Two Worlds

#41 / Sudden Death Overtime

2012-02-10T00:35:00.000-08:00

I don't follow sports that much (except to the extent that "politics" can be considered a sport), and I didn't watch this year's Superbowl.

I did find out about the Clint Eastwood advertisement that played during the Superbowl (because it became a "political" issue), and so I posted it on my Facebook page. In the advertisement, Eastwood said, "it's halftime, America, and our second half is about to begin." Many of my Facebook Friends (and lots of people who saw the ad in the original) were inspired by the sentiments, but one Friend put it to me in personal terms: "Has your second half begun?"

Well, to be perfectly frank, on a personal level I am well into the second half. In fact (and I don't know sports), I may be, and we all may be, playing in Sudden Death Overtime.

#40 / Runaway Growth

2012-02-09T06:00:00.000-08:00

The image here (which may look like a cancer stain) is from NASA, and shows Chengdu, China in the year 2000. Click right here to visit the website featuring this picture. The website article is headlined, "Runaway Urban Growth Threatens Global Environment."

"Runaway growth," in other words, is not considered a good thing, at least from an environmental perspective, and since we all ultimately depend on the "environment," the natural world that sustains all life, "runaway growth" just isn't good for us. Back in the 1970's, in Santa Cruz County, when Santa Cruz County was the fastest-growing county in California, the public objected to "runaway growth." That was the way we described the problem that our environmental and growth management efforts were meant to address.

In the Wednesday, February 8th edition of the San Jose Mercury News, the term "runaway growth" was used in a different context, and it caught my eye. Facebook is soon going to be selling its stock publicly, and according to the article, "Facebook sees slowing growth." Stock analysts have noted that the days of Facebook's "runaway growth" are "apparently over," and while this is not an automatic reason not to buy the stock, it is clearly a concern for the analysts.

Here's my question: if economic success is dependent on the kind of "runaway growth" that destroys our environment, and if our lives ultimately depend on that environment, is "economic success" (at least as currently defined) really that good an idea?

#39 / A Privilege Not A Right

2012-02-08T07:00:00.000-08:00

I seem to remember that the administration at Stanford University was quick to remind students that attendance at Stanford is "a privilege not a right." I have searched the currently available online version of the Fundamental Standard, which is where I thought I might find that language, and while the idea is there, the exact wording is not.

At any rate, authority always wants to make this basic point: what are often believed to be essential "rights" may actually be, legally speaking, nothing more than "privileges." Driving, for instance, is such a privilege. That is a central message on the DUIAttorneys.com website, from which the image here was taken.

In our system of democratic self-government, with a few constitutionally-established exceptions, we are allowed "privileges," legally speaking, and have few inherent "rights."

By the way, since corporations are considered persons (legally speaking), that means that they, too, operate on the basis of privileges; they have no "rights." It's about time the authorities took away some of those privileges, don't you think?

And remember, in our system of democratic self-government, "we" are the authority.

#38 / Who Is Your Customer?

2012-02-07T07:14:00.000-08:00

The literature focused on business advice now often poses the question: "Who is your customer?" It's a question designed to provoke the right kind of introspection by those engaged in almost any kind of activity - and not just business activity.

A book review of Change.edu, printed in the Monday, February 6, 2012 edition of The Wall Street Journal, explores the responses received when the "Who is your customer?" question was put to those whose are in charge of our institutions of higher learning.

I am interested in how governmental leaders might react to the question. I know, in fact, how many Planning Directors answer the "Who is your customer?" question. They think their "customer" is the person who appears at the Planning Counter, wanting to carry out some project or another for which they must obtain a governmental permit. The elected officials who establish the procedures by which such applications are judged can often end up adopting the same perspective. Unfortunately, that answer to the question, in the governmental context, is almost totally wrong.

In the context of applications by individuals to carry out projects requiring governmental approvals, the "customer" is not the applicant; it's the public.

When elected officials and Planning Directors forget that, the results are not good!

#37 / Science And Politics

2012-02-06T06:45:00.000-08:00

Pictured is Katharine Hayhoe, speaking about climate change to students and faculty at Wayland Baptist University in West Texas. She's a climatologist and an evangelical Christian.

Hayhoe has been in the news recently because she wrote a chapter about global warming for a book on environmental issues authored by Newt Gingrich. He cut the chapter, as the Republican Party caucuses in Iowa came close, and as his position on global warming "evolved," if we can use that word without too much sarcasm seeping through.

Reportedly, Hayhoe has been inundated with vindictive and sometimes disturbing hate mail from climate change deniers, which some suggest may have been encouraged by conservative operatives. The controversy about the dumped chapter in the Gingrich book led to a thoughtful opinion piece in the Sunday, February 5th San Francisco Chronicle, titled "Science and Politics: How we resolve the climate change impasse." The main point of the article was that a science-based view of the world will ultimately win over an ideological or opinion-based view, since science reports on "facts," which cannot be changed, and the truth of which ultimately becomes evident (even if too late, perhaps, for an acknowledgement of the facts to be of help to us as we fashion our own behavior).

It's a good example of confusing the world of nature with the world that we create ourselves. In our human world, anything is possible. In the world of Nature, a world upon which we ultimately depend, there actually is such a thing as the truth.

#36 / An Unscientific Method

2012-02-05T05:39:00.000-08:00

The image is from an article on how to use Excel to create an extrapolation model that will provide an accurate picture of the future extent of global warming. Click on the image to read the article. The article was written by a math teacher, and provides a kind of "lesson plan" for teaching math that is based on real life.

I find that I am rather preoccupied by the concept of extrapolation as a way to figure out what the future will be. I have written about extrapolation in this Two Worlds blog on at least five different occasions. I generally end up questioning its usefulness as a predictor of "what will happen," at least if the subject matter of the inquiry involves human beings.

Using the principles of extrapolation to illuminate the future should perhaps be called an "unscientific" method, if it attempts to state what the future "will be" based on an extension of the past.

Human beings can always change what they do, in the world that we create. That's why extrapolation doesn't work as a reliable predictor of the future within that world. In the world of nature, the world of "science," the case may be different. We need to be sure not to get them confused.

#35 / Must

2012-02-04T07:25:00.000-08:00

Two headlines on the editorial page of the Wednesday, February 1, 2012 San Jose Mercury News caught my eye. The online versions have a different wording of the headline; here is what the print edition said:

State must fight early childhood education cuts

U.S. must not cut investment in medical research

I happen to agree with the advocacy position taken in the Mercury editorial on early childhood education, and in the opinion piece by Dr. Phillip Pizzo on medical research. I do want to complain, however, about the headline writer's use of the word "must."

In our political world, "must" doesn't actually apply. "Should," or "ought to" is a perfectly appropriate statement, but nothing in the world we create is preordained. There are no inevitabilities. Attention to the subtleties of our language is actually important. If things "must" be one way or the other, why should we all get involved? Furthermore, telling people what they "must" do is often offputting. If no law already exists, I don't think "must" is the right word.

Both editorial statements were urging action to accomplish a goal. And I am all for the goals and objectives being urged upon us. Let's not forget, though, that we "choose" our future. We create the world we most immediately inhabit. In our world, in the "political world" these statements were addressing, everything is "possible," and nothing "must" happen.

#34 / Inherent Power...Or Not?

2012-02-03T00:08:00.000-08:00

An article in the San Francisco Chronicle on Tuesday, January 31st, began with these stirring words: "The California Constitution says all political power 'is inherent in the people....'"

The article then went on to explain why this might not really be so.

Voters in the City of Santa Clara who would like to have a vote on whether or not the City should subsidize the construction of a new stadium for the 49ers have gathered enough signatures to qualify an initiative measure for the ballot. If the voters have the "inherent" political power to decide what they want to do with their city government - and even to change their minds about that - you would think that properly qualifying a city initiative ought to mean that the people will vote. Not necessarily. The City Council has refused to put the measure before the voters, despite the fact that the initiative sponsors have gathered enough signatures. The Council has relied upon an opinion of their City Attorney in doing so.

According to the City Attorney, the inherent power of the people, guaranteed in the Constitution, extends only to "legislative" matters, and the voters have already legislated on this topic. The people voted for the stadium once, and the City Attorney says that everything thereafter is just "administrative," not subject to change by a voter-qualified initiative measure.

More and more often, this claim that initiatives are improperly attempting to give "administrative" directions (a claim which has received significant support in the courts) is relied upon by elected officials to turn back efforts by the voters to exercise their "inherent political power." I wouldn't be surprised, in fact, to hear this exact claim from officials of the City of Santa Cruz, if a "let the people vote on desalination" initiative gets sufficient signatures. We will have to see about that. We will also have to see about what happens in the City of Santa Clara, with respect to the initiative petition on the 49er stadium. I expect this matter will be tested in the courts, and the outcome of such a court test can't really be predicted very well.

Whatever the courts say about the Santa Clara initiative, there is no doubt that there are significant limits on the "inherent political power" of the people to legislate directly. Be warned. It really does matter who we elect to to govern our cities and our counties. In effect, the whole point of representative democracy is that we give up to our elected officials the "inherent political power" of the people. Once we elect them, they have that power (which they got from us). It's not that easy to get it back!

#33 / OPM

2012-02-02T07:08:00.000-08:00

I referred in yesterday's posting to "OPM." That means "other people's money."

Just in case you missed it, the global financial community has now focused most of what used to be called its "business" or "investment" activities on making "bets" with OPM.

Those who get to make the bets are the 1%. The OP - the "other people," whose money gets wagered - are the 99%.

So, how long are we going to let them get away with it?

#32/ Place Your Bets

2012-02-01T06:31:00.000-08:00

I have taken to reading The Wall Street Journal. Faced with losing all of my (otherwise valueless to me) airline travel points, unless I redeemed them, I arranged for a "free" subscription to my father's newspaper of choice. I remember seeing the WSJ around the house during the period that my father was a businessman. He was the International Vice President for Sales for what would now be called a "Silicon Valley" electronics company.

Frankly, I could never stand to read the thing, back in those days, though I did like the use of pencil drawings of people, instead of pictures, on the WSJ front page. That practice has largely (though not totally) disappeared, now that the paper has become one of the prestigious parts of the Rupert Murdoch media empire.

An article published on Tuesday, January 31, 2012, had this headline: "Moody's Says Bet Was Unexpected." Click on the link to read the content. What struck me was not so much the facts reported, but the quite common phenomenon of calling investments "bets." This is definitely not an unusual usage. Just start reading The Wall Street Journal if you don't believe me. In fact, the use of the word "bet," in the context of describing various aspects of our financial and "business" sector, is not confined to the "financial press."

We seem to be ready to think of our economic system as a crap shoot. I guess, for those who like gambling, that's lots of fun. It's especially fun when you do it with OPM.

#31 / Law School Legacy

2012-01-31T07:12:00.000-08:00

Pictured is that portion of the Sanford University Campus where the Stanford Law School was located in 1965. That is when I began attending law school there. Now, the Law School is found in another place on campus, but this is a photograph that says "law school" to me.

I was asked by a classmate to reflect on my experiences at law school and after, since I was one of the few graduates in my year to go into what might be called "politics" or "public service." I was in good company, though. Another member of the class who ended up in politics is United States Senator Jeff Bingaman, who represents New Mexico.

Here's my reply to my "class correspondent." As you will see, I was reluctant about the law and law school, but I think it all worked out OK!

=======================================================

I ended up in law school because my parents always told me that I “should” be a lawyer, that I had the skills and abilities, and it would be a great thing to do. They were probably right about the skills and abilities. I had a bad experience in high school, in that my desire then was to be an engineer. Great concept, until I took PSSC Physics and math. I concluded that I did not, in fact, have the necessary skills and abilities for that kind of profession, but I could write, and I could talk, so my parents’ argument was convincing. So was a great presentation by then-attorney Pete McCloskey, later an anti-war Member of Congress. He came to a Palo Alto High School Career Day, during my senior year, and made being a lawyer seem pretty exciting.

Without much more reflection, and essentially accepting my parents’ suggestion, I settled on my career choice before even going to college, and throughout my undergraduate years at Stanford, my destiny as a lawyer was taken for granted. By the time I got around actually to going to law school, however, I was a lot less sold on the concept. My participation in the Honors Program in Social Thought and Institutions at Stanford convinced me that I actually wanted to be a college teacher/writer. My father, particularly, strongly opposed any change of course, and since I was on the obedient side (at least where parental directions were involved) I persevered. Nonetheless, I entered law school reluctantly.

I did love my first year contracts course with Professor Hurlbut. As I saw it, the essence of the “contract” is our ability to decide the future by writing down our intentions, and by then binding ourselves to perform our written commitments as promised. That appealed to me, since I was an American History major in my undergraduate years, and I believed that the American Revolution had forged a new political order in the world based on promises mutually made and kept. My Honors Program introduction to the concept of “Utopia” as a way to create a better world again led me to believe that we could accomplish great things simply by articulating what we wanted, on a theoretical basis, and then actually doing those things in the real world. Other law school courses, with their emphasis on money, business, and personal conflict, were a lot less compelling to me, and after my first year, I decided that I should either quit Law School or “buckle down.” Being the kind of person who likes to live up to expectations, I decided to “buckle down.”

The second year was even worse. I flunked “International Law,” which turned out not to be what I expected, but a course in how to make international businesses rich. That was not a priority I found compelling. In fact, what I found compelling was the need to stop the War in Vietnam. During my second year in Law School, I decided I would resist the draft (and not just become a conscientious objector, though as a Quaker I qualified for that I-O classification). I was determined to resist any and all participation with the draft system, en toto. I left Law School, among other reasons, in order to lose the automatic student deferment that was bestowed on those in my age cohort who were continuing successfully to pursue their academic studies.

After a brief stint in the Merchant Marine, and a trip to Asia as one of the “Volunteers in Asia” sent overseas by the former Dean of Freshmen Men, Dwight Clark, I did refuse induction into the armed forces, but I was never prosecuted, because the Selective Service System so mishandled my classification process. I came back to Law School (again, at my father’s urging, more than for any other reason), and graduated a little late (in the Law School class of 1969, rather than 1968, where I belonged). While I did not take the Bar Exam immediately upon graduation, I did take it a year later, but continued to be reluctant to move into a legal career. I worked in the Stanford Bookstore, got married, and then went to New York City as a Rockefeller Brothers Fellow at Union Theological Seminary.

In 1971, my wife Marilyn and I moved to Santa Cruz so I could provide some help to my father, who had gone back to law school (at Santa Clara), and who had graduated a year before me. He had just opened his private practice in Santa Cruz, and was foundering (so he said). I left the theological seminary for law practice, to help out my father, but my reluctance was maintained. Mostly, I wrote wills and represented conscientious objectors to the draft; I am happy to report than my father and I never lost a single case!

In 1972, I was hired to represent a community group opposing the development of a major hotel and convention center on Lighthouse Field, the last open space on the coast in the City of Santa Cruz. This was a defining community fight, and we won it. During the course of my legal representation of the Save Lighthouse Point Association, I frequently spoke in public gatherings of all kinds, including City Council hearings held in the Civic Auditorium where 1,500 persons or more were in attendance. In 1974, I wrote an initiative measure which we qualified for the June ballot. It passed, decisively, the first initiative adopted in the City of Santa Cruz since the initial adoption of the City Charter, sometime in the 1940’s. Through my advocacy for the Save Lighthouse Point Association, I became something of a “notable” figure in the community (beloved by just over 50% of the public, and reviled by the remainder). I was asked to run for County Supervisor, to represent the district that included the City of Santa Cruz (and the newly-established University of California campus). I won my first election in November of 1974, and ended up surviving three recall attempts and serving twenty years on the Board.

During the time I was on the Board, I wrote and the voters adopted, by a referendum vote in June 1978, a growth management system that has fundamentally altered the future growth and development of Santa Cruz County. It’s still in effect.

Having ended up spending the largest part of my professional life in politics and public service, I can testify that I am amazingly grateful for my education at Stanford Law School. Despite all my reluctance to be a lawyer, I did take the courses, and I did learn about the law, and I found in the end that our public life is built upon what I think it is appropriate to call the “practice” of law.

In the human world, the world we create ourselves, we make the laws. And we “practice” how to get the effects we want. This “practice” is, in the public realm, nothing other than “politics,” the debate and discussion, controversy and contention that precedes the social (political) decision that writes down the law we determine will guide our actions. This kind of law is different from what happens in the world of nature, where the laws are not susceptible to human modification, and which, like the law of gravity, can never be broken.

Because we make the laws, we can change them. Those who know law, those who can write and interpret the legal directions we give ourselves, are bound to be importantly involved in the discussions about what we “ought” to do, which is the ever-present legal and real challenge for us, a challenge which is above all a political challenge.

Whether it is the War in Vietnam (or any other war), or global warming, or growth management, every citizen needs to understand and glory in our ability, together, to write the words, and to make the laws, that will create and define the reality in which we live.

#30 / Frederick

2012-01-30T07:20:00.000-08:00

Anyone who thinks that our politics would be improved if we could just eliminate the conflict and the controversy, and tone down all the disagreements and debate, is a bit foggy on the concept.

The "editorial process" by which our politics reconfigures the world will always require a struggle. The more important and fundamental the issue, the more struggle is required.

#29 / An Editorial Change Worth Making

2012-01-29T06:57:00.000-08:00

In the political reality that we have created in the United States, corporations are, indeed, "people," or at least are entitled to most or all of the privileges and powers that we believe that people should enjoy.

This "truth" about corporations is definitely not an inevitable part of the reality of our world. We spoke it into being (thanks largely to a set of concatenated pronouncements by the United States Supreme Court), and we can speak it right out of existence once again.

Here's a place where we ought to be exercising a little "editorial discipline," in my opinion.

#28 / Word Count

2012-01-28T04:28:00.000-08:00

I have been working on a pleading, filed yesterday with the California Supreme Court. The Court imposes a "word limit," and each pleading filed must have a word count certification.

It strikes me that we refine our first attempts at constructing new realities through a kind of editorial process, adding items we may have overlooked, and eliminating the excesses in what we may have first said, or written.

Good writing (and good realities) come from initial inspiration, but disciplined by good editing. It's best to get the word count down.

#27 / Speaking The Truth

2012-01-27T09:56:00.000-08:00

It is my experience (and theoretical belief) that what ultimately become the realities of the world we inhabit enter into that world by our own actions, and that we "precipitate" our human reality from a large set of unseen and inchoate possibilities.

It is also my experience that the most important way that we create reality is by "speaking" it. We bring truth into existence by our words.

#26 / Save Nature

2012-01-26T08:00:00.000-08:00

Nature.org is where The Nature Conservancy hangs out on the web. During the time I might have been called a "professional environmentalist" (I was the Executive Director of the Planning and Conservation League), I and other professional environmentalists called it "TNC." They do good work.

Whenever I go downtown now, and start walking on Pacific Avenue in Santa Cruz, from Cooper Street towards the beach, I find myself asked if I want to "save state parks?" Of course, I do want to do that. If you're downtown, I bet you will be asked, too. If you stop, and sign up to help (and I certainly recommend it), you'll find that the suggested way to "save state parks" is by joining TNC.

I think it is a good idea to join TNC, if you are not already a member, but for the record, there are some other ways to "save state parks," too. The California State Parks Foundation, for instance, has made "saving state parks" one of its main goals. They are a major participant in the Save Our State Parks Campaign. Santa Cruz locals should also know about Friends of Santa Cruz State Parks. Don't forget to join that group!

On the TNC website, you will find that TNC's main mission is not to "save state parks." The most prominent appeal on the website, at the time I'm writing this, is an appeal to "Save Nature." TNC suggests you can do that for only 60 cents a day.

It strikes me that "saving state parks" and "saving nature" are fundamentally different propositions. Our state parks are political creations; they are something that we have decided to include in the human world we most immediately inhabit. Since we created the state park system, we can also dismantle and destroy it, and it looks like California is headed down that road. "Saving State Parks" is a political task, and getting together with friends and neighbors (as well as raising money for a statewide political effort) is absolutely in order. That kind of political activity is what you see pictured in the image on this post.

As for an appeal to "Save Nature," I am a bit more troubled. In my view, the idea that the world of Nature is a human creation (to be continued, or not, based on what humans do) is what has caused us a lot of problems in the first place.

I am hoping that Nature will "save us," since the world of nature is the world upon which we ultimately and utterly depend.

#25 / Not A Spectator Sport

2012-01-25T08:24:00.000-08:00

The City of Santa Cruz has recently announced that its City Council meetings will heretofore be broadcast live online, and thereafter endlessly "looped." Click right here for a link to where that online access can be obtained.

I have a mixed reaction to this latest announcement. Making it easier to access the activities of elected representatives is good. However, "watching" elected officials do something is different from democracy. Self-government means we have to get involved ourselves, and there is no substitute for "being there."

Democracy is most definitely not a "spectator sport."

#24 / Community Reads

2012-01-24T07:41:00.001-08:00

The "Silicon Valley Reads" program is going into its tenth year. Leadership has been provided by the City of San Jose, the Santa Clara County Office of Education, and the Santa Clara County Library. The program has a long list of "community partners," and many institutional sponsors. This year, the theme is "Muslim and American."

I like the idea of what amounts to a community "book group." To make manifest the reality of our human situation - that we are not just a collection of "individuals," but that we are all bound together in "community" (various communities, in fact) - we need to engage in community activities and exercises. Such common activities can help reveal us to ourselves, and to make clear that we are not alone.

Genuine democracy relies on "democratic conversation." What better way to engender such conversation? Let's all read a book and talk about it!

#23 / Grassroots Democracy In Venezula

2012-01-23T07:48:00.000-08:00

The January 30, 2012 edition of The Nation has an article by Gabriel Hetland, entitled "Grassroots Democracy in Venezuela." The article discusses a kind of democratic budgeting process actually being used in Venezuelan communities. That process is based not on a notion of "representative democracy," but on a model of "participatory democracy." Ordinary members of the community develop the budget, instead of having budget decisions made by "government officials who stay in their air-conditioned offices all day and make decisions there."

Electing the people who hire the people who run our lives for us is not truly very "democratic," if democracy means, as Hetland says it does, "giving ordinary people control over the decisions that affect their lives."

In the United States, public revulsion with "representatives" who no longer represent "us," but who are beholden to and represent "the 1%," threatens to undermine our believe in democratic self-government itself.

The Hetland article makes plain that self-government can work, but only if we get involved ourselves, and if don't assume that someone else can make our decisions for us.

The article also makes clear, by the way, that any genuine democracy takes a lot of work!

#22 / I Do Care

2012-01-22T15:47:00.000-08:00

My sister sent me an email to indicate that she has been enjoying my ruminations on the "I don't care" philosophy, which philosophy is not, of course, exactly the same thing as the Buddhist ideal of "non-attachment." Another comment, on one of my earlier postings, quite properly made that point - and in a very clear and helpful way, I thought.

My sister's "subject line," in the email she sent, was this: "I do care." Of course, I care, too! For my sister; for my family; for my loved ones; for my community; for "all those who've sailed with me."

What got me thinking about the "I don't care" topic was not really any examination of my personal situation; it was a complaint on an environmental website that "everyone likes to say they do the right thing but very few actually do it." I wandered from there to a reflection on the more personal, and I do think, on a personal level, that a non-attachment approach can have great rewards, and that in figuring out how to get there, the spirited words of Judy Garland may well be helpful: "I don't care!"

If we do care about the fate of the world (our world and the world of Nature), the "Our Breathing Planet" website has a point. The challenges we confront are urgent imperatives, and yet our "care" doesn't seem to translate into much action. I really don't buy the "lather, rinse, and repeat" idea, which suggests that the way to get people to "care" in an effective way is somehow to impose or promote repetitious caring conduct. "Care" is like "love;" it either comes from inside, or or is related to an internal dimension of some kind. It can't be inculcated by externally imposed or recommended exercises. At least, I don't think s0.

On the other hand, my own concept of "love" draws a lot from Kierkegaard's Works of Love, and he emphasizes the fact that "love" is an "assignment." It is, in fact, a "commandment."

Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind; this is the first and the great commandment, and the second is like unto it: thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets."

There is a certain "external" quality to love (and caring) when it is seen as a commandment; in other words, there is something going on here that is more than an "internal" feeling. There is an "obligation" involved. Any "non-attachment" approach that might suggest that we are without an obligation to the world, or to other people, doesn't ring right, and while I am no Buddhist, it seems that one of the central ideas of Buddhism is "compassion," which could even be seen as a synonym for "caring," if "caring" is considered in its deepest and most profound sense.

Here's where I end up: we achieve "caring" (as we achieve "love") through a commitment centered internally, but tied to the external world. In the political context, we will actually "do" the right thing when we are committed to other persons in a public way, so that our internally-based love and caring is anchored to the "real" world through that public declaration.

If we care enough to address the crises threatening our world today (the world we create, the human world, and the world of Nature) then we will realize our concern and caring by pledging with others to "do the right thing." Our revolution, in the United States of America, began with such a personal pledge:

We, therefore, the representatives of the United States of America, in General Congress, assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the name, and by the authority of the good people of these colonies, solemnly publish and declare, that these united colonies are, and of right ought to be free and independent states; that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the state of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as free and independent states, they have full power to levy war, conclude peace, contract alliances, establish commerce, and to do all other acts and things which independent states may of right do. And for the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor.

It is time, I think, to pledge again. If we do care.

#21 / I Don't Care #4

2012-01-21T07:37:00.000-08:00

I have been thinking about "non-attachment" and the "I don't care" philosophy for some time.

Last October, I was discussing Buddha and Jesus on the topic, and my recent researches reveal that there are lots of people who advocate this "I don't care" approach as a way to minimize the pain of existence on a personal level. It's not just Judy Garland. Click on the image of the button to get connected to one such discussion.

What got me thinking about the "I don't care" issue most recently wasn't so much the application of that approach at the personal level, but the problem it poses at the political level of our existence. The Our Breathing Planet website was bemoaning the fact that "everyone likes to say they do the right thing but very few actually do it." I postulated that the reason was pretty simple: those who aren't doing the "right thing" really just don't care.

I was only partly being facetious. Importing an "I don't care" and "non-attachment" approach from the personal to the political level is an obvious explanation of why we are not dealing more effectively with what are now recognized as life-threatening challenges to our continued existence. On the personal level, "non-attachment" and "I don't care" may indeed reduce personal pain. On the larger, political level ignoring our collective problems can (and undoubtedly will) lead to disaster. I am thinking specifically of global warming, but there are lots of other examples, too. If you are interested in global warming, you might like to read a recent paper entitled, "How Not To Save The Planet."

#20 / I Don't Care #3

2012-01-20T07:20:00.000-08:00

The advantages of an "I don't care" philosophy may be found mainly at the personal level. Click on the image, or right here, to get Judy Garland's take.

When someone you love cuts off all contact, when you don't get that dream job for which you are totally qualified, when you come down with cancer, or have similar experiences, Judy may well have some good advice, though I'm not completely clear whether she's a singing about Buddhist "non-attachment" or not!

I Don't Care

They say I'm crazy

Got no sense

But I don't care

They may or may not mean offense

But I don't care

You see, I'm sort of independent

I am my own superintendent

And my star is on the ascendant

That's why I don't care

I don't care, I don't care

What they may think of me

I'm happy-go-lucky, they say that I'm plucky

Contented and carefree

I don't care I don't care

If I do get a mean and stony stare

If I'm not successful

It won't be distressful

Cause I don't care

A girl should know her etiquette

Alas, alack

Propriety demands we walk a narrow track

When fellas used to blink at me

I'd freeze 'em and they'd shrink at me

But now when fellas wink at me

I wink at them right back!

I don't care I don't care

If people frown on me

Perhaps it's the lone way

But I go my own way

That's my philosophy

I don't care I don't care

if he's clerk or just a millionaire

There's no doubt about it,

I'll sing and I'll shout it

Cause I don't care

Oh, I don't care, I don't care

When it comes to happiness,

I want my share

Don't try to rearrange me

There's nothing can change me

'cause I don't care!

#19 / I Don't Care #2

2012-01-19T08:00:00.000-08:00

An "I don't care" philosophy seems inappropriate in a world filled with natural wonder, and at a time of such historical significance. Nonetheless, there are some arguments in favor.

Last year, it turns out that I had some opportunities to learn a bit about Buddhism. My son spent much of the year at Buddhist retreat centers, and I saw the Buddha (statue) in Soquel.

"Non-attachment" is a Buddhist ambition, if "ambition" is the right word for a "non-attachment" goal. Here is one statement on the concept:

Trying to be a good Buddhist in the modern world is not easy; there is much that conspires against one on every side. Out of all the various concepts of the Buddhist faith, only two or three really stand out as central and dominant. In this respect, I suppose impermanence, bliss and compassion stand out to me as being really central ideas, about which much else revolves peripherally. Karma and rebirth are both concepts Buddhism has taken from Hinduism.
It is hard to find one axiom within Buddhism that illustrates this fact so well, as that of non-attachment. It sums up the whole religion in so many ways and serves to illustrate the theme of how hard it is to be a good Buddhist.

It is hard to say: "I don't care." That's what I get from the observations just quoted. We do become very attached to the idea of getting what we "want," so often expressed as getting what we "need." It could well be that an "I don't care" approach would do us better. Is that what Buddhism means to teach?

#18 / I Don't Care

2012-01-18T07:29:00.000-08:00

The Our Breathing Planet website confronts a typical problem for those who care about the environment. As they put it:

Everyone likes to say they do the right thing but very few actually do it. What's the answer to this problem? Lather, rinse, and repeat - repeat being the key word, here. Shampoo manufacturers figured out long ago that the word repeat is the key to increased action.

Actually, I think that shampoo manufacturers figured out that the word repeat was the key to increased use of, and therefore sales of, shampoo. Maybe I'm just a cynic.

I would never claim that that building good habits through repetition of desired actions isn't important. That, however, is a strategy that must be "internally" generated. Here's a hint, if people aren't doing the "right thing" it's because they don't actually care.

There is a lot of that going around. In a certain way, it can be a good thing, too!

#17 / Controversy And Democracy

2012-01-17T10:04:00.001-08:00

I was an elected official in Santa Cruz County for twenty years, from 1975 to 1995, and my personal involvement in politics was precipitated not by any particular career ambition, but came out of my involvement with a community group in Santa Cruz that had both a specific and a general objective.

Specifically, the Save Lighthouse Point Association wanted to protect and preserve Lighthouse Field as the last open space on the coast in the City of Santa Cruz. This was a controversial issue at the time, and we were ultimately successful. More generally, the Save Lighthouse Point Association wanted to transform our local politics, to make that politics more responsive to what the public actually wanted, as opposed to what our elected representatives were then doing for us (or to us). By and large, that has been a successful effort, too, and that was the effort that led me to my 20-year stint as a member of the Santa Cruz County Board of Supervisors.

During my time on the Board, Santa Cruz County voters adopted a comprehensive growth management program (Measure J), and the Board amended the County General Plan and its Local Coastal Plan several times, always with the objective of protecting farmland and preventing urban sprawl. The County Government also raised money and spent it on the public projects that the public was asking for, notably in creating and implementing a strong redevelopment effort in the Live Oak and Soquel area. The County did not see “redevelopment” as the way to pave over open space and agricultural land, but as a way to direct public investment into the communities where people already lived. It’s a prescription I am still recommending on my weekday Land Use Reports on KUSP Radio.

Here are two conclusions I have come to, after what now amounts to a lifetime of personal involvement in local government: First, we can’t have any genuine self-government unless we are willing to get involved ourselves. There is no shortcut to democracy. If we want to make the world more responsive to our own priorities, we can’t do that by individualistic, private actions. We need to “get it together,” and to act in the public realm. If we are waiting for someone else to do what we want, just because it’s obvious what is “right,” we will be waiting a really long time.

Second, our government won’t be responsive to the public unless there is a spirited public conversation, with debate and disagreement, conflict and controversy. That kind of conversation and debate is healthy and good. Suppressing disagreements and debate is always a step away from the kind of involved participation in government that we need to foster, not reject.

A vigorous and informed press is practically the most important thing going, if we care about the future of our national, state, and above all local government institutions, and about what we can do together if we get involved ourselves!

#16 / Memorial

2012-01-16T07:06:00.000-08:00

Out of a mountain of despair, a stone of hope.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

#15 / The Artifacts Of Our Existence

2012-01-15T10:24:00.000-08:00

The artifacts of our existence have such meaning for us. I have a shelf full in my office. More tucked away, in drawers and files. Twenty years of scrapbook clippings. Only some of them negative!

Mostly, these little reminders that we have been alive do not survive for even one more generation. When children clean out the homes of their deceased parents, most get discarded. They certainly lose their provenance.

But while we live...we don't forget the glories of the world we have been so privileged to inhabit. And create.

#14 / My Mom On The Military

2012-01-14T20:31:00.000-08:00

I have recently read the latest word on U.S. military strategy. It's a "strategic guidance" document, issued on January 3, 2012 by President Obama. It is titled, Sustaining U.S. Global Leadership: Priorities For 21st Century Defense.

This document is only eight pages long, but there is an awful lot of jargon contained in those eight pages. I get the feeling that only those in the know are really supposed to know what it all means. Click the link and you can read it yourself. My take on it is that the President believes that starting a war in Iran can be called a "defense" effort [see page 2].

I know what my Mom would say. She was around when the "War Department" became the "Defense Department," and she never got tired of mentioning the dishonesty of the new title. "Defending" ourselves is always alright. So we call it "defense" while we wage war on others whenever we think it's "appropriate" [see page 2]. Launching military action whenever we think it's "appropriate" is what this paper calls "global leadership."

I'm with my Mom. I call it starting a war.

#13 / Consumer Nation

2012-01-13T10:32:00.001-08:00

Click on the image for the photo credit. It's a piece of photographic artwork by Alexander Aristotle.

Though there is a debate about whether this is true or not, there is a lot of evidence that Americans define themselves, today, as "consumers." Check out Annie Leonard's Story of Stuff, for a report from the front lines of our "consumer society."

If I am right, and we ourselves actually create the world that we most immediately inhabit, self-referencing ourselves as "consumers" is a fundamental misconception of the nature of our situation.

It also leaves us profoundly vulnerable to the manipulations of advertising, which is what the photo is all about, at least according to the website at Fine Art America.

We teach our children to be "consumers" from an early age. Perhaps this photo should have been entitled "School Daze."

#12 / Governmental Murder

2012-01-12T09:32:00.000-08:00

Every morning, I read at least four newspapers (the old fashioned way, which gives me ink stains on my fingers). This morning, The Wall Street Journal had a front page story under the headline, "Scientist Killing Stokes U.S.-Iran Tensions." That article began as follows:

An Iranian scientist working for a key nuclear site was assassinated in Tehran with a magnetic bomb attached to his car, in what the government said was a plot by the U.S. and Israel at a time of growing strains over Iran's nuclear program.

Was the United States government complicit in this murder? I don't know. Maybe the facts will come to light, at some time in the future. The charge, however, has an inherent plausibility since it is no secret that the United States government takes the position that the murder of individual persons engaged in activities that the U.S. government believes are threatening to the the United States is an absolutely acceptable practice.

Murder by government, without trial, and without the victim being afforded any opportunity to "confront his or her accuser," is now a routine practice of the government of the United States of America. Even American citizens are not immune. Is the picture a "Predator," or a "Reaper?" I don't know. It's a weapon under the control of federal bureaucrats in Washington, D.C. who use it to kill people that someone in their bureaucracy decides shouldn't be allowed to continue to live anymore. And anyone else who happens to be in the vicinity, too. We shouldn't forget that.

It is my belief that our "human world" is a world that we create ourselves, by our own actions. Because anything is possible within the world we create, we can make our dreams come true. We can make our nightmares come true, too.

It continues to be almost unbelievable that the Holocaust could have occurred. It was a nightmare, made real, with the knowledge and participation of thousands, or tens of thousands of people. How could so many human beings really have participated in what amounted to an industrial-scale system of governmental murder? I have no sympathy for the "Holocaust deniers." It did happen.

I don't like the idea of Iran developing nuclear weapons. I think that terrorist attacks, like the attacks of 9/11, are horrible and deplorable.

But I do not think that governmentally-sanctioned murder is the right answer to the dangers of nuclear proliferation or the horrors of terrorist attacks.

There are two practical and pragmatic reasons to denounce this practice by our government, and to seek to stop it now, before it spreads further. First, any one of us (just plain vanilla American citizens) can ultimately be murdered by our own government once it is admitted that this practice is acceptable. Second, what the United States government does elsewhere will ultimately be done to us here. It is not in the self-interest of the citizens of the United States to allow our government to murder people in the name of achieving good objectives.

This is not the world that we should want to create. And if we don't want to create that world, we need to dream another dream.

# 11 / Self-Publishing

2012-01-11T06:03:00.001-08:00

An issue for those authors choosing to "self-publish," a relatively new phenomenon in the world of books and writing, is whether or not the "book," when finished, will continue to exist in the form in which it was first published, or whether the "book" will change, on a copy per copy basis.

Since it is now possible to produce the physical book on a print-on-demand basis, and since it is relatively easy to modify the "contents" of a book, always under the same title, at any time, a self-publishing author can decide whether to deliver readers the latest iteration of the author's thoughts, or that version of the author's thoughts that existed at the time the book was first made available through publication.

In real life, time does not stand still, and the world we create is continually updated, for better or for worse.

#10 / Failures And Disasters

2012-01-10T06:51:00.000-08:00

As a recent posting in the Legal Planet blog points out, "there is a strong nexus between environmental disasters and regulatory failures."

When we fail properly to control our own activities, in the world we create, and to respect the absolute requirements of the world of Nature, bad things happen.

#9 / Politics And Fish

2012-01-09T00:45:00.000-08:00

Click on the image, or right here, to read an article by Jonah Lehrer, published in the January 7, 2012 edition of the Wall Street Journal, and entitled "Why Ignorance Is Democracy's Bliss."

Lehrer's essential premise is that "ignorance is an essential feature of democratic governments." Citing a study led by Iain Couzin, a Princeton ecologist who works on collective animal behavior, Lehrer argues that "voters with weak political preferences help to prevent clusters of extremists from dominating the political process."

Hey, Jonah, don't we wish!

I actually think that Lehrer is on to something, based on my own twenty years of experience in (mostly local) politics. He puts it in a provocative way, but it is true that most people are not that engaged in or interested in politics, and that if everyone were as engaged as those who make "politics" a central part of their life, we might have a harder time than we do in reaching community consensus.

Reaching "consensus," of course, is not the objective of any healthy politics. Consensus is fine, but the objective of politics is to make the "right" collective decisions (and to reach the "right" consensus). "Consensus" itself (like "compromise" itself) is not a positive good. The point is to get to "consensus" about something that is helpful to the community. Getting to "consensus" may be bad, not good, if the substance of the "consensus" reached is bad for the overall community.

Lehrer's column cites the rise of Hitler in pre-war Germany as an example of how indifference is good, but it seems to me that this example runs against his thesis. I just finished reading In The Garden of Beasts, a fine book on Hitler's rise to political dominance in pre-war Germany, authored by Erik Larson. "Consensus" was achieved precisely because of the relative indifference of the public as a whole, at least as I read Larson's account.

Lehrer, in other words, is providing an accurate description of what really happens in politics, but in this case, as in so many others, description is different from prescription. It goes too far to suggest that widespread "indifference" to politics is a positive benefit, in terms of the substance of the political decisions ultimately made.

I take Lehrer's point, but I am going to continue to urge (as a prescription, certainly) that if we want democracy, if we want "self-government," we will have to get involved in politics and government ourselves.

#8 / Extreme Energy

2012-01-08T09:19:00.000-08:00

This photo is from a bulletin sent out by the Center For Biological Diversity (or CBD), and it shows the effects of tar sands oil production in Canada. It is not a pretty picture. What we are doing, in Canada and elsewhere, is more than aesthetically displeasing.

It is increasingly clear that our human activities are having a profound, and profoundly antagonistic, impact on the world of Nature. Since our human world depends, ultimately, on the world of Nature, this can’t be a good thing.

CBD is calling our latest efforts to develop new energy sources "extreme energy," which seems descriptive. Extreme energy developments, like the tar sands oil development pictured here, are threatening Canada's boreal forests, the pristine Arctic Ocean, and are putting the continued existence of human civilization in peril, as our combustion of hydrocarbon fuels drives global warming forward at an accelerated pace.

#7 / We Need More Than A Good Concept

2012-01-07T04:34:00.000-08:00

Peter Calthorpe, an eminent urban planner, has recently written a column for the San Francisco Chronicle in which he states that California “needs high-speed rail.” While "needs" is perhaps a stronger verb than I would use, Calthorpe's column makes a very good case for high-speed rail in general.

Unfortunately, the specific high-speed rail project currently proposed by the California High-Speed Rail Authority would not provide any of the benefits identified by Calthorpe. What California “needs” is more than a concept. To make high-speed rail a reality we need a project that is both financially “feasible,” and that is “reasonable” in terms of its environmental and community impacts. That’s not only common sense, it happens to be what state law says, too.

So how does the currently-proposed high-speed rail project measure up, in terms of “feasibility” and “reasonableness?” According to the High-Speed Rail Peer Review Group established by the California High-Speed Rail Authority (the state agency proposing the project), the current plan fails to be either "feasible" or "reasonable."

The Peer Review Group is made up of transportation experts selected by the Authority. Its specific responsibility under state law (Section 185035 of the State Public Utilities Code) is to “evaluate the authority's funding plans and prepare its independent judgment as to the feasibility and reasonableness of the plans, appropriateness of assumptions, analyses, and estimates, and [to make] any other observations or evaluations it deems necessary.”

In a report released on January 3rd, the Peer Review Group said the following: (1) The current project “does not appear to meet the requirements of the enabling State legislation.” (2) “The Funding Plan fails to identify any long term funding commitments … a fundamental flaw in the program.” (3) “We do not think that the current description constitutes a ‘feasible’ business model… (4) “We cannot characterize the demand forecasts as reasonable.” (5) “We cannot overemphasize the fact that moving ahead on the HSR project without credible sources of adequate funding, without a definitive business model, without a strategy to maximize the independent utility and value to the State, and without the appropriate management resources represents an immense financial risk on the part of the State of California … The Peer Review group cannot at this time recommend that the Legislature approve the appropriation of bond proceeds for this project.”

This is a "two thumbs down" assessment from the experts selected by the Authority itself. Neither the Authority, nor the Governor, seems to be too perturbed that the specific plans being proposed, which will cost us $6 billion, incidentally, are fundamentally flawed. Why is that? I think it's because so many people think we "need" high-speed rail, and it's the "concept" that is appealing.

The High-Speed Rail Authority has consistently urged support for its specific plans based on the idea that high-speed rail is a wonderful idea in general. Maybe it is (though I have increasing doubts), but we need more than a “concept” in place before we spend $6 billion. We need a plan that would actually work, that is financially feasible, and that is otherwise reasonable. The current plan doesn’t cut it.

I have been following high-speed rail issues for about three years, working with farmers in the Central Valley and residents on the San Francisco Peninsula. I can testify that the High-Speed Rail Peer Review Group is not comprised of NIMBY naysayers. It is not part of a political plot to embarrass the President or the Governor. The Peer Review Group is not against the "concept" of high-speed rail, either. In fact, it supports that concept. But the Peer Review Group demands (and we should demand) that the State come up with a plan that is both “feasible” and “reasonable” before we spend $6 billion dollars just because we “like the idea” of high speed rail.

#6 / Not A Pretty Story

2012-01-06T08:46:00.001-08:00

My local paper is the Santa Cruz Sentinel. The editorial in today's edition suggested that our lack of rain in December (and so far in January) might soon turn a “weather” story into a “water” story.

From my perspective, the “real story” is a "political story."

At a time of incredible uncertainty about City water supplies, the Santa Cruz City Council is pushing hard to extend water service to the UCSC North Campus. The University is seeking 152 million gallons of water a year to allow the construction of over 3,000,000 square feet of new buildings in what is now a natural reserve area, an area located outside the City’s official urban-rural boundary.

Our natural environment and current water customers are both being put at considerable risk by this effort to extend water service beyond the boundaries of the City's current water service area. The City's willingness (literally) to ignore the limits established in its own General Plan, and by our natural environment, is not a “pretty story,” from my perspective.

#5 / Vertical Access

2012-01-05T11:42:00.000-08:00

The California Coastal Commission is perhaps the best planning agency in the nation. Both on a planning and project review basis, the Commission carries forward a specific, statutorily established agenda to protect and restore the resources of the California coast.

While the Commission's decisions are sometimes controversial, the Commission has had great success in keeping its eye on the ball where key coastal policy issues are at stake. This month, the Commission will meet in Santa Monica, and Agenda Item #5, on the Thursday, January 12^th agenda, is a report on the “vertical access” opportunities that the Commission has established in San Diego, Orange, Los Angeles, Ventura, Santa Barbara, and San Luis Obispo Counties.

“Vertical access” means: “I can get to the beach.” It means that members of the public will have the legal right and an actual opportunity to walk over the private property located between a public road and the beach, to get to the beach and to the ocean. There are lots of places in the world where members of the public can’t get access to the beach. In California, thanks to the Coastal Commission, we can!

The Commission's success in providing "vertical access" along the entire California coast is just one more example of how "regulation is freedom." We tell ourselves what we want to do, and then we do it. That is how our "freedom" to achieve our common goals is actually achieved, in the real world.

#4 / Facebook Friends

2012-01-04T04:28:00.000-08:00

Many of my "non Facebook" friends are pretty skeptical about the Facebook Friend concept. And "skeptical" may be a nice way of putting it. If you click on the image, you can get an article that quotes an anthropologist to the effect that when you've hit 150 "friends" you've reached the actual limit of our human ability to relate to others.

I definitely agree that "real" friends must appear, somehow, in one's "real" life, and that a "virtual" or "online" existence is no substitute for actual human contact.

However, my real life experience with my Facebook Friends (1478 as I write this) convinces me that what some see as "illusory" connections are, in fact, "real" connections. Not only do I now have an ever-refreshing focus group to let me know what "people" think (in general, and specifically about my own ideas), I am learning more about people with whom I have actual (though mostly infrequent) contact, and this seems, to me, to help bind me closer to the "real" world. In fact, my Facebook Friendships give me "real" proof, each day, that we are (as I like to say) "all in this together."

We are not just a bunch of unconnected individuals. Emerging from the interaction of our unique individualities is a "real" world - a world that is our common project.

#3 / Earthlights

2012-01-03T05:45:00.000-08:00

Those who have registered on Facebook know that all of its users will shortly have to react to a major reconfiguration of the Facebook program, which will require each user to make a personal "timeline" the fundamental organizing principle of that person's Facebook presentation. Facebook wants its users to "tell their life story with a new kind of profile." It all starts with a "Cover" page, which is supposed to be a "unique image that represents you best."

I have chosen the "Earthlights" photo, shown here, as my Facebook "Cover." We live in the world of Nature, but we create a different world, our human world, within the world of Nature upon which we are ultimately dependent. If we tend to forget that this is, in fact, our human situation, and that we are ultimately dependent on the world of Nature, the "Earthlights" photo should remind us.

#2 / Theory

2012-01-02T08:18:00.001-08:00

In my way of looking at the world, theory plays a major role. We create the reality we inhabit by going from theory to practice.

I recently noticed, when consulting an online dictionary, that my use of the word "theory" is considered to be an "idiomatic" use. My idea of "theory" considers our theories to be statements of the "ideal," of what we want to make true. That use of the word is the very last use listed in the list of definitions provided by Dictionary.com.

For me, it's a "first principle" of empowerment.

#1 / Just A Little Title Change

2012-01-01T00:45:00.000-08:00

The observant reader will note a little change to my title. As of January 1, 2012, the title of this blog is no longer "Two Worlds / 365." Now, it's just plain "Two Worlds." The way this blogging program works, the title change I make today reaches back in time, and retrospectively alters the title under which I have made every past posting. There have been, incidentally, 736 such postings, not counting this one.

Originally, my blog was titled "Abrazos / 365," with reference to a favorite book by Eduardo Galeano. I began the effort in January of 2009, but by the end of that year I had to confess that the "/ 365" part hadn't really worked out. Despite my good intentions, I just didn't get around to writing something down and posting it each day.

I did a lot better in 2010 and 2011. For the last two years, I have fulfilled my commitment to make a daily posting.

Going forward, while I am not planning to make any big changes, I am relieving myself of that "/365" commitment. I continue to think that it is helpful to consider how we live, simultaneously, in two different worlds, the world of Nature, upon which we are ultimately dependent, and a human world, which we create ourselves, and which is the immediate "reality" in which we live. I hope to continue to think about and explore the interaction of these two worlds.

I like the picture at the top of this posting, which is, in fact, an artistic exploration of the "Two Worlds" relationship. You can click on the image to get a web reference. The art work is called Non-Sign II. It was commissioned by the United States government, designed by artists Annie Han and Daniel Mihalyo, and executed by Lead Pencil Studio. It has been placed at the U.S. - Canadian border near Vancouver.

The world of Nature, upon which we ultimately depend, seems framed by (and defined by) the world that we have made ourselves.

I think, perhaps, we've got it backwards!

#365 / Freaked Out

2011-12-31T07:00:00.000-08:00

Me parece como estaba ayer, pero fue hace veinte años que estudió español con Consuelo España en Cabrillo College y aprendí algo del calendario de los Mayas.

I took Spanish 29 at Cabrillo College in the Fall of 1991. The course was called "La Cultura y Civilizacion de Mexico," and was taught totally in Spanish. A research project was assigned, and I was told to research (totalmente en español, claro) the Mayan system of numbers (and the Mayan calendar). I wrote a report, and made a class presentation, and I have gone back into my filing cabinets to pull out the materials from my class, to see if these materials reveal why I have been "freaked out" about the end of the Mayan calendar (in 2012) ever since this class at Cabrillo. Unfortunately, my papers were not that revealing.

The Mayans had two calendars. Their "normal" calendar, which had 365 days, and was called Haab, was organized in 18 months of 20 days each, with a five day "extra" month at the end of each year. That calendar, in other words, though the days were organized differently, was essentially the same as European calendars, reflecting the reality of Earth's annual trip around the sun. The second Mayan calendar, however, called the Tzolkín, had only 260 days; it was a sacred calendar. At least as of 1991, no one had really produced a good explanation of the basis for the Tzolkín.

When the two calendars were integrated, as they were, they produced recurring periods of exactly 52 years. Each day during that 52-year period had an individual "name," under this dual calendar system, and at the end of the 52-year period, the "name" of the next day would be the same exact "name" of the day that had started the calendar 52 years previously. Obviously, this could cause confusion. In order to eliminate that confusion (or so it is speculated), the Mayans developed a "long count" calendar, as opposed to the "short count" calendar which always ended after each 52-year cycle. It is this "long count" calendar that ends (as I understand the calculations) on December 21, 2012.

What is pictured in the cartoon above, if I am not mistaken, is not the Mayan calendar, but the Aztec calendar. The Aztec calendar was similar to, but different from the Mayan calendar, which has been called the "most accurate" calendar ever produced. I don't think, in other words, that is actually a "lack of space" that compelled the Mayan long count calendar to end in 2012.

Maybe it was the judgment that the Mayan calendar is the "most accurate" calendar ever produced that "freaked me out," when I did my research in 1991. Whatever the reason, I have thought, since that time, that there would be something special about 2012. I still have that feeling.

Without being too "freaked," I am looking forward to next year!

#364 / Affinity Group

2011-12-30T00:02:00.000-08:00

I have been thinking about how the 99% party might be able to recapture control of the ship of state, and start driving its own bus. One thing that comes to mind is the "Affinity Group." According to Wikipedia:

An Affinity group is usually a small group of activists (usually from 3-20) who work together on direct action. Affinity groups are organized in a non-hierarchical manner, usually using consensus decision making, and are often made up of trusted friends. They provide a method of organization that is flexible and decentralized. Affinity groups can be based on a common ideology (e.g., anarchism, pacifism), a shared concern for a given issue (e.g., anti-nuclear, anti-war) or a common activity, role or skill (e.g., legal support, medical aid, black blocs). Affinity groups may have either open or closed membership, although the latter is far more common.

The origin of Affinity groups dates back to 19th century Spain. It was the favorite way of organization by Spanish anarchists (grupos de afinidad), and had their base in the tertulias or in the local groups.

Affinity groups appeared again in the U.S. anti-war movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Anti-war activists on college campuses organized around their interests or backgrounds -- religious, gender, ethnic group, etc. They became popular in the 1970s in the anti-nuclear movement in the United States and Europe. The 30,000 person occupation and blockade of the Ruhr nuclear power station in Germany in 1969 was organized on the Affinity group model. Today, the structure is used by many different activists: animal rights, environmental, anti-war, and anti-globalization, to name some examples. The 1999 protests in Seattle which shut down the WTO Ministerial Conference of 1999 included coordinated organization by many clusters of Affinity groups.

The spontaneously-generated community organizations that transformed Santa Cruz County politics in the 1970's and the 1980's were actually "Affinity groups," though they didn't use that name. The system works. I know it from personal experience.

By the way, the movie Battle In Seattle gives a good sense of what went on during the 1999 WTO protests. It's available on DVD.

#363 / Leave The Driving To Us

2011-12-29T00:03:00.000-08:00

Until I looked it up, I had no idea that the Greyhound Corporation began its operations in Hibbing, Minnesota (Bob Dylan's home town). If you believe what you read on the internet, that does seem to be the case.

I was looking up the Greyhound Corporation to find out the origins of its famous slogan, "leave the driving to us." The same internet site says that this slogan originated in 1956. That was just about the same time, actually, when the Interstate Highway System began to put an end to the idea of taking the bus to get across country, or even across town. Since the 1950's, Americans have always "driven themselves." In more ways than one, actually.

Politically speaking, the entire point of the American Revolution was to get the right to "drive ourselves." While I am all for bus transportation, as an alternative to the single-vehicle automobile, we do need to get back behind the wheel of our own democracy. Leaving the driving to "us," doesn't really mean "us," in the context of modern politics. Currently, the 1% are doing the driving. The 99% are being taken for a ride.

As you can see from the illustration, the bus seems to be heading right over a cliff.

#362 / A Change Of Course

2011-12-28T00:03:00.000-08:00

The "ship of state" metaphor has always been attractive to me. If you click the link, you can see what I wrote about it in April, 2010.

Obviously, changing course is particularly advisable if you are headed for the rocks (or are going over the falls).

That would be my diagnosis. It's time to start steering the ship ourselves.

#361 / Occupy Local Government

2011-12-27T00:02:00.000-08:00

Click right here, or on the image, for an interview with Stephen Lerner, a labor organizer who created the successful Justice for Janitors campaign.

Lerner likes the "Occupy" movement, which he says is "sort of theory and practice meeting." On the "theory" side, Lerner says that one of the reasons that his Justice for Janitors campaign worked was that "we had an analysis of who had power."

Thinking ahead to 2012, we of the 99% party need to base our efforts on just such an analysis. As we do that, I don't think we should overlook the power of local government. Local government agencies are "our" institutions, supposedly responsive to our concerns. We need to start having our local governments become part of the "Occupy" movement, not the locus of efforts to displace and destroy it, by acting as agents of the 1%.

My experience convinces me that local government can act as a kind of "megaphone" for community level concerns, aiming the arrows of local government power at targets at the state and federal level.

Next year, "Occupy Local Government" might be a good slogan to consider.

#360 / Another Day Older And ...

2011-12-26T00:01:00.000-08:00

Today, I am another day older, and ever more deeply indebted to friends, family and loved ones.

I am ever more grateful to be alive.

My birthday, always coming near the end of the year, is my "reminder note" that a new cycle is about to begin. We have "tons" to do, next year!

#359 / Messiah

2011-12-25T00:10:00.000-08:00

Robert Ripley said, "Believe it or not." He wasn't talking about the Messiah, at least not that I know of. Whether you are a believer, or not, Handel's Messiah still sweeps us before it:

CHORUS
Lift up your heads, O ye gates, and be ye lift up, ye everlasting doors, and the King of Glory shall come in. Who is the King of Glory? The Lord strong and mighty, the Lord mighty in battle. Lift up your heads, O ye gates, and be ye lift up, ye everlasting doors, and the King of Glory shall come in. Who is the King of Glory? The Lord of Hosts, He is the King of Glory.

You can listen to the entire Messiah, about an hour and a half, in an NPR program from the Kimmel Center in Philadelphia.

Click on this link (and be prepared for some editorial comment and an advertisement or two from National Public Radio) as you celebrate this day with stirring music, composed by George Frideric Handel in 1742.

#358 / Christmas In Wales

2011-12-24T12:26:00.000-08:00

I admit to an affection for all things "Dylan." I like Bob Dylan, Dylan Drottar (my grandson), and the poetry of Dylan Thomas.

During the best of our family Christmas celebrations, in seasons past, Christmas Eve at our house has been less about Santa and more about how Christmas used to be in Wales. By tradition, we drink hot cider, and I read the famous poem.

You should listen to the recording of Dylan Thomas reading this poem himself, if you have never heard it. But it's a good read for anyone. I recommend it.

Merry Christmas!

A Child's Christmas in Wales

One Christmas was so much like another, in those years around the sea-town corner now and out of all sound except the distant speaking of the voices I sometimes hear a moment before sleep, that I can never remember whether it snowed for six days and six nights when I was twelve or whether it snowed for twelve days and twelve nights when I was six.

All the Christmases roll down toward the two-tongued sea, like a cold and headlong moon bundling down the sky that was our street; and they stop at the rim of the ice-edged fish-freezing waves, and I plunge my hands in the snow and bring out whatever I can find. In goes my hand into that wool-white bell-tongued ball of holidays resting at the rim of the carol-singing sea, and out come Mrs. Prothero and the firemen.

It was on the afternoon of the Christmas Eve, and I was in Mrs. Prothero's garden, waiting for cats, with her son Jim. It was snowing. It was always snowing at Christmas. December, in my memory, is white as Lapland, though there were no reindeers. But there were cats. Patient, cold and callous, our hands wrapped in socks, we waited to snowball the cats. Sleek and long as jaguars and horrible-whiskered, spitting and snarling, they would slink and sidle over the white back-garden walls, and the lynx-eyed hunters, Jim and I, fur-capped and moccasined trappers from Hudson Bay, off Mumbles Road, would hurl our deadly snowballs at the green of their eyes. The wise cats never appeared.

We were so still, Eskimo-footed arctic marksmen in the muffling silence of the eternal snows - eternal, ever since Wednesday - that we never heard Mrs. Prothero's first cry from her igloo at the bottom of the garden. Or, if we heard it at all, it was, to us, like the far-off challenge of our enemy and prey, the neighbor's polar cat. But soon the voice grew louder.

"Fire!" cried Mrs. Prothero, and she beat the dinner-gong.

And we ran down the garden, with the snowballs in our arms, toward the house; and smoke, indeed, was pouring out of the dining-room, and the gong was bombilating, and Mrs. Prothero was announcing ruin like a town crier in Pompeii. This was better than all the cats in Wales standing on the wall in a row. We bounded into the house, laden with snowballs, and stopped at the open door of the smoke-filled room.

Something was burning all right; perhaps it was Mr. Prothero, who always slept there after midday dinner with a newspaper over his face. But he was standing in the middle of the room, saying, "A fine Christmas!" and smacking at the smoke with a slipper.

"Call the fire brigade," cried Mrs. Prothero as she beat the gong.

"There won't be there," said Mr. Prothero, "it's Christmas."

There was no fire to be seen, only clouds of smoke and Mr. Prothero standing in the middle of them, waving his slipper as though he were conducting.

"Do something," he said. And we threw all our snowballs into the smoke - I think we missed Mr. Prothero - and ran out of the house to the telephone box.

"Let's call the police as well," Jim said. "And the ambulance." "And Ernie Jenkins, he likes fires."

But we only called the fire brigade, and soon the fire engine came and three tall men in helmets brought a hose into the house and Mr. Prothero got out just in time before they turned it on. Nobody could have had a noisier Christmas Eve. And when the firemen turned off the hose and were standing in the wet, smoky room, Jim's Aunt, Miss. Prothero, came downstairs and peered in at them. Jim and I waited, very quietly, to hear what she would say to them. She said the right thing, always. She looked at the three tall firemen in their shining helmets, standing among the smoke and cinders and dissolving snowballs, and she said, "Would you like anything to read?"

Years and years ago, when I was a boy, when there were wolves in Wales, and birds the color of red-flannel petticoats whisked past the harp-shaped hills, when we sang and wallowed all night and day in caves that smelt like Sunday afternoons in damp front farmhouse parlors, and we chased, with the jawbones of deacons, the English and the bears, before the motor car, before the wheel, before the duchess-faced horse, when we rode the daft and happy hills bareback, it snowed and it snowed. But here a small boy says: "It snowed last year, too. I made a snowman and my brother knocked it down and I knocked my brother down and then we had tea.

"But that was not the same snow," I say. "Our snow was not only shaken from white wash buckets down the sky, it came shawling out of the ground and swam and drifted out of the arms and hands and bodies of the trees; snow grew overnight on the roofs of the houses like a pure and grandfather moss, minutely -ivied the walls and settled on the postman, opening the gate, like a dumb, numb thunder-storm of white, torn Christmas cards."

"Were there postmen then, too?"

"With sprinkling eyes and wind-cherried noses, on spread, frozen feet they crunched up to the doors and mittened on them manfully. But all that the children could hear was a ringing of bells."

"You mean that the postman went rat-a-tat-tat and the doors rang?"

"I mean that the bells the children could hear were inside them."

"I only hear thunder sometimes, never bells."

"There were church bells, too."

"Inside them?"

"No, no, no, in the bat-black, snow-white belfries, tugged by bishops and storks. And they rang their tidings over the bandaged town, over the frozen foam of the powder and ice-cream hills, over the crackling sea. It seemed that all the churches boomed for joy under my window; and the weathercocks crew for Christmas, on our fence."

"Get back to the postmen"

"They were just ordinary postmen, found of walking and dogs and Christmas and the snow. They knocked on the doors with blue knuckles ...."

"Ours has got a black knocker...."

"And then they stood on the white Welcome mat in the little, drifted porches and huffed and puffed, making ghosts with their breath, and jogged from foot to foot like small boys wanting to go out.""And then the presents?"

"And then the Presents, after the Christmas box. And the cold postman, with a rose on his button-nose, tingled down the tea-tray-slithered run of the chilly glinting hill. He went in his ice-bound boots like a man on fishmonger's slabs. "He wagged his bag like a frozen camel's hump, dizzily turned the corner on one foot, and, by God, he was gone."

"Get back to the Presents."

"There were the Useful Presents: engulfing mufflers of the old coach days, and mittens made for giant sloths; zebra scarfs of a substance like silky gum that could be tug-o'-warred down to the galoshes; blinding tam-o'-shanters like patchwork tea cozies and bunny-suited busbies and balaclavas for victims of head-shrinking tribes; from aunts who always wore wool next to the skin there were mustached and rasping vests that made you wonder why the aunts had any skin left at all; and once I had a little crocheted nose bag from an aunt now, alas, no longer whinnying with us. And pictureless books in which small boys, though warned with quotations not to, would skate on Farmer Giles' pond and did and drowned; and books that told me everything about the wasp, except why."

"Go on the Useless Presents."

"Bags of moist and many-colored jelly babies and a folded flag and a false nose and a tram-conductor's cap and a machine that punched tickets and rang a bell; never a catapult; once, by mistake that no one could explain, a little hatchet; and a celluloid duck that made, when you pressed it, a most unducklike sound, a mewing moo that an ambitious cat might make who wished to be a cow; and a painting book in which I could make the grass, the trees, the sea and the animals any colour I pleased, and still the dazzling sky-blue sheep are grazing in the red field under the rainbow-billed and pea-green birds. Hardboileds, toffee, fudge and allsorts, crunches, cracknels, humbugs, glaciers, marzipan, and butterwelsh for the Welsh. And troops of bright tin soldiers who, if they could not fight, could always run. And Snakes-and-Families and Happy Ladders. And Easy Hobbi-Games for Little Engineers, complete with instructions. Oh, easy for Leonardo! And a whistle to make the dogs bark to wake up the old man next door to make him beat on the wall with his stick to shake our picture off the wall. And a packet of cigarettes: you put one in your mouth and you stood at the corner of the street and you waited for hours, in vain, for an old lady to scold you for smoking a cigarette, and then with a smirk you ate it. And then it was breakfast under the balloons."

"Were there Uncles like in our house?"

"There are always Uncles at Christmas. The same Uncles. And on Christmas morning, with dog-disturbing whistle and sugar fags, I would scour the swatched town for the news of the little world, and find always a dead bird by the Post Office or by the white deserted swings; perhaps a robin, all but one of his fires out. Men and women wading or scooping back from chapel, with taproom noses and wind-bussed cheeks, all albinos, huddles their stiff black jarring feathers against the irreligious snow. Mistletoe hung from the gas brackets in all the front parlors; there was sherry and walnuts and bottled beer and crackers by the dessertspoons; and cats in their fur-abouts watched the fires; and the high-heaped fire spat, all ready for the chestnuts and the mulling pokers. Some few large men sat in the front parlors, without their collars, Uncles almost certainly, trying their new cigars, holding them out judiciously at arms' length, returning them to their mouths, coughing, then holding them out again as though waiting for the explosion; and some few small aunts, not wanted in the kitchen, nor anywhere else for that matter, sat on the very edge of their chairs, poised and brittle, afraid to break, like faded cups and saucers."

Not many those mornings trod the piling streets: an old man always, fawn-bowlered, yellow-gloved and, at this time of year, with spats of snow, would take his constitutional to the white bowling green and back, as he would take it wet or fire on Christmas Day or Doomsday; sometimes two hale young men, with big pipes blazing, no overcoats and wind blown scarfs, would trudge, unspeaking, down to the forlorn sea, to work up an appetite, to blow away the fumes, who knows, to walk into the waves until nothing of them was left but the two furling smoke clouds of their inextinguishable briars. Then I would be slap-dashing home, the gravy smell of the dinners of others, the bird smell, the brandy, the pudding and mince, coiling up to my nostrils, when out of a snow-clogged side lane would come a boy the spit of myself, with a pink-tipped cigarette and the violet past of a black eye, cocky as a bullfinch, leering all to himself.

I hated him on sight and sound, and would be about to put my dog whistle to my lips and blow him off the face of Christmas when suddenly he, with a violet wink, put his whistle to his lips and blew so stridently, so high, so exquisitely loud, that gobbling faces, their cheeks bulged with goose, would press against their tinsled windows, the whole length of the white echoing street. For dinner we had turkey and blazing pudding, and after dinner the Uncles sat in front of the fire, loosened all buttons, put their large moist hands over their watch chains, groaned a little and slept. Mothers, aunts and sisters scuttled to and fro, bearing tureens. Auntie Bessie, who had already been frightened, twice, by a clock-work mouse, whimpered at the sideboard and had some elderberry wine. The dog was sick. Auntie Dosie had to have three aspirins, but Auntie Hannah, who liked port, stood in the middle of the snowbound back yard, singing like a big-bosomed thrush. I would blow up balloons to see how big they would blow up to; and, when they burst, which they all did, the Uncles jumped and rumbled. In the rich and heavy afternoon, the Uncles breathing like dolphins and the snow descending, I would sit among festoons and Chinese lanterns and nibble dates and try to make a model man-o'-war, following the Instructions for Little Engineers, and produce what might be mistaken for a sea-going tramcar.

Or I would go out, my bright new boots squeaking, into the white world, on to the seaward hill, to call on Jim and Dan and Jack and to pad through the still streets, leaving huge footprints on the hidden pavements.

"I bet people will think there's been hippos."

"What would you do if you saw a hippo coming down our street?"

"I'd go like this, bang! I'd throw him over the railings and roll him down the hill and then I'd tickle him under the ear and he'd wag his tail."

"What would you do if you saw two hippos?"

Iron-flanked and bellowing he-hippos clanked and battered through the scudding snow toward us as we passed Mr. Daniel's house.

"Let's post Mr. Daniel a snow-ball through his letter box."

"Let's write things in the snow."

"Let's write, 'Mr. Daniel looks like a spaniel' all over his lawn."

Or we walked on the white shore. "Can the fishes see it's snowing?"

The silent one-clouded heavens drifted on to the sea. Now we were snow-blind travelers lost on the north hills, and vast dewlapped dogs, with flasks round their necks, ambled and shambled up to us, baying "Excelsior." We returned home through the poor streets where only a few children fumbled with bare red fingers in the wheel-rutted snow and cat-called after us, their voices fading away, as we trudged uphill, into the cries of the dock birds and the hooting of ships out in the whirling bay. And then, at tea the recovered Uncles would be jolly; and the ice cake loomed in the center of the table like a marble grave. Auntie Hannah laced her tea with rum, because it was only once a year.

Bring out the tall tales now that we told by the fire as the gaslight bubbled like a diver. Ghosts whooed like owls in the long nights when I dared not look over my shoulder; animals lurked in the cubbyhole under the stairs and the gas meter ticked. And I remember that we went singing carols once, when there wasn't the shaving of a moon to light the flying streets. At the end of a long road was a drive that led to a large house, and we stumbled up the darkness of the drive that night, each one of us afraid, each one holding a stone in his hand in case, and all of us too brave to say a word. The wind through the trees made noises as of old and unpleasant and maybe webfooted men wheezing in caves. We reached the black bulk of the house. "What shall we give them? Hark the Herald?"

"No," Jack said, "Good King Wencelas. I'll count three." One, two three, and we began to sing, our voices high and seemingly distant in the snow-felted darkness round the house that was occupied by nobody we knew. We stood close together, near the dark door. Good King Wencelas looked out On the Feast of Stephen ... And then a small, dry voice, like the voice of someone who has not spoken for a long time, joined our singing: a small, dry, eggshell voice from the other side of the door: a small dry voice through the keyhole. And when we stopped running we were outside our house; the front room was lovely; balloons floated under the hot-water-bottle-gulping gas; everything was good again and shone over the town.

"Perhaps it was a ghost," Jim said.

"Perhaps it was trolls," Dan said, who was always reading.

"Let's go in and see if there's any jelly left," Jack said. And we did that.

Always on Christmas night there was music. An uncle played the fiddle, a cousin sang "Cherry Ripe," and another uncle sang "Drake's Drum." It was very warm in the little house. Auntie Hannah, who had got on to the parsnip wine, sang a song about Bleeding Hearts and Death, and then another in which she said her heart was like a Bird's Nest; and then everybody laughed again; and then I went to bed. Looking through my bedroom window, out into the moonlight and the unending smoke-colored snow, I could see the lights in the windows of all the other houses on our hill and hear the music rising from them up the long, steady falling night. I turned the gas down, I got into bed. I said some words to the close and holy darkness, and then I slept.

Dylan Thomas

#357 / Ataraxia

2011-12-23T00:25:00.000-08:00

My son, Philips, has spent most of the last year undergoing an intensive course of Buddhist training at the Tassajara Zen Center. The picture on the left shows him as he left for Tassajara, earlier this year. He came home the day before yesterday.

The training really is intensive, and physically (as well as spiritually) demanding. Philips reported that it was an accomplishment to have finished the course of training, and that it was "worth the effort." Ultimately, he said, he achieved the goal of being totally present "at the level of the breath." I asked him whether that meant that he had experienced (in my words and metaphor) the sensation of having your finger plugged into a socket of energy that connects you to total joy. He said, "yes." Once you know, through personal experience, that there is such an opportunity to connect to joy, it is possible to experience that again. That would, indeed, be "worth the effort."

As I thought about it, I realized the word for what I was inquiring about is "ataraxia." It's a good word. It's a good thing to experience.

at·a·rax·i·a [at-uh-rak-see-uh]

Noun. A state of freedom from emotional disturbance and anxiety; tranquility.

#356 / A Daily Ray Of Hope #2

2011-12-22T00:10:00.000-08:00

I have mentioned the Daily Ray of Hope before, and I am doing it again, today. Maybe I am just susceptible to beautiful pictures of birds.

The picture here is from the December 19, 2011 edition of the Daily Ray of Hope, and my former mention, in my posting on June 12, 2010, was stimulated by the striking image of a different kind of bird, caught right at the shoreline.

Each weekday I receive, amidst hundreds of other emails, a "Daily Ray of Hope," sent by the Sierra Club. This is an email with a beautiful image from nature, and a little "thought for the day," always of a hopeful variety.

You can sign up (it's free) by clicking the Daily Ray of Hope link, or the image. By my lights, a little bit of hope is a very good thing!

#355 / Do It Yourself

2011-12-21T00:18:00.000-08:00

An article by Joseph E. Stiglitz, in a recent edition of Vanity Fair, discusses what we need to do now to restore our national economy to health and vitality.

He (or Vanity Fair) called his article "The Book of Jobs." I don't think he mentioned "Do It Yourself." That's my gloss on his analysis, which is, by the way, quite compelling. I recommend the article.

Probably, I should have called this posting "Do It Ourselves," not "Do It Yourself," since what Stiglitz recommends is a collective, not an individual, approach to economic recovery. That is what I want to argue for, too.

If we want to "get this country moving again," then "we," collectively, need to mobilize "our" resources and direct them to the good investments which Stiglitz argues are the way we can pull ourselves out of our current economic depression. In other words, we need to spend money on things that will actually increase our economic productivity in the future, and there are more than enough of such DIY projects to get everyone back to work:

Rebuilding failing infrastructure, from water lines to roads and bridges
Preschool education and after school care for everyone
Affordable housing
Health insurance for all on a "self-insured" basis
Tree planting and environmental restoration projects everywhere
Reduced educational costs for higher education ...

This is very much a partial list. While we can borrow some of the money (which is alright by me, for a good investment), we can also do a lot of this "pay as you go." That means taxing those who have the money now to provide an investment in the future for everyone. That's not "communism," the way I see it. It's "Do It Ourselves."

I am tired of waiting for the bankers and the other apologists for the 1% to do it for us!

#354 / Democratic Conversation

2011-12-20T00:02:00.000-08:00

I consider The Nation magazine to be essential reading, and I found the editorial statement that appeared in the December 12, 2011 edition to be particularly thoughtful.

In that editorial statement, titled "Born-Again Democracy" in the print version, William Greider quoted Lawrence Goodwyn on Occupy Wall Street. Goodwyn says that Occupy Wall Street's "open-door, nonhierarchical membership" commits people to "democratic conversation," a sine qua non of real democracy. This is the kind of conversation, according to Greider, that is needed "to inspire the people to become creative citizens again."

I recommend the Greider editorial, and I also recommend "democratic conversation."

In searching for an image to match the title of today's posting, I came across the Sculpturing Words blog, written by a woman who teaches in early childhood training programs in Norway. Among other things, she and her colleagues are seeking ways to foster "democratic conversations in kindergarten," since they have found that such conversations are important for children’s learning. Trying to identify what characterizes the kind of "good conversations” they would like to stimulate, they have discovered that “wondering questions,” where a teacher really doesn’t know the answer, are essential for children’s learning through conversation. The woman who wrote the blog asked a "wondering question" of herself: What happens in the opposite situations, when a teacher knows the answer (which unfortunately often is the way one speaks to small children)?

It's a revealing question, and the answer is pretty obvious. Questions from a teacher to a child, when the teacher knows the answer, are the opposite of that "open-door, nonhierarchical" approach to conversation that will let a child realize and learn to trust the child's own judgment and power.

In the context of our democracy, how often do our public hearing procedures and other legislative processes really allow us, as citizens, to "wonder" about how to answer the questions that confront us, instead of being "told," by the so-called experts, elected or contracted, that there is only one way to do it - the way they say is right?

The key to democracy is to let us all wonder, together, about what we should do. This is indeed what inspires the people to become creative citizens again.

We really do need to "occupy 2012." We really are the 99%.

#353 / Believing Is Seeing

2011-12-19T00:02:00.000-08:00

Believing Is Seeing, Observations on the Mysteries of Photography, is the title of a book by Errol Morris, which has been recently published by Penguin Press.

The book investigates the relationship between photographs and reality. In it, according to one reviewer, "Morris explores how photographs have the power to reveal and conceal, and thereby convey certain truths and frauds." Among other things, Morris "dissects notable documentary photographs, including the iconic image of the hooded man that emerged from Abu Ghraib."

The Nation magazine has recently reviewed the Morris book, and focuses on one of the key questions that the book addresses: can a photograph ever be a true depiction of an independently-existing reality, or is it inevitable that because a photographer must necessarily "pose" reality for the shot, that the picture reveals more what the photographer "believes" than what the photographer "sees?"

It's a pertinent inquiry. It's a question that goes beyond photography, too, since there is significant psychological evidence that we do, literally, "see" what we "believe" (what we think to be the truth).

#352 / Plunkitt

2011-12-18T12:06:00.000-08:00

I remember marveling at the book, Plunkitt of Tammany Hall. That's Plunkitt in the picture. The book's worth reading.

If you want to buy the book, click on the link. It's very inexpensive. If you want to read the book for free, you can do that online.

George Washington Plunkitt espoused (and practiced) a system of "honest graft." And politics made him rich. Think about it; not much has changed. There are lots of those 1% folks in the United States Senate (and in the House), and lots of them became much wealthier after, and not before, they entered into elected office. Not a lot of surprises there, and not much change from the days of Plunkitt.

What I best remember of the book is the pitch it made for a politics that actually delivers direct and tangible benefits to those who work to make a political victory possible. Wikipedia explains it this way:

The positive side of machine politics, as Plunkitt saw it, was the closeness between political bosses and their constituencies. He cites how Tammany bosses such as himself would assist the poor of New York in immediate and necessary ways (such as by providing emergency loans) while others, such as social reformers and the federal government, would only push for long-term improvements in the situation of the urban poor. Similarly, he argues that the machine listened to and defended the poor while others regarded them from a distanced, patronizing point of view. Thus, Plunkitt regarded the fragmented and independent format of machine governance to be the most perfect form of urban administration possible.

If politics doesn't "pay off" for those who work for a candidate or a party, if things don't get appreciably better for them because their candidate or party won, then those people aren't going to get engaged next time around.

That's one of the problems with our politics today. There isn't any immediate correlation between winning the election and getting something you want as a result. That's discouraging. If President Obama is facing a difficult fight for reelection, right now - and I have to believe he is - this foundation principle of politics may be one of the reasons.

Those who work to win elections expect (and deserve) to get something good for their labors. And thinking they got something good is probably more important than actually getting it.

#351 / Bert

2011-12-17T09:07:00.000-08:00

Bert Muhly sold me coffee: fair trade coffee. He fed me crab cakes. He established the basic foundation for the land use plans that have helped preserve and protect the natural environment of Santa Cruz County. He had a particular commitment to the protection and preservation of the California coast.

Bert was a tireless advocate for social and economic justice. He persuaded a reluctant Santa Cruz City Council to support the creation of the Louden Nelson Community Center. He inspired a couple of generations of planning students. He – and his equally wonderful wife and partner, Lois Muhly – have inspired me, during the entire forty years that I have been active in public life in Santa Cruz County.

When I woke up on Saturday morning, I learned that Bert Muhly died last Friday, on December 16th. He was 88 years old, and he was a great person.

My thanks to Bert Muhly for a life of committed involvement – for his work on behalf of the community in which he lived, and on behalf the good causes to which he gave his allegiance, including his consistent advocacy for decency in United States’ foreign policy, particularly in Central America.

Everyone in the Monterey Bay region benefited from Bert's leadership, advocacy, and actions. Those who knew Bert Muhly personally got a double benefit, because they were able to rejoice with Bert and Lois in person, throughout the years, two truly “happy warriors” for so many good causes!

My love, and my appreciation to you, Bert Muhly. My very great thanks for an inspiring life, well lived!

#350 / Granularity

2011-12-16T00:32:00.000-08:00

"Granularity" is a buzzword that is (or has been) popular in the Silicon Valley. At an early stage, the word appears to have referred to how various data were arranged and organized. A more "granular" arrangement made more information more easily accessible. Granularity was good.

The use of the word in this context was extrapolated to a business context, at least, that is my impression. That gave us a 2008 book called The Granularity of Growth, followed by a 2009 book, also focused on business, called Granularity.

Paying attention to details is important. On the other hand, there is another approach that is also worthy. There is a book for that one, too: Don't Sweat The Small Stuff.

#349 / Doxa

2011-12-15T00:10:00.000-08:00

I ran across the word "doxa" recently, in some article I was reading, and my mind went blank. I told myself, "I know I know this word," but I really didn't, and I was forced to search for the meaning online.

Of course, I quickly found the meaning online: "Doxa (δόξα) is a Greek word meaning common belief or popular opinion, from which are derived the modern terms of orthodoxy and heterodoxy."

Heterodoxy and orthodoxy. Of course. It all comes back to me now. The word "doxa" means "common belief," as opposed, for instance, to the "truth."

Doxa also (apparently) happens to be a rather popular brand of watch, as anyone who looks for an image to go with a discussion of the word "doxa" will shortly discover. It also turns out that the word "doxa" has been taken over by the Christian community, starting somewhere back around when the New Testament was written, with the word meaning "glory," as far as these Christians are concerned.

I'm sticking with "common opinion or belief," and I am generally in favor of "discounting" doxa. Whether that opinion and belief is "orthodox" or "heterodox," the real question ought to be: is it true?

So much of the doxa we run across aren't!

#348 / Sarkosy Says

2011-12-14T00:36:00.000-08:00

Nicolas Sarkozy is the President of France. I actually saw him once, in person, though I doubt he'd remember me.

The December 12, 2011 edition of The New Yorker magazine has a story about Sarkozy. It isn't, actually, a very flattering story. It doesn't make me like him very much.

Despite my negative impression, overall, I did identify with this statement, in which Sarkozy discusses the nature of politics: "The main characteristic of our society is the absence of hope, whereas the very goal of politics is to provide hope. I reject the notion of inevitability. I cannot stand the word, the idea, or the consequences of the concept."

For me, a belief in the "inevitability" of things is the opposite of a belief in "politics," because in the world we create, a world that is, above all, "political," anything is possible.

#347 / Geode

2011-12-13T00:04:00.000-08:00

A geode

Might be
Another good metaphor
For where we are:
Things seem

Inauspicious
To an external view.

#346 / Osawatomie

2011-12-12T00:09:00.000-08:00

As with virtually all the postings I make, you can get the website reference for the images I have used by simply clicking on the image. On the left, President Barack Obama makes a speech in Osawatomie, Kansas on December 6, 2011. On the right, President Theodore Roosevelt makes a speech in Osawatomie, Kansas on August 31, 1910.

101 years, more or less, separate these speeches, but in many ways not so much has changed.

The text of President Roosevelt's "New Nationalism" speech can be read by clicking this link. The written text of President Obama's speech is here, and a video presentation of President Obama's speech is available here, on the Obama for America website.

There is no doubt that President Obama intended his speech to refer to and incorporate the main thrust of the speech made by President Roosevelt. President Obama didn't just happen to be in Osawatomie when he made his recent speech. He came to Osawatomie in order to make the speech, to remind us of what Roosevelt said.

And here is what Roosevelt said:

Quoting Abraham Lincoln: "Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration."

At many stages in the advance of humanity, this conflict between the men who possess more than they have earned and the men who have earned more than they possess is the central condition of progress. In our day it appears as the struggle of freemen to gain and hold the right of self-government as against the special interests, who twist the methods of free government into machinery for defeating the popular will.

I stand for the square deal. But when I say that I am for the square deal, I mean not merely that I stand for fair play under the present rules of the game, but that I stand for having those rules changed so as to work for a more substantial equality of opportunity and of reward for equally good service.

Our government, National and State, must be freed from the sinister influence or control of special interests. Exactly as the special interests of cotton and slavery threatened our political integrity before the Civil War, so now the great special business interests too often control and corrupt the men and methods of government for their own profit. We must drive the special interests out of politics.

I believe that the officers, and, especially, the directors, of corporations should be held personally responsible when any corporation breaks the law.

Conservation is a great moral issue, for it involves the patriotic duty of insuring the safety and continuance of the nation. Let me add that the health and vitality of our people are at least as well worth conserving as their forests, waters, lands, and minerals, and in this great work the national government must bear a most important part.

The right to regulate the use of wealth in the public interest is universally admitted.

If our political institutions were perfect, they would absolutely prevent the political domination of money in any part of our affairs.

Next year, we find out whether Roosevelt's vision has resonance in our politics today. I hope it does!

#345 / Tough Minded #2

2011-12-11T00:12:00.000-08:00

You can find out how to buy a tee-shirt with this copyrighted image of a "tough minded cat" by clicking on the image, or on the link.

I have talked about "tough mindedness" before, and celebrated Otis Pease, one of my history professors at Stanford, in doing so. A posting on climate change makes me want to renew my appeal for a tough minded politics.

It seems rather urgent that we pay attention to the realities of our situation (in this case, to the indubitable limitations of the natural world) before we lose our own world in the process.

Let's read what climate scientists Kevin Anderson and Alice Bows have to say, and then think about shifting our priorities for the year ahead.

#344 / Secrets #2

2011-12-10T00:15:00.000-08:00

An article in the December 9, 2011 edition of the San Jose Mercury News reports that the United States government operated a clandestine prison in Romania. This prison was unique only because it was located in a major urban area. It was one of several such facilities, but the others were in remote areas in Thailand, Lithuania, and Poland.

Unbeknownst to U.S. citizens, in other words, their government operated and controlled a network of so-called "black sites." In these locations, U.S. government officials and contractors to the United States government practiced torture on people that the government tells us were "terrorism suspects." They called the torture "harsh interrogation tactics."

I have previously noted my opposition to government secrecy, pointing out that democratic self-government is in fact impossible if the people supposedly in charge of the government (the citizens) don't actually know what the government is doing. Secrecy is damaging in other contexts, too. If you click the image in today's posting, you'll be whisked to a website that points out how bank secrecy helped create the disastrous economic situation in which we now find ourselves.

I believe that there are many citizens who think that it is perfectly "OK" for government officials to apprehend people that they suspect of assisting, or being willing to assist, in acts of terrorism against the United States. Lots of citizens undoubtedly think that it would be perfectly alright to hold such people without trial, and without letting them have any communication with the outside world (no lawyer, no family, no friends to be aware of their incarceration and perhaps to give them some assistance). Many citizens probably think that it is "OK" to torture such "terrorism suspects" in secret, before any trial has proved that the person being tortured has actually done anything to threaten the safety or security of the United States.

As I remember it, former Vice President Dick Cheney has defended exactly this sort of conduct. Former Congress Member Leon Panetta, supposedly practicing a different brand of politics, has operated and defended a somewhat different program, but one based on the same principle of secrecy. Under Panetta's leadership at the Central Intelligence Agency, U.S. government officials have routinely spied on people whom the government believes are "terrorism suspects." When given the correct authorization to do so (such authorization being completely secret), drone planes, carrying missiles, and operated by U.S. government personnel or contractors, then kill such suspects without trial or notification in advance. If there are others around when the missiles strike, they die, too. Again, I think lots of people support this kind of program.

Here's my plea: why don't we be honest about it? Why shouldn't the citizens who are paying for torture and secret missile strikes know about these programs? There are lots of people who support them. I'd like to think that there are lots of people who don't. You can certainly count me on that side.

We can't, however, have a democratic debate about what we should do in our collective role unless we are willing honestly to argue the facts and the options in public.

Just another news story in the Friday paper was enough to set me off! Think about it. Wouldn't you actually like to know what "your" government is doing? After all, we're the 99%.

#343 / Preoccupied [priːˈɒkjʊˌpaɪd]

2011-12-09T00:45:00.000-08:00

preoccupied (adj)

1. engrossed or absorbed in something, esp one's own thoughts
2. already or previously occupied
3. (Life Sciences & Allied Applications / Biology) Biology (of a taxonomic name) already used to designate a genus, species, etc.

I have always found vocabulary to be a great entryway into thought. If we are going to change the world next year and "Occupy 2012," we will need to escape the gravitational field of our own individualistic preoccupations.

#342 / Occupy 2012

2011-12-08T00:25:00.000-08:00

The "Occupy Everything" sign on the right is from Saint Louis. Click here, or on the image, to visit the website from which I got the picture.

The other "Occupy Everything" image is from Santa Cruz. It shows a large banner on a former bank building that was occupied for several days by a group that called itself "Anonymous Autonomous." That group is, or was, loosely affiliated with the Occupy Santa Cruz movement.

I have been following the various manifestations of the Occupy movement from the beginning of the actions mounted by Occupy Wall Street in New York City. I haven't yet showed up at a General Assembly anywhere, nor have I yet brought my sleeping bag down to the County Building, the nearest local location. I have been thinking about how to get engaged, however, because I definitely count myself as part of the 99%, and I want to be directly and personally involved in helping to bring a different and better brand of politics to this country.

An article in the Tuesday, December 5th edition of the San Francisco Chronicle talked about how a couple of Bay Area residents helped kick off Occupy Wall Street. That article led me to a fascinating website (PuppetGov - "Occupy Together"), that puts the Occupy movement in a global perspective.

I like the idea presented by Micah White, given credit in the Chronicle for being an early Occupy strategist. Looking ahead, he says:

What will be new is the marked escalation of surprise, playful, precision disruptions - rush-hour flash mobs, bank occupations, 'occupy squads' and edgy theatrics . . . And we will see clearly articulated demands emerging ... and perhaps even the birth of a new, left-right hybrid political party that moves America beyond the Coke vs. Pepsi choices of the past.

We will regroup, lick our wounds, brainstorm and network all winter. We will build momentum for a full-spectrum counterattack when the crocuses bloom next spring.

Anonymous Autonomous has just provided, in Santa Cruz, and example of what White is predicting for the future. If his forecast is for next Spring, Santa Cruz may be ahead of the curve. I am planning to "stay tuned" and to "get ready."

It looks like "Occupy 2012" to me!

#341 / The Interpreter

2011-12-07T00:10:00.000-08:00

The image is from William Blake, Man Sweeping The Interpreter's Parlor.

According to A Blake Dictionary: The Ideas and Symbols of William Blake, Paul Bunyan has interpreted this drawing as follows: "the parlor is the uncleansed heart; the man who raises the dust is the Law, which only revives and increases sin; the maid who allays the dust with her sprinkling is the Gospel." To the extent that this is an accurate description of what is going on in the drawing, which Blake made in 1822 as an illustration for Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, not much has changed since that time. While all that sprinkling is probably helpful as a palliative, it doesn't seem to be eliminating the basic problem depicted.

This posting did not actually start out to mention William Blake, Paul Bunyan, or the Gospel. It's about a book review by Cathy Gere, published in the December 5, 2011 edition of The Nation. The book reviewed is Who's In Charge? Free Will and the Science of the Brain. Michael Gazzaniga, author of the book, is a professor of psychology at UC Santa Barbara.

According to the review, it is Gazzaniga's postulate, based on research done on divided brains, that "one of the modules in the human brain should go under the name of the 'Interpreter.' This system - located in the left hemisphere, along with the speech center - is what concocts a coherent narrative out of all the brain's activity."

The review explores the reality, or not, of what we often call "free will," and cites Gazzaniga to the effect that the decisions that we think are made in advance of our actions are actually best thought of as "rationalizations" (or "interpretations") because the actions we take are actually already completed before our brains have made the "decision" we think has preceded the action. We act on a "reflex" basis, in other words, and our "decisions" to act are nothing more than "a story we tell ourselves to make sense of [these] reflex actions."

I have a comment about this idea, in view of my "two world hypothesis." However, since I have imported William Blake and Paul Bunyan into this commentary, as I looked for an illustration for a posting titled, "The Interpreter," let me make a theological comment first.

If "The Interpreter" is the part of our human brain that tries to tell us what things mean, and essentially "lies" to us about the nature of reality and our actions, then this concept that we might need to do some "sweeping [of] the Interpreter's parlor" has a significant theological insight to communicate. At least, that's my impression.

When I think about the Gazzaniga thesis in the light of the "two world" hypothesis, it strikes me that the "reflex actions" that Gazzaniga discusses are actions that are part of the world of Nature. They are, exactly as everything else is in that world, determined by "laws" over which we have no control. Our biological being is not something that we have created ourselves, and its behavior, as part of the world of Nature, is not susceptible to human action or decision. In other words, what Gazzaniga is discovering through his application of the scientific method to an exploration of how the human body works, and to how other bodies work (rats, mainly, I gather from the review of his book) results in a discovery of nothing different from what one would expect. What happens in the world of Nature is ultimately determined not by human beings, but by the laws of Nature, since the world of Nature is a world that human beings did not create.

We do not live, though, only in the world of Nature - even as we inhabit bodies that are subject to the laws of that world. We live most immediately in a human world that we have constructed within the world of Nature, and that human world is created by the choices we make and the actions we take, and these actions and choices are not, as in the world of Nature, determined by laws and forces over which we have no control.

Free will, in other words, does exist in the human world that we create. Within the world of Nature, we are just as much subject to the laws of Nature as Gazzaniga's experimental rats.

My point? Let's not get confused about which world is which.

#340 / Civilization

2011-12-06T00:10:00.000-08:00

Pictured in the image is Niall Ferguson. Ferguson is Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University. He is also a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, at Stanford University.

Given his connections to the Hoover Institution, one of the original "think tanks" for those whose political predilections run towards the conservative and libertarian, it is not surprising to find that Ferguson's new book, Civilization, judges with a sense of regret that the West has forgotten "the benefits conferred on the world by imperialism."

I haven't yet read the book, but I read the review that appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle on Sunday, December 4th, and I trust that the review is quoting the book correctly.

For me, "civilization" is just a shorthand word for the human world, the world that we create. As Ferguson sees it, "Western Civilization," the name of "our brand" of this created reality, and also the name given to the seminal course required of all new students at Stanford, when I was an undergraduate there, has been built on "six killer applications": (1) competition in politics; (2) the Scientific Revolution; (3) protection of private property through the rule of law enforced by representative government; (4) improvements in health and life expectancy; (5) a culture that encouraged consumption; and (6) a faith-based work ethic.

I may have to read the book, though I have a strong suspicion that I am not going to like it. I do agree, though, that our civilization is built (#1) on "competition in politics...." The world we create is a reality that is the product of our joint efforts, and efforts that are above all "political." While "individual" actions, of course, affect history and the future, we "make" history through our joint actions, and we "live in a political world."

#339 / Quixote

2011-12-05T00:14:00.000-08:00

I am reluctant to admit that I have never read what is often called the "first true novel," Don Quixote, by Miguel de Cervantes. Published in two parts, in 1605 and 1615, the book was originally titled, El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha (The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote de la Mancha).

Thanks to the Santa Cruz Public Library, and to its books on tape collection, I have now at least "listened" to the entire book, which means 35 compact disks. The Recorded Books edition is an extremely well done modern translation by Edith Grossman, narrated by George Guidall. It's better than reading; at least that's my bet.

Don Quixote, who "lived in madness but died sane," which was held to be a blessing by his biographer, became very "real" to me during the course of the book. The book, in fact, became more of a "biography" than a "story," and an interesting thing is that this was true for those alive in 1605, too, after the first part was published.

The biographical components of the story seemed so compelling, and painted such a "realistic" portrait of its two main characters, that some other author (not Cervantes) began to write stories about Quixote, and Part II of the Don Quixote we know spends a good bit of time having Quixote confront real people who had come in contact with the unauthorized and erroneous Part II, published by someone else, setting them straight as to the real "truth" of his existence. You can get a good summary of how this worked in the Wikipedia article.

Consistent with my "model" of how the world works, the "dreams" of Don Quixote definitely precipitated actual historical realities, or at least this is the conceit of the book. When things went wrong, as they so often did for Don Quixote and Sancho, his Squire, Don Quixote attributed the problems to the "enchanters" who made the genuine realities of Don Quixote's world turn into appearances at odds with that "reality."

We, too, need to overcome the "enchantments" that convince us that things are "true" and "real" that we know should not be so; that we know, in fact, must not be allowed to be so. In this way, we, with Don Quixote, will fight on for the beautiful reality we know is the "truth" of our existence.

Happiness, indeed, may be to "sally forth" in this madness, for as we act upon our dreams and desires, we create the world in which we truly live.

#338 / Once You Learn That

2011-12-04T00:09:00.000-08:00

My "Two Worlds/365" blog has a message. Or, two messages, I guess.

One of those messages is that we live, most immediately, in a world that we create, and that we can make that world into anything we choose.

Here's Steve Jobs on that message. See the video by clicking the link.

#337 / Who Will Follow Me?

2011-12-03T00:02:00.000-08:00

"Who will follow me," said the Fox?
"Who will follow me," said the Bear?

"Who Will Follow Me?" would be a great story for my grandchildren, with illustrations by my sister Nancy.

"Who will follow me," says Rosa Parks, as she sits down right where she is?

"Who will follow me," says Martin Luther King, Jr., as he walks towards the ferocious dogs and across the bridge?

"Who will follow me," says the draft resister, as he steps backwards from the line?

"Who will follow me," say the students at U.C. Davis, and the people who Occupy Wall Street? "Who will follow me?"

#336 / Conspiracy Theories

2011-12-02T00:21:00.000-08:00

The New York Review of Books has just published an article titled, "What Really Happened to Strauss-Kahn?" Click the link or the image to go to the article.

If you followed this story at all, which revolves around events occurring in May 2011, and the arrest, in New York City, of a major candidate for the French Presidency, you will likely be entertained, or even enthralled, by this new perspective on the story. I was, at least.

I am not sure whether the article has a specific "purpose," other than to inform and to titillate, but it certainly raises the possibility that politics (in France, and inferentially in the United States) is significantly influenced by conspiracies operating at a high level.

I am somewhat susceptible to "conspiracy theories," where politics is concerned, but only to a degree. I think that there are conspiracies, and that they do impact events, and history, and therefore the world we create; however, I also think that the ultimate decisions about our future, and the events that ultimately matter, are not determined by "conspiracies," but by the choices made by ordinary men and women. In fact, I think a belief that conspiracies are the main determinant of what happens in politics probably makes democratic self-government impossible, because if democratic political actions are always trumped by the conspiracies of those in power, what's the point of democracy?

Lots of people, consciously or not, have undoubtedly decided that the conspiracies do prevail, and that there is not, in fact, much point in what we call "democracy." As I say, I continue to resist this plausible conclusion. I definitely do not refer to the "What Really Happened to Strauss-Kahn?" article to advance a conspiracy thesis.

The article's immediate impact was to make me sympathetic to Strauss-Kahn. Even assuming that everything the article says is true, however (which is probably not a wise assumption), I note that Strauss-Kahn's account has him utilizing a mobile telephone that he believes is likely "bugged," or jiggered with in some way, and that since he doesn't deny having sex with the hotel worker, he is the kind of guy who will have sex without any knowledge of the person with whom he is engaging, more or less as opportunity presents itself. If these are accurate observations, and that is what the article seems to say, then Mr. Strauss-Kahn is definitely arrogant, since his conduct as portrayed in the story shows that he doesn't think that "anyone can touch him," despite the fact that he is "living dangerously." Arrogance is not a good thing in a President or political leader. At least not in my opinion.

As for conspiracy theories, I don't discount them, but I will defy them. I just won't admit that the rich and wealthy conspirators who are arrogant enough to think that they can run the world, will ultimately run mine!

#335 / Bigger Is Not Better

2011-12-01T00:16:00.000-08:00

Our family Thanksgiving celebrations generally include some fair measure of making fun of me. Mostly, I am razzed on the topic of my absolute conservatism and unwillingness to change my personal habits and personal preferences. This year was no different.

I have lived in the same house in Santa Cruz for exactly forty years, and the bed in which my wife and I sleep was purchased at a used furniture shop about two blocks away, and carried by hand to the recently purchased house. Nothing has changed in those forty years (except now we have more books).

This year, I was savaged by family members, and particularly by my daughter, who sleeps on a bed the size of a football field, for my unwillingness to consider "moving up" to what all seemed to agree would be a more commodious sleeping arrangement. A bigger bed would be a better bed. That was the implicit assumption underlying the conversation.

Check the image and judge for yourselves. In this, as in so many other areas, I believe that "bigger is not better."

#334 / Memes

2011-11-30T00:14:00.000-08:00

My favorite columnist in the world, Jon Carroll, was talking about "memes" back in 2007. There are internet Know Your Meme sites that focus on nothing but what they call "memes," namely on the latest pieces of celebrity gossip. Progressive political commentators have incorporated "meme analysis" into their thinking, and you can click on this link, or on the image, to see a critique of "memes" from cartoonist Thad Guy.

As you might suspect, Wikipedia has a rather extensive article on "memes," and assigns the origin of the idea to Richard Dawkins, who wrote The Selfish Gene, and about whose ideas I have expressed some skepticism.

I am always concerned or skeptical about any purported explanation of the world that relies on the supposed existence of independent and autonomous processes, liberated from the workings of intentionality (that is, processes which are supposed to proceed in the absence of intentional choices, made by individual human beings).

My "model" of the world (our human world) assumes that "we" create it, precisely by thinking of what we would like to do, and then doing it. My model, of course, is quite "legalistic" in concept, at least in one way of looking at it. The "laws" we make (in our human world) represent our articulation of what we think we want to do. They are prescriptions of what we think would be good for us, as differentiated from the "laws" that govern the world of Nature, which are descriptions of what will and must happen. Human "laws" are quite different, in other words, from the law of gravity.

In my "model," if we follow the laws that we ourselves articulate and promulgate, the world we construct comes to reflect the realities that we have first posited as possibilities and then achieved through our actions.

The idea of self-propagating "memes" doesn't seem to fit in, in any natural way, with the way I have looked at the world. However, I note that the Wikipedia article, which I found quite helpful, quotes Dawkins as saying that the "meme," as he sees it, is a "unit of imitation."

I actually do like that. It does seem to me that we change the world as we "imitate" the behaviors (and sometimes the people) we believe are "right," who have the right "prescription" for our world, and for the kind of future we want to create.

In other words, to take advice from Gandhi, we need to "be the change we want to see in the world."

Inevitably, this means lot of "imitation." It also means, to refer to Gandhi once again, a lot of "experimentation with the truth."

#333 / Free Speech

2011-11-29T00:08:00.000-08:00

I am not a fan of Debra J. Saunders, who claims to be the "token conservative" on the staff of the San Francisco Chronicle. I did, however, very much appreciate a quotation contained in her column published on Sunday, November 27, 2011.

Saunders quoted U.S. District Judge Marsha Berzon as saying:

Throughout our nation's history, Americans have counted on the First Amendment to protect their right to ask their fellow citizens to change their mind.

I like that way of talking about the First Amendment. Admitting the possibility that we, and others, might "change our minds," is the sine qua non of democratic self-government.

First we change our minds. Then we change the world.

#332 / Reality And The Movies

2011-11-28T00:20:00.000-08:00

Mick LaSalle writes movie reviews for the San Francisco Chronicle (among other things).

In an article in the Friday, November 25, 2011 edition of the Chronicle, LaSalle noted that "impersonating, not real acting," seems to be winning awards. LaSalle cited various major movies that are essentially biographical, and while agreeing that a number of them are really terrific movies, expressed his qualms that this "indicates a movement away from the imagination."

It strikes me that it is precisely our imagination that permits us to "dream up" the new realities that we subsequently create through our actions, and that this process of imagination/action is in fact the mechanism by which we create our human world.

If there is a "movement away from the imagination," and it is generalized, not just occurring with respect to the movies, that could be serious.

#331 / Melancholia

2011-11-27T00:02:00.000-08:00

Lars von Trier is a filmmaker. His new movie, Melancholia, made an impression on me. I recommend it.

Is our sometimes experienced sense of depression and desolation really just an unrecognized "recognition" of the coming end of our world?

We may try to hide it from our understanding, and ignore its implications, but the truth is that there is no way that we can "save" our lives. There is no "magic cave" to insulate us from the reality of our situation.

In the movie, the world of Nature, our Earth, is a metaphor for the world that we in fact create ourselves: a world that is always coming to an end. A world that is always ready to begin.

#330 / Save Your Life

2011-11-26T00:12:00.000-08:00

For whatever reason, I have been getting a lot of good advice in my email inbox: lots of information on how to "save your life." If you want to pursue the advice in the book pictured, click on the image. If if you want to find out how coffee can "save your life," click right here. I feel particularly positive and partial to the idea that I can save my life through coffee drinking!

Upon greater reflection, I have come to the conclusion that I should be devoting my time to "spending" my life, rather than trying to figure out how to "save" it. That's my Sunday sermon for this week, one day early. Check out the parable of the talents, to get some background on the concept.

#329 / Return To Innocence

2011-11-25T00:07:00.000-08:00

A recently seen Facebook image of a woman putting on lipstick almost exactly duplicated one of my favorite images in the Return To Innocence video. Seeing that picture on Facebook induced me to watch the video again, which you can do, too, by clicking the link (and then suffering through an advertisement first).

If you are not familiar with Return To Innocence (Enigma, The Cross of Changes, 1994), I recommend it.

I was introduced to the video by my son, and the music and the lyrics have stuck with me. It is the images in the video, though, that have made the greatest impression. The video essentially revisits, with profound affection, the lives of a married couple. It is time recaptured; the broken bread restored. And I love the part with the lipstick! It's a powerful way, I think, to say "gracias a la vida."

Return To Innocence

That's not the beginning of the end
That's the return to yourself
The return to innocence
Love - Devotion
Feeling - Emotion
Love - Devotion
Feeling - Emotion
Don't be afraid to be weak
Don't be too proud to be strong
Just look into your heart my friend
That will be the return to yourself
The return to innocence
If you want, then start to laugh
If you must, then start to cry
Be yourself don't hide
Just believe in destiny
Don't care what people say
Just follow your own way
Don't give up and use the chance
To return to innocence
That's not the beginning of the end
That's the return to yourself
The return to innocence
Don't care what people say
Follow just your own way Follow just your own way
Don't give up, don't give up
To return, to return to innocence.
If you want then laugh
If you must then cry
Be yourself don't hide
Just believe in destiny.

#328 / Gracias

2011-11-24T00:06:00.000-08:00

This is a day
To say:
Gracias a la vida.
Thank you to life.

Thank you for the world of Nature, into which we come through no effort of our own, a world that sustains our life, and upon which we are utterly dependent.

And thank you for our ability to create a world of our own, the world most immediately apparent and present to us. This is "our" world, a world we can change.

#327 / I Gave At The Office

2011-11-23T00:29:00.000-08:00

There is actually an online discussion forum that addresses the meaning of the phrase, "I gave at the office." And then there is that great "Sally Forth" cartoon book. You can click the link, or the image, to get the reference for that.

Typically, "I gave at the office" is a response provided to those who are soliciting donations of various kinds (including political donations), in an effort to dodge the donation request.

I have always had another, more idiosyncratic meaning for the phrase, used just for myself alone, and not part of the common parlance.

Particularly when I was an elected representative, and working for the public in that capacity, I told myself that requests or demands for my greater or additional civic engagement (some of these demands being self-created and some coming from the outside) were fairly answered by my claim that "I gave at the office." My response to a call for greater personal involvement was that my work was positively beneficial for the world at large, and involved me in the issues of the day, and that this was really all that was, or ought to be, demanded of me.

I wouldn't be surprised to find that many of us have something of a similar idea about what kind of role we ought to be playing in public life. We tell ourselves that we have "already given," at the office, at home, in our church, or in whatever civic organization with which we may be engaged; we might point to our monetary contributions or attendance at our children's soccer games. Whatever the example, the idea that we have "already given" is something we tell ourselves when someone asks us to do something more. It is something we tell ourselves when we think, ourselves, that we perhaps should do something more.

If "We are the 99%" is going to mean anything in the long run, many more of us are going to have to do something more.

Even though we already "gave at the office."

#326 / Gary-Old

2011-11-22T00:19:00.000-08:00

My computer at home recently went defunct, so I bought a new one. I think I made a slight mistake, transferring my data and settings from my former computer to my new one. Apple says it's easy, and I've done it before, and it was easy. This time, not so much.

At any rate, my new main "Home" folder, the one with the little "Home" icon, is now titled "Gary-Old." I can't change that, either. I've tried, but I just can't get back to plain old "Gary." I don't love it, but I'm living with it.

#325 / Minecraft

2011-11-21T00:27:00.000-08:00

I have never played Minecraft, a computer game that has apparently become a "global phenomenon." That's the claim, anyway, of technology reporter Chris O'Brien, who writes for the San Jose Mercury News. O'Brien self portrays as a non-computer game type person whose "every waking thought" is now dominated by Minecraft. Download and start playing the game at your own risk, I guess. I already have lots of "waking thoughts," and ones that I think should have priority over computer games.

I was most interested in O'Brien's explanation of why the game is so compelling: "The game has won legions of fans thanks to its deceptive simplicity. Rather than walking into a virtual world where all the spaces have been filled in by a developer, Minecraft introduces a world that is a blank canvass where players build just about everything...."

If we think about the reality of our human situation and history, as opposed to computer games, human beings originally walked into a world of Nature that was essentially a "blank canvass," and we have succeeded in building just about everything that now exists.

It is just as possible, in our world, in the human world that we create, to change the results of our past work into something different, and something new. I wonder if the same principle applies in Minecraft? Doing that, creating something genuinely new in the world we have already built, would not be "simple."

It would, however, be possible. Figuring out how to do that is where I am directing most of my "waking thoughts."

#324 / The Tree Of Life

2011-11-20T00:05:00.000-08:00

I found The Tree of Life, a movie by Terrence Malick, to be profoundly affecting. It is an unusual film about families, and about being a young boy in post-World War II America, and about growing up. It's about fathers, and mothers, and brothers, and about the physical architecture of the world we create, and the world of Nature that encompasses all we do.

Malick and I are almost exactly the same age (he's got about a month on me), which is probably one reason that the movie resonated with me so strongly. Malick was also raised in the Episcopal Church, as I was. I would call the movie God-suffused.

Maybe the movie has some real lessons, for practical life. It certainly provides some cautionary instruction for fathers.

I recommend it.

#323 / Marathon

2011-11-19T00:01:00.000-08:00

My daughter Sonya is a rather accomplished marathon runner. Among other things!

When I climbed Mount Whitney (which I did accomplish), I had an occasion to see Sonya running and leaping ahead of me. It was at a particularly difficult moment in the climb. I had been left behind by my companions, and I was thinking of turning back.

Sonya wasn't on the trip, but I swear I saw her.

We can do so much more than we think we can. I learned that from my daughter. Among other things!

Life is a marathon. Just keep on running!

#322 / Abu Dhabi

2011-11-18T00:06:00.000-08:00

Abu Dhabi is is the capital and the second largest city of the United Arab Emirates. It is located on the Persian Gulf, and had an estimated population of 896,800 in 2009. Fortune magazine has stated that Abu Dhabi is the richest city in the world.

The fabulous wealth of Abu Dhabi is based on the extraction of oil. It is, essentially, at least as I understand it, largely a "family" enterprise. The wealth, and the governmental power created by that wealth, is largely under the control of the Abu Dhabi Emiri Family.

An interesting fact that I gleaned from an article in the November 15, 2011 edition of The Wall Street Journal is that the government of Abu Dhabi is moving to become a major investor in the ownership of the EMI Group, which holds the publication rights to massive amounts of music.

Somehow, this story made me reflect upon the strangeness of a human-created reality that has allowed the the world of Nature to be transformed into money, controlled by an amazingly small number of individuals, who now claim not only physical territory as the spoils of their conquest of wealth, but what might also be called the "spiritual" legacy of our civilization. Listening to music is, in fact, how many of us connect to what could be called the "spiritual" dimension of our lives, taking us beyond the physical realities that constrain our existence.

In the future, to hear the music, we will be paying a toll to the Emirates.

All these human arrangements, of course, can actually be changed. I think that is what that 99% movement is all about.

#321 / Indoor-Outdoor #3

2011-11-17T00:31:00.000-08:00

I have never played a computer war game. I think I am correct, however, that these games, which can become a very compelling "reality" for those who do play them, have many of the characteristics of modern movies. I have seen a lot of movies, and lots of the movies I have seen, whether war-themed movies or not, routinely include scenes of extreme violence.

I have noticed something about violence as depicted in the movies (and I am assuming that the same thing is true for the computer war games that I haven't ever experienced personally). In almost every case, the "results" of the violent acts pictured, which seem to be strikingly "realistic," as depicted in the movies, are in fact absolutely at odds with the reality of what such violence would be like in the truly "real" world.

For instance, long fight sequences go on, sometimes for minutes, in which people are hit with bottles, shot with guns, kicked in the stomach, or strangled and beaten. And....they keep on fighting. In fact, they quite often seem to survive all that violence just fine. If you were to believe what you "see" in the movies, you would think that human bodies and human beings can bear much more than they really can. The consequences of the violent acts depicted are not accurately recorded. Quite the opposite.

To the degree that we don't get outside the images that we ourselves produce, these images become more "real" than reality itself. We experience the actual "reality" of our lives outside, in the world of Nature. That is the world that is "real" because it is the world that we do not create, and the world that presents itself to us as a precondition of our existence, and as an absolute. Every other "reality" is one we determine for ourselves. Our human-created world is within our power. The "realities" we create there are ones we visualize first, and then make real. Just like the movies.

If we don't have a continuing and genuine contact with the world of Nature, which is the origin and foundation of our lives, and the true "reality" upon which we ultimately depend, we may be misled about what will happen if we do certain things.

We could, for instance, deduce that war, and violence, will produce good results.

I don't think that has been well borne out in the real world!

#320 / Indoor-Outdoor #2

2011-11-16T00:10:00.000-08:00

The photos here are from the website of the Bay Area Ridge Trail Council. Having grown up in the Bay Area, I am naturally attracted to the trail-building ambitions of the Council. Plus, my son Philips is a trail-maker. He writes, produces videos, and studies Zen Buddhism, too (among other things). In one of his writings, I noted this claim: "I grew up in Santa Cruz, California. Now, I live in the woods."

However he reached this point (and I am not sure it was the result of any conscious intention), I am proud to say that my son has obviously understood the challenge to reality that I discussed in my posting yesterday. And he got there without any direction from me. Philips is not the kind of guy who does what his father says, just because his father says it. I was that kind of a guy, and it worked for me. Philips is making his own trail. That's working for him.

Philips started out deeply immersed in the world of computers, and computer games, and in fact published an Atari Magazine that he sent nationwide, long before he was in high school. He has ended up staking his life on the world Nature. As I say, that's working for him. I think it would work for all of us.

#319 / Indoor-Outdoor

2011-11-15T00:13:00.000-08:00

According to news reports, a computer-based war game, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, made $400 million dollars in the first 24 hours after its release for sale, based on the purchase of 6.5 million copies of the game during that 24-hour period.

"We believe the launch of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 is the biggest entertainment launch of all time in any medium, and we achieved this record with sales from only two territories," said Bobby Kotick, CEO of Activision Blizzard. An online columnist noted that this was a record not only for computer war games but for "any entertainment product ever released."

Meantime, last Saturday, at an event held at the Chaminde Conference Center to celebrate the amazing and lifelong contributions of Professor Robert Curry, I talked with an old friend from Carmel Valley, who happens to serve on the Board of Directors of the Monterey Regional Parks District. He mentioned that soccer coaching has become quite difficult, since the participating kids are ever more reluctant to come outside to practice. They much prefer exercising indoors, through their computer screens - and I guess some with the Call of Duty war games.

Aside from the problematic nature of teaching militarism through online war games, I think we may be constructing, without actually realizing it, a fundamentally new understanding of reality. For me (and my Carmel Valley friend) it is obvious that the most "real" world is the world of Nature, a world outside our own constructions, and a world upon which we are utterly dependent. It is a world less and less experienced directly, as we all immerse ourselves in a human world that is increasingly detached from Nature, and from the physical realities that can be found only in the natural world. The "real" world, in other words, has moved indoors, for many of us, and is internal to our consciousness, not external.

If the idea that our constructed and internal world is the "real" world is a mistaken and fundamentally false understanding, and so I would argue, we have a problem on our hands.

Getting outside is an antidote.

#318 / A New Deal

2011-11-14T00:07:00.000-08:00

I don't really play cards. Therefore, I probably don't fully understand all the intricacies and implications of the "new deal" metaphor. I was an American history major in college, and so I understand the "New Deal" not from the card player's perspective, but as a watershed moment in the political history of the United States.

Thinking about our current moment in history, I tend to believe that a "new deal" is exactly what we need. To me, that means calling a halt to the game currently being played, and taking all the money on the table, and putting it in the center as a new pot, available to all of us at the table right now, and then reshuffling and redealing the cards, and going from there.

As I say, this is probably not be what a "new deal" really means, to a card player. But in terms of politics, and thinking about our collective wealth as a collective asset, this might be exactly how a "new deal" would work.

William Greider, whose economic analyses always appeal to me, has just written an article in The Nation magazine that proposes what I'd call the right kind of "new deal" for America right now. Click on the link, it's worth reading. Greider is calling for "debt forgiveness, American style."

Right now, Greider suggests, we are "in the reverse New Deal," and while I may not really understand cards, I do understand the significance of reversing the New Deal. That means that the current game is unfair, and that ordinary people are being taken for a ride by those who are in control of the deck.

#317 / Decency

2011-11-13T00:33:00.000-08:00

Jon Carroll, San Francisco Chronicle columnist, has what I think is a correct understanding of the Occupy Movement. Here are his observations, from a column published on November 2nd:

I've been trying to think of what the Occupy Movement reminded me of. It is, as others have noted, not a particularly common sort of protest - it's worldwide now, and there seems to be no formal operational plan, and it seems to have drawn many people who would not otherwise be protesting, even on behalf of causes they believed in.

It came to me finally. It's a reference from my childhood, when Boston attorney Joseph Welch confronted Sen. Joseph McCarthy over his hectoring of a young law partner of Welch's. "Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator. You've done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?"

I think that is the root of it. We are accustomed to living in a capitalist system; we understand that there are winners and losers, rich people and poor people. But we did think, perhaps foolishly, that all Americans were on the same path and that a sense of common decency would restrain the banks and the brokerages and, yes, the U.S. government from destroying an at least marginally functional financial system.

But there was no decency; there was only the lust for profits. When people realized all the scams that had been perpetrated on them, whether their personal fortune or mortgage or retirement plan was at stake or not, they became embittered. The high unemployment rate, the profits that banks were still making - and their plans to bleed their customers even drier - and the willingness of the president of the people, oh please, to make the banks whole again after their obscene excesses - became the catalysts for the "at long last, have you left no sense of decency?" nationwide movement.

And it turns out: not really.

Listen to the political rhetoric. Jobs, jobs, jobs, they say. And how would these jobs be created? Tax breaks for the wealthy, a proven loser in the job creation category, but ever so attractive to the wealthy donors who make up the core constituency of both national parties. Even now, Barack Obama seems to be more interested in raising campaign funds than in confronting the malefactors.

We will have "a little decency around here" only when we insist upon that. Only when we refuse to permit the ordinary operations of the institutional apparatus that constitutes our system of government (both official and unofficial).

Our will to insist is what will be tested. If we "occupy" our nation, we can make it ours once more.

#316 / The Machine

2011-11-12T00:04:00.000-08:00

Mario Savio, pictured on the steps of Sproul Hall, at UC Berkeley, in 1964, is probably best known for his passionate speech on the "operation of the machine." You can hear and see his speech by clicking the link.

Savio's words mobilized the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley, and electrified the Stanford campus, too, where I was in my final year of college. Here are his memorable words:

We have an autocracy which runs this university. It's managed. We asked the following: if President Kerr actually tried to get something more liberal out of the Regents in his telephone conversation, why didn't he make some public statement to that effect? And the answer we received -- from a well-meaning liberal -- was the following: He said, "Would you ever imagine the manager of a firm making a statement publicly in opposition to his board of directors?" That's the answer! Now, I ask you to consider: if this is a firm, and if the Board of Regents are the board of directors, and if President Kerr in fact is the manager, then I'll tell you something: the faculty are a bunch of employees, and we're the raw material! But we're a bunch of raw material[s] that don't mean to have any process upon us, don't mean to be made into any product, don't mean to end up being bought by some clients of the University, be they the government, be they industry, be they organized labor, be they anyone! We're human beings!
[Wild applause.]

There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part; you can't even passively take part, and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!

[Prolonged applause.]

The Occupy Movement, it seems to me, speaks in a somewhat different tone, perhaps less strident, though plenty of anger is apparent. But what the 99% are really saying is that the 1%, those who have managed the machine for their own benefit, and who have treated ordinary people as though they were the raw material of a wealth producing system for those at the top, must not be permitted to continue in their "management" positions. We, the people, are in fact human beings, and not material, and must no longer allow ourselves to be picked up or discarded, and rewarded or dismissed, as the managers of the machine so choose.

The world we create should be built to benefit all of us.

#315 / EcoMind

2011-11-11T00:09:00.000-08:00

Frances Moore Lappe will be speaking in Santa Cruz County this evening. She will be discussing her newest book, EcoMind.

Tickets are probably still available for what is likely to be a compelling presentation. The event is at the Crocker Theatre at Cabrillo College, and begins at 6:30.

I'd bet money that Lappe is in favor of ending the "infinite growth paradigm," but her book is concerned with "thought traps" that prevent us from taking effective action to surmount the environmental crises we face. The first one she mentions is "Thought Trap 1: No-Growth Is The Answer!"

"Focusing on growth as the problem - or as the solution," says Lappe, "keeps us from probing to the root of our global crises: the patterns of power over decision making that we ourselves choose, consciously or not... I'm suggesting that we can utterly shift our vision to the goal of aligning our practices with nature, including all we now know about human nature. Together we can then get on with creating the context - the social and ecological relationships - that enable all of us to flourish..."

"Aligning our practices with nature" sounds like good advice to me. And that means that the human world that we create must respect, above all, the world of nature and its limits, for our world is dependent on that one.

#314 / One Thousand Words

2011-11-10T00:12:00.000-08:00

The world of Nature, upon which we ultimately depend, is definitely not "infinite." We are making a mistake if we think we can build our own world, which must inevitably reside within the world of Nature, on the assumption that "infinite growth" is possible.

Or desirable!

#313 / Powerful Government

2011-11-09T00:27:00.000-08:00

State Senator Joe Simitian, mentioned in my posting on November 5th, is "termed out" of the California State Senate, as of the end of 2012. He announced last Sunday that he is now planning to run for what will be an open seat on the Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors. He is expected to win. As the San Jose Mercury News noted, Simitian has been on the Board before.

One of my acquaintances, hearing of Senator Simitian's latest plans, thought that this would be a "step down" for the Senator. That evaluation is certainly in tune with conventional wisdom. Supposedly, the power and influence of an elected official becomes greater as he or she moves from the local, to the state, and ultimately to the federal level of government. There is, however, a different way of looking at it.

I used to tell the high school classes I addressed, when I made class visits as a member of the Santa Cruz County Board of Supervisors, that I was the "most powerful" government official that those in attendance were ever likely to meet. There are only five members of a Board of Supervisors, so each Supervisor wields 20% of the voting power of the entire Board. With your vote, and two others, you can succeed in having the Board do anything that a County government is legally entitled to do. Because local government has very ample, plenary police powers, that turns out to be a lot! A member of the State Senate has only 1/120th of the voting power of the State Legislature. A member of the House of Representatives, or even of the United States Senate, wields only 1/535th of the voting power of the Congress.

"Power" is defined in the dictionary as the "ability to do something."

In terms of getting things done through government, I am not convinced that Senator Simitian will be taking a "step down."

In terms of where we should focus most of our efforts, as citizens, to make our government do what we want it to do, I think the local level has many attractions!