Saturday, February 28, 2009

An Admitted Crime Demands A Prosecutor

No longer in office, Bush and Cheney have admitted publicly that they waterboarded. They created flaky legal opinions, untested in court, that allowed it. They set up the prisons. They ordered particular tortures of particular prisoners. They waterboarded. Some prisoners were tortured until they were killed.

The act of waterboarding is - simply and clearly - a crime. It is a criminal act under our laws and under our international treaties. We have sentenced to death those who did it to our soldiers in World War II. Under American law and under world law, waterboarding is a crime.

Either we give Bush and Cheney a pass - in which case their new principle of absolute Presidential privilege stands proven - or we do for them what we would do for any other American - bring them before a court of law and let the courts determine their criminality.

We must indict and try them.

If Presidential privilege can be absolute, then so can much else over time. Such a privilege would guarantee a people perpetually in revolt. Eternal struggle would be our only freedom, eternal vigilance the signal to struggle. Nature mitigates against absoluteness. We must indict.

Even now as our tortured prisoners continue on a hunger strike until they are freed. We must indict.

Also, if we don't indict Bush and Cheney for their confessed crimes but instead let them run out the clock on the statute of limitations, other countries will judge them in our place. Other countries may even hire thugs for Bush and Cheney's capture and rendition. Before the world, they have confessed their crime. The world can legally be their judge and executioner. It likely will be, if we aren't. The American statute of limitations may not apply in other lands. Our failure will be local. So we must indict.

Many people
are now coming to similar conclusions and are asking Eric Holder, our Attorney General, to appoint a special prosecutor to bring these confessed criminals before a court of law.

The world is watching. We must indict the torturers. Or we are them.

Friday, February 27, 2009

Are Short Sellers Killing The Stock Market?

Whenever the market rises these days, it is quickly swamped by short sellers. They see any market as a bubble they can crush.

The presence of a market is enough to give them profit.

Wednesday, February 25, 2009

Videocam Guantanamo

Guards in Guantanamo are beating prisoners up much harder these days because they know these people will soon be free. They don't realize how they will be sued.

Could someone just put up a slew of wifi webcams on the walls down there and record everything? For posterity? For our own protection?

It would be no big deal, except for those being beaten. And for those of us who will have to pay their lawsuits. How much money would you sue the U.S. for, for having three joints dislocated? That just happened. Post-election.

That's what we will pay. Why are we making it harder on ourselves by beating them now?

What we will pay is already going to be tremendous.

We casually beat them. Still.

Will we other than deserve what we will get?

Praying For Angels

Today at the free Myra Hess concert in downtown Chicago, the stage manager announced that after 32 years they have lost their sponsorship and are looking for an angel. She gave members of the audience an invitation to each donate $750, as that amount would set them up for some time. No one volunteered. So they are praying for angels.

That's about where it stands for a lot of people these days, praying for angels.

It may be necessary for man to become angels in order to have angels.

Monday, February 23, 2009

Send Our Torture Victims Directly To The Hague

Surely they will accept them.

We released today to British custody one Binyam Mohammed, a person whom we held for four years, tortured, and have now released without charging. Sorry, fella. We screwed up.

But we're not about to admit that we're screw-ups or that we let a screw-up named George Bush screw up the country. We need to look forward. From the mud and slime he left.

So we just may let the statute of limitations run out. The American statute of limitations.

That leaves it up to the world to keep the Geneva Conventions real. Otherwise, they are a fraud, a charade, a ghost in the wind.

Binyam Mohammad will find his way to The Hague. Sooner than later.

Why don't we just send all our torture victims there and call it a day?

We don't know how to stop screwing up.

The Aggregation of Unintended Consequences

Every act has unintended consequences. Living well means opening a lot of packages and containers, so our landfills fill up with old packages and containers. The sky fills with carbon dioxide from our wonderful gasoline cars.

The earth is round. We begin to breathe our own exhaust. Our behavior is self-limiting, the growth of human life on earth slows and stops. Unintended consequences congeal globally.

Political side effects require that to define a following, one must define its opposition. The side effect of identity is division. As Republicans scramble for identity in the wake of cataclysmic loss, sorting their moral purity from their moral poverty, they are becoming self-opposed. Preachers chide the amoralists. Amoralists damn the world as sinners.

By welcoming all the opposition into the discussion, if not the agreements, Obama has pulled the wind from beneath their wings. Feathers blow in the wind.

All the side effects from our special effects.

Maybe the purpose of special effects can become to develop quality side effects.

Sunday, February 22, 2009

Cheapest Eats

A lot of people are cutting expenses to the bone so they can pay off their debts. Here are some cheap survival foods that can keep a person healthy.

Corn and beans. It's what we feed to pigs to make bacon and ham. It builds muscle. Corn is cheapest on the cob, but you have to walk a field after harvest and glean what ears remain underfoot to get it for free. Field corn is very chewy - not like sweet corn, which we eat off the cob. It is rigorous. Once it has dried, a person can shell the kernels off the cobs. You can grind the kernels using an old hand-cranked food grinder or a pricy bread mixer with a grinder attachment. What you get is corn meal. Blow the chaff off it and you'll eat a while.

Corn meal is so primitive a food that it should cost very little, but it does not. Why it costs a lot on the shelf is hard to see.

Put a couple of heaping tablespoons of corn meal into a cup of cold water in a pan on the stove and stir it in. Turn the heat on under the pan and as the water comes to a boil, keep stirring. Put in a tiny pinch of salt. Keep stirring as it thickens, so that it doesn't stick. After it is creamy thick, pour it into a bowl. Add some sugar, add some milk.

You have just made breakfast. For pennies. Remember your vitamin C pill.

If any corn meal is left over, just pour it into a cookie tin. It will solidify there, and you can cut it into squares with a pancake turner and fry it. If you mix in a little oregano and pour it into the holes in a muffin tin, you can make little disks that can be used in an elegant entree. You can make cornmeal flan.


Beans can make bean sprouts and fake steak. Make a sprouter out of an old Christmas cookie tin by drilling holes in the lid. Try sprouting mung beans first. Rinse a couple heaping teaspoons of them twice a day for a week. You will have a quart of real live bean sprouts. Add them to spaghetti, to omelets, to veggie stews, to salads. It has cost you almost nothing. Two teaspoons of dry mung beans makes a quart of sprouts.

Ordinary dry beans are easy to cook if you soak them first overnight in very salty water. In the morning, pour off the salty water and fill the pan with fresh water. The salt goes into the beans and pulls the fresh water in afterwards. They can soak in that all day. When you come home at night and cook the beans, they will cook very quickly. Add a little sliced onion toward the end for gourmet appeal.

As Woodie Guthrie sang, "Well, them beans, bacon and gravy, it almost drives you crazy. I eat 'em til I see 'em in my dreams..." For those who still eat animals, pig meat is supposed to go well with beans. (But the hard fat will kill you, and it makes a tired dragger of you first.)

Beans 'and' - what? Just about anything. Grains all work well: brown rice, white rice, barley, the exotic grains you always wondered about. Just add onions and it will all work out fine. Beans combine into soups. Beans make burritos.

Add chopped spinach and onions to black beans and cook them down to make a marvelously rich, nourishing stew. Once it is cooked, add olives and some cross-sliced onion slivers for a party dish. It will work as a dip (especially if you add a tad of garlic) or as a spread. And it's oh-so-friggin' cheap.

Beans and rice if you are a Southwesterner. So many rices, so many beans. Onions are cheap and will keep you healthy.

I cook up a couple quarts of this stuff in my slow cooker, freeze it in decades-old frozen-food dishes that sit inside foldover sandwich bags, and at this moment I have twenty entrees in the freezer awaiting the right wine.

The right wine. Strawberry Kool-Aid without sugar is remarkably like red wine. Same sourness, same bite on the back of the tongue. Sprinkle just a little of the powder into a glass of water and have it with your greasier meals. Get the kind of KoolAid that needs sugar - and skip the sugar.

You can find spices in big bags cheaply in Spanish-American and East Indian grocery stores. Cumin, cinnamon, oregano, curry powder, a different flavor every day.

Soybean fried rice. There is said to be an edible soy bean. It is, somewhat. In poor times past, I and friend ate Italian soybean fried rice, Mexican soybean fried rice, Eastern Indian soybean fried rice, and Thai soybean fried rice. Very nourishing.

For dessert, mix a little instant oatmeal in a cup with some cake mix and just a little water. Nuke it into a candy bar or muffin, depending on the water. For a thrill, mix some grapes in and shove them to the bottom of the cup. A little orange peel shaving goes a long way here, too.

Grapes on sale go in the freezer and make for mini-nibbles as I pass by.

Greens - three leaves of Romaine lettuce a day will surprise you with a new lease on life. You can also sprout your own alfalfa sprouts using a Mason jar lid with a mesh. These are usually for sale in the health food store next to the alfalfa seeds.

A carrot a day gives you vitamin A. So do sweet potatoes. Cut them in half and nuke them. The tomato is nice, but catsup may suffice. An orange will give you vitamin C and you can shave the peel into your porridge.

Coffee, gourmet - add just the teensiest bit of baking soda to a cup to reduce the acidity. Makes the cheapest coffee much easier to drink.


Wheat. Cheap as can be. Massively grown. To get the best food value, process your own. You can buy "wheat berries" - wheat kernals - at the health food store, or you can buy wheat from a farmer. Ask him to save a bushel or two for you the next time he harvests, and you'll drive out to get it. You will eat all year. Call the local organic farmers organization for directions.

Soak wheat, poach it gently until it splits, serve it as cereal with milk. It will make everybody want to brush their teeth afterwards, and that's good. It is also delicious. As the little kernals break in your mouth, flavor explodes.

Fry the cooked wheat. Grind it into paste, sprinkle in some flour,mix it with beans and bean sprouts and onions and garlic into little patties and fry. Don't forget the cumin from the bodega.

Poor people know how to live.

Can Consumers Survive Without Business?

Yes. Because we are producers.

Can business survive without consumers?

Tuesday, February 17, 2009

Droid Mores

It's always safest to be automatic. If you're a droid.

If every move is a logical result, you can explain it. You have plausible deniability. You did the logical thing. At least there was some logic for the thing you did.

So the theory goes. You do what you think is best for the nation. You can explain to history why you did that. You can do anything, if you can explain it.

Because you can do anything, you can simply explain that you have the power. Because you have the power, you can do anything, if needed. Some may disagree. You need to know who they are, so they don't hinder your power.

Endless war can keep you in power forever.

Or at least until spring breaks through.

Sunday, February 15, 2009

Cash-And-Carry World

While big business falls apart as leaders try to see how they could possibly have guaranteed each other's health and growth forever via CDS's in this finite petri dish of a circular world, the small survive.

Cash up front works for everyone.

As a candle crafter three decades ago, I and my partner gave the stores that bought from us a 2 percent discount for payment within ten days. The balance was due in thirty days. The phrase "2/10, net 30" was on our sales brochure. We sold out after ten years, the design lives today.

We gave our stores credit. We were credit givers.

Today, we would play for cash. Prepay those orders, people. Free shipping if you prepay. First box out the door if you prepay - you go ahead of our credit customers. Minimum order is halved for prepayers - order only half a dozen if you like. Try 'em and see!

Candle wax was heavy. Shipping costs had limited our effective territory. The farther from our workshop, the higher the price in the store and the slower the sales. Eliminate the shipping cost and we would quintuple our territory and sell to the whole nation. For cash.

You cash, we carry.

That's what we would have done, by golly. And then we would have bought many houses in Saginaw, and rented them to early retirees using network marketing. But that's another blog post, and I'm late for my basket weaving class.

Saturday, February 14, 2009

Can't Republicans Shoot Hoops? Oops...

Basketball ruled the world - the rural Midwest - when I was a kid. In the little high school I went to, if you weren't in Varsity or Junior Varsity, you were one of the seventy kids in Band. I played the second third trombone. A fellow named "Moose" played the third. Several times we got to play at the home games in uniform. We were solemn and mature, in honor of our uniforms.

Basketball to me is a game of feints and fakes and endless surprises. Players charge continually from one end of the court to the other depending on which side holds the ball. This is like football, but it is a hundred times faster. Players become gaunt and lean.

Off-court, the basketball player's heart beats clearly and easily, not loaded by fats. The carotids are clean and blood goes to the brain. Jowly non-players move slowly and seem confused.

Washington is full of jowly, confused players of an older game. A case in point is the interesting situation of Senator Gregg of New Hampshire. A Republican who had been nominated in a spirit of bipartisanship to become Obama's Commerce Secretary, he has suddenly withdrawn his name.

Several rumors float, fed by the long-windedness of Gregg's explanations of why he couldn't come to terms with working within the Obama administration. He protests too much, much too much, this fellow.

The first rumor is that Gregg voted as he was told to vote on issues for which a former chief of staff received favors from Jack Abramoff, the convicted lobbyist. He did so vote. His former chief of staff was just mentioned in a guilty plea by one of Abramoff's lieutenants, a plea filed after Senator Gregg had already committed himself to join the administration.

The second rumor is that Republicans saw his appointment not as good bi-partisanship but as a departure from rigid party discipline. Knowing of his links to Abramoff, they tipped off the Administration.

The third rumor is that New Hampshire Republicans made it too hot for him.

But Gregg had already decided to not run for re-election for his Senate post in 2010, although he has seniority and is only 53 years old. While this decision well may be for personal reasons like health that he doesn't want to disclose, it also may be because he senses the mighty scales of Justice weighing his worth. The job as Commerce Secretary might have let him pull some rank on his investigators. But how could local Republicans make it too hot for him if he wasn't going to run for re-election?

The Commerce Secretary runs the Census. The total count of individuals - including non-citizens - within a state determines how many Representatives that state gets in Congress.

One would think that the number of citizens or the number of voters would determine the number of Representatives. But it's the number of living, breathing people.

Gregg wanted to run the census. He may not have wanted to count all the non-citizens.

So after Gregg accepted the nomination - and perhaps as soon as Obama learned of his Abramoff links - Obama removed the task of the Census from the domain of his office. Bait and switch. You reach for the ball and it is somewhere else.

Losing the Census, Gregg then decided that he wouldn't be able to be the team player that the Obama Administration needed. And he withdrew.

Several commenters in the Daily Kos posting describing Gregg's links to Abramoff call Obama a genius for his deftness. While he is quite intelligent, another answer may be simpler.

He shoots hoops.

Friday, February 13, 2009

The Topology of Nope

Comedian Stephen Colbert jokes that while Obama has brought to America the 'audacity of hope', the Republicans are now bringing it the 'audacity of nope'.

Apparently the loyal opposition is discovering its new role by reflexively opposing anything Democratic. 'Opposition' is their name.

Perhaps discovering 'loyal' will come next. Although they are loyal to their mottoes - "tax relief creates jobs" - modern faith demands better proof than they can provide. Have tax loopholes created jobs? Is this opposition loyal to any principle higher than mottoes? Is habit the highest loyalty they can discover? Is denial then a principle to live by?

So the Republicans now must oppose whatever Democrats propose.

The Republicans ran the economy into the ground by making endless war. War takes money and throws it. For munitions makers, endless war makes money forever.

Republican Senator David Vitter, avoiding the fact that habituative Republican management has led this country into its current dire straits, has decided that the GOP's goal must be to make the Democrats "own" the stimulus completely. It's all theirs.

Vitter misses a point. If the Democrats "own" the solution, who "owns" having made the problem? The problem-makers couldn't solve the problem, or they would have done so long ago. They own the problem.

Forcing the solution to be Democratic draws a line that makes the problem Republican.

Tuesday, February 10, 2009

The Magic In My Brother's Basement

My brother has a magic basement.

Every week for years, he would make a trip to the lumber yard on Thursday or Friday and pick out some nice shelving boards and other wood. He would carry these boards down into his basement. On the way back up he would bring boxes of toys. He would then go sell them at crafts fairs.

Helped by this magic, he has raised seven kids. He simply takes wood down into his basement and brings toys out. The rest of the week he putters around. He has raised seven kids and paid off his mortgage with the help of this magic in his basement.

This magic - if it could be bottled and sold - could fill a lot of basements.

Friday, February 06, 2009

Is It Time To Cut The Work Week?

Has man become too productive? In one or two days of work a week many people can produce enough value to meet their basic needs in these deflationary times. Income from other work days lets a person buy nifty extras, to which we are addicted.

A three-day work week would allow those who are desperate for money to work two jobs and still have a day of rest. It would allow those under less financial pressure to work for only three days and spend the other four developing a home business, plying a craft or art, volunteering, or just laying in the sun.

An easy way to induce employers to offer two-day and three-day alternatives is to change wages-and-hours laws to add ten percent overtime pay for hours worked between 24 and 40 per week. This would increase labor cost by 2/5 x 10%, or 4 percent, for those who choose to work the 40 hour week.

Surely, the nation can afford this. As demand dwindles due to cocooning, employers are already cutting back on hours. Part-time jobs are easier to get than full-time. A migration to shorter hours is underway even now.

Deflation is drawing the nation back to essentials. I just bought for one dollar a 25 oz bottle of dish detergent made by a company I've never heard of in Salt Lake City. This detergent probably doesn't sponsor soap operas. A dollar is all it needs to cost.

If my soap costs a dollar, I can live on three days work a week.

Gus and Herkimer: In Memoriam

Many of us saw on TV yesterday the sad image of one of Gus's feathers. It was shredded and torn, pulled from the remains of the roaring engine that struck him and brother Herkimer so suddenly from our sky two weeks ago and returned them to the river, nature's home.

He died quickly. That we can say.

Both Gus McCausless and Herkimer Honkalot were struck from behind by a machine running ten times faster through the sky, mindless and unaware of its other occupants. It ploughed through both wings of Flight 14732 Canadian like a Florida rocket, killing both Gus and Herkie and breaking the wings of a dozen others, who now suffer on the ground alone, if they haven't been eaten by the dogs.

The machine fell ok and the people got out. At least it didn't take them, too. Maybe they will feed the ones with broken wings.

Gus's spouse, Nancy has been endlessly grieving and has fallen to the tail of her wing. We fear she may leave us. Herkimer left no spouse, but many friends. They talk a lot in his absence.

We must persist. We must continue. We live.

We live the sky.