Let’s see, this morning I have taken care of the washed out road to the Stompground. Negotiated peace between the neighbors on the road and the road crews. Designed a course in the Foundations of Vocal Professionalism for graduate school. Filled out the spread sheet for the course. Wrote a couple of posts on a couple of lists. Read the news and wrote a comment.
And taught a beautiful young 15 year old Mezzo Soprano for an hour. (I’m really worried about inflation :>))) My friends just lost half of their private retirement in the market and no one gives a shit because they are middle income and expendable so I should be worried about inflation? My mother doubled her retirement years ago in the Money market at the height of the inflation. Bring it back. Why should we care about the bankers profits? Why should I care about Cameron who will jail his poor for rioting. Reminds me of Dickens and Oliver Twist all over again. What’s next “Foundlings” on the Church steps? Children in the docks as little adults? Am I unusual for an American? No my wife’s schedule is even more fulfilling as she travels around the country listening to people’s complaints and picking up the check as she builds her business. Nothing worse than picking up the tab for the complaining wealthy IMHO. In a socialist country we would both have been allowed to retire comfortably at our ages and have the money to go to the opera. Over here we have private sector media entertainment called cable news where the politicians are like sports teams with sport pundits keeping score. THAT’s your idiot private sector that would sell you the guns to rob them (and they are with the second amendment and this Supreme Court). One party hates government and puts up idiots who will be bad at it while the other puts up a brilliant scholar who has no time to learn the job before he has to save the world. (How long did it take you Keith to become a success in the music business? Did you make a profit and get a good salary in three years? That’s a hell of lot less complicated than the man in charge here.) I watched Richard Nixon, who had been there before as vice-President, make an idiot of himself with silly uniforms and pomp and circumstance in envy of British ceremony as we just tried to make him look less like a dunce. However, who set up the Scientists, the Artists and Indians in the federal government more than any President before or since? Richard Nixon, the felon. Only a Republican could go to China and Russia because if a Democrat insisted on it he would be declared a traitor and treasonous as the Republicans are claiming about Obama and you seem to agree. Would you be a Republican activist over here Keith? Meanwhile the world was collapsing around Nixon and he and Kissinger didn’t have a prayer of solving the war, civil rights and student problems given how little the time either had with the complexities of the Presidency before they had to BE the Presidency. But are we supposed to use world bankers as paragons of professionalism? We just had one almost go to jail taken down by a maid in a hotel. A man who would have been President of France? Balderdash! Good word, thanks! America is the third largest country in population. The third largest country in geography and the most mild climate and such fine soil that they let thousands of miles of forest just sit there and look pretty. You could burn down Texas or/and California and they would just plant it back tomorrow and never know anything happened. It does so every year. There is so much plenty in California with the dysfunctional society intact that it begins to resemble the Italian government. Same with New York State. But that doesn’t mean that we don’t need government. We just don’t need it as badly as resource stretched Europe and population stretched China does. We have more forest than England, France and Germany has land. What does China do? Build a dam and destroy their environment because of a billion mouths to feed. What does Brazil do? Build a dam in the Chingu where one of the oldest continuous successful native cultures lives and will be destroyed forever. Just like the dam that the destroyed the Seneca here and is worthless except as a greedy mess for upstate capitalists. Greedy, short term and basically ignorant thinking about systems and their long term use. It resembles nothing more than a tumor on the body of the nation and people. “Plenty” is the difference between the hills of Tuscany and the Catskills where our Stompgrounds are. Except the Catskills are bigger and there is so little need for the land that it’s almost completely forest. They can make a mess and the only thing that happens is whole cultures die and are consigned to the dunghill of history but the land is just SO big that it can almost take anything done to it. That’s why the Republicans don’t believe in weather change. They just can’t imagine the land not being there for them no matter what they do to it. This country hasn’t even begun to use its natural resources. I would add that Canada is like here except with worse weather and a smaller growing season but how many people are in Canada? Your comparison of small systems to large complex systems just doesn’t “cut it.” Nothing will be done because there is no serious scientific study being used on large and small systems. Instead we get 19th century scientific tracts and propaganda. BUT science wouldn’t have existed if they hadn’t raped and pillaged the people and resources of North and South America so that they could spend wildly on anything they wanted and stop creating serious art themselves. At least in England. Where are the great English composers after Purcell? You blame it on the demise of art but the truth is that the rest of Europe had a huge blossom as England went Dark artistically. Except for the performers of course. English performers kept it up and competed but the composers were reduced to drivel and folk music by the society. Only church music reasonably survived along with the performers, actors and writers. What would happened to Vaughn Williams without the church or the lesser composers who labored mightily in the Anglican fold. What was true in your backyard was not true in Italy, France or Germany. There was so much great secular Artistic expression coming out of Germany that Hitler believed it was because the Germans were superior. Just look at the 18th and 19th century in Europe. The theft and abuse of the Americas gave them the capital but they used it magnificently. As an Artist I am more than a little conflicted about that. But today is different. It’s a world of natural resources. Capitalism creates scarcity here even in the midst of plenty. Agricultural companies create scarcity when the country could do so much better under a different system of economics. Tuscany uses every small amount of land magnificently. I guess the rest of Europe does as well. We don’t. There is SO much of it. And our people are under the thumb of a language that is hopelessly “Object related” and will probably be replaced by the languages of Asia that make more sense in a scientific world of the future. The same is true of the old English political systems of Mill and Locke and Adam Smith. They have had their day and without theft, rape and murder they would have been bankrupt. (God, I sound like Eisenstein in Alexander Nevsky! But when we performed it in Oklahoma we all resonated with the story. We knew it first hand, except the Russians were able to resist. We couldn’t and died like the leaves of autumn) How come the Chinese know about the seven systems of culture but the English have declared Science the next God? I don’t have sympathy for religionists who let their people rot for a trip to euphoria but I have just as little patience for materialists who have thrown half of their personhood away for a bowl of soup. Get serious. The world is not about economics. We could go back to the woods and do almost as well as we have under economics. (Many do AS well but you need to be fit both physically and mentally.) I know an economist who makes his living chopping wood and selling it and loves his life. We gave him wood last year. The problem here is not resources but people who are greedy idiots who don’t give a pile of manure for their neighbors and who will run to some other country in a minute if they are asked to pay their fair share. Our costs are also a medical system where most of the doctors would now accept a salary happily as the inefficiency of private capitalism has made their magnificently expensive educations a waste of money as their practices close. How long will this nonsense go on? FDR saved Democracy in the 1930s and the bankers promptly cut his throat only to be relieved by the yeoman effort of every person in WWII. That gave us a respite from creative greed but now it’s back and Windigo is a good description for what’s going on. I’ll let Barry explain that since he named it correctly. “Please don’t throw me in that briar patch!” REH From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Keith Hudson Sent: Wednesday, August 17, 2011 1:20 AM To: RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, EDUCATION Subject: Re: [Futurework] FW: [SPAM] Rick Perry’ s Unanswered Prayers If the Chinese Politburo were not so worried about the inflation catastrophe that America is throwing the world into, then they must be laughing themselves silly at the sort of people that America throws up by way of presidential candidates -- and, of course, actual presidents. Apart from Eisenhower perhaps, one has to go back an awful long way before there were presidents with their feet on the ground and all-round intelligence in their heads. Keith At 02:03 17/08/2011,Mike wrote: -----Original Message----- From: Portside Moderator [ mailto:[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> ] Sent: Tuesday, August 16, 2011 5:44 PM To: [email protected] Subject: [SPAM] Rick Perry’s Unanswered Prayers Rick Perry’s Unanswered Prayers By TIMOTHY EGAN Opinionator The New York Times Blogs August 11, 2011, 8:30 pm http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/08/11/rick-perrys-unanswered-praye rs/?emc=eta1 [Timothy Egan on American politics and life, as seen from the West.] A few months ago, with Texas aflame from more than 8,000 wildfires brought on by extreme drought, a man who hopes to be the next president took pen in hand and went to work: "Now, therefore, I, Rick Perry, Governor of Texas, under the authority vested in me by the Constitution and Statutes of the State of Texas, do hereby proclaim the three-day period from Friday, April 22, 2011, to Sunday, April 24, 2011, as Days of Prayer for Rain in the State of Texas." Then the governor prayed, publicly and often. Alas, a rainless spring was followed by a rainless summer. July was the hottest month in recorded Texas history. Day after pitiless day, from Amarillo to Laredo, from Toadsuck to Twitty, folks were greeted by a hot, white bowl overhead, triple-digit temperatures, and a slow death on the land. In the four months since Perry’s request for divine intervention, his state has taken a dramatic turn for the worse. Nearly all of Texas is now in 'extreme or exceptional' drought, as classified by federal meteorologists, the worst in Texas history. Lakes have disappeared. Creeks are phantoms, the caked bottoms littered with rotting, dead fish. Farmers cannot coax a kernel of grain from ground that looks like the skin of an aging elephant. Is this Rick Perry’s fault, a slap to a man who doesn’t believe that humans can alter the earth’s climate - God messin’ with Texas? No, of course not. God is too busy with the upcoming Cowboys football season and solving the problems that Tony Romo has reading a blitz. But Perry’s tendency to use prayer as public policy demonstrates, in the midst of a truly painful, wide-ranging and potentially catastrophic crisis in the nation’s second most-populous state, how he would govern if he became president. "I think it’s time for us to just hand it over to God, and say, â€?God: You’re going to have to fix this,’" he said in a speech in May, explaining how some of the nation’s most serious problems could be solved. That was a warm-up of sorts for his prayer-fest, 30,000 evangelicals in Houston’s Reliant Stadium on Saturday. From this gathering came a very specific prayer for economic recovery. On the following Monday, the first day God could do anything about it, Wall Street suffered its worst one-day collapse since the 2008 crisis. The Dow sunk by 635 points. Prayer can be meditative, healing, and humbling. It can also be magical thinking. Given how Perry has said he would govern by outsourcing to the supernatural, it’s worth asking if God is ignoring him. Though Perry will not officially announce his candidacy until Saturday, he loomed large over the Republican debate Thursday night. With their denial of climate change, basic budget math, and the indisputable fact that most of the nation’s gains have gone overwhelmingly to a wealthy few in the last decade, the candidates form a Crazy Eight caucus. You could power a hay ride on their nutty ideas. After the worst week of his presidency (and the weakest Oval Office speech since Gerald Ford unveiled buttons to whip inflation), the best thing Barack Obama has going for him is this Republican field. He still beats all of them in most polling match-ups. Perry is supposed to be the savior. When he joins the campaign in the next few days, expect him to show off his boots; they are emblazoned with the slogan dating to the 1835 Texas Revolution: 'Come and Take It.' He once explained the logo this way: "Come and take it - that’s what it’s all about." This is not a man one would expect to show humility in prayer. Perry revels in a muscular brand of ignorance (Rush Limbaugh is a personal hero), one that extends to the ever-fascinating history of the Lone Star State. Twice in the last two years he’s broached the subject of Texas seceding from the union. "When we came into the nation in 1845 we were a republic, we were a stand-alone nation," says Perry in a 2009 video that has just surfaced. "And one of the deals was, we can leave any time we want. So we’re kind of thinking about that again." He can dream all he wants about the good old days when Texas left the nation to fight for the slave-holding states of the breakaway confederacy. But the law will not get him there. There is no such language in the Texas or United States’ constitutions allowing Texas to unilaterally "leave any time we want." But Texas is special. By many measures, it is the nation’s most polluted state. Dirty air and water do not seem to bother Perry. He is, however, extremely perturbed by the Environmental Protection Agency’s enforcement of laws designed to clean the world around him. In a recent interview, he wished for the president to pray away the E.P.A. To Jews, Muslims, non-believers and even many Christians, the Biblical bully that is Rick Perry must sound downright menacing, particularly when he gets into religious absolutism. "As a nation, we must call upon Jesus to guide us through unprecedented struggles," he said last week. As a lone citizen, he’s free to advocate Jesus-driven public policy imperatives. But coming from someone who wants to govern this great mess of a country with all its beliefs, Perry’s language is an insult to the founding principles of the republic. Substitute Allah or a Hindu God for Jesus and see how that polls. Perry is from Paint Creek, an unincorporated hamlet in the infinity of the northwest Texas plains. I’ve been there. In wet years, it’s pretty, the birds clacking on Lake Stamford, the cotton high. This year, it’s another sad moonscape in the Lone Star State. Over the last 15 years, taxpayers have shelled out $232 million in farm subsidies to Haskell County, which includes Paint Creek - a handout to more than 2,500 recipients, better than one out every three residents. God may not always be reliable, but in Perry’s home county, the federal government certainly is. ___________________________________________ Portside aims to provide material of interest to people on the left that will help them to interpret the world and to change it. 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