinsky’s analysis is absurd.

He tells the New York Post’s gossip column PageSix, “This unqualified television performer who is obviously just looking for notoriety is so grotesquely unprofessional as to pretend to diagnose Tom and others without ever meeting them.

“He seems to be spewing the absurdity that all Scientologists are mentally ill. The last time we heard garbage like this was from (Nazi propaganda chief) Joseph Goebbels.”

We are excessively technocratic these days.

I don’t think our ideas about governing are either accurate or important. As if Pavlov/Skinner took our imagination, we now have decades of policies to repair our failing, until Nash just threw up his hands and called it Game. Years on, results suck.

We like to think our tricks of reward or repetition or reprogramming is sophisticated. We like to think we grew beyond ordinary snarling or swatting. But decades later, no one points to great success building behavior or fixing habits or keeping peace. Sell the billboards back to sloganeers.

We may be more easy than that. There’s no formula to manage us. We corrupt ourselves if secret. We solve if challenged. We heal if among.

R. D. Laing was on to it when he said we are best free, unencumbered, amidst ourselves.

“We can work it out” is a heartfelt truth.

The belief and fashion of intervention has hurt us, methinks. We’re not so poorly human that we require so much to repair us.

To make better progress, just give and be together. Community will solve us.