Murder on the Disorient Express

The following is part of an e-mail message from ColorofChange.org that landed in my in-box this morning. After taking the liberty of editing it for clarity and continuity, I took the liberty of posting it here. Yeah, it's that important!

"On New Year's Eve, Oscar Grant was shot execution-style by transit police officer Johannes Mehserle in Oakland, California. He was shot in the back while lying face down on a subway platform, unarmed and restrained by other officers.

Despite damning video evidence, it took nearly two weeks for the District Attorney to arrest Mehserle and charge him with murder. The DA admitted that it was only due to massive public pressure, including more than 20,000 ColorofChange members speaking up, that he moved even at that pace.

That's why it's so important for each of us to commit to staying involved. Johannes Mehserle's arrest is important, but it's only the first step. In cases like this, history has repeatedly shown that as soon as the public eye turns away the prospect of justice fades.

In 14 years as Alameda County District Attorney, Tom Orloff had never before charged a police officer for an on-duty shooting. And when asked, several legal experts were unable to come up with any examples of officer-involved shootings becoming murder cases in California.

But overwhelming public pressure made it impossible for Orloff to ignore Oscar Grant's murder. He said that "because of the intense public interest I think more resources were put into wrapping this up than would be put in in other situations." Orloff made it clear that because enough ordinary people spoke out, he poured investigative resources into this case that his record tells us he never would have, otherwise.

We've exposed a chink in the armor of a system that protects trigger-happy cops instead of regular folks. Now there's a real opportunity to create systemic changes that would introduce transparency and accountability to police forces across California, and especially to the BART Police Department. We need to keep the pressure on Tom Orloff to make sure he keeps devoting time and energy to Mehserle's prosecution.

We need you--and so does Oscar Grant's family. Making sure the prosecution does its job and pushing for much-needed reforms requires your voice. Help honor the memory of Oscar Grant and others who have fallen victim to police violence."

Please, join me in standing up for justice in the murder of Oscar Grant.

Thanks.

Subverting Marijuana Mythology*

Forget everything the government has told you about marijuana (except that it's currently illegal). The government was wrong when it made its bogus case against marijuana 71 years ago, and it's been wrong ever since.

Some basic research into marijuana reveals the following:

• "Marijuana" is a Mexican slang term for the dried leaves and flower tops of cannabis sativa, the common hemp plant.

• Marijuana has demonstrable medical uses and benefits, despite government claims to the contrary.

• Cannabis hemp was a mainstay of economic activity on the North American continent for more than 200 years.

• Unlike alcohol and tobacco, both legal substances that are collectively responsible for as many as 500,000 health-related deaths annually, marijuana has never been shown to be a primary cause of death among its users.

• Cannabis hemp has the potential to reshape and revitalize the economy in myriad ways, including revamped paper and textile industries, new biofuels production facilities, and manufacturing of products for domestic use and for export.

• Society has not collapsed in any country where cannabis is legal.

Despite reams of empirical evidence to the contrary, the U.S. Government persists in perpetuating the myth that marijuana—cannabis hemp—is far too dangerous to be allowed a legitimate place in civil society. And too many fools persist in believing everything the government says is gospel truth.

If marijuana were legalized, the worst that could happen would be the unleashing of a mindstorm of creativity. We might be able to figure out ways to fix our broken political system, our broken educational system, our broken healthcare system.

And the best that can happen? Surely, the best that can happen will arise out of the worst that can happen. Energy independence, a healthier environment, a sustainable culture based on sustainable economic policies and practices are but some of the possibilities.

In short, cannabis legalization—marijuana legalization—would signify the return of sanity to a society gone seriously awry.


*This brief article originally appeared in Petey's Pipeline E-zine, Issue #24, February 06, 2006.


Register your vote for cannabis legalization, today. Visit Change.org/ for more information.

The Problem with Problems*

Global warming, environmental destruction, polluted water, depleted fish stocks, an endangered food supply, an energy crisis, a shortage of affordable housing, poverty, education funding shortfalls, rising healthcare costs, declining numbers (relative to the population) of living-wage jobs, war . . .. These are among the most egregious, most vexing, most persistent problems that plague society today. What are we going to do about them?

The conventional mindset is that if society's problem solvers throw enough money at a problem, or do something equally stupid, the problem will just go away. Sorry! Reality doesn't work that way. In reality, one must attack the source of a problem if one has a serious desire to solve the problem.

Everyone has their own ideas about how to remedy society's most pressing problems, but that, in itself, creates another problem. Most remedies postulated by concerned citizens and well meaning (or not) politicians concentrate on treating the symptoms, not the disease. These are nothing more than feel-good solutions that dull the pain of failed policy while ignoring the underlying cause. They give the illusion of making progress, but deliver nothing of substance.

Feel-good solutions are band-aid solutions; they're stopgap measures at best. The sore that is the crux of the problem continues to fester under the band-aid until the band-aid falls off, at which point the original problem becomes a little more difficult to deal with.

Virtually all of the problems mentioned in the first paragraph of this short essay stem from one source—overpopulation. Until all members of society, from the movers and shakers to the moved and shaken, can recognize, understand and accept this simple truth, and will themselves to act in concert to end our collective nightmare, the nightmare will continue, unabated, to its ultimate, frightful, painful conclusion.

We can take decisive, positive steps to limit population growth by placing sanctions and controls on the front end; we can implement harsh, brutal, extreme measures on the back end; or, we can do nothing, thus letting the status quo prevail. We can do it the sane way, we can do it the insane way, or we can let Mother Nature do it her way. That, too, is a choice. The only certainty is that we, as a species, will either live or die by the choice we make.


*This brief article originally appeared in Petey's Pipeline E-zine, Issue #17, October 17, 2005.

Customer service, please hold . . .

You can always tell when a company doesn't want to deal with customer service issues. The first thing it does is fire all the customer service representatives who take phone calls and replace them with a rat's maze of touch-tone options that were designed by the devil for the sole purpose of driving people crazy.

Around and around you go, pushing a phone button whenever the recorded message pushes one of your buttons, tit for tat, until you forget what your reason was for calling. Somehow, you maintain your sanity until you miraculously stumble across the message that says, "If you're stupid enough to still be on the line and you wish to speak to a customer service representative in person, press '0'." You take a deep breath and press '0,' . . . only to hear another recorded message say, "We're sorry, all customer service lines are busy at this time. Please hold until the next available customer service representative can take your call. "

By now, you're 23 minutes into what should have been a four-minute call. And, you're not done yet. For at least the next 18 minutes, at 30-second intervals, the last recorded message repeats, "We're sorry, all customer service lines are busy . . .."

Finally, a customer service rep answers your call, only to dash your hopes of a quick resolution to your problem against the rocks of frustration when you realize that she probably took her first English lesson at about the same time you started this call.

But, hey! The company already has your money. That’s the only business it cares about.

The New Year Celebration that Wasn't

It may be the start of a new year, but that’s not necessarily, in these uncertain and unsettled times, a cause for celebration. More than a few skeptics and cynics and skeptical cynics (and cynical skeptics) are saying, “Welcome to the New Year, same as the Old Year.”

Because this is sure to be a year of disappointment and delayed gratification for many people, I’m foregoing any celebration until January 20^th. Even then, I’ll only be celebrating George DUHbya (yes, it’s spelled with a capital DUH) Bush’s departure from the White House; it’s too soon to begin contemplating a serious celebration of Barak the Magic Human’s ensconcement therein, and I’m more than happy to put off the festivities until such time that the Mighty O demonstrates his leadership skills in ways that take us out of the morass of mischievous mayhem maliciously visited upon us by his malevolent predecessor.

If it turns out to be more of the same I will have squandered no precious time and energy paying tribute to an indefensible administration bent on perpetuating the wholesale destruction of environment, economy, Constitution and country. Instead, I will devote my time to rethinking my New Year’s revolution resolution, which—in its current iteration—is to essentially remain optimistic in a hostile atmosphere of adversity and deprivation. While I’m still unsure as to where a new New Year’s resolution might be headed, I’m reasonably certain that circumstances will eventually dictate a direction.

Change is coming, of that we can be certain; yet to be determined is whether that change will be for the better or for the worse. It behooves us to remember that change manifests in many ways, and in many different scenarios: a repair shop might change out old parts for new; in auto racing, tire changes are the rule rather than the exception (pit for fuel and tires in two laps, Danica), and change is often implied without the word actually being spoken; in politics it’s a change of administrations, but in political campaigns it’s “change you can believe in” (if you’re gullible enough to believe campaign slogans); and in the new economy it’s “Hey, buddy, can you spare some change?” Context is everything, but content is pretty important, too.

I’m not at all optimistic that the many crises—economic, environmental, energy, healthcare, infrastructure, et al—to which Obama has fallen heir will immediately begin to show signs of recovery once Mighty O takes the oath of office. Nor should you be. It’s far more likely that most of these crises will deepen significantly over the next year or two before a turnaround becomes apparent; problems that develop over years are not fixed overnight. In the meantime, look forward to more unemployed people, more homeless people, more hungry people, and more of almost everything else that’s undesirable.

Do I have any predictions for 2009? Well, yes! Yes, I do. I have one prediction. I predict that before Obama’s first week in office ends, he will know what it’s like to put his shoulder to the wheel and his nose to the grindstone while his back is to the wall and people hold his feet to the fire. Oh, so many clichés . . ..

Wait! I just thought of another one. Prediction, that is. I also predict that before Mighty O has been in office for a month gas prices reverse course and head back toward the recently familiar territory of $4 per gallon.

Wait! I just thought of another ‘nuther one, so make that three predictions for the price of one. I further predict that The Bushwhacker will try to claim credit for the relative low gas prices at the end of 2008 in an attempt to put some positive spin on an otherwise disastrous legacy.

Yeah, like that’s ever gonna happen.

Surreal Reality

So, the talking head on CBS News, last night, reported that CBS News named Hank Paulson as their pick for Businessman of the Year. Huh? Did I miss something?

Isn’t that a little (well, okay, a lot) like naming General Motors as the Automaker of the Year, or George DUHbya (yes, it’s spelled with a capital DUH) Bush as Humanitarian of the Year, or Bernard Madoff as Citizen of the Year, or Jayant Patel as Doctor of the Year, or, come to think of it, CBS News as News Broadcaster of the Year?

The mainstream media appears to be stuck on stupid, so there’s little wonder that MSM gets a bad rap from almost everyone outside the mainstream.

And I seem to be trapped in an Orwellian fantasy world—part Alice’s Wonderland, part Oz, part Brave New World, part 1984—that gets more surreal by the day. Or is it, as I’ve lately come to suspect, that I’m trapped in an unfinished and unaired Twilight Zone episode, forever consigned to this fate because no one has sense enough to call it a wrap?

Crap!

Dr. Mr. StrangeDerangedlove: Or, How I Learned to Hate Santa and Love the Grinch is how I originally wanted to title this piece, but Blogger limitations forbade me from formatting it that way, so I had to come up with a new title. Crap! pretty much sums up how I feel about the whole situation.

If you’re thinking that I’m about to take a dump on Christmas, bingo, you just won a prize for prescience. I’ll tell you what your prize is in a minute.

As for understanding why I hate loathe Santa, you have to understand what it’s like to watch, over ten days, a 40-acre old-growth-and-mature-second-growth forest felled and fed into the maw of a chipper in order to make way for a Christmas-tree farm. That I played a part in all of that destruction (I drove one of four chip trucks that hauled wood chips from the chipper to the paper mill) only deepens my resolve to disavow Christmas and all its traditions, including Santa. There is no redemption, otherwise.

Then there’s the diesel fuel consumed to deliver Christmas trees to distant cities, and the gigawatts of electric power consumed to keep the Christmas lights lit for a month, and the rolling brownouts caused by entire neighborhoods dedicated to decorative displays of Christmas lights solely for the amusement of motorists who have nothing better to do than drive around gawking at Christmas lights—more wasted fuel, and more carbon dioxide entering the atmosphere.

And let’s not forget about the environmental destruction and all the resources that are wasted in the making and disposition of all those crappy gifts that change hands during the Christmas season. More than 90% of all this stuff will end up in a recycling center or a landfill within six months, so why bother?

By not giving material gifts of questionable value, I give the most valuable gifts of all—cleaner air and water, less pollution, a safer, more enjoyable environment. These are the gifts I willingly give to everyone, including those prescient people who won a prize for intuiting that I was about to take a dump on Christmas.

“But Christmas is for the children . . .”

Oh, Bullshit! Christmas is Christianity’s gift to capitalism, to corporatocracy, commerce and consumerism. Bah! Humbug! To my way of thinking, Christmas is not worth destroying the planet for. It’s time to dispense with old, wasteful traditions and establish new, less wasteful ones.

Harry Kwanukkahmas!

Excuses, Excuses

By now you've probably noticed that it's been a few days since I posted my last entry to this blog. You're probably also thinking that the last thing I needed was another blog I couldn't keep up with. But, hey, procrastination is my modus operandi, and I've got other excuses reasons, if you need them.

Take the weather, for instance. Today is Portland’s fourth or possibly fifth consecutive snow day, and the accumulation is now six to eight inches deep. It’s rare that snow gets this deep in Portland, rarer still that it lasts this long.

But it’s not the snow, per se, that’s cause for concern, it’s the disruption to my daily routine that interferes with my writing and causes me so much angst. Snow piled high atop a car parked out front and tree branches sagging under the weight of accumulated ice and snow obstruct my view of yonder pond, putting a serious crimp in my wildlife-watching activities, which I then compensate for by watching stupid humans doing stupid human tricks in the snow, an activity far less interesting but vastly more entertaining—and more time consuming—than watching wildlife. (How’s that for a run-on sentence?)

The food situation is another cause of worry; I haven’t been grocery shopping in almost two weeks. No, I’m not in danger of going hungry anytime soon, but I am starting to run out of things I like to eat, which means that until the snow goes away, I’ll be preparing meals out of things I’m not particularly fond of. Meaning, of course, practically everything in my emergency food supply. I can’t begin to tell you how much I’m looking forward to meals consisting of a split-pea soup appetizer, followed by an entrée of beans and a plate of ungarnished pasta for dessert. And, because I ate my last two slices of bread for lunch today, I see lots of Bisquick biscuits in my immediate future. Still, it’s marginally better than eating out of a dumpster.

Then there’s the matter of staying warm. Doubling up on my coffee and tea intake seems to help, but eventually every visit to the coffee pot necessitates a visit to that other pot—a further erosion of writing time.

My final—and perhaps favorite—excuse reason for low writing output is the fairly large number of other people’s blogs that I read on a daily basis. That I’m sometimes compelled to leave snarky comments on these other blogs also eats into the time I have available for writing for Frieddogleg and Petey’s Pipeline.

But, not to worry. As soon as I find the time, I’m going to study the situation to find out how I can better manage my time so that I have more time to write.

That’s when you should begin to worry.

Non-news is No News

It’s interesting—but not surprising—that media reporters and pundits are doing everything in their power to conflate President-elect Obama’s ties to Illinois with complicity in Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich’s corruption scandal. Sorry, guys! No matter how much you want it to be true, it’s not true; no matter how much you torture logic, it’s never gonna be true. Read my lips: Obama had nothing to do with it. There’s no smoking gun. Not one scintilla of evidence of wrongdoing on Obama’s part. Get over it and move on.

The truth doesn’t seem to mean much, these days, thanks mostly to Repugthuglicans who think that stretching the truth so that it resembles a size-12 girdle that’s been used to constrain a size-56 tummy is an acceptable way of preserving the status quo. However, that’s not to say that they’re the only ones guilty of prevarication. I suspect that if telling lies were punishable by imprisonment, there wouldn’t be enough free people in media and government combined to populate a basketball team.

No one with at least five functioning brain cells thinks that torturing POWs is a good idea, and most people oppose torture for any reason. But few people understand that logic is a POW, too (albeit more of a political prisoner held captive in the media’s war on critical thinking), and that it’s time to call for an end to the torture of it.

Oh, the Iron Knee

Every day brings more bad news about the economy: financial meltdown of this, financial bailout for that, more home mortgages foreclosed, more homeless people looking for shelter, more jobless people looking for work, more working people struggling to keep a roof over their head and food on the table. At some point this whole situation is going to turn downright ugly, and it’s going to get worse—a lot worse—before it starts to get better. The real suffering has yet to begin.

The story of how the U.S. went from being the world’s leading creditor nation to the world’s biggest debtor nation is long and complicated, but once this tragic tale is told and the truth emerges a frightening reality takes shape. From that reality we can draw only one of two possible conclusions. Either the bastards who led us into this financial disaster are mind-numbingly stupid, or they’re the brilliant engineers of a successful scheme to loot the nation’s wealth.

Because no one could be this utterly, insanely stupid unless they majored in Stupidity in college and got a degree in it (Joe E. Half-case, STD?), I’m betting what little money I have left on the latter.

One thing you can’t argue against is that a few evidently privileged people are plundering the mine and giving the rest of us the shaft.