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IS THE UNIVERSE ALIVE?

12/31/2012

Is the Universe Alive?
   In Life On Man, microbiologist, Theodor Rosebury, describes the billions of bacteria inside and outside every human being. A healthy individual supports a bacterial ecosystem evolved over millennia, without which we couldn’t survive. Might we be to our Universe like those bacteria are to us?
   In his novel, First and Last Men, Olaf Stapledon imagines a distant future when our Universe, near the end of its physical existence, hosts colonies of worms who possess group minds. These strive to unify into ever larger groups. In its final millennia, these last “men” unite until every mind is one, and in its final instant, reaches out, sees, and merges with the Mind of the Creator.
   This entrancing idea is ancient. Mind transcends self-awareness and reason to include empathy and love; it engenders religions and gives purpose to lives simple and sainted. It tends to diminish evil, because souls consumed by selfishness and cruelty wink out like candle flames when the body dies. “The wages of sin is death.”
   Prehistoric humans saw and worshipped Earth, sun, moon, and stars, they evolved civilizations, developed sciences, discovered that we live in a solar system within a galaxy within a universe, pondered the deep mystery of consciousness. An American quantum physicist, David Bohm, posits a link between sentience and matter. Others, contemplating space and time, postulate that we inhabit a great cosmic creature, a living sentient Universe.
   These are rigorous scientists whose mathematical structures point to an evolution of universes as each gives birth to others via Black Holes that burst into other dimensions, and whose offspring inherit characteristics from the parent, like biological offspring. The mystery of consciousness would seem to extend to the universe itself.
   Can humanity ever contact that mighty consciousness, exchange thoughts with it? Would a sentient Universe be closer to the Creator, or is it perhaps one more step up an infinite ladder reaching into, beyond and through, a Multiverse, that may itself be sentient, another link in a great chain of sentience on its infinite way to the Creator?
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                      Scroll Down to “Open Letter to Mayor Michael Bloomberg”

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OPEN LETTER TO MAYOR MICHAEL BLOOMBERG

12/26/2012

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    An Open Letter to Mayor Michael Bloomberg
Mayor Michael Bloomberg
Office of the Mayor, City Hall,
260 Broadway, NYC, NY 10007
Dear Mayor Bloomberg,
   Your web site, www.MikeBloomberg.com, presents eight ways to reduce gun violence: 1 - Sign a petition. 2 - Donate to Mayors Against Illegal Gun Action Fund. 3 - Share the petition. 4 - Call President Obama and Congress. 5 - Recruit your own mayor. 6 - Spread the word on social media. 7 - Join Faith leaders, and, 8 - Write Letters to the Editor demanding action. I respectfully suggest a ninth.
    The National Rifle Association’s, Exec VP, Wayne LaPierre, made it clear that he represents only the interests of gun manufacturers, gun dealers, and others who profit by saturating American society with guns. Traditional gun owners, some 70% of whom favor gun control laws, have no one to speak for them. I respectfully ask that you encourage forming a gun owner’s group that honors the traditions of the American Frontier, not the urban street gang.
   I carried a weapon in WW-II, and while not now a gun owner, would gladly join the sane majority of gun owners and all Americans who long for an end to the NRA-sponsored killing plague that poisons our country.
   Yours respectfully,
               Stuart Hodes
                                                ***
   A printout of the above, plus a personal letter was sent to Mayor Bloomberg on Christmas Day.
    The proposed organization needs a name. Some suggestions: American Gun Owners (AGO), Traditional Gun Owners (TGO), American Traditional Gun Owners (ATGO), Good Old Gun Owners (GOGO. Great Guns (GG), Daniel Boon Society (DBS). More suggestions welcome!
   If you agree that we need a group that represents gun owners instead of gun makers, send a letter of your own, or print out this page, put it in a stamped envelope, and send to:
   Mayor Michael Bloomberg
   Office of the Mayor
   City Hall
   New York, NY 10007
   Link to Mike Bloomberg.com
                                                     LINK TO MIKEBLOOMBERG.COM

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"THEY SAW THEIR GUNS AS FRIENDS AND LOVERS"

12/23/2012

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       “They Saw Their Guns as Friends and Lovers”
   When U.S. Army foot soldiers are issued their weapons, the drill sergeant says: “This is your rifle. Without it, you are nothing. Without you, it is nothing.” Growing up in hill country, it’s almost like that.
    Reader ‘r’ commented:
   “I lived in the hills of Vermont for 5 years...and the locals do love their guns. ... Many were poor and did look forward to hunting season for extra food. (By the way, half came up from the Mass. suburbs to "play hunter." Those were the scary ones.) No one ever got shot except a deer. It was the stories of violence in the cities that freaked them out... [and] the rich flatlanders who they had sold their land to cheap, that they really hated... They saw their guns as friends or lovers.”
   Reader ‘c’s Vermonters and others like them are the true owners of the tradition that the NRA appropriates to itself, trading on it to coax play-acting flatlanders to buy guns. Ignorant of the Frontier tradition, they replace it with the street gang’s itch for “respect,” and buy assault weapons. Profits rise for gun manufacturers who reward the National Rifle Association,
   NRA Executive VP, Wayne LaPierre, presented his crazy-like-a-fox rant for such weapons despite their superiority at nothing but mass killing. He blamed the media, video games, lack of a database of the mentally ill (useless if gun sellers can’t do background checks), and tried to whip up fear that “copycats are waiting in the wings... the next Adam Lanza is already planning his attack,” and that, “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.”
   He thereupon proposed turning the entire U.S.A. into an armed good-guys-against-bad-guys battle-ground, gun-toting teachers and armed guards in every school, another juicy spike for gun sales. Reader, ‘C,’ commented:
   “How about mothers and fathers? Librarians, crossing guards, Santa Claus (especially in the mall)? Let's just cut to the chase and arm the kids.”
   NRA membership includes many true inheritors of the Frontier tradition, like those in Vermont who are disgusted by the gun violence in cities—30,000 killed a year beyond the toll of maddened child shooters running amok. But the NRA and Wayne LaPierre do not represent them. They represent gun manufacturers, gun sellers, and proprietors of shooting ranges.
   It is time for a new gun organization, one that will respect and speak for traditional gun owners who support sensible gun laws, and who will send the NRA, whose mouth is where the money is, into the land fill of history.
                      The next post will include a suggestion for immediate action.

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AN APOLOGY TO GAMERS, and, EXPOSING THE TAWDRINESS of GUN CULTS

12/20/2012

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            An Apology to Gamers, and, Exposing the Tawdriness of Gun Cults
   In my last post (below Seedy, etc), I compared video gamers to gun cultists. It’s not fair. When not corrupted by flying body parts, gaming demands brains, coordination, and develops transferrable skills. Some offer intellectual challenge, even beauty. I humbly ask such gamers to forgive my hasty comparison of their interest with the empty, useless, life-destroying obsession of gun cults.
                                                  * * *

Seedy, Sordid, Antisocial
    Movies of the 1940s and 50s, gave cigarettes sleek PR. A soldier comforts a wounded comrade: “Have a cigarette, it will make you feel better.” Stars blow smoke at each other. Producers get paid by tobacco companies who hide secret research proving that their product causes cancer. Death is not allowed to interfere with profits.
   But smoking fell off when its image changed from Humphrey Bogart to Ozzie Schlemozzle, from Marlene Dietrich to Tilly Schlob. Today’s smokers are helpless addicts who pay 10 bucks a pack to puff forlornly on sidewalks outside office buildings. One feels pity, even sympathy, but not a shred of admiration, Who wants to be like that? The same can happen to gun cultists.
   Walter Mitty and Casper Milquetoast, scared of their shadows, imagine themselve to be brave warriors if they buy a Hummer. Gun cultists think they’re Daniel Boone or Annie Oakley if they fire an AR-15 at a target, or unspeakably, at an animal. Their self-serving narrative is pure fiction, and, to put it plainly, horse shit.
   But fiction can harden into myth, and myth is powerful, so I have little hope that the atrocity in Newtown, CT, will much reduce gun violence, even if laws are passed. But one thing will, destruction of their false self-glorifying image.
   Recent polling shows that 78% of NRA members favor gun control, but the NRA, paid off by manufacturers, fights every effort to regulate. It may be immoral and dangerous to sell AR-15s to the general public, but hey! they’re going like hotcakes.
   Powerful and wise people, Michael Bloomberg, for one, are publicly committed to reducing gun deaths. I hope it includes de-glamorizing. We need a campaign to show that gun nuts are as glamorous as child abusers, as mindless as drive-by shootings, as manly as stuffed body bags.
   Start with a truer-to-life Rambo poster, killer bees and jungle bugs covering his bare torso, ammunition belt around his knees, gun discharging like the seed of Onan, into the ground. Then there’s drama; how about a gun cult in a small Connecticut town that makes life miserable for everyone, defies the chief of police, and pays off the Town Council? Tommy Lee Jones can play the chief, and he really gets 'em!

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GUN CULTISTS and VIDEO GAMERS

12/19/2012

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                 Gun Cultists and Video Gamers
   “Guns are why we’re free in this country, and people lose sight of that when tragedies like this happen.”
                            NY Times, Monday, December 17, 2012
   The above was said by:
       1- President of the National Rifle Association.
       2 - Rick Perry, governor of Texas.
       3 - A resident of Newtown, Connecticut.
   Answer: #3, Scott Ostrovsky, owner of a shooting range in Newtown, CT, three days after 20 kids, 6 teachers, and the shooter’s mother were killed by bullets from an assault rifle. The article by Michael Moss and Ray Rivera, describes a gun culture so entrenched that when Newtown police chief, Michael Kehoe, suggested limiting recreational gun use to daylight hours, it was nixed by the Town Council.
    Gun culture is not now, perhaps never has been confined to Texas, Idaho, and back country communities; it is flourishing in picturesque Newtown, CT, 12 miles from Danbury off I-84. It has three licenced shooting ranges, “booked two years in advance,” many more unlicenced in fields and backyards, and it is legal to fire when on one’s own property even though close to neighbors.
    In Frontier days, houses were far apart, strangers rare, and wild game was a part of every diet. Gun owners still talk about self-defense and hunting, but when asked why they need assault rifles that fire 30 bullets in 10 seconds, they squirm because gun culture has been taken over by cultists who inhabit a fantasy world.
   On TV’s Hardball, Chris Matthews asked Larry Pratt, executive director of Gun Owners of America why he collected guns. “For when our government gets out of hand.” said Pratt archly. He seems to be preparing for armed insurrection. Matthews started calling his group, “Gun Owners Against America.”
   The AR-15 used by Adam Lanza, a civilian version of the army’s M-16, can be customized with radar, night vision, stocks, carry handle, ammo clips and drums, comes in tan, brown, and black. Owners say it is “fun to shoot.” Adding to the fun is Tannerite, which explodes noisily when hit. When Chief Kehoe proposed banning Tannerite because of noise complaints, he was nixed again.
   A comparison leaps out: the obsession of adults with guns, and teens with video games. “Gamers” stop studying, stay in their rooms, lose themselves in fantasies. Attempts to wean them away are rejected. The NRA rejects regulations, sends lobbyists to Washington, “grades” politicians, and claims owning guns is patriotic while entertaining fantasies of armed insurrection.
    People can be absorbed by their families, friendships, loves, callings, careers, interests, and hobbies that enrich their lives and communities. They can also be drawn into crime, drugs, alcoholism, power fantasies, video gaming (which most outgrow), and gun cults (which they don’t) that impoverish their lives and harm society. With the staying power of a serious addiction, gun cults and their so-called culture will be tougher to control than anyone imagines.

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TRAGEDY, ATROCITY, ENIGMA

12/17/2012

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Tragedy, Atrocity, Enigma
   We mourn each bright young life taken. But the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting was a preventable atrocity for which the NRA and its craven political supporters are to blame. Mourning is followed by outrage.
   Among predictable NRA responses is one that blames it on too few guns; if teachers or guards had had guns, so it goes, the shooter could have been shot before murdering all 26. We can solve the problem of too many guns with still more guns. We already lead the world in guns per capita, 88 for every 100 people. Yemen, swarming with warring tribes, revolutionaries, Al Queda, and men bearing Kalashnikovs, is second.
   Japan has the strictest gun laws in the world, traced back to post-WW-II when General Douglas MacArthur imposed drastic limits on arms. But in 2008 in Tokyo’s Akihabara shopping district, a man killed 3 by driving a truck into a crowd, then 4 more with a dagger before police subdued him. In 2001 in Osaka, a deranged school janitor with a kitchen knife killed 8 first grade children. Would the NRA argue that with guns, fewer would have been killed? In 1996, the Subway Sarin Incident, a terrorist group killed 13 and seriously injured over 50 by releasing nerve gas in Tokyo subways. Would the NRA argue that if they’d used guns instead of nerve gas, fewer might have been injured? Choose your poison.
   As a 10-year old playing with a single-shot 22-caliber rifle, I shot up a whole collection of Caruso records. The army issued me a Colt 45, I took it to Italy where I bought a German P38, traded it for an Italian Beretta which I had chromium plated. Before returning to the U.S.A. I turned in the Colt, and took the Beretta on the Victory Ship. But NY State had a law, 5 years in jail for having an unlicenced gun so I sold it for $35 to a guy from Texas.
   At Manhattan Community College, a student told me proudly, “Yesterday I got me an Uzi.” It’s a small Israeli close-in assault weapon. “Carrying” gives a boost to those who feel powerless and endangered. Is that why Nancy Lanza in Newtown, Connecticut, bought guns and trained her son to use them?
   Guns project death. The penis projects life. Peter Lanza, the shooter’s father, divorced Nancy in 2,000. Is that when she began buying guns? Their son, Adam, killed her first, then 6 teachers, then 20 children, then himself. Psychologists, especially Freudians, can really run with that.
   Few American will sleep as soundly as before Newtown, but NRA ghouls deserve nightmares. Those who don’t renounce their memberships have dying souls

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SANDY HOOK ELEMENTARY SCHOOL

12/14/2012

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Sandy Hook Elementary School
   President Obama wiped away tears while making the announcement that 26 were shot and killed, 20 of them children, in Sandy Hook Elementary School, Newtown, Connecticut. He wept everyone’s tears, except those of the National Rifle Association, too busy planning how to “manage” this atrocity to weep, terrified that Obama’s mention of “meaningful action” may lead to its worst nightmare: Gun Control.
   Perhaps they need not worry; Connecticut’s Gov. Dan Malone spoke of 9/11 and made pious noises in church. CBS News had Dr. Jon LaPook advise parents how to soften the blow to their kids. On PBS News Hour three professors maintained that what happened at Sandy Hook Elementary is “rare,” and that schools are “safe,” suggesting that the solution lies in better security, ID checks, monitoring “troubled” people, and erecting “perimeters” around schools, like air borne troops in hostile territories. Unmentioned was a single word about gun control, the only honest solution.
   Politicians have thus far dared not even discuss gun control. The merest suggestion that gun purchasers should have to wait a day for background checks brings frenzied rants about the Second Amendment. Assault rifles that can fire off magazines of 100 bullets in seconds are not classified as machine guns, because machine guns cannot be legally possessed by private citizens. So a whole range of assault rifles designed to kill human beings as quickly as possible are deemed “sport” weaponry. As for “gun shows,” there are no rules and any attempt to impose them is met with foam-at-the-mouth NRA tirades.
   Will there now be a grass roots uprising against NRA madness, like the one happening in the economic war of rich against middle class? What with the cowardice of politicians, servile professorate babble, and head-in-the-sand docility of most everyone else, the only force that can prevail must come from the grass roots. But how much more innocent blood must be shed, how many more mass slaughters of innocents will it take?

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A CHALLENGE TO DESTINY

12/11/2012

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A Challenge to Destiny
   WW-II was fought with a “citizen army,” and those not in uniform fought on the “home front.” Today, there is no home front, and wars, writes Jake Tapper, in The Outpost, are “outsourced by the American people to our government in DC, and to the military.” He quotes a recently retired general:
   “The American people are no more connected to our armed forces than the Roman citizens were to legionnaires. And now we even pay for wars with tax cuts, so whose war and whose Army is it?”
   The attackers of the World Trade Center, trained in Afghanistan, were a compelling reason to send in troops, so on October 7, 2001, less than a month after 9/11, Operation Enduring Freedom, a coalition of American, British, Australian, and French forces, entered Afghanistan. Thus reinforced, Afghanis defeated the Taliban in a matter of weeks. But 11 years later, and counting, we’re still there. It is America’s longest war.
   Afghanistan lacks roads, electricity, piped water, schools, hospitals, communications, and has a rural culture that deems women chattels, good only for physical labor and producing offspring. The men, freed of real responsibility, fight turf wars and blood feuds, uniting only in xenophobic hatred of foreigners.
   Now, facing a resurgent Taliban, the U.S. is working to help the Afghan National Army (ANA) empower the nation to take command of its own destiny. In Combat Outpost Keating, ANA troops had their own barracks, and although some were cowardly and useless, others fought to the end. Readying the ANA is the primary mission today. When President Obama announced that American troops would be gone by July, 2014, it was a direct challenge to the ANA, but drew fire from Senator John McCain.
   "You cannot tell the enemy when you're leaving, when you're in warfare, and expect your strategy to prevail," said McCain. who will always live in the glow of his heroism as a North Korean POW. But a hero isn’t necessarily a strategic thinker, and McCain has already shown alarmingly bad judgement (Sarah Palin for Vice-President). His behavior as a U.S. Senator forces one to note that he graduated fifth from the bottom of his class at the U.S. Naval Academy. Son and grandson of four-star admirals, there was no way they could allow him to flunk out.
    Army Capt. Stoney Portis, climbing down from an observation post into besieged Combat Outpost Keating, counted insurgent bodies, stopping at 100 with at least that many still uncounted. Americans lost 9, including one who died months later in the U.S.A. during treatment for PTSD. U.S. troops, holding off hundreds of insurgent fighters, destroyed and left Keating after the battle.
   The end of Jake Tapper’s mighty book notes that an unmentioned problem in that area is Pakistan, where the Taliban can cross the border at will, have safe haven, and recruit fighters. With its atomic bomb, Pakistan is a problem that makes Afghanistan look easy. One shudders to think how a rigid ideologue would handle it. The U.S. has a President with suppleness of mind, and in place of a citizen army, the valiant professionals described in The Outpost. Both need and deserve the full support of the American people.
                                                    (Last post on The Outpost)

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HALFWAY DOWN THE TRAIL TO HELL

12/8/2012

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HELICOPTER OVER PAD AT COMBAT OUTPOST KEATING

                Halfway-down-the Trail to Hell
   “What the hell are they doing here?” muttered Col. Randy George. He and Lt. Col. Brad Brown had just stepped off a helicopter, there to take command of Combat Outpost Keating set in an indefensible notch surrounded by mountains in Nuristan, a remote slice of Afghanistan that lacked roads, water, power, hospitals, schools, spoke its own language (Nuristani), and had never known a real government presence.
   Jake Tapper’s book, The Outpost, concentrates on American troops sent to establish a presence and support a counter-insurgency by protecting locals, by paying Afghani contractors to build roads, pipe in water, erect micro-electric plants, and other projects, and by attending shuras, meetings with village elders that Americans could liken to town meetings. But Afghanistan, with a history of blood feuds, land disputes, and tribal enmities, is united only by its xenophobic hatred of foreigners. After 2½ years the American presence had become more “irritant than balm,” more “incitement than deterrent.” The only American interest there is that it never again shelter terrorists, a goal now achievable by signals intelligence, CIA ground assets, and drones.
   One is struck by the grit, valor, and high professionalism of our troops. Asked by a reporter why they were there, one replied, “You don’t ask that question.” But it doesn’t stop some from trying to understand. First lieutenant, Joseph Mazzocchi, executive officer under Captain Robert Yllescas, understood that the corruption, lying, and selfishness of Afghanis is characteristic of all people, not only those struggling to survive. He read Thomas Hobbes, who deemed people in their “natural” state to be intrinsically anarchical, every man pitted against every other. It is lessened (though never eliminated) by becoming socialized beyond immediate family and village.
   Mazzochi was devastated when his captain, Bob Yllescas, was fatally injured by a targeted explosion set off when he stepped onto a bridge. The man who did it was captured, and when asked why, said, “For 400 dollars.” Yllescas’s killing and that of his predecessor, Capt. Tom Bostick, bolstered the status of the pay masters, whose goal was kick out Americans and grab power for themselves.
   A longing for return to a sentimentally imagined primitive state, “the noble savage,” persuades some to swallow the wacky theory of Ayn Rand that selfishness is good for society. It goads Ron Paul to hark back to a vanished Eden. It animates the Tea Party’s true believers, also opportunists and jingos, as it once did John Birchers, America Firsters, and Isolationists. Lurking behind all are their pay masters, today Citizens United, the Koch Brothers, and a whole co-opting corrupting cohort whose goal is power.
   Afghanistan is no different, but being in an earlier phase and at a distance, the pattern is easier for us to recognize.

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AFGHANISTAN

12/5/2012

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Afghanistan
Under the Taliban, women in Afghanistan had been confined to their homes and forbidden education. Afterward, cautiously venturing out, they found friendly refuge in Deborah Rodriguez’s Kabul Beauty School, where they shared a bubbling women’s culture of which their men knew nothing. The author taught her skills and also offered real help; a woman who’d been raped as a child feared that her future husband, discovering she was not a virgin, would renounce their marriage. A vial of chicken blood helped solve the problem.
The Places In Between, by Rory Stewart, recounts a 500-mile solo hike in winter on mountain trails--- Herat to Kabul. A bearded Scotsman who spoke

Pashto and wore local garments, Stewart counted on a tradition of hospitality to survive in a country where each village could speak a different dialect, have different customs, and different attitudes toward strangers.
After the World Trade Center attack, Afghanistan became the country where Osama bin Laden had trained his fighters. The Outpost, by Jake Tapper, describes attempts to set up an American outpost in Nuristan, a mountainous province with few roads near the Pakistan border. Village elders, proud of ancestors who’d defeated Alexander the Great, the British, the Russians, openly or secretly supported a relentless insurgency while the Americans tried to convince them that they were not like those other invaders.
President Bush talked about "gretting" bin Laden, invaded Iraq istead, leaving our

troops in Afghanistan under manned and under supplied. They hung on with grit and valor, despite feeling that “no one back home cared... the American people would rather hear about what Paris Hilton did... than be bothered by a silly war in Afghanistan.”
   Trying to foster a counter-insurgency by turning locals against radical groups, including Islamists who’d fought the Russians with CIA-supplied arms, now fighting the U.S.with Russian arms, Americans faced daunting odds. Many deemed the very idea of so isolated an outpost a mistake, from the one-stripe Specialist who prepared a Powerpoint presentation, to Lt. Colonel Joe Fenty, commander of 3-71 Cavalry, 10th Mountain Division, who accepted it as a personal challenge. Mountains on three sides, trucks toppling off roads too narrow even when not washed out, helicopters without landing sites, many killed, more wounded, it was a surreal war with a ghostly yet deadly enemy.
   One month after Lt. Col Fenty telephoned his wife, who had just given birth in a Fort Drum hospital delivery room and heard his newborn daughter’s first cry, his Chinook hit a tree trying to land in an undersized field, and he was killed.
             (More on Afghanistan in the next post)

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Author (Yuma, AZ, 1944)

Being 90 years in this world, with great kids, great grandkids, great wives (two, one at a time) and great memories, I wonder why some people seem to have stopped loving the U.S.A.? I will wonder in print right here. If you wonder too, or can provide some answers, please comment.
Stuart Hodes

       With my friend, Nero.
             April, 2012.
    Photo by Ray Madrigal