I am getting old (57) and I have seen better times.  Not in terms of my own finances, because truthfully I am about as prosperous as I've ever been, which is comfortably middle-class.  I have been poor and this is better.  Or in terms of my own mental health; I have been terminally depressed, and this is better.  But in terms of the rest of the world, our own nation, I have seen things slide down hill.  Of course, the global economy, not just our own, is in sorry shape, the dollar is depreciating, oil prices are going to the moon, inflation is rampant, there is turmoil in the Middle East.  Still, having lived through the seventies, I feel like this is deja-vu all over again.  We can survive this.

Other things are not so easy to fix.  And I don't mean that flippantly.

I come from a very Republican family.  How Republican was it?  Well, one grandfather was a Bircher, who subscribed to The Plain Truth and seriously argued that Dwight Eisenhower (even though a Republican) was secretly a communist.  When I came out against the Vietnam War, he told me in front of all the family that I should be put up against a wall and shot.  My other grandfather was an oil man and true to his class.  I once told him that I favored a girl of Japanese extraction.  He told me that if I married her, she and my kids would have to eat in the garage when we came to visit.  We're talking extremophiles like you rarely see any more.

My father was also in the oil business.  My brother was a corporate lawyer for Texaco.  My stepfather was vice president in charge of legal affairs for Getty Oil.  As a kid, before my father started drinking, I won swimming tournaments at the country club in Dallas.  We're talking very, very Republican.

The times they are a-changin', however.

This is the diary that asks--"Is there no argument so ridiculous that somebody somewhere won't buy it?  I offer the following statement from Debra Hananian-Freeman:

"...unless Sen. Hillary Clinton continues her campaign for the Democratic nomination until the Party's convention, there is no presently visible chance that the U.S. will come out of the presently skyrocketting hyperinflationary crisis in any form easily recognized as being, still, our Constitutional republic. The attempt by the powerful, and also predatory financier groups which have sought to crush Senator Clinton, as they had attempted to destroy the nomination of President Franklin Roosevelt in Hoover's favor in 1932, has the smell of a serious attempt at fascist dictatorship all over it."

Follow me over the fold for more Sunday morning silliness.

I am moved to write this, I guess, by the passing of Dr. Hofmann, the father of LSD.  I am what an anthropologist of the '60s might call a hippie.  I wore my hair long.  I spent the last two years of high school, which I graduated in 1969, stoned out of my mind a good deal of the time.  I had several pairs of bell-bottoms, not the kind that you buy in the store, but the kind where you bought Levis from the Army/Navy store, and made a big slice around the ankle, and then sewed in some kind of bandanna.

I want to tell you that hippies are not what you think...

How bitter are you?  Enquiring minds, as well as the LA Times want to know. You can Freep this poll
to let everyone know just how down on everything you are.

Money.  First question:  What is it?  Well so to begin with, we traded STUFF, we had stuff, they had stuff, we wanted some of their stuff, they wanted some of our stuff.  So it was a barter deal--a little bit of monkey meat for some fish, a ceramic bowl for a bracelet, a shrunken head for some dessicated testicles of some champion opponent, a macho man who fell to the lances of somebody younger and stronger.

Well, there was a problem of exchange:  Is a shrunken head equal to a pair of testicles--what if you only had one testicle?  Where you gonna get half of a shrunken head?

You need a mode of exchange, some kind of money. Preferably, something that is infinitely divisible.  Like an ounce of gold or something else.

Well after Jack Kerouac no. 1, which didn't go over too well, I thought I would try another when I was sober, but what fun is that?  So here I go with no. 2.  The first thing on my mind is Hillary; why is she still in the race?  Because I'm  pretty sure Hillary can add and subtract, maybe even multiply and divide.  Hillary is only a couple of years older than me, I can still do all that stuff.  We're better at it, we old people, then you young whippersnappers, because when I went to college, electronic calculators weren't available.  You could get one, but it weighed about thirty pounds and had tubes and cost a whole lot.  We had slide-rules, which are now museum pieces.

O.K., the way I heard it is that Jack Kerouac just wrote his stuff stream of consciousness and never edited it.  Maybe that's true (well, I don't know, I just backed up to put in the apostrophe on "that's true", does that count as editing), I don't know.  Well, anyway Jack's buddy in on the road was Neil Cassady, who is called something else in the novel, but was called Neil Cassady in Tom Wolfe's classic, "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test" (I had to google the title, but Kerouac never googled anything), but I read a lot of Kerouac's stuff, growing up in the sixties.  And so now I want to talk about the campaign that we got going on, not in a hipster sort of style, because that's gone, but in a new sort of style, because this is the 21st century after all...

"No doubt there is a CHANGE coming in our American future...B. Hussein Obama wants to show us how to meet and greet Muslims for a better understanding of each other."  This is the assertion of one Pete Doughtie, columnist for the Rutherford County TN version The ReadeR, a free newspaper featuring reviews and concert listings, etc., that is distributed all over Tennessee with varying local content.  

Mr. Doughtie doesn't believe that achieving a better understanding of Muslims is a good idea.

May the coming year be a year full of peace.  May we love each other a little more than we did last year.  May we think a little more for the future, because ya know, if we keep it up, just the way we have, for the last couple of thousand years, the world as we know it is gonna turn to shit, the way we have never seen it before.

Honestly now,

We are spending money, your tax money, to kill people that don't need killing.
We are spending money, your tax money, to support vast corporate empires that don't need support.
We are spending money, your tax money, to support a system that is killing the Earth, the planet that we all depend on for our sustenance, the air we breath.
This is wrong, but even worse, it is stupid.  Really stupid.  We must change.  The essence of evolution is change to fit changing environments.  We, the human race, the most subtle of God's creatures, have been slow to change.  We are at risk of becoming dinosaurs.

Stay with me now...

I am going to use one of my rare diaries to pimp something that just showed up in my mailbox.

Upcoming, Nov. 2-5th is a large conference and "youth summit" on global warming.  God knows that there's lots of crap out there that needs fixing--the war in Iraq, our broken government, the Democratic party--and lots of disagreements about what the best stategy is to follow.  But almost everybody on this site agrees that we don't want the planet to fry and that so far almost nothing is being done by our appointed "leaders" to keep it from happening.  It seems that its up to us.  Follow after the break to find a place to start:

Stop me if you've heard this one before.  Bush Administration accuses sovereign nation of supporting terrorists.  Bush Administration invades said country.

Get ready.

The United States has decided to designate Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps, the country's 125,000-strong elite military branch, as a "specially designated global terrorist," US officials tell Robin Wright for Wednesday editions of the Washington Post.

The move "allows Washington to target the group's business operations and finances."

According to Wright, the Bush administration has opted to up the ante with Iran citing its "growing involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan and "its support for extremists throughout the Middle East. The decision follows congressional pressure on the administration to toughen its stance against Tehran, as well as U.S. frustration with the ineffectiveness of U.N. resolutions against Iran's nuclear program, officials said."

 

From AFP via Rawstory:

Israeli commandos disguised as Palestinians killed an Islamic Jihad commander and two militants in Jenin on Wednesday in a new crackdown in the north of the occupied West Bank.

This just pisses me off.  Israeli "commandos" disguise themselves, enter a foreign country, and carry out an assassination attempt.  When Israelis murder Palestinians, they are called "commandos", when Palestinans kill Israelis, they are called "terrorists.

Yesterday, I wrote a diary (http://www.dailykos.com/...) about the suppression of my First Amendment rights by the Harold Ford campaign and the Nashville police (the diary made the Recommended List).  Some of those that commented thought I was an asshole for making an issue out of it.  Others saw it as a sign of Ford's latent fascism.    Either way, I still support Ford, and I've already cast my vote.  My reasons are enumerated below.

Incidentally, yesterday I posted the sign that prompted the whole incident in front of my house in rural Rutherford County.  By this morning it was shredded by one of my neighbors.  So we still have a lot of work to do in Tennessee.  

I went to a rally today for Ford in Nashville at the old Courthouse Square.   As I walked in I met for the first time fellow Kossack wild-hair.  I proudly showed him the sign I had made.  On the front it said:  HAD ENOUGH--  LIARS, CROOK$, PEDOPHILES, HYPOCRITES, and WARMONGERS?  THEN VOTE DEMOCRATIC 2006.  On the back I wrote:  READ MY FRICKIN' SIGN kos, FORD IS GONNA WIN.  Wild-hair had his own sign, a Ford campaign sign he had taken from his front yard.  

As we were walking up the steps, a cop stopped me and said, "You can't take that sign in."  (read through the break for the rest of the story)

MSNBC is broadcasting pictures of Israeli troops massing at the border in preparation for an invasion of Lebanon.  I really didn't think this would happen. Israel has called up its military reserves.  Stock market tanking again on this news.  

Condi on the way to the region on Sunday.  Would she go if there wasn't some prospect for a break in the situation?

Meanwhile, G8 countries getting all their citizens out of Lebanon, with Israel giving them a window to do so.

Is the world stressing you out?  World War III getting underway in the Middle East; the stock market tanking; your president undermining the Constitution; the budget deficit growing; civil war in Iraq with the U.S. caught between Shiites and Sunnis; the temperatures soaring as global warming takes hold; etc and so on.  These are the times that try men's souls.

But hey, we've had tough times before.  I lived through the Sixties, and I still remember some of it (mostly in acid flashbacks).  We had the war in Vietnam, students getting clubbed and killed, Tricky Dick and his third-rate burglars and his enemy list.  Back then we had a way of coping that kept us serene when all hell was breaking out around us.  Follow me past the break and I'll show you how to keep your head, while those about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you.

"Like an elephant was standing on my chest!" said my sister in law.  That's how she described her recent heart attack.  In other words, not subtle.  Something really obviously, terribly wrong.  Did she or her significant other call an ambulance, which would have brought medical attention to her as fast as possible?  Well, no, that was too expensive.  When you don't have medical insurance, you think about these things.  Instead, they climbed in their old pick-up and headed for the Emergency Room...