• Category Archives Politics

  • Obama Wins Andover #8

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    25  73%  26%  4mph NW  bar30.04 steady windchill23 Imbolc

                Waning Crescent of the Winter Moon

    Just back from caucus.  A blessedly short event.  Obama won our precinct 58 to 36.  Kate’s PNHP group passed out a sample resolution for universal health care, single payer.  I presented it and it passed.  Though not without some troubling debate.  One young voter said, “Wouldn’t that be a monopoly?  That’s against the constitution and Federal law.”  He had a worried look.  So did I, after that breath taking example of civic ignorance.  A woman said, “It’s been shown that competition makes things better.  The Canadian and British systems don’t provide good care if you have a special case, just for most of the people.”  Well, health care for most of the people would be a hell of an improvement on what we have.  As I left, a man came up, took my hand, and said, “Good job.  Thanks.”  Felt good.

    My political impulses are all contradictory these days.  Don’t know what to make of it. 


    Politics 📎and tagged

  • Ten Thousand Schools

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    29  87%  26%  5mph NNW  bar29.89 rises windchill25  Imbolc

                      Waning Crescent of the Winter Moon

    Saw Scarlet Johanssen talking to a group of Minnesota students tonight.  She’s pushing Barrack.  The political firestorm that will sweep the nation tomorrow will have a brushfire here in the Minnesota caucuses.  It remains to be seen whether a strong youth turnout for primaries and caucuses will  translate into votes in November, but I find the youth surge a hopeful phenomenon.  Maybe we’re getting back to a situation where the politics of compassion, not compassionate conservatism, and the politics of economic justice, not unjust foreign policy will prevail.  It’s got my vote.

    The snow petered out, a dusting only after the vigor of the mid-morning.  Things did get freshened up.

    Watched an anime on the Science Fiction Channel.  Saw why Miyazaki is considered an anime god.  This stuff is much more slapdash, also has a slasher feel to it without the grace of the samurai or wu shu movies like Crouching Tiger. 

    I seem to find myself digging deeper and deeper into ancient China, especially the Warring States period when Taoism, Confucianism and Legalism plus many others–the Ten Thousand Schools–emerged.  It is also the time of the Qin unification and Qin Shi Huang Di fascinates me.  After the Qin the Han dynasty began and lasted for four hundred years or so, one of the first golden ages of China.  Later, the Tang, Song, and Ming dynasties would, each in their own time and in their own way, count as golden ages, too.


    Cinema and Television General Politics World History 📎and tagged

  • Castrate Him!

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    26  87%  28%  2mph NE bar 29.88 steady  windchill23 Imbolc

                    Waning Crescent of the Winter Moon

    A good senate race has run under the radar of the Clinton/Edwards/Obama vs. Romney/McCaine/Giuliani primaries.  It’s a shame, too, since the Democrats have a real opportunity to win back a Senate seat.  I was skeptical of Al Franken, but it seems he’s run hard, straight and with serious intent.  I’m gonna support him on Tuesday, along with Barrack Obama.  I read a convincing article in the Nation that portrayed Obama as the only candidate with true left credentials.  Progressive is a weasel word, not least because Bull Moose Teddy Roosevelt used it of himself and his movement.

    If you enjoy the numbers and drama of politics, this has been a great year.  Lots of poll data, lots of actual votes and plenty of campaign back and forth without, so far at least, too much mudslinging.  Even a pinch of political junkie in your bloodstream would get you into the fray.

    Wish for snow and voilá, it snows.  Six inches today they say.  Paul Douglas called this one.    

    The perfect week shapes up for me:  up north for four days in a time of snow, home for a night and then off to the Sandwich Islands. 

    Started reading last night in the annals of the Grand Historian, Sima Qin.  He’s a fascinating character. He inherited the task of completing the history of the Chinese people his father, also the Grand Historian, began.  Living in the time of Emperor Wu, a great Han dynasty emperor, he made the Emperor mad.  Apparently, at the time, making Emperor’s mad resulted in castration.  And, the usual response was suicide.

    Sima Qin, however, felt he had a duty to finish his history so he lived for 21 more years, in spite of the indiginity.  His work is readable, at least in translation, and more than that, interesting.  Just ordered his volume on the Qin dynasty.

    Now then, off to Maple Plain for some new shoes and to the coop for bread and cheese.


    Politics World History 📎and tagged

  • The Only Place Our Intelligence Community Looks Good

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    24  81% 23%  omph EEN bar29.94 steady windchill24  Imbolc

               Waning Crescent of the Winter Moon

    Movies move slowly across the 694 pick-up line.  I just watched Breach, the story of the capture of Robert Hanssen, the mole in the FBI.  It’s well done, written by the young agent hopeful who worked as Hanssen’s assistant and put the last pieces together to bring Hanssen down.  After reading some of Legacy of Ashes, a history of the CIA, it became clear to me the role these movies play in the national psyche.  Playing up the clever strategies and cunning skill of guys like Hanssen puffs up the image of the FBI when they finally corner him; but, consider, he worked 22 years inside the FBI and even headed the Task Force looking for the mole. 

    Legacy of Ashes shows that when it comes to matters of subterfuge, we don’t get it.  The CIA failed at most of its chaotically designed missions, blundering around in the affairs of other nations like a giant child, flailing and hiding behind parking meter posts.  The only place the intelligence community gets to look good is in movies and books.  I don’t know whether the books and movies are intentional propaganda or if the material that gets a greenlight passes a certain screening.  Or, it may be that we need, as a nation, to believe that in the world of the shadows we can play as well as anybody.  Those who’ve looked into it suggest we can’t.  Thought all the way through movies like Breach show the same conclusion.

    Demonstrating the frail line between happiness and horror our neighbor, 55 or so, went to the hospital two weeks ago.  They thought he’d had a stroke.  It would have been a better thing.  He has a demyelinating process at work in patches inside his brain.  A process at the root of M.S. demyelination strips the insulation off nerve fibers and creates electrical storms.  He has some aphasia. It’s not clear how bad the damage is, nor whether it will persist.  He’s at home now, sleeping 44 minutes at a time which keeps his wife and daughter, who just graduated from college, up as he wanders when not asleep.


    Cinema and Television Politics 📎and tagged

  • Is It a Time to Advance or Retreat?

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    27  66%  18%  1mph ENE bar29.95 falls windchill26  Imbolc

                Waning Crescent of the Winter Moon

    A strange, sometimes troubling struggle has broken out in the responsible section of my Self.  The sometimes subtle, sometimes hammer blow obvious skirmishes have me puzzled about what actions to take, if any.  The formal study of Daoism I began a couple of weeks ago has begun to push me in a way that I hope will resolve this matter, or at least give me a way to handle it.

    The struggle is over politics.  As I’ve written elsewhere politics defined my life during my late teens, 20’s, 30’s and early 40’s.  That is to say, by my junior year in high school I was a political animal, a politician and an activist.  President of my high school class for my freshman, junior and senior years, a favorite teacher pushed the Little United Nations Assembly of Indiana to accept me as the presiding officer for the 1965 Little United Nations.  The year before I represented the Republic of Chad.  In the fall of 1965 we protested the CIA recruiters on the campus of Wabash and I never looked back. 

    Draft eligible and permanently active from that point forward I got involved in civil rights, student rights and anti-war politics. I was a student senator for three years at Ball State, then ran an unsuccessful campaign for president of the student body.  I helped organize and lead anti-draft and anti-war rallies, marches and teach-ins. 

    In seminary I pushed the seminary on anti-war politics, became an early feminist and began a ten year involvement with anti-racism training.

    While working at Community Involvement Programs as their janitor and weekend counselor, I lived in the Stevens Square Neighborhood.  There I got involved in neighborhood level politics, leading an effort to push General Mills out of the community and organizing the Stevens Square Neighborhood Association.  Made a lot of friends and few enemies.  It was fun.  This was the 1970’s. 

    In 1978 the Presbytery of the Twin Cities Area hired me to work on the West Bank as a community minister.  I got involved in community based economic development, building affordable housing, organizing against unemployment and for broader community involvement in the management of philanthropy. 

    In 1984 I left the West Bank and took over urban missions for the Presbytery which expanded the arena of action.  In various ways I was still at it when I met Kate in 1988. 

    Over all this time I had a very active hand in DFL politics working at the precinct, congressional and state levels.  Then I left the Presbytery in  1991.  Not long after that Kate and I moved to Andover.

    Since then my political work has shrunk to near nothing.  I send the occasional e-mail, make a phone call, show up (sometimes) at the precinct caucus, but I’m part of no ongoing, organized effort to make or change policy.  The whole climate change issue is fraught with political issues of real import, many of them.  I’m interested, especially in water related issues and Lake Superior.   Yet I do almost nothing.

    The 1960’s was a “If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.” era.  My political superego came into maturity in those times and this notion became a benchmark for my own assessment of responsible behavior. 

    Thus, the struggle.  I wonder, sometimes, where this guy went, this political guy. It’s like he crawled under a rock, but that’s not so.  No, this is a struggle that has moved back and forth in my mind since the move to Andover.

    Now the Daoist studies I’ve engaged propose a way of addressing it.  Daoism suggests that there are times to retreat and times to advance, times which call for more yang, times which call for more yin.  The wise man, Daoism says, adjusts his inner life to what it calls the temporary conditions, the way the Tao manifests itself.  This area of Daoist studies has my attention right now.  I’ll keep you informed because this struggle is not productive and it’s not over.

              


    Great Work Memories Politics 📎and tagged

  • Gulf Streams Stops

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    -3  44% 17% 1mph WSW bar30.24 rises windchill-5  Winter

                     Waning Crescent of the Winter Moon

    The day continues cold.  We reached -15.8 this morning at 6:24AM.  Since then, we’ve gained about twelve degrees. The windchill all day has been brutal. 

    Kate finished cushions for the window seat in the kitchen.  I put Hilo on it while it was on Kate’s worktable to see if she would like it.  She seemed nervous.

    This week I’ve slept like a rock.  An odd phrase, but apt in the nothing till morning meaning I intend here.    

    Yesterday I finished Fifty Degrees, the second in Kim Stanley Robinson’s eco-thriller/near future sci-fi trilogy which begins with Forty Days of Rain and ends with Sixty Days and Counting. His Mars trilogy is better as science fiction; it’s wonderful; but, this trilogy strikes closer to home and imagines a time period when we pass some of the tipping points talked about in the news these days.  The Gulf Stream stops because the thermohaline barrier breaches.  Weather patterns swing wildly from one extreme to the other.  The West Anarctic Ice Shelf begins to leave land and drift into the ocean, causing several centimeters of sea level rise. 

    The book imagines a loose team of scientists, policy wonks and politicians who in their various spheres create solutions and fight to realize them before the worst becomes worse.  There is also some Buddhist material, too.  The characters are interesting and make the books worth reading, as was true of the Mars trilogy.  Robinson imagines, however, a science  triumphant, even dominant which I find suspicious.  It was industrialists and technocrats who got us in this mess, with our individual complicity, and to imagine that rationalism, their primary tool, will dig us out seems suspect at the core.

    The facet of it that rings true to me is the paradigmatically American approach of, keep trying until solutions come.  That the scientific will play a necessary and perhaps even lead role I don’t question.  I just don’t want an approach that leaves aside the many individual decision makers, those of us in our cars and at home with our dishwashers.  This is science-fiction, not political-fiction, or a novel of manners (though it has some aspects of this genre), so the focus is congruent, yet I want to see us stretch all the way out for solutions.


    Great Work Politics 📎and tagged

  • Bared Roots and All

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    38  73% 23% 0mph SSW bar29.12 steady  windchill39  Winter

                           Last Quarter of the Winter Moon

    Think I lost a post somewhere in cyber space, one from this morning. 

    A miscellaneous day so far.  Kate and I decided on the kinds of vegetables we want to grow.  Next I’ll look at her choices for varieties and the seeds we bought at Seed Saver’s Exchange outside Decorah, Iowa.  With those in mind I’ll put together a planting plan which will include when to plant or start seeds indoors, companion plants, a plan for optimum soil rotation over the years and the amount of vegetables we plan to consume over the summer and fall, plus those we want to put away in the root cellar-to-be or through canning or freezing.  If I have to order some new seeds or plants, I’ll get those orders in early.  I’ll also put together a tree and shrub order for the bare root plants that the Anoka County Conservation folk sell in early May.

    Later I edited my sermon for March 23rd, a sort of where I am now in my own theological/ge-ological thinking.  Decided to wait until March to put together the one page digest on Transcendentalism so I’ll be familiar with it as the day arrives.

    Ordered some meds.  Lipitor this time.  Took a nap that included another dog filled dream. 

    I also finished all the material I printed out from the Real Politics website on the Democratic race.  It’s a real nubby matter right now with conflicting data, streaks rather than whole waves of momentum.  So far Clinton remains ahead in national polls, but the electorate is tricky when they sense someone fading in the stretch.  They’ll bale and move toward someone they believe can win.  How white men and Latinos vote may decide the race.

    Doesn’t seem like much, but it took all day.  time for a workout.


    Garden Politics 📎and tagged

  • A Richard Nixon Dream

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    25  70%  19%  omph SWS bar29.89 steady  Winter

               Waning Gibbous Winter Moon

    “The right moment for starting on your next job is not tomorrow or next week; it is instanter, or in the American idiom, ‘right now.’ ” – Arnold Toynbee

    A long time ago I read how Arnold Toynbee worked when writing his history of the world.  He did the research in the morning and early afternoon, then wrote into the evening.  You’d have to be pretty organized to have the right material handy, but it does cut down on short term memory loss.

    Forgot to mention here that I had a Richard Nixon dream last night.  I spent several dream hours chasing, catching, securing and locking away old Tricky Dick.  Have no idea what that was about, but it did have a recurring theme:  I’m in a hotel, it’s check out time and I’m not gonna make it.  Have no idea what that’s about either.  It did occur to me that Nixon has entered the national bank of archetypes.  He’s the all purpose bad guy, the psychopath who made it to the Big House.  It felt good defeating him.  Maybe that was the point.

    Off to the MIA today to get my photo taken for a new security badge.  I need to do this since the last time I had one was in 2001, when I still had hair.


    General Politics 📎and tagged

  • OMG! Bush Lied!

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    -1  72%  18% 0mph W bar30.10  steady windchill-1  winter

                           Full Winter Moon

    I now have sound going from the DVR/Cable box to the receiver and the 5 speakers.  I also have sound going from the new Blu-Ray DVD player to the 5 speakers.  This is close to total success, but I still have two hurdles remaining.  I have not been able to get any radio signals yet, in spite of connecting the antennas and I have not run the test microphone which will balance the speakers.  Still, I feel largely done with this project.

    In order to get Blu-Ray quality movies you have to get Blu-Ray discs.  Not cheap.  I watched one this evening, Beowulf and Grendel.  This movie takes a spare approach to the story and gives a backstory for Grendel.  It is gorgeous, shot in Iceland by an Icelandic director.  I liked it a good deal, though I’d not heard of it.

    The big screen, HD TV setup came from my love for movies.  This is a stunning way to watch movies at home and, with the surround sound, surprisingly close to the cinema experience.  Movies are as important to me as literature, music and the fine arts.  I’m glad to have this way to view them.

    Now:  It can finally be said.

    “WASHINGTON (AP) – A study by two nonprofit journalism organizations found that President Bush and top administration officials issued hundreds of false statements about the national security threat from Iraq in the two years following the 2001 terrorist attacks. The study concluded that the statements “were part of an orchestrated campaign that effectively galvanized public opinion and, in the process, led the nation to war under decidedly false pretenses.”

    The study was posted Tuesday on the Web site of the Center for Public Integrity, which worked with the Fund for Independence in Journalism.”

    The life and times of celebrities must be difficult.  Heath Ledger’s death today, whether suicide or accident (and I would wonder if accident isn’t suicide by another name), puts another name in the column of this felled by fame.  To those in the limelight all the time there must be a moment when you either choose life or choose self-destruction, a decision many of us face only obliquely, perhaps at the dinner table.


    Cinema and Television GeekWorld Politics 📎and tagged

  • A Recession? We’ll Know When It’s Over.

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    2  74% 23%  0mph WSW bar29.84 windchill2  Winter

                    Waxing Gibbous Winter Moon

    This is not my area of expertise, but the economy is something none of us can afford to ignore.  A recession for some of us is a depression for others.  While poking around on the net about just what constitutes a recession, I happened onto the following information. 

    The folks who make the official decision about whether or not we are in a recession work at the National Bureau for Economic Research.  They gather in an aptly named Business Cycle Dating Committee.  Here are the criteria they use:

    “The National Bureau’s Business Cycle Dating Committee maintains a chronology of the U.S. business cycle. The chronology identifies the dates of peaks and troughs that frame economic recession or expansion. The period from a peak to a trough is a recession and the period from a trough to a peak is an expansion. According to the chronology, the most recent peak occurred in March 2001, ending a record-long expansion that began in 1991. The most recent trough occurred in November 2001, inaugurating an expansion.

    A recession is a significant decline in economic activity spread across the economy, lasting more than a few months, normally visible in real GDP, real income, employment, industrial production, and wholesale-retail sales. A recession begins just after the economy reaches a peak of activity and ends as the economy reaches its trough. Between trough and peak, the economy is in an expansion. Expansion is the normal state of the economy; most recessions are brief and they have been rare in recent decades.”

    The most interesting part to me is that they never “call” a recession until the data is available.  In a Q & A on their website is this entry:

    Q: Typically, how long after the beginning of a recession does the BCDC declare that a recession has started?

    A: Anywhere from 6 to 18 months. We never consider forecasts. In general, the BCDC does not meet until it is reasonably clear that a downturn has occurred.

    This means we probably won’t know for sure we’ve been in a recession until we’re just about out of it since recessions tend to be brief.  According to the Business Cycle Dating Committee. 


    Politics 📎and tagged