A must read

for anyone who wants to understand Gorbachev, his rise, his fall and his legacy. To me, a monumental and positive force in the last half of the twentieth century, along with Martin Luther King, Jr. and Nelson Mandela.

Matt Damon for President

In case you're keeping track, you heard it here (scroll down a few posts) before you heard it here.

An amendment--an addition--to my previous post

urging Matt Damon for President ("You heard it here first"), adding Warren Buffet as his running mate.

A movie recommendation

From director Carol Reed ("The Third Man"), a relatively obscure film, "Odd Man Out," available streaming from Netflix. Fabulous black and white cinematography, street scenes of Belfast in the forties. Throughout the movie, I kept wondering, How'd they do that?

Priceless

Literally so, because George Carlin is dead. Must see video.

You heard it here first

or maybe second, because I thought of it a week or so ago, but didn't blog about it, then I heard it--a quick suggestion-- on the Rim of Fire program yesterday: Matt Damon for President.

Ya gotta love the Web

I mean, where else would you find a fabulous site like this? Sure, in the past you could stumble across a book in the library that contained such information, but wouldn't you just leaf through it then put it back on the shelf? Now you can bookmark it and have access to it instantaneously, whenever the mood strikes or the need arises. Amazing. You'd think we'd all be getting smarter with such a tool, but you'd be wrong.

A fine blog

I don't usually do referrals of blogs, but here's one that strikes my fancy, and it's not just because she apparently likes my novel.

A thoughtful question, and my reply

A good friend of mine--Kyle, who hosts two blogs, Metaphor and Squelch (links below)--emailed me a question after summing up his frustration at the current state of our nation's politics and policies: What would the French and Italians do?

http://kylekimberlin.blogspot.com/

http://squelch.wordpress.com/

Here's what I wrote him back.

Kyle, I'm not certain what the French or Italians would do, but they'd surely do something. I think what's happened in the US over the last thirty years is that we've been overtaken by a perfect storm of developments that has destroyed citizen action.

1. We've become cynical about politics, because no matter what we do (having done lots in the sixties and seventies) nothing changes. Wars keep on being waged; government corruption and waste continue; inequalities, drug wars, poverty persist. Even when it appears something has changed--as when the Soviet Union collapsed and the Berlin Wall came down--our "leaders" found new enemies to justify and enhance their role in our culture.

2. We've become overwhelmed by distraction. Religion isn't the only opiate of the masses (although it's a strong one). Now there's television, the Internet and its attendant gadgetry, consumption of material goods as well as food, drink and drugs, and a most powerful one: financial indenture. We're so engaged in digging ourselves out of the pile of debt that we incurred over the last decades that we don't have the energy or interest in events not related to that most compelling concern.

3. The Internet isn't just a distraction; it also has the effect of channeling any protest into meaningless displays to assuage our guilt at not doing anything effective. We write and connect with each other (as with this email) but do so while sitting at a desk, not swarming the streets. This is Chris Hedges' point in his many essays and which has led him from his Ivory Tower to the White House fence where he and others were arrested for failing to disperse. He's right: We must do something, anything. But we must do it.

The three of us Saturday soldiers have quit our weekly "peace march" after eight years-plus because of a combination of factors, together with the growing futility of our demonstration. For years we kept on because of the support we got from passersby. Nowadays, however, it's not just the shopping along State Street that pulls strollers away from us, it's the infernal plugs in people's ears and those damnable tiny boxes they're twiddling with their thumbs. Besides, we reckoned that since we began our march long ago, wars haven't ceased, they've multiplied. We thought perhaps our protest was simply provoking increased military engagement and so determined to quit marching to see if that stopped US warmaking.

So, come to think of it, I have done something after all. I've stopped marching.

Revised economic figures of US GDP "growth"

Why don't you tell me something I don't know?

I can't resist

making this observation: In the Middle East the populace riots for freedom; in Greece they riot over economic austerity; in the US we riot about a deejay's music festival.

The future is here

I recently read an article on the Internet (can't find the link now) that detailed how our increasing use of the "cloud" to create and store our information renders us more susceptible to commercial and governmental intrusion. I don't (I think I don't, anyway) use the cloud to store much information because I've never trusted that such storage places won't keep my data without being tempted to exploit it.

Now--no surprise--my reluctance to become a Facebook junkie has seen justification. I like the author's reference to the Pied Piper, whose victims not just willingly, but gleefully, followed him to their deserts.

Gotta love Santa Barbara

For several months last year (probably because I'd become addicted to my Netflix rental of BBC's Foyle's War series) I thought I'd like to move to Sussex County, England. It still appeals to me somewhat, actually. But this morning, while I'm grouting my bathroom floor, I've got the British Open golf tournament on television in my bedroom and I just checked out the broadcast from southern England. Result: It's blowing and raining in cold, driven spears there today. In high summer. Meanwhile, today in SB the weather is glorious, too glorious to be indoors grouting, but oh well.

An observation. On mid-day today there's a perfect sport on television to "view" from the other room, namely, football (soccer): the final of the Women's World Cup, to which the US team has (miraculously) qualified. I mean, you can hear the broadcast, but since nothing's happening except upon the occasional score--and each of those gives rise to a huge eruption of noise and are thereupon replayed at least five times--you can effectively see the whole match without having to watch it much, just by checking out the telecast a few times in two hours.

Now don't get me wrong. On occasion, soccer can be interesting, as with the women's amazing last-minute victory last week over Brazil to get them into the semi-finals. But its best function is as white noise in the other room while engaged in an absorbing indoor task.

A voice in the wilderness

Kucinich: A succinct statement of what's going on in America.

Delusional

Panetta is flatly out of his mind.

The next chapter in America's downfall

They already own our indebtedness and our commercial real estate and our jobs. Now they're nibbling away at our houses.

Here we go again

Another outrageous 5-4 Supreme Court decision, this time striking down Arizona's ground-breaking "clean elections" law that sought to "level the playing field" of funding of candidates so that money couldn't as easily buy elections. Under the guise of First Amendment rhetoric, the Court continues to foster finance over speech, money as the ultimate form of expression.

I'm wavering in my desire to sit out the 2012 election, if for no other reason than to keep the right from further polluting the Supreme Court.

If I watched local television newscasts

I'd be strongly opposed to this trend in broadcasting. As it is, local television newscasts come here to Santa Barbara from up north in the Pismo Beach/SLO area, except for one channel (I think there's one) that emanates from SB, and it's so awful I seldom watch it.

Why am I not surprised

at this latest 5-4 Supreme Court decision.

(To be honest, I not only anticipated the result--even the split on the Court--but I felt, as a former class-action lawyer, that the breadth of the class claims, as well as the manageability of the suit were on the outer edge of legal tolerance of the class action device.)

Here's a succinct lay analysis of the legality of Obama's actions in Libya

Its conclusion is that it's unlikely that anything short of impeachment--which is itself unlikely, of course--will be ineffective to stop this, or future, wars by imperial decree. I happen to agree, grudgingly, with that conclusion, which calls for me to consider whether this nation is still one that I revere. (I've been pondering this ever since the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution handed LBJ unbridled power to destroy Vietnam, which the executive later used to bomb Cambodia.)

I still admire the process that allows public debate on such issues and that permits lawsuits, however ineffective, to be lodged to test the question. But these don't stop the presidential power to make war from being wielded by a single person. (Imagine Bachmann possessed of such power, or Palin!)

The only effective halt to this exercise of executive arrogance would be for the Supreme Court to declare the war illegal and to enter an order enjoining the president from continuing it. If disobeyed, the Court could send a US Marshal (imagine Tommy Lee Jones in the role) to arrest the president for contempt of court, which would not make even a decent screenplay. However--and this is ironic because of the disrespect I have for the five dwarfs on the Court--the conservatives Alito, Roberts, Scalia, Thomas and (somewhat less so) Kennedy are more likely than the other four to make such a ruling and enter such a decree because of their self-proclaimed "strict construction" of the Constitution. By that time, however, enormous devastation would have been wrought, the very devastation the Constitution was written to restrict.