For those who never had it

My dad was obsessed with predictions of the future. I grew up with it, along with encyclopedia's of ancient symbols, societies like the Templars, Freemasons, etc. My take on prediction since a young child was "I only believe in self-fulfilling prophecies." I have gone around that block many times, trying to see it from many different points of view of others and other times, but have always had a hard time disagreeing with that initial take. It is almost self-evident to me.

I have been thinking a lot about prophecy lately. Specifically, I can't find it now, when researching "aumakua" there was a reference to prophets of the future in Hawaii around the time of early first contact, who predicted accurate bad things. I thought, what a crappy use of fortune telling. Supposedly someone predicted they would be invaded and almost wiped out. Granted if you know political history going back far enough and looking far ahead enough, it is an easy call to make anywhere on the planet. But what good is it saying, "Hey guys, we're really about to get screwed." I mean if you are right and can see that, wouldn't it make sense in saying how to avoid it? If you can't see how to avoid it, you are not a very good prophet, just more or less a disseminator of useless and depressing information.

So say you can change it by telling it. You can go on and on about how your prediction changed things, but pretty much if you predicted bad things and they did not happen, you will not be thought of well. In fact, unless as an idiot, you will not be thought of at all. You can predict good things though but then one doesn't really need to be prepared for good things. "Watch out or something really good will happen to you tomorrow." Granted, such positive predictions can help you get through bad times, but so can't self-help books and pretty much the entire, we're-great-no-matter-what-we-do-or-what-others-think-about-us culture we live in. All you have to do is look at your horoscope for that kind of stuff.

If you are Bush and you predict an apocalypse, it is kind of cheating if you have something to do with starting it, never mind being the principle "lets bomb them first" proponent. But then so many others around the world too can trigger one. China, Russia, Israel, Iran, pretty much most nuclear and many non-nuclear countries could set the world off right now. It is really getting so easy to do by so many different people, predicting it is like predicting the sun might shine somewhere tomorrow and somewhere else it might rain.

The only thing that is hard for Bush to predict in this vein and still be right is that there will be no world war in the next 20 years, that peace will prevail, common sense will begin to rule, and the world will, if not begin to disarm, then at least begin backing away warily from the brink of destruction. That would be a great prediction, not only because it is positive but because it is much harder to do and involves people he cannot control. Making people dead is not controlling them, in fact it is not controlling anything, just making fewer people to control, usually ones you did or could not anyway. Actually, it is a great sign of defeat. Ups your percentage maybe, but lowers your score.

When I think of real power, it is not in those who can get people to kill each other off in great numbers. Too many in history have been able to do that and unfortunately many more will come because it wrongly gets the name "Great" in there at the beginning or the end of their names. To me, total power was Mahatma Gandhi. He kicked all of the "the Great"'s asses big time without firing a shot. He got an entire nation about to rip itself apart to stop, every single last person to stop fighting because he asked them to. Almost anyone can start a fire or make a political mess or disaster. People themselves are often waiting for an excuse to do something stupid and self-destructive, especially if it is profitable or fun, at least in the short term. Making everyone step back and chill until they can think straight again is something that is beyond Bush's "power". It unfortunately seems beyond his understanding as well, of it being not only a good thing, but a necessary thing. Especially because it contradicts what he has been saying, what he has been predicting, and because it is something beyond his power and requires the help of people he cannot control, only kill.

8:54 PM

Sunday, September 24th, 2006

More easy predictions: Iraq will never have a civil war

"In Iraq, we'll never be in civil war," al-Maliki told CNN's "Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer." (Click here for full post at Captainsquartersblog.com)

Here is another prediction that cannot fail. As pointed out recently, he who controls the dictionary controls the world. Since we define what "civil war" means, like we define and redefine "freedom", "democracy", "human rights", and of course, what is and is not torture, then Iraq can come infinitely close to a civil war without ever technically reaching it. An inch away, a half inch, one third of a trillionth of an inch away, and still we never have to say it actually is having one, never mind that we set it off. So far the non-war supposedly, if put in US terms, the only terms Americans can seem to understand, in terms of population count, would have cost over a million lives and the monthly loss of life would be the equivalent of tens of thousands of dead, high percentages women and children, newly dead month in and month out, but never does it need to be thought of or called a civil war. We invented the undeclared war, mainly for purposes of getting around Constitutionally mandated congressional authorization, so we never actually have to say there is a civil war there either. But then we never have to look them in the eye and tell them how much better off they are with torture and human rights abuses by their new government and/or government supported death squads at higher levels than they had before we "helped" them.

8:16 PM

Sunday, September 24th, 2006

Dying in prison for lost causes like Peace

"He told the jury that he understood that because he was 72 he might die in jail in punishment for this protest."I don't know if I am doing the right thing or not, I am only doing the best I can. If anyone can think of anything better to do to stop this insanity then, by all means, do it! It is up to all of us to do something to stop this madness!""(http://www.counterpunch.org/quigley09182006.html)

-Fr. Carl Kabat

I have to remind myself not to complain about the pathetic and completely ineffectual ways people try to stand up to the US's erosion of democratic processes, rights, social contracts, etc. at home and in other countries. At least they are trying to do something, which is more than can be said about most people. It is not their fault they have no clue about how to be effective at changing things, and only by their feeble attempts might their children or grandchildren have both the desire coupled with an insight in how to implement these noble but ill thought out idealisms of democracy, human rights, and justice for all, regardless of income or birthplace.

9:29 PM

Sunday, September 24, 2006

When I think I might never see Hawaii again

There are a lot of ways things can go where I would never get back. It is not that important, not most important anyway, that I do get back to what I consider home, to be there one more time or one last time. I was there and it is in my heart, a glimmer only sometimes facing these dark days ahead, but as yet unvanquished. I have my Hawaiian music, my memories, and still yet, my hopes for the future, where that is but a mere part of them. Selfish maybe, yet not at all because it fuels all the good things I do, much of what I have done, and much that I might still yet do in time.

What comforts me is that one of my heroes, one of America's greatest leaders, wanted only to see his home state one last time before he died, but was forbidden to. It is not to take comfort that someone else had a worse pain, suffered more, for if I return, I still will feel sadness that he did could not. But I have found what he felt, a connection to a place, a sense of homeland, a connection to a spot on the Earth at a given place in time to wish to reunite with, and a longing or saddness if that cannot be. His place of choice, his place of home where he longed to go but could not return was the Wallowa Valley in Oregon, and hopefully those who go there can appreciate it for him, and remember what little he asked for, and how great a price was taken. If you cannot tell what great American leader called that place home, then I will be glad to be the first to remind or inform you of him, Hin-mah-too-yah-lat-kekt, otherwise known to most as Chief Joseph the Elder of the Nez Percé.

Some may think me unworthy to speak of him, others would condemn me for calling him a great American leader, yet if he was not an American, who can say they are? If American's are not a race, as we like to point out, but many races, then why cannot an American be one outside of a government? Governments come and hopefully will go and give way to better and more just ones, but people and places remain. There was no doubt he was a good leader and an American, therefore it is not wrong to say he was an American leader to which any could be proud of.

I have mentioned him before in my writings, and mentioning him now is because so many have not heard his most famous words, now dead in the hearts of Americans, many but not all, and need rekindling now more than ever. All that was great about America, the government at least, that small portion of what is America, has gone terribly wrong. Former President James Carter's belief in a self-correcting mechansim is unfortunately seemingly misplaced at the moment. We have been fed illusions of our worth, blinded to the suffering we are inflicting all over the world in the name of values it is apparent to all all over the world we are not living by and seemingly no longer believe in except to use as an excuse to take what we wish and do whatever is our will.

Nothing can I remember having moved me more deeply than when I read the words below. It is not just words, not just pain or agony at the reality of war we have been sanitized from, protected from, and because of which, that distancing, we watch men and women without hearts advocating things on television to us and to children, what they are teaching to a new generation, advocating avoidable attacks that would cost thousands of innocent lives, without guilt over what they say, without hesitation in what they are advocating, and without regrets. Joseph's pain innoculated me against thinking like that, and his words will outlive the hate mongers, the torture advocators, and those who scorn diplomacy and the avoidance of war as "weak".

These words, his words, will outilve those people because the world they advocate cannot endure, would not survive. A world which not only remember's these words but learns from them, takes them into its heart as I have into mine, that is a world which can endure. That is the future I work for, hope for, would live and die for, but the future we are creating now, what our present leaders wish to give the world, that is nothing I would want to be a part of. That world in which we have already recently killed tens of thousands of innocents in cold blood unnecessarily, and would kill millions if not billions to prevent the world from growing beyond the systems we have now, based on the need for war, the rewarding of aggression, and the sanctity of mass murders beyond scale in the name of country and in the name of God. May their notions not be passed on. Humanity could not long survive it if they do. The goal and the means to take us to that better world are found in the words below for any to hear, to know, and to feel, and to guide us back from the brink by remembering the slaughters we have done in the past, and are about to repeat again.

"It is cold, and we have no blankets. The little children are freezing to death. My people, some of them, have run away to the hills, and have no blankets, no food. No one knows where they are -- perhaps freezing to death. I want to have time to look for my children, and see how many of them I can find. Maybe I shall find them among the dead. Hear me, my chiefs! I am tired. My heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands I will fight no more forever."

10:04 PM

Wednesday, October 11th, 2006

What it used to mean to be an American and TV "debates"

When I grew up, to be an American meant having been raised to believe in certain values above all else, among these the right to certain unalienable freedoms; the freedom of thought, of religion, the right to speak out and oppose the government politically, and to stand against those who sought to remove these and other human rights from others, such as the right to a fair trail or defend and protect those whose countries were at risk from being attacked by larger more powerful countries and have these rights taken from them. What we have begun teaching our children what it means to be an American, and this is scary because they are beginning to be given a different picture by all that we are doing now opposed to all of these values no matter the rhetoric, some reality seeps through, it means to be able to turn a deaf ear, a blind eye, and a cold heart to those whom we take such freedoms away from because we say they do not deserve them, or that our security means they cannot have them now.

Even worse, that we not only can deprive others of these rights, but destroy the infrastructure of entire countries, robbing them of electricity and clean drinking water, threating to do the same to our allies if they waver in support of us, and be "liberating" them at the same time for which they ought to be not only grateful to us, but indebted to us for, while we profit from both the destruction of their countries as well as the rebuilding contracts, often both ends profiting the very same companies. What I don't see as damning is that some people say torture and holding people indefinitely without charges and pre-emptive wars are a "good" thing, but instead that the debate has been so perverted by the on-screen weakness of those supposedly arguing against such things while actually acknowledging their so called "merits" makes us ALL look like moral despots.

That "torture does not work" they say, that "the occupation of Iraq was botched,"never that such things are simply wrong and poison us and our culture and weaken the argument not only for our superior standing in the world, unprecedented, but strengthen the arguments many-fold among our enemies that we ought not to exist or that we are a drag or weight upon a world reaching after the same values we used to hold but now have seeming turned our backs on out of fear and cowardice.

Maybe the media is to blame, showing people making arguments opposing such things but doing such a poor job at it you can't help but wince and pity anyone after that for trying to articulate such views when those shown on TV to have such views, (real moral views, not the kill the unrighteous views of televangelists), to be known to be making a weak argument in others minds before you even open your mouth simply because of how such views have been framed for them in others minds by the TV. That is the real weapon being used to stifle and retard political debate in the country, pre-emptive argument preparation in how people are made to think about what fools dissenters are by how they are shown on TV, as ineffectual and weak blowhards because those are the only kind of dissenters shown on TV.

For one brief shining moment Albert Gore (1/16/2006) grew enough balls to say the USA is moving toward dictatorship and complete abdication of rule of law, a lawless state run by criminals, something every former President should have said by now, even the present occupants elected father.

There have been occasional streaks of courage in some Congressmen and Senators, most notably Senators Leahy and Finegold, but as with the Military Commissions Act, the Democrats have forfeited not their, but all American's right to oppose the President. It is sad day when the most outspoken and best critics of Bush the Junior Decider are all Conservative Republicans (it seems to them he is giving Conservatism a bad name, to the rest of us he is just giving Humanity a bad name), all ironically or not having shared the same Nixon Administration with the current upsurpers (Cheney, Rumsfeld) of legitimate Constitutional rule, the bravery to speak the truth nods going to John Dean, Pat Buchanan (that was hard to say), and Paul Craig Roberts. When all or most elected representatives need Nixon staffers to remind them that, "oh, we are supposed to have a Congress which keeps the President from acting like a psychotic dictator" (trying to make a larger segment of the world hate us so we can kill them all and pretty much be open about it) instead of encouraging him while he does so out of cowardice or because they have the same stock options, take money from the same "contributors", or are blackmailed by the same secret wiretapping program (everyone except Foley has something left to hide now).

Nothing short of a full fledged Constitutional Convention could even begin to clean up this corrupt mess purposely designed to be uncleanable and to stain America with the blood of unnecessary mountains of civilian deaths by wars of choice and opportunism, whether economic to reward their campaign contributors (and there has been scores of that going around) or geopolitical opportunism at the cost of real security at home. "If we don't fight them there, we will have to fight them over here." Right, and if we were not so unwilling to consider blowing countries to hell before they did anything to anyone might be a bad thing to do, there probably would be far fewer of them wanting to come over here to kill us. The more people you kill the more enemies you create. Unlike the American people, our current leaders understand that math perfectly, and are perfectly profitably persistently pleased by it.

Smokey the Burning Bush to George: Only you can prevent terrorist attacks or forest fires

On Christmas day I was riding my bike on Maui and I saw a sign of just 4 words, “Dry Area Prevent Fires”. The first two words or first half was quite clear, a declarative statement, "this area is dry". The second half was more instructional, seemingly suggesting I should prevent fires there. Seeing as it was a very brief sign, it pretty much left it up to me how to proceed in following that instruction, command, or suggestion.

It brought to mind the old Smokey the Bear campaign from when I was a child against forest fires: Smokey the Bear says “Only you can prevent forest fires.” Even as a child, the logic in that statement was quite obviously faulty. I said, as I am sure many to most others did in response, "if only I can prevent forest fires, then the rest of you are pretty much screwed" because though I was not sure what I would be doing in the next week, next year, or for the rest of my life, I was fairly certain it was not going to be hanging around in forests preventing fires.

Here it was many years later and I once again was being implored by a government campaign, in this case a county road sign, to somehow do something to prevent fires. If I was to imply the rest, how I am to do that, I would hope it would only be asking me the minimal possible instead of hanging around the sign day and night looking for fires to put out. It, I hope, was merely asking me not to do anything stupid while there which would cause a fire; not to throw a lit match down for instance or to discard a lit cigarette carelessly.

That is really all one can do in that situation. No one, not me, not Smokey the Bear, not Jesus, not the President of the United States, no one can prevent forest fires. They will happen, like wars, plagues, and terrorist attacks, and nothing anyone can do will prevent them. The best we can do or ask anyone to do is to not do anything stupid to cause them, not to throw matches on dangerous areas, not to forget to put out camp fires, not to drop bombs on tinderboxes.

Though the President of the United States would like to take credit for a lack of terrorist attacks, mostly the best he can realistically do to prevent them is to not do anything stupid to make them more likely, such as bombing countries which have not attacked us, occupying them, watching over regimes we put in place unable to provide safety, electricity, clean drinking water, health care, or anything we associate with everyday life, while non-government militias led by people we do not like and do not like us further their control by actually keeping these people alive and semi-secure in ways their “legitimate” government, one that to most people there is complicit and tainted with deferring to an illegal occupation force, us, cannot do and is not doing.

After going from “We are winning” to “We are not losing” the war in Iraq which is not a war, not a Civil War of Iraqis, nor a war of us against Iraq, with an occupation force which is not an occupation of their country but “liberators” which the majority of their public believe shooting us on sight is justified and an overwhelmingly majority of them want us to leave no matter what the consequences are to them. At least for a change they would not have us to referee and perpetually prolong indefinitely their “birth pangs” but instead would eventually have one side or another “win”what is left of that destroyed country.

But it would not be won by the people we want to win, war proponents or excusers would say, thus the continued “conflict” which is not a war is a “good thing,” kind of like when Iran and Iraq were warring with each other and we kept switching sides of who to help to keep that one going into extra innings. But who do we want to win? The Shiites which would side with Iran, our new enemy du jour, or the Sunni's who have been causing the most US casualties and make up the backbone of the resistance fighters?

To say as the new media campaign offensive states, “We are not winning but we are not losing,” which like all other government statements is embraced enthusiastically and uncritically by American media corporations, what is the status quo we are holding? All government reports of the CIA, Defense Department, the “independent” Iraq Study Group, they all concur that the terrorist groups have never been stronger because of how Bush has been going about “preventing” terrorist attacks. Now Al-Quida has become so strong in Iraq we are being asked to negotiate with them where before they were virtually non-existent. A conservative estimate is that the people that want to kill and attack Americans now is ten times what it was before the Iraq war by the CIA's own supposedly leaked reports which have not been denied and have been echoed in other government studies.

How is a 1000% percent increase in less than four years of the might of our supposed enemies in the War on Terror, not to be stated as us “losing”ground? If we are not winning and not losing, what kind of ground are we holding, what are we “on track” toward?

So what “not doing anything stupid” course has Bush suggested to counter this non-loss of ground? Bombing Iran of course. It seems most Americans cannot grasp the monumental stupidity of that course of action or the suicidal effects it would have on every aspect of the American Economy, except for of course, the oil companies which would see profits soar the higher the price of oil climbs. (Want to end the insanity now, how about the higher the price of oil, the less profits for the oil companies, the less risk of war, the higher the profits?) To make it simple enough for the Average American who gets what passes for news on networks to understand, not all Moslem's are the same type, as George Bush found out after being President for a year. Shiites and Sunnis are like Protestants and Catholics, and like the latter, have done their share of killing each other, as is going on now in Iraq.

By bombing one country, Iraq, which had not attacked us, we have made most Sunni's, half the Muslim world, very pissed off at us and generally want to kill us. To remedy this or improve upon this by keeping us safe and escalating (but “Surge” sounds so much more virile) the War on Terror, Bush has decided to attack yet another country which has not attacked us, the Shiite country of Iran, which should even the score and make the other half of the Muslim world want to get revenge on us just as badly.

Lord knows when we will get a President would not only know not to do anything stupid to “unintentionally” wreak havoc and destruction all over an area of critical importance to us, destroying our credibility there, making our Muslim allies rightly nervous if not imperiled, but might actually instead try to work to correct the mistakes and stop the hemorrhaging of what history will show was the greatest wound to America, if not any country, which was self-inflicted by so few “democratically” without shame, without fear of accountability, but with one hell of a war profit packed retirement portfolio.