At the Crow’s Laugh Inn
Dancers strobe by the bar
The electric body pulses
As the dealer smokes his fat cigar
Crow’s Laugh was founded in 1784
With ale and lager and wine
Now men hold each other
And form a chorus line
King George was the object
Of that ancient corvid’s scorn
Now women watch each other
Slow dance into the morn
Soon, the crow will be laughing
At another madman’s fall —
You’ll see my body moving
On the floor with the lovers all
Not with your lifestyle;
Not with your hairstyle;
Not with who you love
nor even with who you hate.
Not with your worship
or lack of worship of nobodaddy.
Not with your wife or husband
or lack of mate.
Just take some warm water,
some strong winds, and add
some flat terrain.
So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, Caesars and Napoleons will duly rise and make them miserable.
– Aldous Huxley
The Gun is my protector; I shall not want.
It lays waste to my enemy,
makes him lay down in bloody fields.
It troubles the waters.
It restores my manhood;
it proves I am right,
and none deny me for fear of its wrath.
Yes, my enemies shall know the valley
the valley of the shadow of death;
for I am the angel of death.
I shall fear no evil;
for I carry my Gun always,
its trigger and hammer are with me always.
I prepare a table before my enemies,
I anoint my head with oil;
my goblet overflows with no mercy.
Surely no one will follow me;
goodness and mercy shall give me wide passage;
and I will sleep with my Gun forever.
As translated by the NRA
“Hell, yeah, I'd kill Hitler!” says Jeb! Although he admits this thought experiment could have unintentional consequences, he's sure it's the right thing to do. I wonder if this nominally Roman Catholic anti-abortion activist has really thought it through.
The obvious implication is you're willing to kill any baby who might grow up to be a notorious mass murderer. Why stop with Adolf? How 'bout Charlie Manson? Or Ted Bundy? Or Jeb's! brother? His brother's notorious VP?
Maybe we could kill all babies born to impoverished mothers who have divorced and remarried a brute.
Who gets to choose?
One last thought: Why is it no one considers killing Mussolini as a baby?
A straw vote only shows which way the hot air blows.
– O. Henry, short-story writer (11 Sep 1862-1910)
I think this also applies to recent polls which suggest a certain blow-hard is trending ever upward.
To argue with a person who has renounced the use of reason is like administering medicine to the dead
Thomas Paine
A Founding Father, predicting the level of discourse on most social media sites.
In view of the Supreme Court recent ruling on "buffer zones", I'm thinking about harassing people as they enter gun shops. Call ’em kid killers.
Anyone care to join me?
The following are notes from a presentation given by Krista Tippett, the host of "On Being", on April 8, 2014, at the Mayflower Congregational Church in Oklahoma City, OK. These notes are a reflection of what impressed me in her presentation, and are not expected to be an accurate representation of what she said.
We need to make a distinction between public life and political life. The word “civility” is inadequate, for it seems too demure, prim and proper; but it's better than “tolerance,” the word much in favor from the 60s. Tolerance is passive; what is needed is an active engagement with, and acceptance of, our fellow terrestrial travelers.
We find the big questions of the 20th century are being re-imagined for the 21st century; e.g., marriage, beginning of life, etc.
This requires the reformation of all institutions
The most needed innovation is to recognize how our individual vulnerability is linked with others on the planet (all beings, all creation)
Anxiety about change in public life looks like anger (especially via "news" media) rather than fear.
The next needed innovation is to be conversational entrepreneurs; to see conversation as means to seek shared values rather than means to persuade, to win. This will plant seeds of the civil society we long for.
They met when the blush was on the rose.
Sam's voice was strong; his hands soft as stone;
he was gentle; he was kind. His heart was fire.
Sara was laughter generous as water.
When the bottom fell out, it fell hard,
hard as hands on bluing flesh.
Miriam lived in the delight of flesh
and honored the passion of the rose.
John loved the feel of wood, hard
yet warm. Who knew when stone
consumed his heart, when she became water
who could not quench his fire?
Barry lived for the honest fire,
Mara wore the brands on her flesh.
Her dark wounds flowed like water.
His dark hand fell on the rose;
his dark face became a stone.
Her body, once so soft, became hard.
The night Julie fled was hard:
when she left, his bed was on fire;
but she had set her face to stone.
She brought her daughter, flesh of her flesh:
her light, her guide, her rose,
whose face reflected hers like water.
Janet left, then returned, like water:
returned, where love was daemon hard,
where petals were stripped from the rose.
She returned, but left again — fire
in her feet, in her hands, in her flesh,
and in her eyes. But her heart — stone.
It's been years since the bruising stone
fell upon her face of water.
Sam was the dagger to her flesh.
Sara ran, though it was hard;
she ran through the night, like fire,
to the healing path, the path to the rose:
The compass rose is the central stone;
the border is hidden fire, the path like water:
flowing hard, healing spirit and the flesh.
Norway's prime minister [Stoltenberg] struck a defiant tone Wednesday, saying the response to twin attacks that have rocked his country will be "more democracy."...Or, to quote the Sage of Baltimore (H.L. Mencken): "The cure for the evils of democracy is more democracy."
Stoltenberg said that extremist views are legitimate in a democracy but implementing them violently is not.
Dave Collins
March 23rd I awoke to a deluge of reports and op-ed pieces proclaiming the “historic” victory for the forces of democracy and the well being of the 90% of men, women, and children in the United States that own less than 30% of its wealth. The passage by a vote of 219 to 212 of this glorious reform legislation has been seized on and is being celebrated by a great many of Democrats, “progressives,” “liberals,” “leftists,” and the majority of the pundits who purport to represent those political segments of this nation.
Makes me want to puke.
For me, what has just transpired at the hand of the President and the actions of Congress, and all the blather that has followed, is testimony to how pathetically distant this nation is from either a democratic republic or a humane society.
Please consider just a few of what, appears to me, to be obvious facts. First, and most obviously, this nation will continue to stand alone in the world of so-called developed nations (and most “developing” ones). We are the only one where the only way for the vast majority of the public under age 65 to seek financial protection from the ever rising costs of health care is by paying money to a private corporation required by law to put profit above all other concerns. But wait, “health care reform” goes one better; it makes it a federal crime to decline to purchase one of these “products.”
The revelers protest, “Well, our heroes made sure those health insurance corporations can’t turn you down for a pre-existing condition.” Whoopee! They forget to mention that there does not appear to be a single word that prevents those for-profit insurance companies from jacking the rates on all us poor slobs unfortunate enough not to make it all the way to the grave without some chronic illness. See, here in Texas , I get to buy insurance in spite of my “pre-existing condition.” No sweat. I get coverage, though with an astronomical deductible, severe limitation on how much reimbursed care I can get in one year and – drum roll, rim shot – by state law the corporation must charge me twice the prevailing market rate for that coverage, regardless of how much or little use I make of my “insurance.” Of course, all the taxpayers in Texas get the opportunity to kick in a few bucks for some hidden and mysterious subsidy paid by the state to the insurer as a bribe to “only” charge me that double rate. Sweet deal. Probably see more of that now.
“Yeah, but the President cut a deal with the health care industries and they are going to drive out a whole bunch of cost over the next 10 years,” protest the celebrating pundits and their acolytes. Oh. Was that deal recorded in the legislation with harsh fines and penalties if they fail to deliver? [Nope] But hey, we can trust those good profit hungry folks to keep their word. Wink, wink,
“Look, Rome wasn’t built in a day; this is a first step and soon we’ll be in the land of milk, honey and single-payer coverage,” protest the cheerleaders for the victorious team. Riiiiight. When we are offered examples of how this wonderful incremental approach has delivered the goods in the past, it seems the examples have all exceeded their “sell-by dates” by a few decades. News flash. The reason the only thing that could be squeezed out of Congress is a massive corporate give away cloaked by faux reform is that when incrementalism worked in the past, corporations did not own both political parties. They do now. Stay tuned; the mighty Supremes (not the ones from Motown) made it sooo much easier for Big Pharma and Big Insurance and Big Hospitals and Big Banks and all the rest of the Too Big to Fail Gang to simply buy their politicians outright without the bother of all the silly games. Games like the executives paying themselves bonuses they then use to fund their contributions to their corporate PACs; the cover story [currently] required to make the deal go down. Yeah, no sweat, it’s all gonna get better, don’t you know.
So, the for-profit insurance companies now have a federally enforced monopoly (very literally since in some areas one corporation controls as much as 80% of the market [e.g., Blue Cross in Oklahoma and California]). Repeal of the federal law allowing that literal monopoly was once a topic of reform promises and fevered discussion. Hear about that lately? Didn’t think so.
What about the underlying cost of health care? We never see much in the papers or on TV about how the US compares to the rest of the world in cost per person for health care. Once the watered down, likely DOA in the marketplace “public option” was stricken from the “debate,” so was any remaining discussion of the fact that a person here pays a whole lot more than a person in any of those other countries. You know, the ones with the demon socialized medicine. In some cases we pay twice as much. And, across the board, by every accepted measure, those folks in the other countries are healthier. So, what is the program to attack that little problem? Well, we have that promise from the corporations, the one with no teeth. And then we have…squat.
Just a couple more.
Are you on Medicare? Well, one slight-of-hand maneuver that is part of the historic reform is to find money in Medicare to offset the costs of subsidies to folks too damn poor to buy those for-profit products.
Congress and the President do not intend to cover all the cost of subsidies by stealing from Medicare. The industry must chip in also. Pharma, health delivery and health insurance corporations will be taxed. Now, how should we assume those corporations will cover the cost of these taxes? Well, they could cut into profits. None starter, huh? Or, they could cut into executive compensation. Sure, two days after hell freezes over. So, about the only remaining option is - jack the price of the product to cover the subsidies. Pretty nifty shell game, ain’t it?
There are other gems in this magnificent work of what the FT. Worth paper called the “Work of Decades” in its above the fold headline. For example, there is what happened to reproductive rights for women. The cheerleaders shout and the audience cheers. In the immortal words of Will Rogers, “The rich get richer, the poor get poorer and poor can always be counted on to help with the job.”
Those cheerleaders for the centrist wing of the Corporatist Party are tossing their pom-poms and shouting the cheers. Their team has scored a touchdown for the team owners. But, the owners know that if the players in our sports metaphor laden excuse for a political process ain’t pounding on one another, we might lose interest and maybe start demanding new bread and new circuses. So, the right wing of the Corporatist Party is busy designing new plays and the cheer squad is practicing new cheers and the game goes on. Meanwhile, us suckers just keep paying and dying, but we do neither quite so fast as the insurance companies would prefer.
Sorry. Gotta run, I feel the dry heaves coming on.
Unlike the Koreans, and some other Asian cultures, we do not say a child
is one year old when she is born. An infant's age is calculated,
initially, by the number of minutes and hours it survives. In short
order, the parents start counting days, then months. An infant is not
one year old until she has actually lived a year. Once a child is
verbal, he may insist on marking half way points - "I'm two and a half!"
- but he won't make this distinction until about half a year has passed.
So, this gives us one more year to consider what to call this passing
decade. I heard one commentator on Fresh Air suggest "the naughty
aughts", though he did not explain why the past nine years were so
"naughty". It seem to me less "naughty" than "the roaring 20s", when
most people in the US were breaking the law drinking illegal booze.
I think "the aughts" work just fine, although the word seems
anachronistic. I think it works because it is a homophone for "ought",
and we can consider what opportunities were missed, what things we as
individuals and as a nation would do differently.
In the words of the 1928 Book of Common Prayer, "we have left undone
those things which we ought to have done; and we have done those things
which we ought not to have done".
For example, in hindsight? We ought not have invaded Iraq. Warrantless
wiretaps ought not have happened. Oil companies ought not have been
allowed to draw up energy policy. Rendition of terrorism suspects to be
tortured may carry a certain cromagnon vengeful satisfaction, but it is
contrary to our claimed moral code.
We ought to have pursued Osama and his cronies into the mountains. We
ought to have had stronger regulations on banks and the financial
markets. We ought to have stiven to resolve the conflict between
Palestinians and Israelis without showing favor for either side.
It may seem I am picking on a particular presidential administration,
but that is the administration that has held power since 2000. I can
list a few for Pres. Obama - drug companies ought not draft health care
policy behind closed doors. Small banks need money more than big
financial institutions or the big three car manufacturers. The District
of Columbia ought to be allowed to determine who can marry within its
borders. The government ought to be truly laize faire regarding a
woman's "right to choose" - neither promoting nor hindering her access
to abortion.
I have my own oughts and ought nots - but most are too private to share
in this public space. I invite you to consider your own. It is a proper
time to consider how we might yet accomplish those things we "ought to
have done" in the year to come.
