Changing Places

TomDispatch - Tomgram: The Immoral Relativists of the Bush Administration
For at least 30 years now, the right has fought against, the Republican Party has run against, and more recently, the Bush administration has claimed victory over the “moral relativism” of liberals, the permissive parenting of the let-them-do-anything-they-please era, and the self-indulgent, self-absorbed, make-your-own-world attitude of the Sixties. Since September 11th, we have been told again and again, we are in a different world… finally. In this new world, things are black and white, good and evil, right and wrong. You are for or you are against. The murky relativism of the recent past, of an America in a mood of defeat, is long gone. In the White House, we have a stand-up guy so unlike the last president, that draft dodger who was ready to parse the meaning of “is” and twist the world to his unnatural desires.

In his speeches, George Bush regularly calls for a return to or the reinforcement of traditional, even eternal, family values and emphasizes the importance of personal “accountability” for our children as well as ourselves. (”The culture of America is changing from one that has said, if it feels good, do it, and if you’ve got a problem, blame somebody else, to a new culture in which each of us understands we are responsible for the decisions we make in life.”) And yet when it comes to acts that are clearly wrong in this world — aggressive war, the looting of resources, torture, personal gain at the expense of others, lying, and manipulation among other matters — Bush and his top officials never hesitate to redefine reality to suit their needs. When faced with matters long defined in everyday life in terms of right and wrong, they simply reach for their dictionaries.

What the Bush administration has proved is that, if you have a mind to do so, there’s no end to the ways you can define “is.” No administration has reached not just for its guns but for its dictionaries more often, when brought up against commonly accepted definitions of what is.

As a group, the top figures in this administration have often seemed like so many aggressive children let loose in the neighborhood sandbox by deadbeat dads and moms. Does nobody wonder where those mommies and daddies, the people who should have taught them right from wrong, actually went? Certainly, their children are, in the best Sixties manner, all libido. Let me, in fact, suggest a label for them that, I hope, catches their truest political nature: They are immoral relativists.

Yet, even for the most self-absorbed among them, the ones most ready to twist reality (and the names we give it) into whatever shape best suits their needs of the moment, reality does have a way of biting back. Count on it.

Yup, karma is a bitch — and boy is she getting pissed off at these clowns….

Desire — Justin Simoni

That was no beast that stirred,
That was my heart you heard
Pacing to and fro
In the ambush of my desire.
To the music my flute let fall.
– “Neither Spirit Nor Bird” (Shoshone Love Song), trans. Mary Austin

Since some folks were asking me about this, I thought I would post a little background on what bipolar disorder is, and how it is treated. Simply, bipolar disorder is a chemical brain disorder where the brain does not properly process neurotransmitter chemicals. In bipolar, this leads to a particular problem known as: desire. Whether it’s for stuff, sex, drugs, or just to feel better, bipolars desire things much, much more than other people. We feel more deeply, want things more desperately, and sometimes, just want to do anything to turn that feeling of desire off - but we can’t, not without the right drugs to balance us out. That’s why it’s so important to get the right treatment, because this is a genetic disorder, a physical disease with a very real cause.

University of California, San Diego: External Relations: News & Information: News Releases : Health
Researchers at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) School of Medicine have identified a specific gene that causes bipolar disorder in a subset of patients who suffer from this debilitating psychiatric illness.

Published in the June 16, 2003 issue of the journal Molecular Psychiatry, the findings indicate that a mutation in a gene that regulates sensitivity to brain neurotransmitters such as dopamine, causes bipolar disorder in as many as 10 percent of bipolar cases. The mutation in this gene, G protein receptorkinase 3 (GRK3), occurs in a portion of the gene called the promoter, that regulates when the gene is turned on.

The research team hypothesizes that this mutation causes the individual to become hypersensitive to dopamine, leading to the mood extremes that characterize biopolar disorder.

A complex and variable illness, bipolar disorder is thought to be caused by multiple genes. Although previous research has suggested candidate genes or general DNA regions where faulty genes may reside, the UCSD study is the first to pinpoint a precise gene involved in the disease.

Also known as manic depression, bipolar disorder is characterized by extreme mood states alternating between euphoric peaks and terrible depression. Current treatments help many who suffer from bipolar disorder, but physicians estimate that one-third to one-half of the 1 million bipolar patients worldwide receive little benefit from existing therapies.

“One of the major limitations in bipolar treatment is the lack of new molecular targets for drugs,” said John Kelsoe, M.D., UCSD professor of psychiatry, a psychiatrist at the San Diego VA Healthcare System, and senior author of the study. “Our hope is that discovery of genetic defects that cause bipolar disorder will lead to new drugs that can be directed to those specific genes.”

During a year of screening DNA samples from more than 400 families with bipolar disorder, the study’s first author, Thomas B. Barrett, M.D., Ph.D., assistant professor of psychiatry, UCSD and psychiatrist, San Diego VA Healthcare System, determined that there were six mutations in the promoter region of the GRK3 gene. One of these mutations, P-5, occurred three times more frequently in manic-depression patients than in non-afflicted individuals.

About dopamine, from Wikipedia:

Role in Pleasure and Motivation

Dopamine is commonly associated with the ‘pleasure system’ of the brain, providing feelings of enjoyment and reinforcement to motivate us to do, or continue doing, certain activities. Certainly dopamine is released (particularly in areas such as the nucleus accumbens and striatum) by naturally rewarding experiences such as food, sex, use of certain drugs and neutral stimuli that become associated with them. This theory is often discussed in terms of drugs (such as cocaine and amphetamines) which seem to be directly or indirectly related to the increase of dopamine in these areas, and in relation to neurobiological theories of addiction, which argue that these dopamine pathways are pathologically altered in addicted persons. The mechanism of cocaine and amphetamine is different. Cocaine is acting as dopamine transporter blocker to competively inhibit dopamine uptake to increase the lifetime of dopamine, while amphetamine is acting as a dopamine transporter substrate to competively inhibit dopamine uptake and increase the dopamine efflux via dopamine transporter.

However, the idea that dopamine is the ‘reward chemical’ of the brain now seems too simple as more evidence has been gathered. Dopamine is known to be released when unpleasant or aversive stimuli are encountered, suggesting that it is not only associated with ‘rewards’ or pleasure. Also, the firing of dopamine neurons occurs when a pleasurable activity is expected, regardless of whether it actually happens or not. This suggests that dopamine may be involved in desire rather than pleasure. Drugs that are known to reduce dopamine activity (e.g. antipsychotics) have been shown to reduce people’s desire for pleasurable stimuli, despite the fact that they will rate them as just as pleasurable when they actually encounter or consume them. It seems that these drugs reduce the ‘wanting’ but not the ‘liking’, providing more evidence for the desire theory.

Other theories suggest that the crucial role of dopamine may be in predicting pleasurable activity. Related theories argue that dopamine function may be involved in the salience (’noticeableness’) of perceived objects and events, with potentially important stimuli (including rewarding things, but also things which may be dangerous or a threat) appearing more noticeable or more important. This theory argues that dopamine’s role is to assist decision making by influencing the priority of such stimuli to the person concerned.

In my case, I’m totally “normal” (well, most of the time) and functional these days on a wonderful drug called lamictal. I actually had to talk my shrink into prescribing this drug when I first found out about it. Now, everyone I know who is bipolar and on this drug is doing great. It literally stops the roller coaster of emotions and lets you decide how you want to feel instead of being overun by the feelings. I also occassionally take an anti-psychotic to turn off the “endless chatter” loop when the brain really gets going. This is a miserable phase where you just can’t stop thinking about things, and your mind won’t shut up. Usually I turn this off at night when I want to sleep. One of the truly nasty things that happen with bipolars is when your brain decides to keep you awake all night, you don’t get any rest, and you go into this downward spiral and eventually into a place where you’re essentially awake but dreaming - your mind acts as if everything is a dream and interprets things in that weird dream-like state, making strange connections. This is called psychosis, which is why you need to keep an anti-psychotic around if you’re bipolar and turn this off before it happens.

The other thing I use is a mood elevator called Effexor. I only take this when I’m falling into that other downward spiral known as depression, which in my case starts to rear its head as extreme crankiness and a “nothing is right” feeling. When that happens, I use Effexor to lift me back out of the mood. Between the three drugs, I’m now quite stable and in charge of my own mind and emotions.

Hey, I’m one of the lucky ones. I am smart enough and know enough to get a combination that works for me. But balancing this mix is what is so difficult about bipolar. I also generally avoid stress as much as possible in my life, since it is a huge trigger for me. People wonder at how calm I always am, and about the Tao I study, but for me, these things mean survival.

There is a lot of undiagnosed bipolar out there. If you recognize any of these kind of symptoms - an out-of-control desire for something, manic-depressive behavior, and severe emotional swings, get some help, really. You’ll feel so much better!

Pharyngula
The sacred pieties of these “God-centered Jews and Christians” reduce the meaning of a human life to equivalence with a single cell or a mindless near-corpse, and then they bestow on it only that portion of grandeur they can borrow from an imaginary super-being. His irony is a fabrication; humanists don’t regard human life as worthless. Rather, one life in the here and now is all we get, and it is infinitely valuable. Furthermore, we don’t need to boost our fragile self-esteem by deprecating everything else—dolphins are great and beautiful creatures, as are spiders and sea anemones and scrub pines and E. coli. The universe is a wonderful place, huge and complex and diverse and largely independent of my existence, and I am greatly privileged to be one small but precious voice singing in a mighty cosmic choir. Embracing the majesty of existence does not make me a smaller man.

Amen!

Tell you what, Dubya - send Barbara and Jenna right over, if you believe in your damn war so much. They don’t seem to be too busy.

“And to those watching tonight who are considering a military career, there is no higher calling than service in our Armed Forces. We live in freedom because every generation has produced patriots willing to serve a cause greater than themselves. Those who serve today are taking their rightful place among the greatest generations that have worn our Nation’s uniform. When the history of this period is written, the liberation of Afghanistan and the liberation of Iraq will be remembered as great turning points in the story of freedom.” - Dubya, asking for our kids to go to war and not his

Clarence Finley Boulter

No. No. No.
This ruins a child.

Children are one of the most precious aspects of life, and yet they often are mistreated and abused. If you are a parent, your most important task is to raise your child with as little trauma as possible. Firmness, consistency, and patience are essential. There will undoubtedly be times when you have to correct a child to prevent mistakes and bad habits. However, when it comes to a child’s curiosity, individuality, or initiative, there should never be any discouragement. In that sense, it is wrong to say no.

There is a legend about a thief who stole into heaven and took the peaches that gave immortality. He returned to earth and was about to eat them when he chanced upon two little boys. Taken with their intelligence, he asked them riddle after riddle about the deepest meanings of life and they answered with laughing ease. The thief decided to share his peaches with the boys, and they all became immortal.

If the boys had had their curiosity killed early in life, could they have answered well? If a thief could be kind to children, can’t the rest of us be too? And if the children never had an opportunity, could they have become immortals?

Deng Ming Tao, 365 Tao

The one thing I thought about most of all in raising my kids was their curiousity. How to encourage it, not stifle it, and let them develop their own interests and ideas. Needless to say, this turned out very well, and they think well and are very intelligent and rational human beings.

I think most people’s problems in life stem from having their curiousity stifled - by parents, by society, or by simply never getting the chance to follow their own interests intead of someone else’s demands. My kids rarely complained about boredom, and when they did, I always suggested some unpleasant chore in order to encourage themt o go find their own thing to do. This made getting chores done a bit difficult, but they certainly learned to follow their own interests.

I never rescued them from their own actions unless it was an urgent matter. They didn’t get the best grades in school once they were old enough to decided for themselves about homework, but they learned that there were consequences to their actions, including occassionally having to repeat a class. Once they figured that out, they did well enough to avoid the boredom of having to sit through a class all over again!

They think drugs and alcohol are stupid. They are polite and well-mannered, and would never take advantage of anyone. They simply know better, they didn’t have to be told this was the way to behave. So I know that letting people learn and decide things for themselves does work.

Of course there were limits. Kids need to know the limits in order to feel safe and secure. But the limits were always negotiable when they thought they were old enough to handle certain things. They followed the rules, and paid the consequences when they broke them, which was rare.

So now I have two young men who know themselves and are still curious about life and learning and discovering new things. And isn’t that what it’s all about, really?

Ode 314

Those who don’t feel this Love
pulling them like a river,
those who don’t drink dawn
like a cup of spring water
or take in sunset like supper,
those who don’t want to change,

let them sleep.

This Love is beyond the study of theology,
that old trickery and hypocrisy.
If you want to improve your mind that way,

sleep on.

I’ve given up on my brain.
I’ve torn the cloth to shreds
and thrown it away.

If you’re not completely naked,
wrap your beautiful robe of words
around you,

and sleep.

– “Like This” Rumi, Coleman Barks translator, Maypop, 1990

Onanism Today tagged me with this most excellent meme, and as I just got back in from Tucson and am fairly tired with nothing better to do, it seems like something I can handle this evening. I don’t normally do these things, ya know…

Anyway, so here’s the questions:

1. What were three of the stupidest things you have done in your life?

Easy. Lost three of my best friends through various stupid maneuvers. In spite of being a married woman, I fell in love with two of my male friends in separate incidents several years apart, and managed to turn what I felt towards them into an obsession. This of course created many problems with each of them and eventually managed to screw things up so badly neither one would speak to me.

The loss of my best girlfriend was a fallout from one of these stupid love interests, indirectly, but that loss was probably actually the most shattering. Losing a guy from my life I could handle, after all, my husband stood by me through these traumatic episodes, bless him. But the girlfriend, well, girlfriends are special and irreplacable, it seems. I still don’t have another really close female friend in my life even now.

The root of all this drama was undiagnosed bipolar disorder, but it hardly matters to explain such things to the people you’ve hurt and who have hurt you in return. I’ve learned these type of episodes are pretty common in bipolar lives. Sad, but there is a lot of undiagnosed chemical brain disorder out there. I thank goodness for lamictal, which I had to talk my shrink into giving me. I think it’s a wonder drug for bipolar - I have two other bipolar friends who are on it as well, and none of us has any recent episodes. Great stuff.

Anyway, on to :

2. At the current moment, who has the most influence in your life?

That would be my wonderful hubby who has stuck by me through everything. He’s a sweetie…

3. If you were given a time machine that functioned, and you were allowed to only pick up to five people to dine with, who would you pick?

Thomas Jefferson would always be my first choice. My father, who I still miss terribly. Margaret Mead. Rumi. Rainer Maria Rilke.

4. If you had three wishes that were not supernatural, what would they be?

To have a real media and press corps in this country that would do their jobs.

To have a national health care system so no one would have to worry about family members without health care coverage.

To have people in this country be able to openly and honestly discuss real issues without the distortions of those who want to divide us and fill our heads with stupidity.

5. Someone is visiting your hometown/place where you live at the moment. Name two things you regret your city not having, and two things people should avoid.

I regret that San Diego doesn’t have any money and doesn’t have an honest city council headed up by mayor Donna Frye. I regret that our congresscreatures are total scum sucking maggots who care more about their pocketbooks that making sure the National Guard families have health care coverage and that our defense dollars are spent for things that do us some good instead of lining their buddies’ pockets.

People visiting San Diego should avoid moving here and adding to our housing problem. They should avoid Sea World and visit the Wild Animal Park instead. Sea World is a fake show and a farce, the Wild Animal Park is real animals in natural settings. And the lion cub exhibit is amazing.

6. Name one event that has changed your life.

My father’s death. It shattered my life and rearranged all the pieces. Before then, I thought a lot about career and resented being home with my kids. Afterwards, I realized family is the most precious thing in the world. And that means however you define your family, of course. Losing a loved one is always traumatic, but losing my dad meant the world no longer had any solid foundations for me. It took a lot of therapy to get through that. I still get sad this time of year around when he died 11 year ago, and even while I enjoyed visiting with my husband’s family this weekend, I think there was this underlying resentment that his family was still around to enjoy and mine was not. But of course, the traces of my mom and dad are around, in me, in my brother and sister and our children. I pulled out an old picture of my dad and I see the resemblance to my younger son. I look in the mirror and see my mother’s mouth, my father’s eyes. And their memory is always with me. But still, I’ll never have dinner with them again without that darn time machine.

7. Tag 5 people.

Not that they’ll respond, but:

1. kristin, to get her to write somethin’.
2. smoop, so kristin can’t tag her. ;^)
3. mac, because she’s just so cool.
4. jillian, cause she’s snarky.
5. pinko feminist hellcat, cause hellcats are neat.

Off to visit family in Tucson for the weekend…

Heh.

Wine’s pleasure,
Love’s intoxication,
Work’s obsession,
Children’s involvement,
Age’s sorrow.
When will craving end?

Originally there was nothing. It is to nothing that we return. Differentiation came out of the interplay of cosmic opposites. Human life became mired in complexities, and this constant diversity is stressful and disruptive. We ourselves add to the problem with our own lusts and ambitions. We intoxicate ourselves, we indulge in sensual gratification, we strive for success in our careers, we commit decades to the raising of children. All this, only to be caught in the closing jaws of old age, gradually hemmed in until there is no alternative other than sorrows, infirmities, and senility.

Duty is inevitable, but we need not saddle ourselves with extra responsibilities. Keep life simple. Give up as much as possible. Renounce unnecessary cravings and desires. Leave behind the trappings of wealth and success. Turn toward the divine. It satisfies, it brings knowledge, and it brings joy.

Deng Ming Tao, 365 Tao

What avail riches for the practice of religion? — Jainism. Uttaradhyayana Sutra 14.16

Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from
the mouth of God. — Judaism and Christianity. Deuteronomy 8.3, Matthew 4.4

Do not race after riches, do not risk your life for success, or you will
let slip the Heaven within you. — Taoism. Chuang Tzu 29

Busy not yourself with this world, for with fire We test the gold, and
with gold We test Our servants. — Baha’i Faith. Hidden Words of Baha’u'llah, Arabic 54

Anyone who is stingy, is stingy only with his own soul. God is Wealthy
while you are poor. — Islam. Qur’an 47.38

Woe is he… who has gathered riches and counted them over, thinking his
riches have made him immortal! — Islam. Qur’an 104.1-3

No one can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the
other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot
serve God and mammon. — Christianity. Matthew 6.24

When they see merchandise or diversion they scatter off to it, and they
leave you standing. Say, “What is with God is better than diversion and
merchandise. God is the best of providers.” — Islam. Qur’an 62.11

Riches ruin the foolish, but not those in quest of the Beyond. Through
craving for riches the ignorant man ruins himself as he does others. — Buddhism. Dhammapada 355

Many more of these quotes can be found at United Communities of Spirit or World Scripture

Once Hsuan-Sa sat in silence at one of his lectures for a long time and the entire audience left the hall one by one. Hsuan-Sa said, “You are all fools. What a great pity! When I speak, you all gather here and desire to get some sermons which are nonsense, but when I really help you, you all go away.”

Without cause God gave us Being;
without cause, give it back again.
Gambling yourself away is beyond any religion.

Religion seeks grace and favor,
but those who gamble these away are God’s favorites,
for they neither put God to the test
not knock at the door of gain and loss.

Rumi, Mathnawi, 1972-1974, quoted in: Helminski, Kabir (2000). The Rumi Collection. P.163.

And when you get really good at all this, you can renounce renunciation… ;^)

“Light kisses mountain peaks, Where tulips shine.”
— Ghulam Ahmad Mahjoor (1885-1952), Kashmir, India

Econobrowser:

If you talk long enough with someone who’s persuaded that today’s housing market is experiencing a bubble, the topic eventually is likely to turn to alleged precedents like the Dutch tulip mania. Calculated Risk, the Motley Fool and Seeing the Forest are among those whose fancy this past week turned to thoughts of those old Dutch tulips.

Much of the popular understanding of the Dutch tulip mania is derived from Charles Mackay’s delightfully written book, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds , whose first edition appeared in 1841. Nine colorfully narrated pages describe the market for tulips in Holland between 1634 and 1637.
semper.jpg

It was not until 1989, however, that the record of this episode was really set straight by the careful research of Peter Garber published in the Journal of Political Economy. Garber documented that the spectacular tulip prices recounted by Mackay never applied to ordinary tulip bulbs, whose prices, even at the height of the frenzy, were quoted like produce by the half-pound or pound. The extraordinary prices characterized instead a few special lines of tulips that had been infected by a mosaic virus which in some circumstances produced a particular pattern judged to be beautiful, such as the Semper Augustus shown at the right. But if you liked the effect in a particular flower, the only way to reproduce it would be to cultivate a few buds from the original, hoping to have two or three bulbs in the following year with the same qualities.

Unlike the modern notion of a bubble as an asset for which market participants believe the price will continue to rise, Garber claimed that tulip cultivators always understood that the price would eventually fall. As long the price falls by less than 50% each year, if the grower was successfully able to cultivate 2 or 3 new bulbs from the original, he would come out ahead, because paying 100 guilder for 1 bulb and next year selling 3 bulbs for 50 guilder each is a winning proposition. In a rational market, the value of the original bulb should equal the discounted present value of the future net proceeds after cultivation costs of the bulbs that could be uniquely produced from the original. Given a market for flowers that values unusually beautiful flowers at a higher price, such a valuation implies that the initial price could be quite high but quickly fall over time as more bulbs like it become available each year. There could be (and was) an initial period in which the price actually rises, and quickly, as growers discover that this particular kind of flower is the one everybody would like to have. But from there the rational equilibrium is one where everybody understands that the price will fall rather rapidly, and knowledge of this reality does not discourage a buyer from paying the initial high price.

And this is precisely the pattern that Garber found, both through the alleged mania and for the centuries afterward for which more thorough data can be assembled. Garber could find no indication that anyone experienced financial distress as a consequence of the decline in prices of some of the fanciest mosaics in 1637, or that the rate of price decline between 1637 and 1642 was significantly different from that seen for other special lines of tulips or hyacinths developed in the 18th and 19th centuries.

It is true that there evolved in certain Dutch taverns a system for buying and selling the year-ahead crop for more common bulbs in which more ordinary people participated for more ordinary sums, in part emulating what they saw going on with the rare bulbs market and hoping to profit on a more modest scale from the popularity of the flower more generally. The brokers of such deals were paid with what was described as “wine money,” and such agreements were legally stipulated to be nonbinding for the 1637 harvest. Garber concluded that, if there was anything to the idea of a “bubble” in the tulip markets of this time, it applied to these small-time tavern-negotiated agreements. But Mackay’s account would have been far less entertaining had he simply reported the details of these rather modest deals.

And if your next question is, “but what about the Mississippi Scheme or the South-Sea Bubble,” I invite you to take a look at Garber’s examination of these in his paper published in the Journal of Economic Perspectives in 1990.

I do, by the way, agree with Mackay’s principal thesis that our species is prone to believing in something that isn’t true just because we see that those around us seem to accept its veracity. I’m just wondering whether the conviction that there was such a thing as a Dutch tulip mania might not itself be an example of such a popular delusion.

Tulips are one of my former favorite flowers - they simply don’t naturalize in San Diego - even the ones that are supposed to. Pretty weird for a plant that was originally from the Mediterranean.

I think the real problem with our housing situation is that it isn’t natural - we aren’t supposed to be using our homes as leverage to buy stuff we don’t really need. It’s this that will cause the eventual fall, not the speculation.

Americans simply have too much, live in houses that are too large, drive cars that are too big, and spend money we don’t have. It will all catch up to us eventually. Eat too much and you will have health problems, live in too large a house and you can’t clean it without live-in maid service, drive too big a car and you won’t be able to afford gas for it (and probably can’t park it, either…). Spend money you don’t have and eventually you will go broke, or have nothing to leave to your kids.

We will learn these lessons again the hard way, unfortunately. Those who have ears, let them hear….

Summer Solstice at the ancient observatory of Stonehenge.

Chinese astronomers determine the summer solstice

Solstice comes from the Latin (sol, sun; sistit, stands). For several days before and after each solstice, the sun appears to stand still in the sky—that is, its noontime elevation does not seem to change.

When the true light appears,
The entire planet turns to face it.

The summer solstice is the time of greatest light. It is a day of enormous power. The whole planet is turned fully to the brilliance of the sun.

This great culmination is not static or permanent. Indeed, solstice as a time of culmination is only a barely perceptible point. The sun appears to stand still. Its diurnal motion seems to nearly cease. Yesterday, it was still reaching this point; tomorrow, it will begin a new phase of its cycle.

Those who follow Tao celebrate this day to remind themselves of the cycles of existence. They remember that all cycles have a left and a right, an up side and a down side, a zenith and a nadir. Today, day far surpasses night, and yet night will gradually begin to reassert itself. All of life is cycles. All of life is balance.

So celebrate, but be not proud. For whenever you celebrate high achievement, the antithesis is also approaching. Likewise, in misfortune, be not sad. For whenever you mourn in grief, the antithesis is also approaching. Those who know how to reach the peak of any cycle and remain glorious are the wisest of all.

Deng Ming Tao, 365 Tao

I haven’t been doing my Tao posts much the last few days. Partly it’s being busy, partly it’s because the book passages were about altars and shrines and things that I’m just not interested in. If I have any altar or shrine or church, I suppose it is my garden, where I feel closest to the Tao. But Tao is everywhere, so what is really the point in a shrine or altar except to focus yourself, and I can do that without those things. I suppose the daily meditation would help in a way, but it would also tend to make me feel as if it were something I had to do, which is a feeling I absolutely hate. I am very much a cat, and I resent just about anything I have to do.

So, solstice. I would love to have a solstice celebration, but don’t think that will happen this time around. My husband was out of town this weekend and next weekend we’re off to visit his sister and her husband in Tucson and drop off the youngest for an extended visit. My in-laws will be there as well, so it’s a bit of a family reunion, which will be nice.

San Diego is being totally gorgeous for the solstice - warm and sunny, with a nice breeze and 79 degrees at the moment. It’s really a beautiful day.

Thanks to my cartoonist friend, John Pierce!

And in today’s LA Times:

Duke’s Home Boy
Would you hand $40 million to one of the few people who was able to lose money — big money — in the recent Southern California real estate market?

You did. MZM Inc. received that much in U.S. defense contracts in 2003, the same year that the company’s president and chief executive bought a house in the San Diego area for $1,675,000. The seller was Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham (R-San Diego), a member of the House Appropriations subcommittee on defense who has supported MZM’s bid for contracts.

MZM chief Mitchell Wade put the house on the market within a month and sold it for $975,000, a $700,000 loss in a housing market that bubbles up by the month.

Democrats contend that Wade paid an inflated price for the house to gain Cunningham’s favor. He reportedly bought it sight unseen, using neighborhood comparisons in the Del Mar Heights area.

Questions about the deal abound. Why did a Washington-based businessman want a house in San Diego when he apparently doesn’t go there often enough to even look at the house first? If he wanted it, why did he put it on the market right away? Why did he sell it at such a low price? Is Wade simply inept with money?

Also unclear is why Cunningham is living on Wade’s yacht docked on the Potomac River and whether he is paying market-rate rent, as he claims. Even if he is, this smacks of the kind of coziness that makes taxpayers shudder.

The FBI is reportedly investigating the house sale. Good thing, because there is no longer a functional House Ethics Committee to look into such matters. Republicans, vexed by reprimands of House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Texas), gutted the committee’s membership and weakened its rules.

Whatever the probe of the home sale finds, a question remains, this one for the Appropriations subcommittee: If, under the most propitious market conditions, Wade can turn $1.68 million into $975,000, what could he do with $40 million in defense contracts?

Simple patience - it fixes so many things. Reminds me of that old quote, “Grant me patience, Lord…. but hurry!”

How many times do we make things even worse simply because we lack the patience to wait for nature to have the time it needs to repair things?

GOV. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s call for a special election has plunged California into what promises to be a four-month frenzy of political posturing and 30-second television spots.

The subtext of this election is all about power: Can the governor seize a significant chunk of budget-writing authority from the Legislature? Can he peel away the influence of public-employee unions? Can he take away the ability of legislators to draw their own district boundaries?

What the election over these particular ballot measures will not promote is a discussion of the daunting challenges facing this state in the next two decades.

By 2025, California is projected to add between 7 million and 11 million new residents — a population roughly the size of Ohio’s, according to a new report by the Public Policy Institute of California. The PPIC study tapped some of the state’s leading researchers to identify and analyze the state’s biggest challenges in an attempt to draw a sharper public focus on them.

The tone of the nearly 300-page report was decidedly nonalarmist. It suggested the nation’s largest state could continue to grow and prosper — but it would take strong leadership to address myriad complications related to the pressures of local growth and a rapidly evolving global economy. The report described how the state might have to change its approach education, transportation, water and the basic structure of public funding in order to support a vibrant economy.

It also suggested that policy-makers would have to transcend short-term political considerations to engage in more long-term planning.

Perhaps most striking was the comparison between the type of leadership the PPIC envisioned as the critical element to guiding the state at such turning points — “to forge consensus and to prod key interests to negotiate so that public investments can move forward” — and the current polarization in Sacramento.

If anything, the special election appears to be aggravating the partisan tensions in California. It was discouraging to see Republican Schwarzenegger open the campaign with a cheap scare tactic: warning homeowners that Democrats and union leaders would undermine Proposition 13 if he did not prevail.

The fact is, top elected officials in both major parties are unwilling to have a serious talk about the unintended consequences of Prop. 13 for fear of being slammed with the type of demagoguery Schwarzenegger employed last week.

As the PPIC report noted, Prop. 13, approved by voters in 1978, has become a disincentive for local governments to approve new housing, because the additional property-tax revenue would not come close to covering the cost of the required infrastructure and services. Also, the extension of Prop. 13 limits to corporate property was not anticipated by most voters in 1978.

A state whose future ability to attract and retain workers is being hamstrung by a housing shortage — resulting in stratospheric housing prices — must be willing to discuss how its tax structure may be contributing to the problem. There are many potential ways to modify Prop. 13 while buffering homeowners from the sharp tax spikes that produced a revolt that brought the 1978 initiative and a succession of other initiatives that have constrained local and state governments’ ability to raise revenue to meet basic needs.

The PPIC report suggested that governments need to be more efficient and adaptive, but, even so, it pointed out that the state may have to spend more money on education to calibrate its workforce for the changing economy. It noted that higher education has been hit by the lean times and that “funding cuts have been hardest on the least-prepared students” at community colleges, who “tend to be first-generation, low-income and minority.”

As the report emphasized, concern about the inequities along demographic lines in this state is not a matter of idealism or benevolence: It is a strategic imperative for a state that hopes to remain competitive two decades from now. Latinos will become the state’s largest ethnic group by 2011, yet they remain greatly underrepresented in the state’s colleges and universities. An increasingly service-oriented economy will require a college-educated workforce to fill the available jobs…..

We can’t continue in the divisive way we have been - there has to be an effort to look at the real issues we are facing - not “gay marriage”, not ” people using medical marijuana”, not “the cross on the hill”, etc. Hey, people - we have IMPORTANT stuff to deal with - jobs, housing, making a living and having a decent lifestyle. WAKE UP - and stop fighting about the trivial stuff, or your job will be overseas, your SUV will be undrivable because you can’t afford the gas, and there will be squatters in your pool house because they can’t find a place to live.

Start sharing, you rich folk, or be forced to. And yeah, I’m one of you, so there. I don’t mind higher taxes to have decent schools and great universities and a summer job for my kid, instead of having people trying to support families on three minimum wage jobs. Let’s start making this a country we ALL can enjoy, instead of a national Country Club.

Pharyngula::Planet of the Hats
Planet of the Hats

I know you will not believe me, but I swear it’s true: I’m not of this earth. I fled here years ago because my home planet was driving me crazy. Let me explain.

My home world is very much like this one. It’s populated by billions of bipedal primates, who are just like people here: sometimes foolish, sometimes wise, sometimes hateful, sometimes generous. They are grouped into cities and nations, and sometimes they have wars, and sometimes they cooperate. You really would have a hard time telling our two planets apart, except for one thing.

The hats….

Went out and walked a precinct today for Donna Frye, for the July 26th special election in San Diego for mayor. I think she’s the only shot at cleaning out the financial problems and corruption in the city’s budget and pension fund. Got to meet Donna at a luncheon afterwords, and also Francine Busby

and the candidate who is challenging Duncan Hunter,Jim Hester, (web site should be up in the next week or two). So it was an interesting morning. I hadn’t ever done anything with politics before this year, so it’s all a learning experience for me.

For anyone who is unhappy with the way things are, you need to get out there and volunteer. The one thing that is really needed most of all is the boots on the ground, the face-to-face contact. We talked with many people who were undecided voters, and they needed to know about the candidates. We talked with Republicans sick of Republican corruption who were happily supporting Donna Frye. The mayor’s race is non-partisan, but she is endorsed by the Democratic party. We talked with people who were new to the area and didn’t understand the issues. The Republicans have professional paid staffers to do this - the Democrats don’t, and need volunteers. If you have any time at all to get out there and make a difference, please do it.

I think the Dems have to start fighting Republican issues with this phrase. The Republicans have prided themselves on being “on the right” — it’s time to fight that image. Dems can’t be “left” anymore - they have to become the party that is right.

So my idea is that Dems always use the phrase “It’s not right” when talking about problems created by the Republican party and their hypocrisy. It’s not right that Cunningham takes what are basically bribes from someone whose company benefits from his House committee. It’s not right that Republicans try to intervene in the personal case of a brain-dead woman and her husband. It’s not right that Republicans refuse to give John Conyers an appropriate forum to hold his meeting on the Downing Street memo. Etc, etc…

It also sets any issue up perfectly for the turnaround to the Dem position. It’s not right that people should be worried about being able to survive in their retirement years — that’s why Dems support Social Security as it is, without benefits cuts or gambling money in personal accounts (isn’t that what IRAs are for, anyway?). In fact, let’s make it stronger by adding national healthcare, so that people of all ages in America can live without fear of being impoverished by disability or not being able to afford care for their families….

The current Republican leadership is taking America down a dark path by not offering a national healthcare program and promoting energy conservation - the economy is going to hell, with record debt at all levels of government, personal debt, and corporate debt. They say “deficits don’t matter”, but I think it’s just their excuse to steal as much as they can from the rest of us, while they can. It’s not right.

Republicans - they’re not right.