A link appears this morning--well. it's morning here--in the LiveJournal community debunkingwhite sparking discussion of microcredit as extended by the Grameen Bank to poverty-ridden individuals, mostly women, in Bangladesh. This is a comment on that post. I am writing, admittedly, without researching microcredit much further, so it is a gut reaction to the bare outline that can be made out, in this one post's small collection of links, of how Grameen Bank gives comparatively tiny loans (hence the term "microcredit") to some of the poorest women of Bangladesh, in the name of helping them to help themselves.

The post contains a link to a twelve year old article from the Left Business Observer, which critiques microloans from a slightly different perspective from that in the video link. The striking thing to me in this article is its reiteration of Grameen Bank's--and Muhammad Yunus', the orginator of the concept of microcredit--basic assumption that the women to whom these loans are made have the "innate" ability to use the money given to them in a way that would make them successful entrepreneurs. Apparently, this works in some cases. But in some it simply doesn't.

Honestly, I am not all that interested in the numbers: exactly what percentage of women are succeeding with their microcredit enterprises and are able to pay back their loans and raise themselves out of poverty is not my main concern. Grameen Bank is optimistic, whereas France 24 is less so. The 1996 artical from LBO lists rather unhappy figures that suggest that in some regions loan default rates were up to 80% at the time that it was written.

Whatever the numbers are, what the video makes clear is that microcredit is tearing some families apart and is digging ever deeper holes of poverty for some unspecified number of Bangladesh families and villages. It also makes clear that Grameen Bank is not interested in answering criticisms of its program, or at least it was not willing to talk to the people producing the video.

It is no doubt true that microcredit helps some of the world's poorest families to earn some money. The question that I would pose comes from a general position of critique of exploitation and profit, and in this case, critique of profit from lending paltry amounts of money and charging interest for its return, creating a need for ever-expanding markets and ever-expanding economic growth in order that capital continue to be created. Which is to say, what, exactly, is the price we are willing to pay--no. What is the price we are willing to extract from others in order to spread the gospel of the (compulsory) free market, where some, with certain talents and abilities and a measure of luck, are able to achieve a measure of success, whereas others, with other talents--unsalable perhaps--and other abilities--unmarketable perhaps--or simply less favorable luck, lose what little they have to begin with and wind up carrying what is for them a crushing burden of debt, but for world capital, a trifle, a drop in an ocean, an amount of money it could afford to give away for free, without any wealthy individuals suffering even the slightest grievance? Save, that is, for the knowledge that someone, somewhere, might be making an "unearned" living.

Why are we asked to "earn" life? What is it that makes us think that certain people deserve wealth--namely, those who have it--while others
"obviously" do not--to the point that they do not deserve food, shelter and healthcare? In a scene from the France 24 video linked to above, an agent from Grameen Bank is faced with an angry crowd in a Bangladesh village. It seems that most, if not all, of the people he has come to see cannot pay back their loans, and his paternalistic admonishment to them is that "good people will be able to pay back their loans." The villagers demand to know what he means to imply about them.

I would ask the same thing. What is it about the qualities necessary to succeed at free-market capitalism that leads us to call those who are blessed with them "good," whereas those who are not must be less good--since, after all, good people can pay back their loans because they can make $500 turn into, say, $700 over a period of years? And if one is able to do such a thing, will it reduce one's own poverty, or will it push one into a never-ending cycle of borrowing and debt?

Now I know the arguments here: that productivity is good, that trade is good, that being able to create goods and services that other people will pay for is good, and that the production and exchange of wealth is good. Of course, one can question these assumptions from all angles, from asking whether activities that don't produce wealth might not also be good, to asking whether producing and exchanging wealth can be achieved through means that do not require deeply impoverishing a vague, but always necessary, proportion of the world's population.

My main point is just this: that global capital is itself based upon a large number of assumptions that often go unexamined, and that those assumptions, in almost all cases, draw a line around certain individuals while excluding others, based upon arbitrary beliefs about how we should share--or not--the resources that are freely available from the world around us, or, that is, freely available until one of us stakes a claim and makes the ultimate presumption of "owning" them. At least one woman in Bangladesh has lost her husband to suicide, the only place he apparently felt he could go to escape the shame of being unable to pay back the family's loan. Were he the sole casualty of microcredit, would this program which avoids redistributing wealth but instead demands that villagers create their own, would it be worth the price?

Buried among the thousands of internet memes constantly circulating among social networking sites, one contains the following question: if you had the choice between your own death and the death of some random person elsewhere on the planet, which would you choose? What if ten people were to die in your place? One thousand? One hundred thousand? At what number are you no longer willing to ask for the death of others instead of yourself? Why that figure? Why not a lower one?

Now, how many of your neighbor's lives would you require? Is the number different? The video seems to me to make it clear that in Bangladesh, this is similar to the question the Grameen Bank asks of its borrowers: whether they are interested in competing in the game of the free market, in which some of them will surely lose. Everything.

But of course, that's what they deserve. Right?

I was going to re-open my blog with some sort of heralding post that announced the re-opening of my blog etc and how I had no idea what I was going to make it "about" so I've decided not to make it about anything in particular but to be perhaps more rantish or more linear or more of a certain "je ne sais précisément quoi." I may still do that. But today I'm going to start with a kind of Pre-Grand Opening Sale because I learned very very recently that today is Blogging Against Disablism Day.

I was supposed to work today. I will work tomorrow I am fairly sure. Today I battled uncontrollable anxiety from shortly after I awoke at 6:30am until I finally took an anxiolytic and fell asleep at 2:30 until 6pm. I lost a day of work which, because I work as a private contractor, I don't get any kind of compensation for. Today was a Lost Day.

I've lived through thousands of Lost Days. No one knows I'm disabled except for my closest friends, and some of them do not even comprehend how it is that a disability that is "all in your head" can possibly have the material effect of robbing me of my ability to act, unless of course I am being lazy or irresponsible and "letting it" have an impact on me. Those who think that way tend not to be friends for a very long time, as it will become clear to anyone who knows me that I am a vehement apologist for the "lazy" and "irresponsible" who "let" things like mental illness or social disability--as well as cultural degradation and social erasure, which might be said to be non-material disturbances on a collective level--get in the way of a "successful life." I mean, whatever that is. Read me for long and you will get the distinct impression that I do not have an orthodox opinion of "success," either.

Of course, it is a feature of my mental illness that I do not believe in many of the same paradigms that ordinary Americans believe in, because I have seen firsthand how they assume the everyone is equally endowed with personal, familial and cultural faculties to pursue their dreams uninhibited. And so I find myself in a curious relationship with psychiatry itself even as I realize that I am at least "differently abled" in a way that might be labeled "psychiatric," if only because that word conveys pretty much what I mean it to convey: that getting out of bed and having a day to do as you wish or as you are obligated is not something that I can count on and yet the conditions (My many diagnoses. Let me show you them.) that occasionally dictate that I crouch in my chair all day or curl up in bed or simply sit here unable to move are not taken to be particularly "real" by a large segment of the culture I live in.

Psychiatry itself is to blame for this to a certain extent: it itself parades as a science even though there are very few empirical studies that establish "mental illness" as strictly analogous to physical illness and there is very little evidence to support most of its pet theories regarding neurotransmitters and psychological disturbances. And yet it continues to act as though it knows what it is "treating" and how, even though a cursory look at most entries in the Physician's Desk Reference for psychiatric medications will reveal that in most cases, "it is not understood" how the medication actually works, although it is usually "assumed to be related to" the given pharmaceutical's effects on the availability of one or more of three neurotransmitters: serotonin, dopamine, and norepinephrine. Nevermind that there are more than one hundred neurotransmitters in the human central nervous system [Source: Hyman, Steven: "Neurobiology: On Neurotransmitters" Science Week, http://scienceweek.com/2005/sw050429-2.htm, 1 May 2008.]. Psychiatry pays attention almost exclusively to The Big Three.

But I'm not writing this in order to critique psychiatry as a science. Mainly I decided to "blog against disablism" because I am one of millions who are "invisibly disabled" and that not only are we not obviously disabled, but our disability is such that we ourselves often internalize the rather Victorian notion that if we simply had enough guts, willpower, or something, that we could "get over it" and get on with life just like "everybody" else.

(Yes I use lots of scare quotes. I am endeavoring to use them less often, but unfortunately I find myself frequently in the position of using words that, I think, are widely understood in a way that is personally counterintuitive, so I can't really get behind them 100%, as they say. So I "quote" them in order to make it clear that I am repeating ideas that have come to me from even further away than most of the rest of "my" ideas. If it gets annoying, someone will tell me. And I will ignore them, in all likelihood.)

To be sure, the particular "mental Illness" I have has killed a number of people in my family. The fact that the cause of death in all cases was suicide might lead some to postulate that it was not the mental illness which caused their deaths at all, but rather some sort of character weakness, selfishness, or a the very least an inability to overcome phantoms of pain rather than real, palpable pain. Of course, it is rarely noted by those who would argue thus that any inability that leads to such an unthinkable decision as suicide must be quite powerful, given their own sense of the urgent need to sustain oneself in the face of whatever calamity. It is not as though there are a bunch of us who sit around trying to think of ways to die for the fun of it, to get attention--though we might truly need it--or to otherwise manipulate death so that we somehow receive from it a Get Out of Jail Free card.

(I wonder, actually, why it makes so many people so angry that someone would want to kill themselves. Apart from being angry with a loved one who says a permanent good-bye in that way--people also get angry at loved ones who die for other reasons, and whether that is rational or not, it is a frequent component of grief--there seems to be a large group of people who are quite angry with the idea that anyone, anywhere would commit suicide. Is it fair to make of them an analogy with those who are so "happy" in their jobs that they widely and loudly resent anyone who does not work for a living? What is it about life and work that makes us think not only that they are compulsory, but that someone who escapes either is somehow cheating us, or the system, or getting something for nothing? Is death an unmerited freedom? I just wonder.)

Myself, I've not bothered even to try to apply for any kind of disability here in the US--even partial disabilty--because I have seen the hoops one has to jump through in order to have a non-physical ailment recognized at all, much less given any assistance for, and those hoops would intimidate many who have no particular impairment in social or economic functioning. I can't even begin to want to subject myself to the humiliation of being denied once or more to "test" the authenticity of my claim (Everyone is denied the first time. Ask anybody who receives disability for a psychiatric disorder and you will see that they had to apply for it at least twice, if not three or four times).

As is fairly well known in the US, the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1991 began to require that insurance companies cover certain psychological disorders "in parity" with their coverage of physical disorders. What is not coming to the attention of many, however, is that insurance companies (most notable Blue Cross, in my experience) are either finding loopholes or have gained the right to define parity diagnoses themselves, and the number and types of diagnoses that they cover at parity is dwindling by the month. For another post, or perhaps for your homework, some research into the legal machinations allowing them to do this would be a very good thing.

Right now, I think I have to find a point for writing all of this. Well, my point is simply this: physical pain and psychological pain are not all that different. They are both "soul-destroying" and they are both vividly real. Of course, pain management in the US is a completely other can of testerical Drug War worms, to the point that those suffering physical pain are often "demoted" in the eyes of the medical establishment to patients whose pain is "all in their heads"--another betrayal, this time by medical professionals themselves, of the culturally entrenched belief that psychologically-mediated pain is somehow less real, easier to bear, and not worthy of serious treatment.

In the end, I wind up as I often do: extremely suspicious of an American Individualism that assumes unlimited agency for the human subject. Science itself is at odds with this particular assumption, to the extent that physiology and environment are beginning to be seen as intimately interacting with each other. It seems that "choice" may be an accident if fate, and that unlimited personal agency is at best a frequent illusion and at worst an enslaving, paradoxically dehumanizing myth, demanding that we ignore the very real limitations of our own physiology and psychology and instead relentlessly pursue profit at the expense of anyone who cannot keep up.

I think that it is time to recognize the vast variability of human experience and to create a society unafraid of generosity and compassion, as the US so often seems to be. I'm not the first to come to the conclusion that life itself is, by definition and situation, synonymous with suffering, and I won't be the last, but I find it necessary to point it out every chance I get. Because one day, it will come for you too.

first there was one:

then four:

Dear Mayor, Board of Supervisors, and the Department of Public Affairs for the San Francisco Police Department,

As I write this, yet another police siren is sounding through my window, an increasingly aggravating noise whose frequency has only continued to increase over the last few months and has become especially intensified in just the last couple of weeks. Moments ago I returned from a shopping trip for groceries, from locally owned stores on Valencia Street, as I have been doing for eleven years, without fear for my life or person, as has generally been the case for eleven years. As I approached my house, I passed an enraged man making violent threats against another man on the sidewalk by the MUNI stop--not an infrequent event, and one that generally I make my way gingerly around and go on. As I passed the scene of altercation I happened to notice a police officer ticketing a homeless-looking man for trespassing on property which was vacated by a church about a year ago and which the owner has apparently been unsuccessful in finding another renter willing to pay whatever s/he is asking.

The police officer glanced up the sidewalk in the general direction of the shouting, then, seemingly unconcerned, went back to finish writing his ticket which the trespasser will of course have no way of paying so who knows where he will end up--and I thought "is this what it's come to?"

Put briefly, I have been simmering in anger about the apparent drive to aggressively arrest those involved in non-violent, victimless crimes up and down my street, to clear them out for--for whom? For those with money who would like to live in a city but are afraid of those who are not just like themselves in the way they live their lives? I don't know. I don't know exactly where the motivation has come from to begin this campaign, but once I saw the notices for the "community safety cameras" now trained on the BART plazas at 16th Street I began to notice a sneaking suspicion that the Mayor and the Police Chief are engaged in a Giuliani-inspired crusade to "clean up" San Francisco to make it more "livable."

But let me just point out what a livable city is NOT. At least here, where progressive policies once kept the Police Department trained on actual threats to community safety, such as gang violence, homicide, rape and muggings, a livable San Francisco is NOT one which is heavily monitored, policed and harassed into complying with the insane wars against (some) drugs, against the homeless, and against sex workers. San Francisco used to stand for humanity instead of persecution of those who choose to live their lives in ways the federal government has condemned, even though they HURT NO ONE except when the prohibition of their chosen ways of life drive them to petty thievery, for instance, or into defecating where there were no public restrooms available.

But you know? When someone commits a violent crime in the service of a habit, they should be prosecuted for the violent crime rather than the habit, which is in itself harmless except, perhaps, to the person who has it--and at one time I thought that this city agreed with me in that this was none of the government's business. When there aren't enough public toilets to accommodate those who need them, they should be placed in neighborhoods with the greatest need. Instead, however, it seems that this city has suddenly chosen to align itself with the right wing absolutists who advocate that the people involved in these sorts of crimes are criminals for their non-violent, victimless behaviors and that a proper city should not allow anyone to subsist in it who might frighten a newcomer with enough money to live downtown but not enough guts actually to live in a real city.

I would be interested to know just how many violent crimes it is estimated that the "community safety cameras" have actually prevented. Was the 16th Street BART plaza a particularly dangerous place to frequent before those cameras went up? How many homicides, muggings and rapes actually happened within the area that they now survey? My point of course is that it is all too obvious that these cameras were set up to "protect" people from themselves, not from any particular threat, and this zeal to "protect" has long been a concern of the conservative, puritan element of American society that believes that no one should dare to live as though they do not believe in sobriety, chastity and industry. In other words, the concern of an element that, prior to now, I never thought of as holding sway in San Francisco.

I'm not actually that naive, however. I do suspect that the stepped up police activity is related to money, to the gentrification of the Mission, and to the general unease of the rich around those who get by in ways other than monetary acquisition. The Mission used to be vibrant and alive with lifestyles of every stripe, a neighborhood which may have felt gritty, but which was real and even had a sense of solidarity about it. Now no one trusts anyone: who might be trying to inform on whom? Who has been picked up and let back out under the condition that they work against those who were once part of their community? You might think that prostitutes, transients and those with illegal habits are without community, but this is simply not true, and the police department and by extension the whole city is currently involved in a campaign to destroy it.

As much as some believe that this is absolutely the right thing to do, I thought San Francisco knew better. Mayor Newsom has lost my vote. Any city supervisor who stands up for what is ethically right, in the face of great pressure from those who feel quite differently about right and wrong and who feel they have the right to force this view upon others, will gain it. I realize of course that I am but one voice, but you must realize also that you all are persecuting a community that effectively has no political voice whatsoever, especially given that much of it has been defined as "criminal" and thus without legitimacy. I can guarantee you there are many in that community who feel the same way I do, but who have been driven to desperation by the national wars undertaken to eradicate them, wars doomed to failure but nevertheless capable of engendering hundreds of thousands of needless casualties.

I once thought San Francisco had the sense not to participate in this war. I guess I was wrong.

Oh listen. Another police siren. Why don't I feel any safer?

Your citizen for now,

Erik etc etc

So what happened when I went to see the New Guinea art at the deYoung is not easy to describe other than that from outside someone would have seen a bald medium sized man walking from piece to piece taking pictures by holding his breath and trying to stand very still for the tenth of a second and slower shutter speeds the very scanty light was giving him.

The pieces are encased in glass so you can't get too familiar but still standing next to them and looking into the shell eyes of the one skull one could say a presence but that would be entirely the wrong word because it is also an absence insofar as these pieces are a raw confrontation with death and its relationship to life. It's hard to explain but the energy with which the works were obviously produced seems to pulse right there on their surfaces and in their intricate forms and I don't know if you have to be especially attentive but this was the first time that aboriginal art really got me in a way that outpaced thoughts about the political and moral conundrums behind their simply being there. They speak but they are silent and tell you things that on their surface are as legible as any heiroglyph and yet you cannot figure out what they are saying.

It's as though the arbitrariness and beauty and intricacy of a certain animal culture (ours, that is) stands out in its arbitrariness and beauty and intricacy when one confronts artifacts of another arbitrary, beautiful, intricate but unknown and yet very human culture.

Use "I" statements, Erik.

I felt something similar at the Anasazi ruins in Canyon de Chelly in the Navajo Nation--as though I could almost imagine but not even begin to understand the life that went on there: a kind of deep mystery that was oddly and sometimes uncomfortably familiar precisely because in order to even contemplate it one has to take death into account. These people are gone, after all. They cannot talk to you. The New Guinea pieces especially speak and don't speak that mute witness of death that ends at death and yet goes on as life in general.

The fact that these pieces were all drenched with spiritual significance and that that significance derives from the thin line between life and death that is the organism itself also made me reflect on our distanced, intellectual relationship to "art" in our own culture and how much we have lost by disintegrating it from daily life as though it were just another analyzable but largely irrelevant object. Life is lived artfully from the very moment one imagines a world, but in the US especially we have no acknowledgment of that and indeed art is disparaged at the popular level if it tries to do anything adventurous.

And yet culture itself is a sublime and ridiculous but daring work of art that knows death to the extent that it is knowable which is to say not at all and so one dreams spirits in its place. The fact that the most powerful nation on earth has completely forgotten this is one of the reasons why we keep fucking things up.

I went back to the deYoung Museum today and took six hours' worth of pictures but I'm not going to post all of them just the ones of figures from New Guinea. I'm not certain at the moment how to explain why they were compelling enough to bring me back with my camera and still make it hard to photograph them. I took other pictures as well, but these are the ones I cared about the most. I will probably put them all up on smugmug at some point or at least in livejournal but I wanted to put these here because of some reason I could articulate if it weren't about time to go to bed. maybe after tomorrow morning this post will be longer.

these three are "cult figures" according to their descriptions. the exhibit is very low-lit so I had to be my own tripod. sometimes I succeeded sometimes I did not so much:

marsupial:

spirit:

spirit board:

suspension hooks. as the images got more powerful the harder time I had staying steady for the shots:

ancestral skulls. these are the most powerful pieces in there and in fact I'm not sure I should have taken pictures of them but I did and here they are because I wanted to show you why they are troubling:

this is a child's skull and I could not take a clear picture of it I was so nervous. I think though the image turned out to be appropriate, especially with the shiny eye:

This one I think looks a little better than yesterday's version but I'm still not completely satisfied with it.

I kept trying to get running in the frame but running won't fit in the frame if you know what I mean I mean if you know what I don't mean.

This is inspired by an lj post by mactavish: what sort of opinions do I have that may not match those with whom I hang out?

This would have been easier to answer in, say, 1990, when everyone I hung out with was still too cool to admit they didn't toe a particular punk/queer party line, and now I'm finding out that the people around me have all kinds of interesting ideas and are open to experiences different from theirs but here are some things that as I've gone through various social circles have made me stick out a little.

I don't believe in private property.

I swear I am a total communist about this and I think it is absurd for humans to believe that they can "own" a piece of land. Property is a construct made of certain social conventions that we, mostly, observe, and is not an inherent "right" or even a universal idea. I guess that is probably obvious to most thinking people in the West by now, but it seems to me that most Americans on the left have habituated themselves to private property and are happy to join the ranks of "property owners" without much critical reflection.

I will admit, however, to wanting my own house. Is this a contradiction? Perhaps. But I also realize that I live in a society that is not about to provide me with access to anything like community property except on, say, BLM land, and even that is heavily regulated and often given away to agricultural and industrial interests for a pittance--something the American public should be outraged at but they don't seem to realize that public land actually is land that they themselves should have an interest in insofar as use and "management" goes. All of these are thorny issues for me of course, because I don't think nations can own land any more than individuals, but I do think that as animals emergent from planet earth we have something like an inherent right to go where we will and sleep unmolested and untaxed--by anyone--wherever we can find or make shelter.

Naturally this is a complex issue but I am all for a paradigm shift and seeing how things settled out if private property or rather the whole notion of "ownership" were thrown out the window.

As an atheist I do not believe in the supremacy of human reason, and I am very interested in what the idea of "god" has come to stand for in Mediterranean cultures, i.e., Judaism, Christianity and Islam

To top that all off, I am mostly sympathetic to a mix of Buddhist and Kabbalah-based philosophies regarding existence on earth and what "the divine" consists of. I don't see religion as stupid or necessarily destructive, although it can certainly manifest itself stupidly and destructively, and I think monotheism itself is too caught up with the imperialism of the Subject, or the transcendent Ego, to be of practical value in helping us to learn how to live in a world where religious or spiritual expression itself comes in myriad forms.

I am not sure what the difference is between religious feeling and spirituality, although many would say that spirituality can be freed of particular religious dogmas, but I am suspicious of the word "spirit" itself as it also seems to me to be a projection of the Western subject into a transcendental realm where, in my own "religious" imagination, it has no place. In fact, to me, the divine is precisely where the Western subject meets its ruin, and god can in no way resemble an individual with intents, wishes, motivations, emotions, etc..

And yet the "spiritual" as it is traditionally understood in many different cultures is still very interesting to me, and I think important to life on earth. I just don't see it as a reflection of the world we live in; there is no heavenly realm and there is no "world to come." This is it. We live in the divine right where we are and the sooner we realize that I think the sooner we will stop trashing the planet and each other.

However, "the divine right where we are" is still a somewhat mystical idea to the extent that it is not simply the mundaneness of everyday life but the divinity of that mundaneness, which divinity subsists somewhere in the process that subtends our ability to make sense of the world or in the process whereby the world sustains itself on, well, nothing. the divine is the unconscious of the universe in my understanding.

I believe that the US is in a crisis that may well sink civilization as we know it

At the same time, I am aware that in the West, every age has thought it would be the last, so I am circumspect in my paranoia. However, I think that the left currently underestimates the danger the extreme right presents, especially in its alliance with conservative christianity. I was brought up in a fundamentalist household and think that fundamentalism is almost always a form of child abuse at the level of the family and that it would be a form of tyranny at the level of the nation and that it is, um, hell-bent on gaining as much power over daily life in the US--and the world--as possible.

One of the biggest problems with conservative christianity is that it does believe that the world is coming to and end, and very very soon, and it is willing to go to great lengths to assure that global cataclysm occurs as quickly as possible. I don't think that most Americans understand the extent to which conservative christianity is willing to make its prophecies self-fulfilling, under the delusion that total war is god's will for the "end times." Whether or not most Republicans are really fundamentalists does not matter; the interests of the neocons and the fundamentalists dovetail so neatly that whether or not everyone is on the god bus is not going to make a difference when the US sinks into imperialistic, theocratic fascism. If that happens, the world will suffer greatly.

I'm getting my passport as soon as I can, personally. I want to be ready to get out of here at least as far as Norway if necessary, although I am not completely convinced that will place me out of harm's way. Conservative christianity wants the world to destroy itself. Now.

Ok so much for the grandiose. On the more mundane side of things, I think sex is more trouble than it is worth, that gender is both a cultural construct and a physiological phenomenon, that Western binary logic has grossly oversimplified our (Westerners') understanding of the world for too long, and that the universe is probably completely deterministic and yet too complex in order for that determinism ever to be deciphered. Which does away with free will. Which gets us back to the grandiose but I think I should stop now.

Oh and I don't think that the toilet seat has a correct position either, but I close the lid--although mainly to keep the cats from drinking out of the bowl.

So I don't have a whole lot to say. One day the search engines will find me and maybe the people will come. If you build a blog in helen keller's forest will anyone hear a sound?

I recently wrote to Dianne Feinstein, our Republican Senator parading as a Democrat (but then, aren't they all?) urging her to push for impeachment of the Bush/Cheney crowd.

Her is her reply:

Dear Dr. Schneider:

Thank you for your letter concerning impeachment proceedings against President Bush. I appreciate the time you took to write and welcome the opportunity to respond.

In our recent elections, the American people expressed clear disapproval with the path this country was on. They are tired of partisan politics and of an Administration that pays little heed to the wishes of the American people. They want-and deserve-a Congress that holds the Administration accountable and fulfills its Constitutional responsibility to check and balance the Executive. I share this sentiment and am determined to work hard and across party lines in the United States Senate to promote issues that are of real concern to most Americans, including the situation in Iraq and Afghanistan, homeland security, global warming, and lobbying and election reform.

At this time, however, I believe that impeachment proceedings against President Bush will only divide the country even further, frustrating our hopes for a meaningful change in direction, while having little chance of success.

I have been deeply disappointed by many of this Administration's actions and have been outspoken in those instances. Nevertheless, given the challenges our country faces I believe that we need to focus on constructive and cooperative steps that would lead us in the right direction.

Again, thank you for your continued correspondence. If you have any further questions or comments, please contact my office in Washington, D.C. at (202) 224-3841. Best regards.

And here will be my reply to her, once I compose it here:

Dear Senator Feinstein,

Thank you for getting back to me about my email urging you and the rest of the Democratic-led Congress to undertake impeachment proceedings against the Bush/Cheney administration. Unfortunately, your "deep disappointment," and that of other Democratic Congresspersons, will be of no practical value in stopping the extreme right-wing juggernaut that is currently enjoying a heyday while in power even though barely 25% of the nation approves of what they are doing!

See, impeachment proceedings would not "divide the nation": the nation itself is already sick and tired of the lies, the subterfuge, the manipulation, the fear-mongering, and the abjectly arrogant disrespect for the will of the people displayed by this Administration. When 75% of the people are with you, you needn't worry about setting brother against brother; even conservative brothers agree that the war in Iraq was undertaken under false pretenses, and the rest of us are simply outraged that hundreds of thousands of lives have been lost in this useless war.

That and illegal spying, attempts to hold themselves above the rule of the Constitution, and the blatant chipping away at our civil liberties by this Administration have most of the country angry not only with them, but with you Democrats for doing less than nothing to stop them!

I do not mean to browbeat you, but the fact is that the "mainstream" you fear alienating voted you in to deal with an Adminstration out of control, and this mainstream is already disappointed in your unwillingness to do so.

If nothing else, consider the effects of political hardball: the Republicans did not hesitate to impeach President Clinton for the most innocuous of offenses against national security, while Democrats sit back and let Bush and Cheney dismantle the Constitution piece by piece. And who is in control now? The Republicans are. Do you see the connection? The party with the spine to prosecute what it sees as the shortcomings of others will catch the attention of the voters and will please them. If this sounds Machiavellian, and "below" the standards of good, liberal Democrats--well, I just think that you all might want to consider the business you are in and whether or not it is worthwhile to take a chance and actually stand up in the name of the American people to tell this Administration that we have all had enough of its disrespect and criminal behavior.

You will not divide this country by doing so. You will unite it in getting back on track to its fundamental values of true freedom and courage in the face of all enemies, real or imagined. The Bush administration has used fear to railroad the country under its power-hungry, unconstitutional policies. We need to remember what courage really consists of--not attacking countries on false pretenses, but rather not allowing injury to turn us into a pack of whimpering dogs, ready to give up our every liberty in order to obtain complete security--which will always be an impossible goal and will always lead to the most horrifying excesses of the oppressive use of power.

You all can stop this. Now.

Or you can let it go on and see where the US is in twenty years. We may still be free. I would not count on it.

Sincerely,
Dr Erik etc etc

Even if you don't work at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratories at CalTech, you might want to concern yourself with HSPD-12, not only because of the occasional mention of adopting these procedures for federal employees more generally. This is how committees on unamerican activities get started, and you will note that the use of illicit drugs and the practice of anal sex--but not necessarily both at once--are grounds for termination if HSPD-12 goes into effect.

you can bet that if it goes into effect at JPL it will spread like the fascist cancer that has already gotten a frighteningly strong grip on the American vital organs.

read up. keep your eyes and ears open. write your congresspeople with your opinion of this sort of employment screening ever becoming instituted anywhere.

but for what? is not the question:

was something along these lines although perhaps not exactly this but we'll start here if that is ok with you:

I've decided that I'm going to use capital letters more or less normally in this blog.

That's just my beginning announcement.

Otherwise?

I'm hungry. I am really really really really hungry. And the reason for this is that I have been sleeping for the last few days more than not and when you are asleep you don't eat much nor do you get out to the grocery store. I have some Indian food in pouches but no rice to put under it, for instance, so I haven't pulled out one of those and microwaved it. I keep waking up after the taqueria is closed as well as the corner store and of course rainbow grocery (mostly where appropriate. not everywhere.) so the upshot is that I eat what I have in the house which is nearly always cereal. I have had about five bowls of cereal in the last three days and excepting the blueberry danish I had at Berkeley on Thursday I don't think I've eaten much else.

Which is why, instead of writing an inaugural rant, I am going to go get myself a big fat salmon burrito. Because I am way low on protein and I don't think that I could make it the mile to rainbow grocery just yet so first I will eat and then I will go buy food and maybe if I can keep myself awake for a reasonable amount of time after all that is done I will write something of substance with which to kick off my very own web home that I built and decorated all by myself.

With help from some books.

Anyway I will get into the reason why I have been sleeping and as usual it is someone else's fault. :)

Actually that's not true but I will point out something about who suffers when local governments crack down on "fraud and waste."

This will be a short one, just to see if I can make it through the maze of php directives that always do different things on your hosting server from what they do on your development server. I could go back and erase it once all the bugs are worked out and then write something more momentous for the christening of my own little homebuilt internet craft but there's always that first little trip round the lake to make sure it doesn't sink first. Isn't there? Or is this it? Is this my maiden voyage? Is it sink or swim from the very beginning?

Well, off we go. See you on the flipside.