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HOMOSAPIENS.KI

Progressive News and Opinion
The ideas, history, issues and commentaries behind the events of the day

Thursday, October 29, 2009
New York City / Nelson in the Selkirks, BC Canada

Image - Clifford Harper illustration of Charles Dickens Photograph -- Clifford Harper/Agraphia.co.uk

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GAIA AND HOMOSAPIENS
- Film on evolution and sustainability, or not, of gaia and homosapiens

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Note:The symbol ^ denotes that that article continues at the link.

Imaging Life

Book | "Charles Dickens" by Michael Slater
Simon Callow welcomes an incomparable portrait of an awesome writer.
The Guardian - Review by Simon Callow - October 10, 2009
- LINK ^

In terms of what we know about them, the contrast between our two greatest men of letters, William Shakespeare and Charles Dickens, could scarcely be sharper. Of Shakespeare, we know next to nothing; of Dickens we know next to everything. Dickens might well have wished it otherwise: speaking of his great predecessor, he wrote to a correspondent: "It is a great comfort, to my way of thinking, that so little is known about the poet. It is a fine mystery, and I tremble every day lest something should come out."The mystery of Charles Dickens is quite as profound as that of William Shakespeare, but it is essentially the mystery of art itself and of its roots in the deepest layers of experience and personality. Of the writer's external life, there is almost an embarrassment of riches. It was a life lived at full tilt. There are times in Michael Slater's indispensable new biography when one simply has to close the book from sheer exhaustion at its subject's expenditure of energy. It's like being sprayed by the ocean. Even Dickens was astonished at it: "How strange it is," he said, "to be never at rest!"

The Afghanistani Quagmire

Resignation Letter from US Foreign Service Officer Matthew P. Hoh
US Foreign Service Officer Matthew P. Hoh, Senior Civilian Representative, Afghanistan

September 10, 2009

Ambassador Nancy J. Powell
Director General of the Foreign Service and Director of Human Resources
U.S. Department of State
2201 C Street NW
Washington, D.C. 20520

Dear Ambassador Powell,

It is with great regret and disappointment I submit my resignation from my appointment as a Political Officer in the Foreign Service and my post as the Senior Civilian Representative for the US Government in Zabul Province. I have served six of the previous ten years in service to our country overseas, to include deployment as a US Marine office and Department of Defense civilian in the Euphrates and TigrisRiver Valleys of Iraq in 2004-2005 and 2006-2007. I did not enter into this position lightly or with any undue expectations nor did I believe my assignment would be without sacrifice, hardship or difficulty. However, in the course of my five months of service in Afghanistan, in both Regional Commands East and South, I have lost understanding of and confidence in the strategic purposes of the United States? presence in Afghanistan. I have doubts and reservations about our current strategy and planned future strategy, but my resignation is based not upon how we are pursuing this war, but why and to what end. To put simply: I fail to see the value or the worth in continued US casualties or expenditures of resources in support of the Afghan government in what is, truly, a 35-year old civil war.

This fall will mark the eighth year of US combat, governance and development operations withinAfghanistan. Next fall, the United States? occupation will equal in length the Soviet Union?s own physical involvement in Afghanistan. Like the Soviets, we continue to secure and bolster a failing state, while encouraging an ideology and system of government unknown and unwanted by its people.

If the history of Afghanistan is one great stage play, the United States is no more than a supporting actor, among several previously, in a tragedy that not only pits tribes, valleys, clans, villages and families against one another, but, from at least the end of King Zahir Shah?s reign, has violently and savagely pitted the urban, secular, educated and modern of Afghanistan against the rural, religious, illiterate and traditional. It is this latter group that composes and supports the Pashtun insurgency. The Pashtun insurgency, which is composed of multiple, seemingly infinite, local groups, is fed by what is perceived by the Pashtun people as a continued and sustained assault, going back centuries, on Pashtun land, culture, traditions and religion by internal and external enemies. The US and NATO presence and operations in Pashtun valleys and villages, as well as Afghan army and police units that are led and composed of non- Pashtun soldiers and police, provide an occupation force against which the insurgency is justified. In both RC East and South, I have observed that the bulk of the insurgency fights not for the white banner of the Taliban, but rather against the presence of foreign soldiers and taxes imposed by an unrepresentative government in Kabul.

The United States military presence in Afghanistan greatly contributes to the legitimacy and strategic message of the Pashtun insurgency. In a like manner our backing of the Afghan government in its current form continues to distance the government from the people. The Afghan government?s failings, particularly when weighed against the sacrifice of American lives and dollars, appear legion and metastatic:

Glaring corruption and unabashed graft;

A President whose confidants and chief advisors comprise drug lords and war crimes villains, who mock our own rule of law and counternarcotics efforts;

A system of provincial and district leaders constituted of local power brokers, opportunists and strongmen allied to the United States solely for, and limited by, the value of our USAID and CERP contracts and for whose own political and economic interests stand nothing to gain from any positive or genuine attempts at reconciliation; and

The recent election process dominated by fraud and discredited by low voter turnout, which has created an enormous victory for our enemy who now claims a popular boycott and will call into question worldwide our government?s military, economic and diplomatic support for an invalid and illegitimate Afghan government.

Our support for this kind of government, coupled with a misunderstanding of the insurgency?s true nature, reminds me horribly of our involvement with South Vietnam; an unpopular and corrupt government we backed at the expense of our Nation?s own internal peace, against an insurgency whose nationalism we arrogantly and ignorantly mistook as a rival to our own Cold War ideology.

I find specious the reasons we ask for bloodshed and sacrifice from our young men and women inAfghanistan. If honest, our stated strategy of securing Afghanistan to prevent al-Qaeda resurgence or regrouping would require us to additionally invade and occupy western Pakistan, Somalia, Sudan,Yemen, etc. Our presence in Afghanistan has only increased destabilization and insurgency in Pakistanwhere we rightly fear a toppled or weakened Pakistani government may lose control of its nuclear weapons. However, again, to follow the logic of our stated goals we should garrison Pakistan, notAfghanistan. More so, the September 11th attacks, as well as the Madrid and London bombings, were primarily planned and organized in Western Europe; a point that highlights the threat is not one tied to traditional geographic or political boundaries. Finally, if our concern is for a failed state crippled by corruption and poverty and under assault from criminal and drug lords, then if we bear our military and financial contributions to Afghanistan, we must reevaluate and increase our commitment to and involvement in Mexico.

Eight years into war, no nation has ever known a more dedicated, well trained, experienced and disciplined military as the US Armed Forces. I do not believe any military force has ever been tasked with such a complex, opaque and Sisyphean mission as the US military has received in Afghanistan. The tactical proficiency and performance of our Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen and Marines is unmatched and unquestioned. However, this is not the European or Pacific theaters of World War II, but rather is a war for which our leaders, uniformed, civilian and elected, have inadequately prepared and resourced our men and women. Our forces, devoted and faithful, have been committed to conflict in an indefinite and unplanned manner that has become a cavalier, politically expedient and Pollyannaish misadventure. Similarly, the United States has a dedicated and talented cadre of civilians, both US government employees and contractors, who believe in and sacrifice for their mission, but they have been ineffectually trained and led with guidance and intent shaped more by the political climate in Washington,DC than in Afghan cities, villages, mountains and valleys.

"We are spending ourselves into oblivion" a very talented and intelligent commander, one of America?s best, briefs every visitor, staff delegation and senior officer. We are mortgaging our Nation?s economy on a war, which, even with increased commitment, will remain a draw for years to come. Success and victory, whatever they may be, will be realized not in years, after billions more spent, but in decades and generations. The United States does not enjoy a national treasury for such success and victory.

I realize the emotion and tone of my letter and ask that you excuse any ill temper. I trust you understand the nature of this war and the sacrifices made by so many thousands of families who have been separated from loved ones deployed in defense of our Nation and whose homes bear the fractures, upheavals and scars of multiple and compounded deployments. Thousands of our men and women have returned home with physical and mental wounds, some that will never heal or will only worsen with time. The dead return only in bodily form to be received by families who must be reassured their dead have sacrificed for a purpose worthy of futures lost, loved vanished, and promised dreams unkept. I have lost confidence such assurances can anymore be made. As such, I submit my resignation.

Sincerely,

Matthew P. Hoh
Senior Civilian Representative
Zabul Province, Afghanistan

cc: Mr. Frank Ruggiero
Ms. Dawn Liberi
Ambassador Anthony Wayne
Ambassador Karl Eikenberry

Related | Video - ABC Story
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Carrumpah-Lobo - The Homosapiens.ki Blog
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United States Government

Commentary | Reviewing the Constitution - Rethinking Government
Drew Westen: Effective government is the precondition of freedom. And Obama needs to tell us that.
The Nation - By Drew Westen - September 30, 2009
- LINK ^

Complete here.
In his September speech on healthcare to a joint session of Congress, President Obama invoked the spirit of Ted Kennedy to make some modest steps toward almost, sorta, kinda saying that maybe we ought to rethink the role of government. Unfortunately, since taking office Obama has largely reinforced the conservative "brand" made so popular by Ronald Reagan. In explicitly discussing the role of government in a recent Meet the Press appearance, Obama offered a juxtaposition that would have made Reagan proud: "How do we balance freedom with our need to look after one another?" In fact, perhaps the biggest difference between progressives and conservatives is that one believes that government inherently infringes on freedom and the other believes that government creates the conditions for it.

If there was a silver lining to the state of the union Obama inherited from his predecessor, it was that George W. Bush and the Republicans had so thoroughly discredited the ideology of unregulated greed and hands-off government in matters of financial security that at no time since 1933 was the public more ready for a new narrative about what government should and shouldn't do. Americans were so frightened and angry about what was happening to their 401(k)s, their housing values (if they still had a home), their health insurance (if they still had or could afford it), their inability to know which of their kids' Chinese toys was filled with lead, and the fine print in their credit card bills that they were ready for a progressive alternative to the mantra "Government is the problem, not the solution."

There is probably still time to begin offering that narrative. But the president needs to recognize that the pragmatic problem-solving that Americans so desperately want from their government presupposes a coherent narrative about the role of government. And he needs to recognize that the direction that problem-solving takes us (e.g., either toward healthcare reform that cuts into the profits of pharmaceutical and insurance companies and offers some variant of Medicare as at least one choice to people under 65, or toward reform that taxes and ultimately eliminates the better plans offered to working Americans by their employers) depends on which narrative you offer.

It isn't hard to construct one (FDR wrote a pretty good rough draft), but the president needs to tell it--and tell it over and over, until it can compete with the well-branded conservative narrative. A progressive narrative that could move the political center the way Roosevelt did isn't that difficult to tell: we've been told for years that we face a choice between the free market (capitalism) and tyrannical government (socialism), when that's not our choice at all. The choice is between unregulated greed, which leaves none of us free, and responsible, effective leadership that protects our freedom. We just saw what happens when we embrace the ideology of unregulated greed--the idea that if we just trust our financial futures to big businesses pursuing their interests, we'll all end up better off. If you want to lose your financial security, your job, your house and your healthcare, it's a great ideology. We just relearned the lesson of our grandparents, who lived through a time when Republicans preached the same philosophy in the run-up to the Great Depression.

The alternative to government for the sake of big business isn't government for the sake of big government. It's government for the average person, who actually creates prosperity by working for a living. No one doubts that we need government to protect our national security. But what we just learned so painfully is that we also need government to protect our financial security--just the way we need government to protect the quality of our air, our drinking water and our bridges and levees. And it's no different for energy, education or healthcare.

Sometimes the best role of government is to partner with business (e.g., to invest in wind and solar energy, so we're not at the mercy of governments that are hostile to us). Sometimes it's to regulate it (e.g., to prevent Wall Street sharks from using our money to speculate away our security--and then expecting us to bail them out and pay them bonuses for their bad judgment). Sometimes it's to compete with big business to make sure the "free market" is really free and competitive and that it extends opportunity and prosperity to all (e.g., in higher education, where our public universities are not only some of the best in the nation but the most affordable, and in healthcare, where the best way to keep insurance companies honest is to make them compete with a plan or two that they don't get to control). Sometimes it's all of the above, and sometimes it's none of the above.

There isn't a piece of progressive legislation the president can pass without making unnecessary concessions to a weak but determined opposition, and without creating tensions within his own party and unnecessarily losing seats in 2010--unless he enunciates an alternative vision of government. Our founders believed we could govern ourselves effectively, and that doing so was the precondition of freedom. Let's prove them right.

HS Editor - You want to bake a scrumptious cake? Make sure you use the right ingredients.

Congress | Dick Gephardt's Spectacular Sellout to the Corpocracy
The Nation - By Sebastian Jones - September 30, 2009
- LINK ^

In March, months after the government gave an unprecedented $85 billion to AIG, the insurance giant released a list of counterparties, exposing some of the world's top financial institutions as the real recipients of the bailout. First among its peers, Goldman Sachs got a whopping $12.9 billion, despite having claimed in September to be insulated from AIG's troubles. Based on these revelations, Maryland Democratic Congressman Elijah Cummings, who had dogged the financial industry since the crisis began, told his staff to prepare a letter calling for an investigation.

Two Congressional staffers familiar with the matter told The Nation that a draft was circulated to House members on March 23. Within hours, Cummings's office had received a phone call from a lobbying firm hired by Goldman Sachs, making an "insistent but polite" request for a meeting. Cummings, intending to send the letter regardless, granted the audience, and so it was that top Goldman executives like president Gary Cohen and CFO David Viniar arrived the next day. They brought someone else too, a big-name Democratic politician with serious populist credibility: Dick Gephardt.

While Gephardt spent most of his twenty-eight years in national Democratic politics quietly promoting and voting with establishment interests, he is best known for his friendship with labor and advocacy for universal healthcare during two presidential runs. In 2003 he harshly condemned corporate crime, which he said "ruined people's lives for selfishness and greed," and launched his candidacy claiming, "Every proposal I'm making, every idea I'm advancing has a single, central purpose: to revive a failing economy and give working Americans the help and security they need." So why, six years later, was he on Capitol Hill representing one of the biggest players in the largest economic crisis since the Great Depression? And further, why was he recently working for Visa to kill credit card reform, helping Peabody Energy stymie climate change legislation and consulting for UnitedHealth Group alongside Tom Daschle to block meaningful healthcare reform?

As autumn sets in, the progressive agenda on which Barack Obama rode to victory last November has stalled, even with Democrats controlling every branch of government. Key aspects of healthcare reform, like a public option, appear dead; climate change legislation, having narrowly passed the House in June, awaits an uncertain fate in the Senate; the Employee Free Choice Act and financial industry reforms have gone off the grid. Behind all these setbacks is a pattern: with little outright opposition, corporate interests have insinuated themselves into the legislative process to co-opt attempts at reform. As a result, the big-ticket items are rotting away, key provisions have been removed and bills are being weakened beyond recognition behind closed doors.

Certainly there are still those in Congress willing to stand up to pressure from lobbyists--like Cummings, who, after meeting with Gephardt and the Goldman Sachs executives, sent his letter anyway, launching an investigation by TARP inspector general Neil Barofsky. But the broader momentum is with the corporate interests, thanks to players like Gephardt who have escorted them to the bargaining table. In a town where everyone seemingly has a price, Gephardt has distinguished himself, selling his reputation as a pro-labor, pro-universal healthcare, pro-environment expert and advocate to his new corporate masters, giving their efforts to kill and maim reforms a familiar, friendly face in the Democratic establishment. As a result, Gephardt has become a highly sought-after and very effective lobbyist. He has also betrayed nearly every principle he once claimed to hold.

op-Ed | State Court | Texas, the Eyes of Justice Are Upon You
Truthout - By Bill Moyers and Michael Winship - Saturday, October 24,2009
- LINK ^

On October 13, we lost a resolute champion of the law, a man who left his impact on the lives of untold numbers of Americans.

His very name made his life's work almost inevitable, a matter of destiny. William Wayne Justice was a federal judge for the Eastern District of Texas. That's right, he was "Justice Justice." And he spent a distinguished legal career making sure that everyone - no matter their color or income or class - got a fair shake. As a former Texas lieutenant governor put it last week, "Judge Justice dragged Texas into the 20th century, God bless him."

Dragged it kicking and screaming, for it was Justice who ordered Texas to integrate its public schools in 1971 - 17 years after the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision made separate schools for blacks and whites unconstitutional. Texas resisted doing the right thing for as long as it could. Many of its segregated schools for African-American children were so poor they still had outhouses instead of indoor plumbing.

This small town lawyer appointed to the federal bench by President Lyndon B. Johnson ordered Texas to open its public housing to everyone, regardless of their skin color. He looked at the state's "truly shocking conditions" in its juvenile detention system and said, repair it. He struck down state law that permitted public schools to charge as much as $1,000 tuition for children of illegal immigrants.

And Justice demanded a top-to-bottom overhaul of Texas prisons, some of the most brutal and corrupt in the nation. He even held the state in contempt of court when he thought it was dragging its feet cleaning up a system where thousands of inmates slept on the dirty bare floors of their cellblocks and often went without medical care. The late, great Molly Ivins said, "He brought the United States Constitution to Texas."

HS Editor - Of course, Texas hasn't quite understood the legal implicatios of some parts of the US Constitution yet.

Citizens / Civil Organizations / Activism

"Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter" - Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Topical Sections

Art and Culture

Leonard Cohen | "First We Take Manhattan, Then We Take Berlin" | Music Video
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The Insurance Troglodytes and Corporate Crime

"The real truth of the matter is, as you and I know, that a financial element in the large centers has owned the government of the U.S. since the days of Andrew Jackson.?
--- Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1933-Nov-21, in a letter to Colonel E. Mandell House

US | A Simpleton Tries to Understand the Health Care Debate
Truthout -- By William Fisher - Sunday, October 25, 2009
- Let me get this straight ^

Congress is going to pass a health care plan
written by a committee whose head says he doesn't understand it,
passed by a Congress that hasn't read it, but exempts themselves from it,
signed by a President that also hasn't read it (and who smokes),
with funding administered by a treasury chief who didn't pay his taxes,
overseen by a surgeon general who is obese, and
financed by a country that's broke.

What could possibly go wrong?

Now, the first thing I want you to know is that I'm no health care policy expert. Far from it. But, like the rest of us, I have a body and a mind that can get sick. So, I'm a participant in the debate whether or not I want to be. And being about to mark my 81st birthday gives me a shorter time to participate but, arguably, a heightened motivation.

Over these past months, I have been drowning in seas of data and analysis and opinions and lies and spin about health. But very little of it has actually been about health. A lot of it has been about process, such as the process in the sausage factory through which legislation gets crafted. But mostly it has been about money - money headed for so-called health insurance companies.

Now, maybe I have a simplistic mind, but frankly I don't understand why health care and insurance companies keep appearing in the same sentences.

After all, these two things are not the same. Insurance companies are not in the health care business. They are in the risk business. They assess risk and then charge you a fee - it's called a premium - to protect you against that risk. Just like your car or your home insurance. If your car gets wrecked, the insurance company doesn't make it better; it gives you money so that you can make it better. Same with home insurance; if a storm tears your roof off, your insurance company will send a contractor to fix it.

So it is with health insurance. Health insurance companies don't do a thing to make you well if you're sick. That's the work that's done by physicians, nurses, hospitals and clinics. And these two groups - health care professionals and health insurance companies - are far from buddies. In fact, they're pretty intense enemies.

The reason is that the health insurance companies, being in the risk business, do whatever they can to reduce their risk. So, they are more than likely to deny all or parts of the care your doctor is prescribing to make you better. Their loyalties are to their shareholders. Shareholders who've seen a run of great profits, based on ever-rising premiums, based in turn on generous government subsidies and an almost total lack of competition among all these companies.

Oh, I forgot to mention that our Congress, in its infinite wisdom, gave these health insurance companies the same antitrust exemption enjoyed by major league baseball. This means they can fix prices with impunity. Trouble is, they haven't been staying fixed for long; premiums have been increasing exponentially year after year. And there's been no noticeable improvement in our health; in fact, our health has gotten steadily worse.

Communities and Species

The So-called Animal Community - Moral in Tooth and Claw
The Chronical Review - By Jessica Pierce and Marc Bekoff - Octber 18, 2009
- LINK ^

Animals are "in." This might well be called the decade of the animal. Research on animal behavior has never been more vibrant and more revealing of the amazing cognitive, emotional, and moral capacities of a broad range of animals. That is particularly true of research into social behavior?how groups of animals form, how and why individuals live harmoniously together, and the underlying emotional bases for social living. It's becoming clear that animals have both emotional and moral intelligences.

Philosophical and scientific convention, of course, has pulled toward a more conservative account of morality: Morality is a capacity unique to human beings. But the more we study the behavior of animals, the more we find that different groups of animals have their own moral codes. That raises both scientific and philosophic questions.

Researchers like Frans de Waal (The Age of Empathy: Nature's Lessons for a Kinder Society), Elliott Sober, David Sloan Wilson (Unto Others: The Evolution and Psychology of Unselfish Behavior), and Kenneth M. Weiss and Anne V. Buchanan (The Mermaid's Tale: Four Billion Years of Cooperation in the Making of Living ThingsThe American Journal of Physical Anthropology that for many nonhuman primates, more than 90 percent of their social interactions are affiliative rather than competitive or divisive. Moreover, social animals live in groups structured by rules of engagement?there are "right" and "wrong" ways of behaving, depending on the situation.

While we all recognize rules of right and wrong behavior in our own human societies, we are not accustomed to looking for them among animals. But they're there, as are the "good" prosocial behaviors and emotions that underlie and help maintain those rules. Such behaviors include fairness, empathy, forgiveness, trust, altruism, social tolerance, integrity, and reciprocity?and they are not merely byproducts of conflict but rather extremely important in their own right.

Economy and Finance

Bloomberg Economic News
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Bloomberg Current Worldwide Financial News
- LINK ^

US | This Year's Biggest Hoax Is Tim Geithner's 'Solution' for the Economy, Not the Balloon Boy
Alternet - By Robert Scheer - October 22, 2009
- LINK ^

Food and Nutrition

US | America?s Food Revolution
City - By Jerry Weinberger- Summer 2009
Urban revival, globalization, and some world-class chefs have created one of the world?s great culinary scenes.
- LINK ^

In a 1769 letter to the naturalist John Bartram, Benjamin Franklin observed that while lots of people like accounts of old buildings and monuments, ?I confess that if I could find in any Italian travels a receipt for making Parmesan cheese, it would give me more satisfaction than a transcript of any inscription from any old stone whatsoever.?

Hs Editor - This 1789 reference of Benjamin Franklin to 'receipt' in lieu of 'recipe' reminds me of my father, born in 1888 in Illinois. who used the former spelling and pronunciation, a practice that I found noticeably quaint as a child.

Humor in Humorless Political Times

East German Jokes Collected by West German Spies
Der Spiegel - By Hans-Ulrich Stoldt and Klaus Wiegrefe - October 14, 2009
- LINK

Complete here.
Did East Germans originate from apes? Impossible. Apes could never have survived on just two bananas a year. Such jokes were whispered in communist East Germany -- and West German spies recorded them diligently to gain insights into the public mood, according to recently released intelligence files.

"What would happen if the desert became communist? Nothing for a while, and then there would be a sand shortage." Jokes like that made the rounds among East Germans during the communist era, and West Germany's intelligence service would collect them, as a way to assess the public mood behind the Iron Curtain but also to amuse its masters in Bonn, the West German capital.

Here's another one: "Why does West Germany have a higher standard of living than we do? Because communists can't get work permits there." The ubiquitous Trabant or Trabi, East Germany's legendary plastic car with its clattering two-stroke engine, was a favorite butt of jokes as well. Like this one: "A new Trabi has been launched with two exhaust pipes -- so you can use it as a wheelbarrow."

The jokes were gleaned from secretly opened letters and phone conversations that agents from West Germany's Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND) would monitor in their quest for East German state secrets during the Cold War.

Intelligence services around the world tend to value every snippet of information they get and the BND was no different. It scrupulously collected and filed the jokes and dispatched them to Bonn during the carnival season each year, much to the delight of civil servants. The BND has just released the files it kept on East German humor.

Carnival Treat for West German Officials

The joke report was by far the most popular service the spies provided. "It was our biggest hit," recalls former BND spy Dieter Gandersheim, whose real name is of course quite different. The Chancellery and the ministries couldn't wait for the file, he said.

It wasn't just about livening up the gray civil service routine. The jokes gave insights into what ordinary East Germans were thinking about their regime and about current events. The Chernobyl nuclear accident in 1986 spawned a new proverb, for example: If the farmer falls off his tractor, he must be close to a reactor.

Chernobyl, incidentally, wasn't an accident, another joke went. It was just a Soviet program to X-ray its population.

East Germans weren't averse to secretly lampooning their political leaders, bureaucracy or the chronic supply shortages that plagued the country, even though it was risky for them.

"Political jokes thrive in dictatorships," says Christoph Kleeman, a former official from the Birthler Authority, which was set up after German unification to manage the archives of the East German secret police, or Stasi. "Anyone who tells one or laughs about one creates democracy for a brief moment, and brings the regime leaders down to his level."

Playing With Fire

Christmas has been cancelled, goes another joke. Mary didn't find any diapers for the baby Jesus, Joseph was called up to the army and the three kings didn't get a travel permit.

The BND's joke reports were often preceded by an analysis of the political and economic situation in the German Democratic Republic. In the early 1980s, when the Polish government imposed martial law in response to strikes against food price increases and demands for political reform, the BND reported that some East German workers had also downed tools, and it gave the following analysis: "The GDR leadership believes the population is resilient and ready to make sacrifices but it is prepared to take tough action if necessary to prevent 'Polish conditions.'" It added a chapter on "Political jokes on the supply situation." Like this one: "Why can't you get any pins in East Germany anymore? Because they are being sold to Poland as kebab skewers."

"Telling jokes was playing with fire," says Kleemann. The Stasi had 91,000 employees and a network of around 189,000 civilian informants to spy on the East German population of 17 million. It regarded every political joke as a potential threat. Anyone who poked fun at the representatives of the organs of state and society was subject to prosecution.

"There were cases of people who were jailed, it was particularly bad in the 1950s and 1960s," says Kleemann.

Here's one example about how that risk was lampooned: "There are people who tell jokes. There are people who collect jokes and tell jokes. And there are people who collect people who tell jokes."

Legal and Constitutional Issues

Bloomberg Index of Current Legal News
- LINK ^

US | After the Billionaires Plundered Alabama Town, Troops Were Called in ... Illegally
Alternet - By Mark Ames, AlterNet - October 24, 2009
- LINK ^

Life Style

US | There?s No Place Like Home
Fewer Americans are relocating than at any time since 1962. That's good news for families, communities ... and even the environment.
Newsweek - By Joel Kotkin - October 19, 2009
- LINK ^

On almost any night of the week, Churchill's Restaurant is hopping. The 10-year-old hot spot in Rockville Centre, Long Island, is packed with locals drinking beer and eating burgers, with some customers spilling over onto the street. "We have lots of regulars?people who are recognized when they come in," says co-owner Kevin Culhane. In fact, regulars make up more than 80 percent of the restaurant's customers. "People feel comfortable and safe here," Culhane says. "This is their place."

Thriving neighborhood restaurants are one small data point in a larger trend I call the new localism. The basic premise: the longer people stay in their homes and communities, the more they identify with those places, and the greater their commitment to helping local businesses and institutions thrive, even in a downturn. Several factors are driving this process, including an aging population, suburbanization, the Internet, and an increased focus on family life. And even as the recession has begun to yield to recovery, our commitment to our local roots is only going to grow more profound. Evident before the recession, the new localism will shape how we live and work in the coming decades, and may even influence the course of our future politics.

Perhaps nothing will be as surprising about 21st-century America as its settledness. For more than a generation Americans have believed that "spatial mobility" would increase, and, as it did, feed an inexorable trend toward rootlessness and anomie. This vision of social disintegration was perhaps best epitomized in Vance Packard's 1972 bestseller <A Nation of Strangers, with its vision of America becoming "a society coming apart at the seams." In 2000, Harvard's Robert Putnam made a similar point, albeit less hyperbolically, in Bowling Alone, in which he wrote about the "civic malaise" he saw gripping the country. In Putnam's view, society was being undermined, largely due to suburbanization and what he called "the growth of mobility."

Yet in reality Americans actually are becoming less nomadic. As recently as the 1970s as many as one in five people moved annually; by 2006, long before the current recession took hold, that number was 14 percent, the lowest rate since the census starting following movement in 1940. Since then tougher times have accelerated these trends, in large part because opportunities to sell houses and find new employment have dried up. In 2008, the total number of people changing residences was less than those who did so in 1962, when the country had 120 million fewer people. The stay-at-home trend appears particularly strong among aging boomers, who are largely eschewing Sunbelt retirement condos to stay tethered to their suburban homes?close to family, friends, clubs, churches, and familiar surroundings

Media

US | 8 Reasons Fox Is Not a News Organization
PR for the GOP? Yes. Platform for right-wing hatemongers? Definitely. But a news organization? Definitely not.
Alternet - By Adele Stan - October 24, 2009
- LINK ^

Rights and Freedom

The doctrine of blind obedience and unqualified submission to any human power, whether civil or ecclesiastical, is the doctrine of despotism, and ought to have no place among Republicans and Christians."
--- Angelica Grimke - (1805-1879) Source: Anti-Slavery Examiner, September 1836

"Yes, we did produce a near-perfect republic. But will they keep it? Or will they, in the enjoyment of plenty, lose the memory of freedom? Material abundance without character is the path of destruction."
--- Thomas Jefferson - (1743-1826), Source: in a letter to John Adams as quoted in John A. Stormer, None Dare Call it Treason (Florissant, MO: Liberty Bell Press, 1964)

Science & Technology

Bloomberg Index of Current Science News
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Sound and Fury

Photography - US | Photos from the Book, Who We Were: A Snapshot History of America
- Slide Show / Audio

Hip Hop | Maestro Fresh Wes - Drop The Needle
- Video

Bouncing barefoot on the sidewalk
- Video

A Song for the Times - Bing Crosby (1932) ?Brother, Can You Spare A Dime?
- Audio

The History of A Great Depression-Era Anthem For Our Time
- Audio/Text

Yip Harburg (1970)
- Audio

The Internet Press Room

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Music Video | Leonard Cohen | "Democracy Is Coming to the USA"
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