The New York Times has an editorial, Incursion Into Gaza, this morning which many find sadly out of touch. I’ve been reading the comments and have selected two, the first from Valenciennes, France, the second from Chicago, Illinois, which capture my views better than I myself might express them.

Are you joking? How can you honestly report these opinions? Essentially, what I gather from this article is “Well, Israel has killed an obscenely disproportionate amount of people, but now it’s time to use caution. But only if Hamas rocket fire stops.”

— Ed Caddell, Valenciennes, France


The Times has waited for several days before sharing its “wisdom” on Israel’s invasion of Gaza, and out popped a mouse. It would have been better not to say anything.

— Kim Scipes, Chicago

Well, maybe Obama can get them all to sit down in a room together and talk, talk, talk, until a solution is reached, and then talk, talk, talk some more until the solution is refined and peace is achieved. Simple? Take a century? Maybe.

Watch it and blame it on Hamas! Hey, that’s what Bush does as well as most of our media.
Click here to view the embedded video.

Not that I didn’t have some laughs during the season and enjoy my family but the whole thing was a bit hectic, unnecessarily so. We need drastic simplification and change. Next year?

But in the meantime….. This morning I discovered Nick’s Bytes. He has a tremendous bunch of jokes on his blog post for today, called TBIM or Too Bad It’s Monday. Here’s a cartoon that had to make me laugh!

Of course, it’s ridiculous, mad magazine style, but as I say, I had to laugh.

A Little Background: A disaster was waiting to happen, and no-one was doing much about it. There was of course a date for the end of the ceasefire – December 19th. As that date approached both sides sought to improve their relative positions, to test some new rules of the game. Israel conducted a military operation on November 4th (yes, you had other things on your mind that day), apparently to destroy a tunnel from which an attack on Israel could be launched, Hamas responded with rocket-fire on southern Israeli towns. That initiated a period of intense Israeli-Hamas dialogue, albeit an untraditional one, largely conducted via mutual military jabs, occasional public messaging and back-channels. Again though the main reliance was on Egypt – by now in an intense struggle of its own with Hamas. When Hamas pushed the envelop with over 60 rockets on a single day (December 24th), albeit causing no serious injuries and mostly landing in open fields (probably by design), Israel decided that it was time for an escalation. That happened today [Dec. 27] – on a massive scale - with an unprecedented death toll.

Robert Fisk

Here’s a cell phone video:

Three Deer One Coyote Running In The Snow

            First three deer bounding
and then coyote streaks right after
                 tail       flat out 

I stand dumb a while       two seconds
blankly black-and-white  of trees and snow 

            Coyote's back!
	good coat, fluffy tail,
sees me:          quickly gone. 

            Later:
I walk through where they ran 

to study how that news all got put down. 

                                    Gary Snyder 

She points out that Sir Isaac Newton, arguably the greatest scientist of all time, may have been born on Christmas day, depending on the calendar you use, or he may have been born as late as Jan. 4th. The year was 1642.

So, why not celebrate the Ten Days of Newton?, she asks. She gives us the final verse of a new song to be sung to the tune of “The Twelve Days of Christmas”:

On the tenth day of Newton,
My true love gave to me,
Ten drops of genius,
Nine silver co-oins,
Eight circling planets,
Seven shades of li-ight,
Six counterfeiters,
Cal-Cu-Lus!
Four telescopes,
Three Laws of Motion,
Two awful feuds,
And the discovery of gravity!

Olivia Judson, Sir Isaac Newton, John Lennon:

Cynthia and I braved the elements yesterday and headed for our UU church in Norway, Maine, leaving a bit before 9am. No trouble at all getting there. The snow hadn’t started yet. But during our church service the storm began.

We were having an exciting and amusing Solstice service. Noise makers and drums were brought in to chase away the darkness and witness the return of light and life. So, as we had fun banging and clowning around, the snow began to build up outside.

Hey, we had some serious aspects to the service as well. It wasn’t entirely Pagan, but did have a bit of the Christmas cheer with tree and all, plus some messages for the Christians among the sparse congregation.

Needless to say, we left for home, normally a 35 minute drive, right after the service. We did fine, driving very carefully behind lines of cars behind snow plows, until we made the turn onto rt 117 to Denmark.

Then suddenly, with no warning from anybody (not even from God), we spun off the road. I watched in horror from my driver’s seat as our Subaru Forester slid past a road sign and to the right of some birch trees, and came swinging around down an incline to rest beside a small house. We were unscathed but a bit traumatized.

Suddenly people seemed to appear from nowhere. A small truck with a plow stopped up on the road, people got out and came down to us, a friendly guy from the house came to my window. “Hey, with a little help I think you can back out of here!”, he said.

The people in the truck maneuvered it down by the house and started removing snow from behind our car. Cynthia was invited into the house. Shovels went to work and I was told to back up slowly. Before I knew it, the car was freed and ready to go.

I thanked the people profusely, drove back to the road from the driveway, and followed the savior truck, ever so carefully, back toward Denmark, and then made it up the hill and home.

All this time it had been snowing without let up of course. What a exciting and interesting day we had! Whew… we were sure happy when we emerged from our car safely at home.

I was thinking of a deeper problem that’s related to this. We hear a lot of talk about the class differences between the banking and auto bailouts. What that reveals is that there’s no sense of common destiny between different parts of the country. It’s true that working people need a functioning banking system, but it’s also true that bankers need a functioning manufacturing system. The banks have long operated as if the capital they play with has no relation to anything made in the real world. So when they’re in trouble, most Americans don’t care because the financial world is so apparently irrelevant to most of us. And the bankers don’t care about the rest of us because our fate is not clearly intertwined with theirs.

What we need is a new social compact that explicitly links us to a common fate. The first thing we do is index all executive salaries to the lowest wages in society. No executive should make more than X times the lowest employee of the company or any of its subcontractors and outsourcers. What’s more, executives as a class should get bonuses only in years where other workers as a class get proportional bonuses. As for capital, whenever government bails out private industry it should get common shares that in the long run are held 50/50 by workers and the public at large. That means that a fully “nationalized” company would be 1/3 private management, 1/3 workers, and 1/3 public control. Everyone would have a stake. Regardless of whether there is public control, companies should be required to give stock to employees above and beyond a liveable salary proportional to executive stock bonuses using the same X:1 ratio used for income.

With this arrangement, profits would go to everyone in profitable years. Losses would be shared. No one would get a bonus or bailout without everyone getting a bonus or a bailout. We would have a common interest, and there wouldn’t be fully isolated classes living in different conceptual worlds.

What’s good for GM should be what’s good for its workers, and what’s good for America. And what’s good for workers should be good for GM and America. And what’s good for the country should be what’s good for its workers and companies like GM.

This would also lead to a reconsideration of reforms such as single-payer health insurance. We’re all in this together, so we should all have access to quality health care instead of creating a two or three-tier system that in th end fails almost everybody.

Monday, 15 December, 2008

Asad Abu Khalil, a Lebanese-American professor at Stanislaus University in California, wrote in his blog that he had early childhood memories of watching his father hurl shoes at the television whenever a certain Lebanese politician appeared. “The flying shoe speaks more for Arab public opinion than all the despots/puppets that Bush meets with during his travels in the Middle East,” Khalil wrote at angryarab.blogspot.com.”

Brian Donohue on dailyrevolution.net is promoting a new model, Tight Spiral, shoe featuring an autograph from Muntadar al-Zaidi. Should sell well in the Middle East, and even here.

But there’s a problem: conservative politicians, clinging to an out-of-date ideology — and, perhaps, betting (wrongly) that their constituents are relatively well positioned to ride out the storm — are standing in the way of action.

There are already a goodly number of comments on Paul’s piece. Here’s one comment that sums up the situation perfectly in my estimation:

As a historian, I am utterly shocked by the response to this economic crisis by Conservative Republicans in Washington and Chancellor Merkel’s response in Germany. What planet are these people on? Have they ever opened up a history book? I hate to say it but it almost seems as if these people have absolutely lost their minds. Here in the U.S., I do feel that these Republicans are simply trying to score political points with their out-of-date ideology by killing another powerful labor union. Meanwhile, the middle class continues to shrink at an alarming rate. Companies like the Big 3 and other major manufacturers provide this country with thousands and thousands of middle-class decent paying jobs. However, all I hear from Republicans at my university and everywhere else is that any intervention is “socialism” or “communism” or part of some internationalist conspiracy for one world government. The Red Scare is over people and McCarthy has long been dead. Why do we keep bringing back these McCarthyist rants during these times of crisis? The truth is these economic conservatives have absolutely no clue what it is like working in a factory and being on the bottom of the ladder, struggling to make ends meet every month. All they want to do is criticize workers for wanting to make a decent wage that actually keeps up with inflation. What is wrong with that? Of course, these Conservative Republicans would have no problem voting for a raise for themselves. But at the second a poor man comes to them for help or wanting health care, they stick their noses in the air. Mr. Krugman, I hate to say this but if something is not done soon with this economic situation, this country is going to fall apart beyond description. What will it take for these people to understand the situation? Do people literally have to be starving to death in the streets, fighting for food, jumping out of windows, killing themselves in their forclosed homes before they notice the problem? I mean come on: it came out the other day that we have been in a recession since December of 2007….it took them this long to notice and fess up? We need to start acting with depression economics now before it is too late. It is time for a Kenyesian revolution now more than ever. The solution is staring in the face of not just the United States but the entire international community as a whole. Why will they not accept that their completely free-market ideology has failed them?

— Matt, Ball State University

Right! Their completely free-market ideology has failed them! And us! Let’s take some action. But we’re still in that state of limbo until Bush finally goes.