10.27.2

last watercolor i finished. couple of days ago. begun in prescott az. and no, it doesn't look like the locale.

and now sunday's sermon from brother ken wilber:

"Likewise, looking deep within the mind, in the very most interior part of the self, when the mind becomes very, very quite, and one listens very carefully, in that infinite silence, the soul begins to whisper, and its feather-soft voice takes one far beyond what the mind could ever imagine, beyond anything rationality could possibly tolerate, beyond anything logic can endure. In its gentle whisperings, there are the faintest hints of infinite love, glimmers of a life that time forgot, flashes of a bliss that must not be mentioned, an infinite intersection where the mysteries of eternity breathe life into mortal time, where suffering and pain have forgotten how to
pronounce their own names, this secret quiet intersection of time and the very timeless, an intersection called the soul. "

-- Integral Psychology , p. 106.

10.26.2

one more saturday night.

the last time i heard the greatful dead, they played the song of the same name. and it was one more sat. nite. at the whatever it's called outdoor pavilion in phoenix, that stale hot sweltering summer night air, the band seemed small, miniature and cramped on the far away stage, and all kinds of young people holding bags of shake and enthusing how good the band was playing.

dunno if you ever saw "mad dogs & englishman" concert film with leon russell and joe cocker but the ambience was the same: trash scattered all over, sleaze running rampant, pressure, crowds, dismal lights winking in the distance: the dream was over, long since cancelled and shredded.

so why write about this now? well, it is one more saturday nite and i have that depleted, enervated and hopeless feeling that i must have made a few wrong turns somewhere. and not just me. all of us.

paul wellstone is dead. the only memeber of congress who seemed to live in the same world as i do. hopefully ben jones might be another one. and not to speculate, but why did that kingair crash on vfr landing? no smoke, no fire, just headed in the wrong direction.

the sniper extravaganza re-introduced me to late-nite AM radio. unbelievable. the o'reilly factor ("no-spin") was bad enough but his schtick seems to be curdled indignance with the media, so he scores some points. course his idea of discourse is yelling at the caller and then cutting him or her off.

but somebody named savage takes the booby prize. this guy went on for hours about how chief moose had an accent (like black accent?) and therefore should not be in a position of authority. "speak the king's english" he ranted and raved over and over. what he was speaking, stylistically speaking, doesn't have a name yet - that i am aware of - but rush limbaugh is the origion of this smug, intolerant, vituprative dialect, subtext violence, that seems to be spreading.

i got a chinese er-hu, 2 string chinese fiddle from friend barbara who spent time in china and has just returned. when i was 10-11 yrs old i lived in the southern part of tainan taiwan and these things were all over. i used to play them just for the hell of it, probably because the us govt couldn't get a school together for american dependants so i wondered around the city and countryside day after day, drinking tea and smoking cigerettes in the red light district which was full of elegant mahogany wood columns, spent a lot of time in huge temple comlex a few miles outside of town, giant statues of wrathful dieties pulling swords, pogodas full of ceramic vases holding cremation ashes, and the occaisional catacomb loaded with guns and ammo, still packed in grease.

and you wonder why i'm crazy? for the same reason you are. for some mysterious reason - to us - the spirit beyond the beyond has put us here to experience this craziness and suffering for the purpose of involution, or as plato put it "remembering" who we really is.

only i don't remember. i don't even remember 4th grade.

the push seems to be towards the state where our thoughts and emotional life are looked on like we look at the sky and trees. effortless attention. naked awareness.

only it is not easy to do this. personally - oops, probably wrong word - i think my thoughts etc are looked on with the same effortless attention with which i might gaze on a river at dusk.

but not by me. i vaguely remeber a japenese story where a monk announces it is like a distant momentary flash of concious light shining on him for a microsecond.

as an old fart chronologically preceeding the boomer bulge, i can feel the pressure of so many who have put in their time in the secular insanity wanting to spend what time they have left dealing with the real, or hyper-real, or supra real if you prefer. this will open up the culture to a last phase of life which is not reading the stock reports and playing golf, but practice practice practice.

i have been suprised by the role that creativity and expression seems to be taking in this regard. who was it, erikson? who posited the last phase of life as choice between creation and dissolution.

ok it's past my bedtime so i'm heading for sleep, but probably will listen to shortwave radio all night, chinese seguing into christian fundimentalism into arabic, little cubano rhythm on the side.

tommorrow i want to make a quaker service whre i understand quitness can leave room for the spirit - which may or may not make an appearance as is it's habit.

meanwhile i got a painting to finish and an electronic instrumental to finish. why? i don't know, i talked to an artist in prescott az last month and mentioned the reason i paint was mental health maintenance. he said "yea we all do."

10.24.2

for those of us still learning this and that, MIT has an interesting idea: free courseware. they hope and so do i that this idea catches on.
MIT OpenCourseWare | Home

10.23.2

back online after several days of server problems. during this time i emailed an old friend who lives outside of richmond va and asked him what was going on. ensuing correspondance is below:

---------------------------------------------->

me:

just got back from marathon trip west, spent time with father who is
doing well and attended wedding of oldest son in las vegas which is
worse this century than last. can you give me the scoop on snipper
action in your parts? whassup?

chris
---------------------------------------------->

him:

whassup??

heads are down. walk in zig zag pattern. schools closed. crouch when you
pump gas. Have to go to Home Depot? send the wife.
Other advice. dont drive a white box truck or white van. if you're an
illegal mex dont stop at a suburban exxon to call home. dont get shot in
stomach for at least an hour after having eaten at steak house.
ignore cnn.
sniper is a lone gunman, is tandem duo freaked out on video games, an AArab
terrorist, an annie oakley wannabe, audie murphy in drag, the ghost of sgt.
york.
montgomery county police chief charlie moose is a UNC grad

if the bushies invade iraq and nuke north korea before the sniper is caught
or killed, no one in virgnia, maryland or dc will notice.

the cops are very close to catching the sniper or dont have a clue.

they should look for a crazy person with a gun; that's what i'd do. Doesn't
narrow the field much does it?

---------------------------------------------->


me:

hey man i've gotta post yr answer on my infamous web boondoggle. do you
mind? no names or ID, just another pilgrim's observations.

and it might help clear people's heads, or maybe they'll just shake them
sadly. "another bright idealistic young man who could have been a lawyer
ranting out in the boonies". well you got a lot of company.

me, i spent a night last week in the luxor pyramid in las vegas, all darth vader
and cheap tin replicas of hieroglyphic fragments. i found that you could
pound the latter and get some pretty spooky polyrhythms going.

we is having coup d'etat but no one knows cause it's secret. corporate
oligharchy had this in place before clinton bumbled along and setem back
8 years.

i saw tv coverage out yr way today. lady lamenting that her schedule was
upset said "i'd rather be shot than stay home".

make a nice epitaph.

---------------------------------------------->

him:

post away. with our very own sniper and with crazy arabs flying planes into
tall and five-sided buildings the corporate coup is not really very scary.
so many of the wall street and main street universe masters were clueless
enough to get caught and will go to jail, that i dont worry about them. in
fact i feel quite comfortable knowing that incompetents run the world; they
are so much less dangerous that west nile bearing birds, killer wood ticks,
mutating AIDS virsues and suicidal deer hell bent on crashing through your
windshield. and dont forget last summer's sharks, eating russian imigrants
at hatteras. life threatening danger is all very random, whether its sadam
gassing kurds (nobody likes kurds anyway including other kurds) or the
"small animal" (state police didnt say what kind of small animal) that, the
other night, caused two 18-year-old falls church girls to swerve and lose
control of their car on i-95 south of here and get whacked by a tractor
trailer. the truck also got the critter. the two girls could have just as
well stayed at home in falls church and gone shopping at home depot.

---------------------------------------------->

me:

maybe i am obsessive - probably am in addition to other mental maladies
- but i can't help thinking that some of these random always with us
problems - like colliding animal populations are another unintended
consequence of the present set of deal makers, power groupies, and
megarich celebratory personae.

life is bad enough - these guys are making it worse for no reason except
to distract themselves.

---------------------------------------------->

him:

well, thank god. our sniper has returned to montgomery county to communicate
with local authorities by killing a bus driver. take that charlie moose.
moose, of course, does not acknowlege that people are being capped on his
watch. he will concede that someone or someones are causing situations.
situations make charlie uncomfortable.

saturday we leave for hatteras for a week. chances are the our sniper wont
follow. as for sharks, i dont plan on going in the water. last saturday we
went to uva/unc football game in charlottesville with friends. the heels
rise to ever higher heights of mediocrity. leaves here are turning; ice the
other day in the dogs' water bowl. soon deer season will be upon us, the
season when i wear a blaze orange cap to walk about my woods and carry a
pistol in my pocket when i go chase off tresspassing hunters.

i hope someone has bagged the sniper by the time i return, tho i suspect we
will miss him when he's gone.

---------------------------------------------->#end of correspondance

10.20.2

painted this at my father's house in arizona. no, the local landscape did not look like this.

i guess i've recovered from trip, bounced back to same old erratic hypomaniacal state. i remain fascinated by the immense distance between we the pipple and the corporate oligarchy.

got email from old friend geoff who opines that what is going on now was planned during first bush's reign, interupted by 8 years of clinton, and is now happening again. maybe this accounts for the hurry. what it does not explain is the numb response to economy, terror, and ragged edge so many of us now live.

10.19.2

took a look at random blogs today - so many people with something to say. everythings been said. but not everyone has got to say it yet.

altho i love words, they seem increasingly...irrevelent. public discourse has more to do with alliteration and proximity of various words (like "political candidate" and "child molester", no kidding, ads in arizona are doing this; not saying one is the other, just making sure that the words appear close together).

personal discourse - ie the spoken word - seems to go like this:

"how is your mother?"

"fine".

"mine is in a wheelchair".

the question is a setup to talk about one's own world, not an inquiry into another's world.

can monads discuss liebnitz? or oprah for that matter?

and maybe blogs are a way to siphen off the human instinct to question and discuss, you know thw way the beatniks did last century instead of working, siphen off the wooly words into the iredescent white blast of beyond the beyond. like a prayer? naaah, more like a spell to keep away the electronic demons.

talk about sliding signifiers: what does rock star, social butterfly, coach potato, village idiot, and mainstream media mean?

ok, now what do they mean?

ok, now what do they mean?

10.18.2

Back Online
Got back from wild west and other stops a few days ago. been hiding under bed, knawing on fingernails, wondering why.

while i was away the sniper saga started. the war didn't. saw lot of political ads in arizona saying the other guy was soft on child molesters. eric & angela's wedding in las vegas was a once in a lifetime event, met lots of nice people, a few from one of my former lives.

don't have enough energy to talk about las vegas except to say i have seen the future and it winks and blinks and you have to stand in line for everything.

later: more.

11.25.2

Modern Peasant Has Gone Fishing
Back online oct. 15
i'm visiting son eli, his wife melissa, grandaughter lily, daughter nicole, husband doug, grandson corbin, and son nathan in chapel hill NC, sister jane, husband fred, nephew jonathan and niece anne in phoenix, my father in prescott AZ, and attending the wedding of my oldest son eric and angela in las vegas.

i've got my gas mask and iodine pills on order, plenty of tape to seal apartment, lots of twinkies and old reader's digests so i am ready for coming extravaganza and hope you are too. see ya.

9..23.2

the question of the day seems to be the nature of the american public. will they buy into the very orchestrated PR swell of war-fever, or surprise the world with a cry for reasonable discourse? chances for the latter seem slim; however the rejection of the clinton impeachment and the rejection of the gingrich revolution are 2 recent instances where the manipulation of public opinion did not work as expected.

let's all stand up and point out the holes and specious logic that can be spotted everyday in the deluge of psuedo-facts bombarding the public.

the mother of all psuedo-facts currently is 9/11 debacle = saddam and even if he was not involved he might be in the future. or maybe it is the confusion between a war against a nation-state and a war against an individual.

on another topic very related: watch out for this one, it will affect your life much more than you might think:

'Doctors also say they fear being hassled by Medicare for billing mistakes from complicated coding procedures. Malpractice insurance doesn't cover Medicare fraud, and Medicare can go after personal assets, Murphy says. "There are almost 30,000 pages of regulations and you are supposed to stay up to date," Murphy says. "It's hard to keep track of them."'
The Daily Camera: Health And Fitness

9.21.2

every since my mother and exwife died early this year my desire and ability to communicate verbally is pretty non-existent. but i thought i�d post some recent email correspondence between my friend tucker and myself as an example of what people are talking about these exciting days:

----------------------->

From Tucker:

Subject:
I just have to comment about today's EIB broadcast
Date:
Thu, 19 Sep 2002 00:54:14 EDT

Dear Rush Limbaugh;
I am writing to you as your soul brother who was also raised in Cape Giraudeau, Missouri and who periodically checks into WABC for your show to see if anything other than the usual right-wing, Clinton bashing, Republican yahoo, conservative Rants might surface.

I have evolved from seething and pure antipathy I might add . I have quite successfully tried implementing what the Dalai Lama, the Course in Miracles, Thich Nhat Hahn, Jesus so often extol- Being Love and not coming from make wrong, anger, hate etc., but sometimes...
well it still just happens.

It happened today...I couldnt believe the drivel over the Clinton/Letterman appearance and your abhorance of what was a pretty sound exchange; the absolutely humorless Katie Couric award crap--gee Representative Solomom Ortez manages to mumble a stupid question about Iraq to Rumsfeld....so you try to mock his website.

As if your 'solutions' in your inimitable fashion to your listeners concerns about America taking on the role of war maker and not peace maker were any better! Try reading Thomas Friedman or Maureen Doud on the OpEd NY Times today to gild your lilly .

And please stop with baiting the fear of sending our children to war as no concern since we dont have a military draft ( your "dear friend" says it takes a village and we sure are all in a big old American village.)

And yes, we do have 'kitchen table issues' about which your screed today was so even more sophmoric than usuual, that it actually sucked the big one.

Almost as much as your positively ludicrous assertion that "there is no social program that goes unfunded because of war." and as if advertising about Food Stamps was some conservative heresy. I can't believe you havent noticed the toileting of our economy, the 1/4 increase in the defense budget and all that increased homeland security hasnt taken a toll, that bombing Iraq would have to increase even more.

There is some sort of government spending pie that does get parceled out, and keeping our eyes on our paper-tiger Wars on terror, drugs, for homeland security, Saddham, Iran, the Axis of Evil; All that stuff sure keeps us preoccupied so that what you call 'kitchen table' issues which dont appeal to you get a kabash , because even the spineless democrats can't go up against these 'patriotic needs.'

But we can sure get excited about you flitting Dick Cheney -like to unknown parts of Texas and the 2 planes it
takes to move you-- Doesn't Imus just hook up a mike and decent phones at the Imus Ranch?
OK. So mega ditto's to you!!

With so many followers and loyal listeners listening to your exhortations no wonder we are fast becoming a nation of political morons, bankrupt crony capitalists, permanently at wars of the many abstract unwinable kind, like in Brave New World, as we go from surplus to deficit, world loved to dispised by most; a leader in absolutely
nothing benefitting the world (as in Environmental Issues, economic solutions, ways of governing and leading to democracy, Peace and UN and World court issues, fighting disease, poverty and ignorance).

But you can still rant on about Monica, and how the Democrats are doing us in.

Feel proud in your uplifting of America and the World.
Tucker Clark
----------------------------------

In a message dated 9/19/2002 8:43:09 AM Eastern Daylight Time, modpeasant@ioa.com writes:

(IN reference to my letter to LImbaugh to which some of you wrote me, tucker as being an ok response---Chris has it even better --a war would be an outmoded response..I like that! TUCKER)
-----------------------------------

Tucker:
i admire your ability to check in from time to time with ... i don't
know what to call it; politics as entertainment? the syntax of clich�s? high drama as western values go down the tube?

i myself have decided to stand up and talk out loud about all
this...stuff. the very idea of war on terrorism being accepted by john
q. public (remember him?) as a coherent meaningful phrase says it all.

[tucker: yea my man Denzel just played him on a kitchen table subject -- no Health care coverage so take the hospital hostage-alright!]

here's a copy of email i sent to "my" senator [edwards]; the next day i
found out he is warming up for presidential run and therefore had to be
"for" the "war".

[later] i don't have it anymore. but...

i am going to concentrate my pontificating to 3 areas:

1 - saddam is a threat to the world, and the situation does have to be
taken care of. so it is a question of strategy. an obsolete response
would be military invasion in the mode of a high-tech d-day.

2 - even if we won the military war in one day and saddam died, our
troubles would just be beginning. big troubles. world troubles. terminal troubles?

3 - this effort has been "hijacked" by the �republicans� - i prefer
"corporate oligarchy" - just as islam has been hijacked by terrorists - and they carry entirely too much ideological baggage to be trusted to evaluate the situation and make decisions that might work.

how is your world otherwise? what's new?

chris
--------------------------------

thanks for asking Chris and responding--I haven't heard from the newly-slimmed down windbag --but should I expect to? Am letting our tight circle of friends reflect on your thoughts, if it's ok
Love Tuc

9.19.2

i don't know what to say. mr. dylan says "high water everywhere" and i think he means it. nobody could possibly keep up with the inbred power plays going on in our capital right now. it strikes me that we are fighting a shadow army, ghosts, with the only way we know how, lots of meetings, whispered voices in the halls of power, and anybody with a lick of sense shut out. it used to work.

islam hijacked by terrorists? how about the defense of our people hijacked by the corporate oligarchy with their eternal agenda?

here and there:

remember area 51? well it's still secret, Bush just extended it's status as secret. course he keeps a lot of things secret.
Area 51, truth seekers 0

Freeh's misplaced priorities.
"The threat level grew so high that by December 1998, the director of central intelligence, George J. Tenet, issued a "declaration of war" on Al Qaeda, in a memorandum circulated in the intelligence community.[not very widely from what i understand]. Yet, Ms. Hill said, the intelligence agencies failed to adequately follow up on the declaration, and by Sept. 10, 2001, the F.B.I. still had only one analyst assigned full time to Al Qaeda."

[and i bet he was exiled to the desk and not invited to social events because of some faux-pas; maybe the wrong color tie].

Whereas Freeh had 85 agents assigned to the continous microscopic inspection of Clinton's zipper. Politics trumps national security?
Metafilter | Community Weblog

9.19.2

May I suggest that rather than bombing civilians in various Muslim countries, the United States and Britain begin to take a more intelligent approach to the international drugs trade: namely, to legalise it. For by doing this, not only will we help solve one of the major problems facing the world today, the unregulated growth of drugs trafficking, but it would also further isolate the terrorists.
Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | Fight terror: legalise the drugs trade

9.16.2

well i don't know about you all, but the media machine is rolling a bit over the line these days. new phrases manifesting every day. "terrorist state" is one. if you are fighting a war against terrorism, then a terrorist state is fair game. like what? well nicaruaga, the phillipines, guatamala, columbia, argintina, isreal have all fit this catagory at one time or another.

now iraq is said to be a "terrorist state". raises the question is it the nation-state of iraq, or it's ruler that we are fixing to fight. and yes, saddam might succeed in nuclear program, and he might slip WMD (new acronym for me since today: weapons of mass...you know) to "sleeper cells" of akaida and diaster could result.

lots of ways to stop this hypothetical possibility without a replay of d-day.

lots of babble, electronic of course. a new phase for urban letgends:
Urban Legends Reference Pages: Rumors of War

another subject: here's an item that probably should be better known. notice particularly verisign.

"Police would not comment on how the Internet criminals managed to hack into either Spitfire's credit card processor, Online Data Corp., of Chicago, or VeriSign Inc., of Mountain View, which secures and processes about 25 percent of all online transactions in the U.S."
Mercury News | 09/16/2002 | Computer thieves ring up $5.07 each on 140,000 credit cards

9.15.2

Autonomic Carpet
man i feel like i've been away forever. did the war start while i was gone?

it did.

i think we all know what is happening: the republicans (and the democrats) are daily shifting syntax, re-arrainging rhetoric, the languge of political discourse is a meaningless parody of itself.

the war against terrorism is a war not against a nation-state with a flag, and taxes, and armies. it was decleared against individuals, who tom friedman calls "super-empowered individuals".

it looks like the war will be fought like a high-tech d-day repeat, gulf war redux, massive movements of armies etc.

but a gigantic military attack on iraq is a mismatch because the people who have lived and fought there far longer than we have been a country can dissappear into a world we do not understand.

so i think a new kind of response is called for, something light, tricky, quick, subtle, unexpected. one that is to our advantage in every context.

at the very least, talk about it should be linguistically possible.

9.10.2

remember this guy?
well neither do i.

but i did get a quote today:
"memory is imagination pinned down."

imagination, image, flashes from a distant world. where our experience comes from. and goes to.

ps. do not call or visit tommorrow. i will be on a 24 hour media fast. under the bed. no cell phone. maybe some granola.

or i will be eating popcorn in front of the tube, watching the electronic pagentry.

9.9.2

Pik 8

i'm selecting 12 watercolors that i'll do something with. picture above is number 8.

yesterday i was talking to my father on the telephone, and sometime during the conversation, i said "don't worry, be happy".

he said "that's wierd, at the same time you said that "jeopardy" just showed a new catagory, "don't worry be hopi".

9.8.2

"But the mourning had barely begun, when the highest leaders of the land unleashed a spirit of revenge. They put out a simplistic script of �good vs. evil� that was taken up by a pliant and intimidated media. They told us that asking why these terrible events had happened verged on treason. There was to be no debate. There were by definition no valid political or moral questions. The only possible answer was to be war abroad and repression at home."
a good source of news without the "official" stamp of approval:
Welcome to ZNet

9.7.2

regarding president carter"s very lucid and i think correct analysis of our approach to iraq (read yesterday's post), i found a number of comments. it is amazing that most of these seem to treat carter's article as nonsense. if you think the american public is starting to "get it", this may give you pause:
kuro5hin.org || technology and culture, from the trenches

on the other hand some do get it:

"On this latter point we can turn to Merle Haggard, the bard of blue collar America, the man who saluted the American flag more than a generation ago in songs such as "The Fighting Side of Me" and "Okie from Muskogee." Haggard addressed a concert crowd in Kansas City, Mo., a few days ago in the following terms: "I think we should give John Ashcroft a big hand ... (pause) ... right in the mouth!" He went on to say, "the way things are going, I'll probably be thrown in jail tomorrow for saying that, so I hope ya'll will bail me out."
www.workingforchange.com

keep up with scattered oppisition to the coming techno-drama:
Antiwar.com

9.6.2

put another muzak up. i did it nite before last. today i went to the mall. i'm getting used to it. it didn't even seem strange.

so i'm sitting here at home trying to conjure up a letter to sen. edwards about the war against terrorism when i get the following email:

"This letter should be published in every newspaper in America. If there is a way to bring it to the attention of your media, congresspeople, and other groups, please let them know about it.

washingtonpost.com The Troubling New Face of America By Jimmy Carter

Thursday, September 5, 2002; Page A31

Fundamental changes are taking place in the historical policies of the United States with regard to human rights, our role in the community of nations and the Middle East peace process -- largely without definitive debates (except, at times, within the administration). Some new approaches have understandably evolved from quick and well-advised reactions by President Bush to the tragedy of Sept. 11, but others seem to be developing from a core group of conservatives who are trying to realize long-pent-up ambitions under the cover of the proclaimed war against terrorism.

Formerly admired almost universally as the preeminent champion of human rights, our country has become the foremost target of respected international organizations concerned about these basic principles of democratic life. We have ignored or condoned abuses in nations that support our anti-terrorism effort, while detaining American citizens as "enemy combatants," incarcerating them secretly and indefinitely without their being charged with any crime or having the right to legal counsel. This policy has been condemned by the federal courts, but the Justice Department seems adamant, and the issue is still in doubt. Several hundred captured Taliban soldiers remain imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay under the same circumstances, with the defense secretary declaring that they would not be released even if they were someday tried and found to be innocent. These actions are similar to those of abusive regimes that historically have been condemned by American presidents.

While the president has reserved judgment, the American people are inundated almost daily with claims from the vice president and other top officials that we face a devastating threat from Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, and with pledges to remove Saddam Hussein from office, with or without support from any allies. As has been emphasized vigorously by foreign allies and by responsible leaders of former administrations and incumbent officeholders, there is no current danger to the United States from Baghdad. In the face of intense monitoring and overwhelming American military superiority, any belligerent move by Hussein against a neighbor, even the smallest nuclear test (necessary before weapons construction), a tangible threat to use a weapon of mass destruction, or sharing this technology with terrorist organizations would be suicidal. But it is quite possible that such weapons would be used against Israel or our forces in response to an American attack.

We cannot ignore the development of chemical, biological or nuclear weapons, but a unilateral war with Iraq is not the answer. There is an urgent need for U.N. action to force unrestricted inspections in Iraq. But perhaps deliberately so, this has become less likely as we alienate our necessary allies. Apparently disagreeing with the president and secretary of state, in fact, the vice president has now discounted this goal as a desirable option.

We have thrown down counterproductive gauntlets to the rest of the world, disavowing U.S. commitments to laboriously negotiated international accords. Peremptory rejections of nuclear arms agreements, the biological weapons convention, environmental protection, anti-torture proposals, and punishment of war criminals have sometimes been combined with economic threats against those who might disagree with us. These unilateral acts and assertions increasingly isolate the United States from the very nations needed to join in combating terrorism.

Tragically, our government is abandoning any sponsorship of substantive negotiations between Palestinians and Israelis. Our apparent policy is to support almost every Israeli action in the occupied territories and to condemn and isolate the Palestinians as blanket targets of our war on terrorism, while Israeli settlements expand and Palestinian enclaves shrink.

There still seems to be a struggle within the administration over defining a comprehensible Middle East policy. The president's clear commitments to honor key U.N. resolutions and to support the establishment of a Palestinian state have been substantially negated by statements of the defense secretary that in his lifetime "there will be some sort of an entity that will be established" and his reference to the "so-called occupation." This indicates a radical departure from policies of every administration since 1967, always based on the withdrawal of Israel from occupied territories and a genuine peace between Israelis and their neighbors.

Belligerent and divisive voices now seem to be dominant in Washington, but they do not yet reflect final decisions of the president, Congress or the courts. It is crucial that the historical and well-founded American commitments prevail: to peace, justice, human rights, the environment and international cooperation.

Former president Carter is chairman of the Carter Center in Atlanta. � 2002 The Washington Post Company"

AMEN

9.4.2

i finally fixed the box at upper right that links to my latest obsession, digital sound. fooling with blog templates can be dangerous.

i've been otherwise engaged lately, so the verbage of this weblog has slowly been evaporating.

but the iraqi war choreography has become really disturbing, so now i've got a bee in my bonnet and can write away.

is there a problem this war might solve?

i believe there is a problem, pretty much as the current bunch says. i think bush will release some information sept 12 when he talks to the UN.

but i don�t think a traditional war will solve this problem. there are all kinds of other, smarter ways.

why this war is a bad idea:

1 - but even if we won it in one day, the iraqui gov. surrendered, and mr hussein died somehow, our difficulties would just be beginning.

because we are not equiped to deal with arabic-speaking countries. very few arab speakers, people who were born and raised in that part of the world and understand it.

halbersteim�s book �the best and the brightest� outlines a similar situation before we became involved in the vietnam war. the state department had been gutted of people who knew that world. there were many smart people who had been born and raised in china and they all were dismissed during the finger pointing era of �who lost china�. after that our govt. didn�t have a clue.


more tommorrow.