Path Through The Wormhole

Corporate Conspiracies Confirmed - Moyers, Moore, anti-Sicko Insurers

2009-07-17T13:15:00.007-05:00

Isn't it amazing the reality -- that conspiracy theorists are not just paranoid whackos -- is shown in this YouTube clip of an interview with a CIGNA communications director by Bill Moyers on PBS. Conspiracies are the reality in the corporate world and in government.

The evidence on screen showed communications among the health insurance industry -- in guarded phrasing -- to arrange political lobbying and public media influencing, as well as the admissions on the program by one of the organizers who formerly acted as CIGNA's henchman but saw the Sicko documentary as being valid originally.

We have been watching the consistently successful 'blunting' of the 9-11 'theorists' by the political media supporting Cheney's agenda and wondering how long it would take before the public would stumble over some exposed ragged edge of the operations behind the scenes in the corporate world or maybe slipping out from government.

Apparently the 'healthcare' pushing and shoving was intense enough -- and not as hideous as 9-11 -- to turn up such a voice in the safety of a milder publishing venue.

It's not that we're in favor of the Moyers's defended victim of 'blunting' -- namely Michael Moore's movie "Sicko".

We have lived in Canada for 10 years and used their government healthcare system for ordinary routine doctor's visits mostly, including their clinics. The problem with heaping up the tax burdens required to support such a system, as is advocated in "Sicko", is that the product -- allopathic drug pushing -- is so damaging while being promoted as 'healthy' and 'care-solutions' and blessedly normal.

Other than the obstetric alternative possibilities -- home-like birth, midwives, etc available in some Euro systems -- those people are not otherwise healthier with their government tax-funded health care. Even Australia's statistics show the same death-roulette being played with the drug-pushers and disease-treatment pushers.

American stats -- allopathic-medicine caused deaths -- were the 3rd leading cause of death in the US, just below heart disease and cancer. That's the death-roulette that's being foisted in the US 'healthcare' solutions. There's little difference elsewhere in the industrialized world, other than the Euro's being able to use midwives, and the availability in some European countries of hypnosis as an anesthetic now emerging as majorly better than the assortment of drugs pumped into surgery patients for anesthesia (and related) purposes.

The problem we are facing in the US 'healthcare' scene is the drug industry (and their pushers in the AMA and the FDA) -- not just the insurers. Yet the entire fiasco in Washington DC is focused only on the insurers -- and those Americans who have no insurance.

Don't be fooled by the flim-flam misrepresentation of opinion polls where the media tell you -- the supposed innumerate reader -- what the numbers mean, like we saw in the USA Today's Gallup results just recently, to support their own favored political futures. The key factor was when the poll asked the participants the crucial question of setting cost containment against universal inclusiveness. People did, sensibly recognize and choose, cost containment in the large majority. Intuitively people see the financial damaging that the allopathic system is inflicting, including the fact that a majority of mortgage defaults was due to unexpected medical bills.

Many people already know that it's not fair to force people to participate in a program in the name of bogus inclusiveness which is what the proponents of the current favored bill was doing. The tactic used by the promoters of the current bill: Blaming those who refuse to pay their medical bills as adding to the insurance costs of those inside the insured group, when in fact those inside the insured group get tax benefits denied to those who are outside. But that's not all the money gaming in this blaming as we shall shortly see.

Being among those who don't carry the usual sort of insurance -- we self-insure, we don't want allopathic treatments and even avoid the optional Medicare coverage opportunities -- we would like to clue the public into the reality of where the pea is hidden in these shellgames called medical insurance for the uninsured -- some of whom, like us, don't want 'health insurance'.

When you have no big insurer behind you at the bill-paying point, the killers among the 'medical community' do present you -- their patient -- with prices that are sometimes anywhere from triple to ten times the price they charge the big insurers. It's no wonder many people who are not buying 'insurance' fail to pay their bills.

It took several months, many letters, persistent phone calls, extensive research to document the price discrepancies, the invalid charges, plus applications for programs and certifying of financial resources -- and ultimately in one case, confrontations with the doctor himself and the harassment staffers his incompetant biller had hired -- before the gougers backed off. The anesthetist had no clue what his out-sourced billers were doing and was amenable to reason and evidence.

For the surgeon, who was an independent (not a hospital-office supported practitioner) and was among the few who offered the same prices to self-insureds as they offered to big insurers, they were satisfied with a longterm, no-interest payment schedule and are now paid-off. Surely that would be the way that decent payment for services could be handled by providers in the health industry, since those surgeons were doing it and were a successful group practice. The insurance problem would be truly solved.

Accident coverage is not part of the drug-pushing and disease-treatment extortionary torture-scene routines. That true 'emergency' sort of MASH-unit resource is the appropriate limit -- based on observation and research -- for the allopathic professionals. Their disease treatment is thoroughly tainted.

More on alternatives to fill the gap, and on self-insuring financial planning later, because nutritional solutions, midwifery, and hypnosis have proven themselves to be far better health care than the blessed allopathy system with its drug-blessers and pushers.

Darwinian Bigotry in Judicial Malfeasance in a Divorce Case

2009-03-20T00:17:00.016-05:00

North Carolina Judge Mangum in Wake County has disgraced himself -- and the freedom loving, self-confident half of the scientific world -- by engaging in what looks like science-bigotry in none other than a divorce case.

Talk about history mirroring itself. It was in Tennessee that the South did disgrace itself many years ago by engaging in religious-bigotry to prevent a teacher from introducing a theory – Darwin's Evolution – into his own Tennessee classroom to challenge a legislated bigotry that was designed to establish Bible teachings as official doctrines for students to accept without 'confusion' of other ideas of where humans came from.

This year is the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth. In the aftermath of the science community's impotence in the face of GWBushism's imposition of his own brand of political Christianity – done to stifle the environmental and other dissenting science advising voices opposing his policies -- now the science magazines, the academic community and the media have been engaging in an orgy of articles, full magazine focused issues and celebratory events to flaunt Darwinism 'rightness' and to ridicule 'creationism'. Their goal is to combat the residual political doctrines that had so irritated the science and academic world -- Bushism's religious group paybacks to political supporters, that evolution be demoted to questioned theory level in student textbooks. The overriding strident attitude of these editorials and feature articles was to trumpet a hollow sounding success story that encourages bigotry among those whose grasp of freedom's essence and American rights -- not to mention genuine scientific confidence when questioned -- is slipping into the dustbin.

It appears to have permeated the mind of Judge Mangum whose blatantly prejudiced orders to strip a homeschooling mother of her parental rights to suit an overly adulterous spouse in order to 'challenge' her children's religious beliefs is making so much unfavorable news that he's revised his initial reliance on everything that happened -- and was exposed online -- in the courtroom documents that have been hashed over on the internet – print and broadcast media – and trying to justify his original injustice on the basis of other less public documents which he thinks will not be as easily accessed by the public online. But we shall see, it doesn't look like the internet's justice system is going to be deterred any time soon.

The controversy is still generating a lot of attention with little consensus on the issues except that
-- parents should have the right to guide and structure their children's education and upbringing
and that
-- the judge thoroughly was making a mess of the case by ordering the children to attend public schooling while allowing the adulterous husband to live in the common home that he's disgraced with his adulterous affairs which still continue publicly. And further insisting that only the mother be psychologically evaluated, for which she would be expected to pay in spite of her current stay-at-home mother status as basically a pauper with the absolute minimum childsupport allowable under the state's formula, ignoring the substantial $122,000/year income of the adulterous father.

Politically, their state senator condemned the judge's order as 'terrible' and North Carolina Governor Perdue had just reaffirmed her position as supporting homeschooling for its contribution to excellence and to diversity in the education efforts of the state. All of which criticisms are likely being brought to the judge's notice just as opinions are being formulated publicly. Clearly the adulterous husband has considerable influence in the minds of some officials but his behavior is despicable and we would suggest that there be another poll conducted to answer the following issue.

Kings and baronets have abdicated their rights as kings and elites in order to be with their true love, giving up all power over the country they were ruling or ceding their titles to younger brothers. This kingship right is a family right. As is a barony. What about parenthood, is it abdicatable? Can it be lost due to malfeasance?

Just how unending is parenthood? Is the holder of the title 'parent' able to lose all power over the family rights that they once held? In fact, parenthood claims cease because some are able to give up their children for adoption. Parenthood ends then, so clearly it's not a lifelong, inalienable right and is abdicatable. What about a child abuser claiming parenthood? Even a pedophile. Conviction of serious crimes – felonies and damaging criminal activity – that result in lengthy imprisonment -- for violence especially -- effectively terminate most family relationships for at least the incarceration period and sometimes forever. Just how inalienable, vulnerable to malfeasance evidence, are parenthood's rights?

Florida, and by now probably other states, have judged that a child who is of a certain knowledgeable age – about early teen age, just a couple years older than these children -- can divorce his or her father – or mother – so the parent-right can be terminated at will for malfeasance, hence it can also be lost for malfeasance and is not inalienable.

In this contest of wills between Vanessa Mills and Thomas Mills, his demand that his children should not be allowed to continue homeschooling under their mother's direction is the pivotal issue.

To evaluate the fitness of the defendant Thomas Mills to be a co-parent, we need to evaluate the judge's decided preference for Thomas Mills – since the judge's apparent bias could be serving as an indicative favorable character witness.

The judge has -- unexplainably in justice terms -- sided with this adulterous husband to the extent of actually having made biased references in the court proceedings including to the idea that he would be looking forward to how public schooling would "challenge" Vanessa's teaching of her rightfully-held and chosen faith in the minds of her children. Unexplainably because – for a judge's professional responsibility, he's supposed to be committed to fairness and impartiality and evidence and to protecting the innocent children in divorce cases, not treating them as rats in a maze. Instead his judicial favoritism pointedly sided with the public school option (cheapest for one party and on that party's demand list) -- not an alternate private schooling less disruptive to the children considering their religious background and more acceptable to the other party in this dispute who had removed her children specifically from public schools, as well as sensibly acceptable presumably to a well-to-do reasonable father, clue number one. This judge-person's professional sense of justice does willingly want to put the children's feet to the flames instead of protecting their fragile interests. How much do you trust someone's judgment who would harm small animals and children in crisis? How trustworthy is his character valuation?

Bias occurs when opinions get adopted in spite of evidence to the contrary, leading to clue number two. The judge's bias – yes bias because the judge's statements are in conflict with the evidence presented in this case -- is confirmed by other comments he made. Specifically, in one comment he disparaged these children's education for lack of socialization in their homeschooling – which was effectively disputed with extensive lists of the children's social activities within and outside their homeschooling community, which evidence he was fully aware of in the documents that the presiding judge has in preparation for a case like this. How trustworthy is the judgement of someone who selectively ignores facts of evidence and presents character support for false claims?

The list of demonstrations of bias continues. The children are doing well academically – judging by the state's testing – and this academic progress under Vanessa's guidance was openly acknowledged in the courtroom by all parties. Yet the judge steadfastly maintains his opposition which is solely focused on their unusual religious beliefs that make them different from the public school's mandated teachings. The judge's attack is against homeschooling's rightful role as a valued diversity component of the state's education programming and a stimulus for excellence in learning. This role is specifically stated in the Governor's proclamation honoring homeschooling's academic excellence and diversity value to the state just recently. This judge is ignorant of or disdainful of the importance of diversity -- strictly bigotry, in spite of the testimony and evidence of his peers and betters in North Carolina's government. Such a stance shows ugly bigotry instead of judicial fairness based on evidence. Judge Mangum's bigoted performance disqualifies his opinion of the defendant adulterous husband, and in fact suggests an unsavory truth about his favored party.

There was no evidence presented that showed that the children's rightful comfort in their current caregiving was in need of improvement, with the exception of the influence of the adulterous husband. The current pseudo-science-based-bigotry is being applied by an ignorant judge instead of professional judgment of rightness, otherwise these conflicts between evidence and bigotry-based orders could not have happened. The judge has been brainwashed into desecrating constitutional respect for religious freedom. His reliance on the general consensus of the establishment scientific community in favor of evolution is no excuse for desecrating his responsibility to American justice under constitutional law.

Furthermore, a general consensus by the scientific community doesn't make the status of theories invulnerable to change. In the beginning of the last century, it was the consensus of the physics community within the science world that they had fully identified the laws of physics and it was now merely a matter of refinement of the constants of their glorified physical laws. Then came Einstein, then came quantum theory, then the physics community exploded with new ideas never dreamed of before in their earlier complacency. Genuine science doesn't quail before questioning people and instead demand that they salute. Personally I tend to think the evolution evidence – though not the science evidence on consciousness nor life -- will hold up to the ongoing exploration of the intricacies of how evolution works in the myriad situations where it must be operating. But that doesn't preclude honoring another's sincerely held ideas that hurt no one, including Thomas Mills nor the judge, and may in fact hold the key to understanding consciousness or life.

Hence we shall consider the Judge's opinion of the situation and his favored defendant to be faulty and shall disqualify that judge as a reliable character reference for the defendant. In fact we shall be leery of this defendant because the favorable opinion of his examining character witness – the court's judge -- is based on that witness blocking out evidence, which is a bad sign. However, we shall start again from scratch and examine the existing evidence and see what it shall indicate about whether Thomas Mills would be a fit co-parent or has abdicated his parental rights.

What evidence of parental aptitude has Thomas Mills shown or has he shown evidence of significant malfeasance and callous abusiveness in his dealings with these children and dishonesty in his claims of caring?

We begin by looking at his claims of caring and what they show about his motivations and priorities. He claims his success as a co-parent is dependent on Vanessa's ceasing to homeschool their children and that their children must attend public school. This is his priority demand so he can have equal co-custody. Some people would agree that his rights were being violated if his wife's chosen method of educating their children was to be continued at his expense. But what about the children's wellbeing since this is a priority in fairly adjudicating a divorce where children are involved. Otherwise the children's wellbeing is being set aside in favor of one demander – as are the parental rights of the other party being unjustly set aside.

Our precondition for even considering his demand should be that the children would be enrolled in a Montessori or Quaker private school which would be necessary to protect children being uprooted and shuffled around like property between hostile parties. And further it would be a precondition that the demander shall be responsible for all tuition since this change is at his own demand.

Thomas Mills' only reason available for making such a demand is so he can be fully involved in their children's education while they are in his custody. But has he demonstrated that this involvement is how he will operate when he is no longer under duress of court judgment? The children's wellbeing is at risk here as well as the imposition of a possible injustice to their mother's own rights to control her children's education and upbringing. That upbringing and education has been acknowledged by both the defendant and the judge -- in the courtroom -- to be fine mothering and to show proficiency in her handling her children's education. So we must not allow the children's welfare to be disrespected.

We shall not tolerate any cessation of homeschooling that does not meet the private schooling requirement. Should Thomas Mills insist that his requirement of public schooling is a precondition in order for him to agree to other settlement terms. We shall point out that this homeschooling arrangement was in place for the LAST FOUR YEARS during which it was never disputed UNTIL Vanessa filed for divorce after finding out about Thomas Mills' adulterous affairs. Somehow this his current demand suggests something other than genuine disputed parenthood rights on Thomas Mills' side, more like paybacks for divorcing him. This is what he would be revealing about his parenting motivations.

In addition it reveals that he gets other benefits from such a demand of insisting on public schooling. First of all, he avoids the expenses that she is incurring as part of her homeschooling processes. And public schooling is cheap by any financial standards and even moreso for him because his income would allow private schooling in the venues we have selected for their philosophy where children are respected.

With acceptance of our precondition of appropriate private schooling which he would pay for, we can now examine his track record of parenting under previous circumstances.

Thomas Mills' own proven acceptance for four years of Vanessa's religious-based homeschooling -- into which his contribution of time and attention was likely absent due to his philandering with a mistress -- suggests that his newfound upright-concern that his wife and children are 'IN A CULT' is fraudulent play-acting, indicating that he is fully capable of attempting to swindle the court, disrespecting the oath he took to tell the truth while telling a lie under oath. That alone would disqualify his pledges of caring co-parenting as reliable in our opinion.

But there's more to this strange lying than just reliability in pledging caregiving.

What sort of genuine parent would be pleased FOR FOUR YEARS-- including statements to that effect in his court testimony while simultaneously expecting the court to believe that the homeschooling of his children was an arrangement he genuinely considered to be 'BRAINWASHING' of those children 'IN A CULT' of Vanessa's choosing, making her the scapegoat of his displeasure??

Which leaves the alternative explanation standing that his demand is abusive in the extreme. Abusers' main weapon in holding their victims from relief and from escaping further abuse is to isolate them from friends and family. This tactic is recognized as a defining characteristic of abusers. Thomas Mill's phony concern – to which the judge is providing malfeasant support – does precisely this. Specifically, Vanessa's homeschooling friends and her church 'family' are in support of her rightful freedom from a terminated relationship with an adulterous husband and he knows his scapegoating claims will cut those ties better than he is otherwise able, especially if he and his lawyer can dupe the judge into enforcing Vanessa's separation from her support groups' mutual ongoing children's activities and social/religious events where divorced women are less welcome in most circles.

We may not be able to look over their shoulders in their private life – past – but we can measure some behaviors in their present circumstances and compare them to standards. Other signs of abusive mentality that are emerging include the suggestion for Vanessa to undergo demeaning evaluation as an unstable mother and his personal vendetta is to denigrate her publicly before her friends and church membership.

Add to that the monetary issues of their marital circumstances, where she must effectively submit individual requests for HIS approval of hers and the children's and household expenses before he will release the money. His financial status revealed his rather lavishly well-endowed income of over $9,000 PER MONTH with a house mortgage of only about $1,100 per month. What exactly is his other use of funds that he must be so completely tight-fisted and stingy, unless it's the need to pamper one or more mistresses, some of whom he still plays tennis with, openly embarrassing his wife and children in front of their friends and neighbors. Otherwise his money practices are simply another abusive tactic.

Nor has there been any claim by Thomas Mills that his personal and emotional needs were not met by his wife, nor that she is irresponsible with money. Nor is there any sign of some other source of income in Vanessa's past, such as an endowment or trustfund that she would be expected -- even obligated to consider -- to be using for her and her children's needs and expenses.

Can someone who has so many indicative behaviors that fit the description of an abuser actually be expected to be a caring co-parent?

What's the prospect for success as a co-parent in domestic relations experience?

My former brother-in-law was a decent co-parent but he was also a decent parent. Conversely, my own ex-husband immediately ceased to pay the minimum child support and was eventually excluded from further contact under risk of arrest for non-support of my children should he show up. That minimal amount was so low because my lawyer and my-now-ex's lawyer could not get agreement from him on any other higher amount and this was the rock bottom permissible amount in domestic relations rules -- even for minimal income situations -- even though my-now-ex was quite well off where he was and I was making the transition to new employment in my family's new home. When – in court -- the judge considered $25/month/child in 1983 to be unacceptably low, my own lawyer – who had spent many years in domestic relations court as judge as well as many years as a lawyer – cautioned the judge not to disallow this settlement and predicted that the child support would likely not be paid in any case since my lawyer's experience as a judge had shown him that there are men who do not perform as fathers and, in my case, my now-ex would never be a father to my children in any capacity in the lawyers' opinion because my now-ex was already reneging on his lawyer's billing and had an impressive lack of interest in his own young daughter to the extent that he had never held her for any longer than one picture taking moment or two since she was born 12 months before our divorce was filed. In my lawyer's own experience as a judge there was no point in expecting co-parenting when the individual was not a decent parent in the home before the disruption. Which my-now-ex wasn't and my sister's now-ex was. Rule applies across genders.

So now let's add up the evidence and figure out just whether co-parenting is a reasonable expectation or if Thomas Mills has abdicated his fatherhood of Vanessa's children and has criminally terminated their family-identity for his own pleasure.

Thomas Mills now claims that his children have been laboring under brainwashing influence as part of a cult religion that his wife did join FOR THE LAST FOUR YEARS... while his father-role was what? Was he getting involved in 'his' children's educational activities, not likely, mistresses tend to complicate group activities? Was he so concerned about THE CULT that he was reaching out to change 'his' children's education arrangements, not according to his records. He was pleased with their academic progress. He considered his wife's homeschooling to be within his level of acceptability during the period while he was adulterous. Conveniently for his purposes in adultery. Obviously he not only had the time to do things, he had the money – AND THE CONTROL OF THAT MONEY'S EXPENDITURES ON HOMESCHOOLING – to make his wishes wellknown if they were in any conflict with hers. HIS NOW-CLAIMS ARE SEEN CLEARLY AS UNTRUE. His concern was to find and entertain a mistress or more than one, using his lavish income, boat, tennis and other apparently extensive free-time -- sufficient to do these things. We do judge him accordingly as having abdicated his fatherhood of Vanessa's children on the basis of malfeasance as a parent to those children and as having terminated his marital relationship with Vanessa, publicly.

Therefore we do find Thomas Mills in contempt of court for lying – under oath likely – about his parental role and about his concerns for his wife's sanity and her church relationship. He is merely abusing Vanessa and destroying the peaceful homeschooling lives of 'his' children -- now still successful academically and still socially involved with the wider public in their routine homeschooling events than they would otherwise be in public school – for his own pleasure and sadistic attempts to damage his wife who dared to divorce him for his criminal adultery.

We further maintain that his demands be dismissed and that the children's wellbeing be allowed to go undisturbed as much as possible.

Nor should he be able to fail to pay for the mortgage that he agreed to as the earning member of an economic union with Vanessa, minus an allowance for salary of his own personal housekeeper. However due to the unlikelihood of this ever reaching completion of this mortgage's terms since this arrangement will be seen as disagreeable to anybody in this divorcing situation, the house should be sold and the proceeds split, with an adequate portion set aside from Thomas Mills 50% share to cover the normal realignment of the stay-at-home partner's earning prospects. Thomas Mills – as the financial manager of the economic union he and Vanessa set up -- is obligated to honor the normal employment realignment requirements for Vanessa just as he would for himself if he had lost his income temporarily. An economic union is an economic union – evenfor those couples where they have arranged for one party to be a stay-at-home parent to the exclusion of that party's continued development of a career. Financial planning usually advises a 6 month savings account be established to cover the eventuality of a 'job-loss' requiring the finding and the beginning of new employment as available because this job-seeking is basically what he has caused. This implies a transition payment upfront to fund such six-month savings account for such an eventuality now occurring, even though -- or because -- Thomas Mills was the one whose earning career was enabled to thrive above his own individual powers because of full support at home. Taking the funding for this six-month savings account to support Vanessa's job transition out of the house sales proceeds is sensible because it is unlikely – though it is possible -- that he would have been agreeable without oversight. No further demands for her support shall be honored should they be made by Vanessa Mills.

As for child support, Thomas Mills will probably welch on that after the dust has settled so that child support amount should be alleviated or reduced to some safety minimum. Such precaution of establishing a defaulting figure is necessary in order to protect the children and Vanessa from later disruption of their post-divorce relief by an unsavory re-intrusion of an emotionally charged ex-husband in the future -- after never supporting the children as is frequently and tragically seen in general domestic relations practice. We do not recommend any but overseen visitation for Thomas Mills since he has displayed abusiveness in his personal relationship and neglect when it was to his advantage.

Vanessa now is responsible for her own children and her own wellbeing. Judging from the mortgage payment, the current home – at interest rates recently available for ordinary payment terms to credibly employed married men – could supply enough equity by now to adequately pay for a small, decent doublewide in the country, free and clear, assuming Thomas Mills was even a halfway decent manager of his own finances. With enough creativity, it's still possible to homeschool three well supplied responsible children – one at least 12 years old -- in Ohio using OHDELA -- Ohio Distance Education and Learning Academy which is quite friendly to homeschoolers -- and parttime work for Vanessa. Governor Perdue, how about in North Carolina?

Case closed. Court adjourned, we wish.

CBS 60Minutes Disgraced: Caught Mouthing Hamas Propaganda

2009-02-01T18:16:00.036-05:00

Recently, the word was spreading around that the Israelis were proving that the Palestinian Hamas "warriors" were definitely using UN schools, hospitals, as well as their own mosque sites and their people in them as human shields for Hamas' rocket launching equipment and operations. The broadcast proof was said to be on YouTube. Those who had recommended this YouTube channel do specialize in monitoring videographic presentations for signs of doctored photographics so the trip to have a look seemed warranted inn order to see the reality from a cockpit at the combat site. I went to Google to find it:

Israel Air Force Precision Strike on Qassam Rocket Launcher 30 Dec. 2008 From IDFNADesk

The images on this and other clips from IDF flight videos showed targets being hit and moments later massive explosions when the initial strike ignited munitions hidden in or adjacent to those buildings. Effectively the Hamas "warriors" were hiding their artillery behind the skirts of women and children, behind the wounded in medical facilities, behind the religious peoples there.

But I also noticed a link among the Google references that showed that CBS -- that major trusted TV broadcaster in the US -- had reported on the YouTube effort by the Israeli's. This was -- I thought -- amazingly good news because it would mean that the constant stories of atrocities would now focus on the use of non-combatants as human shields. So I went to see what CBS had discovered:

Israeli Military Pounds Gaza, On YouTube Posted by Khaled Wassef, an analyst and producer with the CBS News Internet terrorism monitoring team.

The article was unbelievably misrepresenting the reality of what the videos had shown. The initial paragraphs were straight factual:

(CBSNEWS) Video clips of the Israeli Air Force (IAF) strikes on Gaza have been posted on a special channel set up by the Israeli military on the famous video-sharing Web site, YouTube.

The channel youtube.com/user/idfnadesk was launched on Dec. 29, 2008, and has already attracted 4,122 subscribers. Twelve videos are on-show so far.

YouTube requires age verification if you want to see some of the clips that show missile strikes on human targets.

Some of the videos have already been censored, and then restored by YouTube.

"We were saddened on Dec. 30, 2008 when YouTube took down some of our exclusive footage showing the IDF's (Israeli Defense Forces) operational success in operation Cast Lead against Hamas extremists in the Gaza Strip. Fortunately, due to blogger and viewer support, YouTube has returned the footage they removed," a message posted on the channel's page explained.

But the conclusion of the CBS report -- for the non-benefit of those who would probably never go surfing over to YouTube for their own look, possibly since the factual portion had made the point that some clips supposedly showed carnage (which was not in any of the footage that I had seen) -- completely misled readers as to the important content. Hiding the reality of the Hamas abuse of non-combatants, CBS stated that the footage showed that the IAF was not as accurate as they'd like the public to believe! Specifically:

(CBSNEWS) The IDF move to set up a channel on YouTube comes amid reports of heavy civilian casualties suggesting that the Israeli air strikes on Gaza may not be as 'surgical' as claimed by the IAF.

What, a lie? Was CBS simply hiring unscrupulous writers with their own personal bias on display and strangely no editor curious enough to check the article? Was there a larger group -- including editors and fact-checkers -- who were covering the conflict in the middle east at the moment and were consciously doctoring data? Maybe some large stockholders had bought major segments of CBS ownership issues and undeniably had influenced the hiring practices or just editorial judgment?

Ordinarily, I wouldn't even have been interested in foreign affairs, much less digging further, but the idea that the once revered venue that produced Walter Kronkite had such a twisted propaganda arm in place was puzzling. I personally would not qualify for any favoritism by Israeli government acceptance as an immigrant. To the Jewish world, I've been labeled a 'shicksa' and my son was called a 'sheigitz' (spelling unknown) by my former mother-in-law. Not that I was ever interested in going to Israel. But my instinctive alarm over such a misrepresentation of reality by a major source of trusted information was ignited. So I looked around for other CBS coverage.

It didn't take long to find that the article hiding the Hamas cowardice and abusiveness of their own people was part of a much larger CBS fantasy production. Video after video was up at the CBS online site whose headlines fit the same picture of Israeli troublemaking and Hamas/Palestinian victimization, with peace as lost and hopeless. Check these examples:

Time Running Out For A Two-State Solution? 60 Minutes: Growing Number Of Israelis, Palestinians Say Two-State Solution Is No Longer Possible

Has peace in the Middle East become nothing more than a pipe dream? As Bob Simon reports, a growing number of Israelis and Palestinians feel that a two-state solution is no longer possible.
Is Peace Out Of Reach? (13:09)
* Hamas political leader Moussa Abu Marzuk explained to Steve Kroft, in 2002, that the terrorist organization was developing missiles to escalate the conflict with Israel beyond suicide bombings.
Hamas (3:35)
* Bob Simon reported from Israel and the West Bank in 2003, where the construction of a fence to block Palestinian suicide bombers had received international opposition.
The Fence (4:45)

So we did, check them, and this is what we found in the one titled "Time Running Out for a Two-State Solution". For your convenient study, the text from CBS is presented with highlighted commentary to raise flags as necessary for decent FACT-CHECKING, which we do for our own operation here in our in-house research, my son included:

(CBS) Getting a peace deal in the Middle East is such a priority to President Obama that his first foreign calls on his first day in office were to Arab and Israeli leaders. And on day two, the president made former Senator George Mitchell his special envoy for Middle East peace. Mr. Obama wants to shore up the ceasefire in Gaza, but a lasting peace really depends on the West Bank where Palestinians had hoped to create their state. The problem is, even before Israel invaded Gaza, a growing number of Israelis and Palestinians had concluded that peace between them was no longer possible, that history had passed it by. For peace to have a chance, Israel would have to withdraw from the West Bank, which would then become the Palestinian state.

It's known as the "two-state" solution. But, while negotiations have been going on for 15 years, hundreds of thousands of Jewish settlers have moved in to occupy the West Bank. Palestinians say they can't have a state with Israeli settlers all over it, which the settlers say is precisely the idea.

Daniella Weiss moved from Israel to the West Bank 33 years ago. She has been the mayor of a large settlement.

"I think that settlements prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state in the land of Israel. This is the goal. And this is the reality," Weiss told 60 Minutes correspondent Bob Simon.

Though settlers and Palestinians don't agree on anything, most do agree now that a peace deal has been overtaken by events.

"While my heart still wants to believe that the two-state solution is possible, my brain keeps telling me the opposite because of what I see in terms of the building of settlements. So, these settlers are destroying the potential peace for both people that would have been created if we had a two-state solution," Dr. Mustafa Barghouti, once a former candidate for Palestinian president, told Simon.

And he told 60 Minutes Israel's invasion of Gaza - all the death and destruction in response to rockets from Hamas - convinces him that Israel does not want a two-state solution. "My heart is deeply broken, and I am very worried that what Israel has done has furthered us much further from the possibility of [a] two-state solution."

Palestinians had hoped to establish their state on the West Bank, an area the size of Delaware. But Israelis have split it up with scores of settlements, and hundreds of miles of new highways that only settlers can use. Palestinians have to drive - or ride - on the older roads.

When they want to travel from one town to another, they have to submit to humiliating delays at checkpoints and roadblocks. There are more than 600 of them on the West Bank.

QUESTION: How would it make sense to spend scarce civic construction money on a high speed highway then clog it with hundreds of checkpoints to make it secure enough. In order to carry other-than-Israeli traffic how could it be done without those hundreds of checkpoints? Perhaps there's some logic to the absence of any checkpoints on the highway and the limitation on users that has escaped CBS's writers' mental image of the fantasy they are constructing and it would spoil their big viewership emotional response to clutter up the image with logical complicating ideas of how to accomplish their wishes. We would also wonder if some complication on construction cost-sharing -- as we shall see in the water system -- affected the highway sharing.

(CBS) Asked why there are so many checkpoints, Dr. Barghouti said, "I think the main goal is to fragment the West Bank. Maybe a little bit of them can be justified because they say it's for security. But I think the vast majority of them are basically to block the movement of people from one place to another."

Here's how they block Barghouti: he was born in Jerusalem, grew up in Jerusalem and worked in a hospital there for 14 years. Four years ago he moved to a town just 10 miles away, but now, because he no longer lives in Jerusalem, he can't get back in - ever.

He says he can't get a permit to go. "I asked for a permit to go to Jerusalem during the last year, the last years about 16 times. And 16 times they were rejected. Like most Palestinians, I don't have a permit to go to the city I was born in, to the city I used to work in, to the city where my sister lives."

FACT: Barghouti's cousin was convicted in Israel of the murder of several people and is held in prison there -- where he, Barghouti, is excluded. Guess that fact slipped Barghouti's mind as a possible reason why his visiting privileges might be reduced, because he "neglected" to inform CBS's Simon. As for Simon's research skills -- or those of CBS' vaunted 60Minutes fact checkers -- this connection was found in a quick search of Google records on Barghouti. Either CBS has a seriously pathetic research team or they have no interest in disturbing the fantasy-story they calculate will draw large viewership. Possibly trumped-up war-stories are as good for TV networks as murders were once said to be for selling newspapers. Would a broadcast network be inclined to nudge viewers into an angry mindset and risk US military involvement in an unjust war venture just to boost prime-time? What would be their dis-incentive? Not financial.

(Bob Simon/CBS)What he's up against are scores of Israeli settlements dominating the lowlands like crusader fortresses. Many are little cities, and none of them existed 40 years ago. The Israelis always take the high ground, sometimes the hills, and sometimes the homes. And sometimes Arabs are occupied inside their own homes.

FACT: The incendiary concatenation of this image of crusader invasiveness with the subsequent assertion that the invasiveness is rampant with presumeably settlers invading and occupying Arabs space "inside their own homes" -- after all, settlers' actions were the topic of this paragraph, not Israeli military on security missions -- is sheer calculated hyperbole. The CBS fantasy writers swing right into a vignette to cover the sleight of tongue as though they have easily discovered an ugly example. That's sheer theater tactics, not news reporting.

As for the location of the settlers enclaves, and yes they would need to be fully community operations because the settlers were originally not welcomed decently... what a crime, "little cities"... don't the Palestinians live in their own towns and "little cities"?

And then there's the accusation that the settlers had taken the 'high ground' as if that were the most desirable in the WestBank. When the settlers began arriving in the beginning, there were no critical services like water and electric for the area and the prime locations were in the bottoms where the water at least would be accumulated naturally and be handy. In those areas the Palestinians had already made the prime land their own. The settlers were told by the Israelis to occupy the then-less-desirable heights, as also offering some security from an unstable situation as well as being what was less contentiously undesirable by the existing population of Palestinians.

When water services were proposed later, the Palestinians were negative, some refusing entirely to participate, some Palestinian officials refusing to contribute their community funding share to the project which put the entire price of the water for their people on the individual Palestinian using the water service. Furthermore, the water coming through the pipelines used by the settlers -- and those Palestinians who did stubbornly choose to be connected to the pipelines in spite of their "leaders" decisions -- is Israeli water, not Palestinian water. It is being pumped from Israeli aquifers within the Israeli boundaries with the exception of a couple wells within meters of the boundary.

The data on the water situation is available online with a simple Google search and download. In pdf form it will be attached here for further reading. Amazing lack of fact-checking by a major news organization makes you wonder whether the entire American schoolsystem is responsible for some mental character-flaw where the listener is expected to take every, and only the, word of some authority and to simply repeat it on request. Totally schoolish. CBS factcheckers do fit the image and their management apparently expects that their viewership will also simply swallow the fantasy pill as presented by their 60Minute news authority experts without questioning any part of the concoction.

(Bob Simon/CBS) One house for example is the highest house on the highest hill overlooking the town of Nablus. 60 Minutes learned that Israeli soldiers often corral the four families who live there and take over the house to monitor movement down below.

Simon and the 60 Minutes team went to an apartment owned by a Mr. Nassif. That morning, Israeli soldiers had apparently entered the apartment, without notice, and remained there when Simon knocked on the door.

"We cannot speak with you, there are soldiers," Nassif told Simon. "We are in prison here."

Asked what was happening, Nassif says, "They are keeping us here and the soldiers are upstairs, we cannot move. We cannot speak with you."

Nassif said he couldn't leave the house and didn't know how long he'd have to stay in place. Asked if they were paying him any money, he told Simon, "You are kidding?"

Abdul Nassif, a bank manager said he had to get to his bank to open the safe, but one of the soldiers wouldn't let him go. He told 60 Minutes whenever the soldiers come they wake everybody up, and herd them into a kitchen for hours while soldiers sleep in their beds. They can't leave or use the phone, or let 60 Minutes in.

(CBS) He sent 60 Minutes downstairs to see if his brother would open the door so we could ask the soldiers why they keep taking over this house. But the brother told Simon, "The soldiers close the door from the key. They take the key."

So Simon and the crew left, and that night, so did the soldiers. But when 60 Minutes returned two days later, the soldiers were back for more surveillance. This time they kept the women under house arrest, but let the men go to work and the children go to school. When the children returned, we caught a glimpse of two armed soldiers at the top of the stairs.

Then more children came home, but the soldiers wouldn't open the door again.

A commander told Simon that he and the crew would have to go back behind a wall in order for the children to be let in.

The commander declined to talk to 60 Minutes. "But we are talking to you now," Simon pointed out, standing outside. "Why don't you tell us what you are doing here? Have you lost your voice? Well they've closed the door now, they've closed the window so I guess if the children are going to get home now we have to leave, so that is what we will do."

An army spokesperson told us the army uses the Nassifs' house for important surveillance operations. The Nassifs told 60 Minutes that soldiers usually stay for a day or two, always coming and going in the middle of the night. When they do go, the Nassifs never know when they will be occupied again. It could be tomorrow, next week, or next month. The only certainty, they say, is that the soldiers will be back.

NOTE: CBS has access to much more senior political contacts, yet they basically wimp out on asking anyone with more authority to discuss legal/political issues whether this is standard practice for a war-zone. Nor do we have any clue on how long this particular surveillance operation has been active.

Note also that the demure, beautiful woman that is in one of these scenes and never says a word or plays any significant role, becomes the main icon used for the cover image to the entire video, in contrast to the burly, roughneck woman mayor from one of the troublemaking settlers' groups who was featured repeatedly and usually quoted after presenting her with incendiary remarks that challenged the safety of the settlers from eviction from the homes they've built, diminishing the roles they've played in support of the occupation's security.

(Bob Simon/CBS) Another crippling reality on the West Bank is high unemployment, now about 20 percent. So some Palestinians can only find jobs building Israeli settlements. They're so ashamed to work on the construction sites that they asked 60 Minutes not to show their faces.

The settlers now number 280,000, and as they keep moving in, their population keeps growing about five percent every year. But the 2.5 million Arabs have their strategy too: they're growing bigger families.

NOTE: Curious lack of notice by Bob Simon that larger families in circumstances where you can't find jobs or support your existing population is rather irresponsible for anyone else to do. In this fantasy of CBS creation, it's just a 'strategy'. Interesting that the Hamas use of women and children as human-shields could also be confirmation that the value of individual lives is in low regard and that more human-shields are expected to be useful for their 'strategy', hence the women must produce more human-shields -- or warriors if needed . Canon-fodder time is immoral personal, civic and military operation. Yet we see no uprising against Hamas in any of Simon's reporting. Support for those who make your children into human shields makes no sense. Possibly the Palestinians are, in effect, hostages of the Hamas mafia and are excusably Stockholm syndrome affected, which is not an attempt at diagnosis only an observation reminiscent of the Patti Hearst events of my graduate school days when we saw the kidnap victim join her kidnappers and take up weapons to rob banks to get funds to support her abusive kidnappers' agenda.

(Bob Simon/CBS) Demographers predict that within ten years Arabs will outnumber Jews in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza. Without a separate Palestinian state the Israelis would have three options, none of them good. They could try ethnic cleansing, drive the Palestinians out of the West Bank, or they could give the Palestinians the vote. That would be the democratic option but it would mean the end of the Jewish state. Or they could try apartheid - have the minority Israelis rule the majority Palestinians, but apartheid regimes don't have a very long life.

"Unfortunately, and I have to say to you that apartheid is already in place," Dr. Barghouti argued.

(CBS) Apartheid? Israel is building what it calls a security wall between the West Bank and Israel to stop suicide bombers. The Palestinians are furious because it appropriates eight percent of the West Bank. Not only that. It weaves its way through Palestinian farms, separating farmers from their land. They have to wait at gates for soldiers to let them in. Settlers get a lot more water than Palestinians, which is why settlements are green and Arab areas are not.

FACT: CBS is again repeating a standard -- but gross 'inaccuracy' -- line from the Palestinian propaganda machine. The pdf attached above -- including factual data on water in the West Bank and Gaza -- and cited earlier shows the reality of Palestinian refusal to participate in the construction of the water pipeline.

Further the damning idea that Israelis are profligate water-wasters and that the Israeli claim to greening the desert -- by using intelligent methods of agriculture and conservation -- is supposedly exposed as phony are also revealed to be gross propaganda when checking the facts. The Israelis' water usage is approaching the sustainability levels that have been measured for their water sources and the Israelis have been the 2nd lowest water users among the arab neighboring countries.

(Bob Simon/CBS) Moderate Israelis who deplore the occupation used to believe passionately in a two-state solution. That is no longer the case.

Meron Benvenisti used to be deputy mayor of Jerusalem. He told Simon the prospects of the two-state solution becoming a reality are "nil."

"The geopolitical condition that¹s been created in '67 is irreversible. Cannot be changed. You cannot unscramble that egg," he explained.

Asked if this means the settlers have won, Benvenisti told Simon, "Yes."

"And the settlers will remain forever and ever?" Simon asked.

"I don't know forever and ever, but they will remain and will flourish," Benvenisti said.

"The settlers, the attitude that I present here, this is the heart. This is the pulse. This is the past, present, and future of the Jewish state," Daniella Weiss told Simon.

She says the she and the settlers are immovable. "We will stay here forever."

But one very important Israeli says she intends to move them out. She's Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, a candidate to become prime minister in elections next month. She's also Israel¹s chief negotiator with the Palestinians, and she told 60 Minutes peace is unthinkable with the settlers where they are.

"Can you really imagine evacuating the tens of thousands of settlers who say they will not leave?" Simon asked.

"It's not going to be easy. But this is the only solution," she replied.

"But you know that there are settlers who say, 'We will fight. We will not leave. We will fight,'" Simon asked.

"So this is the responsibility of the government and police to stop them. As simple as that. Israel is a state of law and order," Livni said.

FACT: Livni is as athletic and brusque as any military paratrooper and constitutes the embarassing third puppet-image for this feminized theatrical production, to contrast with the burly settlerwoman and the demure silent arab beauty. Livni is tough and impressive and promising brutal fighting among the Israeli troops and the settlers. Stay tuned, viewers! More theater! To CBS, of course, the broadcaster who also knows how to use women.

CBS has presented this image of the settlers as brutal invaders who don't belong there, but the fact is that Israel has absorbed over 600,000 Jewish refugees from Arab countries so that by now there are almost no Jewish refugees left to come, but the Arab 'brothers' have outright refused to absorb the Palestinian refugees, not even lining up to provide substantial resources for them -- nothing sufficient to thrive, only to suffer -- much less encouraging them to come to their brothers' homelands. Just the opposite. The Egyptians shoot at Palestinians trying to flee Gaza. (See evidence below).

The Palestinians never did have a state of their own either. There was no reason why they should have been considered to have been forced to be refugees for these 40 years when they could have had their own state -- multiple times in past negotiations as far back as 1967 when the offer was made to them after they had been evicted from Israel for the attack that led to the 1967 Seven Day War. Or even been welcomed into the homelands of their Arab 'brothers', but they were more convenient and useful to their Arab brothers as abscesses on the Israeli border. What would Americans have done if we were the Palestinians' arab brothers with our refugee brothers on our doorsteps? Think about it.

Further, none of the current states in the Arab world were in existence much longer than the Israeli state, so the claims of invasive state-creation is diminished to a suspect claim. There were over a million Jews spread out in the Arab world in 1948, and if they had not been badly treated by those Arabs, why have those populations of Jews emigrated to the point that there are few left in Arab countries and Israel has welcomed 600,000 of them when they arrived destitute on Israel's doorstep. The Arab world and their Palestinian brothers are the cause of the suffering of the Palestinian refugees. The earliest Arab state was a product of the WWI conflict resolution, barely 40 years prior to Israel's claim. The other Arab statehood dates are even later -- Syria as late as 1941 and Kuwait in 1961. Prior to WWI, the area was mostly ruled by Turkey, and subsequently imperially 'incubated' by France and England while they were supposedly developing their infrastructure for independence again in some new form. Ethnic groups were not neatly separated, the Jewish population had an established presence in the area and their claim to statehood is contemporary with the objecting Arab countries. (See the population movements in the evidence below).

There were 600,000 Jews in Israel in 1948, and over 1,000,000 jewish refugees in the Arab countries surrounding Israel. Israel has demonstrated their statehood-worthiness in both economic, military and humanitarian responsibility for their Jewish brothers effectively banished from the Arab territories, something their Arab neighbors have yet to demonstrate for their own brotherhood. The Egyptians guard their border with Gaza and treat any Palestinians trying to escape the carnage in Gaza as if they were criminals to be excluded from Egypt at all costs. Jordan even reneged on supplying their agreed quota of critical water for the Palestinians. Only the Israelis have supplied access to water from their own resources as well as electric from their own resources.

All of these 'inconvenient truths' are public knowledge if any fact-checkers or responsible editors were employed by CBS News. The sources quoted in the pdf on water and the public history dates, the history facts are all credible sources, not just Israeli propaganda.

How long will the American viewers remain docile in the face of CBS lying to us? How long will Americans continue to trust the educational curriculum and training of the factory-schoolsystem that inculcates this sort of docile ignorance and susceptibility to trumped-up enthusiasms that make such scams as CBS is pulling over viewers' eyes possible? For whose benefit is this fantasy-enthusiasm being created and where will those misled by it be circumstantially guilty of what crimes?

Stay tuned to CBS? We have a new administration that is currently more trusting of such fantasies as CBS is broadcasting. Where will they lead? Will there be more alertness when we are told the sky is falling. And yes, there's going to be carnage, and yes we care, and we realize this is a warzone where carnage happens. The Israelis airlift warnings -- air-dropped leaflets to be precise -- but war produces disasterous mindsets that need to be corrected, which we have seen happens occasionally among the Israelis when one of their combatants goes over the edge. Hamas however is the supposedly elected government of the Palestinians and that government is totally over the edge (see the evidence below) and will not be at all capable of justice. In fact, since there is such a curiously drastic difference between Gaza and the West Bank in the guerilla activities, it would appear that the Hamas have decided that Gaza is not worth a decent life since they concentrate their death-and-destruction activities in Gaza, effectively deciding that Gaza's people are to be sacrificed as victims -- useful for crying and reproducing. If there were a decent humanitarian peace group, their focus would be to transfer Gazans -- willing to be abandoning everything in their current homes that they cannot carry -- to new homes in the West Bank. There are instances covered online of what happens to Gazans who protest to Hamas when they don't wish to be human shields any longer and the Hamas response was gruesome. The peace groups on site are the only ones capable of finding a way to do something to relieve the unwilling sacrificial human shields.

So where is the UN, to insist that the Palestinians should be welcomed into the countries of the surrounding Arab states? The UN? All hiding behind their own oil dependence. At least for now. If the end of the oil age is approaching, this whole scenario could turn totally around. It would seem the only practical solution is to stall while we work for independence from foreign oil. Then insist that the Palestinians be re-settled by their Arab brothers. Some attempts at progress on this oil-independence path are in play all over the world -- third world and first world. Economics is going in this direction if we can just keep the situation from getting out of control with trumped-up enthusiasms based on 'gross inaccuracies' THEN PEACE IS NOT OUT OF REACH AS CBS WOULD HAVE US BELIEVE.

Further evidence:

Egyptian government shoots at hundreds of Palestinians fleeing Gaza.

Refugee rescue, or none

data on water systems

somehow

scoop

Hamas has adopted a strategy of death for women, children and the aged

armed Hamas operatives grab children apparently at random

CNN reported that 175 Fatah members were reported shot -- knee-caps, elbows, feet, etc -- at close range and by Hamas members

CBS stands accused of more than willful ignorance in their coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It is beyond belief, beyond a reasonable doubt, that CBS 60Minutes could be so mindless and unprofessional. The verdict we see is willful lying to us by CBS and 60Minutes. Vote as you will.

Ethanol, Competition, Risking Food Prices and Escaping Oil

2006-07-27T15:11:00.000-05:00

There was a major article in the Cincinnati Enquirer on Ethanol and there are glaring errors in their ideas being foisted on the Cincinnati public.

Sometimes I wonder if the editors of our mainstream media setup these articles on ideas that would change our lives specifically to include such obvious and gross errors as to provoke the readers to write in and play a sort of publishing game of tag. Unfortunately the Cincinnati Enquirer seems to be serious about their errors.

The latest in this pattern was the Fourth of July Forum front page story on "Ethanol: Fueling Debate".

Anyone who's been awake and reading for any amount of the last 50 years must have been rolling on the floor laughing at the hypocritical standard set for ethanol to 'compete fairly' with gasoline. Please, really. Where have the editors of this paper been? Over the last 50 years, our taxes have funded $350 BILLION in subsidies for oil and gas, whether they were called that or not. (International Center for Technology Assessment) That's $7billion each and every year of windfall support from your taxes. Specifically, these included tax breaks, accounting tricks, direct subsitides, R&D support and something euphmistically called royalties. And the 2005 Energy Bill was no exception. In the middle of oil company profits pushing record billions of dollars, the bill had a new slick sleight of hand royalty that could net the oil industry a minimum of $7Billion, maybe as much as $30Billion over the life of the royalty -- another $140-360 million annually over the usual.

We scoff at the Enquirer's claim that the ethanol and biodiesel newbie's are unfair players. Renewables would just LOVE to have a LEVEL PLAYING FIELD.

And then there's the claim that ethanol doesn't deliver the power that gasoline does. Let's straighten this out. Gas has more BTUs per gallon, but lower octane. The bottom line on power is the compression ratio. Ethanol runs very well on compression ratios as high as 13:1 whereas gas is limited to numbers around 8 or 9:1 so later model cars with turbo-charging are closer to thriving on ethanol's power. Cars may get slightly lower mileage. The Indy500 is running on ethanol this year. But less power, my foot.

Next is the timetable the Enquirer's writers grudgingly set for the emergence of ethanol as 'America's "second" fuel', -- sniff, second, sniff -- suggesting that years and years of research and 'scientific innnovation' was lacking yet. FFV's have been on the road in the USA for over 10 years, TEN, with millions of them. We not only have a good handle on what they perform like, we have far more knowledge about their viability than on any other alternative. Even more, among those comparing notes online at the open encyclopedia -- wikipedia -- Americans have been informally experimenting to determine with their own non-ffvs just what ratio of ethanol blending is compatible with our everyday cars thanks to the automotive engineers' conservative standards. It currently looks like something in the vicinity of e30 -- a 2-to-1 mix of regular gasoline and e85.

On top of that there are two Canadian groups building commercial plants to produce ethanol from cellolosic waste. This year and next, not 'long term'. Maybe the Enquirer editors should read the business pages instead of whatever their usual sources are. The world's largest investment bank, Goldman and Sachs, just layed $27 million onto the table for Iogen, one of the Canadian-based biotechs specializing in ethanol made from cellulose, to start building on a commercial scale. The US has BRI in Arkansas, and Vancouver has Syntec Biofuel, both of whom have near term construction plans. With about 3-4 years of nuts-and-bolts adjustments, all of these should be at the finish line. Are you ready for it. Let's free ourselves from oil and WWIII.

Meanwhile, we have corn-based ethanol providing us with launching platforms to work from and with stable long term potential since the ethanol's the same whether corn or cellulosic. Especially since we have a lot of car buying to re-direct to FFVs and diesels. And for those thinking of a new car right now, simply order the FFV version. Unlike the big step necessary to produce a hybrid, the tinkering necessary to give you an FFV -- at assemply line time -- instead of a non-ffv is around a mere $100. For lack of that measly amount we could have been driving FFVs by now.

Which brings us to the Enquirer's curiously blind 'worry' about a failed crop from drought as a reason to back off. A failed crop is just another source of cellulosic feedstock for the other ethanol producers, not a risk at all by the time we have shifted to ethanol. But most of all, the Enquirer totally ignores our knight in shining armor who came to the aid of our rescuers in Katrina-land. It wasn't the sheiks and the oil barons, it was the farmers with their biodiesel and ethanol. They are the ones we should stand with and choose renewables.

The Enquirer frets about the impact on the price of food if we are using corn for ethanol, but they blithely ignore the real source of the already rising cost of food, namely the skyrocketing cost of gasoline, which we can get rid of by diverting some corn to ethanol for a moderate time while we convert our vehicles away from the really frightening risks of gasoline.

We have genuinely massive worries over the big risks in depending on gasoline -- from the increasing likelihood of hostile political embargos, or simply the unpredictable success of terrorists with firepower aimed at oilwells because they know our craven dependence on oil, to the sudden needs of increasingly frequent category 4-5 hurricanes.

On top of these sudden nightmares, we have the realization that the convergence of the high price of 'cheap oil' and the greed to tap the oil-sources where the damages of drilling and removal -- like the tar sands -- and damages to our pristine treasured remote sites are colluding to produce nightmares in our air and water, the life support of our children's future as well as all those we compatibly share this planet with. Is the Enquirer seriously clinging to petroleum oil in the face of these and advocating fear of a minimal shortterm risk? Yeah, that's what it amounts to, but should we? Hardly.

And last, but not least, ethanol is not as impotent as the Enquirer and the politicians think, not when we combine it with its renewable cousins, namely TDP-oils -- thermal depolymerization of industrial and municipal wastes. Do the numbers. For example, TDP can produce 150 gallons of the equivalent of home heating oil from each ton of turkey offal at their fully functioning plant in Carthage MO, which would be wildly profitable if the playing field were level. That's an amazing 60% by weight, and the process can be applied to industrial and municipal waste, much as Rumpke is producing natural gas from Cincinnati's garbage for DukeEnergy, formerly Cinergy. And for the record, industrial wastes per the EPA, are 5 times as great as agricultural waste, which alone would eliminate our dependence on foreign oil. And for the capping achievement, Rocky Mountain Institute has a method to make carbon-fibre car bodies -- ultra light, ultra strong and safe -- affordable which would give us the last and final piece of the puzzle, namely genuinely high fuel mileage.

If you don't want to do the numbers yourself, come look at the displays at the website of www.bergerac.tv in the top story, a substantial article on the oil topic. The pages within called The Solution have what Enquirer readers really need. More soon.

Sailing West to the Orient to Reach Independence

2006-07-01T19:01:00.002-05:00

In a recent pronouncement from the University of Chicago's prestigious Graduate School of Business, the geniuses finally getting around to figuring out how corporate games are played are again prescribing some strategy for women to try in the equity adventure.

They've got a new set of buzzwords in the 'science' of networking analysis, namely social capital, structural holes and illegitimacy. Naturally they conclude that women aren't doing things right and should 'about face' and march to UC-GSB's new tune. All on the basis of a handful of current timeframe studies, they conclude that women never tried their super-clever marching song before, otherwise they'd be populating fortune 500 boardrooms in numbers.

Look at Token Woman, written in 1997 about a timeframe in the late 70s, before you tell us that you know the answer.

Women readers have every right to be cranky over yet another putdown. Sociologists and the bottomfeeders who sell big-hype advicebooks are misleading women pursuing parity.

Think about it. Your 'strategic partner', eagerly clawing his way to the top, who loans you 'some social capital' is putting his 'legitimacy' at risk and at the first sign of loss among his peers is going to cut you loose in most cases regardless of your value to his work or the corporation. But the bottomfeeders can sell advice if they make women feel inadequate and needy, while dangling some ephemeral carrot-mirage in front of the hungry.

Corporate top management has made it clear and sociologists have recorded top managements' answer that the 'responsibilities at their level' are too important to risk the extraneous effort of making them uncomfortable with common rules like including women in their high-powered operations just because the women are eminently capable and have succeeded at proving themselves, even in 'structural holes' in the organization. I remember the sociology presentation at a Women's Studies Luncheon at UC back in about '98 where this result was announced. (Harlan & Weiss) Everyone shrugged and spoke of promise for other generations, but that's not the response women should take.

The women's leadership in the corporate parity marketplace keep being 'puzzled' and constantly coming up with 'new' strategies to say women should try. Well they've been tried, including the one about social capital and structural holes. The women who entered the corporate games in the 70s were not dumb, nor were they poorly endowed with degrees and goals.

The game top management plays is simple and I've outlined it before. It's called creating a 'token woman', specifically a younger one, promote her several steps ahead of all her male peers and those peers immediately stop being nice and working as a team. Doesn't matter whether she's suitably capable, dedicated and well-connected, not even if she's unique and ideally situated. She, and by association, all the other women in the organization automatically become pariahs among their peers unless they openly choose the mommy-track. Frozen out, stalled. There are stats that show that promotions start for males at a later age. The politically correct roosters just ignore the implications and crow that women are making progress with each of those token women! How deluded!

Meanwhile the rest of women's problems keep haunting the shadows giving us nightmares.

It's time to write off the corporate parity thrust and rework our strategy, including how and when to pursue higher education. We've got the cart ahead of the horse in the current sequence.

We should be supporting young women (and our sons) in getting themselves established with a home of their own FIRST. Complete with a set of skills in construction and self-employment. With a women's system-designed home, built with workingclass values and ergonomics, and supporting a lifestyle geared to health and smart economics, our children's futures will be established, unlike the albatross/homes being foisted on the public, not to mention the unproductive adventures as immature learners in higher education. And homes like these, built with major labor input by our construction-talented children would cost less than the usual bill for most college educations at today's prices.

They would effectively earn a home in their youth. Where are young people going to get a job offer with financial potential like this. Want to see how we can swing this?

Postpone the highstakes risks chosen by the wealthy in chasing a degree or three, running up big debts and delaying our natural needs til we and our children are in jeopardy, behind in the race forever because we're not rich enough to make up for the extravagances of the wealthy. Don't emulate that strategy, it's a mistake.

Do the numbers, with a home like we're proposing, free and clear, our economic struggles are minimized. The choices -- of academic pursuits or of civic engagements and activism or of careers of all sorts, most especially in the arts and letters -- are within reach. All because we take the time to get the horse first.

Maybe you think that horse is overly expensive. In fact, not only is it in many cases less expensive than the 'higher' education, but is accessible to a much wider spectrum than just those considering post-secondary education. The numbers I've been accumulating run in the range of $20/sf, or $30/sf if you start with a knowledgeably selected doublewide and make serious improvements. Think about those numbers, with your typical home now being 1500sf, that's an investment of $45,000 and 4 years work, tops. Women just have to learn to tackle real construction with a systems analysis rigor.

But here's the really good part. Look how many women are about to 'retire'. Maybe you've been misled to believe that SocialSecurity-income is inadequate. Well, the game is changed because of our strategy and now we're going to incorporate another thread, namely the home should be multigenerational.

Did you know that in Crete, parents endow their daughters with a home of her own on the promise that the parents can count on their daughters for care in their old age? Interesting, but we're going another step further.

Medicare is the albatross in seniors' financing yet in other societies (Sardinia, Okinawa and the American 7thDay Adventists who were studied in medical circles and photo-storied in National Geographic) the 'typical' aging scenario is invalidated. Specifically in The China Study, the trojan horse carrying the diseases afflicting our lives is our western diet with high proportions of overheated and overprocessed foods and high percentages of animal proteins, one of the other mistaken marks of wealth we've adopted.

But health and smart economics was one of our system-design requirements so our women of the boomer generation could cherry-pick that benefit by keeping their children and grandchildren fully sharing in this home, now larger, that manages its food operations accordingly.

Did you know that intentional communities where resources and operations are shared, majorly reduce the amount of work required to maintain those resources and operations? Roughly half the time and effort of standard individual housekeeping and maintenance.

A large home with shared food-area, utilities, tools, and social areas but with ample private spaces for each couple and their children is economically more buildable than separate homes for each couple. Reducing isolation in aging and supplying experiential knowledge to youth, and financially more doable both to build and to maintain for all of them.

The HOME is the key, not the education nor the career.

I suspect Bodichon and Parkes -- earlier writers on what resources women needed -- also never did the numbers either though I haven't read them and would be interested to know, but from descriptions of their prescriptions it clearly sounds like they were totally focussed on 'income' but that's the wrong place to look.

It's the BOTTOM LINE that matters and by that I'm not excluding intangibles... In decision analysis you have techniques for incorporating intangibles into the bottom line. The good news is that in this case the bottom line financially is itself favorable, and the intangibles in harmony.

Furthermore that bottom line is less prone to risks like workingclass families run into when their employment fails them or some accident occurs. With a more sustainable home economically, especially energy-wise, and more income streams, even though likely smaller for a variety of reasons, the law of large numbers makes the bottomline more stable, not prone to being 'lost', ever.

As a mathematical decision analyst I frequently do mathematical models of situations I'm researching and I'm thinking of doing this scenario of our women boomers and their near-grown children, with soon-to-be families, just to demonstrate 'the numbers'. Everyone seems to have an aversion to doing the numbers and they stay stuck in the ruts corporate greed has engineered. Those mathematical models tell stories, at least to those who pore over the results and who play what-if games with the variables. It's a kind of gaming.

In this case I'd throw out medicare and health insurance, regular schools and childcare.

I can hear the screams now but the reality is, when you look at numbers and logic, those institutions are unbelievably detrimental on any end-use/least-cost analysis.

Did you know that hospitals, doctors and pharmaceutical drugs are the 3rd leading cause of death in the US? How do you square that with our society's knee-jerk fear of being denied access to the 3rd leading cause of death, even being willing to pay extortionary premiums for their chance to play this russian-roulette.

Medicare is one of the worst distortions. I have a set of numbers on the costs of stroke care, at home vs with medicare, and the figures clearly show the financial hardships imposed by medicare -- if you want 'the benefits' owed to you for the premiums you paid for, you actually pay more for the care than if you arranged all the services for yourself at home. What sense does Medicare make? Dump it, skip the death-roulette. Skip the extorionary costs of premiums. In fact, with the home/diet strategy of this plan, you've increased the likelihood of staying healthy.

Yet the insane fear prevails. Everyone knows the world is flat. Imagine the impossibility of sailing west to the orient. Only madwomen would try it.

And then there's the screams over dumping regular k-12 and childcare. Home and cyberspace and libraries are our answer. In particular, in Ohio, there's a cybercharter school called OHDELA where any Ohio child can enroll (gotta have a phone). Every OHDELA cybercharter student (or two in the family) is endowed with an empowering computer, complete with scanner, printer and internet access. Plus a budget for individual programs and curriculum, as well as an edu-consultant to work with the parents, or grandma. No rational parent in hard straits like those described by workingclass academics would choose regular school, putting their child at a competitive disadvantage academically and socially, when their child can grow in an environment on near equal footing with their age-peers, have customized opportunities and have more time for needed involvement in family. Not to mention hugely improved time-on-task being free of the herding and crowd-control of factory schooling, not to mention busing. Unfortunately, no one, in the school system those children have access to, will tell them, even though the cybercharter option is less burdensome on the taxpayer.

Think what that computer/internet-access would do for the family after school hours are over.

I once did a comparable financial analysis for a hypothetical pair of single mothers (with one child each) and working only parttime, making near minimum wage to start, finding them a way out of poverty, but an even better arrangement would be if it was grandmother on social security with her daughter and grandchildren. In that presentation, I refrained from displaying the tables of numbers, relying on the story they told. I have since decided that the story has the vulnerability of being discounted as not based on hard facts even though the story includes the significant variables, so I'm thinking of recreating the numbers and posting them with the article.

More like I did in the analysis I did for a presentation of a strategy for the peace & justice art show's program on our energy dilemma, where I trailed along the tables of numbers as they developed. If I was going to sail west to the orient (and I am) I'd want a verifiable set of numbers.

In any case, the answer to the puzzle about women, post-secondary education and remunerative working life is that women should put their funds into a mortgage free, modified home, preferably with mother and siblings, before tackling the adventure of advanced education and not worry about big income promises. Meaningful work, of her own choosing and design, is then a possibility while still being able to share a comfortable, healthy life with her children, free of the financial instability.

Bottomline independence and well-being, not income and parity frustrations.

Dark Humor, the Sierra Club and Peak Oil

2006-05-15T16:08:00.000-05:00

Do members of the Sierra Club get a kick out of dark humor? In a recent appeal they apparently enjoyed putting the following oil facts juxtaposed with the Sierra's appeal for contributions. I mean, read especially these amazing facts from their list:

$30 million

$80 billion

$7 billion

$100

Then the Sierra Club leadership 'appeals' for donations to the Sierra Club wanting to raise a few what.. millions, maybe only a couple... and how do they justify this raid on member pockets? They, in their hubris and delusions, think they're going to inspire a reversal in political will. What a joke! Look at the facts, their own facts. Just counting those 10 companies, $30million rolled into political coffers, think how much more followed. Face it please. The govt is bought and paid for and WILL NEVER get any political will to turn their backs on big business.

Government will only do what business wants. THE ONLY WAY TO GET WHAT WE WANT IS TO MAKE ANYTHING ELSE FINANCIALLY UNPLEASANT FOR BIG BUSINESS WHILE AT THE SAME TIME CUTTING OUR FINANCIAL SUPPORT FOR GOVT SO THAT THEY CANNOT PROVIDE BIG BUSINESS WHAT WE DENY TO BIG BUSINESS.

It's a fact of life!

Anything less is an exercise in futility, a waste, a self-imposed defeat.

The oil picture is an opportunity, but only if we keep the facts of life clearly in focus. Predictions of Peak Oil are looking pretty impressive compared to the Real World Performance, even with the impacts of embargos and Gulf Wars.

The big business interests have every intention of running the last drop of oil into our veins in order to extract the continuing flow of our funds and avoid the intellectual work and risk of dealing with the unpleasantness ahead. Then they plan to turn around and make us scapegoats and slaves when the oil picture is undeniable and our alternative is a dieoff. They're already trying to make us take the weight, claiming the american public should control their appetites -- unsaid is that industry should continue to draw their piece which btw is roughly 50% to 100% more than what we directly use. And their waste is unbelievably huge.

Big business fully intends to go on wolfing down profits to the detriment of the private individual by playing this petroleum card til the wells are dry. If we let them, we will witness the extremes of that detriment, as if now is not bad enough. All the while chasing our tails on useless agendas like the Sierra's, if we don't grasp the reality of government's perfidy, and act on it.

Meanwhile China, India and the rest are growing faster than we are, especially in population. How are they going to stem their demand? Collision ahead.

Eisenhower warned us about being so dependent of foreign oil, Carter started trying to get us off. Then the oil barons, here and abroad, went into high gear and brought us... (drum roll) cheap oil for a few years so we'd be hooked again. The Saudi oil barons not only accomplished that one, they are responsible for bankrupting Russia. Oil was a major export for the Russians, look in any old atlas. The Saudi cheap oil, undercut the Russian market and Saudi Aramco held them in that hammerlock for six years til there were so many shortages in Russia that the government could no longer continue its operations. Hence Glasnost, all economics, all designed to deal with the big powers.

After recent history, do you think the government will rise to the challenge. Not a chance.

There is a way to piece together a replacement energy system within the next 8-12 years, all finessed by our power as consumers but... the full plan gets to be heavy reading and pretty math stuff so we'll do the executive overview here and you can read the rest at your leisure. I've got the data accumulated at a website, have been discussing this plan with the members of the alternate energy group here in Cinci and will be doing presentations on the concept, first one was last Sunday to a group at the Mockbee galleries. The most urgent part is our basic role as consumers.

The car companies in the US have been making FFVs (flexible fuel vehicles) that will run on gas (which is now 85% gas and 15% ethanol), or on e85 (which is 85% ethanol and 15% gas) or on blends of those, for the last 10 years, that's right 10 YEARS. These FFVs were designed to reduce pollution and the wizards in govt made some phony concessions to environmentalists to require that fleets reduce their collective pollution -- at least on paper -- by buying some of these cars. The Sierra Club's quotas are such a waste, an invitation to weasels. This 'brilliant' government strategy resulted in the FFVs being widely dispersed in fleets everywhere. Of course with this distribution, there was no real market for the e85 they were to run on -- no market anywhere. So although by now there are about 4-5 million of them, the e85 stations are so few that the FFVs run mostly on gas and their enviro impact is nil. A few of the agricultural-states have tried to push their own fleets into using e85 but it wasn't until this year that any of us could get one of these, except as a used car, strictly luck, nor have most people ever heard of e85.

We could have all been driving these FFVs since they're well understood technology and we could have simply driven away from this oil mess. Now comes the opening for consumers, now that these FFVs are "supposed" to be available to the public beginning in 2006, anyone not wanting to throw away their car budget should refuse to buy anything but a diesel or an FFV. (Chrysler announced their plan just last month but the dealers here weren't told and have no clue, only internet readers monitoring these events have paid any attention.) Unless we spread the word that PEOPLE HAVE THIS CHOICE, no one will know and the car companies will pocket your new car money without improving anyone's chances of getting through this mess unscathed.

We simultaneously need to get those already existing FFVs into a limited area so then the e85 conversion can begin. Illinois is offering incentives to stations to clean out one of their tanks and offer e85. That's basically all it would take to provide the infrastructure. In fact, if we get into a real fix, like another embargo, it would be really useful to have the e85 stations around everywhere as well even before we have lots of FFVs, but let's save that 'wiggle room' for discussion IF something dire happens. (Note Illinois govt is interested because of the benefit to business in their state)

Meanwhile, know any good mechanic who likes to travel to fleet auctions? Taking FFVs from states-with-no-real-e85-stations to states-with-a real-e85-market would probably get a better price. Any other suggestions? This is not a waste of our efforts.

Every FFV running on e85 cuts their contribution to big oil's immoral profits by 82%, AND IF we refuse to buy any new cars but FFVs BUT we continue to replace our vehicles at about 10% of them per year, within 6 years we will have cut our cars' oil consumption in half. In 12 years we're free of the monsters in oil -- at least when we're driving.

The other part of the equation is a process called TDP (thermal de-polymerization) which has the ability to convert most of our waste into oil, everything carbon-based can be converted (which means no help with nuclear waste so until someone wants that stuff in their backyard the nukes have to go but that's covered in another part of the strategy). Sewage yes, old tires yes, turkey guts and cow brains yes, plastics yes, etc. All produce oil. The key is to have a consistent stream of waste, so the optimal arrangement is to have a suitable size TDP facility adjacent to a dedicated source, like a factory or a mall or the sewage plant or a junkyard, etc.

The volumes required to replace foreign oil, however, would require 30,000 such facilities and cost $600 billion. Those are big numbers so let's put them in perspective with appropriate sources of site and funding. Assuming we aren't limiting ourselves to agricultural waste, since industrial waste is 5 times as great, this would mean about 300 some in Ohio, with maybe 7 inside the Cincinnati loop. Not too bad.

On the funding side, US corporations have $ 500 billion in retained profits -- after paying shareholders -- FROM LAST YEAR ALONE, which they have not committed to investing in their operation's growth or improvement because they 'detect' a 'lack confidence' in consumers. Maybe they remember how they downsized huge numbers of those potential consumers as former employees, then stole their pensions later, in between getting caught in major corruption scandals and still try to induce us to risk more of the equity in our home on more shoddy merchandise.

Anyway they are sitting on this huge stash. Almost what's needed in just one year's retained earnings! Nor are other year's profits that much less, with the lowest in the last 5 years being at least 70% of this year's. Rationally, the funds invested would save them from spikes in their oil expenses due to foreign meddling (like an embargo, or unstable supplies due to terrorist activities, or maybe just another Katrina), would likely marginally increase their earnings (from oil income minus operating costs, instead of waste removal expense) and generate positive PR, not to mention that it has to be done eventually.

We're going to have to push them to move, any way we can. Suggestions, consumer pressure, stockholder lures, whatever. If the car companies get the message that we're serious about our demand for FFVs, maybe investors will shift their money -- and corporations will be forced to dance to our tune that much sooner.

The third piece is to get our homes using as much solar heating as we can so we can get free of the need for oil (and soon natural gas) to shelter our families from the cold. To make solar work in the midwest (the original solar designs are more viable elsewhere, but the midwest has been only recently developing refinements of solar that are more practical here) requires well insulated homes, and thermal storage to get through the sometimes 10-11 winter days of very little sun. This push for solar is not just a nicety anymore.

Nor are conservation tactics like setting the thermostat lower in winter (and higher in summer) and making adjustments in lifestyle to fit. The key at lower temps is to enjoy the season's treats of well-designed warm clothing, warm drinks, infra-red task lighting, more baking, radiant heat under your feet, warm bathing areas, etc... The principle is that a small allocation of energy to personal warmth makes the large allocation of energy for space heating an unnecessary waste and hence an opportunity to save.

The main change in thermal storage is insulated berms. Houses in the midwest should have berms. It's simply regionally appropriate. And in those berms we can store summer's heat, using way fewer solar collectors once the berm is insulated and designed for the purpose. That design is called PAHS -- passive annual heat storage.

Cars and heat are our biggest vulnerabilities and as consumers they're in our grasp.

There are a few more wrinkles to our plan but those are the big pieces. How many more of the wrinkles we will need -- and how soon -- will depend on when oil production can't keep up with growth in demand, as well as on how well we manage to twist arms to get FFVs and begin building TDP facilities.

What we do know is that we have to get as many families as we can to start figuring their way along this path -- FFVs, e85, TDP, conservation, solar and berms -- so we can get free of petroleum-based oil.

Oh, and if you did want to read through the details of the full picture, the first presentation is currently developing at Bergerac.TV assembled by the reader with the spreadsheet.

What the 9-11 dead and their 911tapes are telling us about their killers

2006-04-05T11:01:00.000-05:00

I trust you've seen/heard at least excerpts from the tapes of the 911 operators on 9-11. But in that emotional turmoil accompanying this reviving of that day's events and images, are we missing the real message the dead are sending us?

Look at the locations, the timing and the comments of the victims that have managed to get through the court's hurdles for release. Every one of them is pointing to smoke as their immediate killer. Not one is mentioning any blazing inferno. Any searing heat. The callers were still active, judging by the transcript's times, til at least 10 minutes before the total collapse of the towers.

Yet the WTC towers collapsed so rapidly, not even delayed by pancaking stages, that the official story's inferno would have had to have destroyed the towers' cores from bottom-to-top, including the floors where these calls originated. But steel doesn't melt down at Fahrenheit 451, more like ten times that. What happens in interiors of offices and homes is rapid incineration when the temperatures reach the flash point. In fact, I've read that smoke is a sign of a, relatively speaking, cool fire.

So 10 minutes before the building whooshed to the ground, the interiors of those offices were still below the flash point for all that office and paper mess. That was at least an hour and 15 minutes after the second plane hit. The planes' impact, the planes' contents, none of that has built an inferno in the core after an hour, yielding even temperatures that could ignite office materials from the inferno's heat.

Nor were these floors protected by the asbestos that was built into the lower floors. All that asbestos the WTC owners were trying to avoid 'remediating' was confined to the lower 70-some floors, not where these victims were trapped with no such protection. The heat from any quarter-mile long (full-tower-long) inferno in the core would have swept through these offices, now lacking life support, even sooner than the lower floors where firefighters were preparing to fight the fire they saw and expected to rescue the buildings' occupants.

Whatever brought that steel down was not being seen or experienced by either firefighters below, nor victims above. That's what those tapes and their messages from the dead are telling us. Not that the operators were badly prepared, nor handled the hazards inappropriately.

What this court release of tapes appears to be, with its timing coming on the heels of increasing media attention to the '911Truth' movements, is an attempt to again add the weight of anguish to the facade the real killers and their collaborators hide behind, the lie that our defenses failed, that incompetance and lack of preparedness, were the key to understanding the disaster.

Let's not be so easy to manipulate. Let's absorb the message our dead are telling us. The cause of the towers collapse was not likely the result of plane impacts and towering infernos. Instead we should add the weight of their testimony in the 911 emergency tapes to the accumulating attention to 9-11Truth.

It must be discomfiting the real killers to see even the puzzled mainstream media attention like CNN's program and the article in The New Yorker. How much more alarm must the petition documents filed by the Scholars for 911Truth be arousing in the depths of the minds of the truly guilty.

Or do they sit back like shellgame perpetrators and think this distraction aimed at 911 operators will strengthen their facade of incompetance adequately, that reminders of our trauma will make us want to forget that day's details, that attention stirred up on the topic by the Truth9-11 interest will be muddied with diffuse and unfocussed speculations about peripheral details?

Let's not give them that satisfaction. Let's turn their ploy against them, not let them or their collaborators who benefitted, majorly, escape recognition. We may or may not be able to get the current government to deal with the monstrous reality, but we have other ways to deal with them all, more subtle, more peaceful, more beneficial to all the innocent and more devastating to the guilty.

Temple Grandin and humane slaughter vs Rupert Sheldrake and extended animal consciousness

2006-02-05T12:44:00.000-05:00

There's currently a considerable flurry of media and activity surrounding the work of Temple Grandin and her theories of animal behavior. Temple's personal story of achievement and success in spite of an early diagnosis of autism is very inspiring, yet her professional work on animal behavior and her interpretation of social relationships requires careful, though maybe mmomentarily unpleasant, evaluation. Unpleasant because it will open the door to current farm animal handling, including humane slaughter.

Among Temple's claims to validity is her contention that autism gives her clearer insight into animal behavior and experience, particularly consciousness, pain and social relationships. We do not dispute her claims to uniqueness of view, nor her acknowledgement of animal consciousness as real. And Temple's achievements in reducing animal terror in slaughterhouses are amazing and desirable, though open to other interpretations.

Perhaps you're asking yourself why we should even devote the requisite attention to this evaluation if it’s potentially unpleasant. Her focus is on farm animals and not our pets. Perhaps we should be content with her achievements on livestock handling equipment and go back to our own work. But the stir over her books about consciousness, social behavior and animal nature suggests the urgency for our attention because this sort of impact implies either she's touching something fundamental or there's some ulterior motive in media, or both.

We applaud the demonstrations of animal thinking, right up to and including the claims of genius and brilliance in some animals. Read that for yourselves. As a writer, she's amazingly logical and has many fewer blindspots toward animals than our culture delivers. Be prepared though for the unvarnished views, as she draws them clearly.

We have also read with awe the database of animal and human events in Rupert Sheldrake's books and website. Rupert's theories in biology fitting with these collected events, suggest that animals that are our pets and companions, as well as animals in the wild, can intercept our minds’ images. Why not farm animals? And if so, Temple's assessment that animals in well maintained and managed slaughterhouses don't know what is about to befall them and can be humanely stunned instantaneously to make slaughter totally painfree and fearfree is in need of examination.

Her argument is that if they were aware of the slaughter pending, they would bolt and struggle even in the well maintained and managed slaughterhouses, but they don't. Those nightmare panic events appear to be reserved for places where the facilities are poorly kept and the staff poorly directed. Temple's programs have done this, provided caretaking and surroundings that lead to calm animals walking to slaughter. No apparent fear, so she concludes they have no knowledge.

But does it really necessarily mean the animals are unaware and have no knowledge of what is waiting? It is easily conceivable that they are fully aware, that they see that the caretakers are assiduously looking after them, that pain is to be avoided and that they have the solidarity of their fellows to comfort them. Which says a lot about priorities for survival and understandings, implying potentially some code of stoicism or honor. A possibility like this deserves that we examine this.

Temple maintains that we have unspoken and unwritten social agreements with those with whom we have relationships. What about our relationships with animals. Where would these agreements come from and how did we and they get into them?

Humans were once prey and only later developed predator skills. Our defenses and our hunting abilities reinforced one another as well as establishing our new status in nature. Barbara Ehrenreich's Blood Rites describes these interactions and their implications for war glorification as a driving force in our social dealings.

Our prey ancestry is supported by a realization that our digestive system is not carnivore. We are frugivores because our digestive tract is at least a dozen times as long as our spines, and our intestinal tract is sacculated. Our bodies cannot handle the mechanics even of processing meats, which putrefy in the lengthy processes in our guts, become compacted and generally involve health problems in the simple mechanics. Carnivores have sleek, short digestive tracts roughly only a couple times the length of their spines. That's why they can manage carcasses that are not freshly cleaned and assiduously prepared since their systems eliminate the remains of the meal before the negatives coming in the biochemistry -- beyond the mechanics -- does their damage. The bodies of humans and non-carnivores like rodents have been demonstrated to have limited abilities on the chemical side of digestion to safely process the animal protein and all its residual by-products. In labwork and demographics, as well as clinically, there appears to be an animal products' ceiling of about 5%-10% of our calorie intake that can be dealt with safely by our systems. Beyond that the accumulations of negative biochemical processes reduce our immune systems' abilities to cope with routine exposures in nature as well as genetic predispositions. Mice pushed beyond those limits cannot avoid the consequences of carcinogens and undesirable genetic traits, whereas below those limits they can. See Colin Campbell's China Study for the specifics.

Having taken up hunting, humans sought improvements for its hazards and unreliable production, leading to herding and agriculture generally. In the process of hunting, herding and plant cultivating, we made alliances with some of our fellow prey and small predators, allowing us to domesticate some of them. Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel traces the benefits and differential development rates around the world that resulted as humans engaged in developing their regionally available domesticable animals. Some of our fellow prey and small predators served as companions, as guards, as transport, as engines, as providers of milk and eggs, in exchange for protection and feeding. Somewhere along the way, hunting and herding led to slaughter. Conceivably the benefits to our fellow domesticable prey as well as the hazards of herding and possible slaughter may have outweighed the benefits and hazards of freedom and other predators. At that point a bargain may have effectively taken shape.

In any event, domestication led to breeding for our selective purposes, not theirs, til we now have farm animals totally dependent on our resources. Their ancestors may have been able to manage in the wild with difficulty, but should anything happen to us suddenly, these creatures would probably not survive unless what removed us from the picture also eliminated their adversaries without diminishing nature's ability to rebound rapidly. Chernobyl's deadzone is a demonstration of how nature can thrive once humans are removed from the scene.

If that breeding for docility has reduced animal intelligence as a recent Discover Magazine article suggested, can today's farm animals be held to the agreement as a matter of ethical dealing? On the other hand, if our science knows as little about measuring animal intelligence as they know about human intelligence, the whole issue of domestication and intelligence is voided and we have only Temple's and Rupert's collected observations on intelligence to rely on.

So where does that leave us on the interpretation of calm in the face of slaughter? Clearly some relationship between herder and domesticated animal was developed and we've acknowledged our fellow animals' range of intelligence as well as their ability to read our minds' images. Particularly after seeing the evidence in Rupert's experiments. Look especially at the case of Nkisi when you read The Sense of Being Stared At. If fear of pain is absent due to the ability of the animals to read mental pictures and see the level of assiduous management, is that enough to overcome survival instincts and rely on a samuraic code of conduct? Are there added bases in the comfort of companions in the picture?

Curiously, an observation from a few perceptive friends who watch the reality TV show "Survivors" suggests that humans in a near parallel situation do choose near-peers over hazard. In the diabolic tradition of bad bargains, the show requires that players choose a member of their 'tribe' for exclusion from continuing each week in the game's simulated wilderness extended trial.

In those games, there apparently is a pattern of choosing the most talented individual to distinguish themselves in the recent challenges to be excluded even though that would seem a predictor of subsequent disaster. The strength of the desire not-to-be-excluded seems to reinforce the peer bond relationship. They then choose the comfort of peers over the improved prospects of survival.

Of course we ourselves have been bred and indoctrinated for a century and a half of compulsory, age-segregated schooling so it's not clear whether this choice would apply among independent, school-free social groups, nor among our wild animals. Surely the contests among wild males for group leadership of their herd or clans, though seldom fatal, has been suggested to be demonstration that wild and training-free animals choose talented life over peer relationships. Of course they are not governed by the diabolic game entirely and other research shows that the secondary males are very successful at reproducing in spite of non-dominance, maybe even moreso than the males pre-occupied with dominance. On the other hand there are the lemmings. Maybe even the whales that beach together.

Farm animals could therefore seem to fit the conjecture that the calm before slaughter may actually be reassurance of conscious knowledge of painfree caretaker handling and the comfort of peer solidarity.

Temple is clearly right about the importance of fear over pain, as she demonstrated by the example of the switch from pain response to defensive behavior in the bull that was suffering from castration but immediately rose to face approaching humans. (How can veterinarians even think of doing such monstrosities without pain-relief! But then again contemporary doctors have practiced circumcision on infant boys without pain-relief for the innocent til relatively recently.) But Temple seems to have overlooked the impact of the comfort of companionship in the absence of pain as well as the samuraic code of honoring an ancient contract.

And while we're thinking about their bravery and comradeship when the likelihood of handling slipups is eliminated, maybe we should also tally up our animal protein intakes and ask why we pursue this demand from our farm animals. Especially when this shortterm gratification in supposed luxury diet leads to longterm sickness and suffering as well as early death. Even the vendors of meat are recognizing that the reduction in stress hormones from bad handling at slaughtertime, is worth the extra costs to their clients. Without even touching the hideous and ethically repugnant subject of factory farm type abuses of the animals as being detrimental to our health through chemical impacts on meat quality.

On top of that health question, on top of the equity question, stands the realization that animal husbandry is more oil-intensive than no-till agriculture and its other organic variations. Research at the agricultural engineering colleges has shown considerable comparability in the productivity of low-oil agriculture, particularly when you factor in longterm dwindling fertility and even losses of usable soil under the contemporary forced, oil-intensive food growing. With oil becoming ever more price-volatile and ultimately requiring infrastructure changes, we as individuals will naturally eventually be making choices. Among those experimenting in alternative lifestyles, the low meat to no meat alternatives, as well as the decentralized agriculture concepts have made promising headway. In the city, the concept of metro-farming is being explored. with the requisite clearing and sharing of land for gardening. Suburban laws with noxious regulations on what owners can and cannot grow are similarly due for removal and rethinking.

Which leaves our companion carnivores, primarily cats but dogs also though they are already omnivores. We've resorted to wildcaught fish processed at freezing temperatures for our cats. Nature doesn't frown on carnivores though they are vulnerable not only to carnivore hazards but also to the variations in prey populations due to omnivore and herbivore hazards. It would seem preferable to choose TNR (Trap, Neutre, Release) as well as enhancing the entire habitat for our human-friendly animals, which would not only sustain the lives of our companions as well as the birds and little critters, but would also give ourselves and our children more leafy, nature-guided environments, precisely the environments that were recently shown to undo tendencies to ADHD type disabilities, environments that have become less common in our denuded landscapes. Leafy, ragged edged beauty.

Which leaves the question of how do we humanely get from where we are to where we should be, certainly ultimately. Each of us is individual, and our lives and resources vary. Just keep the principles in mind, find a step or two to try. Some things work better than others for you or me or others. If we simply keep the targets in mind and keep whittling, we can get there. And remember if you, your family and your companion animals all eat more raw foods, you actually require less food overall, in fact for pure raw food diets, balanced of course, you need only half the caloric intake. Our cat survived a deadly case of hepatic lipidosis because we switched his diet to totally raw meats since his body -- compromised by HL -- had limited ability to process the foods we could get in him. He's more lively and energetic now than ever. So maybe now the cats will cancel their strike, as soon as I post this.

Temple's publications

Opt-out Revolution vs the MothersMovement.Org

2006-01-11T21:43:00.001-05:00

Feminism failed? No that's not the implication of the Opt-Out Revolution. Corporate-parity feminism failed, is the implication. Remember all those variations of feminism that feminists claim are under the feminism umbrella? Let's be honest. Corporate-parity feminism did fail. If we can get past this mental block to dealing with the reality at hand, we may have a chance of preventing the whole liberation movement from going under.

The Mothersmovement.org perpetually suggests the need to discuss -- although Judith Stadtman Tucker means 'debunk' -- the Opt-out revolution, so let's accept the invitation to dialog on the topic.

To begin, I should at once illustrate how empty are the promised 'intelligent commentaries', 'shrewd summations', and 'editorial deconstructions' which Tucker's opening article suggests were demolishing the NYT article by Louise Story.

Cupaiuolo's article at Ms, shrewd? The sum total of Christine's summation was 1) that the Story article was about wealthy women's choices -- which is not that amazing a conclusion given the title of the article as well as the content was about Ivy League women -- and 2) that the media doesn't focus much on the major problems of women attempting to pursue a career and motherhood so she added her own personal wishlist to the summation. Why doesn't she just say that this implies that corporate-parity feminism failed, and face it? That's the reason for the blinders on media focus that Tucker and Cupaiuolo both acknowledge. We've got to come to grips with our fears of failure.

And Jack Shafer's deconstruction at Slate is totally pathetic. First he makes an enormous issue of Story's choice of a predominately verbal characterization of her survey results rather than a more numerical presentation -- which lack of specificity he demonizes as 'weasel-words' -- then he writes a followup article to correct the factual errors in his original baseless assumptions about the writer and goes on to now criticize Story's occasional use of numeric specificity so that he can now demonize the survey as weak and not justifying holy numbers. What's his solution? Use another weasel word! But to top off that disastrous attack, someone clued him into a similar NYT article written in 1980 so he reports that he's located one of the women quoted in that article and crows that she feels she was misinterpreted then, that she was highly career oriented. But this actually adds proof to Story's contention without acknowleging that fact. By demonstrating that the interviewee in 1980 was more gung ho than today's group though she apparently said somewhat similar things to be misinterpreted in the article, is in fact adding 'one more anecdote' to show that today's group were 'more realistic' while still saying those sorts of similar things -- which it may be pointed out were confirmed as to the interpretation for this generation's intentions by Story doublechecking the survey's phrasing and comparing results. One might wonder whose side Jack was really on.

When those two promised rebuttals ended up supporting Story, I was beginning to doubt my excitement at finding a mothers' movement. You see, I've been promoting the opt-out concept for several years and experimenting in strategies with more effectiveness than I see around us. Working from the perspective of a mathematical decision analyst, I view the mothers' movement as the key to leveraging our collective future, provided we can recognize the real entanglement we're in. Fortunately entanglements are a mathematician's playtoy.

Although disagreement is the reason for dialog, we have also some fundamental common perceptions. For example, the observation that the 'organization of work' is totally ignored as the primary factor seems to me to be precisely on target. Let's keep that factor in focus.

Back when I entered the career world of the 1970s with my PhD in math in hand, there was an article in Ms that described a young mother, corporate lawyer in the investment world, who took her infant to the office along with the nanny. We had visions of those adjustments, those perks we wanted in order to maintain our connection to our children while being productive. Different perks than the ones that favored men's productivity but no more unjustifiable. If corporate-parity feminism had prevailed, would we have pursued our leadership goals like Winona LaDuke whose mother accompanied her on the Green Party's VP campaign trail in 2000 so that Winona could have her baby with her? But Winona is anti-corporate, an independent. We, who worked the corporate side, don't come anywhere close to that, after 30 years of corporate game playing. The handwriting is on the wall, just some women refuse to see it.

And we're in full agreement with Tucker about the impossibility of 'involved family life while devoting 60 to 80 hours a week to climbing the career ladder.' The 'maternal wall' as Tucker put it is real but the crux of the problem is more complex and depends on understanding the reason for the work week.

The corporate leadership has been groomed for the greed olympics and they are determined to keep women out. Our entire system of wealth is based on excessive consuming, the more we can be driven to consume the greater the apparent wealth. Not real wealth, of course, because this greed devours our infrastructure and progressively leaves our national treasure in quality of life ever more debased. But for media purposes, the appearance of wealth is convincing. And because corporate needs also buy research as well as political clout, the academy and the government both support and depend on greed's success. But even with this re-inforcement, the helm must be guided by a relentless vision sustaining this agenda or risk running aground or collapse. To perpetuate this wealth-generating process requires a stream of suitable leadership, namely individuals who willingly sell their lives, families, and souls for access to the top. To identify and groom that stream, top management has creatively developed an invinceable and unrecognized strategy, using ambitious women as pawns in the game.

Women, especially as caregivers and mothers, are viewed with suspicion anyway in the greed game and are openly discriminated against at top levels, dismissing Title VII as insupportable in such crucial areas as require CEO's undivided attention, lest profit for shareholders be compromised by distraction. Priorities for profit over parity are claimed justified, according to surveys of senior management done by Harlan and Weiss, sometime around 1998, when it was announced at a women's studies conference I was attending at my former alma mater.

To complete the leadership training and mobilize the process of blocking women's entry to the boardroom, a small number of ambitious young women are promoted earlier than their male peers, creating the appearance of favoring women when in reality they have made them, and any like them, targets of jealousy. In the book Why Men Earn More, there is an interesting statistic that confirms the pattern of this ploy. According to the author -- one Warren Farrell, PhD -- of the top women executives 21% are under 40, but of the top male executives, only 1% are under 40. Yes, I'm aware the author is using his data to justify and sanctify corporate human resource practices and either doesn't realize he's given away the game or else figures his spin can handle this tidbit that he finds useful for his ploys. We however are entitled to recognize that this tactic accounts for the abrupt isolation promising women have reported in their description of the glass ceilings, when prior to that invisible ceiling, inclusive team playing had been the pattern. Having thus isolated the more aggressive women from team playing, and sparked the ruthless competition, the rest are easily dealt with by the remaining dynamics. At that point the natural propensity in games, where servile competition for favor is the driving force, takes over making it easy to groom the males most willing to serve greed's agenda with 60-80 hour weeks.

Having seen the nature of the beast's game and knowing where the beast is driving us as a society, it should be apparent that corporate-parity feminism is a lost cause and the Opt-Out Revolution is our only ace in the hole. For the sake of family and women's liberation, we must focus on re-claiming and re-engineering the home to serve as our base of strength. Having done that we can provide re-inforcement for husbands who choose not to be made servile and thus stem the debasing of our national infrastructure and our quality of life.

What is newsworthy about these NYT surveys -- Belkin's and Story's -- is that there's been so little progress after more than a generation. Tucker's saying that four years of college results in more college women remaining in the workforce than women with less-than-college indoctrination only means that more education makes us more vulnerable to corporate ploys and less resistant to powering their blueprints, and *that* certainly merits stepping up the discussion of finding alternate leadership and strategies. Today's young women have been abused by the current women leaders in academia, who advised women students to pursue advanced degrees in areas where these 'leaders' knew the market for degrees was dwindling, figuring they could argue that the expanded pool of women in their specialties justified the promotion of more women academicians, namely themseslves. Using these young women as cannon fodder in the academicians' battles with university administrations is downright immoral, a clear indication of strategies of the impotent.

In order for the women's movement, in particular the mothers' segment to pull off the changes we need we must, right now, deal with some of the mind-viruses that corporate-agenda feminism has slipped into our midst, particularly in the politically ever-present 'accolades' to caregiving as not really bad for 'smart women'.

Tucker must stop the backhanded belittling of at-home motherhood and of spending time with children. I'm sure it's not intentional but this supposed need to acknowledge "menial and mind-numbing" as aspects of care-giving is so unfair. There are menial and mind-numbing chores in any profession, whether it's architecture or system design or law or medicine or real estate or for that matter, horticulture. Why is it de rigeur to label this as a deficiency of at-home motherhood? Properly done, when we settle our focus to those repetitive periods in the workflow, we find they are an amazing opportunity for creative machinations, from looking at problems from different angles to recognizing patterns, which Asian philosophies such as zen have always known.

On the other hand, we should acknowledge that the design of the conventional house, or apartment, is unsuitable for infants, for the elderly and for pets, with kitchen and cleaning and maintenance barely one step removed from frivolous waste and multitudes of servants, merely shrunken in size. And almost never suitable for the productive upheaval of creative endeavors. Complete system redesign is required for the current housing supply, yet women are expected to submit to this imposition and we allow these spaces to inhibit our creative management. Motherhood is not the problem, women's reluctance to wield hammer, saw, screwdriver and wrench is the pressing difficulty.

I'm however puzzled by why Tucker thinks she can claim that it should be a pressing problem that all sorts of economic and social factors need to be dealt with in order for a woman to succeed in arranging time with her child. This problem is ordinary to any species, not just messed up homo sapiens. That some neighborhoods are unsuitable for habitation by anyone is a problem, but not a motherhood problem. The fact that a disproportionate number of mothers appear on poverty lists is a problem of the advice women are given, not a motherhood problem.

Nor is it logical for Tucker to conclude that these young women opting-out in the survey are unaware that you can't be the best father and the best brass-ring pursuer at the same time merely because they recognize it in women. It didn't seem that the survey was structured to determine whether this connection had been made or even whether there was some perceived relativity in the importance of the roles. There are no points awarded fairly to those who claim the young women in the survey said things they never did. Tucker scores no points for this one either.

Although many of Tucker's assertions on conditions are accurate --

Tucker's segment on solutions is however limited to occidentalism. In oriental martial arts, it is not necessarily the biggest and most powerful who can win the contests. Let's rethink the balance of economic energies and protected motions, recognizing that leadership is not limited to the powerful elite. There are strategies we can pursue that use the power elite's force against themselves. We need to recognize our strengths, re-build our base, and draw in our natural allies for mutual protection, while maintaining our vision of motherhood as primary.

We can and should cease channelling energy into frustrating exercises that corporate-parity women get into when they marry, squabbling over who should get to play brass-ring pursuer, because our goal is now for neither to be. By calmly staying on target you can avoid the running in illogical circles inherent in the debasing of caregiving roles. Otherwise you flip-flop, like Tucker, from accusing these young women of duping their intended husbands -- suggesting that their young men should complain about having to conform to the ideal worker regimen to support a wife -- to the equally undesirable accusation of being duped themselves -- the young men will be big reapers, presumeably at the young women's expense? Let's try to keep our vision straight here, we're all being led in circles for the benefit of the greedy. Let's stop allowing them to play us against one another. The only real target worth our efforts is undoing the seduction of the greedy.

But we must also not allow those who lead, or are led, in those circles to make our strategies and control our voices. In one of Tucker's positions, they have misled Tucker as well. Reconsider the following segment of Tucker's article.

"A single-minded determination to claw one's way to the top may be tolerated in childless women, but in mothers that kind of thing is still viewed as an aberration -- and a blight on their children's futures. A University of Pennsylvania freshman quoted by the Times remarked, "I've seen the difference between kids who did have their mothers stay at home and kids who didn't, and it's kind of an obvious difference when you look at it." Well, no, it isn't, not after age four or so -- and studies show the behavioral variations of young children who spend more than 30 hours a week in day care fall well within the normal range of development. So what's going on here?"

Unfortunately the young woman is right, the difference is one of the noxious compromises corporate-parity feminists have made in "truth in research". Even before Belsky's research demonstrated that children subjected to more than halfday daycare exhibited significantly more violent aggression toward peers and toward their mothers, this charade by feminists in child psychology that daycare was producing academically and socially advanced children was in force, concealing the reality of their actual results under a twisted world of spin. How utterly despiccable to sacrifice children's wellbeing for 'the cause' of parity. That's "what's going on here". Tucker's confusion is palpable. So now they've conjured this subterfuge of focussing on age four and older, when children have learned to better conceal their feelings. "Behavioral variations", my foot. Tucker, nor the feminist researchers dare to name it. Significant differences in violent aggression is not *just* a behavioral variation. This is babies' anguish and anger. Nor does concealment mean it's gone, what explains the explosive violence against peers we see in places like Columbine. And more subtly but still ultimately destructive and painful, what explains the difficulty of our children's generation in intimacy skills, in forming families of their own, and the animosity between generations -- all these were differences identified by Israeli researchers comparing daycare children, now grown up, to their home cared peers. Don't let corporate-parity feminists in child psychology draw you into their fraud, driving you with embarassment over corporate-feminists' errors and hiding behind this latest coverup.

So how much is 'single-minded determination' in mothers the problem, and how much is immoral concealment by feminist researchers of the damages of daycare the problem? Those researchers actually showed that the women most satisfied with their daycare service were the women who knew the least about those arrangements and were least involved in them. The researchers spun that as 'enlightenment' on the part of those mothers in achieving freedom. (Children at Home and in Daycare by Clarke-Stewart, Gruber and Fitzgerald, all major spindoctors). That is not my idea of 'ensuring their children receive quality care' as Tucker defined mothering in her opening sentiments. That kind of 'clawing their way to the top' is more than a blight on their children's futures, and the vocal opposition is not *hyperparenting* because any definition of *normal* that describes violent aggression against peers as *behavior variations* is a reprehensible perversion of motherhood. I suggest Tucker reconsider hyperparenting as the natural normal because the corporate-parity feminists' definition is based on lies, as are the solemn declarations of the current elite in government in the service of the 'New American Century' cause.

Beware, too, of other related mind viruses that are perversions of motherhood, this time in the service of concealing the nature of corporate intentions. Corporations have little to gain in diverting women from their former 'smidgen of social power' but a great deal to gain in masquerading as mother-corporate, expert in best practices, claiming our trust. But as Tucker seems to suspect, this is surely a ruse.

Mothering adopted by corporations? In the face of downsizing, how can anyone even grant that idea credibility? What motherhood example is summoned by corporations abandoning their employees here to move operations in order to take advantage of cheaper labor and less environmental infrastructure regulation in some under-developed country? Oh yeah, the feminist-psychologically-researched-normal mother, clawing her way to the top. That's not motherhood, that's simply velvet gloves over an iron fist.

Tucker is rightly leery of something unsavory in the appearance of 'mothering' in corporate best practices, though for the wrong reason. Yet even that tangent reveals clear evidence that Tucker has succumbed to the errors in the corporate-parity feminists' perversion of motherhood.

I object to the dissociation of excellence and motherhood. Tucker's claim is untrue that it is merely an unfortunate complication of the infusion of mothering concepts into corporate shellgames, that these young women with elite opportunities would confuse mothering and the pursuit of excellence. Why shouldn't motherhood be entirely compatible with the desire to excel? Where's the confusion? Somehow the corporate-parity version of motherhood has again displaced the real thing, diminishing it to insignificance and menial tasks and all the rest of the unfair slurs about mind-numbing. There's the confusing twist.

Like the women who reformed public health in the early part of the last century, the corporate parity scheme has been stifled by thinking that women can make progress from positions within the structure. All the significant progress in public health reforms, which by the way occurred due to women's activism, occurred before women were offered inside positions in government. Ask women's historians. Once inside, the rate of progress stalled. We must reclaim our positions in the home, with determination, with new skills, with a clear vision of the playing field. There's the way to leveraging the changes in lifestyle that are needed, not the shellgames of one dime per generation.

Inching our way forward was the sort of thinking exhibited by the immoral generals on the western front in WWI. In the name of their futile strategies they sacrificed young men's lives as cannon fodder. This same immoral use of the younger generation to throw their lives at insurmountable difficulties for lack of a better plan is why feminists outside the corporate-parity agenda should pull the rug out from under the parity leaders. This generation is rightfully exhibiting a sense of the need for more flexibility and less trust of corporate parity dogma.

Tucker's favored disbelievers of this trend, which was correctly observed by Story, show an amazing lack of attention to the time variable. For example, Tucker's proposed time frame on the trend needs rethinking: the young women's mothers were also career women and as such their college attitudes were more than 25-30 years ago, not 10-20. Please, these were not teenage mothers.

But then Tucker's favored numbers slip in the other direction in the use of Hoffnung's work. That research is timewise irrelevant to critiquing Story's conclusion since Story's timeframe reaches 5-10 years *further* back than 1985's college students. No overlap, no cigar. Story's timeframe is closer to my cohort, described earlier as envisioning our children with us.

But think about Hoffnung's research on its own merits. What she's saying again amounts to the fact that corporate-parity feminism has failed. There has been no appreciable change in the conversion of college aged women into the likes of career-first women in a full 20 years of social 'change', one whole percentage point. Career-first will never fly.

But enough analysing of losing strategies. Forget Tucker grasping at academic straws about intersections and narratives and gender. That's just one more losing strategy. If Tucker intends to wait on the academic world for serious consideration of bringing equal power to women, Tucker is in for a long wait because academics are notorious for avoiding activism. Recall the connection between corporate money and research that drives the administration. That 'little' connection is why it's unhealthy for one's research to be "advocacy driven", the term used to restrain action and deny tenure to those who dare to consider activism, by diminishing the merit of advocacy topics and results as being temporary and ephemeral, as opposed to classic, worthy and valuable for credibility, promotion and tenure.

The Opt-Out Revolution is the answer that brings us equal power, if we're smart enough to make it work. Having been experimenting in its strategies for several years now, I believe it's potent, not some flaccid plan for progress in inches. Add them up, total housing redesign, multigenerational alliances, homebased businesses, sustainable consumption, appropriate technology, minimizing governance, natural medicine, progressively self-insuring independence, and unschooling. The pieces can be fitted together into a quality, satisfying lifestyle if you take your time, figure, then refigure your safety net, and gradually take your steps to opt-out and build your better future. And no, based on our results, I don't believe it's a strategy only for the elite wonder girls. Dialog is begun.

Treason, Crackpot Claims and Internet Parallel Processing

2006-01-01T14:22:00.000-05:00

One more piece of the Sept11 attack for you to consider before deciding who's attacking us. Have you seen any of the evidence that's accumulating on the pentagon attack? Maybe not. I could go through the pieces but it wouldn't be as stunning as the UK's PentagonStrike website.

OTOH, if IIRC, the site runs pretty fast, so if your connection in-coming is maybe not compatible...

The gist is that the official story of the administration is that Flight 77, a 60ton behemoth with 125' wings and a 150' long fuselage not only made that little 20' high narrow hole in the pentagon before the outerlayer collapsed and that it penetrated through 3 layers of the building, but left nearly nothing recognizable as appropriate sized aircraft parts out on the lawn nor inside the structure.

They claim that it hit going 500some mph, skimming only a couple feet above the ground or slowing only by bouncing on the approach, but in the photos there's no trace of damage of any kind to the landscaping and lawn, perfect for golfing.

And more, all lies, that intelligent media should have uncovered and should have demanded to see the immediately confiscated security cameras' tapes from the Sheraton, the DOD gas station and the highway crossed by whatever delivered the damage. The website video only highlights the glaring discrepancies in the evidence and draws the picture of the official lying process that led to absurdity. We however know from Gulf I that *we*, and a few others, have the drones with guidance controls to execute the flight path and they would usable in other size aircraft, including small commutercraft. And there's no logic nor evidence to connect what's basically drone use to "suicide" bombers. And where exactly is the original Flight 77, someone with authority is behind this. There's no natural Bermuda Triangle in Ohio.

So Now there's a petition being circulated to demand answers from those with that authority, under 'criminal' penalties for treason, which is what such a betrayal warrants. Oh my, how contentious! What crackpots!

Well, before the 'conspiracy theory' label-fears attack you, consider this. What has been going on online among those who detected something unsavory, or thought they did somewhere, is nothing more nor less than the speculations of exactly the type that produces good science, it's called brainstorming, but applied openly to social issues and on a scale of the internet, with all the powers of the wonders of distributed & human-parallel processing, and transparent for everyone to see and kibbitz. Unlike the glossy facade of their opponents, aka the establishment.

There's absolutely nothing crackpot about brainstorming, and if some of those engaged in it are enthused overly about their current discoveries or explanations and the energy of participation that's valid too, until the next better fitting theory gets worked out. There are huge benefits in co-operative research. If a flaw is discovered, so much the better, that's what generates improvement, in science as well as here online doing legal research. It's not fast, especially when you have opponents with the advantages in this case, but progress has been quite amazingly satisfactory.

It's only the "schoolish" who are rigid with fear about making a mistake and who succumb to the labelers. Remember, first and foremost, those who operate in secrecy, which includes most govt and corporations and those with enough money to hire fronts, have a vested interest in our not figuring out their games, hence the primary objective of the conspirators in the secrecy business is to deter you from figuring, to convince us that anyone who does suspect the unsavory is a crackpot.

Yup, it's bad enough being a fringey type, doing things 'different' in order to make headway against the current idiocy -- diversity is only a lipservice word -- now you've gotta endure the crackpot threat in order to see what's being hidden under the rug, because it will bite you.

Maybe 2006 will be better.

Game plan for countering organized psychopathy

2005-12-17T16:46:00.000-05:00

We hope we may be seeing signs that those who believed in govt as part of the solution to our economy's problems, via protest to get policy to do the job needed, are beginning to see the futility of that route and hopefully reserve recourse to government and protesting strictly for the events where putting the brakes on the latest outrage is all that's sought.

A recent post at Signs-of-the-Times very nicely identifies the reason for this futility as 'organized psychopathy' and then proceeds to seek a way to break the grip of the forces involved.

Some are accepting now that our daily purchasing activities are empowering exactly those forces that are the cause of our problems and advocating more cognizance of and responsibility for re-directing our own spending. An economic version of think globally, act locally. The suggestions however get murky at that point, with few specifics on proceeding beyond politically correct affiliations such as CSAs (community supported agriculture) and salutes to anti-Walmart.

Having explored CSAs and found them inappropriate for anyone selective in what greens they want to eat, and having reason to believe that Walmart not only holds the key to leveraging our escape from Big Oil but also seems to be targetted primarily for 'class' reasons, I would suggest that a more thought out strategy be developed.

Our approach has consisted of patronizing those sources that promote serious DIY efforts, and those sources that keep the lid on prices of foods, basic groceries, tools and such. Those two agendas seem crucial to the functioning of free people, including the working class. Under this logic, we regularly patronize Home Depo, Krogers and Walmart, AutoZone, etc.

The second segment of the plan is sustainability. We target our expenses very carefully and study the results. We have concluded that energy use and food and healthcare are key areas for improvement in quality while simultaneously reducing quantity. The other element is eliminating isolation, the demon that makes us vulnerable. We advocate the multigenerational household because we can marshal more knowledge, more connections, more work-sharing, more commonspace and tool sharing, while respecting personal privacy.

Further I maintain that people have major misconceptions about how effectively they're performing in these areas and the only way to clear our collective vision is to discuss *numbers*. Then people can identify appropriate targets and devise implementation routes to get them to aggressively doable goals instead of wishful thinking while drowning in depression, victims of expert 'organized psychopathy'.

Our household budget for living expenses, even while living temporarily on rent in preparation for our mortgage-free home, is under $7000/person/year and includes some of our business expenses that get mixed in, yet we live very well, high-speed connectivity of all sorts, top quality foods, plenty of comforts, pets and a sense of ease about possessions. We're doing very well with this sort of agenda and have sustained it for the 5 years at this location even though these sorts of figures would be classified as poverty level and an invitation to intrusion even though the lifestyle clearly is not. With the coming elimination of the rent that figure will drop even further back to half, $3,500/person/year.

Energy is coming in at about $27/person/month and is greatly facilitated by the berm-to-window-level that surrounds this apt. And the figures go on for other budget items, each whittled down over the past 15 years. Food now is running at $120/person/month, using healthy raw foods and bulk buying.

If the entire american workforce lived like this, they'd be healthy, well provided for and competitive on the world market. In addition we would have reigned in the disease of affluenza that consumes our innards, reduced the corporate monsters to serving us instead of being our masters, and empowered our activists to pursue the criminals that stole our voting rights.

So we wholeheartedly support the direction of the posting and think it's time to get some serious focus on implementation. We welcome comparisons in this forum and would like to probe where we could take advantage of even more strategies, because these define the foundations for pursuing our goals of liberty through economic choices.