A COUP BY ANY OTHER NAME WOULD SMELL AS BAD!

When is a coup not a coup? Apparently it is when the President won't say the word. I know it's a complicated business. Israel is worried about its security if Egypt were to descend further into chaos, Our own military contractors are worried about future sales to Egypt should we declare it a coup and have to stop military aid. The Saudi Royal  Family and various other of our allied Kings, Sheiks and Dictators in the region are probably a little nervous too. Then there is that whole democracy thing, you remember, our supposed support of fairly elected governments but maybe that's only when they turn out the way we want them to. No Islamic fundamentalist need participate! Can you imagine the message this is sending to the Muslim  world? 

I think we should at least be honest about the situation and admit that the Egyptian Army has executed a "Coup D'etat", deposed Egypt's first democratically elected government which we were more than a little nervous about and we are standing by and letting them do it. Our President won't even say the word.

BP: DON'T GET MAD, DON'T GET EVEN, GET SMART!

This cartoon was inspired by one of those warm and fuzzy BP commercials that talks about how much British Petroleum is doing to cleanup of the Gulf of Mexico and take care of all the folks along the Gulf Coast. At the same time I was reading about the considerable efforts BP is making in court to shirk it's responsibility in the matter. It just made me mad! Hence the cartoon you see above but that got me thinking. 

There is an old political saying that goes: "Don't Get Mad, Get Even!" As dumb as getting mad and doing something rash is, plotting revenge is probably worse. So what are we to do when something like a BP or Walmart commercial or price gouging at the gas pump makes us really mad? You know you are being lied to or cheated or both but what to do? Most of us just get cynical, learn to live with the situation and develop high blood pressure but there is another path you can take. Get Smart! Use your brain and figure out how you can change the situation. For instance, I won't shop at Walmart because of their labor practices and by doing some research I found that CostCo and WinCo have just as low of prices and they treat their employees fairly. I'm as upset as anyone about the manipulation of gas prices so I've decided that our next car is going to be either a plug in hybrid or an electric car. I'm doing my research now and I'm finding that prices are finally coming down into my price range. I know that there aren't easy solutions for every injustice but there are probably more options out there than you are aware of. 

As Progressives, we need to find these new solutions not just nationally but on an individual and community level, that's going to take some serious creative thought! So, like I say if you don't like the way things are going "Don't Get Mad, Don't Get Even, Get Smart!" 

RECYCLING AND "THE END OF TIMES!"

It's the old "Garbage In, Garbage Out" principle we've used for years with computer data but as it turns out it's kind of a natural law too. If you put millions of tons of non biodegradable trash, poisonous chemicals, heavy metals and greenhouse gasses into the environment a day you're going to get unbreathable air and undrinkable water back. If you take this pattern of behavior out it's logical conclusion you get an uninhabitable planet, game over, the end of time for mankind! 

Interestingly enough, one of the biggest and easiest things we can do to reverse this self-destructive trend is to recycle, repurpose  and repair our stuff instead of just throwing it away. We did it during World War II we can do it again. Some cities, like San Francisco California and Portland Oregon, are already trying to get to the point of recycling/composting 100% of their trash. Recycling needs to become an integral part of our society, something we teach our children, practice in our homes and support in our communities. People look at all our overwhelming environmental problems and wonder what they can do to change things. Well, recycling is an important first step that everyone can take to returning our environment to good health!

THE GREAT GUN DEBATE: THE NRA AND MY PERSONAL JOURNEY WITH GUNS.

I have conflicting feelings about guns. I was raised in a family of hunters. In the 1950s my Father was a logger and we were financially struggling. The deer that my Father and my Uncles killed during hunting season each year were an important part of our diet. The family would often spend a weekend or two at my Uncle's little tree farm just outside of Grants Pass Oregon where the whole hunting experience became kind of a family gathering. They were good times in my life but this warm fuzzy memory covered a darker reality that I would not be told about until I was fourteen. 

This dark side of my family came out when my parents finally explained why my uncle had only one arm. We had been told for years that he had lost it in a hunting accident but the reality was far more disturbing. As it turns out, back in 1930 my Grand Father, who suffered from mental illness and alcoholism, had gotten hold of a shotgun and tried to kill the entire family. He killed my Grand Mother and my Uncle fought with him but was nearly killed. He ended up losing his right arm and struggling for many years with bad health from infections caused by the buckshot and fragments of his coat that were embedded in his side. As my Grand Father reloaded my Father, who was five years old, escaped from the room. Even as an adult he could still remember the sound of buckshot hitting the wall of their screened in porch when he ran into the yard. My Grand Father then killed himself. It was quite a shock to learn all this. We were one of those family tragedies that you see on the TV news and we hadn't even known it but my journey with guns wasn't over.

Around this same time other events conspired to change my feelings about guns and blood sports generally. First was the death of my Sixth Grade teacher in a hunting accident. A member of his own hunting party shot him. Then a few blocks from our house a young boy accidentally shot and killed his brother while playing with loaded gun. Another boy in my math class committed suicide with a hand gun. All of these events and more were weighing on my mind but it was a relatively small thing that revealed to me how much my feelings about guns were changing.  I shot a robin one day with pellet gun. I knocked it right out of a tree and as I picked it up to inspect my prize the poor little thing pumped it's life's blood out into my hand. That day I stopped wanting to kill things. It's impact on my life was profound, perhaps because the bird was so small  and helpless, I'm not sure why exactly.

The warm fuzzy memories of my childhood had met the cold hard reality of how very dangerous guns are and I found that my interest in guns and blood sports was over. So I can understand the appeal of hunting and even collecting guns. I have a cousin who collects antique guns but I feel guns should be much more carefully regulated in the interest of public safety, like cars. Our current laws have so many loopholes in them that we have developed a very large prosperous black market for illegal gun traffickers right here in the United States and these guns are flowing through our gun shops and gun shows. Why do you think the NRA fights so hard to protect the sale of assault rifles with 30 round clips and a dysfunctional background check system? It's not for hunters or home protection or even to protect our civil liberties, it's to make sure that U.S. gun manufactures can continue to sell into this black market. How do you think the Mexican drug gangs get most of their arms? Estimates are as high as 90 percent of their weapons come from the U.S. I suspect they aren't the only ones buying their guns on our black market. We need to stop this!  

EARTH DAY: HOW FAR CAN A POLAR BEAR SWIM?

On this Earth Day, I can't help but wonder how many species we will have to lose before the Earth can no longer support mankind? Right now there are a host of species on the edge, from polar bears to honey bees but in thirty, forty, fifty, or perhaps a hundred years it may well be mankind that is on the endangered species list. If we continue to abuse nature now we will pay a very high price later.

UPDATE: Checkout what Louise Leakey thinks about the possibility of human extinction:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/louise-leakey/human-extinction_b_3543036.html

THE GHOST OF AYN RAND STRIKES BACK!

I think our nation is being haunted by a malevolent spirit. Not a spirit in the religious sense but more metaphysical in nature. We are talking here about the world of ideas. There are many ghosts in that world, ideas left over from dead people. There is a dark and a light side to the world of ideas sort of like in Star Wars. Some are good and enrich our lives, think Jesus, while others have staying power like Shakespeare, still others lurk in libraries barely noticed waiting for their opportunity to reinfect the minds of men. It is one of this last group that I fear has reemerged to vex mankind and our nation specifically. 

Ayn Rand was the person that spawned this powerful new ghost who walks among us. It lives in the pages of "Atlas Shrugged," her most important work. It has infected the minds of many powerful people including Alan Greenspan the former Fed Chairman, Congressman Paul Ryan Chairman of the powerful House Committee on the Budget, and Senator Rand Paul a potential Republican Presidential Candidate just to mention a few. Objectivism is the name that Ayn Rand wrapped around her ideas but you can see parts of her thinking spreading to the libertarian right, mainstream conservatism, and even the Tea Party to some degree. If unchecked it will soon form the intellectual foundation for the Republican Party and much of our economic elite on Wall Street if it hasn't already.

When you look closely at the core values of her philosophy the number one thing that jumps out at you is that she believes that selfishness is right and altruism is evil. So greed really is good and compassion is more than misguided in her book. At the top of the food chain in Rand's world are the economic elites which are in a life or death struggle with corrupt governmental elites for dominance. Everyday working people, the middle class, working class and poor are pretty much parasites wanting benefits that they have not earned. It reminds me a lot of the 47% Speech given by Mitt Romney in the 2012 Presidential Campaign and the fact that he was using her basic arguments to induce the  rich to give him their money tells me that the wealthy elites of our nation have already bought into her ideas whether they realize it or not. This type of thinking leads directly the situation we are now in, where the public is crying out for the government to invest in infrastructure, education and job creation but a Republican controlled Congress is forcing austerity measures, threatening to default on our national debt and trying to hack away at our social safety net programs.

I believe one of the reasons for the successful resurgence of Rand's ideas is that they are invisible to the public at large. Like a ghost they are moving among us undetected. We must change that! Many who are being baited in by parts of Objectivism do not understand the whole package they are buying into. For instance, many in the Tea Party love Rand's anti government rants about the virtues of unrestrained capitalism yet what many of these fine Christian people don't realize is that Rand hated Christianity specifically and religion in general. So they are being sucked into following a philosophy which is anti religious and anti Christian. It's hard to imagine that they would continue following her ideas if they understood the whole picture. This is just a small part of this malevolent philosophy and all of it needs to be dug up and exposed.

We on the left of the political spectrum can no longer afford to ignore Rand and her followers. If we want to have a society which is here to help all of it's citizens not just the elites and is not ripped apart by class warfare then Ayn Rand's Objectivist ideas must be challenged and debated openly so all can see where they will take us.