Excerpt From My Book

I'm thinking of writing a little self-help book on exercise and fitness for lazy people. Here's what I have come up with thus far:

In 2007 I lost 40 pounds and went from a size 40 waist to a size 34. My resting heart rate is in the upper 50s, my blood pressure is well within normal limits and my cholesterol is also normal. I will be turning 40 years old next week. Contrast this with my physical condition a year ago-constant pain in the knees and feet, borderline high blood pressure and out of control eating habits. How did I manage to achieve this miracle of self transformation? In a word, running. I have always been a runner, but as of a year ago my routine had dwindled to a paltry 12 miles per week and I shuffled through my 3 milers at a pace in excess of 12 minutes per mile. Back in the 1990s I was much more serious about getting my miles in and consequently I was in far better shape. Then came three years of law school followed by another six years in the stressful yet sedentary position of a trial lawyer. This perfect storm of stress and lack of movement wrecked havoc on my health and caused me to regain the 50 pounds that I had lost way back in 1993.

When my wife Becky died last January I knew I was going to have to embrace something other than a bottle of cabernet to get me through the tough times. What I decided to do was get back into my life and back out on the road. I also adopted a largely vegetarian diet and started counting calories. Not obsessively, but I engaged in what can best be described as “conscious eating”. I considered everything that I was going to put into my mouth very carefully and I simply wouldn’t eat something unless I knew what it’s effect on my weight loss goals was likely to be. By mid February I was up to 20 miles per week. By mid-march 25-30. My speed began to increase as the weight came off. For rapid results there is nothing like running on a treadmill because you know exactly how far you are going at what pace and in what amount of time. This helps you maximize the benefit you receive from the time spent training, an important factor if you train on your lunch hour like I did. The additional benefit from running on your lunch hour is that you have less time to eat lunch. Rather than wander around lower Manhattan stuffing my face with whatever ethnic cuisine struck my fancy, I was grinding out 5 miles on the treadmill at Gold’s gym, listening to music and sweating out the morning’s aggression. Far from tiring me out, the daily runs energized me and kick-started my afternoons they way no cup of coffee ever could.

Are treadmills boring? They sure are. I was lucky enough to find a gym whose machines looked down from their perch on the second floor over a lively scene on John Street in downtown NYC. Watching people scurry about their business on their lunch hours provided hours of amusement. I also for the first time started running to music. My I-pod was a constant companion and turned potentially boring slogs into something akin to dancing at a Dead show.

People who know me are generally surprised that I have anything approaching the discipline needed to actualize a weight-loss routine. The big secret is that it hardly takes any discipline at all and you don’t have to turn into a teetotaling monk to see great results. I still drink too much red wine and smoke an occasional cigarette, but I have reordered my priorities to put my weight loss goals first. If I run 30 miles in a week, I have absolutely no problem going out on Saturday night and painting the town red. After all, I earned it.

Quote of the Day

Revolution is about consciousness, about rebelling against one's own state conditioned consciousness in favor of the unique one bequeathed us by the very evolutionary process that gave us the killer ape gene, which has proven so handy a tool in the hands of the state.
-Joe Bageant

Ho, Ho, Holy Crap Another Year Has Flown By

These are the dog days of the holiday season. The no-mans land between Christmas and New Years that nobody really knows what to do with. I’m at work, but not working. I imagine this is the case for almost everyone except teachers, college students and those unfortunate workers who can’t carry over their vacation time into next year. I suppose now is as good a time as any to start contemplating New Years resolutions. For the last several years I’ve tried to pick some sort of challenge to make sure I end the year better than I began it. For obvious reasons I took last year off, although Jack certainly challenged me in ways I couldn’t have expected last January 1. Many thanks little buddy; I learned a lot about life from you this past year.

The two years prior were consumed with getting scuba certified and continuing my scuba diving and training and even this past year with all the insanity I managed to lose 40 pounds and pick up my running to a point where I have started to really enjoy it again. So what to do in 2008? I have been thinking of a number of activities from getting a pilot’s license to going for a walk up Mt. Fuji in Japan, but nothing has really struck me as THE thing to do. I suppose the decision is weightier since I will be turning 40 next week, although I don’t ascribe much meaning to the passage of time. I really have no control over it so why bother. Maybe Great White shark diving? That would be interesting. Perhaps I’ll clean up my diet and run another marathon-it’s been 10 years since the last one-but I hate to chain Jack into a baby-jogger for 15 mile runs on Sunday mornings. The possibilities are really endless.

I think I will settle on a few rather pedestrian goals-eat a good vegetarian diet, run a ½ marathon in the spring, and plan on taking one killer trip this year to do something spectacular. I’ll let you all know what I’m thinking later in the week. I hope everyone had a nice Christmas.

Happy Holidays

Ethanol

The Patriot wishes all of his regular and not so regular readers a happy holiday season. I regret that posts have been few and far between lately, but I have been getting acclimated to a new job which leaves little time for bitching and moaning about the state of the union. Yet there is always something to bitch about, isn’t there? Some statistics: Every year, Americans travel some 3 trillion vehicle miles. We consume about 140 billion gallons of gasoline along with 40 billion gallons of diesel. Even the most die hard willfully ignorant among us can’t imagine that the earth has the ability to withstand a rate of oil consumption like that for very long, not to mention the effects on the environment of burning all of that crap. The government’s response to the impending disasters posed by a dwindling fuel supply and global warming was to pass an energy bill that raises the fuel-efficiency standard for new auto fleets to 35 mpg by 2020, a 40 percent increase from today's 25 mpg. To this I have no objection, but the bill also relies much too strongly on ethanol as the fuel of the future. As Salon reports in an article on the energy bill, “Biofuels from most food crops or from newly deforested lands do not provide a significant net decrease in greenhouse gas emissions -- and some may cause a net increase. Most life-cycle analyses show that corn ethanol has little or no net greenhouse gas benefit compared with gasoline because so much energy is consumed to grow and process the corn.” Moreover, even when the United States attempts to solve it’s own energy problem it ends up screwing over someone else. The Economist points out the amazing statistic that "the demands of America's ethanol program alone account for over half the world's unmet need for cereals."

So with all the reasons not to use ethanol, why does the bill mandate that the U.S. increase the use of renewable fuels to 36 billion gallons by 2022, of which 15 billion can be corn-based ethanol? The easy answer is that we got sidetracked on our way to discovering how to efficiently extract from cellulosic sources, such as crop waste and switchgrass. Unfortunately for all the havoc our current biofuel use is having on national and global food prices, ethanol use must, by law, increase to 7.5 billion gallons by 2012, a jump of some 50 percent from current levels.

I am sure there is a hidden nefarious reason why the administration is pushing this. I’ll do a little more digging and report back what I find.

Let It Snow, Etc.

Consuming season is in full effect here in the New York area. The Patriot and his money took advantage of the overhyped ice storm and made a trip to the Satan Island Mall yesterday. Despite living on Staten Island for three years, I never did any Christmas shopping here before this year. It was easier to drift out of my office building down by the Seaport and get whatever I needed without leaving Manhattan, often without leaving a ten block radius of where I worked. Working in the Meadowlands offers few shopping options other than the Walmart at exit 15W and the outlet mall at 13A. I was in no mood yesterday to do battle with half the suburban rabble in the Garden State so I headed back to the Island thinking, correctly as it turned out, that most folks were sitting home glued to their televisions thinking that they were in the middle of bad storm when in reality the weather was pretty benign. I think it borders on the criminal the way weathermen scream disaster any time there is the potential for a little of the white stuff, but yesterday the masses collective ignorance worked to my advantage. I was in and out of the mall in an hour, fists full of gift cards and tinsel.

I must confess, getting into the holiday spirit is difficult for me even in a normal year, and this year has been anything but normal. Becky was typically a whirlwind of activity around Christmas and while I have tried to recreate the frenetic holiday atmosphere, my heart just ain’t in it. Her absence is keenly felt. But, as they say, the show must go on. Jack is certainly aware that there is something different about this time of year, if only because he has had the opportunity to enjoy spending several hours of quality time yanking strings of lights off the Christmas tree, opening presents and wearing funny hats. He seems to understand that this season is about taking the time to relax and celebrate the things we have, remember the things we’ve lost, and not take ourselves too seriously. I know exactly how he feels.

Technology, Etc.

When I arrived at work this morning there was a sign on the door informing the employees that the computer network was down for the indefinite future due to a malfunctioning air conditioning system in the server room. Without access to the various insurance related programs and, of course, the internet, some 200 people sitting in an office park in the middle of the Meadowlands have nothing to do. I work in a paperless office, so there aren’t even any files to review. The only thing that does work is Microsoft Word which is how I am able to type up this blog entry. I will have to wait until the computers are back up to post it.

I got my first office job in 1984, filing medical reports into claim files in a dank basement office in Long Island. There were no computers, and the hottest technology at the time was an early prototype fax machine that used the shiny rolls of ultra thin paper. The copier jammed every third use (well some things never change) and the phone system was state of the art with two lines and a hold button. It’s a wonder anything ever got done.

The most interesting thing to me about the ascension of the PC as the indispensable tool of the office is that there was very little associated rise in productivity. In 1987, Nobel laureate Robert Solow famously observed: “You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.” Despite massive investment in IT infrastructure, productivity growth was nonexistent. At the time, this was known as the “Productivity Paradox.” Economists have also made a more controversial charge against the utility of computers: that they pale as a source of productivity advantage when compared to the true industrial revolution, or the invention of the automobile.

While the slow growth in productivity accelerated somewhat at the dawn of the 21st century, it hasn’t reached levels one would expect. Some experts partly attribute this to the integration of the internet into work desktops; thereby giving employees easy access to entertainment they wouldn’t have had a few years ago.

My interest in workplace productivity issues is now completely spent. Look for further entries on such exciting topics as the living organic qualities of the NewJersey Turnpike.

The Telephone Keeps Ringing So I Ripped It Off The Wall

I hope everyone had a pleasant Thanksgiving. Florida was nice, although my dives got cancelled by an overly cautious boat captain. Jack is 10 months old today. Man, this year has flown by. Today is also the Patriot’s last day at his current job. Monday finds me cruising up and down the New Jersey Turnpike commuting to my new gig. This will be a big adjustment since I have worked in and around NYC for my entire adult life. I’ll miss the ferry in the morning but not the chaos of downtown. I suppose the next step is to buy a mini-van and move to North Jersey.

So when I switched to Verizon last month because T-Mobile SUCKS, I purchased a smart new phone manufactured by the Korean company LG. I have been enjoying the QUERTY keyboard and built in GPS navigation system and up to this point the only thing that scared me about the phone was the prospect of receiving an enormous bill. Then I read this (from CNN):

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) -- An exploding mobile phone battery apparently killed a South Korean man in the first such known case in this gadget-obsessed country, police say.
The man, identified only by his family name Suh, was found dead at his workplace in a quarry Wednesday morning and his mobile phone battery was melted in his shirt pocket, a police official in Cheongwon, 135 kilometers (85 miles) south of Seoul, told The Associated Press.

"We presume that the cell phone battery exploded," the police official said on condition of anonymity.

The official said the phone was made by South Korea's LG Electronics, the world's fifth-biggest handset maker.

LG Electronics confirmed its product was involved in the accident but said such a battery explosion and death was virtually impossible. E-mail to a friend

Virtually impossible doesn’t sound like completely impossible. The doctor who examined Suh said the death was probably caused by an explosion of the battery.

"He sustained an injury that is similar to a burn in the left chest and his ribs and spine were broken," Yonhap news agency quoted Kim as saying.

His freaking spine was broken? What kind of insane technology is involved here? An exploding cell phone battery has the force potential to actually break your back? Imagine if he was holding the damn thing up to his head at the time it exploded. Ewww.

A little internet research reveals that similar explosions have taken place in New Zealand. The phone that exploded there was made by Nokia who issued a warning about bl-5c batteries made between December 2005 and last November. That story also proffered the statistic that around 100 out of 46 million cell phones worldwide have overheated or exploded “so far”. This begs the question as to whether we are all carrying around little potential hand grenades which could rip off the side of our faces at any time without any warning. Wonder if the TSA will ban them on commercial flights. Seems to me the risk is at least equal to the shoe bombs.

Giving Thanks

The Patriot is taking Jack and heading for Florida to celebrate the Thanksgiving holidays with the parents. It will feel strange to be wearing a golf shirt and shorts on what is usually a blustery day here in the northeast, but I suppose we should all get accustomed to the effects of global warming and this will be a good start. Plus I can go to the beach and even fit in a couple of dives assuming my nagging head cold clears up by Saturday. I’m flying out of Newark tomorrow morning, Thanksgiving Day. I learned last year after a 27 hour nightmare trip to Oklahoma City that flying the day before the holiday is a recipe for total disaster. Hopefully the airlines will have worked out any massive delay issues by tomorrow morning.

To get into the spirit of Thanksgiving on my morning commute I was ruminating on American gluttony and consumer culture. Despite the fact that a barrel of oil is approaching the $100 level, sales of trucks and SUV’s were actually up last quarter. Americans are so addicted to their lifestyles that a few more dollars at the pump certainly isn’t going to interfere with their favorite sport-spending money they don’t have. These are the same overextended Americans who are losing their homes at a record rate because they took out $500,000 mortgages while bringing in an average yearly income somewhere in the $36,000 range. Who on earth actually needs a 3500 square foot house besides a family with eleven children? Well, we’re told that WE do. We’re entitled to one. We’re Americans and therefore deserving of a larger share of the world’s resources, even if we can’t afford it. I am the biggest anarchist around, but even I have a hard time blaming the banks for this real estate mess. Greed drove the market to unsustainable heights and hubris brought it crashing back to earth. PT Barnum had it right a hundred years ago, there really is a sucker born every minute. These suckers who think that there should be “less government” are now running to the feds begging for a bail-out. As a wise friend noted in a text this morning, “self-reflection and sustainability are not embedded in the archetypical American identity.” Indeed. It’s bad enough that we are self-destructing economically here at home-the weak dollar, the mortgage mess, the spasms in the markets, etc., but we are exporting our American Exceptionalism to the rest of the world, often at the point of a gun. And we’re not even running out of oil yet. Imagine how many countries we’ll have to invade when things get really tight?

Of course it may not come to that. Thomas Friedman (the NY Times Op-Ed contributor) in his recent book, The World Is Flat recounts a journey to Bangalore, India, when he realized globalization has changed core economic concepts. Due to this discovery, he suggests the world is "flat" in the sense that globalization has leveled the competitive playing fields between industrial and emerging market countries. Americans now compete for jobs not only with other Americans, but with the most brilliant minds around the globe. This does not bode well for future generations of Americans when one considers the pathetic state of our educational system and general lazyness. The number of American college students now studying math, science, and engineering is at a dramatic low yet students in China and India are now graduating their own cadres of mathematicians, scientists and engineers that outnumber America's by prodigious margins. And these people are hungry. They look at the American shining City on the Hill and want it for themselves. And who are we to tell them they can’t have it? The rest of the world doesn’t believe in American Exceptionalism. They believe in Indian and Chinese Exceptionalism. The problem is that there are nowhere near enough resources on planet earth to allow a billion Chinese people to live the American lifestyle. So what do you think is going to happen? My guess is that we will eventually rip each other apart with nasty wars over dwindling resources unless the idea of diminished consumption and the virtue of conservation are sewn into the fabric of our domestic and foreign policy. How likely is that to happen in a capitalist system?

Anyway, Happy Thanksgiving y’all. Remember the needy, since the government can't be bothered. Also, heritage turkeys aren't just for yuppies anymore. They're tasty and good for the environment; a win win.

One Pill Makes You Larger...

I ran across an interesting site today in my wanderings through the back alleys of the internet. The "The Erowid Experience Vaults” are “an attempt to catalog the wide variety of experiences people have with psychoactive plants and chemicals as well as experiences with endogenous (non-drug) mystical experiences, drug testing, police interactions, deep experiences of connection to music, etc.” http://www.erowid.org/experiences/.

Most of you know that the Patriot hung up his crack pipe years ago once things started to get ugly back in the boogie down Bronx. Nevertheless, being an unrepentant Deadhead, I still find stories of people doing weird and illegal things while under the influence of psychedelics to be vastly entertaining. I don’t know if this is because I can personally relate to some of the stranger aspects of the psychedelic experience, or if getting away with stuff while tripping my brains off has left some kind of indelible mark on my psyche. Either way, the following excerpt is representative of the type of tale categorized at erowid. The title of the entire piece is called “It's Fake....Let's Eat It All' (WRONG!)” Been there, done that.

“At one point, probably six hours into the trip, I decided that I just needed to leave for a while. Just go away, into the woods, AWAY from this seething mass of lunacy swirling around me. I walked into the edge of the forest, into a little sunlit glade filled with white flowers here and there. Ohh the relief I felt! here was a perfect spot to lie down and grab ahold of the fraying edges of my sanity and...wait...that's not a flower!! I had stumbled into a shithole. The white flowers were wads of toilet paper that had recently wiped some dirty hippie's ass. THERE WAS NO ESCAPE. The crushing blow struck me between the lobes and i was paralyzed, stark still for several minutes. Then I pulled myself together and plunged back into the howling, gibbering carnival of humanoid creatures which now spread out for miles and miles. I knew I had no choice but to surrender myself to it.”

There’s a lot like of stories like this one. Have fun, my freaky friends.

$12 Billion Per Month

CNN is reporting today that according to a recent congressional committee report the total economic impact of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is estimated to reach $1.6 trillion by 2009. The figure -- which includes the cost of borrowing to pay for the war, higher oil prices, and the cost of caring for wounded veterans -- is nearly double the $804 billion in direct war costs already requested. The committee calculated that the average cost of both wars for a family of four would be $20,900 from 2002 to 2008. The cost for a family of four would go up to $46,400 from 2002 to 2017.

The Democrats, who seemingly don’t care enough about the cost of the war to actually cut off financing, nevertheless made some small squealing noises when confronted with the reality that $12 billion per month is being paid to support our aimless wandering in the Iraqi desert. It is noteworthy that Dennis Kuchinich stands alone among the Democratic candidates running for president who is advocating an immediate withdrawal. While Kucinich has about as much of a chance at being elected President as I or Politicalspazz do, there is another Democrat with a better shot at the oval office who understands that cutting off Congressional financing for the war has to be the first step in any discussion of pulling out. John Edwards position is rather simple yet eminently reasonable. According to Edwards, “[w]e have to take the next step and cap funding to mandate a withdrawal. We don't need debate; we don't need non-binding resolutions; we need to end this war, and Congress has the power to do it.” The power, yes, the will, no.

Ten Days That Shook The World

Ninety years ago today, Bolshevik revolutionaries seized power in Russia. NPR chose to commemorate the event by broadcasting a story on the murderous excesses of Josef Stalin and the heavy handed tactics of the Soviet government. As usual, Soviet rule was equated with communism and dismissed as an anachronistic philosophy with no modern appeal. The USSR was clearly not a communist state, at least not in any way that Marx would recognize. As I understand the term, communism is an ideology that seeks to establish a classless, stateless social organization based on common ownership of the means of production.

Under Stalin, the Communist Party of the USSR adopted the theory of "socialism in one country" and claimed that, due to the "aggravation of class struggle under socialism", it was necessary, to build socialism alone in one country, the USSR. This line was challenged by Leon Trotsky, whose theory of "permanent revolution" stressed the necessity of world revolution. (For his defense of the revolution, Trotsky ended up being murdered with an ice pick while in Mexican exile in the late 1930s).

Marxist critics of the Soviet Union, most notably Trotsky, referred to the Soviet system, as "degenerated" or "deformed workers' states," arguing that the Soviet system fell far short of Marx's communist ideal. They called for a political revolution in the USSR and defended the country against capitalist restoration. Others, like Tony Cliff, advocated the theory of state capitalism, which asserts that the bureaucratic elite acted as a surrogate capitalist class in the heavily centralized and repressive political apparatus.

Wow, the Patriot is getting bored. This reminds him of interminable political lectures by the League for The Revolutionary Party that he sat through in college. Anyway, the October Revolution (November in the Gregorian calendar) overthrew the Russian Provisional Government and gave the power to the Bolsheviks. It was followed by the Russian Civil War (1917–1922) and the creation of the Soviet Union in 1922.
The revolution was led by the Bolsheviks with the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries and anarchists coming along for the ride. The Bolsheviks viewed themselves as representing an alliance of workers and peasants and memorialized that understanding with the Hammer and Sickle on the flag and coat of arms of the Soviet Union. The rest, as they say, his somewhat distorted history.

New Directions?

Happy Election Day; go vote in your local elections, they’re the only ones that mean anything. For some reason the Patriot has been content lately to sit on the sidelines and watch the country convulse on its own. One bright spot in the firmament has been the lawyers rioting in Pakistan over the suspension of constitutional freedoms. If only the lawyers in this country went out into the streets over Lynn Stewart and the Patriot Act. Unfortunately they were too busy either over billing their corporate clients or chasing ambulances (depending on their ideological bend) to be bothered.

I’m thinking of taking this blog in an entirely new direction. I just don’t know what it is. There is exactly one year to go before the Presidential election and I can’t stand the idea of writing about politics for another 365 days. I mean, the very thought of it makes me sick, especially when one considers the candidates. The only one I’d consider voting for right now is Kucinich, and that’s because he’s married to a hot 29 year old and admits seeing flying saucers. The other Democratic contenders are just different shades of fascism-lite. Even Edwards, who’s star is setting fast, can’t seem to distinguish himself from Margaret Thatcher, um, I mean Hillary Clinton and Obama-been-forgotten.

There is so much else going on in the world, isn’t there? Does anyone want to hear about anything other than the evisceration of our civil liberties? Please? Maybe I can go back to reviewing restaurants, music and books, or start talking about comparative philosophical systems. I’m going to mull it over for a bit and then get back to you all.

But before I go, here’s a bit of depressing news from the boggie-down-Bronx. As the Patriot predicted over a year ago, law enforcement has been quietly attempting to expand the definition of terrorism to encompass ordinary crime involving Americans. (Disclosure: Most of the following is a paraphrase of the NY Times story.)

As you may or may not know in the weeks after Sept. 11, 2001, 36 states enacted laws that would guarantee harsher sentences to people convicted under state law in terrorism cases. Gov. George E. Pataki signed New York’s law within six days of the attack. These laws were political PR pandering, pure and simple, since how often do you think the feds would give up jurisdiction and allow a state government to prosecute a terrorism case? Nevertheless the application of New York’s law had an unfortunate effect on Edgar Morales, a 25-year-old recreational soccer player and gang member who fatally shot a 10-year-old girl and wounded a second man outside a christening party in 2002.

Mr. Morales was a construction worker and a member of the St. James Boys, a gang formed by Mexican immigrants to protect themselves from being assaulted and robbed by other gangs in the west Bronx.

The Bronx District attorney, Robert Johnson, decided to try Morales under New York’s terrorism statute in order to get a tougher jail sentence. Johnson explained that just as racketeering laws aimed at mobsters have since been used in other crimes the terrorism charge fit because Mr. Morales and his gang had terrorized Mexicans and Mexican-Americans in the west Bronx for years through violence and intimidation. The jury deliberated for four days after testimony ended last Thursday, but despite their disagreements on other elements of the case, jurors said yesterday they had concluded very early that Mr. Morales was guilty of terrorism.

“When you fire a gun into a crowd, whether you hit your intended victim or not, you scare people, you make them fearful for their lives, and that’s why, in my opinion, the terrorism charges applied,” said an apparently marginally educated juror who identified herself only by her first name, Linnea.

Another juror said she had been hesitant about using the terrorism statute against Mr. Morales when prosecutors presented evidence, but once Justice Michael A. Gross told them on the trial’s final day that terrorism was defined as an act meant to “intimidate or coerce a civilian population,” her reluctance dissolved.

The prosecution of Morales under the terrorism statute understandably freaked out the libertarians and the lefties.

Timothy Lynch, of the Cato Institute said the New York law and others like it had no place being used to prosecute gang members. “Lawmakers were told after Sept. 11th that we needed new laws, and it’s become kind of a bait-and-switch, because lo and behold, they are not being used against Al Qaeda, they’re being used against ordinary street crime,” Mr. Lynch said.

Donna Lieberman, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union,, also criticized the terror application in the trial. “Without commenting on the manslaughter and attempted murder convictions, the pile-on of a terrorism charge is indeed a matter of concern,” she said. “The law was pitched as New York’s way to protect itself against Al Qaeda and the like. No matter what horrific crimes were committed against the Mexican-American community, that’s not terrorism.”

Robert Johnson might be the first DA in New York to use the anti-terrorism law in an ordinary criminal prosecution, but I’ll bet you my plane ticket to Gitmo that he won’t be the last.

Here Come Those Santa Ana Winds Again

The Patriot is cruising at 35,000 feet on his fifth trip to California in as many weeks. This incessant jetting around the country has put a serious crimp in my blogging schedule and many events of note have passed by without a mention here. I’m not one for making up lost time and rehashing old events. Apparently the Democrats are still unable to mount anything approaching an opposition to the fascist juggernaut. One only need look at their apparent lack of concern over Judge Mukase’s statement at his confirmation hearings that he thinks the president should be able to ignore federal statutes with which he disagrees to be reassured that things are business as usual in Washington.

Constant travel, while interesting on some levels, is nevertheless quite stressful. My Continental flight was an hour late taking off from Newark this morning and it is a near certainty that I’ll miss my connecting flight to San Luis Obispo. The gnawing feeling in the pit of my stomach will no doubt remain until my sprint through LAX in what is sure to be a vain attempt to get to my hotel in time to catch up on the three weeks of work that have been piling up on my desk. At least the sushi is reasonable on the central California coast. I can only hope that I get out of the state before the wildfires reach north from Santa Barbara and cut off my escape route.

In brighter news the Patriot was recently informed that access to this blog has been cut off at various military installations due to its subversive content. I guess all those impressionable young officers of character can’t be exposed to too much thinking outside the box lest they hesitate before dropping their payloads on Iraqi villages while the mighty eagle spreads democracy around the Middle East. I’m not prone to paranoia, but I have also been informed by anonymous sources with ties to the intelligence community that the government is quite vigilant at monitoring blogs that they consider subversive. I’m not really surprised. I’m also not particularly concerned. This is the same government that set up the TSA to function as the vanguard against terrorism in American skies. Wait, maybe I should be concerned.

Everyone who has ever taken a civics class as part of their education knows that the true test of freedoms is how they are treated in a time of crisis. What civics class never taught is how a manufactured crisis like the “War on Terror” can be used to strip away constitutionally guaranteed freedoms in the name of consolidating power in the executive branch. The intelligence services have decades of experience manipulating public opinion and they have lately had the willing support of a complicit mainstream media. We are witnessing such a manipulation of public opinion in the current demonization of Iran. The stage is once again set for military action based on false evidence and flimsy justification. There is no will to stop it, and no way to keep it from happening, especially when since the silent coup d’etat has already happened.

It's Tea Right Here In Berkeley

Ok kids, the Patriot is in Berkeley California, land of the unrepentant deadhead. I will admit that noodling around UC Berkeley has made me a bit nostalgic for my own college days. I have had a few interesting experiences since I’ve been in town, although nothing that quite compares to being stabbed in the gut while buying drugs during the heyday of the crack epidemic. Perhaps an unfair comparison some 20 years on. Mostly I have been wandering the streets looking for whatever it is that makes Berkeley celebrated among intellectuals and stoners alike. Can’t say that I found too much to distinguish this town from college towns back east. Ultimately, Berkeley is much like every other college town, albeit with a liberal California overlay; vegetable powered cars, the smell of calitas rising up through the air, that sort of thing. The students here look like students everywhere, except here they are more prone to driving their parent’s aging Volvos rather than the IRocs sported by my better groomed friends from Jersey. This is also a very diverse community; equal opportunity panhandlers from post dead tour refugees to people in actual need of food. Those of you who know me know that I am a very pro-California person of late but, dare I say it, I prefer the honest fakeness of the south to this contrived hippie nonsense of the north. This confuses the Patriot. Perhaps I need to spend some more time parsing what is real and what is artifice here on the left coast. I welcome comments from readers who actually live here.

More Santa Monica At Dawn

I was here for less than 24 hours and spent most of my time running up and down the bike path; 13 miles in all. You see so much more of a place while running or biking. These were taken during this morning's run. I'm at LAX waiting for a plane to San Francisco. No rest for the wicked.

Santa Monica at Dawn

Still a Nader Raider

(This posting is dedicated to my friend Lee who gives me shit about Nader and the 2000 election whenever we go out drinking).

Greeting fellow freaks! The Patriot is traveling for work once again and finds himself in Santa Monica California at the Fairmont. Quite a nice hotel actually. On the plane ride out here I had occasion to watch the documentary about Ralph Nader that came out earlier this year, An Unreasonable Man, and I recommend it highly, especially to those who think that Nader cost “us” the 2000 election. Bashing Ralph Nader has become popular sport among the institutional democrats who can’t seem to get it through their heads that their arguments about why Gore lost (won) in 2000 have nothing to do with Nader and everything to do with their centrist strategy. Dare I say that the Democrats failing to put up a fight against the Republican agenda over the last six years proves Ralph’s point that the difference between the parties is minimal at best? Nah. For those of you who drank the Carvell cool-aid nothing I can say would change your minds. Nevertheless, I ask you to consider the following: Nader did not work for the Florida Secretary of State, the Palm Beach County Election Commission, the Al Gore campaign committee, or the United States Supreme Court. Yet, he has become a scapegoat among Democrats for Al Gore’s loss. These diehard Democrats are averse to looking at the failings of their candidate. If Gore had won Tennessee, he would have had the necessary Electoral College votes to have won the election and the Florida results would have been irrelevant. There’s no moral ground for claiming that Nader took any votes away from the stumbling, pandering Gore, who, like Kerry four years later, campaigned as though the only votes he had to “earn” were Republican votes. Gore in fact WON not only the national vote but the state of Florida as well, despite the bogus ex-felon purges, the hanging chads, the “Jews for Buchanan” and the Nader vote. According to a recount commissioned by a consortium of major newspapers, who of course buried the story, Gore would have won Florida, and thus the battle for electoral votes, if he had commissioned a statewide recount. Despite everything, he got the most votes. He just didn’t have a the balls to go to the mat against Bush. If he really thought so much was at stake for the Country, why didn’t he make use of every opportunity available to him to keep Bush out of office?

The fact of the matter is that Nader’s support overall brought voters to the polls who never would have gone there in the first place. Also, EVERY third-party on the ballot in Florida garnered enough votes to throw the election to Bush, but the Democrats, in typical fashion, decided that the left wing of the party was responsible and should be roundly punished. This is quite convenient because it draws attention away from that annoyingly loud sucking sound, recently identified as the DNC drawing on the tit of corporate money.

And then there’s this (excerpt):

“Sixty-two percent of Nader's voters were Republicans, independents, third-party voters and nonvoters.

Had Nader not run, Bush would have won by more in Florida. CNN's exit poll showed Bush at 49 percent and Gore at 47 percent, with 2 percent not voting in a hypothetical Nader-less Florida race.

Gore lost his home state of Tennessee, Bill Clinton's Arkansas and traditionally Democratic West Virginia; with any one of these, Gore would have won.

Nine million Democrats voted for Bush, and less than half of the 3 million Nader voters were Democrats.

Ninety thousand African Americans were illegally and intentionally stricken from the voter rolls in Florida under the guise of felon disenfranchisement.

The 5 to 4 Supreme Court decision stopped the vote counting that favored a Gore victory.”(editorial comment: Gore had other avenues to challenge the decision which he declined to take advantage of)

And let’s not forget 2004. Kerry cravenly conceded to Bush while the enormous irregularities in the Ohio vote were being contested by the Greens and Libertarians, and said not a word about the disenfranchisement of untold numbers of would-be (mostly Democratic) voters nationwide that probably cost him the election. Yet he managed to wage a vicious, resource-wasting campaign of harassment to keep Nader, and his message, off the ballot in as many states as possible. It’s the only fight Kerry won.

This will become relevant when the chicken littles go running to vote for Hillary Clinton in 2008, the most conservative Democrat in the history of the party. VOTE GREEN in 2008. What have the Democrats done for you lately?

Jack-August 07

Happy 8th Month Little Dude

Jack and Daddy Sometime In July, I Think

I'll put up a few newer pics soon. The boy has gotten considerably bigger since then.