watch the spin
The New York Times' Frank Rich warns that Sesame Street's Big Bird is the "ornithological equivalent of a red herring." The right's latest assault on public broadcasting is "far more insidious and ingenious" than that seen under Newt Gingrich a decade ago.
The above notice, along with more details and relevant links related to this and other stories of current PR underhanded spinnings are from here -- where it's worth checking daily to make sure you're not suckered.
Me? I'm still packing and hauling things to the new place, where I'm helping to paint the walls. Going for the day tomorrow.
No rest for the wicked.
Categories:
the two heads theory
Two heads are supposed to be better than one, right.
Not if one is your 89 year old mom (and you're trying to get her to pack in an organized way).
Unless she's playing with your toddler grandson.
(I took a ride yesterday with my mom out to my daughter's to bring some stuff she can use and I didn't want to move. Found an auger pile driver in the dollar store for the little boy who loves construction trucks. He also likes explaining how it works to anyone who'll listen. My mom was a good listener.)
...............
When we got home, I found two heads (below) attached to my windowpane. They're still there. I assume they're in that position for a very good reason, but it sure does seem like it's taking an awful long time for a couple of little bugs!
..............
I don't know what was in my own head when, a decade ago I rescued this old seen-better-days cactus from the deck of an at-the-time-significant-other who was moving. I think he said it was about 30 years old at the time, having been his mother's before that. It's ugly, unwieldy, prickly, and top-heavy. I've moved it myself four times now. Yet, I can't bring myself to toss it. Now it's part of my family.
So, move it I will, along with all the other stuff I can't bear to throw out. Heh. Am I my mother's daughter, or what?
Categories:
looking behind the curtain
All politics are performances, right? Give 'em a good show, tell 'em what they want to hear, and they go away happy. Nevermind the truth of what goes on behind the curtain. Or so our government leaders seem to think.
Take, for example, the recent news that the Department of Defense has contracted with a private company, BeNow, to gather data on high school students, even though school districts already are required to gather student stats so that they can get federal funding.
Over at Uncomment Thought Journal, Rowan takes a peek behind the curtain:
.....So why the contract with BeNow? After all, under SEC. 9528. Armed Forces Recruiter Access to Students and Student Recruiting Information of the "No Child Left Behind" Act, schools receiving federal funds must turn over the Names, addresses, and phone numbers of students on demand by the military. Isn't that enough information? According to Chu [David S. C. Chu (U.S. undersecretary for personnel and readiness]. , it is not. The data collected under the No Child Left Behind provisions is "decentralized" and of use only to "local recruiters" and is not a centralized list of all possible recruits.
However, the data being collected for the BeNow contract goes well beyond the data collected through No Child. It includes "The new database will include personal information including birth dates, Social Security numbers, e-mail addresses, grade-point averages, ethnicity and what subjects the students are studying" according to the Washington Post article. Why the additional information just for "recruiting?" Grade point averages and classes being taken? Are the planning on focusing their recruiting on the highest G.P.A. or the lowest? Are they looking for those who are failing? This seems entirely possible, as earlier reports have note that the military is lowering their standards in an effort to meet recruiting targets.
Get a better glimpse of the hidden agenda here.
Then there's the bit in my local Saturday newspaper by Andy Rooney (not available online)on how lobbying fattens wallets.
....Big Business is in business with Big Government, Rooney says -- meaning this Republican administration.
The popular concept is that Democrats favor more government and Republicans want less. But there are no fewer government employees now than there were under President Clinton.
Government spending in Washington increased by a whopping 30 percent between 2000 and 2004 to a record $2.9 trillion.....
....Last year, Hewlet-Packard paid lobbyists $734,000 trying to get Republicans to pass legislation that would allow the company to pay a lot less tax on the $14 billion they made in profits from foreign companies they own. I wouldn't want to have to explain it to a class of eighth-graders, but if a company pays Chinese workers 35 cents an hour and sells what they make in the United States as if they has paid the workers $25 an hour, the company makes a lot of money.
And then such outsourcing companies can pay even more lobbyists even more money to get out of paying more taxes.
And Americans are treated to a lot of circuses, but not nearly enough bread.
Speaking of circuses, I'm sure someone is going to make a movie out of the just-breaking story of the CIA Operatives who were living the good life in Italy, until they finally got caught:
They ran up tabs of thousands of dollars at some of Milan’s best hotels and restaurants. They chatted easily on their cell phones and gave out passport, frequent-flier and driver’s license numbers when booking flights or renting cars.
And now they are fugitives.
If Italian authorities are right, a CIA operation has been exposed in Milan that on some levels was brazen and perhaps reckless, even as it successfully spirited away a reputedly notorious Egyptian imam.
And, most touchingly, over at (Pro)Claiming Age. blogger Mary Godwin, with a daughter recently deployed to Iraq, begins to wish she didn't know what keeps slipping out from behind the curtain.
In the months that have passed since Tommi's deployment to Iraq, I have learned how to read the news faster and better than I did before. I have learned to read electronically, to read RSS feeds through online aggregators like bloglines, and to appreciate the various watchers who collect, synthesize, and engage difficult issues circling around the topics of war and the U.S. involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan. Months of learning are bringing me to a new place now: each next story seems to raise in me a recurrent response. "Enough now," I think to myself. "I don’t want to know."
But we need to keep knowing, no matter how painful and upsetting. We need to keep knowing what the war is costing all of us, and especially what it's costing those expected to fight, as well as their families waiting for them to come home -- and not just American fighters and families.
We Americans have not yet felt the ultimate results of this war and the profiteering that this administration is allowing -- even encouraging. There is a big mess being hidden behind Bush's curtain of deceit.
If the next presidential election doesn't pull down the curtain and show us how to clean up what's been swept behind it, we weary travelers are going to be eaten alive by those insatiable lions and tigers and bulls and bears. No, we're definitely not in Kansas any more.
Categories:
remoting
i had it right there, she says. i made a green..you know....green, not velvet, you know...
felt, you prompt her.
yes, felt. i put it right there by the.... you know....the music thing.
what is it, you ask.
it's for the music thing. i kept it there all this while and now it disappeared. you took it. why did you take it.
you take a deep breath. i didn't take it, you say. it's around here somewhere.
she starts crying. sits and the table and cries that people are coming in and taking things from her.
you take a deep breath, look at all the stuff yet to be packed. you pat her back, give her a tissue, tell her that it will turn up somewhere. she thinks you're lying.
you have a headache because you haven't had a chance to eat breakfast yet and it's almost lunchtime.
you leave her at the table with her tissues and her fantasies and you go to your place and eat. lunch.
a knock on the door. she comes in with a green felt pouch in her hand, secured with a large gold pin.
i'm sorry, she says and kisses you on the forehead. i found it on the dresser. do you want to see what's in here, she asks.
sure.
she carefully opens the pouch and pulls out a slim SONY remote.
you don't tell her that it's for a tv that she doesn't even have anymore.
put it in the drawer with the other remotes, you say, and we'll pack them all together.
oh, no, she says. it's my first one, she says, smiling, returning to her apartment to, no doubt, misplace it again.
you sit down to finish your glass of homemade orangeade and read a little more delightfully escapist nonsense
the phone rings.
you're not sleeping, are you?
no, i'm packing, you lie, because she doesn't seem to like you wasting time reading.
i went to the bathroom, she says, and now i can't find it.
it's there somewhere, you say. taking a deep breath. we'll find it later.
ok, she says. i'm going to lie down for a while.
Categories:
and this is the man we've put in charge??
President Bush explains his social security reform proposal.
WOMAN IN AUDIENCE: I don't really understand. How is it the new [Social Security] plan is going to fix the problem?
Verbatim response: (Pay Attention, now...you don't want to miss anything important.)
PRESIDENT BUSH: "Because the -- all which is on the table begins to address the big cost drivers. For example, how benefits are calculated, for example, is on the table. Whether or not benefits rise based upon wage increases or price increases. There's a series of parts of the formula that are being considered. And when you couple that, those different cost drivers, affecting those -- changing those with personal accounts, the idea is to get what has been promised more likely to be -- or closer delivered to that has been promised. Does that make any sense to you? It's kind of muddled. Look, there's a series of things that cause the -- like, for example, benefits are calculated based upon the increase of wages, as opposed to the increase of prices. Some have suggested that we calculate -- the benefits will rise based upon inflation, as opposed to wage increases. There is a reform that would help solve the red if that were put into effect. In other words, how fast benefits grow, how fast the promised benefits grow, if those -- if that growth is affected, it will help on the red."
The above is from a press release issued by the White House. You definitely should read the whole thing.
Categories:
Married Love per 1918
In 1918, Dr. Marie C. Stopes published Married Love -- "dedicated to young husbands and all those who are betrothed in love."
I still have my father's yellow-edged and fingerprint-stained 1931 edition of the book. (I have not yet finished packing up my books, amazed at the titles that I've chosen to cart around with me.)
Apparently the book was banned in America until 1931. I wonder if my Dad was first in line at the bookstore. :-)
According to the Oxford University Press, which has a 2004 edition,
"Married Love" (1918) combined a lyrical evocation of marital love with a no-nonsense and detailed account of sexual intercourse and sexual pleasure. It has sold over a million copies in Britain alone and was for many people a revelation.
With a "passion" for helping the individuals in heterosexual couples to achieve an enjoyable sex life, Stopes did not approve of homosexuality. In that way, she was an unfortunate product of her times.
But in other ways, she's right on the money with her advice for men about how women's bodies and psyches function in tandem. While biology doesn't have to be destiny, hormones can sure set us up on roller coasters of all kinds.
"Well, Dad," I think, packing the slim volume in along with John Lennon's In His Own Write and the little Pocket Poet Howl from the 50s, "Good for you. I hope that Mom read it too."
Categories:
if you're feeling good, you haven't been paying attention
Hey, I know it's summertime, you're getting ready for a little vacation fun -- a little escape from the humdrum.
And so it's a perfect time for our government and its rabid supporters to begin slipping some mean deeds by us why we veg out under the trees with our cold beers. And they're doing that "marketing" thing again, paying some high-priced flaks to sell us some more bills of goods that are toxic to this democracy of ours (certainly what's left of it).
Pay attention. Follow the links.
The Republican group Progress for America released the television ad “Get Ready” on June 22. In a news release, the group reports that the ad will run through July 1 as part of a $700,000 effort to “warn opinion leaders in Washington, DC and beyond that some Democrats will soon unleash a fury of dishonest and ugly attacks about any Justice that President Bush nominates to the Supreme Court should a vacancy occur.
WASHINGTON — The Defense Department yesterday began working with a private marketing firm to create a database of all U.S. college students as well as high-school students between ages 16 and 18, to help the military identify potential recruits in a time of dwindling enlistment.
ALEXANDRIA, Va., June 23 /U.S. Newswire/ -- The American Conservative Union, the nation's oldest and largest Conservative grass roots organization, sharply condemned today's highly controversial 5-4 Supreme Court ruling that local governments may use imminent domain to take people's homes and businesses and turn them over to private developers.
Are you all feeling a little less relaxed now? Well, at least you're not feeling as DUMB as I do after posting about "The Medium is the Massage," a little paperback book by Marshall McLuhan that's been nestled in my various bookshelves since the mid-sixties. I should have taken the time to do a little research before I posted, but time is something I don't have much of these days.
But Mark Federman, whose blog "What is The Message" looks at all things McLuhanesque, left a comment. Between his explanation, and the one left by my friend Frank Paynter, I am now more informed about how the message got massaged into the little book in my possession.
I feel like a salmon swimming upstream. I keep realizing how much I don't know anything about. I keep realizing that my mom and I each have too much stuff and I'll never get it packed in time for the move. And I keep realizing that there's no stopping Bush and his crew.
I'm definitely going to hide out in the woods until it all blows over. Which it will, you know. It's all ebb and flow. The ol' Dharma Wheel.
Categories:
aaarrrgghh!
That's my scream of frustration as I try to get my mom to start packing. Her apartment is a bottomless pit of scraps of fabric and paper; hats from the 50s; shoes he doesn't wear; little boxes filled to the top with assorted paper clips, bits of string, nails, rusted washers, broken pencils, dried up pens.......... But she watches so that I don't thow anything out.
The packed boxes are piling up. I have no idea where she thinks they're going to fit in the smaller space into which we'll be moving.
I'm just tired of arguing.
And I still have my own packing to do.
aarrgghh!
Categories:
a 12-minute Social Security tutorial
In case you still think that Bush is right about Social Security being in big trouble, watch this flow-chart animation that explains why it isn't and come to your own conclusions about why Bush et al should be.
Categories:
misrembrances
I'm not the only one who misremembers the title of Marshall McLuhan's famous book about how electronic technology is reshapting patterns of social interdependence.
As I'm packing up my books, I come upon a paperback book dated March, 1967 entitled The Medium is the Massage, by, yes, Marshall McLuhan. Well, dagnabit, lookit that -- its MASSAGE, not MESSAGE, as so many of us misremember.
What a difference a vowel makes.
Back in 1967 this paperback book cost me $1.45. Ah, those bygone days.
I'm not misremembering that it's Father's Day. But my Dad died more than 20 years ago, and I've posted about him many times before.
Categories:
more than a taste of honey
-- sautee broccoli (or any other veggie) with olive oil, garlic, and honey
-- add honey to basil pesto and every kind of marinade
-- homemade salad dressing with apple cider vinegar and honey
-- stir fry with honey and soy sauce
I always cook with honey. Love honey-mustard and honey-barbeque anything. Right now, pretzels.
I always cook with honey
To sweeten up the night...
That was one of my favorite Judy Collins songs.
Or maybe this one was really my favorite.
Or maybe I most like her versions of some of Leonard Cohen's songs.
No, this is my all-time favorite:
ALBATROSS
The lady comes to the gate dressed in lavender and leather
Looking North to the sea she finds the weather fine
She hears the steeple bells ringing through the orchard
All the way from town
She watches seagulls fly
Silver on the ocean stitching through the waves
The edges of the sky
Many people wander up the hills
From all around you
Making up your memories and thinking they have found you
They cover you with veils of wonder as if you were a bride
Young men holding violets are curious to know if you have cried
And tell you why
And ask you why
Any way you answer
Lace around the collars of the blouses of the ladies
Flowers from a Spanish friend of the family
The embroid'ry of your life holds you in
And keeps you out but you survive
Imprisoned in your bones
Behind the isinglass windows of your eyes
And in the night the iron wheels rolling through the rain
Down the hills through the long grass to the sea
And in the dark the hard bells ringing with pain
Come away alone
Even now by the gate with you long hair blowing
And the colors of the day that lie along your arms
You must barter your life to make sure you are living
And the crowd that has come
You give them the colors
And the bells and wind and the dream
Will there never be a prince who rides along the sea and the mountains
Scattering the sand and foam into amethyst fountains
Riding up the hills from the beach in the long summer grass
Holding the sun in his hands and shattering the isinglass?
Day and night and day again and people come and go away forever
While the shining summer sea dances in the glass of your mirror
While you search the waves for love and your visions for a sign
The knot of tears around your throat is crystallizing into your design
And in the night the iron wheels rolling through the rain
Down the hills through the long grass to the sea
And in the dark the hard bells ringing with pain
Come away alone
Come away alone...with me.
Categories:
fresh air
Hot. Humid. Ugh.
At least it's not 111 degrees, which it is in Phoenix, where Randi Rhodes blows fresh into the air waves on Air America Radio.
According to Rhodes:
As I walked out of the Barry Goldwater Memorial Terminal (seriously) at Sky Harbor Airport, I couldn't help but think about how many so-called Goldwater-Conservatives actually STILL believe that Sen. Goldwater and the Bushies are cut from the same cloth.
In fact, it was this 1964 Goldwater quote that came to mind:
I'm frankly sick and tired of the political preachers across this country telling me as a citizen that if I want to be a moral person, I must believe in A, B, C, and D. Just who do they think they are? And from where do they presume to claim the right to dictate their moral beliefs to me?
Terri Schiavo, stem-cells, corporatist judges, purposefully lying "journalists," Downing Street Memos, etc, etc, etc. ENOUGH! Regardless of your party affiliation, how much more are you going to take?! And more importantly, how much more can we afford to take?
................
I dreamed last night that I went to see my former therapist, and when I stood in front of him, I was so overwhelmed that I couldn't even articulate what I was coming to see him about. And then the room was full of people getting in my way, and I left.
I'm packing for two. Move of big stuff is scheduled for July 14.
Hot. Sweaty. Tired. Need some fresh air.
Categories:
no wonder we're all dizzy
If they spin us any faster, we're all going to have scrambled eggs for brains and then we'll all become dumb and dumber Bushites.
Source: Media General News Service, June 10, 2005
"The U.S. Special Operations Command has hired three firms to produce newspaper stories, television broadcasts and Web sites to spread American propaganda overseas." [big snip] The firms will produce "print articles, video and audio broadcasts, Internet sites and novelty items, like T-shirts and bumper stickers, for foreign audiences. Video products will include newscasts, hour-long TV shows and commercials."....
Source: Washington Post, June 8, 2005
"The new drug safety board established by the Food and Drug Administration to restore confidence in the nation's drug supply will actually set back efforts to improve the safety of the medications Americans take and will not make it any easier to take dangerous drugs off the market," the Washington Post reports.....
Source: New York Times, June 8, 2005
In a lengthy memo Rick S. Piltz, a former senior associate in the Climate Change Science Program, revealed that U.S. government climate research reports had been edited by a White House official, Philip A. Cooney, to emphasize doubts about climate change. According to Piltz's memo Cooney, a former "climate team leader" and lobbyist with the American Petroleum Institute, changed one 2002 document to "create an enhanced sense of scientific uncertainty about climate change and its implications." .....
Source: CBS.MarketWatch.com June 14, 2005
ExxonMobil has confirmed that it has hired Philip A. Cooney, the former chief of staff at the White House Council on Environmental Quality who resigned last week after it was revealed that his editing of government scientists reports downplayed the significance of climate change. An Exxon Mobil spokesman declined to provide details of Cooney's new job, which he starts in autumn. Deputy spokeswoman for the White House, Dana Perino, told the New York Times "Phil Cooney did a great job and we appreciate his public service and the work that he did, and we wish him well in the private sector." ....
Source: The New York Times, June 8, 2005
In a joint meeting in Washington, President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair brushed off a recently revealed British memo from July 2002 that said "intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy" to remove Saddam Hussein "through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and W.M.D." or weapons of mass destruction.......
All of the above, and more, are detailed on www.prwatch.org the website of the Center for Media and Democracy.
Don't know what to believe any more? Check in with the watchers. Don't get caught up in the spins.
Categories:
while mom saves pie tins, I save magazine articles
Back in 1995, as my mother was diligently adding to her collection of used aluminum pie tins (I just threw out 43 of them that were hidden in the back of her closet), my son (then AKA Slowdog; now AKA b!X) was diligently collecting signatures for his "Hands Off! the Net" petition.
I think of this today because of the death of Senator James Exon, who tried, unsuccessfully, thanks in part to b!X, to introduce the original Communications Decency Act.
The October 5, 1995 issue of Rolling Stone Magazine had this to say about Slowdog/b!X as he led off their article on "Ten Things You Can Do to Make A Difference." There's no link anywhere to this article; of course, I still have the hard copy, which begins:
Slowdog's hanging out upstairs at the @ Cafe in New York's East Village, sipping cup after cup of coffee and tap-tap-tapping into the Internet on one of the computer terminals that looms over every table like a television set. Slowdog is 25 years old, with black pants, black t-shirt, black baseball cap, black sneakers, long black eyelashes, and a face that sees very little sun.
Born Christopher Frankonis, Slowdog used to work at the New York Public Library and log on, stop at the @ Cafe and log on, traipse back to his basement flat in Brooklyn, NY, and log on, surfing the Internet that runs like a vast river through wired America.
No real point, no particular politics, just another college dropout hooked on the Net. A kid from upstate New York with a mouse and a quick wit.
Then came Sen. James Exon, D. Neb, and his Communications Decency Act. Exon introduced a bill this March that proposes to tame the Internet. This senator wanted to pasteurize Slowdog's wild river of words and symbols, criminalize the transmission of lewd and lascivious language, make the world safe for June Cleaver.
An activist was born.
"Instead of understanding a new medium, they want to extend an old law from television," Slowdog says. "I'ts going to chill speech, make users liable for content. I knew I had to go beyond my insular little world on the Net. Here is my shot."
Slowdog and a half-dozen young activists worked with the Center for Democracy and Technology in Washington, D.C., and started a computer petition. They hoped for 10,000 signatures in three days. Two and a half months later the tally stood at 121,284, with support ranging from the libertarian Cato Institute to First Amendment absolutists. "Man, we were getting 1,000 signatures an hour," Slowdog says.
In late April a messenger walked into the office of Sen. Larry Pressler, R.S.D, whose committee was holding hearings on the bill, with a 1,000-sheet printout containing the names of the petition's signers. "To a politician, that's like carrying a political loaded gun," one staffer recalls. The petition came on top of the e-mail messages and faxes that Pressler's office had been getting for weeks.
Slowdog takes a hit of his latte and smiles. "I don't know that I was ever political before," he says. "But this was so severe and showed so little of understanding of something new. All of a sudden I had to put up or shut up."
b!X has not shut up since. I'm afraid, though, if he doesn't get some advertisers, he just might have to find another way to keep getting his words out.
Categories:
no Maine in June for me
June is the month during which I usually go to Maine for the week of the Summer Solstice. I am usually accompanied by one, two, or three of my good women friends. We missed the summer of 02 but 03a, b, c, and 04 were worth blogging about. [For some reason, some punctuations in those old posts show up as question marks; I don't have the energy to go in and fix them. Sorry.]
No Maine for me this year. I'm packing for our big move out of what Old Horsetail Snake calls "the old folks home."
For all the effort I've made to try NOT to be like my mother, here I am confronted by the fact that I'm almost as bad a pack rat as she. This time I keep taking bags of stuff to the Salvation Army. But my mother won't part with a thing. Tonight I found a box she packed filled with such things as plastic lids from various long-finished snack containers; five dish washing brushes, never used; the top of a coffee pot that she no longer has; an old greasy broken wooden hour glass egg timer; the lid I've been looking for that belongs to one of my pots...etc. etc.
Me? I just have hundreds of pens and pencils and videotapes of movies I taped from tv.
-----------------
On this June night that I am not in Maine, I go out and steal willow branches from the tree on the far side of the building where I live. A waning sickle moon pierces the thick black sky above the pond where bullfrogs are singing each other to sleep. I slip inside the dark heart of the willow....
Here in my apartment,the branches are soaking in a pan of water. Tomorrow I will strip off the leaves and form the pliable willow stalks into circles. I have gathered the materials I will use to make willow talsimans. My hope is to start them all on the Solstice, June 21.
-------------
My former colleague and continuous friend who owns the cottage I stay at in Maine has offered me time there this month for free. She reads my blog; sees the stress. I wish I could take her up on her offer. But I'm packing. I'm packing for two. And I'm doing the ol' "four times a day one drop in each eye of four eye drops" for my mother, who had her second cataract out earlier this week and now keeps marvelling at all of the different colors of green of the trees around where we live.
--------------
no Maine for me
just a waning sickle moon
and willow branches
waiting for magic
Categories:
The lure of the smart, seductive sociopath.
For the first time in her life, a woman I know is seeing a therapist. This is a woman who, sans therapy, survived living in foster homes as a child, her husband's premature death, her own bout with cancer, and the fiery destruction of her home.
But the seductive sociopath broke her heart in enough pieces to require help putting it back together.
I think that the character Jack that Thomas Hayden Church plays in the movie Sideways has that conscienceless charm of the narcissistic sociopath.
It's so easy for a woman to get obsessed over a sociopathic lover. He plays his part with infinite finesse and plays you even better. It's like he's born knowing exactly what to say and do to get you to painfully yearn for more.
At least I managed to get some decent poetry written as a result of my stint with one of those.
I think of my feisty and bright woman friend who had the recent misfortune to be hurt by a seductive sociopath. I know that she thinks she should have known better.
Uh uh.
Categories:
All my life's a circle.
Mary Travers of Peter, Paul, and Mary 60s folk fame sang this, my favorite song, on one of her albums -- which I wish I still had but I don't.
All My Life's a Circle
All my life's a circle, sunrise and sundown
The moon rolls through the night time
Till the day break comes around
All my life's a circle, but I can't tell you why
The seasons spinning round again
The years keep rolling by.
It seems like I've been here before, I can't remember when
But I got this funny feeling
That we'll all be together again
There's no straight lines that make up my life
And all my roads have bends
There's no clear cut beginnings, and so far no dead ends.....
I'm thinking of these lyrics now because, as a result of getting in touch with a college classmate of mine, I've been able to get in touch with a few more through him.
I have to admit, I get very nostalgic when I think of my college days, during which I pursued fun and frolic a bit more than I pursued academic achievement.
One of my recent old-classmate-e-interchanges reminded me how the girls from my sorority would gather in the Student Union on Sunday evenings and take over the place with our dancing. Mostly the Lindy. With any guy brave enough to take us on. And if there were no takers, with each other. I so miss dancing.
--------------
Circles are comforting -- full of mythic meaning.
I am making circles made of willow branches. Within them I will weave special symbols and give each of my closest 6 women friends atalisman before I move away. It's what I do.
There's no straight lines that make up my life
And all my roads have bends
There's no clear cut beginnings, and so far no dead ends
Categories:
Blog It and They Will Come.
I have to say that I've been contacted by the most interesting people who Googled something they were looking for or interested in and found exactly what they wanted in one of my posts.
Take, for instance, Canadian Carrie Watkins, who found this 2003 post of mine because she was trying to track down a particular photo of "Witches at Tea." She was doing the same thing I was at the time -- superimposing the faces of the women in her life over the faces of the old ladies. We've kept in touch on occasion, and the last occasion was her sharing of her blog experiment in creative writing: A Witch's Corner. I promised I would go over and keep up with her story -- which I didn't for all kinds of lazy reasons, so now I will tonight.
And then there's artist Jan Hurst (from Indiana, I think), who also was looking for the "Witches at Tea" photo to use in a collage. I really like Jan's work. Some of it reminds me of Laurie Doctor's wonderful pieces that combine calligraphy and mythic images.
Doncha just love Google??!
Categories:
The Sensible and Sympathetic Mr. Smith
No, not Mr. Brad Pitt Smith.
The Mr. Smith to whom I'm referring is Adam Smith, whose ideas about free-market competition are associated with the belief that self-interest brings about a healthy economy. His book, "The Wealth of Nations," is often referred to as the text or prescription for laissez-faire capitalism. "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer or the baker that we expect our dinner," Smith wrote, "but from their regard to their own self-interest."
The above quote is from my favorite local newspaper columnist, Diane Cameron, who, yesterday, had a piece about Adam Smith, since it was his birthday.
She goes on to say:
Adam Smith did understand that. While he wrote about the importance of self-interest, we forget that he was neither a politician nor an economist, but rather, by training and practice, a moral philosopher. He never advocated not caring for the poor; he presumed that a community -- whether that meant a village or town or a country -- took care of its needy. Smith made his name with another book before "The Wealth of Nations." His first book was "A Theory of Moral Sentiments," written in 1759, in which he described the role of sympathy in society and advocated for the need of it to maximize the "efficiency of care in a community."
Smith's favorite metaphor, the "invisible hand," came from that earlier book in which he presumed a basis of equality among men. It was that emphasis on equality that made his books bestsellers in the American colonies and, hence, still part of our political consciousness.
Smith believed that "there is no place for privilege and class" in a moral economy. In Smith's scheme, wealth meant not just business and prosperity but also charity, generosity, compassion and modesty: having a sense of what is enough.
On the same page as Cameron's article commentary is a piece by George Richardson of the Rockefeller College of Public Affairs and Policy, "Waging a Ratio."
Richardson suggests a way to a achieve a more equitable wage structure in which the minimum wage is tied, by a ratio, to the salaries of top CEOs. He suggests:
There are those who are troubled by soaring top management salaries while the purchasing power of average and minimum wages erode. It seems both immoral and unstable for a society to drive such a growing gap between its rich and poor. And it is a dramatic example of a kind of market failure: Top management compensation appears to be a runaway cost. The phenomenon cries out for solutions that help to control the growing disparity between rich and poor, and reduce the compensation strains on corporations without harming the strength of our economy.
So what should Congress do? Rather than focusing on short-term, stopgap maneuvers increasing the minimum wage by $1 or $2, or even $3 an hour, Congress should reach for a policy that solves both the minimum wage problem and the inequity problem once and for all, without constraining the ability of anyone to make as much money as possible.
The solution is to substitute for the minimum wage a "minimum wage ratio," or if you prefer, a "maximum compensation ratio."
Here's how it might work: Congress could establish a standard for the maximum ratio of top corporate compensation to the wage and benefits package of the lowest paid worker in a firm. We could take the standard that existed in the 1970s and say the maximum compensation ratio in every firm cannot exceed, say, 30. If that's perceived as too low (so 20th century), set the maximum ratio at 40, or even 50. But set it, and enforce it through the income tax machinery. We would then have a federally mandated "minimum wage ratio."
To raise top management compensation, a firm would have to raise the wages of its lowest paid workers. There would be no limit, of course, to how high any wages could go. The lowest and the highest would just have to stay within the ratio.
Congress could set the ratio and forget it. No need for periodic updates, as with the minimum wage. No periods of declining purchasing power for those on the minimum wage, unless everyone is experiencing that. The policy is self-adjusting.
There are problems to work out about how such a policy could be implemented -- how to value stock options, how to handle sports and entertainment salaries, how to prevent corporations from gaming the policy, and so on. But it is time to recognize that periodic boosts to the minimum wage are like pushing on a string. They don't solve many problems in the short run and may even create some.
It's time to stop thinking about pushing on that string, and switch to pulling on it from the other end. We should work through the implementation puzzles and set a federal minimum wage ratio policy -- a maximum compensation ratio -- and set a self-adjusting standard for wage equity that re-establishes rationality in wages and compensation packages and is a model for equity and efficiency for the world's economies.
I'll bet that Adam Smith would have liked Richarson's sensible and sympathetic solution.
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I went to college with a CIA Lie Detector
Last night I met some of my "old" sorority sisters for dinner. It is reunion weekend at SUNY/Albany, so we thought we'd have our own get together. One of the women had gotten a letter from a guy we vaguely remember from the good ol' days. He had kept track of lots of other people from college that we all knew in common; his letter filled us in on their whereabouts. It also filled us in on the career he wound up in with the CIA. Apparently, when I was still dorking around in graduate school, trying my best to avoid the real world, John Sullivan enlisted and
...served in the US Army from 1962 to 1967 as a Staff Sergeant E-6 in military intelligence. He was trained as a Russian linguist at the Army Language School in Monterey, California. After completing the Field Operations Intelligence (case officer) course, he was assigned to Germany where he studied the German language.
The most interesting information, from my perspective, is on Amazon.com, from the reviews of his new book, Of Spies and Lies: A CIA Lie Detector Remembers Vietnam.
This offered by Publisher's Weekly:
...Sullivan arrived in Vietnam a war hawk. After 48 months of traversing the war zone administering lie-detector tests to thousands of enemy prisoners and others, he came home a thoroughly disillusioned dove. Sullivan chronicles his change of heart by seemingly sparing few details about his work and social lives during his extended tour of duty. He paints a generally negative picture of the CIA's war against the Vietcong. Sullivan claims that CIA operatives produced "some good information," but that information was misused by those at the top and produced no real progress in undermining the enemy. On the social side, Sullivan readily admits that he lived the good life in Vietnam. He and his wife and child lacked for few creature comforts in the war zone....
and this from Booklist:
There is no shortage of Vietnam War memoirs, of course, but here is one with what just might be a unique perspective: the war as seen by a CIA agent responsible for polygraphing prisoners of war, potential allies, and even his own colleagues. Sullivan is not unaware of the ironies implicit in his role as polygraph specialist--a lie-detecting expert hunting truth at a time and in a place where disinformation was ubiquitous. His work took him from one end of Vietnam to the other, as well as to Cambodia, Laos, and Thailand, and his memories of the final four years of the war (1971-75) are deeply unsettling. There are no lid-blowing revelations here (like all books by former CIA employees, this one has been vetted by the agency), but the very personal story of a man confronted with the elusiveness of truth proves surprisingly moving....
I barely remember John from our college days. I have always been, after all, a peacenik. We didn't travel in the same circles back then.
Actually, several of my sorority sisters and I didn't really travel in the same circles either. They are the more conservative ones. But somehow, when we get together now, in our more mellow years, we enjoy each other's company. We have a shared history of times when we were still forming who we would become. When, in those naive 1950s, we were still innocent. Some of us have stayed more innocent than others.
And we never would have pegged John Sullivan for a career detecting lies in a war zone.
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