Gary Rumor’s Anti-Entropic Continuum

It is tough when most of the people you work with, ie white middle aged males, are Rush Limbaugh listening conservatives. Living in Los Angeles I realise that the liberal white male is more common on the west side of town. Once you get east of the coastal district you get more of the normal American pattern, women tend to be liberal or at least concerned with human values, men tend to be conservative or into macho values. Hispanic and black men tend to be liberal, Asian and white men tend to be more conservative, in fact I would say that the only liberal white males east of the downtown of LA are gay, college professors or odd ball eccentrics like myself. At my old job, in Torrance, well on the coastal section, the conservatives and liberals were relativly well balanced but here where I work now, in the San Gabriel Valley, we are in a Republican zone.
It is strange to work with otherwise intelligent people who talk about immigrants like they are aliens from another planet. Or to hear someone make a reflexively negative comment on the government, like it is not possible for the government to do anything right. As a former Anarchist I have my criticism of government but that is mostly based on an opposition to the use of power by the government to crush people. I guess ultimately I don’t believe that government is inherently corrupt, I believe that it is corrupted by people who use it to prop up their group of vested interests. My question is if we removed the government all together would the problems go away or become more manageable? That was what I believed for a long time. I simply thought that people were inherently corrupted by the structure of government. But I also believed that people were inherently good and therefore corrupted by government.
I don’t believe that any more. My life experience has taught me that people are the same with or without government. What we have is people who have a variety of experiences, and who look at the world from a variety of perspectives. These sometimes mesh and sometimes don’t. There are patterns that can be understood, and behavioral modification experts working for marketing corporations are good at finding ways to motivate people. I tend to take a materialist perspective, looking for the economic motivations, but that is not all there is. I acknowledge that there is a psychological aspect that may not be materially based. How to identify that and quantify it is the hard part. I am not going to say there is such a thing as good and evil in the biblical sense, that to me is simply primitive anthropomorphism. But don’t ask me to tell you what I do believe. I went to India, I lived on a spiritual commune, I took lots of LSD trying to answer that one, and all I found out was that when you tear the face off of reality what you get is… well, cartoons.
Prototypical reality, looks to me like a cartoon, a stereotype world of patterns that get morphed and rearranged and then fleshed out into what we call reality. There are patterns of code that look like Mayan glyphs, this code becomes fleshed out as the cartoon and then the cartoon becomes actualized as reality. There is a whole series of alternate reality glyphs that are more or less on the shelf, played out in the alternate version of this reality that is sort of like a cosmic kitchen where certain combinations are put together because they taste good in the experiential sense. But then people get into ruts of familiar reality. I personally have spent so much time exploring the alternatives that go into creating reality that I have had almost no time to experience the reality that we live in. Or to put it another way I am more interested in what goes on in the kitchen that what is on the dinner table. But in an experiential sense. I am not very good at shaping reality when it comes to actual reality, or to put it another way, I am an apprentice cook. Will I ever get to be a chef, well I don’t know, but it is more interesting than to merely be one of the items on the menu.
It is what I mean by saying at the peak of a trip it becomes your turn specifically to shape reality. It is your trip then. How much to each of us have to play in this? Good question. I get nervous and want to go take a pee just thinking about it. In other words is this my fault, that the world is so messed up? Well sort of, I mean, I did participate in my own small way in creating this reality. But I am not the only one, no, there is not only one godhead. There may be only one god head at a given moment in existence and what exactly is that? Is there a time that advances? Is it as described in Magister Ludi, a series of beads of beauty and intent on a chain of reality? Interesting concept. Well that would make life to be like some necklace on some cosmic goddess. So if that is our reality, the what reality is her tiara, or her teeth, or fingernails, or well you get the point. It is a weak analogy.
Marx is to strong, he comes on like some kind of shot of whiskey, bracing but you know, I don’t know if I want whiskey every time I want to take a look at what we are all about.
Kant is like, well the shot of valium they give you in the hospital before an operation, you are immediately asleep.
My dad turned me on to this scientist Campbell, he wrote the My Big TOE (Theory of Everything), kind of like having sex with a teenager, lot of energy, not a lot of nuance.
Hegel strikes me as being just right, not to hot and not to cold. The chicken soup of the brain….
And Plato, well it has been a long time, but I did read the Stoics, Epicureans and about Neoplatonism recently and I found them to be mmm, ok, a bit warmed over.
Ok, you don’t want me to give you a nursery rhyme review of theory. You read this, if you read it at all because of my, well my part in creating reality, you want to know if I am up to the job, more or less. Or you like a good laugh, or perhaps I am like Kant is for me, I am a good sedative.

This from Rachel Maddow today in case you want to know who is behind the Republican talking points in the attempt to sink the health care plan.
Grassfire.org, is the funding source for Resist.Net. That is owned by Shirley and Bannister who is Craig Shirley the publicist behind the Willie Horton Ads back in the Bush Senior presidential campaign, he was the guy who sank Dukakis as the Democratic presidential candidate in 1988.
That was the year that I had my vision that Bush would be a mass murderer. I trust my visions. They have always been correct.
I spent at least half of the last 30 years with my brain locked down in a deep sleep. It was deliberate. I could not let myself participate in Regan’s “Morning in America”, it was the American Dream that I was dead set against. There was nothing for me to do, I could either stop it, which is anti-democratic, or I could wait it out, which is what I did.

Ok, time out. We need to change the Health Care System in America. We have been talking about it and making modest moves for about 75 years. At the beginning of the last century we decided people might need insurance against all the accidents that were happening to people in the dangerous jobs they were doing in industrial America. Roosevelt gave us Social Security, Johnston gave us Medicare, and now Obama will give us universal health care. Right? Right.
We will let the right blow steam, they are a small and shrinking minority as John Dean pointed out. He ran the Democratic Party that elected Obama, he should know. All Obama has to do is to round up the Democrats after the recess and lay the law down, enough fooling around, we have a real majority, we have a filibuster proof majority, lets get it done, or we lose the next election. It is as simple as that.

Today Chuck Grassley let the cat out of the bag. He specifically stated that he held up the Senate version of the Health Care legislation to give the right wing media time to kill the bill and turn the American public against the bill. He and the Republican party know that if they can kill it then they will be able to come back in 2010 and sweep the Democrats out of the House. All they have to do is to stall the legislation and buffalo the Democrats. They know that it is not rational arguments that win their points, it is irrational fear. All they have to do is create fear. It has nothing to do with winning the argument logically, they don’t care about that. They will play dirty to win. If Obama is foolish enough to let them con him, then he deserves to be put in the same emasculated position as Clinton was.

Another thing, what is this I hear on the radio today about tens of thousands of people incarcerated in the war on terror? Today on KPFK on the evening news there was a report about Bagram air force base in Afghanistan where over 600 persons are detained. There is a law suit being brought foward by the ACLU on behalf of prisoners there who were rendered to that base prison from other countries. One of the lawyers interviewed noted that tens of thousands were taken and put away in other countries. Who is keeping track of these people? Why don’t we know about this? It started under Clinton, got blown up big time under Bush Jr and now it is continuing under Obama. Enough. I want an explanation for all this. It is bad enough not to know it is happening but it has happened to people with no right to trial.

This from Google
“in 2003, the ICRC visited nearly 470,000 detainees, held in nearly 80 countries around the world. Of these, nearly 127000 were individually registered”

This from the Democratic Underground Blog
“U.S. Has Detained 83,000 in War on Terror
Nov 16/2005 2:56 PM US/Eastern
By KATHERINE SHRADER
Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON
The United States has detained more than 83,000 foreigners in the four years of the war on terror, enough to nearly fill the NFL’s largest stadium. The administration defends the practice of holding detainees in prisons from Afghanistan to Guantanamo Bay as a critical tool to stop the insurgency in Iraq, maintain stability in Afghanistan and get known and suspected terrorists off the streets.
Roughly 14,500 detainees remain in U.S. custody, primarily in Iraq.
The number has steadily grown since the first CIA paramilitary officers touched down in Afghanistan in the fall of 2001, setting up more than 20 facilities including the “Salt Pit,” an abandoned factory outside Kabul used for CIA detention and interrogation.
In Iraq, the number in military custody hit a peak on Nov. 1, according to military figures. Nearly 13,900 suspects were in U.S. custody there that day _ partly because U.S. offensives in western Iraq put pressure on insurgents before the October constitutional referendum and December parliamentary elections.”

This from AFP
“ACLU seeks information on Bagram airbase
(AFP) – 7 hours ago 8/13/09
WASHINGTON — The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) on Thursday voiced concern over the Pentagon and CIA’s refusal to provide information on detainees at Bagram airbase, sometimes called the Afghan Guantanamo.
The ACLU said in a statement it was seeking the names and nationalities of about 600 current detainees at Bagram, just north of Kabul.
Additionally, the civil rights organization said it wants to know how many detainees there are, where they are detained and other essential facts.
“There are serious concerns that Bagram is another Guantanamo — except with many more prisoners, less due process, no access to lawyers or courts and reportedly worse conditions,” said Melissa Goodman, staff attorney with the ACLU National Security Project.
“As long as the Bagram prison is shrouded in secrecy, there is no way to know the truth or begin to address the problems that exist there,” she said.
The ACLU made a formal request for the information in April under the Freedom of Information Act.
“The DOD (Department of Defense) told the ACLU that it has a list containing basic information about the Bagram detainees but is withholding it in its entirety.
“The CIA has refused even to confirm the existence of records about Bagram,” the ACLU added in a statement.”

If in so called repressive Iran hundreds of activists at least get what are called show trials. what about all these people being held by the USA in other countries so that they can bypass the notice of the American media. Maziar Bahari is being tried in Iran. He had dual Canadian-Iranian citizenship. He is a reporter and today on MSNBC they are making a point of highlighting his plight as a captive of the Iranian state. Why is this happening?
He is a pawn in the game between the Iranian government and the West. The USA, Israel and western Europe wants Iran to bend to the will of the west. They want Iran to specifically stop threatening to cut off the oil to the west. Iran wants to develop nuclear power and they may want to be able to counter the Israeli threat with a bomb of their own. Just like North Korea, the Iranians feel threatened by the western powers. They don’t have the leverage that the Princes of Arabia have, but then they have a democracy not a theocracy like Saudi Arabia. Hmm, strange, a democracy, they had elections. Just like we did. They have a body of experts who vet the candidates before the election. So do we. We have an Electoral College that votes for out leader. It is the equivalent to their council of elder theologians. Remember you and I don’t elect the president, the Electors do. So how does that make us better than Iran?
We have tens of thousands of prisoners who cannot even go to trial, they have a show trial, or that is what we call it. Who is better? We each think we are superior. Iran has a culture that has existed for millennia. Their civilization ruled the known world in competition with the Romans for centuries. They were not defeated by the Romans, but they were by the Muslims.
The USA has been around for what two centuries, and some change. Who has the history? I think they do.
But that is not my point. I am interested in this news that there are tens of thousands of people in prisons around the world at the behest of the United States war on terror. More than that there seems to be a policy to shoot first and sort them out later.

This is from a blogger Fabius Maximus who is quoting this excerpt from Fox News on killing prisoners.

(1) Ralph Peters advocates war crimes

An interview by Neil Cavuto, sometime in late May 2009, Fox News (source). What a sad nation we’ve become, when advocating war crimes does not damage one’s career as a military expert for a major network. What will we become after another 7 years of warfare?

Excerpt:
Peters: First of all, I am not concerned about the human and legal rights of terrorists. Because as far as I am concerned, when a human being chooses to commit an act of terror against innocent human beings, he puts himself outside of humanity. And this obsession with the legal — supposed legal and human rights of terrorists — a small number — condemns billions of human beings, billions, to live in fear.
And again, Neil, once you commit an act of terror, in my book, you are outside, you are anathema, and you should be killed.
Now, I’m not talking about killing every living thing in the barnyard. But for example, when we attack an Al Qaeda compound, and the people defending the Al Qaeda compound can — and they’re shooting at us, that’s probably a pretty good indicator that they are terrorists. So I see no reason to bring them to the United States, no reason to bring them to Guantanamo. There are a small number of senior terrorists who have intelligence value. Them we should take prisoner, but we should do the interrogations in foreign countries — and why set ourselves up for legal problems?
Now Neil, I know it’s not politically correct. I don’t care. I care about the security and well-being of my fellow Americans. I care about the human rights of innocent people around the world. And as far as I’m concerned, terrorists should die.
And a good thing that’s happening now — as soon as you had this movement to close Guantanamo, et cetera et cetera, the word I’m getting from the field is our special operators and our soldiers and Marines on the front lines are taking fewer prisoners.

Cavuto: All right, so in other words, they’re killing them.

Peters: Yep.

Peters: We’re dealing with people who aren’t human anymore. They’re monsters. And just like in the movies, monsters deserve to die. And we agonize over this.
Cavuto: I see your point about what we agonize over. But what if all the 200 or so Gitmo detainees are not monsters — some were just caught up in a roundup where they weren’t doing anything wrong. Now, I don’t have the details or the who’s who on who might fill that equation here, but you know what I mean, that, that — then you would be wiping them all out.
Peters: Well, there will be miscarriages of justice in a brutal war like this. But I don’t think too many. We’re pretty good at figuring out who’s right and who’s wrong.”

Pretty good huh? Pretty good at killing people all over the world. Ok time to bring this stuff to the surface and to an end. Period.

Today Hillary Clinton let out a zinger in Nigeria when she noted that Jeb Bush, Governor of Florida was related to the Presidential candidate Bush and was in a position to influence the election results. Implication, Blood is thicker than water and when it comes to the Republican party they like to play hardball. Question is how tough are the Democrats? I think Obama is a pretty smart player, so we shall see if his team outsmarts the Republicans again or if they get snookered themselves. Who are the real puppet masters? Perhaps I should stick to philosophy.

And Sarah Palin supported “Death Consultation” when she was Governor, perhaps that was why she quit, so she could repudiate that position. Is she hilarious or what? She would have made a great “Lucy”.