Hate speech, racism, superstition, bigotry and love.

Most folk who engage in racist and hate speech say they don't see it, and they really don't! Racists and haters are people who say things that are mean and hurtful and not true, but they're "only telling the truth." Thus, in their minds, the rest of us are trying to suppress the truth and deprive them of their right to speak it! 
 
Hate speech and racism are like superstition. Like our racisim, our superstitions are invisible to ourselves so long as we hold that what we believe is the truth. It's all those other people that are superstitious, because they believe things we can see to be untrue! 

Some of us *used to be* superstitious, but we got over it and we're not superstitious any more. Because if we didn't believe our beliefs were the truth, we wouldn't believe them anymore, now would we? 

Standards are like that too. Each of us has our standards, the things we hold to be good, right, the best way. Some folks come close to our standards, but no one's standards could be better or higher than ours, because if we accepted that, then those would *be* our standards!

There's always someone whose standards are different from ours *and therefore lower*. Sometimes a lot lower. If we don't meet *their* standards, so what? Their standards are wrong! We have churches and clubs where we can get together and agree on standards, and then gossip with each other about all the other members of our club who don't live up to our standards! 

We can however recognize we don't live up to our own standards - and beat ourselves up for it- which somehow makes it seem fairer to beat up other folk for not living up to our standards.

Like our own racism, all of this is invisible to us. It all begins with the assumption that the world revolves around us. We all started there as little children, and despite all the hard knocks and blows of life it's baked into us; it never really goes away. 

The only way out of this trap is to accept - on logical grounds - that we're not so different, that we too are superstitious narrow-minded self-righteous bigots in someone else's eyes, and then really try to walk in their shoes, hear what they are saying and see ourselves as they see us. 

What makes that possible is love. Sometimes tough, hard angry love, but the love that comes from never forgetting that the person I can't stand - even that scum-sucking billionaire banker who thinks he owns the world and has the God-given right to destroy it if he doesn't get his way - is just like me inside. 

As humans, we have to have beliefs and standards, but with love we can keep reaching for the ones that will draw us together in our common humanity, in a community of solidarity. 

Which is just what it will take if we - our species - are to survive!

Pew Study shows 90% of Us Say We're Middle Class

90% of us may say we're Middle Class, but what on average is our answer to the question What percent of Americans (i.e. everybody else) is Middle Class? 

We were deliberately sold a bill of goods on "middle class" in the '50's and '60's in a very high powered campaign (which I am old enough to remember) involving thousands of colleges and universities, think tanks and thousands of newspaper editors. We're all middle class Americans now, except for those low-life scum next door or down the street who don't uphold our standards, or who are poorer or browner or speak worse English than us. 

So how come so many of us are living paycheck to paycheck, driven by the fear of homelessness or an old age of poverty? How come we have to try harder and harder just to stay where we are, or take out a second mortgage just to fix the roof or fix our car? 

Middle class used to mean managers, professionals, small business owners, medium-size farmers and academics. They shifted it to mean "wanting and trying to live a decent settled life with high standards of behavior and a decent income." 

When I was a child, many of us were proud of being Working Class. When I was in college I saw how they were pushing hard on the idea that Working Class = Lower Class = Loser. 

The truth is that at least 80% of us were and are Working Class - it may be 90% now. People who have to work for a paycheck to live, but we're the ones who built this country and made it great, and "without our brains and labor not a single wheel would turn." 

This may be part of why we're so confused and divided. We are living in a Middle Class fantasy, and suffering because there's such a clash between our ideas and our reality. 

Should we reach out to the stars?

When we meet a civilization from another planet, it will almost certainly be much more advanced than ours just because ours is so new. The question here is will they treat us the way we treat less advanced and weaker civilizations? If so, we should beware. But how likely is that? 

Our European-grown global civilization, descended from the great Roman slave empire, has a quite extraordinary record of discovering new (to us) civilizations around the globe and conquering, plundering and consuming or destroying them. There have been voices denouncing this practice for a long time, voices of the victims and of radical critics from Padre Las Casas to Mark Twain, but It's only in the past century that any serious effort has been made by governments to restrain or reform our predatory practices. So it's only natural that we imagine this is what others would do to us. 

There have been many science fiction stories and films, starting with HG Wells' classic War of the Worlds, where aliens discover and trying to conquer or destroy us. One awesome recent science fiction film, Avatar, turned the story on its head and told of the plundering of a distant planet inhabited by intelligent beings - by us! But ultimately all these stories are not about alien life, about which we know nothing. They are about ourselves. Only a few, like ET, Close Encounters and Carl Sagan's Contact, depict aliens as benign. 

So how likely is it, really, that an alien civilization would be dangerous to us? I think it's unlikely. 

Any civilization that reaches our level of development must either bring its predatory phase to a close or destroy itself. That is the moment we are in. They will have survived and gone beyond it. 

Second, the distances are so impossible in terms of a human life-span that the only thing we really have that they could want is our story. 

The huge benefit of contact to us would be hope, hope that we too could survive our predatory phase, that humanity could have a future. 

Pain-killers are not the problem. It's our attitude toward Pain!

I commend Maura Healey for her promise of action in support of heroin recovery programs. I hope she continues to work with all the great people coming together to deal with addiction issues. But we as a people have to come to terms with a deeper issue: our attitude toward pain. 

I was just released from UMass Med. The care I received, from physicians, nurses, PCA's was wonderful. Its weaknesses were those not just those of American medicine but of America, and one of those was their attitude toward pain. 

As they poked, stuck and prodded, cleaned and swabbed and asked me to put a number on my pain, almost every time I flinched or grunted or reported a pain they treated it as a problem. I was told 1000 times how sorry they were something hurt, asked 100 times if I wanted something for pain - with the attitude of course I would. 

No, I didn't. No I don't. I was reporting to them as clearly and promptly as I could what was hurting, because they needed to know. 

Pain is not a terrible thing to be avoided at all costs. Pain is first of all information being sent from somewhere in your body to your brain that something needs attention. Or from one part of your brain to another. Knowing when and how to override our body's reaction to pain is something we must learn as we grow older. Yes there are times when we need to make our pain shut up. But generally it's something to pay close attention to, and if you figure out and deal with what it is saying, it usually fades to background. 

When I left, my physicians insisted I take another prescription for Oxycodone, even though I told them I'd only used one pill from the last batch. (I was sorry I did!) 

With that attitude toward pain no wonder there are so many addicts. Heroin, coke, speed, pain pills, alcohol, cigarettes, gambling, love, even 12-step programs, the list of addictions is endless. Human beings need to fully commit to something larger than ourselves, such as family, neighbors, community, even humanity. 

The more we do, the less our pain matters.

In response to "Broken young lives hard to fix" By Clive McFarlane TELEGRAM & GAZETTE, http://www.telegram.com/article/20141024/COLUMN44/310249916:

So the police are focusing on the problem youth, 105 of them, at the heart of a "subculture of young people living outside the rules and constraints of this city's civil community." 

They got that way because of "...early and prolonged exposure to violence, abuse, neglect, living in poverty and with family members involved in criminal activities, and with racism." 

Commenters point to lack of fathers, but what about lack of jobs? 

Chief Gemme's response is probably appropriate, what else can the Worcester PD do? But this is the tip of a much bigger problem: thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of young people who have never had and have no hope of ever having what my generation would consider a "good job". Many grew up fatherless because their birth father couldn't find or hold a good job either. 

By a "good job" I mean a "bread-winner" job which you can raise a family on, steady work with good pay and benefits and some assurance you won't be fired without good cause. Today many regard  temporary work for $15 an hour as good, which is ok if you have only yourself to support, but even those are few, fleeting and far between. 

The core problem is that THERE AREN'T ENOUGH JOBS! And the competition for the few jobs there are is driving down wages and conditions, making "benefits" a thing of the past. If you doubt this, go explore the BLS statistics for "Employed" and "Employment Population Ratio" at bls.gov/cps/cpsatabs.htm   and see if YOU can find a "recovery" there! 

In the meantime Governor Patrick has been sitting on some $16 Billion (with a B) in money for projects that could put tens of thousands back to work for 4 or 5 years, money authorized by the Legislature that he never chose to borrow and spend - despite record low interest rates. Congress and the Obama Administration, with the power to go after the unspent Trillions (with a T) that the billionaires and big corporations are sitting on, have utterly failed to tackle the task. 

And young people with no hope and no future get into trouble and throw their lives away. 

Ebola crisis, why now?

The failure of hospital workers to follow protocols and adequately protect themselves from the Ebola virus is something that should have been addressed a long time ago on a national scale and updated annually. Doing it on the fly will probably not work out well. There are grounds for being deeply suspicious of the integrity of the CDC, but it is a fact that their budgets have been cut steadily by a myopic Congress more intent on funding the US efforts to screw over the rest of the world and rescuing bankers from the consequences of their crimes than with meeting the needs of the folks who elected them.

Anyone who has trained in the use of haz-mat protection gear knows that understanding how to use it in theory is the easy part.  The hard part is retraining a lifetime of habits and becoming mindful of where every part of your body is and what it's doing. I've only trained in nuclear and chemical hazards, where a degree of screwup leads to a degree of contamination, and that was struggle enough.  "Humbling" is a good word for it.  

A situation which is binary, where even a fraction of a degree of screwup could be for keeps, is a far greater challenge.

Tens of thousands, then millions of health care and public safety workers will have to learn how to handle bio-hazard protective gear perfectly, without mistakes. Often they will have to learn without experienced trainers, without sufficient equipment to spare, under pressure of time and fear. To say that training videos will be no substitute is beyond understatement. Anxiety and urgency do not foster clarity, and learning this routine above all requires clarity of mind.  Overcoming habits takes time, drillling under supervision, measuring results, reflection and trying again. And it takes equipment to spare.  

When we look at how the US has handled public health emergencies in recent years - Hurricaines Katrina and Sandy spring to mind - it is easy to imagine that such massive screwups involved some kind of conspiracy. And there have certainly been enough demonstrable conspiracies going around to support that suspicion.  Plus, the large and growing bio-warfare establishment is real, malignant, and active in West Africa.  We should write nothing off at this point.

However, let's not ignore the part being played in this unfolding fiasco by

* the accumulated neglect, decay and collapse of our once great nation's entire civilian infrastructure,

* the loss of our moral center and social contract,

* the decay of our healthcare, public health and civil defense capabilities,

* the weakening of our population's resistance to disease due to unchecked pollution and contamination of our air, water and food,

* half the population weakened by the struggle with poverty and housing issues, a third suffering some degree of malnutrition

* the epidemic of depression, despair and hopelessness brought on by mass unemployment.

If the outbreak of this Ebola crisis was not planned to coincide with the imminent economic collapse, it is nevertheless not unrelated.

Gold Standard is no cure

re. 

Why is the Gold Standard Urgent?  by Keith Weiner

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-10-15/why-gold-standard-urgent

................

This good well-reasoned article ends with a logic failure and leap to an unsupported conclusion.  

Weiner writes:

"When the rate keeps falling, the borrowing keeps rising. Is there a failure point for debt?

"... What happens when an entire society doesn’t save?

"Our financial system has suffered an escalating series of crises. Each crisis has grown out of the fix applied to the previous one.

"The crisis of 2008 was different. No matter what the Fed has attempted, they have not been able to create even the temporary appearance of recovery (other than in asset prices). It’s not merely that growth will be slow, or slower than it should be in some theoretical ideal economic world.

"There will be no recovery while our monetary cancer rages, unchecked...."

Well put. Very well put.  But then he jumps to:

"We must rediscover the gold standard, which is the only cure."

Not so clear. I know, there are theoretical arguments that this should work, but what does the historical record show?

The founding of the Fed was not just simply a criminal conspiracy.  It took place during the 30-year "Long Depression" that began in the 1880's and ended with World War I, an economic and social crisis that saw the rise of populist, labor and mass socialist movements throughout the world including in the US.  By the time the smoke had cleared from that crisis, most of the old Russian Empire had repudiated capitalism and Germany had nearly followed suit.    

The next big lurch into fiat currency occurred during and just after the Great Depression, beginning with Roosevelt's confiscation of private gold holdings and crowned by Bretton Woods.  That crisis ended with the Soviet Red Army occupying Eastern Europe and Berlin, communist-led movements overthrowing old colonial empires, and the "fall of China".  By 1955 the terrified global bankers were hiding behind the threat of a world-destroying nuclear armageddon to save their system and their skins.  

The final lurch into a fiat currency world began during another profound system crisis in the 1970's, at a time when world capitalism appeared to be lurching back into depression. A depression my professors in the '60's swore could never again happen and would never again be allowed. The response was the final unpegging of the dollar from gold, followed by the unleashing, step by step, of what became today's de-regulated, financialized bubble economy, where money flows like water from the Fed, the central banks and great banking houses, where "value" and "price" have been fully conflated. 

Seen apart from this historical context, the rise of central banking and fiat currency can be modeled as simply a criminal conspiracy.  But in historical context, it appeared as a succession of apparently successful emergency responses to emerging systems failures.  But if that is how we should understand it, then it is hard to see how fiat money could be the root problem of the crisis, or how reverting to the gold standard could be the cure.

Which is not to say that gold won't play a key role in the global drama that's unfolding.  I'm just saying that it's illogical to jump to the conclusion that reverting to a gold standard alone could fix a crisis that predates and perhaps precipitated its abandonment.  

If we conclude that some underlying condition, problem or set of problems must have been driving the system into depression and mass unemployment over a century ago, and if we conclude that is what must have forced our grandparents' and great grandparents' generations to abandon the gold standard, then we should assume this underlying problem or condition must still be there waiting for us.