United States Senator - John Thune

United States Senator - John Thune
Is he any relation to the famous "Looney Thunes"?
McCain is senile but is he that demented?
Bring him on, Joe Biden will take him in the first round.

Veterans for Obama

This is one contribution that I can make on my own. If there are any other vets who would like to carry the colors of the "1st Obama Brigade" send me an e-mail and I'll send a FREE BUMPER STICKER to the first 100 vets.

McCain's a Joke

Are you old enough to remember the "bad ol days", before P.C., the days of radio shows like "Abie's Irish Rose","Jack Benny & Rochester" and the 1000 year old man etc. I think we laughed a lot more when we weren't worrying (too much} about saying the wrong thing. OK so it was wrong and I guess we should have known better but my point is that if we can't laugh at ourselves - we're in trouble. McCain and I are almost contemporaries. I was born two year before he was so I think it's OK to make jokes about his age since I frequently make jokes about my own. I think I might have been a decent president if I had been elected eight years ago but I don't think I'm really up to the job now and neither is McCain and it's for the same reasons. We're both grumpy old men who often forget where we left our glasses or the car keys and we have to pause a little to remember the names of our grandchildren or the first name of the French President and although I aced history and gography in school, I can't remember which countries border on Lebanon or Iraq without looking at a map but the main reason we shouldn't be in the White House is because we can't inspire the young people of the world to go out and make a difference but Barack Obama can, almost the way JFK could.
Considering the kind of campaign my contemporary is running now- he should be treated as a joke.
As my Jewish friends would say:
"I laugh so that I don't cry"

The Barbeque Media Wants Senator Obama To Win? That's Rich.

About Barack Obama
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

(Photo Courtesy of The New York Times)

If ever there was someone who can be the icon of the new age in American politics it is Michelle Obama.

My Real Age

When I was a student at U.C., there was a story going around about two graduate students from the Psychology department who found themselves unable to make ends meet and were forced to find part-time jobs. One, went to work as a teller in a bank and the other decided to be a bank robber. After a few weeks, Robber Student found himself at the counter of Teller Stuudent. He handed the teller a paper bag with a note : "Put all the cash in the bag and hand it over. Just act normal and nobody will get hurt- I've got a gun"
Teller read the note and wrote on it "First, let's define our terms, what do you understand by 'normal' ?"



First, we have to define the meaning of "Real Age". Are we referring to the elapsed time between my birth and today? If so this is actually a rather arbitrary definition. If we were on a planet or star that had no solar system, how would we measure "time" and age? Would there be any time at all? Would we age? Further, why should we accept the idea that "time" is defined by the rise and fall of the sun rather than the rising of the moon or the movement of other planets?

Second, there are the question of "mental" age", "physical age" and "emotional age". There are millions of so-called "adults" who read at a fifth grade level or below and many 50 year-olds who can't climb a flight of stairs or swim 100 yards without assistance. How old are they? If we divided the entire population of this country by those who were of chronological voting age and those who were not, what percentage of the voters have the emotional and intellectual maturity to make the decisions proposed on the ballots?

Why, when we're computing ages, do we count from the moment of birth rather than conception? Or, why do we disregard previous incarnations?

Why do we count backwards with age? "You are 63 years old" (you have completed 63 years of living on this planet) Maybe we should count forward "You have 21 more years to live" (according to current actuarial tables)

The question of how old I am can only be answered in relative terms like:

How old are you right now at this minute?
How old were when you woke up this morning?
How old were you last night when you went to bed?
How old are you when you're playing a good game of golf? Catching a big mouth bass? Flirting with a young woman?
How old am I when come upon a new and interesting idea or concept?

What is my real age?
You tell me.

What is BlogThis! ?

What is BlogThis! ?

Vietnam Now

In the three weeks since I returned from Vietnam, practically every publication I read has published lead stories on the upcoming economic "explosion" in Vietnam, (including the New York Times, The Economist, Newsweek, Prospect, The New Republic and more)

It was one of the reasons I felt some urgency about making my trip: it's all going to be very different in a couple of years. When I was in Saigon, I was watching CNN and there was an interview with a major Chinese industrialist who told the CNN reporter that he was moving all of his operations to Vietnam by the end of 2009.
Here's why:

• Vietnam's literacy rate as of 2006 was 94%
• 98% of school age children are enrolled in school
• Vietnam has a labor pool estimated to be nearly 40 million workers, with an additional 1.5 million workers joining the work force each year
• Minimum Wage $35/month, higher in major cities.
• Mineral resources (including coal and oil deposits) plus rich and fertile farmland and an immense coast line makes the country almost paradisaical
  

The major cities Ho Chi Minh/Saigon and Hanoi are already bursting at the seams - traffic and pollution are incredible but there is still plenty of land available for development and exploitation.

However, there is a dark side to Vietnam and it made me hesitate about staying for more than a visit. The people are for the most courteous and apparently friendly but beneath the surface there is a strong feeling of resentment towards foreigners, particularly the Chinese, Americans and the French each of whom invaded Vietnam and occupied for significant periods of time. The Americans had a relatively brief and quite violent encounter with the Vietnamese in the 1970's but their predecessors, the French came early (1859) and stayed late ('til 1954).
The French fought hard to retain their Asian colony the war lasted nine years and left a lot of scars.

In his recently published The Boat, Nam le, the author describes how his father was conscripted into the South Vietnamese Army and fought alongside the American Army: asked how he could fight on the side of the Americans, after what he witnessed at My Lai, he replies: “I had nothing but hate in me, but I had enough for everyone.”

In the past six years I have traveled extensively through eastern Asia but Vietnam is the only country I have visited in the region where almost no signs (advertising or other) are written in English or any language other than Vietnamese. The children are now studying English in school but hardly any of the adults I met spoke English and only my Vietnamese contemporaries, spoke French.

The Hmong people who I encountered in mountains of the north, were congenial and pleasant but they have some "history" with the U.S. and are naturally more friendly than the Vietnamese.

I Found it When I stopped Looking

As I get older, I am more and more prone to misplacing things like keys, eyeglasses, books, files etc.
and when I search for them, I usually don't find them- until I stop looking.

Last week my grand daughter was here- she decided to spend Spring Break with us. It's the first time she's been with us since she was about 11 and she'll be celebrating her 20th birthday in a couple of weeks. About two weeks before she arrived I had misplaced my "good glasses" these are a pair that I bought originally about five years ago. They have titanium frames (really unbreakable) and a new pair of tri-focal no line lenses. Cost to replace today about $400 . I searched everywhere for them and eventually stopped looking. I knew they were somewhere in the house and someday they would turn up. Camille was idly perusing my "stacks" when her hand happen to fall on a copy of Shakespeare's Sonnets. Standing close to her, my eyes followed the movement of her hand, I was curious to see which book had attracted her attention. As she pulled the book from the shelf "I spied, with my little eye" - my "good glasses"!
I
I've looked, for a long time, for something that could explain the meaning of Buddhism to people like me who are "anti-theistic" but deeply involved in the practice and philosophy of Buddhism. Yesterday, totally by chance I found a short work that, I think is exactly what I was looking for - when I wasn't looking.

The title is Buddhist Meditation and Depth Psychology. The author is David Burns and it is published online by the Buddhist Publication Society.
You can view and download it (38 pages and it"s FREE!) at:http://www.dharmaweb.org/index.php/Buddhist_Meditation_and_Depth_Psychology

Even if you never read anything else about Buddhism or meditation

You must read this.

The Real Hillary Clinton

Previously Posted on the Huffington Post:

When it became absolutely clear at RNC headquarters and in the inner sanctae of the ultra-conservative churches of America that the Republican Party couldn't possibly win the 2008 presidential elections, a cry of anguish and terror was heard from the right side of the land.

The elders joined together with the young neo-con zealots and agreed that the only way to insure the continued mis-rule of America was to elect someone who appeared to be a Democrat but underneath was a true god-fearing conservative Republican stalwart, bathed in the blood of the free-market lamb, dedicated to the principles of "Capitalism Uber Alles"
Hillary was brought before the council of Elders and NeoCon Zealots and after swearing to uphold the principles of Baptist Christianity and Friedman Dogma she was promised the complete support of the council and its members.
AND MAY gOD HAVE MERCY ON OUR SOULS...

T-Mobile is Undercover

It's the "stealth" wireless service provider. A company that will not allow anyone to know where the corporate headquarters are or how to contact them except through the "Customer Service? Department".

Got a problem with your phone or didn't get the rebate you were entitled to and on which you based your decision to buy a particular phone?

Tell it to the Chaplain because there ain't nobody home at T-Mobile USA. Strangely enough, the parent company, Deutsch Telecom publishes the mailing address of their corporate headquarters prominently on the front page of their web site but the U.S. subsidiary keeps everything "very close to the chest"

Why are they hiding? What's going on?
Ask thousands of unhappy customers with two year contracts, lousy service and defective, unsupported phones. They'll tell you.
We can't expect total transparency for scam operations like T-Mobile but this is going a little too far.

toonlet: The Other Side

toonlet: The Other Side

Iraq-The Deadliest Year Yet

From Today's NYT:

2007 Deadliest Year for U.S. Troops in Iraq

By DAMIEN CAVE

Published: November 7, 2007

BAGHDAD, Nov. 6 — Six American soldiers were killed in three separate attacks Monday, the military said today, taking the number of deaths this year to 851 and making 2007 the deadliest year of the war for American troops.

Didn't the White House just tell us that the surge was working?
Seems like the obvious is happening exactly as we should expect- the more live bodies we ship to Iraq, the more dead ones come home. Maybe this is some kind of a Malthusian solution to the continued shrinking of job opportunities for our young people without M.B.A's or technical skills? Or maybe it's just a grim reminder of the futility and senselessness of the Bush "Shock and Awe" doctrine. (Read Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine
to get a clear picture of what Bush, Cheney & Co. are up to and why)

We stopped the VietnamWar by protesting but it almost seems as if nobody is very upset by what's going on in Iraq or at least not upset enough to get off their butts and out into the street. You can say all you want about the "Flower Children", the Hippies et al but at least they got the job done.

Walking the Italian "Wild Side"

Cinque Terre is an Italian National Park area on the Mediterrenean coast midway between Genoa and Pisa. The name "Cinque Terre" refers to the five villages in the Park area: Vernazza, Monte Rosso, Corniglia, Manarola and Riomaggiore. Travel within the five village area is either by foot, along the paths cut into the seashore cliffs or by boat.
The footpaths are often steep and narrow - it took me and an hour and a half to walk the three miles between Vernazza and Corniglia. The incredible sea views made it worth the effort. We stayed in the village of Vernazza for the five days we spent in Cinque Terre, eating in local restaurants where the local seafood is a staple.

SOS in Iraq

G. W. Bush invaded Iraq with the goal of bringing democracy to its unfortunate citizens. The effort has been an abysmal failure as the breakdown in the oil field now demonstrates. It appears as if there are some countries where, for a variety of reasons , some chronic and others temporary, the only suitable form of government is either a very loose form of Federalism with "separate but equal" regional governments or a rigid dictatorship where order is maintained through brute force and dissidents are dealt with harshly. The area that was previously known as Yugoslavia is an example - another is Iraq. Obviously, the Sunnis, the Shia and the Kurds are not going to "get along together" any time in the near future - too much blood has been shed on all sides. Like Spain in the 1930's, two opposing foreign coalitions, are using the country as a venue for their ideological conflicts.
We never should have gotten involved in Iraq in the first place and the prospect of ten more years of occupation is obscene. We no longer have any chance of "saving face" in Iraq but let's at least not lose any more American young people there.

"Divisadero" Best to Date from Michael Ondaatje

Jhumpa Lahiri

Jhumpa Lahiri was awarded the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, as well as the PEN/Hemingway Award for her mesmerizing debut collection of stories, Interpreter of Maladies. Her poignant and powerful debut novel, The Namesake was adapted by screenwriter Sooni Taraporevala, and released in theaters in 2007.

My life always stops for a new book by Michael Ondaatje. I began Divisadero as soon as it came into my possession and over the course of a few evenings was captivated by Ondaatje's finest novel to date. The story is simple, almost mythical, stemming from a family on a California farm that is ruptured just as it is about to begin. Two daughters, Anna and Claire, are raised not just as siblings but with the intense bond of twins, interchangeable, inseparable. Coop, a boy from a neighboring farm, is folded into the girls' lives as a hired hand and quasi-brother. Anna, Claire, and Coop form a triangle that is intimate and interdependent, a triangle that brutally explodes less than thirty pages into the book. We are left with a handful of glass, both narratively and thematically. But Divisadero is a deeply ordered, full-bodied work, and the fragmented characters, severed from their shared past, persevere in relation to one another, illuminating both what it means to belong to a family and what it means to be alone in the world. The notion of twins, of one becoming two, pervades the novel, and so the farm in California is mirrored by a farm in France, the setting for another plot line in the second half of the book and giving us, in a sense, two novels in one. But the stories are not only connected but calibrated by Ondaatje to reveal a haunting pattern of parallels, echoes, and reflections across time and place. Like Nabokov, another master of twinning, Ondaatje's method is deliberate but discreet, and it was only in rereading this beautiful book--which I wanted to do as soon as I finished it--that the intricate play of doubles was revealed. Every sign of the author's genius is here: the searing imagery, the incandescent writing, the calm probing of life's most turbulent and devastating experiences. No one writes as affectingly about passion, about time and memory, about violence--subjects that have shaped Ondaatje's previous novels. But there is a greater muscularity to Divisadero, an intensity born from its restraint. Episodes are boiled down to their essential elements, distilled but dramatic, resulting in a mosaic of profound dignity, with an elegiac quietude that only the greatest of writers can achieve. --Jhumpa Lahiri

The Power of Oprah

It's the big test and Oprah's laying it on the line. She's going to see how much power she's got. She's endorsing Barack Obama and if he gets the nomination she's our 21st century kingmaker and Barack has some heavy debts. If he doesn't make it. She hasn't lost much except a little face and "the system" wins.
So the question is "Can you beat the System or not?"

Bushspeak - A Forked Tongue Masterpiece

Bushspeak - A Forked Tongue Masterpiece

Bushspeak - A Forked Tongue Masterpiece

In Today's New York Times

PAUL KRUGMAN

Op-Ed Columnist

Writes about a

"A Socialist Plot"

Suppose, for a moment, that the Heritage Foundation were to put out a press release attacking the liberal view that even children whose parents could afford to send them to private school should be entitled to free government-run education...

The truth is that there’s no difference in principle between saying that every American child is entitled to an education and saying that every American child is entitled to adequate health care. It’s just a matter of historical accident that we think of access to free K-12 education as a basic right, but consider having the government pay children’s medical bills “welfare,“ with all the negative connotations that go with that term.

And conservative opposition to giving every child in this country access to health care is, in a fundamental sense, un-American.

He makes a clear and cogent argument for a universal health care system and makes the neo-con Bush argument against it seem absurd - which it is. How indeed have we come to consider 12 years of free education for all of the children in our country an un-alienable right, and access to health care -socialistic?

Even the most casuist Jesuits would blush at this kind of rationalisation.

Wake up America, you're being conned - again!

A Woman's Place -2007

In the home, in the workplace, with her children and on the campaign trail, Michelle Obama just keeps moving on.
She is proving that today's women is completely capable of wearing many hats and looking good in every one.
Win lose or draw, the Obamas are injecting a fresh, passionate and articulate flavor to this country's political scene and I believe, that it will signal a new era in American politics with politicians finally accepting the fact that American voters will no longer be fooled by the tired rhetoric, vain promises and spin that have been the substance of discourse up until now.

In a sense, we must thank our very lame duck president. He went so far over the top with his "shock and awe" and similar theatrics that people have now decided that:
"that's enough and we're not going to take it any more"