Ukiah Peace Vigil

We held a Peace Vigil in town today. There was a pretty good turnout. I counted over a hundred people. Not bad for a small town.

I took some pictures. Here's a handful. (click on pic to see full size) The full set is viewable at Flickr.

all photos ® olduncledave.com fair use policy - free for people, corporations must pay. :-)

Orwell on Eternal War

Excerpted from George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four

The primary aim of modern warfare … is to use up the products of the machine without raising the general standard of living. … From the moment when the machine first made its appearance it was clear to all thinking people that the need for human drudgery, and therefore to a great extent for human inequality, had disappeared. If the machine were used deliberately for that end, hunger, overwork, dirt, illiteracy, and disease could be eliminated within a few generations. …

But it was also clear that an all-round increase in wealth threatened the destruction -- indeed, in some sense was the destruction -- of a hierarchical society. In a world in which everyone worked short hours, had enough to eat, lived in a house with a bathroom and a refrigerator, and possessed a motor-car or even an aeroplane, the most obvious and perhaps the most important form of inequality would already have disappeared. If it once became general, wealth would confer no distinction. It was possible, no doubt, to imagine a society in which wealth, in the sense of personal possessions and luxuries, should be evenly distributed, while power remained in the hands of a small privileged caste. But in practice such a society could not long remain stable. For if leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of human beings who are normally stupefied by poverty would become literate and would learn to think for themselves; and when once they had done this, they would sooner or later realize that the privileged minority had no function, and they would sweep it away. In the long run, a hierarchical society was only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance. …

The problem was how to keep the wheels of industry turning without increasing the real wealth of the world. Goods must be produced, but they must not be distributed. And in practice the only way of achieving this was by continuous warfare.

The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labour. War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent. Even when weapons of war are not actually destroyed, their manufacture is still a convenient way of expending labour power without producing anything that can be consumed. A Floating Fortress, for example, has locked up in it the labour that would build several hundred cargo-ships. Ultimately it is scrapped as obsolete, never having brought any material benefit to anybody, and with further enormous labours another Floating Fortress is built. In principle the war effort is always so planned as to eat up any surplus that might exist after meeting the bare needs of the population. In practice the needs of the population are always underestimated, with the result that there is a chronic shortage of half the necessities of life; but this is looked on as an advantage. It is deliberate policy to keep even the favoured groups somewhere near the brink of hardship, because a general state of scarcity increases the importance of small privileges and thus magnifies the distinction between one group and another.
…
War, it will be seen, accomplishes the necessary destruction, but accomplishes it in a psychologically acceptable way. In principle it would be quite simple to waste the surplus labour of the world by building temples and pyramids, by digging holes and filling them up again, or even by producing vast quantities of goods and then setting fire to them. But this would provide only the economic and not the emotional basis for a hierarchical society. What is concerned here is not the morale of masses, whose attitude is unimportant so long as they are kept steadily at work, but the morale of the Party itself. Even the humblest Party member is expected to be competent, industrious, and even intelligent within narrow limits, but it is also necessary that he should be a credulous and ignorant fanatic whose prevailing moods are fear, hatred, adulation, and orgiastic triumph. [sounds like a job requirement at Fox News! -oud] In other words it is necessary that he should have the mentality appropriate to a state of war. It does not matter whether the war is actually happening, and, since no decisive victory is possible, it does not matter whether the war is going well or badly. All that is needed is that a state of war should exist.
---
Did ol' George nail it or what?

In Memorium

Arthur C. Clarke
Dec 6, 1917 - Mar 18, 2008
R. I. P.

Clarke's Three Laws:

1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.

3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
from: Profiles of the Future (1962)

Everybody Sing Along!

For more great political and cultural song parodies, visit their website versusplus.com.

The Bush Memorial

(click here to view)

John Sherffius Mar 12, 2008 EditorialCartoonists.com

Eat Gamma Ray Death, Earthlings!

A beautiful pinwheel in space might one day blast Earth with death rays, scientists now report.

"I used to appreciate this spiral just for its beautiful form, but now I can't help a twinge of feeling that it is uncannily like looking down a rifle barrel," said researcher Peter Tuthill, an astronomer at the University of Sydney.
(From: space.com)

Since it is 8,000 light years away, that pic is of the stars as they were 8,000 years ago. The supernova could have happened already and we won't know it until we're zapped.

Sleep well.

Nobody Expected The Amerikan Inquisition

An AP report says Bush will veto legislation to ban the CIA from using torture.

John 11:35

Another Crime Discovered? -- Crank Up The Fear!

Action: Court order sought in e-mail controversy
WASHINGTON (AP)- A private group told a federal court Thursday the Bush administration made apparently false and misleading statements in court about the White House e-mail controversy.

Reaction: Commander warns of al-Qaida threat to US
WASHINGTON (AP)- Al-Qaida terrorists may be plotting more urgently to attack the United States to maintain their credibility and ability to recruit followers, the U.S. military commander in charge of domestic defense said Thursday.


Also on Thursday, Bush gave a speech that could have come from a two minute hate, "...the danger to our country has not passed. Since the attacks of 9/11, the terrorists have tried to strike our homeland again and again. We've disrupted numerous planned attacks — including a plot to fly an airplane into the tallest building on the West Coast and another to blow up passenger jets headed for America across the Atlantic Ocean."



Every nation has the government it deserves.
--Joseph de Maistre

And the Lord said unto Moses, "Faaar Out!"

"Was Moses high on psychedelic drugs?" - Syndey Morning Herald
"Moses was tripping at Mount Sinai" - Haaretz

Benny Shanon, a psychology professor in Jerusalem has published a new theory which makes the case Moses and the Israelites took hallucinogens.

At long last we know why they wandered around for forty years!

Save the Wolves

The Bush administration has just eliminated federal protections for hundreds of endangered wolves in Greater Yellowstone and the Northern Rockies.

This decision leaves wolves in Greater Yellowstone and the Northern Rockies at the mercy of outrageous state management plans that allow for the killing of as many as 1,200 wolves - 70% of all the region's wild wolves!

Idaho officials want to use aerial gunning to kill wolves in their state. Wyoming agencies have left the door open to the use of traps and poison to eliminate wolves. And officials in both states - and Montana - have proposed wolf hunts.

That's not responsible wildlife management. It's a recipe for disaster.

Sign the petition here, then forward to your friends.