Sgt. Crowley Did Act Stupidly.

So did everybody else involved in this mess. Dr. Gates apparently acted even more stupidly. But perhaps most stupid of all was President Obama for calling Crowley stupid after saying he (Obama) knew nothing about the issue. But talk about the perfection of stupidity will lead you to swoon in admiration over the brilliant stupidity of the nation’s press, no longer a contender for any mythical “Joe Friday Award” for patient questioning and keen observation, but now the clear winner of a “Headless Chicken Award” for most spectacular flapping and running around wild while your head lies in the dust unseeing but still screeching.

Originally, I even thought the most stupid of all was Lynn Sweet for wrapping up the press conference with her dumb question which just lay there for a moment before slowly unfolding into a Harry Potter-like death-eater, and flying with the speed of the internet through the minds of the civilized world. EVERYbody involved with this now looks stupid. Even the lady who called the initial 911 call was made to look stupid by some in the press before she caught on and started acting stupidly on her own. I’m sure I look pretty darn stupid for having even noticed it, even more so for writing about it.

But. Beer heals all. Too bad Gates didn’t offer Crowley any that night. Too bad Crowley didn’t bring any with him. It would all be different now. We all know beer will calm disagreements. Ask any bartender. Or bouncer. What will they serve? My recommendation is a beer from the Oskar Blues Brewery in Lyons, Colorado. It’s the one they call “Mama’s Little Yellow Pilz”, a smooth pilsner which makes all other things seem irrelevant.

Still, questions remain. This was presented as a pretty simple breaking-and-entering thing, right? So why did Sgt. Crowley along with an unknown number of Cambridge and Harvard police officers botch up this nonevent so badly? The police Incident Report doesn’t say how many police officers were called in to back-up Crowley but it indicates that Crowley called them all out to take care of administrative matters only. According to the report, the Cambridge police were just to question Ms. Whalen (the 911 caller)! The Harvard University police were called only to verify that Dr. Gates Harvard University identification card was valid! (Apparently Sgt. Crowley did not call the Massachusetts Registry of Motor Vehicles to verify that Gates’ drivers license was actually legitimate - at least that is not mentioned in the report.)

One More Thing - Let's remember that Dr. Gates was still in the act of returning from China. So you could make a pun and say he was dis-oriented - and I have never returned from China - but I do know that whenever I return from Europe, I am also disoriented for a day or so - it's a big change. We schedule NOTHING for the first day back. Dr. Gates might have handled the incident differently had he had not just come from the other side of the world.

Now let the blame fall where it may, but this much is to be remembered - Incidents such as this can be expected more often as police increasingly trade in their traditional constabulary role for that of the military assault team. Look out. It could be playing in a theater near you soon.

(The bottom photo - the police Incident Report will enlarge if clicked upon)

NRA , Sotomayor and Treason

The NRA wrote a letter to Senators Harry Reid and Mitch McConnel, and copied all 100 senators calling for a "no" vote on Judge Sotomayor for the Supreme Court. The last paragraph reads:

We believe any individual who does not agree that the Second Amendment guarantees a fundamental right and who does not respect our God-given right of self defense should not serve on any court, much less the highest court in the land. Given the
importance of this issue, the vote on Judge Sotomayor's confirmation will be considered in NRA's future candidate evaluations. (emphasis provided here is mine).
Thank you for your attention to our concerns. Should you have any questions or wish to discuss further, please do not hesitate to call on us personally.
Sincerely,
Wayne LaPierre Executive Vice President Executive Director Chris Cox NRA NRA-ILA
cc: Members of the United States Senate

This type of action highlights and underscores the serious problem that is - in fact - destroying the government of the United Sates of America. Our nation has become a corporate nation now. We citizens are still permitted to contact our senators, we each have two of them, and our single representative, and we can ask them to please do or not do a certain thing, maybe donate a small amount of money and that's about it. The great corporations and organizations though, like the NRA, or Blue Cross, or those in the pharmaceutical or armament industries, contact 100 senators, and 435 members of the House, and lobby the president's administration, with expertly designed propaganda, LOTS of money, and now as the NRA letter shows - THREATS.

So what is the recourse? What should we do? First - we should become aware of what has already happened. Then we should examine and verify that it has occurred. Then we need to talk with each other. We are living in a time of treason. If we act early enough we can save our nation, many in government share our concern.

Second Amendment

A big vote today on authorizing people to carry concealed weapons across state lines. It was defeated but the vote was close. Why now? This seems strange in light of the number of people who have been shot and killed in our country over the past several weeks. Policemen sometimes find themselves out-gunned in exchanges with criminals, and we are shooting ourselves down far better than the Taliban or Al-Qaeda could ever do. Even the number killed on 9-11-2001 is racked up again and again about every 40 days by American terrorists using guns. And while I sit here and write this I almost KNOW that another big shooting is coming later this week or maybe next week.

What is the second amendment anyway? Believe it or not, most people don't know. What does it really say? What does it mean?

I sometimes tell people that the second word in the second amendment is the word “regulated”. That’s not quite true but it's not far off the mark. Actually the amendment reads: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

It’s pretty simple. A single sentence with two clauses. Five words immediately stand out. "Militia", "State", "people", "Arms", and "infringed". These words can be very interesting.

"Militia". This word has many different meanings, but their common connection seems to be related to a concept of “military” control, with various civilian modifications. There seems to be no doubt that all militias will perform under the authority and guidance of a responsible leader who had been chosen and deputized by the officials elected by citizens of the “state” which would be protected by these militias. It is the authorizing clause of the entire amendment and clearly the reason upon which the second clause is dependent.

"State". Almost certainly refers to the individual states who will ratify the constitution of the United States.

"People". Interesting use of the designee of this right. It does not say “citizens” or “persons”. There is no right for “citizens” to keep and bear arms . . . or for “people” to do so. The right is assigned to “the people”.

"Arms". Fascinating choice of words here with many meanings from anatomical to clothing and nautical and several others. The two main ones which probably apply to this amendment are 1) the ability to physically carry a weapon and 2) to serve as a member of a military force. Which one applies here? Obviously, the one related to being part of a military force would complete the first clause of the amendment which refers to “militia”.

"Infringed". To "infringe" is to weaken a right that has been awarded. For example, if “citizens” had been the subject of the Second Amendment instead of “the people”, all American citizens would now be able to carry their guns, concealed or otherwise, into airports, onto commercial airliners, military installations, schools, jails and prisons, the House of Representatives, the Senate, into presidential press conferences, sporting events, and many other places where the carrying of guns are currently, and traditionally have been "infringed" - by being prohibited.

Going back to “arms” we wonder about assault rifles. That would seem to be applicable to the “militia” part, but then why not hand grenades too? Or flame-throwers, tanks, rockets, high explosives, phosphorus chemicals, mustard gas, Agent Orange, atomic and nuclear weapons, missiles, air planes and so on? They could all come in handy on various occasions. Even when the amendment was written, back in the late 1770s, the scope of military “arms” included weapons sufficient to destroy fortified castles. This seems to reinforce the understanding that the right which is reserved to “the people” to “keep and bear arms” in “militias” for the purpose of providing security for “the State” is to be accomplished under the direction and control of deputized personnel who are acting under the authority of that state.

So what does this bill that would permit unknown people to secretly smuggle guns across state lines have to do with the second amendment? It looks like a way to shoot holes in the constitution. Come on Senators Hagan and Burr, you can do better than that - who do you REALLY represent?

John Womack

This post is not copyrighted and is intended to be in the public domain.

Wise Latina? Hmmm.

“I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life,”

Bold statement? Well, she didn't claim that those experiences WOULD lead to better conclusions but only that she HOPED they would. I really doubted that she knew what she was talking about. However, Lindsey Graham, Jeff Sessions, John Cornyn, Jon Kyl, Orin Hatch, Mitch McConnell and several other white males who had evidently not lived very rich lives proceeded to exhaustively PROVE she was RIGHT. Boy, those senators are really good, aren't they?

Apollo - The Great Mistake

40 years is a long time even in biblical terms, but it seems even longer since Apollo 11 made its journey to Tranquility. Many of us who were already in the missile business at that time felt that it was a mistake to go to the moon before we were ready, but even we had no ideal that it would turn out to be as bad as it did.

The great alternative of course was to build space stations. Not just one but several. One basic pattern called for six. Four of them would be spaced evenly around the earth more or less equatorially and two others in a general polar orbit, one north, one south. Another plan called for placing a collection of stations together in one area of the sky to be used as a storage/repair/construction/command location. From these staging stations, journeys to the moon and elsewhere in the solar system would be much easier since they would be free of the heavy lift required to escape the earth’s gravity and also free of the earth’s weather. A true Space Command would become an integral part of the United States Air Force available for both defense and humanitarian missions, and accidents like those which destroyed the Columbia could have been easily avoided.

How much money would this have cost? Not that much - considering what we did spend elsewhere. The total cost of the Apollo space program itself is commonly given as $25 billion, adjusted to 2005 dollars this would approximate $135 billion. Meanwhile, the American war against Vietnam cost $686 billion in 2008 dollars, and the American war against Iraq has cost over $900 billion in 2008 dollars. We could have several permanent stations on the moon and explored Mars for those outlays alone. And of course, the money spent on the space stations would have had positive results for our national economy, education system, military defense and opportunities for international leadership and cooperation.

But when Project Apollo reached the end of its road with number 17, the ships and rockets were taken apart, the facilities were stripped down, the engineers and scientists let go to get a “real” job, and that incredible capacity for space flight was blown into the void. Now, 40 years later, we’re still trying to build one space station. And we currently have no space ships left to even reach that one station. Russia, China, India are moving on. America is fighting needless wars and celebrating footprints in the dust.

The News Issue

In a capitalistic system, if you are going to go public, your company will have to not just make a profit, but to increase that profit each quarter. To do that you will have to 1) cut expenses, 2) increase prices, 3) increase market share, 4) introduce new products, or 5) expand into other commercial activities.

Your biggest bang for your buck is to get rid of people - amazing, your productivity will always increase, current costs will drop quickly and balance sheets will rise, legacy cost decreases will lift your P & L and make your stock shine, beep, and say “howdy” on the market. You won’t have to charge customers more money for your product, become creative, try to kill one of your current competitors, or take on a new batch of competitors.

Newspapers have been in an increasing downhill spiral since the radio began broadcasting news. Now with radio, TV, internet, Twitter and all, newspapers have been shoved out of the “breaking news” business all together, and their “scoops” now come in the form of in-depth analysis and prolipsis announcements that can only come from great knowledge about the places and things about which they are reporting.

The business of news - call it The Press or The Media - has clearly changed dramatically in the last twenty years. We always long for the “good old days” to return, no matter what the issue. Truth is, they don’t - they never do - because they can’t. (And we would be miserable if they did!) News has not only become faster but also more fragmented. We’ve always had propaganda and sensational information but now they mingle with reputable news organizations. Paul Krugman publishes on the Steven Colbert program, they each have a part of the news - together they get “it” (meaning something) out to more masses.

It may be that in the same sense that IBM moved from the typewriter business into the information storage and retrieval business, so too newspapers have changed from the newsprint business into some new business. To name this “new business” will take someone who is more familiar with the issue than I.

The BIG TRICK is how to pay highly qualified people an income commensurate with the work they do - much of which requires comprehensive technical and professional expertise, and also has an extremely low productivity factor in sometimes lengthy initial stages.

There is a lot more to be said on this issue but it will have to come in another post. I need discussion from someone else.

A Meeting of Raw Emotions?

Wow - the computer hiccuped and published a White House statement on Facebook in Spanish, "Las declaraciones iniciales de la Jueza Sotomayor". The United States then erupted into in a great collision of comments by both erudite readers and those barely able to grunt. After reading this fascinating recital of Comments, I have a new outlook on my country. Now I see more clearly that the term “United States of America” refers not to New York, Texas, California, Kansas, Florida and such others, but rather to Schizophrenia, Borderline Personality Disorder, Rationally Normal, Narcissism, Obsessive-Compulsive, and oh yes, Post-traumatic Stress Disorder. Me, I’m now clinically depressed. And by the way, FaceBook says they translate through 64 languages - all but Urdu, the 6th most spoken language, I am told, on the planet.

Bob McNamara

Whiz kid. Phenom. The best of the best and the brightest of the brightest. But he was wrong. Terribly wrong. Tragically wrong. Brilliantly wrong. His reasoning was right - it always was. But he was still wrong. He knew too much, but he didn’t know the story. He had facts like some people have collections of crystal, or fine works of art, or great writings in literature - Bob had his facts. And he KNEW. He really did know. But he was wrong because he couldn't see the story, and his ignorance was responsible for the deaths of more than two million human beings. Why? Because he didn’t know the story that was taking place all around him. He didn't know the story that he himself was telling. He only knew the facts.

How did this happen? McNamara was open to John Stuart Mill’s art of questioning power, he loved logic and he lived to reason with other people. He held nothing so “sacred” that it could not be challenged. “Challenge me!” He seemed to beg, with that famously confident McNamara smile which seemed to say “I want to know if I am wrong - PROVE to me that I am wrong!” But he lived in a world of facts, not a world of stories. His facts told him what he already knew was true. But that wasn’t the way things really were. There was a real big story involved here and Bob didn’t know anything about it.

He held his own with the press of the world. He answered ALL their questions and they finally shut up. He met with the congress of the United States. He answered their questions. He would sit at the table in the senate meeting rooms that became silent following all their questions and he would ask THEM - “any more questions?” They would stare at their tables. If they had questions, he had answers. And his answers all had facts. He KNEW. And he knew he knew. And they knew he knew. But he was still wrong because he didn’t know what he was really talking about - he only knew the facts - he didn’t know the story. When other people would begin telling him the story he would interrupt them with facts, and they would stop.

So, anyway - McNamara built a great edifice of Facts. Facts on how to kill, how to bomb, how to destroy, how to deny, how to contain, how to blow up. He was good at his facts. But he didn’t know the story. He didn’t know any of the stories. He had degrees in economics, philosophy and a Harvard MBA. He taught at Harvard, served in the military for three years, rose to Lt. Colonel, selected targets for General LeMay, Was Kennedy's second choice for Secretary of Defense but got the job anyway, leaving Ford as its CEO. He was the mastermind of the American War against Vietnam.

McNamara apparently died a bewildered man. He knew everything except why the war didn’t work. He was probably the most rational man who ever lived and he knew how every thing worked. That’s probably why he didn’t understand war, or people, or democracy, or life.

He knew his facts and he could string them together but what he never did know is that the world is not rational. Bob McNamara was a freak. And that is a fact. And that is also the story.

Independence Day 2009

As we celebrate our national day of Independence from the British crown, let us also acknowledge the presence of some the things upon which we have become dependent.

We have a declining status in the world in part because our citizens are DEPENDENT upon an education system which is not preparing our children to live in the modern world. OECD scores now rank America 31 out of the 57 nations it rates, in spite of the money America spends on education. An increasing number of American schools have ended instruction in arts, music, literature, foreign languages, philosophy and other “unimportant” subjects to “save money” and to “improve” test scores.

Our “criminal justice” system now houses more prisoners than any other nation in the world both in numbers and percentage. Almost none of its inmates are being prepared to live independently after release. Americans are DEPENDENT on this system which creates different forms of terror, one affecting the law-abiding citizens, another for those who break the laws and are caught and sentenced.

Our health care system is ranked 37th among industrial nations in terms of effectiveness and is the most expensive in the entire world. The main reason that Americans now declare bankruptcy is for medical bills. We resist governmental health care because of “higher taxes” yet many families are DEPENDENT on private policies for which they pay cost close to $1,000 every month, and which can suddenly increase in price or even terminate, especially if they lose their job or are laid off.

Americans are DEPENDENT upon automobiles for transportation. Buses, trolleys, subways, and trains are not available for the average American. Most families must have two or more cars for their basic transportation. And to drive these cars, America is totally DEPENDENT on foreign oil.

The American people are DEPENDENT on an economic system which has frozen the purchasing power of the average American wage since the late 1970s. This has happened during a period of astonishing increases in productivity, since almost all of its increases in capital have been accumulated by fewer and fewer owners and the American middle class has not prospered but appears to find itself shrinking.

Americans are DEPENDENT upon supporting a Capitalistic system which proclaims the virtue of the “free market” and “private property” even as it seizes and destroys both of them. To Americans, Capitalism IS a free market because the Capitalists tell them it is free, even as their purchasing options continue to be restricted. Americans believe a “free” market is one which is “free” FROM government control, instead of understanding that a truly “free” market is really “free” because OF governmental regulation. No one would believe the outcome of a major football game played without referees, much less one in which the referees were all hired and paid by one of the two teams, but that is the kind of system that Americans are DEPENDENT on for their economy.

America is totally DEPENDENT upon waging war. We not only wage “wars” against poverty, cancer, disease, terrorism, pollution, global warming, drugs, AIDS, obesity, pornography, but we have been almost constantly at war with some sovereign nation. We have fought the British, the French, Germans, Russians, the Spanish, Mexicans, Chinese, Iraqis, Iranians, Koreans; we’ve fought Japan, Italy, the Philippines, our own Native Americans, the black slaves and Asian coolies we imported to do our dirty work for us, and we’ve fought each other too. I fought in our wars in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, and we have fought since then in Kuwait, Iraq, and now Afghanistan (and Pakistan?). And that is overlooking Granada, Cuba, Guatemala (three times), Panama, Nicaragua, Venezulea, El Salvador, Columbia, and others right here almost at home. Now American is building one of the largest mercenary armies in the world, arming people who are not sworn to fight for their country and bound by its laws and treaties, but to kill for a for-profit corporation. Americans are DEPENDENT upon providing for its vast military to “protect” itself from the world.

Americans are DEPENDENT upon corporate cabals which rule its legislative and executive branches of government. Powerful groups from pharmaceutical and medical, financial, petroleum, prison, religious and armament industries among others, direct the nation's actions and determine what is in its “national interest”. One such single group, the National Rifle Association rules congress with a “cocked pistol” held to the Congressional and presidential “head” even though somewhere between 14,000 and 30,000 Americans are killed by guns (by other Americans) every year. If a foreign terrorist kills 3,000 Americans in one day, that is cause for a Trillion dollar, never-ending war, but American terrorists kill that many about every 40 days - year around.

Americans are virtually DEPENDENT upon a press which has become a 24/7 presentation of opposing fascist propaganda machines. Truth - absolute Truth - is no longer sought by the American press except that both sides seek it out to find it out and kill it before normal people find out about it. The American press has become dedicated to misinform and detract its viewers from reality.

Americans are increasingly DEPENDENT upon actions from a religious fundamentalism which creates fear and hatred among its followers and denounces selected scientific findings with totalitarian fervor and threats of “eternal damnation”. Any attempts to operate “independently” of this religious fundamentalism may be met with terrorist activities which include warnings, threats, intimidation and even killings as “directed by the will of God”. No American can any longer support scientific findings without at least considering the impact they may have on the Christian fundamental terrorists in this country.

So - let’s pause for a moment and try to think - what are we Americans to do this Independence Day? Well, we can watch TV, we can drink beer and eat hot-dogs, watch fireworks, and - oh yes - wave the flag (better carry your gun too). That’s important because no matter how DEPENDENT we have become, it is very important that we act like we think we are “independent.”

I wonder what people from other nations is the world really think. But I would only want to hear from them if they were willing to also list some of the main things they are DEPENDENT upon. And if anyone reads these words and disagrees with them, please let me know what has been misstated or needs clarification and I will check that out and correct any errors I find.

Somewhere there has to be a basic “thing” that we can all call “humanity”, and somewhere there has to be a will to build on the wreckage of those great ideals upon which all our nations were once founded and which are still good and sound, but need to be applied to the real world in which we all now live.