how is "pollution" not "terrorism?"

LE BOURGET, France (AP) — Talks on a universal climate pact shifted to a higher gear Monday with U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon urging governments to set off an "energy revolution" to rein in heat-trapping carbon emissions and avert disastrous global warming.

Simultaneously, in Beijing,

[BBC] Schools in Beijing are to close and outdoor construction to stop after the Chinese capital issued its first "red alert" over smog levels.

The red alert is the highest possible, and has not been used in the city before, the state-run Xinhua news agency says.

Authorities expect more than three consecutive days of severe smog.

Cars with odd and even number plates will be banned from driving on alternate days.

And, all-but simultaneously in the United States,

President Barack Obama on Sunday laid out the most sweeping defense yet of his strategy to defeat Islamic State, but he offered no U.S. policy shift to confront what he called a "new phase" in the terrorist threat after a mass shooting in California.

With the word "terrorism"infiltrating increasing numbers of nooks and crannies of the social consciousness, I wonder at what point analysts and alarm-ringers will get around to the notion that pollution is terrorism.

On the one hand, how is it not terrorism when pollution affects swaths of human beings and probably has a hand in slaughtering them. On the other hand, of course, declaring pollution to be a very concrete, if subtle, form of terrorism would call into question the income streams of those bathed in wealth and power.

Death has always been a price the wealthy are willing to pay -- your death, not theirs -- but when the sources of their comfort are whittled away by their own forward-looking institutions and industries ... oh dear, what a conundrum.

Beijing all but shut down. Imagine that. All the ideology in the world falls flat on its face.

Pollution as terrorism ... we'll see if anyone has the nerve to float that postulate and then follow the Yellow Brick Road outside the routine whining and knicker-twisting..

my daily irresponsibility

No insufferably sweet kitten or kid...
No intractably self-centered money manager...
No oleaginous intellectual or holy man...
And no inescapably huggable red wood

                       Was harmed in the creation of this blog post.

a statistical anomaly ... not

As I understand it, Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, the man who would come to be known as the Russian dictator Josef Stalin, at one time denied he had said it but later was willing to shoulder the responsibility for the observation that "a single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic."

With a widely-accepted figure of Russian military and civilian deaths at roughly 20 million during World War II, you can sort of see why Stalin, the man who oversaw Russia's efforts during the war,  might adopt the observation as his own. Not-so-widely cited are an estimated 40 million Russian dead during Stalin's wartime tenure.

What is beyond processing or comprehending and yet cannot be eradicated -- as for example, 20 million anything, let alone people -- seems to need a handle that will allow the mind to free itself and move on and convince itself that it cares and has been attentive to the world. It is easy to question and critique the hard-assed Stalin, but, but, but....

What about the personal willingness to wrap up the circumstances life presents and create a portable, supportable format ... a statistic, in short? A quick survey of the number of times anyone says "they" or "them" or "one" or "we" in a day offers ... oops ... a statistical overlay for the topic. It's too prevalent to be called naughty or nice, but it is worth noticing.

And against that backdrop, to the extent that it's true, isn't it also true that individuals are willing to sweat their buns off in pursuit of a single goal -- not to become a statistic; to be something or someone worthy of individual attention and, perhaps, accolade. Statistically, others may die or screw up or be blithely parceled out in a statistical analysis, but my passing or the passing of the ones I love is different and, perhaps, a tragedy. The whispered sense that the universe doesn't give much of a shit is fine for others, but moi? The tragedy lifts its insistent head: No, this life more than an easy-peasy statistic, isn't it? I take myself seriously and the universe damned well ought to as well.

I don't want to be forgotten or minimized. I wonder why. I don't want to be "just another" anything and yet the evidence hardly supports any other appreciation. I seem bound to become someone else's statistic and, after all the effort that has gone into this life, I don't like it at all. I am, or work pretty hard at being, a statistical anomaly.

Statistics are toneless, tasteless and flat whereas one life is as full of music and juice and horror and meaning as a green grape exploding between the back molars.

Strange how it is impossible to compass the truth that every statistic is a person; people are important; and yet statistics become an inescapable resting place.

OK, I'll be your statistic if you'll be mine. Someone, even if it's just some number-crunching statistician, needs grist for the mill.

Let's enjoy our grapes and try to remember that just because anyone is indispensable to the universe does not mean the universe needs his or her help.

police and the law

My email chum and fellow columnist -- and, oh yes, did I mention ACLU lawyer? -- Bill Newman wrote what follows in today's Daily Hampshire Gazette. Since I agree with him, I thought I might give the piece a minuscule bump here:

NORTHAMPTON — Consider Chicago. There on a city street, police officer Jason Van Dyke shot 17-year-old Laquan McDonald 16 times — in the chest, back, neck and head — mostly while the teen was lying on the pavement. This was a cold-blooded execution.

Hard to believe? Go watch the video, the Chicago police dashcam recording. fter the shooting, city officials engaged in a conspiracy of silence for 13 months. But a judge ordered the video released and this past week, the day before the release, the state charged the cop with first degree murder.

Why was the video suppressed? Why was the public’s right to know so blatantly ignored and discarded? Aren’t police officers public officials subject to the same disclosures and bound by the same legal rules and standards that apply to all other public officials?

In 2000, in our brief to the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, my ACLU colleagues and I argued that police officers indeed were public officials. The officer in the defamation case claimed to the contrary that he was not a public official or a public figure but merely a private individual employed by a governmental entity.

Our side won. The unanimous decision noted “the broad powers vested in police officers and the great potential for abuse of those powers ... in areas impinging most directly and intimately on daily living (including) the sidewalks and the streets.”

Abuse of this important public office, the court stated, “can result in significant deprivation of constitutional rights and personal freedoms, not to mention bodily injury ....” The court was swayed in part by “police officers’ high visibility within and impact on a community” and concluded that law enforcement, including patrol-level police officers, are public officials.

You might have thought that after this decision law enforcement in Massachusetts (as in Illinois and almost every other state), cognizant of their status as public officials, would not try to block the public’s right to know about their public job activity performed in a public place.

But you would be wrong.

In 2011, when Simon Glick videotaped Boston police officers using excessive force as they arrested a young man on the Boston Common, the cops busted him. Those criminal charges quickly were thrown out of court. But when Glick, also represented by the ACLU, sued the police, they asserted as their defense that no one had a firmly established constitutional right to video-record them.

The federal courts emphatically rejected that argument. There is in fact a constitutional right to record cops as Glick had, and that right is well established.

The Glick decision emphasized the pinnacle on which the law places the public’s right to be informed about law enforcement activities. That right is grounded in the public’s legitimate and significant “interest in the responsible exercise of the discretion granted police .....” 

Unfortunately, some municipal officials still believe that they enjoy the right, an entitlement of their power, to try to bury information about the most public of public officials — the police.

When keeping the public in the dark they almost always employ a subterfuge or have an excuse. Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel claims, for example, that he didn’t want to interfere with an investigation.

Here’s reality. The dashcam video would have remained buried forever if not for lawyers and journalists having been tipped off to its existence. The video, if released before the election, would have further ripped apart Emanuel’s already tattered reputation in the black community and threatened his re-election. The video was kept under lock and key until long after the votes were counted. Emanuel is supposedly a liberal Democrat — you know, the kind of official who allegedly believes in official honesty and transparency, often referred to as government in the sunshine. Well, apparently not so much.

Don’t discount the importance of institutional racism. If the victim had been white, do you think that municipal officials would have, or could have, engaged successfully in this conspiracy of silence that went on month after month after month?

When a public official — whether elected or appointed — allows, condones or facilitates hiding significant information about alleged or apparent police misconduct, the public and our system of laws and government pay a high price. Such non-disclosure vividly demonstrates a lack of transparency and honesty. It undermines faith both in government and those officials, a fact which sadly too often doesn’t deter them or make them honor the public’s right to know.

Christian students urged to arm themselves

Nuff said:

LYNCHBURG, Va. (AP) -- The president of Liberty University is urging students at the Christian school to carry concealed weapons on the Virginia campus following the mass shooting in San Bernardino, California.

President Jerry Falwell Jr.'s call for an armed campus was greeted by applause at a Friday night convocation on the Lynchburg campus.

The News & Advance (http://bit.ly/1Na9kYd) reports that Falwell encouraged students to take a free class to obtain a permit to carry a concealed weapon offered by the campus police department.

He said, "Let's teach them a lesson if they ever show up here."

Falwell said it "just blows my mind" that President Barack Obama called for more gun control laws.

Liberty was founded by the Rev. Jerry Falwell Sr., who also launched the Moral Majority.

Meanwhile, in a first of its kind in 95 years, the New York Times published a front-page editorial today calling for stricter gun crontrol:

"It is a moral outrage and a national disgrace that civilians can legally purchase weapons designed specifically to kill people with brutal speed and efficiency," said the editorial.
The opinion piece also slammed elected leaders "whose job it is to keep us safe but who place a higher premium on the money and political power of an industry dedicated to profiting from the unfettered spread of ever more powerful firearms."

union wins a small victory

Once they fought battles in which police were liberally employed to stem the tide of workers' rights, unions and any other such Unamerican activities. It took a bit of sacrifice and a lot of blood before the 40-hour work week and other concessions were wrung from the oh-so-American captains of industry in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Once they became powerful, the unions overshot their mark and dwindled until today membership is about 11.3 percent. Even workers these days can scoff at the idea that a union might actually help them.

As commentator E. J. Dionne has noted, the union movement has traditionally espoused a set of values—solidarity being the most important, the sense that each should look out for the interests of all. From this followed commitments to mutual assistance, to a rough-and-ready sense of equality, to a disdain for elitism, and to a belief that democracy and individual rights did not stop at the plant gate or the office reception room. Dionne notes that these values are "increasingly foreign to American culture".

But now, perhaps, there is a turning of the screw: From no unions to powerful unions to few-if-any unions, now again the need for a communal voice -- even one dubbed socialist or anti-capitalist or anti-American -- has gotten a small boost.

The United Auto Workers union won its first organizing vote at a foreign-owned auto assembly plant in the U.S. South on Friday, in a groundbreaking victory after decades of failed attempts.

Will this small victory herald other victories to come? Will the captains of capitalist industry be chastened in their rush to demean unions through their surrogate Republican representatives? Will workers gather up their courage that is not supported by a vast disposable income and risks the pay-check-to-pay-check existence that many of them live?

I don't know. But I do know I am glad to see the pendulum swing.

But then, be it said, I was raised on Pete Seeger and the Almanac Singers ... as for example in this straightforward bit of union agitation ... Talking Union.

no crime inspires 2-week jail term

JACKSON, Miss. (AP) -- A Louisiana woman spent two weeks in jail following a case of mistaken identity.

The Sun Herald (http://bit.ly/1LS5BfR) reports 50-year-old Jacqueline Renell Charles was arrested Nov. 18 during a Louisiana traffic stop after the officer found a warrant for her in Mississippi.

Charles says she was booked and spent one week in a Louisiana jail before being hauled off to another jail in Mississippi.

By Dec. 2, officials realized she wasn't the suspect. Officials say the original defendant had a tattoo that said "Earl" on her arm. Charles, however, has no tattoos. Additionally, the Jackson County District Attorney's Office realized the original suspect's name was Jacqueline Marie Charles and that her birth date and Social Security number did not match those of Jacqueline Renell Charles.

Charles has since returned home.

That's the entire Associated Press brief.

"Ooops" is not an excuse for this sort of inaccuracy. It might be interesting to know if police extended an apology: I'm not sure I'd want to spend a two-week-furlough in jail based on someone else's mistake. Also, although AP doesn't tell me, I wonder if this woman is black (she is). AP too is getting increasingly sloppy: If you can't write a brief, why should I trust you to write something longer ... and if you can''t assure you have arrested the right person (traffic stop) in a two-week time frame, why should anyone trust you for the more weighty crimes?

croc advisories

Tourist photos of a larger, salt-water crocodile eating a smaller, fresh-water relative in Australia gave the BBC an occasion to issue a list of croc warnings... advisories that suggest whatever anyone's worries might be -- from climate change to Donald Trump -- at least they probably don't have to cope with crocs. And you thought you had a problem....?!

• Obey crocodile warning signs and never swim where crocodiles may live.
• Stand back from water's edge while fishing and never stand on logs or branches overhanging water.
• Never dangle arms or legs out of boats.
• Never provoke, harass, feed or interfere with crocodiles, even small ones.
• Camp at least 2m above the high water mark and at least 50m from the water's edge.
• 

Bible Belt loses Bible clout

... Churches are losing their grip on a region where they could long set community standards with a pulpit-pounding sermon or, more subtly, a sideward glance toward someone walking into a liquor store.

Nor, I sense, is this bit-by-bit dwindling limited to the Bible-Belt South. Everywhere, unless I am mistaken, there is a refocusing when it comes to spiritual life. The monolithic father with the upraised and upbraiding forefinger simply does not have the clout, the convincing-ness, the conclusive first or last word.

On the one hand, things fall apart.

On the other, perhaps,

Fuller, the religion professor, said the loss of influence isn't all bad for Southern churches. The idea of churches controlling Southern society is giving way to individuals searching for a deeper faith, he said.

Maybe less-committed from the organizational point of view is more-committed in a serious sense.

PS. And as a bit of cut-the-bullshit evidence, the New York Daily News apparently actually ran this front page today:

"Following the heinous December 2 attack that resulted in the deaths of 14 innocents in San Bernardino, CA, the New York Daily News ran a front-page story mocking GOP presidential hopefuls who prayed to God rather than calling for more gun control."

toss it all out

Hinduism, which is arguably the oldest organized spiritual persuasion in the world, has the good sense to laugh. The laughter is woven into its tapestry of tales and encouragements and, despite the frowns of others, I like it. Just because spiritual life addresses so much self-oriented sorrow and confusion is no reason not to take a break, give it a rest, kick back for five seconds or ten and throw it all out the window like some medieval chamber maid emptying the slop bucket into the sewerless street below ... heads up!

OK ... furrow your brow. Write disquisitions on laughter and point out its flaws. Explain to me why the Bible contains no line saying, "And Jesus laughed." Have a good time. Sure, laughter may be scary, but ... But at my age, with nothing more than a forty-plus-year load of spiritual puppy fat, I hope you will forgive me for thinking: Go fuck yourself! No guts, no blue chips! Laugh.

This morning, this tale, filtered through my imperfect memory banks came back.

Once upon a time, near a certain village, an irascible cobra lived in a field. The villagers wanted to use the field for crops, but the cobra kept them at bay ... they didn't dare challenge the fatally-venomous cobra. One day, a sadhu or monk came to town and the villagers put their desires and fears before him. As a result, the monk went out to the field to consult with the cobra. He knocked on the snake's door and when he came out, the monk told him of the kinder-gentler way to get along in life ... something more compassionate and less selfish. The snake listened and after a while the monk went on his way.

Time passed and then, once again, the monk came for a visit. He could see the field filled now with crops but he wanted to see how the cobra had made out. He knocked on the cobra's door. With great difficulty, the snake came out. He was battered and bruised and not at all happy.

"What happened to you?" the monk asked with concern.

"Well, after you left, I did everything you told me. I was kinder and gentler and didn't bite anyone. After that, they beat me to a pulp."

The monk looked both surprised and a little bit exasperated:

"I told you not to bite," he exclaimed. "I didn't tell you not to hiss."

Some may see this as a tale for spiritual children, but I see it as a tale for spiritual adults: There is plenty of time to wallow in the shadows and sorrows and tears of a confused and sometimes painful lifestyle. Spiritual discipline was conjured as a means of addressing all that. Sometimes it does a pretty good job. And sometimes -- whether the arena is "spiritual" or not -- it really is time to duck and cover if you don't want shit and piss raining down around your shoulders.

Just because I take things seriously does not imply that they are necessarily serious.

Toss it all out every once in a while. Don't worry -- there's plenty more where that came from.

emphasis and enjoyment

Maybe ....

The point is not emphasis.

The point is enjoyment.

I may not yet be grown-up enough for that possibility, but it rolls around on my mind's tongue like a hard candy.

insisting on what is not true

No doubt there are a hundred others like them, but two that occur to me at the moment are:

A LIFE INSURANCE POLICY, that relies for its existence on what it refuses to name, namely death.

and

THE DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE, which likewise refuses to name what it gaily promotes, namely war. (The "War Department" had a healthy and more forthright run from 1789 to 1947. The "Department of Defense" became the new moniker in 1949.)

Lesser luminaries include the latter-day "issue" to replace the blunt-force-trauma of a "problem" and the always-soothing "procedure" to stand in for an "operation."

Yes, Virginia, it's true: Shit doesn't stink.

doors to the future

Passed along in email:

computer literacy

Backed by technology leaders, nonprofits and companies, schools in New York, San Francisco and other cities have committed to offer computer science to students in all grade levels. Chicago also says computer science will eventually become a high school requirement.

I concede that computer literacy is likely to be a sine qua non of the future. For better or worse, it strikes me as a fact and I would like to think kids would not be deprived. I further concede that I am sluggish with age.

But I still want to know what these children can accomplish when the electricity goes off. Can they tie a square knot, add/subtract/multiply/divide, skin a rabbit, dress a wound, skip, suss out a snake-oil salesman, change a flat, write a small poem, or know the satisfaction of a spit ball? What built-in skills will they have when they are unattended and empty-handed?

It may all sound hopelessly antiquated and backward-leaning until anyone does in fact lose the electricity. Isn't this important? I think it is -- not in some excluding or elevated sense (computers-bad-common-sense-good) but rather in the sense that, with or without electricity, everyone would like to be happy and happiness, as often as not, requires a few tools.

What are things like when anyone stops relying on something else?

boats with skeletal passengers

"Fishing boats carrying decomposed corpses have washed ashore in Japan in recent weeks, leading to speculation they are rickety North Korean vessels that have strayed dangerously far from port under the impoverished nation's push to boost its catch."

burnishing the worm hole

Shakespeare, among others, put his finger on it: "The truth will out." Eventually, with drips and drops or tsunami-like force, a new appreciation of what may be or have been a wracking situation shape-shifts and becomes more complete or honest or something.

But since the point at which the truth comes out refers to a situation now past, I wonder at its usefulness: In a knee-jerk way, I think it is useful, but less reflexively, I'm not entirely sure. Saying it has no use opens the door to more obfuscation and lying; saying it has a decisive usefulness -- "healing" or "closure" or some such -- hardly scratches the surface.

Everyone seems willing to burnish his or her own chosen worm hole, the not-quite-so-delicious aspects of one apple or another.

The U.S. invaded Iraq based on faulty intelligence, but once committed, the tale was burnished. "Collateral damage" is so much nicer than children ripped to shreds. In Paris, heavy-hitters have gathered to address climate change on the same day Beijing is elbow-deep in a coal-inspired, soupy smog that betokens a red-hot economy.

And then, of course, there are individual bits of spin-doctoring and facile forgiveness based on an outcome that makes "it" all worthwhile, whatever "it" may be. Yes, I have done cruel and irresponsible things, but just look at the good parts that likewise evolved. Five thousand, six hundred and nine people died of disease and accident in the course of building the Panama Canal that opened in 1914. A lot of deaths ... but a marvel of engineering and commerce and many of those who died were brown and besides, it's all in the past.

From the 1960's to the present, the Zen exponent Eido Shimano was dogged and chastised and defended in a sandstorm that accused him of thoughtless affairs with his vulnerable students and, peripherally, with some financial hi-jinks that have yet to be addressed. Through it all, like the Vatican's subtle and not-so-subtle sidestepping of its pedophile-priest scandal, Shimano implicitly denied all wrong-doing and sought to maintain a burnished persona. There were people who had been badly shaken -- vulnerable women whose vulnerability made them easy sexual prey.

The critics -- me too -- yowled. Shimano stood fast. The evidence mounted. Shimano stood fast. A lot of the accusations -- like the accusations against the Vatican -- were just too compelling to describe as vindictiveness or high-class gossip. The Shimano Archive collected information and loosened Shimano's purchase on a vaunted persona. Yes there were those unwilling to let him sink into a sea of calumny, but there were also others who were. Still, Shimano never 'fessed up.

Until last Nov 21 at a meeting that Shimano himself orchestrated -- a gathering in New York that he claimed was in search of some healing balm. The fact that such balm might coincidentally restore some of his tattered luster was not the point. He cared. The meeting took place at the All Souls Unitarian Church.

Various raw recordings do not make clear whether the congregation absolved and resurrected a fallen angel -- it was a set piece, but what table it set is not entirely clear: Was this a contrite and more honest Eido Shimano? Were the women he had taken as paramours in any way salved? The questions hovered. I wasn't there so I don't know.

But I do know that for the first time, Eido Shimano said the words he might have said so long ago: "I had many sexual relations with female students." (http://www.shimanoarchive.com/Audio/Shimano%20Apology%20A2.mp3 ... 12.15 mark)

A simple statement. And yet on it hangs years of twisting and turning and discombobulation of the Zen sangha, a no-no in Buddhism. And what does it amount to after all this time? The workers at the Panama Canal are dead. The women harmed by Shimano remain, in many cases, wounded. What price has been paid and what good does this latter-day honesty do?

I'm not trying to minimize, but I can't help but wonder. Cui bono -- who, if anyone, benefits? The truth is easy, somehow, and yet it is also used up and battered and what good does it do? I hope it does some good outside the absolution and resurrection of the man who organized the meeting.

As Dylan Thomas wrote, "Time passes. Listen! Time passes." I favor the best truth anyone can muster. I favor a reduction in the effort to burnish the worm holes, public and private.

I favor ....

But that's just me.

news that 'cares' so much

Grouchy old man alert!

Sometimes it drives me batshit to come into contact with yet another person or entity that "cares so much" and cannot seem to refrain from repeating how much s/he or it 'cares.' This caring is, to hear the excuses given, for my benefit ... it's like some mewling spiritual apologist pretending not to interfere with my lifestyle or convert me in any way while all the time coo-ing sweet nothings in my ear. It's all self-serving hogwash.

Consider the Associated Press, an organization that describes itself as the world's largest news-gathering organization. I read its headlines and occasional stories every morning. And on its index page, the AP has taken to adding something called "10 Things to Know for Today."

Your daily look at late-breaking news, upcoming events and the stories that will be talked about today:

How helpful.

How caring.

How incredibly pablum-esque and self-serving!

Because I am so busy with the twitdom of Twitter or the vacuous facelessness of Facebook, the Associated Press is obviously trying to make my life "easier." Wouldn't like to look like a dummy in conversation, right? I need to keep up with current events if only according to what someone else says. Well, the Associated Press is there to care.

My crabbiness relates to the fact that I think news is important and keeping abreast of your own world is sensible. But popularity is not the point. The point is not to be any stupider than you were in the first place. It may change absolutely nothing to read the news, but it indicates a willingness to take some responsibility and shoulder your own life.

Beliefs and opinions only reach so far. Of course the same can be said for news, but at least news has the potential to inject another point of view ... when it is not, as of late, too busy skipping salient points or selling something. News is not a hand-holding enterprise. Popularity is thin tea.

What I "need to know" is something I can figure out for myself. What I don't need to know is that some ersatz do-gooder is there to lend a caring hand.

incognito in life; 'cognito' in death

Funny how those who once strove and sweat to achieve and maintain the spotlight in life can slip away post mortem and simultaneously those of no particular, flood-lit stature can spring to life after suffering a similar fate.

Case in point:

CANBERRA, Australia (AP) -- A reclusive great-grandson of Russian Tsar Alexander III had a funeral in the northern Australian city of Darwin after living his final years in obscurity and alone with his dog in an Outback trailer park where he was known by locals as Old Nick.

Here's another limping-attempt story to reconstruct what had been so carefully deconstructed in Leonid Gurevich Kulikovsky's lifestyle. He's news now ... what the hell: The Romanovs (the last of the tsars) and the English house of Windsor have family links that go back forever (and I can no longer retail) but as I recall, those links of European royalty make the inbreeding of the American South look positively pristine.

No matter what the links or my faulty memory, still this guy was part of royalty and royalty is definitely on the 'kool' scale of American consciousness ... when it's not busy being excoriated. How could he live with a dog and keep his mouth shut and not capitalize on his roots? What sort of decision-making process went into his low-key life that he seemed to follow with determination? Why won't he be famous for me, preen and strut in that lordly realm that cannot conceive of being ludicrous.

Only his dog knows now.

George V

Alexander III

a kinder, gentler Islamic State

It's a bit thin by argument, but an article suggesting that Islamic State's acts of charity could prove decisive in its war with the western infidels is interesting. Who, after enough bombing and hunger and death, wouldn't settle for a little charity?

Although Islamic State rejects democracy, if it continues to rally public support through works of charity and governance, it could become entrenched in society and be that much harder to defeat. Even the group’s draconian treatment of women may not be enough to stymie public support.

Is such decency nothing more than a political ploy? Perhaps so, but put yourself in the place of the recipient: If someone promised you a better life after dropping salvo after salvo on your neighborhood (and seldom if ever actually delivered) and someone else suggested they would limit liberties but wouldn't kill you in the meantime ... which would you choose?

the phone book

The land-line phone book was tossed up on the porch this morning -- a waxing anachronism in a day and age of more-cell-phones-than-people-and-each-'smarter'-than-the-last. The book is thin, given that it covers two counties in my neck of the woods. In New York City, the phone book used to be so thick that strong men would show off by ripping it in half and police officers would sometimes whack reluctant suspects as an encouragement.

Fifty-five pages devoted to throwbacks like me who have an address and a phone. Thirty pages devoted purely to businesses. I used to like having a cell phone for in-the-car emergencies and quick connections with family members, but otherwise, the fidelity was poor and the price not worth the possession. Most of the devices devoted to "connection" these days strike me as ways of driving people further apart and I don't like it. ... Facebook, Twitter, an "app" for this and an "app" for that ... horseshit.

But I can recognize my own anachronistic being in all of this. If everyone is doing it, I must be wrong, though I decline to agree with the assessment. I'll just keep on waiting for all those lonely-and-getting-lonelier people to tune in to something serious.

I will do what I can not to converse with anyone holding a cell phone as we speak, wearing expensive sun glasses s/he neglects to take off or hidden behind a barbed-wire beard.

Talk about lonely, right?

smithereens

Yesterday, a friend called to say his son was being transported to a Boston hospital from Maine. The son had apparently overdosed on Tylenol and needed a liver transplant or he would die. My friend is old and tired, so the news was redoubled in its intensity: He could not go with the son he was trained to love and protect.

How things stand this morning, I have not yet found out and, from afar, I too feel the sympathetic winds: How would I feel if one of my children were threatened with death? There is no answer but that doesn't mean the question can likewise go unasked.

It's a gob-stopper and yet this gob does not stop. Your kids aren't 'supposed' to die first. In fact, your kids aren't supposed to die. They're supposed to stay around and wave goodbye when you die, right? There are a million assumptions like this, climbing out of hidden lairs where they were assured and went unchallenged except in an occasional intellectually-distant fashion. How can the protector no longer protect? Could he, in fact, ever have truly protected? Well, he tried and perhaps convinced himself that he had somehow, in whatever small way, acted as a firewall for what is loved.

But now it's all shot to shit -- shot to shit and the bald fact is that it was ever thus ... uncertain, approximate, and sometimes flat-out wrong. So then there is the situation itself underpinned by a long-standing inaccuracy that passed as accuracy.

Everything seems to be blown up... and I am just imagining where my friend is living the explosion.

It's all too much...

... and there is more.

escorting the elephants

If a man's profession were to escort elephants from the dance hall, I wonder by what circuitous training he would have achieved this rooted calling.

Strange how resumes, within and without, seem to command the present and yet, while not exactly wrong, never touch the sweet spot.

In the face of such odds, what else is there but to escort the elephant?

Lord, I would give a million bucks to have learned to walk like an elephant!

"dismal swamp"

Like some unpitted and polished ball bearing, there are words in my mind that hold an almost-treasured place. These are words that, in their time, are perfect and whole and fill the bill, though I am not entirely sure what the bill is or will be. They are brilliant friends whose light source is elusive.

"Shit" is a pretty good example.

And, this morning, floating burnished in my head are the name and words, "Dismal Swamp." How I wish I had contrived so perfect a perfection. I realize I cannot "have" it in any literal sense. It is like looking into the eye of a hawk -- present, fierce, and the more challenging because I know it doesn't give a shit about "challenges." But it is perfect somehow ... and what are perfections for if not an improvement that is utterly impossible?

Dismal swamp. Its literal size and location and being are just the tip of the iceberg. What goes unseen is the redolence and suggestions in my mind. What a fine word "dismal" is. What a tall tale "swamp" can tell.

Part of what beckons to me is that there is no beckoning. It is some unpitted and polished ball bearing that seems to await its time: And how could it possibly be "waiting?"

Wish I'd said that ... but grateful to have made its acquaintance: Dismal swamp.

writing for the waste basket

I am still gnawing on the iron spike -- the one that suggested to my younger son that if he were going to be deployed with his National Guard Unit, the first thing he should do was to learn 100 words of the language of the country he was going to be sent to.

Gnawing and trying to write it and ... here is what I wrote this morning as an intro ... and realize is too long and will have to be thrown out. Nevertheless, the memory was fun...

Once upon a time, a long time ago, in the early 1960's a fellow German linguist and I sat on the terrace of a Berlin cafe and eased through an afternoon on which we were not tasked with spying on the administration of  the then-dread government of East Germany.

We sipped beer, soaked up the sun, admired women, and mentally put aside the sheets of paper that were integral to our weekday work -- the papers marked "Top Secret" (code word) at top and bottom; the ones on which we translated governmental phone calls.

"If you had to choose a single word to know in any foreign language," Bill said, "what would it be?"

This was a topic worthy of a lazy afternoon -- frivolous and yet serious, somehow. Communication had to begin somewhere, didn't it? So ... was there a Rosetta Stone of some sort, a jumping off point between those who spoke and those who listened from different perspectives? The question hung in the air and then we began throwing out possibilities.

One after another, we tried them out and then discarded them. They weren't exactly right. They weren't encompassing enough. They weren't bulls-eye enough. We were just about to give up when Bill hit the nail on a head we could agree on:

"Toilet" he said simply.

And somehow, perhaps because the beer was good, that was that. A single word. No matter that there were cultures that had no literal toilets: The function was the same with or without the porcelain.

criminal thinking

Once, the yardstick of a crime was the crime itself. Now, bit by bit, even considering a crime has apparently become a crime:

Under U.S. law, federal prosecutors do not have to “establish a link with specific terrorist activities” in order to charge a suspect with a crime, but only show a suspect intended to “support or join” a group the government has already labeled a terrorist organization, the paper noted.

The quote comes from a Reuters story outlining U.S. efforts to encourage foreign countries to ramp up their efforts against not just the criminals called "terrorists," but pre-emptively to ramp up the efforts against 'apparent' or 'wannabe' extremists.

The U.S. Justice Department has provided specific suggestions to governments in Europe and elsewhere on how to strengthen counterterrorism laws in order to arrest would-be foreign fighters before they join groups like Islamic State, according to a policy paper reviewed by Reuters.

And bit by bit. like the tortures at Abu Ghraib, the lawyers line up to declare it all legal and, no doubt, desirable.

pillow fights banned at West Point

"Huge pillow fights among US cadets to mark the end of summer training at the prestigious West Point military academy are to be banned, officials say.

"A recent event at the end of August left at least 30 soldiers injured."

If pillow fights are injurious and therefore to be banned, how much more injurious is war and should consideration be given to banning that as well?

life "like chicken"

Am I wrong? Well, it wouldn't be the first time....

How much of what passes for communication relies on implicit or explicit use of the word "like" or the phrase "it is as if?" When referring to experience, there is no direct transmission. There is only what the fact or situation is "like" or "is as if." And it is on this basis that "communication" rests.

Everything "tastes like chicken." Speaking to others, speaking to oneself ... everything tastes "like" chicken. God is "like," wealth is "like," love is "like," joy is "like," depression is "like...."

In communication, one with the next, this strikes me as an ordinary compromise. Experience cannot be transmitted and yet human beings are social critters, so I'll live with your approximations if you will allow mine.

But what is acceptable compromise in one instance may rankle when alone. Just once in this life-like-chicken, wouldn't it be nice to know not what something was "like" but rather what it actually was? Just once: What is it? Without the bangles and baubles of solemn or serious consideration ... just what the hell is it? Pick your "it," any "it."

What is it, even for just a nanosecond, to lead a life that doesn't taste like chicken? Where god is god, who is god?

Just once.

Everything else tastes like chicken.

"The Pilgrims"

Happy Thanksgiving.

I was watching a Public Broadcast System documentary called "The Pilgrims" yesterday. It's worth a watch, I think. As you might expect since today is Thanksgiving, it was about the Puritans who landed at Cape Cod in 1620 and managed to weave both a true and over-ornamented history for this country. I found it interesting by way of history I retain poorly and also by way of standing as an example of the human DNA strand that seems to insist on the realization of dreams -- a realization that never lives up to the brightness that once sucked the dreamer in.

The Puritans, described at one point in the show as the religious "nutters" of their time, suggested that man might set aside the church as the portal to their God. In the time that they did this, the church and the monarchy were of one cloth, so the monarchy saw these nutters as a threat and persecuted them. It was the Puritans, if I got it right, who planted the seed-notion that church and state could and perhaps should be separated.

They set sail at the wrong time of year, landed at Cape Cod in the cold, did a lot of starving and dying and appeared strange to the indigenous peoples who had recently suffered a terrible case of plague that had decimated the villages that the Puritans chose to see as a place their God had prepared for their righteous adventure. Bodies and skeletons were strewn about....

The first Thanksgiving was as much a sorrowful remembrance of all in their membership who had died as it was any sort of festivity of food.

 What a risky and determined effort they made. But how different are they from today's man or woman who sets out to make some sort of reality out of their fondest dream? Are these latter-day pilgrims not "nutters" as well? Are they any less informed and corrected by the attempt to actualize/realize their bright, pure visions? Are they any less capable of refusing to ask the obvious questions that might dim the brightened landscape? For example, if my god is "good," on what sustaining evidence can and do I make that observation? I'm not playing the snarky atheist or humanist here. I mean the question as a question anyone with a dream of purity might set out to realize ... to make real.

Lenin with communism; Jesus with Christianity ... or anyone else: Which one foresees the dimming of the much-praised light when the rubber hits the road and the dreamer steps off his or her cliff and into the abyss of practical realities?

Realization is expensive, but the nutter has no way of seeing the cost. S/he dreams and is dared and ....

Not to choose the nutter's way will not suffice. And yet choosing the nutter's course means that the get-go purity is bound to dissolve into ... something fruitful and rich, perhaps, but likewise attended by what is grim and grisly.

No, Dorothy, we're not in Kansas any more.

holiday spending

Passed along in email together with the correction -- this kick-off to the holiday-spending season:

additional Eido Shimano tapes

Two additional recordings has been appended in the Shimano Archive to the two earlier-posted tapes of Eido Shimano's meeting on Nov. 21 at All Souls Unitarian Church Chapel, 1157 Lexington Ave., New York City. The following is a list of all four tapes:

http://www.shimanoarchive.com/Audio/Shimano%20Apology%20A1.mp3

http://www.shimanoarchive.com/Audio/Shimano%20Apology%20A2.mp3

http://www.shimanoarchive.com/Audio/Shimano%20Apology%20B1.mp3

http://www.shimanoarchive.com/Audio/Shimano%20Apology%20B2.mp3

PS. And here is a comment from Genjo Marinello on Facebook:
"I've just listened to the last two installments of the recording of this event (posted just above this comment) and feel disgusted. I heard not one woman speak that was directly used sexually by Eido Shimano, except for Shinge who spoke last. She assured us if we could all just be honest and come from our hearts we could all heal together. Of course she was hand picked to succeed Eido Shimano, and lied about her own affair with him for years, waiting for him to expose it at this event. I don't know, but it seems to me he threw her under the bus, as he has done to so many others. She asked the group if she should resign.
"Like - Reply - 42 mins"