Major Nidal Malik Hasan’s rampage

Bryan Zepp Jamieson, November 8, 2009

It’s been about 48 hours since a inoffensive looking, balding, middle-aged army psychiatrist allegedly opened fire and shot 43 people in a major military base in Texas. The latest word is that the man accused of the shootings is off a ventilator at a nearby hospital, but paralyzed by the wounds he received from police. It’s not clear if he can communicate or not.

Like nearly everyone, I want to know why he did it. The only people who wish he had simply been killed outright are the ones who want to use the shootings as an excuse to go to war against all Moslems. But in this case, there is very little about the events that make any sense on the face of it – not that shooting 43 people and killing 13 of them makes much sense to begin with – and motive is only one of the big questions that need to be answered.

There doesn’t seem to be much doubt that he did it. The Independent reported that one of the police officers who shot him approached him and found him lying on his back, gun still in hand, and kicked it away. There is still doubt as to whether he acted alone or had an accomplice, but there doesn’t seem to be any evidence of any weapon other than the 5.7 handgun – a small caliber anti-personnel weapon with an extremely high muzzle velocity – being used.

That weapon is an anomaly in and of itself. It’s a high-end Belgian weapon, and costs well over $1,000. It’s designed very explicitly to kill people, and its manufacturer, FN Herstal, boasts of the extreme hydrostatic shock the high-velocity bullets will cause. It has a load of 20 bullets, and since Hasan fired at least 100 times, that means he reloaded at least five times. It was equipped with a high-end laser sight, which meant this army psychiatrist, who had no gun-range experience, spent over $2,000 just on this one weapon.

It’s not a military weapon, and the US army doesn’t even have an equivalent. But it’s very nearly the perfect gun for someone who wants to wade into a crowd of unarmed people and massacre a lot of them. I expect it to become a big item for Christmas at the gun shops this year.

How is it, though, that this man, a Walter Mitty sort with no special training in killing people, was able to open fire in a major military base, pausing only five times to reload, and kill all those people? Even if all the soldiers were disarmed on the base, were none of them trained in taking out an armed adversary in hand-to-hand?

Much has been made of how Hasan was about to be shipped off to Afghanistan (yesterday, in fact) and how he was deeply conflicted over the prospect of killing fellow Moslems. Except that doesn’t make any sense.

The man was a doctor, and a major. He wasn’t going to be riding patrols along the Kybar highway of death, or even doing street patrols in Kabul. He was going to be in a military hospital in Afghanistan, doing pretty much the same as what he was doing state-side; trying to ease the psychological and emotional injuries of war that are the biggest invisible damage the troops suffer over there.

Nobody was going to make him shoot and kill people, and in any event, you don’t usually protest being made to shoot and kill people by running out and shooting and killing people.

That his religion played a role in this seems beyond doubt, but it’s not what the hate-mongers on the far right think. They’ve been busily painting him as an extremist in the mold of al Qaida or the Taliban, and that’s sheer nonsense. He was American born, of parents who left Palestine long before Israel reduced it to a charnel house. There’s no shortage of people who have come forward and expressed shock because he loved America and was proud to be in the military. If his parents passed their grievances on to him, it manifested in a odd way, because he didn’t become an observant Moslem until after his mother’s death, in 2001. The pattern just doesn’t fit someone who is seething with rage against America.

What role did his religion play? It’s unlikely he thought he might have to shoot his fellow believers, since even in the Army, psychiatrists don’t usually get into firefights. Nor would he have felt any unusual affinity for the people of Afghanistan, since his family came from over a thousand miles away and a vast culture apart (Palestine is closer in customs to London than to Afghanistan).

He was apparently subject to slurs and taunting from other military people who felt that no Moslem should be in the military. While it wouldn’t turn him against America, it would have left him feeling largely alienated and isolated. Unfortunately, the army has a lot of mindless bigots in it, and as a consequence, gays, women, and people who aren’t Christian fundies all suffer to various degrees. These bigots really are the Achilles heel of the American military.

The first place to look is at how his role as a psychiatrist played into this. He specialized in treating returning soldiers with PTSD, and day in and day out shared the nightmares of those damaged heroes.

It’s a truism that psychiatrists need shrinks of their own more than most people, and the main reason is that the constant wading in the blackness of injured and diseased minds gets to them, and makes them a little crazy.

I would look at his profession as first cause, and reaction to his religion, rather than the religion itself, as the second cause.

Put a man under severe emotional stress. Then isolate and alienate him, and then ratchet up the stress.

What happens? Keep in mind, Hasan IS an American, born and bred. He’s been told, even if he didn’t believe, that guns can solve all your problems. He’s been told this a million times.

What happens next?

In all this, there was a bright spot, a moment where one of the bereaved reached up and touched the ideals of his faith. This, according to the AP, whose tone was not approving:

“‘Lord, all those around us search for motive, search for meaning, search for something, someone to blame. That is so frustrating,’ Col. Frank Jackson told a group of about 120 people gathered at the post’s chapel. ‘Today, we pause to hear from you. So Lord, as we pray together, we focus on things we know.’

“Jackson asked worshipers to pray for the 13 dead and 29 wounded that Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan is accused of shooting, but also asked them to pray for Hasan and his family ‘as they find themselves in a position that no person ever desires to be.’

“‘And Lord, teach us to love and pray for those who rise up against us and pray for those who do us harm. We pray for Maj. Hasan. Asking that you do the work that only you can do in his life,” Jackson said.”

At the other end of the spectrum is Joe Lieberman, who was quick to run onto Faux News and exploit the tragedy for his vendetta against Moslems. From the same AP article: “Sen. Joe Lieberman, chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, said he plans to begin a congressional investigation to determine whether the shootings constitute a terrorist attack. Lieberman, an independent from Connecticut, said on Fox News Sunday that he wants to find out whether the Army missed warning signs that Hasan was becoming extreme.”

In the middle are the rest of us, who are glad Hasan is alive so he can answer the question we all have: Why? I don’t trust the American media to give us the answer. They’ve already come in and made a propaganda circus out of Kim Munley, one of the two cops who apparently shot Hasan. She supposedly, despite being shot and wounded herself, brought him down.

Except she took two rounds, one to each leg, from a weapon designed to maximize hydrostatic shock. I have a friend who took a rifle shot in the leg during basic training in the fifties, and he still has medical problems from it today. She would have been out of commission. She may well be a hero, but she isn’t the Amazon bravely returning fire after being shot that the press is painting. She may be getting the PFC Jessica Lynch treatment.

So if the media is bullshitting us already in their vapid desire to give us bite sized drama kibble in place of news so they get good ratings, don’t expect much in the way of insight or keen analysis if Hasan tells his tale.

But the truth will eventually out, and hopefully, we’ll learn why he murdered and injured all those poor people.

What corporate power has made of a once proud country.

Bryan Zepp Jamieson, October 31, 2009

Joe Lieberman has come to represent what America has become.

Unfortunately, that’s a pretty ugly sight.

Lieberman, who became an Independent in order to cling to power back in
2006 when disgusted Democratic voters tried to kick his ass out in the
state primary, was able to keep his seat that year in part by
campaigning for universal health care. He lured Republican voters by
promising to support Bush’s ruinous tax policies, and to unswervingly
support the hundreds of billions wasted on the twin occupations in Asia.

So he came out Wednesday and told the world that he was going to join
the GOP in filibustering against the health care reform bill because he
was afraid of what it would do to the deficit.

Even Republicans had to be sucking their cheeks in and wincing in
private. What Joe was doing was basically the equivalent of a young
woman loitering in red pumps, a micro-dress and crotchless panties in
front of the police station.

It’s unlikely that 25 people in the country bought Joe’s explanation.
Even Faux News and talk radio, usually fast to lionize a defector from
Democratic ranks, were curiously subdued about it. Oh, they crowed that
it would kill health care reform, but about Joe himself they were pretty
quiet. Even by their standards, his was a pretty disgraceful performance.

By traditional politics, as has been pointed out by many pundits, Joe’s
stance was inexplicable. Health reform will save the country tens of
billions a year, even in a weakened form. With a robust public option,
it would save hundreds of billions, and reduce the deficit.

Nor does he have public support. In his home state of Connecticut,
public option has the support of 68% of voters. Health care reform has
the support of nearly 80%.

He can’t even argue that he is philosophically opposed, because he ran
on a platform of supporting universal health care in 2006.

He did complain that “We’re trying to do too much at once”, an objection
that apparently didn’t occur to him when he voted to lavishly fund the
occupations of two Asian countries, and supported the PATRIOT ACT, which
basically gave government the power to ask your phone company to spy on
you, and to eliminate four of the ten items on the Bill of Rights.

As recently as 2006, Lieberman could claim to be a progressive on most
things, but whatever progressive ideals he had evaporated in a hurry
during his frantic efforts to cling to power in 2006.

Here’s what he says about the relatively mild public option – a step in
the direction of universal health care – today. “I feel so strongly
about the creation of another government health insurance entitlement,
the government going into the health insurance business, I think it’s
such a mistake that I would use the power I have as a single senator to
stop a final vote.”

He’s become such a whore to the Republicans and the Insurance companies
and HMOs (who chipped in $1.6 million to get him elected as an
Independent after Democratic voters threw his ass out of the election
process) that he can’t even allow a simple up-or-down vote.

It’s the sort of behavior you expect from Republicans.

Joe Lieberman is a Republican. It doesn’t matter what he calls himself,
he sold out, and he’s a Republican. The minute he votes to end cloture,
the Democrats need to throw him out of the caucus and strip him of his
seniority. They let him keep those in return for supporting the party on
important votes, and he betrayed them as much as he betrayed his own
constituents.

Not everyone in Congress is a whore for the insurance industry or Big
Pharm or the HMOs. But that’s the way to bet. If your Congressional rep
is a Republican, then it doesn’t matter what his or her personal beliefs
are: the party demands utter lock-step obedience, and will destroy the
career of anyone who deviates on any significant issue. So even if your
rep isn’t a whore personally, that rep is marching in lock-step with all
the other whores, and personal integrity has nothing to do with how that
rep will vote.

With Democrats, there’s some variation. Some, like Senator Baucus, are
as just as bought out as Lieberman, and are scrambling to do the bidding
of the industries. At the other end is Dennis Kucinich, the House
representative from Cleveland who is still pressing for a House vote on
single payer.

Single payer is far too radical for the timid, bought-out clowns of
Congress to even consider. Mind you, this is the highly successful
program Canada has. Doctors and hospitals are private businesses.
Patients can choose any doctor they want. It enjoys nearly universal
approval in Canada, costs 60% of what Americans pay per capita, and
covers everyone in Canada. It’s a nearly perfect blending of private
business and government social service.

But just as the contemptible Lieberman is fighting to prevent the Senate
from even DEBATING the even milder public-option, Democrats in the House
are fighting to prevent a floor vote on single payer. Probably the large
number of bought-out Democrats such a vote would reveal is too
embarrassing.

That leaves the tepid public option, which is a kind of a baby step
toward single payer. It provides for a public insurance company to
provide coverage to people who cannot get it through private insurance
companies. It was originally proposed as a alternative to regulating the
insurance companies, and demanding that they end the practices of
pre-existing conditions, rescissions, and other abuses. The insurance
companies thought this was a good idea, until they realized that despite
what their own propaganda claimed, such a government program would work,
and undercut them by at least 40% on the premiums.

In the Randian world of the free market, the last thing the consortium
of private enterprises want to see is actual competition. What they want
is a nice, gentlemanly competition such as exists between oil companies,
where prices are never more than a couple of pennies apart, and they
have absolute control over retail “independent” outlets and what they
charge. This gives them absolute control of the market and prevents the
horror of a centrally-run economy.

As a result, with nearly utter control of all Republicans, and control
of a good chunk of Democrats, they have an ideal goal: in which a reform
bill goes through that contains no actual substantive reform at all, and
indeed might just tighten things up, making it easier for insurance
companies to gouge and cheat customers, while making sure that they only
have to deal with the type of customer who is worth gouging and
cheating. No more messing about with sick people, or poor people.

And more and more, it looks like that’s what this pathetic excuse for a
Congress will give us: a “reform” bill so hopelessly watered down that
it won’t even qualify as soup, or possibly even something that makes
things worse. It could be like the Medicare “reforms” of the Bush
administration that took a highly successful and popular program and
made it a bureaucratic nightmare that bankrupts people and costs more
and loses money hand-over-fist.

So Lieberman, slimy little whore that he is, might actually be right:
Nothing might be better than any “reform” that comes along now.

If we get fake reform, we’re probably stuck with that for a generation,
as happened with the Nixon “reforms” that inflicted HMOs on us.

If we get nothing, people can make health care reform THE issue of the
2010 election, and use it to throw out Republicans and Liebermans, and
as many industry whores as they can. It will be easy to do: don’t listen
to what any candidate says. Just look to see if he is getting
significant money from HMOs, insurance companies, Big Pharm, the Chamber
of Commerce, or other major industries. If they are, throw them out!

I think we’re near the point where a total loss now might be our best
option for meaningful reform in the near future.

If Kucinich gets his floor vote, we’ll have a pretty good idea of who
has to go first.

Brian Zepp Jamieson, October 26, 2009

A poll came out two weeks ago measuring American attitudes toward global
warming. According to media accounts (gleeful media accounts, in the
case of Faux), only 57% of Americans believed in global warming,
compared to 77% in 2007.

At first I thought it was an unbelievably sloppy poll. If someone came
up to me and asked if I believed in global warming, I would say I
didn’t. “Believe in” suggests faith without evidence, religiosity.
“Believe in” means you have an opinion, and you want that opinion to
come true, because, well, you happen to like that opinion. I believe
there is intelligent life out in the universe, not because I have a
shred of evidence supporting such a view, but because I want it to be
so. I have faith.

I don’t believe in global warming. I acknowledge its existence, based on
a lot of solid evidence, and its potential to do severe harm to us. I
don’t accept it on faith; I accept it on evidence.

So I thought that the pollster had just been unbelievably sloppy. Except
it turned out it was Pew Research, and when I went to the source to find
out what they actually asked, I discovered that the phrase “believe in”
wasn’t there. What they did ask was, “Is there solid evidence the earth
is warming?” There’s a flaw in that question, too, but the flaw depends
from a lack of thought by the respondents, rather than lack of thought
on the part of the pollster.

Since there haven’t been a rash of fires at college libraries around the
world in the past year, its safe to assume that all the solid evidence
that existed in 2007 still exists today, and it’s also a safe
supposition that more evidence has been added since then. Since none of
it has been falsified by new findings (believe me, Faux News would have
let us know immediately if it had), then the only possible legitimate
poll result would be 100% saying yes, since the evidence is still there.
Mind you, that doesn’t delegitimize the poll, which gives an accurate
result. It just shows how willing people are to embrace the philosophy
of “I’ll see it when I believe it”. One in five respondents changed
their minds, and in order to accommodate that change of mind, decided
that all the evidence they had seen before was now a figment of their
imagination or something.

The same poll also asked how serious a problem they considered global
warming to be, and 35% said it was very serious, and 30% said it was
somewhat serious.

Hmmm. So of the people willing to acknowledge that the evidence was
there for global warming, at least 114% of them felt we should take it
at least somewhat seriously.

Paging Olive Oyl to the white courtesy phone. Or maybe it’s the red
courtesy phone. Tell you what, Olive; you decide. You’re exactly halfway
between the two phones. Folks, I bet she starves to death before she
picks a phone.

The same set of questions last year produced 71% who saw serious
evidence of global warming, and 71% who felt we should take it at least
somewhat seriously.

That we see such a discontinuity this year suggests to me that we’re
seeing the reprocessing of thinking by people who have been successfully
depersuaded on the issue of global warming by the slick propaganda
campaigns. The problem with spending billions to persuade people that
something isn’t true when in fact it is, is that inconvenient truths
have a way of disrupting the new-found faith, and it is hard to maintain.

So if the denialists are chortling that they are winning the battle of
public opinion, their behavioral psychologists will be shaking their
heads and warning them that one big heat wave next summer will undo all
that hard work.

Denialists got more hoped-for news from Paul Hudson, the Climate
Correspondent at BBC News. Hudson wrote an article with the provocative
title, “What happened to global warming?” The article begins, “This
headline may come as a bit of a surprise, so too might that fact that
the warmest year recorded globally was not in 2008 or 2007, but in
1998.” Unfortunately, the lead is misleading, and at least partially
inaccurate. 2007 was as hot as 1998, but what is really misleading is
the implication that global temperatures subsided to pre-1997 levels,
with only a spasm of heat in the past two years. The fact is that of the
11 years since 1997, eight are the hottest ever recorded.

Hudson attributes the “end to global warming” to the Pacific decadal
oscillation (PDO), which is sort of a long-term (20-30 year) background
oscillation to the short-term El Niño Southern Oscillation. Hudson
suggests that the PDO is entering a cool phase, which will reduce global
warming for the next 20 to 30 years. He doesn’t dispute the actual fact
of global warming, but believes the PDO may provide a respite.
The charts for the phenomenon (available here
http://jisao.washington.edu/pdo/ ) don’t suggest such a respite.

If the
PDO is longer than the ENSO, it’s also much weaker, and the chart bears
this out. It shows trends of 20-30 years, and suggests that we may have
entered the cooling phase of such a trend some four years ago. (That
would include two of the three hottest years on record). The trends,
weak to begin with, are easily and visibly disrupted by the El Niño and
La Niña events.

So, far from stopping global warming dead in its tracks, it might, at
best, slow it down a little.

Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt, the authors of Freakonomics, a
contrarian look at basic economic principles (highly engaging, well
worth the read) found themselves under attack from environmentalists
last week when it came to light that their new book, Freakonomics II,
included suggestions on how to handle global warming if we can’t control
our CO2 emissions.

My gut reaction is to say, “No, the only good long-term solution is to
control our emissions.” And I believe that it is something we must do.
In the long run, nothing else will work.

But that’s long term. In the short term, even if we could wave a magic
wand and instantly reduce our emissions to 1970 levels, global warming
would continue for at least three more decades.

Then there’s the matter of political will. As we all know, getting the
nations of the world to sacrifice now to avoid trouble thirty years down
the road is difficult at best. It doesn’t help that the world’s most
powerful nation, the United States, is little more than an enforcement
arm for large multinational corporations, and if they don’t want to
sacrifice to cut CO2 emissions, than neither does the United States.
Even the somewhat sour hope that peak oil and the resulting economic
stagnation would reduce CO2 emissions isn’t panning out. Vast new
reserves found in the past three months suggest that Cuba and Uganda may
be the largest petroleum producing nations on earth in about 15 years.
And in a bitter irony, Canada and Greenland are eying the nearly two
million square miles of land presently under ice caps, and wondering
what vast troves of minerals may emerge, including, of course, lots and
lots of oil. Russia and the US are vying for drilling areas in the
Arctic should it become ice-free.

In light of these factors (“these factors” being much easier to type
than “Pure, blind human greed and stupidity”), we have to acknowledge
that the political will to contain global warming might not be there. If
getting people to prepare for problems thirty years down the road is
difficult, getting them to reduce profits to prepare for problems thirty
years down the road is impossible.

So Dubner and Levitt are looking at quick technological fixes. Contrary
to what you may have heard, they don’t underestimate the peril of global
warming, let alone the fact that it is happening. Nor are they saying
that alternate short term approaches are any sort of substitute for
addressing the two biggest problems causing global warming:
overpopulation and greenhouse gas emissions.

The range of tech fixes available range from the feasible to the
ridiculous, and from harmless to potentially worse than the problem they
are intended to address.

With present technology, there are several options available that can
cause global cooling. One one that Dubner and Levitt look at is
injecting sulfur dioxide into the upper atmosphere. They argue this
could be done for several hundred million dollars. In effect, it would
replicate the effects of a large volcanic eruption. The sulfur dioxide
becomes a sulfuric acid aerosol, which reflects sunlight, reducing the
energy reaching the earth’s surface. A large volcanic eruption can
create such a mist for up to three years, resulting in a decrease of up
to 4 degrees Celsius for the planet.

We could duplicate the results of
moderate volcanic eruptions and thus reduce temperatures. The big
drawback is that of a major volcanic eruption were to occur randomly (as
they are wont to do), then what might otherwise have been a couple of
summers of poor crops becomes instead a global food supply crash.
Salting the ocean with iron oxide (rust) to induce a plankton growth
spurt has been suggested. The problem is that if we don’t do it just
right, we could cause a population explosion in plankton that leads to a
population crash, leaving the region that was salted with less
oxygen-producing plankton than there was before.

One that I intend to take a closer look at that Dubner and Levitt
mention is the idea “of increasing oceanic cloud cover by seeding such
clouds with salt-water that is sprayed into the air by a fleet of solar
powered dinghies.”

The authors maintain that.”the estimated cost of
building and implementing this technology is a few hundred million
dollars.” Yes, it could change weather patterns. As if global warming
wouldn’t.

It’s one thing to promote non-carbon energy such as solar, wind, and
nuclear, but another to actually implement it. There have been enormous
strides in recent years – solar panels alone are six times more
efficient at one quarter the cost. Toshiba is working on a $25 million
nuclear reactor the size of a kitchen fridge that could power a town of
1,000 for ten years before refueling. They promise no possibility of
meltdown or toxic leaks, although they don’t mention the issue of waste.
Or the cost of digging it up and refueling it.

Of course, the real bottom line is that we need to reduce our birthrate
and strive to get our population down to 3 billion by the end of the
century. Even that seemingly modest goal will require incredible effort
and sacrifice, and mean a lot of people not having children. As you may
have noticed, we haven’t had a great deal of luck in controlling our
numbers, and we are rapidly approaching a fateful point where if we
don’t do it ourselves, nature will do it for us. We almost certainly
won’t like the answer nature comes up with. It will probably involve
lots of people – billions – getting sick and dying miserably.

Even if Copenhagen, the big conference on emissions next month, is a
success and they come up with a treaty, by itself it won’t be enough. We
simply cannot hope that we can reduce emissions fast enough or hard
enough to avoid a catastrophe by 2060.

Dubner and Levitt are right: we need to look beyond just striving to
reduce emissions to solve the problem. And we need to start doing that now.

It’s harvest time.

Bryan Zepp Jamieson, October 9, 2009

It’s harvest time here in Siskiyou County, and judging from some of the
crops around town, it’s going to be a bumper crop.

Mind you, we don’t have much of a growing season here, one kilometer up.
Last frost is usually early May, and first frost is about now, and this
year it’s already snowed once: last week. August is the only month where
nobody has seen it snow, And August only gets a frost once every 20
years or so.

So it’s not a real friendly place to grow vegetables. As the joke has
it, Siskiyou is an old native term that means, “Shit! My tomatoes!” This
year, all the tomatoes go bye-bye. That first frost did for them.

But marijuana, ah, that’s a different story. Most of it around here gets
grown out in the National Forests, which is a bloody nuisance. The type
of people growing weed out there tend to have Uzis and attack dogs, and
definitely aren’t your friendly hippy-dippy love children from the 60s.
They present a hazard to unwary hikers, since they don’t like the idea
of people seeing their 40 acres of top-quality weed and going back and
spreading the word. As a result, savvy hikers just avoid areas where
there are streams, since that’s where the growers are.

Here in town, it’s a different story. This is California, so if you can
get a prescription from a doctor for marijuana for medical purposes (and
that’s not hard to do), you can grow your own, quite legally, and a lot
of people do. The law says, “personal use” and that you can’t sell it,
but there’s a loophole that allows people to raise smoke for fun and profit.

A lot just have a small patch in their back yard, a dozen or so plants,
discreetly set behind a fence so it isn’t visible from the street (cops
aren’t a problem, but thieves are), and come this time of year, they
harvest a couple of pounds of bud, and use the leaves for salves or
tinctures or baking.

Then there’s the serious growers. A lot of them were around before 215
passed, and they learned a lot. Their operations are indoors, and
involve hydroponics, fertilization measured to exact grams and exact
minutes, and the amount of light they get from the high-tech gro-lights
is gauged very carefully. Outdoors, marijuana plants bud around the
autumnal equinox. The gro-lights liberate the growers from the tyranny
of the earth’s orbit, and they can arrange to have plants bud when they
think the plants should bud, for optimal quality and/or quantity of
harvest.

Time out for a quick confession:

Fact is, I don’t use marijuana. I used to, but I quit back in the 80s.
It wasn’t a conscious decision. One time I was siting with some friends,
and a joint got passed around, and I passed it along without partaking,
and I got around to wondering when the last time was I took a hit.
Thinking back, I realized it had been over a year. Oh. Well, I guess I
quit then. Gee, that was hard. You gotta admire my moral character. The
main reason was that when it came to holding my smoke, I was a real
featherweight. One toke was all it took to leave me spending the rest of
the evening pointing at the Moon and giggling. Weed is inconvenient when
you have to stop and consider whether you might be driving in the next
six hours whenever someone passes you a joint. This being California, I
usually do have to drive somewhere in the next six hours, and I much
prefer the comfort of remembering which side of the road I’m supposed to
be driving on. Reduces the stress levels, you know.

But I’m doing this digression in case anyone out there thinks that I’m
some sort of expert on weed growing. I’m not. I know a female plant is
desirable and a male plant isn’t, but I couldn’t tell you with any great
certainty which was which.

Even before Proposition 215, the Compassionate Care Act, was passed,
Northern California had a reputation for growing and exporting weed. In
most northern counties on the coast north of San Francisco, it was
probably the leading cash crop, and might have been so here in inland
Siskiyou County, as well. The temperate rain forests and Mediterranean
climate of the inland valleys encourage the growth of nuclear marijuana,
stuff that would affect Cheech and Chong much the way one hit of Mexican
junk weed affects me.

Since the Act passed, things have changed. Medical Marijuana
dispensaries have sprung up all over the state, thousands of them. We
actually have more in Siskiyou County than we do McDonalds’ Restaurants,
although with a score of 3-2, that’s not a real impressive statistic.

Just about anyone can open a clinic so long as they get an ok from the
local authorities, so the clinics range from scrupulously law-abiding to
flat-out dodgy, usually reflecting the morality of the local police. Up
here, the cops are pretty skeptical about the whole thing (the first
dispensary opened only a couple of months ago) and so the local outfits
are meticulous about demanding proof of a prescription (usually the
’script itself) getting a clinic ID that they have to show before they
are even permitted to go back and look at the produce. Not all the
cops—I know a California Highway Patrol officer who recently retired and
is now happily growing marijuana in the back 40.

Further, a lot of the clinics are run by people for whom medical
marijuana has been a godsend. It’s effective in alleviating intractable
pain without the risks of morphine, heroin or oxycontin. It greatly
alleviates nausea from cancer treatments, and is effective in treating
the discomfort of glaucoma. In fact, I knew a guy back in 1987 who had a
marijuana prescription, then extremely rare, for exactly that, secondary
to severe diabetes. He showed me his little tin of state-grown weed. It
looked like the state made their joints using one of those clunky old
roll-your-own machines you could buy with Bugler tobacco.

What caused the dispensaries, and above-ground marijuana cultivation, to
explode in the past year is that the state decided that “personal use”
was too vague, and dealt with it in a relatively sensible way: a grower
is permitted to sell his excess crop to the dispensaries.

This basically ensures that there is an unlimited supply of weed. The
price of weed is already crashing (anyone growing a big crop in their
basement hoping to become rich is going to discover that they might get
$100 a pound, instead of the $400 an ounce of of last year). So at this
point, there’s probably two or three little back yard weed patches on
every suburban block in the state, millions of people growing. And some
of the serious growers are renting warehouses.

Grass is probably the most thoroughly socialized underground hobby
America has, even more prevalent than porn. Back before 215, I would
have guessed that about 1 in 5 adults in California smoked weed. Now I
would say it’s actually about 1 in 3. I’ve encountered people I would
never have in a million years have figured for pot smokers, grinning and
showing me their scripts.

Pot dispensaries are no more remarkable than liquor stores at this
point, although there tends to be a lot less vomit on the sidewalks
around the dispensaries. If Americans are going to embrace another
medically questionable habit, they could do far worse than marijuana,
and frequently do. Cigarettes, booze, double cheeseburgers, television,
twitter, you name it. Weed is less destructive.

So with marijuana out in the open, and widespread, it’s no surprise that
there are no less than three different initiative petition efforts going
to get propositions on the ballot next spring that will just simply
legalize marijuana.

I’ve always favored it; I suspect that zero-tolerance for marijuana,
including poisoning it with paraquat and giving life sentences to
dealers, played a big role, first with the rise of easy-to-transport
“white drugs” such as cocaine, and then the scourge of cheap,
easy-to-make meth. People like to get high. That’s human nature (and one
shared by most warm-blooded animals), and if marijuana is too expensive
or unavailable, they’ll turn to something else.

The second big plus to legalizing it is that this will make it possible
to grow large amounts of hemp. This is an incredibly valuable plant, one
that makes superb textiles and paper, is far more eco-friendly (doesn’t
deplete the soil like cotton, doesn’t decimate forests or require
bleaching like wood pulp paper) and the seed is nearly the perfect
nutritional food. It makes great paper—I have some hemp paper that is 15
years old, exposed to air, and it’s never yellowed or become brittle,
the way wood pulp paper does.

Even if the state doesn’t tax weed (and it will, you can be sure), it
will save hundreds of millions in police time, courts, and jails. If
weed is legalized, the governor will have little choice but to pardon
all non-violent prisoners who were jailed for selling weed, releasing
tens of thousands of people. And California needs the money. I heard an
estimate that just the sales tax on weed could raise $25 million a year
in revenues. I got a good laugh out of that. Even with the price
collapse, Siskiyou County alone could produce that much weed.

An article today reported that the district attorney of Los Angeles
County is fighting to close down the dispensaries. That article noted
that if subject to sales tax, weed would bring about $1.3 billion into
state coffers.

As for neighboring states, they’re just going to have start thinking
about legalizing it too. Because constitutionally, they can’t put up
search stations on the state borders.

It’s a change long overdue. Forty years overdue.

“Welcome back, America. We missed you.”

Bryan Zepp Jamieson, October 8, 2009

I think most people, when hearing that the Nobel Peace Prize had been
awarded to Barack Obama, were incredulous. Matt Drudge had a headline
that seemed to encapsulate the reaction most people had: “For WHAT?”
American troops are still in Iraq, although their presence is greatly
reduced. Obama has been trying to shut down Gitmo, but it’s still there,
and 150 untried and uncharged men still languish, their lives pissed
away by American caprice. And in Afghanistan, the occupation continues,
and Obama is said to be dithering over whether to send 40,000 more
troops or 60,000.

The last American to win a Nobel Peace prize was Al Gore, for his work
on global warming. But even on that score, Obama seemed a questionable
choice. While he has strongly advocated green technology and industry,
his attitude on global action is mixed, to the extent that there are
accusations that the Americans are trying to undermine any accord to be
reached at the big upcoming conference in Copenhagen.

Other American presidents have won the prize. Teddy Roosevelt got one in
1905 for his work on setting up a peace treaty to end the
Russian/Japanese war. Woodrow Wilson got one in 1919 for working to
establish the League of Nations. Jimmy Carter, who was cheated out of
the prize for the Camp David accords, got one anyway in 2002 for his
humanitarian work in general. In all three cases, it’s not hard to see
why they won the prize. In fact, with one glaring exception, the Nobel
Peace Prize has usually made sense. That exception, of course, was Henry
Kissinger. They gave him the award for his role in the Vietnam peace
talks, along with his counterpart, Le Duc Tho, and had to ignore his
hobby of advocating the immolation of hundreds of thousand of men, women
and children by carpet bombing in his effort to prevail at the peace
talks. That was a bit like giving Tony Soprano an award for labor
negotiations.

But what, exactly, did Obama do to win the Nobel Peace Prize?

Obama himself seemed at a bit of a loss, saying, “To be honest, I do not
feel that I deserve to be in the company of so many of the
transformative figures who’ve been honored by this prize — men and
women who’ve inspired me and inspired the entire world through their
courageous pursuit of peace.”

I’m glad that Obama was inspired by other Nobel Peace Prize winners, but
it seems a thin reason for getting one himself. That’s a bit like being
invited to join the band REM just because you like their music.
Obviously, a clearly perplexed and surprised Obama felt the same way.

I don’t have any leads into the thinking in the Nobel committee’s
selection, but I can hazard a guess.

Simply stated, Obama got the prize because he isn’t George W. Bush.

There’s no delicate way of putting it: during the two Bush terms, the
United States behaved like Nazi Germany. It invaded two sovereign
nations that were not aggressive, posed no threat to the United States,
and then occupied them. The United States set up gulags around the
world, both known (Gitmo) and unknown (even now we still don’t have a
clear accounting as to how many US gulags there are in eastern Europe
and the former Soviet ‘Stans).

As the rest of the world surged forward, hoping to deal with global
warming and the economic meltdown, the US sought to sabotage any efforts
to deal with pollution or anything that might impede what the
administration clearly saw as a divine right of major corporations to
rape the world, and it was runaway cowboy capitalism in America that
caused the economic meltdown.

To the rest of the world, the US had turned into a rogue nation.
Countries that had, for years, embraced the American model now anxiously
worried that Americanism might damage their own economies and the rights
of their own people. Even in Canada, Conservative plans to privatize the
economy were stalled because the opposing parties held up the American
economy – as a bad example. Canada is America’s best friend; when
Canadians are showing pictures of Uncle Sam and saying, “Don’t be that
guy,” it’s a sign that something is desperately wrong with America.

Despite the self-pitying whines of right wingers who feel, in the words
of the Randy Newman song, “Nobody loves us, everybody hates us, guess
we’ll drop the big one on them,” America was the best loved and most
respected country in the world all the way through to 2001. Everyone
knew America had flaws, but counted on America to at least try to do the
right thing. It made the failures easier to forgive, knowing that
America wanted to do right.

Watching America during the Bush years was pretty much like watching a
close friend or relative succumb to a bad drug habit. You could see that
person going downhill self-destructively, and you knew that at some
level, that person could see it too, but that wasn’t going to make it stop.

Then came the election of 2008. Obama, just by being elected, made a
statement about war mongering, police state stuff, racism, greed, and
being a corporate lackey. His election showed that the people in America
still had some resolve, and weren’t always going to do the bidding of
the corporate interests that have so corrupted and subsumed the American
government.

Obama was America’s way of standing up in front of a group of friendly
strangers and saying, “My name is America, and I’m an alcoholic.” That
Obama was elected showed that Americans realized that America had a
problem, and it was time to address that problem.

The rest of the world was paying close attention. When Obama drew those
huge crowds in Berlin, they weren’t there for the novelty act of a black
man running for President; they were there to see if Obama could remind
them of the America of the Marshall Plan, the America that dared to go
to the Moon, the America that airlifted millions of tons of food into
Berlin rather than let the Communists take over. Was there anything left
of the America that vowed to feed the world, that wanted to extend the
five basic freedoms to all people, that told the world there was nothing
to fear but fear itself?

Obama isn’t the answer. He is simply an answer. He can’t cure all the
evils of the Republican regime, and doesn’t want to cure some. But he
has at least stopped the calamitous plunge that defined America during
the previous eight years. Instead of the swaggering, empty little bully
boy whose cowardice was so evident, the American president was now calm,
reflective, intelligent.

You can’t give the Nobel Prize to a country. So they gave it to the
individual who best reflected what was happening to that country.

The Nobel Prize committee remembered the years when America was great.
They remembered when America was strong, when Presidents sent their own
sons to fight in wars that America fought, not because it wanted to, but
because it had to do the right thing. They remembered when American
supplies landed in areas of drought or famine or war, with no surly
remarks about giving precious food to undeserving ethnic terms while
people at home needed help. They remembered an America determined to
fight poverty and privation, that felt a moral calling to make the world
a better place.

Obama isn’t all those things. America isn’t all those things. But
Obama’s election showed that America had stopped turning her back on her
own strength, her own goodness, her own greatness.

They weren’t giving the award to Obama. They were giving the award to
America. They wanted America to know how much they valued the America of
years past, the good guys that everyone respected. They wanted to
belatedly thank America, and to wish America success in her efforts at
sobriety.

They were, in effect, telling America with this award, “Welcome back,
America, we missed you.”

As Michael Moore noted, getting the prize gives Obama something to live
up to, and I hope that Obama really does see it that way himself. He’s
not perfect, a long way from it, but his heart does seem to be in the
right place, and it was a good time for America to be reminded that she
does have friends who care about her.

Obama may not have done anything to deserve a Nobel Peace Prize, but it
might just be the most sensible – and the most productive – choice
they’ve ever made for that honor.

Welcome back, America. We missed you.

Tim Teeman, The Times Online, September 30, 2009

A conversation with Gore Vidal unfolds at his pace. He answers questions imperiously, occasionally playfully, with a piercing, lethal dryness. He is 83 and in a wheelchair (a result of hypothermia suffered in the war, his left knee is made of titanium). But he can walk (“Of course I can”) and after a recent performance of Mother Courage at London’s National Theatre he stood to deliver an anti-war speech to the audience.

How was his friend Fiona Shaw in the title role? “Very good.” Where did they meet? Silence. The US? “Well, it wasn’t Russia.” What’s he writing at the moment? “It’s a little boring to talk about. Most writers seem to do little else but talk about themselves and their work, in majestic terms.” He means self-glorifying? “You’ve stumbled on the phrase,” he says, regally enough. “Continue to use it.”

Vidal is sitting in the Connaught Hotel in Mayfair, where he has been coming to stay for 60 years. He is wearing a brown suit jacket, brown jumper, tracksuit bottoms; his white hair twirled into a Tintin-esque quiff and with his hooded eyes, delicate yet craggy features and arch expression, he looks like Quentin Crisp, but accessorised with a low, lugubrious growl rather than camp lisp.

He points to an apartment opposite the hotel where Churchill stayed during the Second World War, as Downing Street was “getting hammered by the Nazis. The crowds would cheer him from the street, he knew great PR.”

In a flash, this memory reminds you of the swathe of history Vidal has experienced with great intimacy: he was friends with JFK, fought in the war, his father Gene, an Olympic decathlete and aeronautics teacher, founded TWA among other airlines and had a relationship with Amelia Earhart. (Vidal first flew and landed a plane when he was 10.) He was a screenwriter for MGM in the dying days of the studio system, toyed with being a politician, he has written 24 novels and is hailed as one of the world’s greatest essayists.

He has crossed every boundary, I say. “Crashed many barriers,” he corrects me.

Last year he famously switched allegiance from Hillary Clinton to Barack Obama during the Democratic nomination process for president. Now, he reveals, he regrets his change of heart. How’s Obama doing? “Dreadfully. I was hopeful. He was the most intelligent person we’ve had in that position for a long time. But he’s inexperienced. He has a total inability to understand military matters. He’s acting as if Afghanistan is the magic talisman: solve that and you solve terrorism.”

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Who says right wingers can’t be trained?

Bryan Zepp Jamieson, September 27, 2009

My wife and I have been training a rat terrier pup for the past few
weeks. He’s a smart little guy, and prompt and eager to obey the two
most important commands: “come” and “sit”. He’s not yet four months old,
so more elaborate commands await him.

This morning, Rygel and I walked down to our local post office, a
distance of about a kilometer. It was his longest walk to date, and he
was frisking and jumping on the way home, not even slightly tired.
(Proper leash training begins this week). As we came back, we would stop
so he could sniff something exciting (our neighborhood has, along with
dogs and cats, ducks, chickens, and a lot of wildlife that traverse at
night from the surrounding forest. Lots of adventurous scents for a
little puppy, and I was indulging him.)

But he would get overstimulated, so we would stop, and I would say
“Rygel. Sit” with the appropriate hand gesture. He would plop his butt
right down with a happy and eager expression on his face. He would get
praised on what a smart boy he was, and we would continue. When we
started teaching him that command we would (as with all new commands)
give him a doggie treat when he did what we wanted, along with praise.
But once he gets halfway reliable with a specific command, the treats
cease. He always gets praise, of course. But he’s just the right size,
and he’s brown and white, and if he starts getting thick around the
middle, he could be in mortal danger if the local HS football team were
to make an understandable mistake. That’s no way to treat a dominaar.
And the limitation of treats to new training adds emphasis to the new
commands.

His adolescence is rapidly approaching, and he’s going to be willful and
defiant. But just having those two commands in our arsenal will make
getting him through that difficult stage a lot easier.

We got a kitten for a companion for Rygel (named “Lally” by the kitten’s
original owner, an eight year old girl, and it stuck) and while we were
horrified the first time we spotted Rygel dragging Lally around the
house by her throat, it quickly became clear that Lally could escape
when she needed to, and that the roughhousing was consensual. The two
adult cats and the ancient Samoyed have all taken turns teaching Rygel
to Know His Place, a process that involved loud puppy shrieks of outrage
but left no permanent marks. And now the animals have all pretty well
settled in with one another. Moon, the preposterously old (14½ years)
Sammie, seems to enjoy mentoring Rygel.

All that said, I’m going to compare poor little Rygel to America’s right
wing. But don’t worry: I’m not out to defame my dog. He’s intelligent,
friendly, sweet tempered and anxious to work with others. Everything the
right wing isn’t.

The comparison is mostly the training.

We already know that right wingers will cheerfully go against their own
best interests on the behest of Faux news and all the rest of the right
wing echo machine. That’s why we are treated, on a daily basis, to the
ludicrous and even grotesque sight of seniors campaigning to keep
“socialist” government away from their Medicare, or out of work factory
workers supporting “right to work” laws, I refer to the phenomenon as
“cultivating fools”. Not politic, I agree, but perfectly apt.

These people are TRAINED. Rupert Murdoch or Karl Rove snap a clip on the
ring through their noses, and lead them down any path they care to, and
they trail along obediently, tails wagging behind them. Rygel could
learn how to be a good little dog from them.

The latest example involves the big foofooraw over ACORN. The advocacy
group has long been a target of the GOP, because it focuses on getting
the poor and minorities to vote, and attempts to empower them with legal
and social aid. The GOP utterly hates people who do that, and will stop
at nothing to destroy them. Indeed, the whole thing of the Bush
administration illegally firing federal District Attorneys stemmed from
the refusal of many of those DA’s to carry out Karl Rove’s vendetta
against ACORN, arguing that it was their job to investigate and
prosecute actual crimes, and not to frame people for political reasons.

Two sleazy clowns, apparently at the behest of Andrew Breitbart, a Matt
Drudge protègé with pretensions of being a journalist, went into ACORN
offices and passed themselves off as a couple looking to set up a
business. They gradually worked around to saying they wanted to open a
brothel, and wanted to know the tax advantages to hiring illegal
underage girls to work there.

It’s safe to assume that the majority of ACORN offices threw them out on
their slimy asses. But a couple played along, mostly waiting to see
where they were going with this. One, realizing they were frauds, pulled
her own head game on them, claiming that she had murdered her
ex-husband, but shhh! Don’t tell anyone! Another one, the one accused of
conspiring to set up a child prostitution ring (conspiring with whom?
Shhh!) called the police after that loathsome pair had slimed out.
The two clowns playing the class act of a prostitute and her pimp were
James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles. They were secretly recording the
proceedings. Given that they were in a office, asking for tax advice,
confidentiality rules were in place, which meant that the ACORN people
had a reasonable expectation of privacy. In other words, O’Keefe and
Giles violated the rights of the ACORN volunteers, and since they did
this in Maryland where non-consensual videotaping is illegal, may face
criminal charges along with the civil suit they already face. Definitely
class acts. Rygel would kick sand over them.

Highly edited tapes of the ones that played along—although none of them
actually agreed to the scheme—got wall to wall coverage on the vicious
and dishonest pseudo-journalistic outlets such as Fox, Drudge, and all
the Kangarupe Murdoch “newspapers”.

A couple of the volunteers were “fired” (ie, told not to show up until
the heat was off, but reckless outfits like Faux called it being fired
anyway), and Congress, in a spectacular display of cowardice, suspended
funding for ACORN. Since this makes up less than 10% of their funding,
it won’t do them any real damage.

And of course, the howls of moral outrage and breast beating among right
wingers was endless. “They were ENDORSING CHILD PROSTITUTION!”

The horror, the horror!

Of course, it never occurred to any of the howlers that the two were
soliciting on behalf of child prostitution. Never mind that the intent
of O’Keefe and Giles was just to entrap people; they were soliciting
criminal activity.

The main howl, of course, was that taxpayers were supporting this
incredibly vicious, evil criminal enterprise in which a couple of people
actually bandied about thoughts on opening a brothel. Right wingers were
apoplectic about that. Along, of course, with the usual pretenses that
Obama was secretly the head of ACORN and they were a recruiting office
for the Nazi Party and all the other insanities we’ve come to expect
from the lunatic right. (I was amused to see that even Ann Coulter
thinks it’s getting out of hand – given that she did much to instigate
such insanity, that’s a bit surprising – and is now trying to blame the
Obama/Hitler comparisons on liberals sneaking in with signs to make
right wingers look stupid. As if “Keep your government hands off my
Medicare” doesn’t.)

But the howlers are the same people who have been utterly silent about
the billions of dollars in tax payer money (tens of thousands times as
much as went to ACORN) that went to Halliburton, Kellogg-Brown-Root, and
Blackwater (now Xe). These are outfits that used those billions of
dollars to steal from the public, kill civilians for the fun of it,
endanger legitimate troops with provocations of the populations in Iran.

Their employees raped, looted, stole and burned people alive. While
there are doubtlessly decent people working in those outfits, there are
a lot who are sheer filth, who really are no better than Nazis.

The howlers were silent about the abuses of these outfits during the
Bush years, despite swarms of complaints from the military, despite the
stories of soldiers being electrocuted in the showers because of the
incredibly shoddy contract work, of civilian populations in an uproar
because mercenaries were shooting people for sport. I suspect the right
knew that these guys were utter slime: in a famous incident in the early
days of the Iraq occupation, an Iraqi mob got their hands on three
Blackwater employees, burned them, and left the charred corpses to hang
from a local bridge. The right’s response to this was muted. Even if the
individuals did nothing to deserve such a horrific fate, there was a
general appreciation that as Blackwater employees, they were a logical
target for such treatment.

How is it possible for people who howl about ACORN — an outfit that,
when all is said and done, is guilty of nothing worse than encouraging
people whom the GOP doesn’t like to vote — but yet remain silent, even
now, to government paying tax dollars to rapists and murderers to
endanger US troops?

Training. “Sit!” “Stand!” “Bark! Bark mindlessly and endlessly, until we
tell you to stop.”

If the right wing echo machine has taken nearly every moron in America
and turned them into inferior versions of dogs, the Democrats aren’t any
better, because they show only cowardice. The Democrats who voted to
defund ACORN should be hit with serious primary challenges next year to
get their craven asses out of Congress and replaced with Democrats who
can show even a little courage.

As for the Republicans, well, Ann Coulter is right, although she won’t
admit it: the right wing is beginning to lose control of their morons.
If you train dogs to be vicious and dishonest, you get vicious and
dishonest dogs.

Eventually, the GOP will learn why such demagoguery is always, in the
end, self-destructive.

And if Rygel had a tail, I’m sure he would wag it at the news.
Republicans are giving dogs a bad name.

Ted Rall, uExpress, September 24, 2009

NEW YORK–I got swine flu. Five days later, I was at death’s door–because my evil insurance company wouldn’t honor my doctor’s prescription. Memo to future revolutionaries: if you require a firing squad for the executives of the Health Insurance Plan (HIP) of New York, I’m handy with a rifle.

I wasn’t worried at first. A little sneezing, slightly achy joints. I figured it was my usual bout of fall allergies. There’s usually nothing to do but suffer. But I felt worse each day: achier, more congested, stiffer, headache, fevers. The third night was bad. I went to bed under a pile of comforters, chattering uncontrollably. Then nightsweats. I checked my temperature: 103.7. When your temperature looks like a classic rock station, it’s time to see the doctor.

I’ve known my general practitioner for decades. So I pay out-of-pocket to see him even though he’s not on HIP’s list of plan-approved doctors. Hey, what do you expect for $749.01 a month?

My ordeal with the insurance company began when I went to fill my prescription for Tamiflu, an antiviral medication that is widely considered the standard treatment for swine (and other types of) flu.

“Your insurance isn’t going to cover this,” the pharmacist said. “You would need a pre-approval from your doctor.”

“But that’s a prescription,” I said, motioning to the white slip of paper in her hand. For younger readers, I come from a generation when a doctor’s prescription was all you needed to get a medication.

“It’s not going to work,” she said, slowing her speech for emphasis. “This drug is for people who have the flu.”

“Um…I have the flu.”

“You have the flu?” She looked shocked.

Because Tamiflu or another drug called Relenza can significantly reduce flu symptoms if taken less than 48 hours after the onset of symptoms, people have been hoarding and taking anti-viral drugs prophylactically–especially in New York City. Given what was about to happen to me, I admire the hoarders. Smart.

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