Tannishblog

David Brin always make me feel dumb. In a good way. His reads are the most even-handed political comments I have yet uncovered. Today, this snippet caught in the folds of my brain:

There is one more reason for the right wing to support gerrymandering at all costs. The biggest reason - possibly - of all. At present, more than a hundred super-radical GOP congressmen exercise their traditional privilege of appointing one candidate from their district to each of the US Military Academies (e.g. West Point). There is strong anecdotal evidence that these new cadets are being appointed according to social, political and cultural litmus tests, including religious zealotry. This bottom-stocking of the US Officer Corps is symmetric with the ongoing purge of the apolitical and superbly professional flag officer ranks, either forcing retirements, re-assigning, or viciously harrassing any general or admiral who will not toe the line. Of these two trends, the bottom-stocking of zealots has received the least attention, and may do our constitutional civilization the most long-lasting harm.

This acts upon me so powerfully I cannot make a coherent closing statement. The phrase Army of God echoes in my head…

I’m becoming skeptical about every new revelation offered by our government supporting Bush’s War. Today’s dish: a 6300-word letter translated by god-know-whom, obtained by who-know-how, and purported to contain a direct missive between the “Number 2” Al-Qaida so-and-so and He-Who-Should-Not-Be-Named, “Number 1” Al-Qaida Dr. Evil-type mastermind whose name we all know by heart.

I can’t care less what this supposed letter supposedly contains. If we can intercept the personal correspondence of Osama Bin-Laden, why can’t we just knock on his door and fetch the bastard? I’m sure Al-Qaida members are all dancing around an effigy and singing, “Who’s afraid of the Big, Bad Bush,” then collapsing in laughter.

This “new” letter amounts to another smokescreen devised by the real Dr. Evil-types in Washington to bring their one-note-song back to the forefront of media playlists across the nation (News of corruption, insider trading, and poor governance can’t be tolerated.) You know the song; the one about freedom, justice, and forcing the American Way™ upon the unwilling at gunpoint. This song has a nostalgic flavor, an historical timbre, sort of like the government radio band of the Third Reich; every house is supposed to play it. To do otherwise is un-American!

I’m fed up with media manipulation by the Bush administration. This boy has cried wolf too long, I’m not listening anymore. What this brat needs to do, is to bring home a nice pelt so we can all dance around it. Nothing else will do.

Because my friend Leucanthemum suggested it, I have been working on a vacation scrapbook commemorating our trip last summer to Israel. In true Tannish fashion, it takes an electronic form. While my wife was busy buying photo albums and extra inserts, printing out some of the 1100 digital images we brought home, and arranging them just so, I was busy doing the same thing online.

I have the smug satisfaction of being able to say my version cost much less…

So if you’re curious, an internet voyeur, or just a glutton for punishment - click on through!

I’m sitting in my company pickup in a parking lot of a municipal building in semi-rural Wisconsin awaiting arrival of the guy who would issue a building permit for an upcoming job in the area. His (or her) office hours are Tuesdays and Thursdays 1:00 – 2:30PM; I’m early. Like me, this person must spend a lot of time on the road to perform his job function as Building Inspector.

No worries – I just play with my new laptop, fire up this nifty freeware and…Hey! They’ve got an unsecured WiFi setup here! I wonder if I can tap into it. Cool! I feel so illicit. And my boss thinks Wireless internet doesn’t work…

I just had to share that. Apologies to the geeks already in the know. Not that those kind of people read my bloggings anyway…

Here’s another (as if we need one) indicator of the failing administration of our Drunkard–in-Chief. The Nobel Committee awarded its Peace Prize awarded to the International Atomic Energy Agency and its chief, Mohamed ElBaradei. Yes, this it the same man president Bush tried to remove from office for daring to criticize our delicate handling of Iraq. Those damned Europeans, so ungrateful that we helped them in World War II…

………

But when the US senate overwhelmingly passed a motion aimed at closing a loophole allowing torture of US detainees, George W-is-for-“Whip ‘em” Bush wants to veto. This guy is really into his executive powers.

………

We must be doing all right. The Labor Department reports that the economy lost only 35,000 jobs last month – better than expected. I can only scratch my head and wonder how this can be good news for people. Economic punditry celebrates this news. Isn’t this like saying “I lost my two toes, but I’m glad it wasn’t my whole foot.”

………

The rats continue to leave the sinking ship USS BushCo. Evangelical voters, Republican men, Southerners and Protestants have lost support for the president since the beginning of this year. The president’s overall job approval is at 39 percent - with 21 percent strongly approving. Only 28 percent say the country is headed in the right direction, while two-thirds, 66 percent, say it is on the wrong track. [PDF]

I’m suffering from despair reading the endless mudslinging from the democratic Party. Enough! “Just gimme some truth!” Or substance, I’ll settle for that…

But one young senator has my best interest at heart, and he writes nice letters, too (or his staff does). Below is a reply from an internet-activist-petition thingy I sometimes agree with. This time its about the shafting our moron-in-chief gave the survivors of the hurricanes las month.

Dear T(annish):

Thank you for writing me regarding the President’s suspension of the Davis-Bacon Act. I agree with you that the last thing that workers affected by Hurricane Katrina need is to have one of their most basic labor protections suspended.

On September 8th, President Bush proclaimed that all federal contracts to be performed in the hurricane-affected areas of Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, and Mississippi would be exempt from Davis-Bacon Act requirements. The Davis-Bacon Act ensures that workers earn prevailing local wages on federally-funded construction contracts. The President’s move suspends this requirement, and permits contractors to pay less than the locally prevailing wage on contracts entered into after September 8th.

I think the President was wrong to suspend the Davis-Bacon Act, which is why I co-sponsored with Senator Kennedy the Fair Wages for Katrina Recovery Workers Act. If passed, this bill would reverse the President’s suspension and ensure that the workers involved in the recover and reconstruction effort will earn a prevailing wage. I am hopeful that my Republican colleagues will see the need to protect workers affected by Hurricane Katrina, and work to pass this bill.

An estimated 400,000 to 1 million workers may become unemployed as a result of Hurricane Katrina. These hard-working Americans will need good jobs quickly. Workers in Mississippi and Louisiana were among the poorest in America even before the hurricane; the states rank 1st and 2nd among the poorest states in the nation. The President’s move to depress their wages even further is confounding, and extremely unfortunate.

President Bush would have Americans believe that Davis-Bacon wages are exorbitant, and that contractors would not be able to afford to do their jobs and pay their employees’ wages. Nothing could be further from the truth. For instance, sheet metal workers in Pearl River County, Mississippi earned $9.16 an hour before the Hurricane, and truck drivers in Mobile, Alabama made $8.54 for an hour’s work. I am sure you will agree with me that by any reasonable estimates, these wages are not prohibitively high.

T(annish), thank you for writing. As this fight for fair wages for America’s workers continues in the coming days, I will be certain to keep your communication in mind.

Sincerely,

Barack Obama
United States Senator

This guy rocks! I stand here being represented by Barack Obama and Jan Schakowsky, how lucky can one Get?

(That was rhetorical)

More Words of Wisdom From Lama Suryas Das:

Who is wise?
He that learns from everyone.
Who is powerful?
He that governs his passions.
Who is rich?He that is content.
Who is that?
Nobody.
~ Benjamin Franklin

It seem that some things don’t change. I’m reminded of the vast technological changes that have occurred since Ben Franklin’s time to ours. Perhaps its safe to say that the world we share would be seen as dangerous and confusing to him and his ilk, perhaps viewed with distaste. I stretch my imagination to question how our world would be different if we had advanced just as far in social or political arenas as well. These are, after all, the areas that our founding fathers were trying to address with their “Great Experiment.”

I wonder what he’d say about our progress…

Slowly and somewhat begrudgingly, the West is finding more need to “think outside” of its own “box.” Economists have been touting gross domestic product as a yardstick of national happiness for decades, as if money alone could be a measure of personal satisfaction. But the kingdom of Bhutan is pursuing happiness a different way.

“We have to think of human well-being in broader terms. Material well-being is only one component. That doesn’t ensure that you’re at peace with your environment and in harmony with each other.”

So says Lyonpo Jigmi Thinley, Bhutan’s home minister and ex-prime minister. This idea, which economic thinkers in the west are just now attending to, is based on Buddhist doctrine. Some relate this to the more Jeffersonian philosophy of happiness:

“The Enlightenment theory of happiness was an expression of public good or the public welfare, of the contentment of the people,” said John Ralston Saul, a Canadian political philosopher. And, he added, this could not be further from “the 20th-century idea that you should smile because you’re at Disneyland.”

I find this to be self evident: happiness is subjective, after all. The chase for money, status and other ephemeral accoutrements of society can often take on a like of its own, undermining whatever basis for happiness we’ve accrued. To live in an era where messages of consumerism feed our subconscious false fears and desires, we have to work diligently to remain centered on our own values, not to get caught up in the false values of corporate entities. To live in a society which deifies wealth, we must remember that most of our material possessions are unnecessary to our emotional needs.

And now, some few Western researchers are, in a very Western style, trying to quantify this self evident truth.

But researchers have been hard pressed to develop measuring techniques that can capture this broader concept of well-being. One approach is to study how individuals perceive the daily flow of their lives, having them keep diary-like charts reflecting how various activities, from paying bills to playing softball, make them feel. A research team at Princeton is working with the Bureau of Labor Statistics to incorporate this kind of charting into its new “time use” survey, which began last year and is given to 4,000 Americans each month.

“The idea is to start with life as we experience it and then try to understand what helps people feel fulfilled and create conditions that generate that,” said Dr. Alan B. Krueger, a Princeton economist working on the survey.

For the rest of us, not involved with spending grant money, all we have to do is look into ourselves to discover happiness. If only we take the time.

What passes for a Palestinian identity is violence. Violence is the only way they know. From 1948, when the British Mandate gave the area once known as Palestine to the displaced European Jewry, the Arab peoples have been at perpetual war with the Jews. During the Israeli War of Independence, the backers of and Arab state of Palestine, all six of the neighboring nations, could not prevail against an under-equipped partisan militia of farmers, refugees and teens.

With each successive attempt, the Arabs fighting for Palestinian statehood have been weakened by an ever strengthening Israeli Military. Today, nearly 60 years later, what is left of Palestine is a few thousand people, mostly youths, whom refuse to accept that they are themselves refugees. Generation after generation of Arabs clinging to an impossible dream of self rule have flung themselves mindlessly at an unassailable wall, taught their children to value hatred and exemplify martyrs and bred into their cultural identity values based upon uncompromising hatred and militant extremism.

For decades, the Palestinian Authority has been accepting foreign money to build an economic foundation for their dream. Instead they hoard the money through corruption; How did Yasser Arafat become a millionaire? Money for healthcare and education given in faith to enrich lives of so-called Palestinians founded the militant organization known as Hamas, which is currently vying for control of a Palestinian police state inside the Gaza strip. From the Institute of Counter-Terrorism:

Hamas enjoys strong financial backing. In fact, its rivals claim that this is major reason for its strength. Hamas receives financial support from unofficial bodies in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states, and recently also from Iran. These funds are distributed among the various groups and associations identified with the movement, and from them filter down to the operatives in the field.

A broad network of charity associations (Jamayath Hiriya) and committees (Lejan Zekath) operates in the Territories, on the basis of two Jordanian statutes: the Charity Association and Social Institutions Law, and the Charity Fund-Raising Regulations. Hamas makes extensive use of many of these charity associations and committees, which (together with the mosques, unions, etc.) also serve as the overt facade of the organization’s activity, operating parallel to and serving its covert operations. The movement’s ideology attributes great importance to the giving of charity (zekath, which is also one of the five basic principles of Islam). Giving charity can serve to bring the people closer to Islam and, as a result, to broaden the ranks of Hamas.

The network of charity associations serves as a screen for its covert activities, including liaison with the movement’s leadership abroad, the transfer of funds to field operatives, and the identification of potential recruits. The great importance which Hamas attaches to the overt aspect of its operations - charity and welfare - has been particularly evident since the extensive arrest and exclusion of many of its operatives.

An important aspect of the charity associations and committees is their role as a means for the channeling of funds into the region. While part of these funds is in fact used for charity, it is not always possible to distinguish between the ‘innocent’ activity of the charity associations and the funding of covert, subversive and terrorist activity. Thus, for example, the associations pay fines and assist the families of operatives who are arrested, or the operatives themselves. Such donations are defined as charity, but are in fact given to the hard and active core of Hamas. The charity associations can also help in transfering funds to Hamas through their financial-administrative infrastructure. Hamas enjoys strong financial backing. In fact, its rivals claim that this is major reason for its strength. Hamas receives financial support from unofficial bodies in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states, and recently also from Iran. These funds are distributed among the various groups and associations identified with the movement, and from them filter down to the operatives in the field.

A broad network of charity associations (Jamayath Hiriya) and committees (Lejan Zekath) operates in the Territories, on the basis of two Jordanian statutes: the Charity Association and Social Institutions Law, and the Charity Fund-Raising Regulations. Hamas makes extensive use of many of these charity associations and committees, which (together with the mosques, unions, etc.) also serve as the overt facade of the organization’s activity, operating parallel to and serving its covert operations. The movement’s ideology attributes great importance to the giving of charity (zekath, which is also one of the five basic principles of Islam). Giving charity can serve to bring the people closer to Islam and, as a result, to broaden the ranks of Hamas.

The network of charity associations serves as a screen for its covert activities, including liaison with the movement’s leadership abroad, the transfer of funds to field operatives, and the identification of potential recruits. The great importance which Hamas attaches to the overt aspect of its operations - charity and welfare - has been particularly evident since the extensive arrest and exclusion of many of its operatives.

An important aspect of the charity associations and committees is their role as a means for the channeling of funds into the region. While part of these funds is in fact used for charity, it is not always possible to distinguish between the ‘innocent’ activity of the charity associations and the funding of covert, subversive and terrorist activity. Thus, for example, the associations pay fines and assist the families of operatives who are arrested, or the operatives themselves. Such donations are defined as charity, but are in fact given to the hard and active core of Hamas. The charity associations can also help in transfering funds to Hamas through their financial-administrative infrastructure.

Today, Hamas clashed with Palestinian police in Gaza. Now that the Jew have gone, they have no one but themselves to pick on. From WaPo:

A police officer and two civilian bystanders were killed in the hours-long gun battles, and at least 50 others were wounded in the most sustained factional fighting since Israel withdrew from Gaza three weeks ago.

Palestinian authorities and Hamas officials gave conflicting accounts of how the clashes began. Hamas officials said gunfire broke out after Palestinian police sought to disarm a group of Hamas fighters riding in a taxi in Gaza City…

Palestinian officials said the violence began with a dispute at an automated teller machine involving a Hamas member. When Palestinian police arrived to settle the matter, Hamas gunmen tossed grenades at the men, authorities said. Witnesses said Hamas gunmen later used RPG-7 grenade launchers to attack two police stations.

So-called Palestinian so-called Freedom Fighters throw grenades at policemen called to the scene of a disturbance. The group is upset at an attempt to disarm the rabble for the safety of others in the crowded city. A protracted gun fight breaks out. All of this happens in an area that is supposed to be a testing ground for a future Palestinian state. They have proved, and will do so again, that they aren’t ready for self rule, they aren’t mature enough as a people to be awarded statehood.

All of this illustrates why an Arab “state” inside the boundaries of Israel is a foolish dream. How many wars does it take for a people to realize that they have been well and truly conquered? Only in the modern world of global media could the meme of “Palestine” continue to circle the globe ad infinitum. Palestine is dead, and the miscreants and over equipped gangs that is remaining of a once proud nation should be given their cultural due, equal education and economic opportunities as free Arab subject of Israel, and forget the whole Palestine thing as the memory it is. The Israelis have known this for decades; only the Western media is unaware, mostly because they really don’t care (besides, a peaceful resolution would harm newspaper sales.)

My daughter is becoming quite the bloggster. For the past few months, she and I have been discovering the Joy of Blogging ™ together. As I struggle with the usual middle-class issues and wrestle out of my day a few cogent moments in which to attempt to write, she struggles with a daunting workload of homework, activities and still manages to write creatively.

She started last spring with Brianna’s World, then after several revisions, branched out to a general interest blog entitled Shades of Pink. Two web site cannot contain her ideas, it weems, so she expanded further for her Library. Not content with that, she has envisioned a creative writing blog called Lucid Waking, and her best friend coerced her into sharing a Xanga site: Urban Legend, just for kicks.

While all this seems a bit scattered it’s understandably a by-product of a child’s method of investigation. All of these consist of a larger work-in-progress, which will enable her to find her unique voice. While she rapidly leaves her childhood behind, her work will develop into a coherency I can only dream of.

It’s daunting to imagine what these highschoolers can do when you let them. Coming as I have from the Children-Are-Seen-And-Not-Heard school of childrearing, I am constantly amazed by my daughter’s generation. And I am proud that the fates have chosen me to be her papa.