“Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose” Alphonse Karr

I couldn't resist the quote for the title of this post. I was using my updated version of Stumble Upon when I came upon HyperHistory which is, in itself, an interesting site. However, being possessed of natural curiosity, I clicked one of the links on the home page, and that link took me to...well, the following excerpt from MacroHistory:

A vociferous debate was taking place among Christians, with some Christians denouncing those who no longer believed in taking the scriptures literally. Among the denouncers was Billy Sunday - born William Ashley. He had been a farm boy from Iowa and a hard drinking, woman chasing outfielder for the Chicago White Stockings. He was the country boy awed and tempted by the big city called Babylon, and he continued to describe himself as brawling with the devil. "Hitting the sawdust trail" with his revival specialists and huge choir, he liked to preach the gospel wearing a good suit and expensive shoes. He preached with emotion and a rapidity of words, mixing wisecracking, slang and baseball terms, attacking rum, prostitutes, card playing and gambling. He railed against science, Galileo, Plato, Darwin, intellectuals in general and the modern world. He admitted that he knew nothing about theology, but he felt qualified to denounce Christians who no longer believed in heaven and hell. He was quick to proclaim his patriotism, and he announced that immigrants complaining about working conditions should "go back to the land where they were kenneled."

Reading that, I could close my eyes and see some of our current Fundamentalist Christian preachers lip syncing to Sunday's preaching. It is more than a little discouraging to see that memes circulating through our culture can be this persistent. Billy Sunday could walk into a meeting of the Left Behind crowd, and feel right at home because those people would still be mouthing the ignorance he preached over 100 years ago. One of the biggest mistakes progressive folk make is to think that ignorance is easy to erase. It isn't. Which is why the great explosion of progressive, liberal thought and action from the Sixties and early Seventies has actually produced far less change than one might have thought.

What a difference!

I forget exactly when I bought the Yamaha stereo receiver...it was either 1978 or 1979...but, when I bought it, it was a really top-of-the-line receiver. It has been my primary music system for all these intervening years, and I thought that it drove those JBL speakers pretty well. At least I did until about two weeks ago. I have to admit that over the past few years...OK, maybe more than a few...the sound quality has deteriorated a little...OK, a lot, and the left channel has gotten a little tempermental--you have to give the receiver a couple of whacks to get that channel actually putting out sound--recently.

About a month ago I saw a neat little gadget for sale on Woot: a transmitter that you can use to hook up your computer to your stereo...now you can stream that music anywhere in the house. I bought one, but now I needed to get the stereo actually working. So, I went out to buy a new receiver. I had been cruising the Best Buys and Circuit Cities of late, and had found a Sony unit that was selling for under $200. I figured Sony was a good name and that the price was right, At least I did until I talked to the sales guy. He looked at me with a certain amount of pity and condescension, then took me over to the other side of the audio show room. There he pointed out a high-end Denon and a comparable Sony system. Then he asked me one question, "Why, if the two units are roughly comparable in their specs, does the Denon cost about twice as much as the Sony? What can possibly cause that difference in price?" (OK, technically that's two questions...quibble, quibble, quibble.) Then he pumped some sound from the Sony through the speakers, and did the same for the Denon unit. WOW!! The difference was palpable even to my poor ears.

Then he took me to the front of the store and showed me a Denon unit that was on sale 'cause it was out of the box. It was about $100 more than the Sony, but he assured me that the sound was worth it. I am here to report that he was right. Those JBL's haven't sounded this good maybe forever. I find myself moving into the living room with the old laptop rather than work in my office. I sometimes stand in front of the speakers and wallow in the richness of the sound emanating from them. It is soooo cool. I can hardly stand it!

Sometimes life is good!

Things that are past...

There was once a Dead End Kids movie where, at the end of the movie, the good looking Dead End Kid was going to get out of Hell's Kitchen and go to where life was good: Somerville, New Jersey. I think it was Tommy who was going to go live on a farm, which featured an apple orchard, in Somerville. Needless to say, there is not an apple orchard in sight these days. However, it is not apple orchards that I want to talk about: it is old houses.

Recently, I began a walking program to maybe lose a little weight and to gain a little physical fitness. My walks have taken me around the west side of Somerville, and I have begun to really pay attention to the buildings I am walking past. (Mea culpa: I have lived in this town for over ten years, but I have never really given a great deal of thought to a lot of the older buildings on West End Ave., High St. and Cliff Street.) The majority of buildings on these streets are now commercial in that they house offices, but their beginnings were as private residences. And they are mostly Victorian.

In a way it is sad. I would much rather see these stately old buildings once again housing families, but I know this will not happen--economics militates that this does not happen. There are only about four blocks in the West End of Somerville where some older houses still serve their original function. A major factor in this lies in New Jersey's property tax structure. Here in Somerville, which is a county seat, our property taxes are almost 1/3 again as high as those in neighboring towns. And when you compare the property taxes here with those in Pennsylvania, well, let's just say there is a reason for all those Pennsy license plates on New Jersey roads these days. As I said in the beginning, it is sad to see the change...

Venezuela's Chavez tells Washington "go to hell" - Yahoo! News

If I were looking at this (Venezuela's Chavez tells Washington "go to hell" - Yahoo! News ) in a vacuum, with no concern about context, I would assume that Chavez is a total asshole. Well, it turns out that he is just that, but it is also true that a lot of what he complains about vis-a-vis George Bush is also true. S0, here we have a case of the pot calling the kettle black, and it turns out that they both suffer from overwhelming hubris. To tell you the truth, if I were a Latin American, I would resent how my country and those around me were treated by this administration. I also don't have a lot of problems with taxing the upper classes: they enjoy a much higher standard of living than the rest of their fellow citizens therefore they have a higher responsibility to share the wealth. That's just the way it is. Also I don't have a great deal of problems with Chavez raising the price of gasoline to something a little more in line with its true costs. What I do have problems with is legislation by decree and unlimited presidential re-election. Both of those are the tools of a dictator and not part of a free, democratic society. When push comes to shove, Chavez is not much more than a Banana Republic Dictator of the kind grown throughout Latin America for decades. The only difference between him and the thugs we have supported is that he spouts the Marxist line while our lapdogs paid some sort of lip service to capitalism. I cry for Venezuela and its citizens. Chavez has managed to pack the legislature with his Brown Shirts, so his "reforms" (especially the national police force--read NKVD or Gestapo) are almost a lead pipe cinch to pass. So Venezuela will have themselves a Castro to deal with for the foreseeable future...at least until some group gets the where-with-all to either kill him or stage a successful coup.

Cross posted from my super secret blog that I haven't told anybody that I have...

OK, I do do MP3s, but I don't have either an IPod or a dedicated MP3 player. Instead, what I have is a Sony Walkman CD player that plays MP3 discs. Now, I can burn an MP3 disc that has between 135 and 150 tracks (depending upon average size). My problem is that it is goddamn hard to come up with 150 unique songs that I really like enough to burn. Or, rather, I can do it for one cd, but the second has overlap and the third has considerable overlap. Now, let me tell you that, first of all, I have a pretty big collection of vinyl records from the 60s, 70s and 80s, and then I have a reasonable collection of CDs from the 90s and the current century. So, I don't have a lot of compunction about downloading songs that I already own, and, when I come up with a song I really like that I don't already own, I make sure that the artist gets money from me somehow.

For example, I have recently "discovered" James McMurtry. Now, James is from a very creative lineage as his old man is Larry McMurtry of Lonesome Dove, and a lot of other titles, fame. The first three or four songs of his that I heard on Radio Paradise were pretty cool. I liked the references to San Antonio in "Safe Side" and the humor of "Choctaw Bingo", but when I came across "We Can't Make It Here Anymore", I was blown away. The song itself is good from beginning to end, but there are a couple of verses which are so goddamn good that they should be engraved upon our national consciousness. Try this, for example:

Some have maxed out all their credit cards Some are working two jobs and living in cars Minimum wage won't pay for a roof, won't pay for a drink If you gotta have proof just try it yourself Mr. CEO See how far 5.15 an hour will go Take a part time job at one of your stores Bet you can't make it here anymore Or this: High school girl with a bourgeois dream Just like the pictures in the magazine She found on the floor of the laundromat A woman with kids can forget all that If she comes up pregnant what'll she do Forget the career, forget about school Can she live on faith? live on hope? High on Jesus or hooked on dope When it's way too late to just say no You can't make it here anymore

Those are two powerful verses that are an indictment of our societal values...or at least those values espoused and held dear by the neo-conservatives on the right of the political spectrum.

Like I told a few of my young co-workers tonight, I may be old in years, but in my head, I'm still twenty-fucking-five years old and I still have some of that fire that burned in our collective breasts back in the day. When verses like those quoted fail to evoke a response in me, that is the day I start looking for a way out of this life. (OK, I've had a couple Kettle One's on the rocks and this is like the 5th time I've cranked the song through on the headphones...doesn't change the truth of what I say...)

'Nuff said

There are some things which just have to be challenged...

There is a column in the Christian Science Monitor which has as its premise that "Atheism, not religion, is the real force behind the mass murders of history". And then it goes off about how most of the religious based killing in the past has been minor compared to the damage done by modern "atheists". And some of what the columnist says is pertinent. However, towards the end of the column, he shoots himself in the foot with this statement: "...cannot explain why, if Nazism was directly descended from medieval Christianity, medieval Christianity did not produce a Hitler."

Well, the short answer is that the rise of Hitler required the technology of the 20th Century. Also, while Hitler's motives were complex, his antisemitism was, in fact, a direct result of centuries of religious persecution. The deaths of over six million Jews can be laid directly at the feet of religious intolerance. Nope, sorry...Harris, Dawkins et al have a point which needs to be considered.

Bush lies to us once more...

The son-of-a-bitch lies, then smirks because he knows he's lying and he also knows that "you can fool some of the people all of the time". How does he lie? Well, the man who, in living memory, has done the most to wreck the American economy is trying to accuse the Democrats of being the people who "will raise taxes and hurt economic growth". This is the man who has took one of the most vibrant US economies of the past 100 years, and, basically, drove it into the ground. Under Clinton, the economy was growing (and growing with good paying jobs rather than the minimum wage jobs more and more Americans are ending up with), the federal deficit was shrinking and we, as a nation, were starting to believe in ourselves again after the long, long recovery from the Vietnam debacle.

So, in less than six years, Bush has managed to throw all that away, and a great deal of what he has tossed away was the foundations laid by Ronald Reagan (who, while I may not have been a supporter, I do grudgingly admire for his optimism about our future.) When we were attacked by the Islamic fundamentalists, rather than give us a shining vision of the mountaintop, George encouraged us to hide in caves and to shun the light.

But even more than the psychological damage he has done, there is the disasterous fiscal legacy he is going to leave. People, sooner or later somebody is going to have to pay for the huge deficit this man and his Republican administration has run up, and that "somebody" is going to be us, our children and their children. If I were a Democrat, I would run on the Bush legacy for the foreseeable future (or at least until the national debt gets back to the level Clinton had it in 2000.) Yep, I would tar and feather the Republican Party with George Bush for many years. Lying Son-of-a-Bitch!!

A couple of comments and predictions about the upcoming elections

First I have a question: Isn't it great how the price of gasoline has dropped almost a buck from what it was a month ago? And then I have an answer: No, it isn't great, it is, I think, a premeditated move on the part of Big Oil to influence the upcoming elections. It has been well publicized that the American public was not at all happy about paying $3.00/gallon to fill up the tank of the family SUV. Since there has been nothing on the world stage to account for the rapid drop in oil prices, I have to assume that said drop is the result of decisions made in the executive suites and boardrooms of the Big Oil companies. I have a sneaking suspicion that the thinking goes, "If we drop oil prices, people will be happier with the Republicans." While philosophically I can't complain about gasoline costing more (because it is a non-renewable resource which needs to start funding its replacement(s)), I think that the recent price hikes have been more about lining the pockets of Capital and not about funding alternative energy research, and I think that the oil companies are a little worried about what the Democrats will do to those obscenely huge profits they have been amassing during the Bush years.

My second prediction is that I think that the owners of this country will do their level bests to trash the economy over the next two years should the Dems recapture the national legislature. This is especially true in that the Democrats seem to have a very dangerous potential candidate for the presidency in Barack Obama. Mr. Obama has the power, I believe, to bring a real vision back to this country, but that vision is not the one the owners want to see. Accordingly, it would be in the owners best interest to trash the economy and blame it all on the Democrats in Congress. That way, in two years, they could advance their neo-conservative successor to Bush, and his crowded coattails as the panacea most needed by the nation to get out of the "economic slump those Congressional Democrats have gotten us into...". What will be interesting is seeing if the Democrats have learned who their actual opponents are, and then how to campaign successfully against them.

"We Can't Make It Here Anymore" Part 2

A couple (two) posts ago I wrote about James McMurtry's song "We Can't Make It Here Anymore". I would like to dig a little deeper into that song because every time I listen to it, it digs a little deeper into me. I mean, it starts out with:

Vietnam Vet with a cardboard sign Sitting there by the left turn line Flag on the wheelchair flapping in the breeze One leg missing, both hands free

which tells us something about the men and women who are currently in charge. The fact that we treat citizens who pretty much gave their all for their country like disposable diapers is bad enough; that we make them beg for their food and shelter is even worse. Nevertheless, this is our reality, and it is how the self-centered neo-cons running things think.

Shit, I was going to go through this, cherry picking lyrics, but I can't do that. Instead, let me send you to the lyrics and then urge you to go out and get this song any way you can (I've gone and actually purchased one of Mr. McMurtry's cd's because I feel honor bound to pay the artist for his work. I know that most of what I paid is going to some suit who had nothing to do with the creative work that went into this, but at least something goes to the artist and that is the important thing) and listen to it while reading along with the lyrics. It is just powerful stuff...then go out and send the Bushites back to clipping coupons--or whatever other unproductive work they did before going to Washington--on November 7th.

China Drafts Law to Boost Unions and End Abuse - New York Times

It's about fucking time! One of the things that is killing this country is the nonstop exportation of our jobs. Let's face it, we all can't be rock stars, CEOs, or stock market gunslingers. Some of us won't ever make it into the jobs that pay huge salaries: the rest of us (who make up about 95% of the population) work at the millions of jobs that are both necessary and non-glamorous. So, the news that China Drafts Law to Boost Unions and End Abuse (New York Times 10/13/06) is a step in the right direction. Maybe if the manufacturing jobs start getting close in pay around the world, there will be less incentive to export them from home.

In fact, maybe it will begin to heal our huge balance of payments deficit. If we begin building the "stuff" of our lives here at home rather than in Shanghai or Chengdu, we will create jobs for our own citizens and keep some of the dollars that now flow overseas in our own communities. Also, it may chop some of the obscene profits that have been flowing into the pockets of the owners of capital and redirect those dollars into the pockets of middle class Americans. More money to the middle class means more tax revenues for the government (middle class taxpayers don't have as many tax accounts and tax lawyers sniffing out every possible loophole in the tax code like the super rich have.)

So, I applaud any move by China to improve the lot of their workers, and I would urge every other country in the world to do the same. Even if America stops importing as much stuff from abroad, the workers with their higher pay will take up some of the slack, and the fact that there will be more money in the local economies will mean that the shop owners and farmers and all the rest of the citizens in those countries will also have more money available to buy the output from those factories. Again, for our country, the best possible foreign policy is to raise the economic levels of the rest of the world to bring them closer to our own.

Yeah! Go China!!