Monthly Archives: November 2006

Giving thanks

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My third grade twins were asked in school last week to write down three things they were thankful for. Both wrote that they were thankful for family, friends, the earth. Under each category they were asked to elaborate a bit. Under family, my little girl wrote that she was thankful for Mom, Dad, brothers and sisters.

My little boy, however, had a different take on the assignment. He wrote that he was thankful that his family was supportive, funny, and “willing.” Willing. How cute. Willing to do what? He didn’t really say.

Upon reflection I know that I, too, am thankful to the people in my world who are willing. Willing to let me be myself. Willing to forgive my indiscretions. Willing to hike with me on a snowy morning. Willing to be spontaneous and funny and engaging. Willing to offer words of encouragement or words of advice. Willing to confront me when necessary. Willing to love me, come what may.

I want to learn a lesson from my son, accidentally wise beyond his years, and be more willing.

Israel’s Targeted Assassinations leading to renewed Lebanese Civil War

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‘Targeted Assassinations’ have become an integral part of official US policy and official Israel policy. Nowhere is this illustrated more than with Israel’s constant running after Hamas leaders to try to sniper them out. By sniper though, often times this means dropping bombs or shelling neighborhoods and murdering entire families of innocent people, and not just firing away at a single person using a rifle with scope attached.

The US leadership likes this Israeli Jewish terrorist mode so much, that it is now using the same tactic in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq, and with the exact same consequences. As we have come to see, ‘collateral damage’ is often quite high. It should be clear, that what the Israeli and US governments refer to as targeted assassination’ in reality is nothing more than terrorism. It’s another semantics game like the Right also plays with the meaning of what constitutes torture. When the Right Wing US and Israeli governments do it, it supposedly does not constitute torture, or so say their apologists.

So what does this have to do with Lebanon? It is quite simple really. When state terrorism (targeted assassinations) becomes official policy, the victims almost always reply in kind. They too start targeting the leaders of the Right for ‘targeted assassinations’. Both sides, Right and Left, then usually enter into a prolonged sort of ‘dirty war’, where both sides employ terrorism against each other’s leaderships. Yesterday, Israel murdered Hamas leaders in Gaza, and today, Hezbollah murders a US-Israel allied, Christian Lebanese leader, Perre Gemayel. And as pointed out previously, this situation is actually being fomented and inflamed by the deployment of United Nations troops into Lebanon in order to save Israel from any consequences from beginning a bombing attack on Iran.

The European’s tolerance for Israel’s policy of ‘targeted assassination’ of Arab leaders it doesn’t want to deal with, PLUS the allowing of the US to turn UN ‘peacekeepers’ into agents of Bush’s foregin policy is throwing fuel onto the regionalization of the Iraq and Afghan fiascoes. The US government seems intent on turning the entire ME oil producing region into a zone of anarchy and chaos, where eventual control can ultimately only fall into Pentagon hands. It is a policy to drench in blood this entire area of the world in order to grab the energy supplies out of the ensuing chaos.

Ladies who lunch: a rebuttal

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Ladies who lunchEric, I hardly know where to begin. I guess I will leave the analysis of sorority girls alone as I was never one of them, neither were any of my sisters, I’m guessing neither were yours. I’m sure I have a few friends who were but I couldn’t tell you who.

I do know many society gals, however. And, yes, we threw a big party this month to raise funds for Newborn Hope. We also educated the 1600 people in the room about prematurity and gave them further opportunity to get involved with the cause.

Because we fed our fat faces, migrant workers on the Western Slope will have access to prenatal care; Peak Vista will have money to see high-risk indigent pregnant women; McKee Medical Center will have a bi-lingual social worker on staff, Penrose Community will hold smoking cessation classes for pregnant teens, etc.

In August we threw a big party called Pasta in the Park to raise funds for TESSA. We challenged each other to make the tastiest pasta sauce, dressed up as though we were heading off to Ascot, and made a bunch of money so that abused women and their children have a safe place to go. Ask Cari Davis what she thinks of the work we sorority gals do, and what she would do without us.

I think in December, it’s S-CAP. The Red Ribbon Ball. Yet another garish event designed to raise funds to help those suffering with AIDS.

In February, it’ll be the Heart Ball. We’ll raise more than $100,000 in a single night. The men will dress in tuxes and we girls will get to wear our ball gowns, maybe even our furs. We’ll once again eat delicious fattening food and dance to the mellow sounds of Moments Notice, or some other local boring band.

I was part of the organization that started the Children’s Literacy Center. Remember, we used to hold the Celebrity Dinner at Jose Muldoon’s? “Important” people served us tacos and margaritas and we made enough money to kick off our fledgling project. If you don’t know what a difference the Children’s Literacy Center has made in Colorado Springs, you should really check out their website. Or talk to any educator in town.

Guess what? The same 100 or so society women hold every one of these fundraising events. EVERY ONE. We also do the Festival of World Theater, the Dance Theater’s wine tasting weekend, the Fine Arts Center’s annual gala–all kinds of arts and culture undertakings that benefit our community mightily.

I took a graduate course on Nonprofit Management a few years ago at UCCS. It was taught by Cathy Robbins who heads up the El Pomar Foundation. She taught us that the role played by society women, the fund raisers, in the world of philanthropy is immeasurable and critically important.

The thing about your post that is the most upsetting to me is the accusation that Newborn Hope has played into the hands of the anti-abortion activists. As the person who was recently in charge of granting the nearly $300,000 we raised last year, all I can say is NOT ON MY WATCH. The ironic thing about society gals is that we are smart. Really smart. Maybe we gave up careers to marry the big guys and raise families, but we were chosen by those big boys because of our DNA. Because of our charisma. Because of our mental acuity. We were chosen by them because of our genes. Not because of our jeans.

My Advisory Council co-chair, former Kappa Kappa Gamma turned attorney who has recently published her fourth book, and I understood very well how the issue of prematurity might be linked to the issue of abortion. She and I are actually on opposite sides of the abortion issue. Be we are most definitely on the same side when it comes to prematurity prevention and the work done by Newborn Hope.

I’ll give you a little education. We give a lot of money for pregnancy tests. This has never felt to me like a great use of our funds. However, because we have several physicians, neonatal nurses and social workers on our committee (we’ll only accept them if they have a least one strand of genuine pearls and understand that Birkenstocks with knee socks are not allowed in any circumstance), the pregnancy test is a very important first step. It is imperative if (1) a provider wants to enter the woman into the healthcare system (2) the provider wants to enroll the woman in the Medicaid system (3) the provider wants to take control of the woman (usually a young girl) to prevent her from obtaining an abortion.

Those in category 3 usually are also interested in funds for “early ultrasound.” From a medical standpoint, there is almost no reason to do an ultrasound at six weeks except to show a young girl that this is in fact a “baby” living within her womb that should not be aborted.

My co-chair and I, despite the fact that we are society gals, are not idiots. Nor are any gals on our committee. We understand very well the dynamic. As a result, we changed the way Newborn Hope grants funds. We now have a rubric that we use to evaluate grant proposals. If the pregnancy test is a first step in getting the patient into Medicaid, or if it is a first step in referring the woman to a doctor who will provide “continuity of care” all the way until birth, we’ll pay for the pregnancy tests. If not, we won’t. On our watch, a local medical care organization, which is actually closely aligned with the anti-abortion movement, got nothing. NOT ONE DIME. For the first time in years. Check out our website at NewbornHope.org to see who gets our money. Our evaluation rubric is posted there as well.

So make fun if you must. But this town would be a much different place without the ladies who lunch. People in the non-profit world know it. They would never belittle our efforts, because we help them achieve their ends in a way they couldn’t without our support.

If you’d like me to throw a little soiree to raise funds for one of your pet projects, maybe the PPJPC, my sorority friends and I could have about a hundred grand in your pocket by the end of next week. So let us know. Even with the holidays fast approaching, lots of shopping to do for our little silver spooners, we’d still love an opportunity to feed our fat faces! And shop for new outfits from our fine local merchants! You don’t have to ask twice!

Songs banned by Clear Channel radio stations

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As part of the project to mirror web resource material that the media would otherwise hope to bury, here is the list of music recordings which Clear Channel banned from the airwaves of its enormous network of radio stations. On the heels of 9/11, Clear Channel asserted these songs had “questionable content.”

Drowning Pool “Bodies”
Mudvayne “Death Blooms”
Megadeth “Dread and the Fugitive,” “Sweating Bullets”
Saliva “Click Click Boom”
P.O.D. “Boom”
Metallica “Seek and Destroy,” “Harvester or Sorrow,” “Enter Sandman,”
“Fade to Black”
All Rage Against The Machine songs
Nine Inch Nails “Head Like a Hole”
Godsmack “Bad Religion”
Tool “Intolerance”
Soundgarden “Blow Up the Outside World”
AC/DC “Shot Down in Flames,” “Shoot to Thrill,” “Dirty Deeds”
“Highway to Hell,” “Safe in New York City,” “TNT,” “Hell’s Bells”
Black Sabbath “War Pigs,” “Sabbath Bloody Sabbath,” “Suicide Solution”
Dio “Holy Diver”
Steve Miller “Jet Airliner”
Van Halen “Jump”
Queen “Another One Bites the Dust,” “Killer Queen”
Pat Benatar “Hit Me with Your Best Shot,” “Love is a Battlefield”
Oingo Boingo “Dead Man’s Party”
REM “It’s the End of the World as We Know It”
Talking Heads “Burning Down the House”
Judas Priest “Some Heads Are Gonna Roll”
Pink Floyd “Run Like Hell,” “Mother”
Savage Garden “Crash and Burn”
Dave Matthews Band “Crash Into Me”
Bangles “Walk Like an Egyptian”
Pretenders “My City Was Gone”
Alanis Morissette “Ironic”
Barenaked Ladies “Falling for the First Time”
Fuel “Bad Day”
John Parr “St. Elmo’s Fire”
Peter Gabriel “When You’re Falling”
Kansas “Dust in the Wind”
Led Zeppelin “Stairway to Heaven”
The Beatles “A Day in the Life,” “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,”
“Ticket To Ride,” “Obla Di, Obla Da”
Bob Dylan/Guns N Roses “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door”
Arthur Brown “Fire”
Blue Oyster Cult “Burnin’ For You”
Paul McCartney and Wings “Live and Let Die”
Jimmy Hendrix “Hey Joe”
Jackson Brown “Doctor My Eyes”
John Mellencamp “Crumbling Down.” “I’m On Fire”
U2 “Sunday Bloody Sunday”
Boston “Smokin”
Billy Joel “Only the Good Die Young”
Barry McGuire “Eve of Destruction”
Steam “Na Na Na Na Hey Hey”
Drifters “On Broadway”
Shelly Fabares “Johnny Angel”
Los Bravos “Black is Black”
Peter and Gordon “I Go To Pieces,” “A World Without Love”
Elvis “(You’re the) Devil in Disguise”
Zombies “She’s Not There”
Elton John “Benny & The Jets,” “Daniel,” “Rocket Man”
Jerry Lee Lewis “Great Balls of Fire”
Santana “Evil Ways”
Louis Armstrong “What A Wonderful World”
Youngbloods “Get Together”
Ad Libs “The Boy from New York City”
Peter Paul and Mary “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “Leavin’ on a Jet Plane”
Rolling Stones “Ruby Tuesday”
Simon And Garfunkel “Bridge Over Troubled Water”
Happenings “See You in Septemeber”
Carole King “I Feel the Earth Move”
Yager and Evans “In the Year 2525”
Norman Greenbaum “Spirit in the Sky”
Brooklyn Bridge “Worst That Could Happen”
Three Degrees “When Will I See You Again”
Cat Stevens “Peace Train,” “Morning Has Broken”
Jan and Dean “Dead Man’s Curve”
Martha & the Vandellas “Nowhere to Run”
Martha and the Vandellas/Van Halen “Dancing in the Streets”
Hollies “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother”
San Cooke Herman Hermits, “Wonder World”
Petula Clark “A Sign of the Times”
Don McLean “American Pie”
J. Frank Wilson “Last Kiss”
Buddy Holly and the Crickets “That’ll Be the Day”
John Lennon “Imagine”
Bobby Darin “Mack the Knife”
The Clash “Rock the Casbah”
Surfaris “Wipeout”
Blood Sweat and Tears “And When I Die”
Dave Clark Five “Bits and Pieces”
Tramps “Disco Inferno”
Paper Lace “The Night Chicago Died”
Frank Sinatra “New York, New York”
Creedence Clearwater Revival “Travelin’ Band”
The Gap Band “You Dropped a Bomb On Me”
Alien Ant Farm “Smooth Criminal”
3 Doors Down “Duck and Run”
The Doors “The End”
Third Eye Blind “Jumper”
Neil Diamond “America”
Lenny Kravitz “Fly Away”
Tom Petty “Free Fallin'”
Bruce Springsteen “I’m On Fire,” “Goin’ Down”
Phil Collins “In the Air Tonight”
Alice in Chains “Rooster,” “Sea of Sorrow,” “Down in a Hole,”
“Them Bone”
Beastie Boys “Sure Shot,” “Sabotage”
The Cult “Fire Woman”
Everclear “Santa Monica”
Filter “Hey Man, Nice Shot”
Foo Fighters “Learn to Fly”
Korn “Falling Away From Me”
Red Hot Chili Peppers “Aeroplane,” “Under the Bridge”
Smashing Pumpkins “Bullet With Butterfly Wings”
System of a Down “Chop Suey!”
Skeeter Davis “End of the World”
Rickey Nelson “Travelin’ Man”
Chi-Lites “Have You Seen Her”
Animals “We Gotta Get Out of This Place”
Fontella Bass “Rescue Me”
Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels “Devil with the Blue Dress”
James Taylor “Fire and Rain”
Edwin Starr/Bruce Springstein “War”
Lynyrd Skynyrd “Tuesday’s Gone”
Limp Bizkit “Break Stuff”
Green Day “Brain Stew”
Temple of the Dog “Say Hello to Heaven”
Sugar Ray “Fly”
Local H “Bound for the Floor”
Slipknot “Left Behind, Wait and Bleed”
Bush “Speed Kills”
311 “Down”
Stone Temple Pilots “Big Bang Baby,” “Dead and Bloated”
Soundgarden “Fell on Black Days,” “Black Hole Sun”

Crying while eating

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images2.jpgYou’ve done it. I’ve certainly done it. Sitting down for a bite to eat, suddenly overcome by emotion. “My GOD. What has my life become?” Or “Why, oh why, are we fighting WARS when we should be MAKING LOVE?” Or, in my most recent case, “Why the HELL do I spend half my life doing things I HATE?”

Perhaps you were already crying but, through your tears, saw last night’s leftover lemon chicken and could not resist.

Do not despair. We are not alone. Plenty of good people, people just like us, cry while they eat. The difference is that they have the presence of mind to capture it on video.

Privacy freak

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Social Security clownA couple of years ago I took my son to a local college to register for a class. I filled out the required paperwork and when I handed it back to the clerk she said, “Oh, you forgot to fill in his Social Security number.” I replied that no, indeed, I had not forgotten but that Social Security had nothing to do with studying Plant Biology and therefore I was unwilling to give his SSN to them. “But we need it because it will be his student ID number.” I disagreed and informed her that she could simply assign him a student ID number like 999-99-9999.

I am sure I’ve never seen anyone look quite as perplexed as the clerk did at that moment. It took over an hour and several different administrators “reasoning” with me before my son got his random student ID number and off we went to the bookstore.

First mini-moral of the story. You people are giving out your Social Security numbers way too readily. This is obvious because with thousands of students registering every year I was apparently the only privacy nut in the history of the college unwilling to cooperate. Your SSN should never be given to anyone except a company/individual who is required to report your earnings or wages to the IRS. Period. Period. Period.

Next, remember in the not-too-distant past when brilliant geeks in labs participating the the Human Genome Project discovered that the presence of certain genes could predict possible future diseases or health problems. What an amazing discovery, one that could benefit mankind mightily. Enter bastard medical insurance companies. “Oh, we’d sure like to get our hands on that kind of information so we can deny coverage.” Enter corporate assholes. “Oh, we’d sure like to get our hands on that kind of information so we can deny employment.”

Second mini-moral of the story. Guard your medical information in every way that you can. Start by refusing to give doctor’s offices and insurance companies your SSN which is, as we’ve learned, a number you must only give to an employer, possibly a bank or a broker. If you are insured under a group plan, talk to your employer about keeping those numbers private. There is absolutely no reason that Kaiser Permanente needs your fucking Social Security number. Make some noise about it.

And if you ever need to seek treatment for substance abuse or mental health problems, do not do it with the knowledge or assistance of any insurance company. Pay cash, use a fake name. I know this sounds like paranoia (oops! a mental health problem) but this is a monkey that will hang onto your back forever. Once again, denial of employment, medical coverage. Don’t even think of running for public office or being a teacher or a policeman or a firefighter. Medical care providers pretend that our privacy is protected. It’s not protected. Talk to Bill O’Reilly.

The Patriot Act gives the government the right to mine the entire spectrum of public and private sector information. Any walls of privacy that may have formerly existed, shaky as they were, have come crashing down.

Third mini-moral of the story. Teach your children to protect their privacy. I’m not advocating that we make them hate or fear the government, or insurance companies, or school counselors, or Kaiser Permanente (actually I am). But young people should be made aware that personal information in the wrong hands can make life a nightmare.

I saw my son this morning and he showed me his new cell phone. “Guess what?” he said. “I got it at Wal-Mart. Sixteen cents per minute prepaid, no contract, I gave ’em a fake name. Kubla Khan.”

Mission accomplished.

The United Nations preps the way in Lebanon for US/ Israeli war on Iran

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Once again, like with Haiti, the UN is acting as just another arm of the Pentagon. In Haiti, the Bush Adminstration toppled the popular government of Aristide, and then moved UN troops in as occupation force in support of the group of US installed thugs. Now in Lebanon, once again the UN is being used as US spearhead for Bush’s foreign policy of aggression against yet 2 other countries, Iran and Syria.

The 15,000 UN troops that are being set up in Lebanon are not being sent there to protect Lebanon from attack by Israel. It is a little late for that, is it not? Quite the contrary. They are being deployed so as to neutralize a front where Iran and Syria, with their Lebanese Hezbollah allies, could resist military attack from Israel and the US, and try to strike back at Israel for bombing them. The UN, is effectively now just another NATO/ Pentagon/ Israeli military army in operation on the Lebanese regional front.

By this deployment, the UN is also actually fomenting and fueling new flareups of civil war within Lebanon. Kofi Annan, despite all his sweet talk, is basically making himself nothing more than a paid whore for George Bush, and paving the way for an new US-Israeli war, this time against against Iran and Syria. And Lebanon be damned.

It is unfortunate that the US and European antiwar communities still have so many delusions about the United Nations. There is nothing united about the world’s nations, and the UN ‘peace keeping units’ are now a totally captured body of troops being used by the US in its plan to reorganize its colonial control over the Middle East and world oil supplies. NATO in Afghanistan, Pentagon in Iraq, UN as ‘buffer’ in Lebanon, and Israel free to attack Iran on behalf of its US master. It’s a bad situation for those looking for a peaceful world and an end to this continual bloodshed. Don’t count on the UN ‘peacekeepers’ anymore. They are part of the problem, not any solution to it.

Iraq- the nursing shortage in Hell

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Somehow it’s not too surprising that Iraq, too, has a nursing shortage like in the US. Management would like to hire foreign Philippine or perhaps Palestinian nurses I bet, instead of treating Iraq nurses with a little more dignity. But recruitment must now be quite low… lol. And then there’s the pesky problem of the US soldier maniacs tearing everything apart.

Still, as one can see from this article, nurses there have so many problems identical to what nurses here at home face within the US medical system, that it is eery. Iraqi nurses do seem to finangle 2 hour breaks for mid day meals, yet I doubt that too many US nurses would much like to trade places with them. 150 patients a day is quite a heavy patient load I think. In fact, Good god almighty how horrible that would be.

What must it be like to be a nurse in Hell one can only imagine? Here’s a glimpse. See IRIN article

The Pigs love their new cattle prods, they do

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Long time ago, I once did a psych rotation at Terrell State Hospital in Texas. The big question posed for us students by our teachers, was whether or not it was right for administration to be using a cattle prod on a patient that was gutteral, scatalogical, and aggressive? I was the lonesome minority of one amongst the teachers and students that said that it was absolutely disgraceful to be doing this.

The big argument for using it at Terrell, was that this was supposedly more humane than allowing the patient to wallow in his own shit. My the great claims for electricity through the years! Always in vogue. But in my youthful innocence, I thought then, that it was just the particular regional backwardness of where I was at (Texas), and that this debate was a vestigal remains of a former primitive psychiatry along with the use of ‘insulin therapy’ and ‘hydrotherapy’. Alas, but one can see today that ‘hydrotherapy’ is now back in vogue with the likes of Dick Cheney, Ricardo Sanchez, Alberto Gonzalez, and Donald Rumsfield runnning the wards. And so is the cattle prod. They now call it The Taser, and it has become the fascistmindeds’ favorite tool of torture, both at home and abroad.

An Alternet article looks at The killers’ alternative to guns

Red Tennis Balls

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Is it an artifical vegetable or an artificial fruit?Move over Fast Food nation. I just picked up a new book (2006 publishing date) from the liberry, and the first chapter is titled Red Tennis Balls. Ever since my job as a carrot juice maker at a health food store when I was 16, the whole US ‘natural’ food thing has fascinated me. In those long ago days I used to grind carrots and then squash them for 6 hours a day. The rest of the time I made things like beet and parsley juices for our local gourmets. I even tried all those soy ham and soy hot dog things, and even today I got some veggie burgers in the fridge waiting to be charcoal broiled! But what to do for toppings? That’s what me laugh most about this book titled The End of Food. The chapter on the tomatoes!

Well the author says he totally lost it and started to study the food world of corporate science, when all he could find for his simple salads were red tennis balls. He discovered that once there had been over 6,000 varieties of tomatoes available to the North American consumer. But now, sad to say, the typical factory mart has us down to a choice of about 3. Three red types of tennis balls, that is. So he set out to further study just how all this had happened?

He studied USDA statisitcs on the matter. He found out that one pound of tomato in fresh, sauce, and ketchup form had all lost nutritional value since the beginning of USDA record keeping time from what was currently being distributed. When he studied other foods, he found yet the same. He studied pig shit too. He studied chicken eggs, and he studied apples. All foods had less vitamins and minerals in them than from before. All had less taste. Hey, all of it was getting pretty nasty, too. Since we didn’t have so much pig shit everywhere back in the Old McDonald had a farm time, only the pig shit now entering our human food supplies actually was ‘nutritionally’ increasing in volume It was adding things like ammonia, hydrogen sulfide, and carbon dioxide into our living areas, and some locales were literally wallowing in it, so to speak.

Back to the tomatoes of Chapter One though. The author decided to go to grocery stores, farms, and corporate offices to ask folk just what exactly in their learned opinions were the characteristics of a good modern day tomato. Lo and behold, not one group of modern engineers of tomato production mentioned either taste, nor nutritional value, to be on their top seven important items on their lists. Thickness of tomato skins, appearance of being ripe while not, ability to go on long distant trips, etc. were all there, but not taste or nutritional value! In conclusion, the modern day American factory tomato cannot even be productively used to throw at the emperors of our land. They are like dull red tennis balls, and will not splatter. Better to hit them with the eggs from factory chickens, whcih due to less calcium now in their shells will actually help them splatter yet better. Go for it.

And Bon Appetit!

Army men

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Just following ordersYou might call it unfair to label those who go into the military as from the bottom of the barrel, but even at the top of the Pentagon’s barrel the mental qualifications appear pretty damn loose.
 
Our military’s options in Iraq have been summarized as this: go long, go big, or go home. Explained, these choices mean either decrease the troop levels and dig in for a protracted occupation, or increase US forces to attempt a definitive coup, or withdraw and bring the boys home. Defense Department heads are said to be favoring a combination of the three.

Sorry boys, for breakfast you get either Lucky Charms, oatmeal or donuts. Not all three.

Who else but the idiot at the back of the classroom could conceive of this synthesis: go big AND long, THEN you can go home? We’re not talking Gomer Pyle or Forrest Gump. We’re talking Larry’s brother Daryl and his other brother Daryl, awoken on the wrong side of the bed, armed, on Viagra. Keep those boys away from the heavy equipment!

Addendum: Am I saying that all Army men are idiots? Of course not. But let them come forward! All non-idiot soldiers please speak up about the war, refuse to fight it, show us what you’ve got upstairs.

Addendum 2: At the protest today, a middle aged gentleman drove by slowly with his window down, frowning and giving us a protracted thumbs down. I shouted from the side of my mouth so the others wouldn’t hear: “IDIOT!” He nearly leapt out of his expensive SUV to yell back to me “FUCK YOU!”

Does supporting the war in Iraq automatically make you an idiot? Damn straight. What a stupid question.

Palmer Park, hidden treasure of Colorado Springs

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Colorado Springs is blessed with having a spectacular natural setting, no doubt about that. I have now passed a little over 4 months of my life here and if I had to list one thing that the city has done well, it would be setting aside Palmer Park for the people’s use. It is defintely the city’s hidden treasure and my family and I use it on at least a weekly basis. Our dog is especially in love with the park (though not the official dog park there), and that’s part of what makes the park special. It is a special place for bikes and horses, too, and even the most incapacitated person can probably be wheeled down to the main scenic lookout for the big view.

Sure, there are other great parks here, but none is located so smack dab in the middle of the city. It is as central to Colorado Springs as Central Park is to New York City. What blows me away is that it hardly is mentioned in any tour guide and its main lookout is sometimes without a solitary visitor, even in the middle of the most pleasant afternoons. Out of state tourists and even other Colorado folk tend to head to Garden of the Gods, Pikes Peak, and the water falls, as most of them have not a clue that Palmer Park even exists and that it is someplace special. But there are many parts of the country where if such a park was available people would drive for hundreds of miles to visit it.

One of the things most lamentable about how our country has misdeveloped itself is how it has destroyed downtowns, central plazas, and people places of all kinds. So get out and use Palmer Park, for you are lucky to have it here. From where my family moved from, we didn’t have sidewalks in many neighborhoods, let alone a place like this park. Even now we discover new hiking trails every time we go there. There is variety at Palmer, if you go beyond what might first meet the eye.

Certainly, Palmer Park is a model for what every city needs to do. Every American city needs places to hike, not just more roads to drive on. Palmer Park is the crown jewel of Colorado’s interurban trail systems, but defintely not recognizzed as such. It has miles of safe hiking/walking trails that are something that’s a cross between city walks, and remote trails in the wilderness, yet still located in the heart of the city. Other cities would envy this city if only they new Palmer Park even existed. More than any other attribute of Colorado Springs, Palmer is what makes this city a more attractive place than Denver to live in. IMO, it’s definitely the heart of Colorado Springs, even if the Pentagon and Church have robbed much of its soul. It’s not downtown, it’s not speactacular like Garden of the Gods. It’s doesn’t have a lake in the center of it. It’s not high up like Pikes Peak.. It’s just Palmer Park, the best place in town for taking a walk.

Does this blog suffer from DID, or what?

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Not to despair, they say twice as many people have DID as have schizophrenia in the US population. So I figure, too, that at least twice as many blogs have DID, also. Psychiatric diagnoses are kind of like corporate names in America, so they get changed every few years or so for public relation reasons. DID is the new cutesy name for MPD (multiple personality disorder). You got it figured out what the diagnoses for ‘Not My Tribe’ is, don’t you? We’re like Sybil! For more info about DID, see Wikipedia

Sybil’s behavior was erratic, and what you see here is erratic as well. The only way in America to not get erratic behavior is too pay wages to workers that march lockstep, or get their asses fired. But people with DID don’t get paid, so we just turn out blogs with DID on our own. I lied, the American government is proved in the pudding that, paid or not, America is infectedx with DID. The brain docs (psychs) got it wrong. DID is all over the place, much unlike the more hallucinatory schizophrenia blogs.

I might say that I come well prepared for working with a blog with DID in the blood. I even have had a fling with a DID woman once. Imagine a narcissist on both steroids and crack at one and the same time. Now imagine a group of folk in the same drug induced condition all crammed in one body (or so they say…lol). Multiply that by 1,000, and maybe you can understand how extreme DID can actually get?

So if you see it one minute, and the next moment it is somebody else, then go figure…. Not My Tribe might just have the dreaded DID?

Sorority girls

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LineupI have nothing, nothing, nothing against sorority girls, nor society girls, they’re just fine.
 
I remember sororities at college. They provided camaraderie and support for women in educational institutions that had only comparatively recently become co-ed. And sororities prepped girls for the veneer surface of — I don’t know — a life of little academic enterprise after college?

Sororities taught girls social skills and cemented a community fashion. Not fashion in the creative sense but rather a pageant of the accepted norm. Beauty as a dress code that everyone could feel excited about despite it being ludicrously conformist. Sororities also reinforced the preening considered necessary to attract the ambitious corporate male who sought a domestic arrangement in much the same way that he courted a career. For girls who were neither creative, independent, nor perhaps all that complicated, sororities extended the home economics lessons to the prospect of hiring maids.

What do sorority girls do after college when their only idea of extra-curricular means to hold an ice cream social? I don’t want to demean what they do, they have children of course, and run communities. And when there is time, they do lunch. And when there’s charity afoot, these girls do as their sororities did and conduct a benefit.

I saw such a benefit recently, an enormous social function, an annual society event, the cumulative product of countless sub-subcommittee meetings. I could say that the beneficiaries of the charity could have mattered not the least, but that would in this case be most inaccurate. Two factors:

At Newborn Hope the fuzzy bunny factor is in overdrive. Money raised is “for the babies!!!” Specifically babies born prematurely in rural areas without access to urban hospital programs. The money goes for brochures and nurse training programs which teach, basically: Get that baby to the city stat! Money sometimes goes directly for taxi vouchers to accomplish that end.

So it’s not just that the NBH charity is for a demonstrably compelling, in-your-arms-tangible cause, but the chief beneficiaries, as with traditional sororities, are the sorority girls themselves. Making a rough estimate of the figures, I can approximate that well over half of the resources generated by NBH go to feeding itself. Throwing the big party, holding all the planning meetings, that’s the primary function. The money these women spend goes to pay for the luncheons and the overhead. It’s a great boondoggle for The Broadmoor and the shops which get to advertise through the annual function, the NBH fashion show.

The time which the girls expend toward putting it all together is also a large resource redirected. The girls are not driving the taxis nor holding any babies. These philanthropists are holding lunches, paying for the lunches themselves, eating the lunches themselves, and planning for themselves the next one. While it might be uncharitable to ask these ladies to give directly, albeit unselfishly to a good cause? Do premature babies have to settle for only a fraction of their self-serving dollar? Such sorority-style events are very similar to a retail store charity model where an advertized small percentage of sales, nothing extra from the customer’s pocket, is promised to go to a charity.

And what about the charity of premature babies? Wouldn’t a public health matter be best addressed by a public health program? Here you have rich Libertarians who would rather contribute their table scraps to the cause, rather than support taxes to improve the health system thereby resolving many health problems, among them premature births.

And in Colorado Springs there is the Christian Anti-abortion element. NBH plays straight into the hands of the Respect Life crowd. Anything that forces a pregnant woman to commit to her pregnancy, prematurely.

It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature

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Product placementTalk about subverting mother nature. In the guise of an environmental message –stop overfishing for the sake of tap-dancing penguins– Happy Feet screws up everything. Forget ecosystems, it wants you to unlearn social systems. This movie builds upon our awareness of the selfless Emperor Penguins from last year’s Oscar-winning documentary and marches it straight off a cliff of ice. Calfs it right into the warming ocean.

Happy Feet is a Footloose attack on the seemingly dogmatic tradition of penguins to value an individual’s vocal heart song as opposed to tap dance. Although, such a presumed rigidity might not be unexpected from a society of birds which spends two thirds of the year balancing eggs on the tops of feet. Emperor penguins have no limbs with which to retrieve an egg should it fall by accident unto the ice. One of the heartbreaks of March of the Penguins was to learn that an egg succumbs to exposure within seconds of rolling upon the ice.

For the children perhaps, Happy Feet soft pedals the harsh brutality of Mother Nature. Getting past that, the movie befuddles us with what it means to work individually toward a mutual goal. Collectivity is portrayed here as mind numbing, spirit killing conformity, as opposed to biological imperative, genetic behavior.

But let’s address a real pop misconception. It’s not herd mentality. It’s herd. There’s nothing wrong with humanizing the animals, but don’t let’s pretend to learn something from them, the fiction of us.

There’s a preacher penguin in the movie whose head towers over the rest, the archetype of the sinister puritanical demagogue. This character keeps every penguin in line by shaming those who might stray. Do you recall ever seeing a penguin taller than the others? It’s one of the charms of penguins that they are all the same. Penguin behavior appears curiously random to us, yet at the same time it’s as mechanized as dominos. There is a deeper leadership somehow, and I think it’s what humans are seeking for ourselves.

Happy Feet is the message you get when there is no God but Coca Cola. When product placement rules, not even secular education is served.

The Lion King highlighted the Disney monarchist reordering of nature. It’s lovely to think of the lion as the King of Beasts, but it’s certainly very silly. No animal rules another except for interpersonally. Looking at man’s natural order, isn’t it rather silly to think that one idle fat man should lord over others who labor?

Ant armies are not led by ant generals. Queens may be the backbones of insect colonies, but they are not social architects. Penguins and ants may have something to teach us about how human beings can someday achieve balance with nature. It might have something to do with conformity and a sense of collective purpose. We know already it doesn’t come from Marx or Jesus, it’s something farther inside.

I’ll bet you right now such an inner compass will be more like a penguin’s heart song and less like a tap-dancing, individualist, obey your thirst, just do it, gotta be me, fool.

I have a weed problem

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Unsavory charactersI don’t watch the Sopranos so I don’t know whether this kind of thing happens everyday on television. Authority figure / love interest / recurring character / moral compass on the TV show Weeds gets driven summarily into a garage and killed.
 
Sitting in his car outside a drug deal gone awry, he is asked by a girl to roll down his window. She releases the locks and two goons slip in beside him from both sides and turn the car into an awaiting garage. The garage door lowers to the soundtrack “time to die.” Did I mention he was a cop?

The other thing the cop character representated was the show’s least morally compromised character. He was a narc who lapsed in a self-interested act, to protect his lady friend pot dealer, with the hope that she then get out of the business. When she does not, and in fact ramps up her activities to become a grower, he rebels at her decision, ultimately forcing estrangement. Then she betrays him and it gets ugly.

And what happened when loverboy died? Our Miss Dealer, in the midst of a multiple gunpoint drug deal standoff, interrupts to wander, to wax, glassy eyed and aimlessly about the kitchen, repeating “he’s dead?”

That scene captured two incongruous aspects of the show: the heroine’s empathetic innocence, walking around in bemused bewilderment at what happens to her, and two, the comic non-violence (dead copper aside) of the suburban drug world.

To its credit, Weeds teaches nothing of the real world of pot growing, distribution, addiction or law enforcement. In the same way that it is too idyllic, it is also thankfully uninstructional. Pickups are mere social calls, a grow house is tended as neighbors coming in to feed the fish while you’re away. There is no question of unreliability that in real life always marks a Keystone Cops constabulary of pot heads. Dealing is never shown. Our heroine is a “natural” at dealing, we’re told, but we never see what that would be actually. Sort of like we never saw interior design practiced in Designing Women.

We see pot fetishism, even an implied popular support for pot smoking by a suburban majority, and addiction is never shown. Unless you count our heroine’s addiction to the business of easy money and notoriety. The series started with a sudden widow facing an insurmountable suburban house payment, who is dropped into pot dealing as a last resort.

I’ve wanted to address the problem of Weeds. Everyone’s quirky. Because we become familiar with them, we do become empathetic. You could say they are all flawed but real human beings. I’ll assert they are not even. All the characters are opportunists and hedonists and worse than a non moral tale. They tell an immoral tale.

E-trade investor impotence

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Mouse trying to get homeA clever act, E-trade’s new TV ad, to depict their customers under magnification as countless sperm, seen in closeup as computer mice struggling here and there to find their way. Where do sperm head? As far as eggheads are concerned probably toward the ceiling and kleenex, but I think E-trade means to suggest that sperm are looking for fulfillment, sound financial investment, wealth, the egg.

Computer mice as sperm. “It’s in our DNA” says E-trade. How clever. But then E-trade shows its logo, two arrows that form an asterix. A computer mouse hits it like it’s the egg and bounces off!

Well isn’t that truth in advertising! There’s the little customer, their human struggle exemplified by a cute little two-button mouse. It zeros in on E-trade, the point of the ad I’m sure, and the little investor sperm can’t penetrate the egg.

E-trade will take you money, but you’re certainly not getting any of theirs. They don’t want your DNA.

Welcome to the working class

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Working Class. What does that mean to you? Bruce Springsteen? Blue Collar? Manual Laborers? It’s easier than that. Those who work for a living. The American Dream has always promised an escape from the tedium of labor. The Bourgeois had long before broken from the laborers, setting themselves apart from those who possessed no property or education. But Bourgeois are still workers. So are white collar workers and professionals. The middle class, the upper middle class and frequenly beyond. Who is not working class? The Leisure Class.

Why make the distinction? Because of the increasing gap between the rich and poor. The haves gather more and the have-nots less. Less money yes, and less leisure. The famed middle class aspirations of education and pursuit of personaly fulfillment will be soon be out of reach. A great bubble of self-delusion keeps the American populace from fully embracing their peers. A belief that a little hard work, or good fortune, entitlement, will elevate them above their station, above the problems of their neighbors and co-workers.

Paris Hilton, heir to what could have been an aimless life of leisure, decided to work. Bill Gates works. As do the Bushes.

SOA Coverage

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The annual protest against the School of Americas, US military counterinsurgency school of how-to in the arts and ways of torture, is winding down today. It is a sure thing that the instruction there is being used right at this moment in Oaxaca, Mexico. The obtuse refusal of most Americans to confront his issue of what the US government does abroad clandestinely, is part and parcel of what led to 9/11, and the subsequent idiocy that is the current occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Why just a few days ago, I was pedantically told by a Colorado Springs city councilman that Mexico was a sovereign country and that our government didn’t control what happens down there. He also went on to tell me that there was no torture used inside US prisons, too! And to inform me that what he called getting tough with US military held captives was different than actually torturing them. I think it save to say that our local Colorado Springs political leadership is on an even par with the spiritual leadership of Ted Haggard and brethen.

To see some coverage in the US press of the SOA protests, go to the multimedia coverage by Columbus, Georgia’s newspaper

Let OJ say he did it

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OJ ponders what if the gloves fitMy favorite argument of Michael Moore’s was in his book Downsize This. He had a chapter about the OJ trial. Moore’s conclusion? OJ didn’t do it because the rich can’t be bothered to do anything themselves. OJ couldn’t pick up late night drive-through burgers. Was he going to traverse Brentwood to give the time of day to a blonde who was sleeping with someone else, actually a waiter?

The ownership class does no labor. It even lives off the labor of its money, the interest of wealth. Michael Moore made points too about the racism of the LAPD, as well as the scavenger nature of the media, also racist.

Now OJ wants to exploit his own notoriety. He flat beat the case in court, but he simply can’t convince the American public. He has to live everyday with the accusations. Maybe OJ has nowhere to go but to give the people what they want. If they’re going to insist he killed Nicole, certainly he should deliver. That would be poetic justice.

For the historic record, I have no problem with learning what really happened. The American people were subjected to endless speculation, their morbid appetite was fed and developed. Let them get a dose of the answers. What’s OJ going to say, he didn’t do it again?

Is something divinely radical afoot?

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I think it’s actually something far more interesting, and hopeful, and maybe even enchanting. Here it is: Maybe these megachurches are not, in fact, a sign that the United States is coagulating like a tumor to the Right, but, in fact, they indicate the exact opposite.

Maybe megachurches are, in short, an anxious and massively quivering reaction to a hot divine upsurge, one they can’t quite comprehend and which makes their eyeballs shudder and their loins burn; their existence is irrefutable proof that something divinely radical is afoot, a massive sea change, a karmic mutiny, with the churches acting merely as a sleek and desperate defense. You think?

In other words, maybe these delirious throngs of blind believers are merely a trembling shield masquerading as a sleek salvation, vainly attempting to protect themselves from the onslaught of, oh I don’t know, divine self-definition? An orgasm of radical sticky nontheistic cosmic beauty? A goddess with a bright red tongue and a wry knowing grin and an appetite for destruction? Let us pray.

Campus cops taser torture Iranian student inside UCLA library

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It’s just been a little over 2 months since Boulder cops murdered a young man with their tasers simply because he had grown some marijuana in a field there. He fled the cops because he didn’t want to do jail time for something so stupid. Instead of just sluffing off such a minor ‘crime’, the cops murdered him instead. Now, this past week, campus cops at UCLA put themselves in the international spotlight for torturing an Iranian student with their taser guns inside the student library. These thugs did it in front of numerous students, whom in turn got threatened with being tasered for coming to the aid of the cops’ victim. Because this act of brutality got caught on video, it has even sparked an official protest from the Iranian governement. I think it rather obvious that the student’s accent and Mid East appearance had much to do with why the cops went after him like animals on a hunt.

Newborn Hope and Faded Beauty

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Tiny handOn Thursday and Friday I, along with 1600 of my closest friends, dolled up and went to the Broadmoor International Center to attend the annual Newborn Hope luncheon and fashion show. This is a spectacular event, something that we look forward to all year. Filet mignon, chocolate mousse and champagne are culinary staples. Beautiful models from Denver, both male and female, entertain us. We have a silent auction (Botox, rounds of golf, ski jackets, jewelry), we sell table decorations and Christmas ornaments, we have a balloon raffle. We have fun. We raise money.

I have been involved with Newborn Hope for more than a decade. I have co-chaired the event, co-chaired the Advisory Council, been a member of the Corporate Board. Newborn Hope is about prematurity prevention and maternal/neonatal healthcare. I could go on and on about my passion for our mission and for the organization, but I think I’ll save that for another time.

What I want to talk about are the women who are Newborn Hope. Shortly after I became involved with the organization, I discovered that I was pregnant with twins. I had had 4 easy pregnancies in the past so this discovery did not deter me from my normal behavior in the slightest. At 26 weeks (normal gestation is 40 weeks) I went to my doctor for a routine check up. Ironically, she informed me that I was in pre-term labor and that I needed to walk across the parking lot and check myself into the hospital.

The long and short of it is that I ended up enduring 10 weeks of strict bedrest. I had 4 young children at home but was told that I was allowed to get up only once every 2 hours to go to the bathroom. Yeah, right. Puh-lease.

My Newborn Hope friends, none of whom I knew well at the time, heard of my plight and knew how important, and how impossible, compliance was. In order to help me and my little preborns, they arranged for a different committee member to deliver a meal to my home, enough to feed the 6 of us, every night for 10 weeks. A woman I hardly knew called me and said, politely but firmly, “I will be in your driveway every morning at 7:45 to take your kids to school. Please have them watch for me.” Another woman drove my little David to preschool three times per week, a thirty minute round trip.

Twice during my confinement, 20 women or so brought me a moveable feast. They showed up on my doorstep with egg dishes and waffles and bacon and sweet rolls, flowers even. They arranged chairs around me, hugged me, talked to me, made me laugh. Two hours later they gathered everything up, washed and put away every dish, left me with a few good books, and out they went. It was a bit surreal. Kind of like Cat in the Hat.

My new friends came and took my little ones to Happy Apple Farm to get Halloween pumpkins. They showed up every day at 3:30 to lift my little Lara out of her crib after her afternoon nap. They heard that I was having a hard time reading so they blazed in, taught me to cross stitch, brought me everything I needed to complete a project, and raced back out to their own lives.

A severely premature infant is the most expensive medical patient there is. Much more expensive than a cancer patient, a transplant patient, an accident victim. More importantly, premature babies can have developmental delays, vision problems, physical difficulties that last a lifetime. My twins, had they been born at 26 weeks, might be very different children today. I am grateful for their good health. I’ll be forever thankful for the women who helped me carry to term.

I took a friend of mine, a guy, to the luncheon this year. I wanted to share with him an important part of my life, to show him what I’ve done for 10 years, to introduce him to the people who’ve made a huge difference to me and to Devon and Ryan. He was one of only a few men among 800 women. I thought that it would be fun. Educational. Inspiring perhaps. Sadly, he saw a bunch of middle-aged women, shoved into leather pants and halter tops, flaunting back fat and delightful but embarrassing fake boobs, hoping to regain lost youth. How sad and how jaded. I’m really sorry that that is all he saw.

I saw my angels. I saw my friends. I saw love in action. I saw gorgeous women who’ve made a difference to me and to the community.

Relax, guy friend. You don’t need to tell us about our faded beauty. We already know. Many of us who are involved with Newborn Hope have had heartbreaking experience with prematurity. We’ve also dealt with breast cancer, aging parents, learning disabilities…you name it. As a result, we don’t worry too much about our saddlebags. Our chin hairs. Our wrinkled foreheads. Our sagging boobs. We’d rather revel in the potential and perfection of our children. And in the beauty and kindness of our aging friends.

So go screw yourself. You’ll never again be invited to hang out with the ladies who lunch.

Milton Friedman, Champion of Liberty?

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Today’s Gazette has their lead editorial starting out chirping away with “Milton Friedman- Champion of freedom passes away”. Oh come now, you guys! This economist was known more for being the economic theorist that inspired Chile’s Dictator Pinochet, and you lame brains heil him as being a champion of liberty? Oh well, this is typical of the nutty Right Wing Libertarian nitwits running that paper.

What Milton Friedman was noted for, was his desire to remove all government regulating of the multinational corporations that run the world, “arguing for freer markets” in the words of the Gazette editorial. Ironically, the Gazette has another story today that gruesomely shows the Milton Gazette mentality in its most extreme form. Page A3- China admits to using executed prisoners’ organs for transplants. In this story, we discover that American citizens have been travelling to China to buy and get these parts of butchered Chinese prisoners sewed inside of them. China certainly is a part of the rather unregulated world ‘free market’ in body parts that has become truly Friedmanesque in scope. And can we forget the Friedmanesque ‘free market’ of Argentina, where babies stolen from the wombs of political prisoners went to the high rollers of that country.

Milton Friedman, a real champion of freedom? Sure he is, Gazette. You guys are economic visionaries for sure. Is it any wonder that countries like Guatemala and Saudi Arabia have had major internal scandals around the issue of stolen body parts, where many in the population believe that Americans are stealing body parts from Guatemalan children, or stealing them from dead Iraqis murdered by the US army? That’s as wild a believing that Mickey Mantle is still alive, isn’t it? Remember his go to the head of the line liver transplant? But when a country’s leaders champion the likes of economic butcher Milton Friedman, then we can expect the rest of the world to be just a little leary of it. That’s Friedman’s real legacy. Neoliberlal ghoul.