Is Bush the Result of our National Psychosis?

Keith Olbermann raised a good the other night.

He pondered whether we as a people are all suffering a form of
collective shock as a result of 9/11?

That's an interesting point. When I was covering 9/11 for Democracy Chronicle, at the end I questioned a few teachers as to the kids' reactions since most could not avoid seeing the twin towers coming down over and over again

I had seen it happening without the filter of TV and it left me changed somehow. It was as if I had established my own belief system that nothing, absolutely nothing could affect the twin towers or affect the skyline; that was my personal bias and I couldn't accept change; it just wouldn't process.

And then to see this great cloud of smoke and hear the rumble and then watch the building disappear behind the smoke was confusing and frightening.

What was happening?

I knew that the building would reappear once the smoke was gone....but there was no opportunity to hang around.
When it finally cleared enough to see through the smoke it wasn't there; oh, how we can rationalize almost anything--I waited patiently as if I thought it would reappear in the former space it occupied; or maybe, just maybe it moved a few yards to the right or left? This of course, was my irrational way of dealing with a truth that I couldn't process. .

That was why as a post mortem I spoke to teachers. They told me that many of the children would just start to cry over what happened. Some more outspoken wanted to know how many buildings really came down. I could understand that since we were all treated to the same shocking site over and over again. My heart went out to all the teachers who had to explain what happened to terrified children who couldn't understand or grasp why this has happened. Many, I was told, had to go into therapy.

If this was so apparent among young people, might it not be the case with their parents? Adults tend to keep painful experiences inside. One suspected that if they viewed what happened either on TV or up close and personal, there was no way you were going to come out o that unscathed in much the same way that none of us of a certan generation who loved JFK came out of the assasination the same way.

It has been said that an entire generation experienced lasting shock from this experience and I suspect the same is true of the WTC experience. Even now, it continues to replay in my mind’s eye over and over again and that stirs associations of people and places and things that happened that day to friends and neighbors.

That’s despite the fact that we have all tried to put it to rest although the Commission was flawed and so many questions remain that I don’t suspect will ever leave me the same way that the
Committee set up to investigate the assassination failed to wash with me and left lingering doubts that will never go away.

I am sure that the next generation will have its own crosses to bear.

But I think Keith may have hit onto something. I’ve mentioned it to my associates and friends and many of them about my age tend to agree that they notice the changes, the fear, the quickness to anger and the polarization that seems to hold sway and the disconnect with so many who blame government for all that ails us…and want to have nothing to do with it.

Les Aaron
Hubmaster


The Blue Blog Moves Up Again! Now, in the top 1/2 of 1% of all Blogs...www.lesaaron.blogspot.comThe Committee for Positive ChangeThe Book That Republicans Don't Want You To Read: A BLUEPRINT FOR WINNING: TAKING BACK THE WHITE HOUSE 08. Democrats believe that they don't have to do anything to win! THey are wrong!. Studies and research show that Democrats are disorganized and disconnected; that the Republican base is strong and that if the Republicans can coalesce around a candidate, they may take the 08 election making it six out of the last eight elections. THat would be the end of the Democratic Party as we know it!... and the end of the Middle Class...

The Nightmare Team

The nightmare team.

You’ve heard of a dream team; we have just the opposite.

Just take a look at our senior negotiators: Cheney who never saw a liberal he didn't want to shoot. Rice, whose answer no matter what the question is always, "no," a PhD with the imagination and vision of a flea. She should have stayed in school although I'd hate to think of all the young minds she would ruin. Bush who’s not happy unless he's playing his tough cowboy role or cutting down brush and imagining its bin Laden. Bolton, the original angry man, would have his face fall off if he ever smiled. this is the cast of characters; no wonder everyone in the world hates us including our former friends.

Now, we are facing a really tricky scenario in Iran and we have nobody who knows how, or really cares, to play the game. Nobody on our side has seemingly connected the dots; otherwise, they wouldn't act so imbecilic. The fact of the matter is that we better start running some ads for pros with credentials in international relations.

The bottom line is that we need a high wire act to keep things cool right now. Look at the hand we’ve been dealt. We've got Russia supplying Iran with its nuclear technology and we have China who gets much needed oil from Iran standing in the background. If we start to play hardball, what are they going to do. That's the sixty four dollar question and you can't find answers unless you open your mind, something that this administration is incapable of. So, where do we go from here asks the wise man?

If I were playing on the other side, I would see a stretched out Army, a lame duck president who cannot keep order in his own party and a population unhappy with every decision made in the last five years. This gives me the advantage.
I would hold my cards close to the vest and let them squirm.
And that seems to be precisely what the Iranian premier plans to do.
Who is the dummy here?

Les Aaron

"Monarchs, Bees, and Whales..."

What two hump back whales have to do with us?.

About the same thing as mutated frogs, disappearing bees and dying monarchs.

Last night that moron on NBC talked about the hump back whales who lost their way. He talked about all the people who applauded when they saw the poor creatures so imperilled surface for a second probably scared to death. This is not spectacle; it is a warning! And NBC totally missed the point. They should have instead been addressing the Navy's deep sea lines that confuse the whales or pollutants that have practically wiped out various categories of whales and our dumping of toxins in the breeding grounds of krill, what most whales fill themselves on.

When whales start acting strangely, it is upsetting enough. When their ranks are joined by dying MOnarchs killed by man's manipulation of food stocks, when mutated frogs grow extra legs and heads, it's a signal that we need to start paying attention immediately to what we are doing.

Looking the other way so that the president's friends can make profits is not the solution, it is the problem....

In fact, it's mind boggling to think that we make no connections to these phenomena and assume that what is happening is part of the natural order of things.

One has to be literally blind, deaf and dumb not to make these connections.

So then why is there no outcry.

Why aren't people coming together to communicate the challenges we face. Where is the scientific community. Do they all work for the government; are they all afraid for their jobs?

Does this mean that the Creationists hold sway in Washington and there truths are not our truths?

Or is this just too insignificant to even address when there is oil to seize and assets to plunder.

For the remaining rational people, the question is "What's next?"....

Will all the bees have gone before the Election.

Pity!....Since they fertilize about 60% of what we eat...

Les Aaron


The Blue Blog Moves Up Again! Now, in the top 1/2 of 1% of all Blogs...www.lesaaron.blogspot.comThe Committee for Positive Change

Creationist Blarney

Creationists try to fill our minds with bunk; to me, they seem not unlike the Pythagoreans who doomed Greece to also ran status because they rejected pure science and replaced it with superstition, speculation, and symbolism. Once the Pythagorean symbolism replaced pure science, it was good bye to the hegemony of Greece for all time

Could this be the fate of the western world?

Will the modern day Pythagorians, “the Creationists” gain sway and lead to America’s eventual demise? Holy cow, am I really saying this? Yes, and, sadly, it’s real, it’s endemic and fifty percent of the population believe it, today, in the year 2007..

Creationists seem to have a very narrow view of tolerance, too. Creationists believe that stem cell research borders on murder. That Darwin was wrong. And that science doesn’t reflect the truth.

It’s hard to discuss things with people who are so locked into dogma of the worst kind.

If that isn’t worrisome enough, consider that there are enough people who buy into this bunk to sway an election. Consider that three men who are vying for the Republican vote claim that they already eschew Evolution. All that was missing were the clubs and the skins…

These are candidates who are purported to represent the best and the brightest of the opposition and who purportedly exhibit the kind of leading judgment that the rest of us can subscribe to.

Is it time to check the requirements for citizenship in Tegucigalpa, Tierra del Fuego and the Galapagos?

. But if that seems incomprehensible, how much more incomprehensible is the act of assuming that a man-made collection of liturgical views and history, written by dozens of scribe interpreters—from Jesus’ Apostles to paid hacks, later edited by the Council of Nicosia, who under their own assumed power dictated what they wanted us to believe about Jesus, and, in the process, rejected, per se, those codifications that didn’t satisfy this august church commission. Can such an organized attempt to explain religion serve not only as canon but also the literal world of God??? You have ten seconds to respond…

If we accept everything the new religious revisionists believe, then we might use their principles and see how they hold up. Let’s travel back into early history to what they concede is the beginning of time—around the time of the beginnings of Western Civilization, the time of Philip Macedon and later, his son, Alexander or maybe even further back to the Peloponnesian wars and Agamemnon and Helen, the face that launched a thousand ships. But if that was the beginning of time, how do we account for the fact that the heroes of the Wars had fathers and they had fathers… Were they born whole six thousand years ago and placed on their various world stages like chess pieces?
I mean God is good but is he that good?

If we accept a literal interpretation of the bible, the flood had to be more than six thousand years old and according to the scripture wasn’t Noah a thousand year’s old at the time? If we were to jetision everything that had it’s beginnings before the supposed start of the Earth, we would actually have to dispose of not only people but the dinosaurs who died 50 million years ago, evidence of the ice age that settled on the land 12,000 years ago, the land-bridge that connected Asia and the North American continent. But how do you do that when we’ve taken core sediments from the ice age and found evidence of fresh flowers before the ice age. And we would have to discount evidence of humanoid creatures some million years ago, and we would have to erase what we know about “lucy,” the missing link and homo erectus…We would have to ignore the cave drawings of our ancestors in the caves of France. And every other tidbit of evidence that establishes man in the firmament.

If this weren’t embarrassing enough, our religious zealot friends who will not even tolerate any deviation from what they already know. This would mean good-bye Earth, which we already know from analysis of geographic layers show a strip of tritium that is embedded at a layer in the rock strata that has been dated to the time the dinosaurs disappeared, some fifty million years ago and if we go even further, we would have to toss evidence of the Earth’s presence in the heavens some 4.1 billion years ago.

If we accept just the carbon dating evidence, we have to say that the Creationists were off by more than a factor of 20,000, not exactly a miniscule error on the scale of things. Well Creationists don’t seem to be exactly great mathematicians but they are great at being set in their ways and their beliefs. But Americans tend to be tolerant. We’d only wish that they’d keep their opinions to themselves and not try to convince us dinosaurs and people were good buddies. That holds up for cartoons, but the rest of the world kind of thinks we’ve lost our collective minds. Having a superpower believe in myth does not seem to encourage investments or confidence so as a practical matter, we’d better get some realists onto the republican side if they hope to be taken seriously. In the meantime, all the more argument for a democratic win!....

Les Aaron

Focus on a government spinning out of control...

Press Release Announces A Guide to Taking Back the White House
To the Editor
For Immediate Release
7601

A Democratic Strategy for Winning in O8!....

Lewes, DE: Mr. les Aaron has been invited to discuss his new book, “A Blueprint for Winning:” Taking Back the White House at the upcoming meeting of the Eastern Democrats of Sussex County at their meeting on June 7th.
According to Aaron, “A Blueprint for Winning is a compendium of what every good democrat needs to know in order to assure a democratic victory. A democratic victory would serve notice on this autocracy that American government is not “unilateralist” but was designed to have three equal branches of government with innate provisions for oversight, checks and balances and the Congressional power to conduct investigations and hearings. When it becomes clear to us, the citizens, that separation of church and state is violated, that the president has excessive powers that exceed his legitimate authority, that our protections under the Constitution can be arbitrarily side-stepped, that the president can eavesdrop without the court’s express permission, that guarantees like habeas corpus, posse comitatus can be willfully set aside, when business operates in collusion with government to import cheap labor and “off-shore” jobs at the expense of American labor, when security for our borders can be dismissed and global warming poked fun at, when it is possible to go to war for insufficent cause, it becomes obvious that the party in power has overstepped its bounds and immediate adjustment is required if we are to restore a modicum of equilibrium and fairness in governance.
.Contributing to America’s malaise is the belief by a majority of Americans that the democrats have become powerless, that the media has failed in its responsibilities and that the system must be brought back into balance again if only to protect American democracy and to rebuild our prestige in global markets. Towards this end, this book is not only a resource for election strategies and tactics, it delves into areas that have been neglected by prior political tomes: How to effectuate change. It describes in detail the history of the republican party, their “weapons” of mass communication, how they achieve dominance and what we can do to change the existing formulae.

A Blueprint for Winning begins with an overall review of the last six years of Republican rule under President Bush and aks the question why this government was so determined to gain power and so little interested in governance. It also questions many other aspects of government including why the Democrats have, with the exception of William Jefferson Clinton, faired so badly in getting their candidates elected. It suggests that the republicans have been much more successful at preparing the groundwork and in-depth organization than the democrats have been and gives the reasons why.
A Blueprint for Winning then proceeds to provide an incisive look at what democrats need to do to win in 2008 through an analysis of a panoply of resources, methods and techniques—some of which derive from marketing and positioning a ‘brand,’ the use and misuse of “framing,” marketing and media communications which the opposition has already learned to use with admirable dexterity and skill and the media. A comprehensive analysis of the last two elections is designed to open the eyes of the voter and spell out the challenges that democrats face..

“ In preparing this overview, the author points out, “I decided to view the challenge from many different angles and as a result, probe and discuss the key instruments of developing and maintaining power in a marketplace where, ostensibly, many are disconnected, and the dynamics have changed dramatically from the former smoke-filled rooms to the invasive power of TV made possible by an endless flow of money from motivated business interests. In this equation, the voter has become virtually superfluous superseded by the power of money and influence with the Middle Class paying the price. Today, many are even questioning whether democrats can even survive as an effective party.
“The irony is, of course, that politics, as many of us realize, affects all of our lives in deep and meaningful ways and if we, the citizenry, do not become involved, we are likely to face dire consequences as Americans and as concerned citizens. At present, we are already seeing the results of our disengagement from the failing schools to the serious concerns over our health care system or lack of one. No common good can derive from a fusion of interests of between politicians and business lobbies; or the media and government and the current predispositions need to be addressed and corrected.”
The author challenges the reader at every turn. “Would the Founding Fathers be proud of what they saw happening in America today? Hardly, he suggests. In fact, they might even be astounded that the people have stood by uncomplainingly as their freedoms, rights and jobs are being taken from them and moved offshore to benefit business investors and leaders. ” Nor is the author inclined to treat democrats with kid gloves; this critique has everyone in the barrel taking responsibility for America’s declining position in the world today, a debtor nation that exports agricultural products and ‘scrap,’ and gross importer of manufactured goods, a Colony that is deeply indebted to Saudi Arabia, England, Japan and China.”

To the multiple faceted and complex challenges facing America today, the author sees a solution in his Twenty Point Plan for America which begins with a zero budget approach to ideation and demands hard answers to tough questions as a precondition to doing what is necessary to return America to its former greatness.
Included in this over approach, is a warning that not only do we need to refresh our understanding of what democracy infers but what our obligations are as citizens living in a democracy. In the current dialog, we must also ask ourselves whether we are willing to sacrifice our freedoms and liberties for some abstract advantage in the War on Terrorism; furthermore, unless we are willing to commit ourselves to the purposes of a democracy as expressed by the Constitution, we may wake up to discover that our rights and freedoms have been neutralized and that we face a government that resembles more a totalitarian state than a democracy as we warned by deToqueville and others who saw the potential weakness of a democratic form of government more than one hundred years ago!...

The author, in developing his thesis, discusses the Democratic Party and whether it is still capable of representing some fifty percent of the population who identify with either independent or democratic values. Or whether the grass-roots, so distanced from the process, may feel that the only way to guarantee representation is to fundamentally change the party or create a new party.

Mr. Aaron has based this overall political tome on more than forty years of active behind the scenes participation as an activist and supporter dating back to McGovern, Humphrey and Kennedy up through Clinton, Gore, Kerry and Dean. . Currently, he serves as the Chairman for the Committee for Positive Change.. Formerly, he was the president of four companies where he served as a spokesperson for business and industry. .
The book, A Blueprint for Winning: Taking Back the White House is available from Lulu.com in both ebook and print formats. For additional information, please contact the managing offices at LAACO management, 239 Lakeside Drive, Lewes, DE 19958; 302 645 7443. Or remit 24.95 plus 5.50 shipping and handling to the above address. First editions are still offered on a first come, first served basis. Part of the proceeds will go to the CFPC, Lewes.

# # #

Burn the books?...or use them as a bridge?

In my pantheon of troubling things certainly ranking right up there is the number of “things” that were once either invisible or benign and are now troubling. . Enjoying a near second in my rankings are things that I detect on my travels that I immediately react to and find troubling. Like the knowledge that Tom Wayne, owner of Prospero Books in Kansas City, Mo, finds it necessary to burn his books in order to lighten his inventory.

Am I serious? Burn books? Isn’t that some Fascist acting out? Or an example of a Pope overstepping his bounds?

It seems somehow a step backwards likening this event tragically to the book burnings of the Middle Ages that led to one poet named Milton writing a classic speech turned into a book called the Areopagitica which seemed to halt book burnings for awhile—or at least until Hitler showed up on the scene…

In the Middle Ages, the Pope ordered the burning of books for what he thought were good reasons: there was just too much information out there and not was all healthy for someone who presumed to be the spiritual father of all humanity.

Today, apparently, the reason given by Mr. Wayne for book burnings : It’s people who no longer value culture and intellectual pursuits Not a good sign for a purportedly progressive society that must compete in the world.

People started burning books almost as soon as they came out in supply as a result of the printing press suggesting that they carried ideas that might be construed as dangerous to a malleable society. Even Luther had to run from country to country to find a printer who would print his bible and not be threatened with prison or burning at the stake.

Why is Mr. Wayne burning his inventory of 20,000 books? He explains that he has run out of space in his warehouses and that nobody has shown a scintilla of interest in buying them. Imagine burning 20,000 books; that’s about ten times more than Sir Thomas Moore had who had the largest collection of books in the world; and about twenty times the library of Henry the VIII one of the most well read men of his time.

This seems beyond senseless but so many things seem to add up to senseless today that it is hard to get any more steamed up than I usually am about most things in this country where American Idol is the new standard by which all things should be judged..

This would have been my preferred vision: Wouldn’t have it been inspiring to learn that some farsighted government official buys the whole lot and decided to ship them to the Middle East where school children would be able to gain an insight about what Westerners are really like? This is what Hamas and Hezbollah did: They invested in school books and schools to influence the local youth and lunch programs to win them over. And now look at where Hamas stands relative to the West. What a wild and wooly idea! It’s been suggested that had we done as Hamas and Hezbollah did and invest in books for school children we might not have had the death squads and hatred towards the West that we find today….

Book burnings never did sit right with me. They remind me of Hitler’s book burnings, which I equate with totalitarianism and attempts at ‘mind control.’ And subsequent views of the world as envisioned in 1984 and Farenheit 451 where reading books was banned.

Fortunately, we have short and convenient memories for such things and when they come out with books on plastic cards, we will find a way to destroy them, too, but by then people will be watching the equivalent of American Idol from dawn to dusk.

Les Aaron

An End to Arrogance?....

The Russian Miscalculation

It’s no secret that we overestimate our own capabilities and underestimate everyone else; in short, that foreshortened view of the world seems to characterize our international behavior and has led to America now being thought of as the bully on the block. But more often than not, our eyes prove bigger than our stomachs. We always overshoot and it comes back to haunt us; nevertheless, our recklessness persists. It is as if we learn nothing from experience as we expect new results from the same actions--a surely a marker of insanity.

The latest indication of how our provocations can lead to much more serious responses is exemplified by our recent Missile Shield program.

Working with NATO, America has installed these anti-missile batteries in former Eastern Bloc nations which the Russian leadership believes are targeted at them, not the rogue nation of North Korea which doesn’t even possess an intercontinental missile.

As recently as just a few years ago, Bush looked into Putin’s eyes and saw into his soul and that what he saw was benign; now, Putin eyes reflect a new truth; he is angry at the west and he is speaking out. If we assume that it will end with a war of words it is we who are the optimists. Just recently, in Estonia, when the people tried to remove a statue of a Russian soldier, Estonia was literally crippled by a influx of organized hacking that nearly disembowled the country. We should heed Russia’s actions and be very careful about the implications of our precipitous action..

We make a serious mistake if we underestimate the Russians, newly rich from the sale of gas to the West. In our enduring arrogance that has led to miscalculation after miscalculation, we have provoked the one country that still has thousands of intercontinental missiles in place that can be retargeted in under two minutes to zero in on our biggest cities. This kind of brinkmanship goes Dulles, the architect of this wrong-headed tactic, one better; it frightens the living daylights out of most rational people.

Why are we doing this? Especially in light of the fact that as most scientists agree, America’s anti-missile shield was a joke from day one. Even today, there is not a scintilla of truth behind the claim that the anti-missile shield works. When it did work marginally, it was only because the mission was simplified and a receiver was discovered in the target missile . Clearly, it’s for the same reason we are building a space station on the moon, it’s to keep our defense contractors fat and happy and supporting republican causes with their never-ending flow of money despite the fact that it will accomplish very little that couldn’t be accomplished with a robotic program..

It’s time rationality entered the picture; that the people stood up to say what we are doing borders on “madness.” Let’s bring down the barriers; let’s get rid of the bullies and the sycophants and let’s practice good governance—something these clowns don’t have a clue about.

Les Aaron

Being More Effective: A Solution

A Force Multiplier

I keep thinking that Move-On has basically become our liberal mouthpiece and while in many cases, many of us are in agreement with what Move-On is trying to accomplish, it seems kind of limiting to have one outlet for liberal and progressive thinking. It is simply not democratic.

If we accept this premise, we might want to consider other ways to maximize our leverage and our clout so that our audience can pick and choose or fine tune their ideas from the number available.

Good idea?

We think so.

The fact is that there are literally hundreds of democratic mailing lists and conversation groups going on at any one time and, virtually, they are hardly known by anyone outside the lists. But there is something we can do about that using existing technology and it could be a boon for communicating the liberal and progressive message, as a force for education, a means to set the facts straight or for any number of tasks necessitating communicating to large numbers of people within a short time frame. Moreover, assuming that most groups vary from a dozen members to perhaps hundreds, finding a way to come together could really leverage our efforts and serve as a force multiplier to impact positive change.

So what can we do about it?

Here’s an idea that’s been bouncing around in my thoughts for quite some time.

It gives us a way to heighten our profiles; it adds the power of leverage to what we say; it can focus the attention of our political representatives and it may just be the kind of trigger progressives need to be and heard by the conventional media.

What is it?.

I think the best way to explain what I have in mind is to suggest how it might work.

In its most elemental state, a topic would be decided by group concensus.


But first, we would come together by establishing links to each other.

Subjects would be decided by popular vote shared by all the sites and tabulated by volunteers from various groups…to be decided.. A specific time for conducting the Town Meetings would be established.

Established formats for expressing an opinion would be agreed upon.

Everyone would be interconnected and share all of the members opinions.

As an add on, the information and results would be gathered and made available to anyone to download.

Assuming that this could be done, it would make a group of a dozen or a hundred appear like a force of thousands.

I am going to send this out to a small number of groups on my list and see if this idea generates any sparks and whether it could be a force multiplier.

Anybody can get together with me at hubmaster@aol.com to discuss the merits or failings of the idea and it can be improved and shaped through discussions to generate more clout and interest.

What say you?

Les Aaron

WHY THE WAR GOES ON...

News&Views
The Armchair Curmudgeon
May 27, 2007
A Few Memorial Day Thoughts..


Why the War goes on…


It should be over. We all know that. We all know that the ‘surge’ by definition is temporary and the rest of the signs are perversely negative, yet our Commander in Chief stubbornly continues on.

How can this be?

It can be because most of us, the majority are not touched by this travesty.

We continue doing the things we did before going to the War; we continue to separate or not separate our detritus; we continue to power up our gas guzzlers—although I suspect that market forces will change that…and we do all the rest of the things before Sept 11.

Those who are impacted by the war are, dare we say it, tend to be on the lowest rungs of the economic ladder for the most part. No Congressman’s kids for the most part is joining up or anxious to be a hero. As teacher at the college level, most the kids I taught didn’t have the first clue that there even was a war going on so to say that the rest of us may be a tad disconnected, is putting a nice spin on it.

Many of those who were either volunteers or joined the Guard to supplement their income or get enough money to go to college really believe Bush’s admonition that they are doing God’s work—that they are bringing democracy to the Middle East.

As a result of the constant propaganda they’ve been subjected to, many literally buy into the absurdist notion that Saddam and bin Laden were in bed together—never a more laughable proposition considering that they were polar opposites.

For the rest of us, we’ve never been asked to sacrifice a thing. We’ve never had to roll our own cigarettes, give up meat on Thursdays, or buy from a ration book. We don’t even have to save our tin cans, collect aluminum foil or grow a Victory garden to help the War effort.

And that’s the problem.

Thinking back to Vietnam, I remember at the beginning, today’s population was not unlike the general population at the time.. They didn’t know Ho from Adam; they didn’t know Vietnam and they couldn’t even find the place on a map.

What changed it all was one thing: Johnson’s draft.

As soon as the first numbers were called, young people from all walks of society started to protest and those protests spread. And the media started to cover the protests.

The draft was very ecumenical; it touched everyone.

And if we had a draft over Iraq, I guarantee that the war would be over faster than you can say, “General Petraeus.”

Sadly, we have a president who started on a false premise and still doesn’t get it even when his dad tells him that he is on an path that is going to lead to his failure.

Yet, people like Bush think that inflexibility and rigidity connote strength; they don’t, if anything they show him for the dolt that he is.

For the rest of us, it’s time to get connected. What better time than Memorial Day…

Les Aaron
The Armchair Curmudgeon

Iran, the Next Tinder Box

The Pieces are All in Place…


I hate to rub salt in the wound, but the crisis in Iran is a potentially lethal one for us.
Consider, the other day, Bush gave the go ahead to the CIA and other agencies to do what they have to do to keep the Bay of Hormouth open so that the Iranians will not interfere with the flow of oil as I understand it.

Has anyone before heard of a president of the country giving direct and open instructions to one of our most covert agencies?

Not I.

What do I make of it.

I make of it is that Bush in Iran’s face again. And like our build-up to Iraq when we strong-armed the UN, we are using the same tactics once again to snub the Iranians and set-up all the pieces for subsequent actions. .

Why would we do that?

The only thing that occurs to me is that we want to show the Iranian premier that we cannot be intimidated, and that we are ready to back up what we say.

The last step is the easiest one and the most dangerous prelude to war.

It is to find “the cause.”

When in the past, America wanted a provocation, they didn’t have much trouble in getting it. From the Tonkin resolution to “Remember the Maine, “ America has always found a good reason to go to War.

Of course, the true motive for such doings may have nothing to do with Iran; it may simply be a way for Bush to go down through history as a good Republican who adeptly turned the reins over to his successors.

Here’s why: Americans don’t abandon their president in the midst of war.

If America were to plunge into war with Iran, it would almost guarantee another four years of Republican rule.

This is not such a far out scenario judging from what we’ve seen in the past and it should be evoking all kinds of dialogue but nothing is happening. No one is discussing this very real possibility and one wonders whether we have become so immune to the outlandish moves of ths government, that we have quietly gone into a deep two year trance to protect ourselves against the men in white with butterfly nets. The other scenario is that we just don’t care what happens and that nihilism usually brings out the worst in us.

Les Aaron
The Armchair Curmudgeon..

For Those Desperately Seeking Answers, Know That They Are Already Within Reach...

A PERSONAL VIEW

A Prophet for our time.

Since the year 2000, many of us have been troubled in deep and complex ways by something we could not quite define. What it resembled for many of us was a vacuum that suggested that there was no philosophical underpinning to anything that we as a nation were engaged in—it was as if we were endorsing something that had the depth of a human hair and bordered on farce if it weren’t for the fact that it was a force multiplier that changed lives; it was as if our arms were being twisted to accept someone else’s half baked vision of values and spirituality and trying to use strong arm tactics to justify it.

. Without such a philosophy, it seemed that we could fall right through the center of the earth with nothing we could grab onto that would interrupt our fall. There was no one or nothing to cling to that would explain why everything around us seemed so wrong so utterly craven; nothing we could believe in. The media was mute. Our senior statesmen didn’t whisper a word. . Why the only corresponding parallel was something we could barely grasp suggesting what we already knew that something was dreadfully wrong, that our instincts were being trampled upon and that we were being lied to with impunity.

Many around me were seeming to buy into what appeared to be a huge hoax that threatened to bring us down as a people, preparing us for things we might never accept otherwise. There were no voices for truth; nobody willing to stand up and say that this doesn’t seem right—Lord something is wrong here. Am I the only one who sees it. Americans are smarter than this.

We awoke from this feverish nightmare in what was becoming a strange parallel universe only to discover that there were no answers to our most fundamental questions or at least no one to answer them. We were in a wasteland of unimaginable dimension. The right were made to feel wrong. And the smart held their tongues. We awoke to discover that we were alone and adrift on a black sea replete with sea monsters of every description. It was as if we have been traveling in a vacuum for the last seven years with no explanation and we had all become mired in a kind of molasses of the soul.

What we needed, we didn’t recognize.

But the instrument of change was there; only we didn’t understand his role as prophet and, perhaps, at the time, he didn’t either. It is to his credit that Al Gore after the election of 2000 did not lose his courage, his commitment and his faith in America; Al Gore stood up, unwavering and gave us that something to cling to, a bastion against the winter storms that assailed the very foundations of our beliefs that seemed to be crumbling before our eyes. And, over time, he has endured as the whitest of White Knights gently steering us to coherence, to honesty, to values that we can believe in once again.

It is to his credit that the real president also had the ability to fill the voids when there was no one else to turn to; to satisfy our lusting for rational explanations for all things. Over time, we have discover that he is the ‘real thing,’ a prophet for our time to lead us out of the wilderness.

To this boy, he is an amalgam of Carl Sagan, Adam Smith, Rousseau, and the inheritor of the ideas of Adams, Franklin and Hamilton. And we love him for it. But, despairingly, there is no number two. No one who understands the truth and tell us what we need to hear without first taking a poll, consulting with staffers, judging the impact of their words, hemming and hawing. Why are people so afraid to speak their minds; to tell the truth.

For many, myself included, Al Gore has assumed the mantle of Deux Ex Machina, the mechanism for solving a Greek tragedy in the third act.
We are not in Greece today but we may well be in the “third act.”
Gore’s insights and positive approach buoys us up in ways that without him, could not even be entertained. But without him, we are like ships tossed at sea.
He has correctly identified the enemy, the cabal that gouges away at our government and depletes all of our resources; that attacks our middle class; our most cherished traditions with impunity like robotic devices designed to just keep taking until there is nothing left to take or exploit.

There is no more Mario, the Hellenistic Catholic Theologian who is more likely to quote Acquinas than St. Augustine. Bill Clinton goes on worldwide trips with the man who says nothing, does nothing to interrupt the fulfillment of his vision of a New World Order which raises the legitimate question of whether our former president has sold out to the instruments of power and bought into the wholsesale abandonment of the middle class. If he really cared, why couldn’t he say, “rein in your boy, Mr. Bush.” Beyond them, we seem bereft of those who might help us find moorings. But they are there. Buried in their little academic dens or shunted off to the side waiting for the present nest of foul things to be swept away in the coming election; nevertheless, we yearn for the Eisenhowers, Trumans and Roosevelts of old and their predecessors for guidance in seeking a safer harbor and a truer course. .

Until the reemergence of Al Gore, we had to plod along through alien space like a bunch of misplaced hobbits seeking redemption from a cabal of evil creatures who seek to steal our souls and plunder on feeding off of lies that we could not accept or integrate with all honesty. ..

For now, aside from Al Gore, who do we trust to do God’s work? . And make no mistake about it, for what needs to be done, we do need someone who can take on the onerous task of rebuilding our world from the bottom up under a clock that ticks away and threatens to erase our futures. .

Les Aaron
The Armchair Curmudgeon

The Manana Solution

iT'S FUNNY...If I didn't know better, I might think it's even a case of role reversal.

What I am referring to is the implications of the new Immigration Bill.

For most Americans, there seems to be a South of the Border attitude that suggests "we'll deal it with it manana..." while conversely our Hispanic friends south of the border want a resolution to the problems of immigration now. Even though they are illegals, they may have a point. If there is a problem, let's address it, make whatever changes are necessary and move on. But it can never be so easy when there are so many diverse issues represented.

But is this the way it should be in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave?


Like Bill Maher says, "I am pissed off because not more Americans are pissed off."

And I think that may say it best.

Most Americans seem to be in suspended animation as if they are on a space ship headed into deep space.

The enemy, instead of being HAL trying to con us with his lulling voice is actually the government trying to tell us why this hodge podge of legislation that attemps to please everyone is pleasing no one.

In attempting to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear, they have only managed to put together something that looks worse than a sow's ear.

What's the answer when nobody is happy?

You start over!

But our candidates are feeling the pressure of summer recess.

Maybe our representatives, with all that they are being paid, should take fewer holidays than a highschool teenager. Maybe that's the way they could make up for their poor showing this year.

But, frankly, taking the holidays away from a group that seems to be generally on holiday all of the time would be maybe as bad as sending innocent citizens to a Cuba internment camp for questioning.

It would not go over well.

So meanwhile while we say "manana;" they beat the drum for change that seems to be slow in coming.

What else is new?

Les Aaron

Monica Should Be Nominated for an Award...

Don't Waste Your Tears...

Before we get too weepy eyed for Monica, let us remember that this fifth grade lawyer, a recent graduate of one of the lowest rated law schools in the country, a Christian law school that seems to confuse religious interpretations with the law, had the power of life and death over first rate quality lawyers whose boots she couldn’t shine.



We seem to lose sight of that when we discover that Monica can actually walk and talk and isn’t the complete Barbie Doll we made her out to be. If anything, Monica is proving less a good lawyer than a fine actress emoting almost on cue.



If anything, the Investigators have lost out to the clever witness once again and an opportunity to place blame where it belongs lost!



Les Aaron

The Armchair Curmudgeon

Third Party Rumblings...

Want to hear a crazy idea that maybe not so crazy?

It turns out that Chuck Hagel, the Nebraska republican, and Mayor Bloomberg, a former democrat and now republican mayor of the biggest city in the country, are contemplating starting a third party.

Chuck Hagel, a Vietnam veteran, and Bloomberg have already declared their independence. And just yesterday, Bloomberg showed his green roots when he ruled that all cabs driving in New York, more than 13,000 of them, must convert to gas efficient vehicles within the next five years.

Might this rumor be tossed aside as the ravings of a couple of lunatics?

No, because when somebody has billions of dollars in his war chest to drive his point home and controls a media empire, we should all pay attention.

Moreover, a candidate like Chuck Hagel appeals to both sides since he was one of the first republican senators to publicly differ with the Administration’s position on Iraq in what appeared to be either the smartest thing any candidate could do or a sure path to political suicide. Interestingly, not one of today’s republican candidates takes issue with Bush’s stand on Iraq. Is Chuck right and the rest of the party wrong?

There is evidence of that if you consider the lop-sided vote in the mid-terms.

Of course, we all know that third parties don’t stand a ghost of a chance.

But wait a minute, a recent study may actually raise the question as to whether it may actually give the lie to that proposition. Here’s why:
It showed the Democrats polling at 32% and the Republicans ten points less then the democrats.

So what’s the big deal? The big deal is this: For the first time in memory, there are more voters who identify themselves as Independents as opposed to Republican or Democrat by a significant margin.

That would seem to auger well for the formation of a third party—especially with a high profile candidate like Chuck Hagel who has stood tall on rejecting Iraq policy and a popular mayor with deep pockets.

On top of that, so far both parties are not faring well in the big lead ups to the Primaries and with five hundred days to go before the election, it may just turn out that more than half of them burn out before the final rounds.

So, let’s not be too quick to rule out what on first blush looks like one of the dumbest ideas to come down the pike this year and adapt a wait a see attitude. Perhaps, too, a third party may just wake democrats from their lethargy.

In contemplating the third party idea, what we do know is that they usually hurt democratic efforts. Therefore. We’d have to ask ourselves whether democrats would shift sides, jump ship? How would middle of the road republicans, who are generally turned off by a party that has jettisoned its values and moved away from conventional republican positions, respond to such an idea?

Certainly, if nothing else, a third party would stir the pot.

Good or bad? Well leave it for you, the voter, to decide.

Les Aaron
The Armchair Curudgeon

Are We Watching the Wrong Store?

While Congress and the President are focused like a laser on what’s happening in Baghdad, the irony is that it is not Baghdad or even Iraq that we should be studying.

What? You say

Here’s my rationale: The fact of the matter is that while we are assuming that what happens in Baghdad will decide what’s happening overall in Iraq, like an inductive experiment, it could be just the reverse of what we think.

From where I stand, it may be what happens in the region will be the barometer of what is going to happen in Baghdad and not vice versa.

Here’s why I say what I do: We are already witnessing the beginning of a melt-down that’s spreading across the Middle East--from as far West as Egypt to Iran in the East.

There is now sufficient hard evidence to suggest that the Syrian and Iranian governments are conspiring to influence change inside Iraq but also Palestine and Lebanon.

On the balance sheet, it looks as if it may wind up with Iran and Syria positioned against Jordan and the Saudis. If that should happen—and there are signs that it is already in motion if you consider the state of Lebanon and the threat to the government from the Islamists and the Iranian backed Hamas in the Gaza, we realize that we need to pull back and take a broader view. It may in fact be a case of watching the wrong tinderbox; nonetheless, should that occur, we will undoubtedly side with the Sunnis especially with the Saudis. It is hardly a secret that we have had a marriage of convenience with the Saudis. It is also no secret that the Saudis are funneling some of their oil profits made on US gas guzzlers back to bin Laden,

. But backing the Saudis may be bad for the Saudis and bad for America because it will definitely position America as pro-Sunni and anti-Shia’—an untenable posituon for a country seeking to bring peace to a tormented land.

In many respects, this is reminiscent of the many polarities that existed in the Balkans
When the West came to the aid of Bosnia against the militancy of Serbia where Islamists and Christians had lived peacefully side by side for generations only to tear at each others throats when Belgrade called the shots.

Similar old animosities have now resurfaced between Sunni and Shia’ and we have only served to aggravate Middle Eastern feelings in our misguided effort to impose democracy on everyone. Like the Christian missionaries of old, it might have been smarter to keep our proselytizing to ourselves.

Les Aaron
The Armchair Curmudgeon

First Editions Still Available

Dear Democrat, It’s time to come together!...



This is the text from our hand-out on A Blueprint for Winning.

We have a few signed first editions available. Contact me or LAACO at hubmaster@aol.com for more information. I apologize if you already ordered or read the book.

For those friends, please recommend it to your friends.

If you have not ordered it or read it, I think you will be in for a treat.

It represents tons of research and five years of hard work and experience gained working for the elections of McGovern, Jerry Brown, Mo Udahl, Howard Dean, Al Gore, John Kerry and others and knowing many people inside and outside of government…

Best wishes,

Les Aaron





What the republicans don’t want you to read…

A Blueprint for Winning: Taking Back the White House: Why hasn’t anyone thought of writing a book this way before. This is a tell-all, take no prisoners approach to WINNING…

In the text, we have called a spade a spade, listed our demands, attacked the Right Wing for their excesses/their violations of the Constitution, and their trampling all over the law; we’ve upbraided them for their disregard of the people; attacked them for their inability to govern; condemned them for ignoring “Clean Air/Clean Water” regs; charged them for going to war without reason; and pilloried them for the needless death of our best and brightest and revealed them for what they are, egomaniacal bottom-feeders motivated by self interest and greed.

If this sounds like warfare, make no mistake about it, it is. And the enemy is not some ignorant peasant in flowing robes, it is the arrogant clique who thinks we are all stupid and misinformed, a government that has sidestepped the law and violated its oath to the American people.

Make no mistake about it, in writing this book we are not playing according to Hoyle any more than the opposition does. It’s about time Democrats grew up!... This book, in fact, subscribes to the view that the opposition is treated to as much fairness as the republicans accorded to Bill Clinton; or Donald Segretti and his worshippers—Lee Atwater, Ron Delay, and Newt Gingrich accorded to the democratic line up whom they slandered, lied about, misquoted, denigrated and otherwise attacked from 1980 until today.

We must recognize that the mid-terms were an aberration. The Independents and Republicans will not give us the benefit of the doubt again. If we want to win, we are going to have to work our backsides off!...Period. And the Republicans have no intention of giving up power without a battle. IT’S TIME TO GET REAL! We are not going to win because we have nice smiles, solid “abs,” or take Viagra—we are going to win because we had a plan, we learned to use the tools, and we put together a winning effort. That is the lesson of A Blueprint for Winning. It gives you the tools, the fundamentals of the plan and even reviews the platform issue by issue. It’s a no-brainer. Somebody with no experience could read this book and win an election.

Part of what we must do is educate the voter as to what the Republicans have done to dismantle our democracy, steal our jobs, ruin our environment, poison our air and our water, decimate the Unions and alienate the entire world. We have gone from a nation with a surplus to a nation that is identical to a Colony. We export agricultural products and import manufactured goods at huge monthly losses. A Superpower? Not by a long shot thanks to the people who sit in power and make policy. And that has to change.

Beginning now.

Today,. More than sixty percent of the nations wealth is concentrated in the hands of fewer than five percent of the population; there is something terribly wrong about that. The executives in today’s plants make more than 400 times what the worker on the floor does!...That’s an outrage! And not duplicated elsewhere in the Western world. The top five percent earn more than the bottom 40% after taxes!...43 million people do not have health care; more than 37 million people live at or below the poverty level. What we have is a Let Them Eat Cake Monarch, not a democracy that looks out for the people!

And that, too, has to change…

A Blueprint for Winning tells it like it is. It proceeds to not only give us the tools and the knowledge, it goes further. It lays out an imaginative and progressive agenda to rebuild America and makes us great again. The Twenty Point Program is our ace in the hole and differentiates us from the unimaginative forces that are leading us into a black hole as they pursue their vision of a New World Order that is for everyone except the people.



If you can read A Blueprint for Winning and not get motivated, we suggest that you contact your physician immediately.



In Democracy,



Les Aaron

Former Editor, Democracy Chronicle

Gore Activist

The Committee for Positive Change



A percentage of proceeds will go to the CPC for progressive causes and the support of local and national candidates

To order, send check or money order for 24.95 plus 5.50 S&H to LAACO, c/o les aaron, 239 lakeside drive, lewes de 19958; if you have problems, email hubmaster@aol

Survival of the Middle Class Threatened

New Threats to the Survival of the Middle Class

As director for the Committee for Positive Change, I recently prepared an editorial the other day on the coming re-engineering of society. I thought that it would appeal to a few thoughtful readers causing them to perhaps consider taking some kind of positive role to change the status quo. Quite surprisingly, I didn’t hear from anyone on the subject despite the fact that has such broad implications for the middle class and the very fabric of our society.

For many of us, brought up in a middle class milieu, it seems hardly believable that we could read this staggering assessment and not be concerned about what is happening to the middle class in America; but if anything, the middle class’ lot has deteriorated over the last six years bringing into serious question whether it can actually survive and remain viable; yet, alternatively, it is at the very foundation of our democratic way of life. Without a middle class in America, the entire dream collapses.

Could this really happen?

This is a question that has been plaguing us lately because we have not seen such a confluence of negative factors reinforcing each other that could have that deleterious effect. One might ask: Are we nearing the brink? Are we facing the prospect of chaos and entropy?

On the surface, such scenarios seem so far out and so improbable that we thought we would look more closely at the problem.

It is not a pretty scenario but it must be considered now in order that we can prepare a plan to deal with the multiple challenges we face.

The principal catalyst in this is, of course, oil and its availability., .

It is oil that threatens the middle class.

Reading background on oil supplies and producer reports, the news is not encouraging; nor has it been good for a very long time. A quick recap: We have done nothing to free ourselves from oil dependency while the supply of oil from the 41 world-wide suppliers is diminishing; but even worse, there is reason to believe that estimated quantities in the ground have been overestimated and our reserves, on average, may only last us another thirty years. In the end, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait shall rule; they have the largest supply of oil reserves and what they decide to do will, in large measure, determine our own fates….so no one is quite immune and the world has gotten perilously smaller in the interim..

But what does that mean?

Can Saudi Arabia be trusted to support our best interests?

History shows that the Saudis have always operated out of self interest and it is expected they always will. They cooperated with the US in the past because they invested their oil wealth here; that is no longer happening. America is so saddled with debt arising from a negative balance of trade and other forms of debt, it has literally changed the world’s perception of us as a safe haven for their investments.

Saudi Arabia, for example, is now investing directly in assets, in stocks rather than countries and that could significantly change the landscape for us…so they cannot be counted on as a stabilizing force.

However, and here is the kicker! If we wanted to wean ourselves away from oil, it would take generations. And we haven't even taken the first steps.

So, the oil increases where there is no oversight, puts the middle class and most of the US population between a rock and a hard place. And we are and will be dependent on oil for long into the future….that is the critical factor.

Years ago, back in the seventies, It was estimated that fundamental change in our society would take place when oil hit 2.00 dollars a gallon; it is now over three dollars a gallon and expected to go to four to five dollars a gallon in short order.

This will affect everything involving petrochemicals from the price of plastics, packaging, distribution, food, etc. In other words, you can expect to pay more for packaging, food, anything made of plastics, anything that employs a derivative of plastic or oil. If your budgets have not as yet been attenuated by divergent demands from every quarter, they will now.

Consider this: As recently as last year, you could fill your tank for under thirty dollars, now it is not uncommon that it will cost sixty five dollars to fill an average tank.

The trouble is that most people cannot afford to give up their cars; we live in a culture that has sacrificed mass transit to individual rights and we are now paying the price for it—a price that we cannot afford.

But when we talk oil, we are not only talking about transportation, we are talking about energy—energy to heat our home and power our needs. Heating costs this winter seemed to have reached stratospheric levels, almost capriciously as if there was no one or no department monitoring or supervising increases of twenty to thirty percent in home heating oil costs.

We observed that in smallish homes of 2,000 square feet or less, homeowners were paying in the range of 500 dollars a month plus to keep a home at 68 degrees. This can be staggering for families on fixed incomes or others who have not benefited from wage increases who are already pressed at every turn.
.

Were this the only factor to consider, the average homeowner might be able to assimilate it, but it isn't. The average homeowner is faced with stagnant wages--even in a period of rapidly rising productivity and a continuing exodus of jobs and opportunity. Moreover, credit problems and a lack of equity in their homes has put the average middle class family at a level of risk seldom seen before especially in an economy characterized as “booming.”.

More and more, middle class families are finding themselves struggling with basic survival considerations: from putting food on the table to paying for medicines and, now, oil becomes the straw that can more than anything else break the back of the middle class.

You can see the depressing outcome without thinking too long or too hard on the subject

As we see it here at the Committee for Positive Change, there is considerable momentum from the pressure of today’s economic realities to propel society to entertain massive re-engineering of the middle class. This is not a positive estimate but an eventual reality predicated on the confluence of many factors and an inability to deal with society’s problems.

If nothing else changes, the average middle class family hugging the lowest rungs of the economic ladder will find that with few options available to them, hope will evanesce and without hope, there is greatest concern for the continuing stability of the middle class. Without stability, any outcome is possible—from protests to riots and beyond.

There are hints of of unpleasant outcomes even now. Families are maxed out; heads of households are finding it exceedingly difficult to maintain quality of life. Families are unable to pay for the three fundamentals: food, shelter and transportation. And the luxury of a night out or a new toy or game have become beyond the reach of most families.

Ordinarily, a wise and farsighted administration would recognize the need for bringing relief because, ultimately, it will impact that leadership’s own survival. But it seems such considerations are furthest from the minds of the current occupants of the White House. The very fact that they cannot contemplate the consequences of their precipitous actions in so many arenas on family stability is beyond imagining.

And without government intervention, there is little optimism for a change in outcome.. What we see is that the middle class is increasingly finding itself between a rock and a hard place with no solution in sight.
A society that cannot heed the warning signs from its society is in very difficult straits.

If no actions are taken to change the status quo, we see a clash between government and the society and one of two things will occur: repression or change. We are presently unprepared for the effects of either.


We hope that this warning will highlight the problem and begin the curative process but judging from this leadership's track record, we are not encouraged.

The answer in the light of the realities we are faced with is the massive response of the people. Increasingly, as Al Gore has said, and we have underscored: It is the people who must decide their own futures.

It should be noted here that something will happen that will change the projected negative outcome that may result from a pernicious do-nothing policy for the people and that happily we have misjudged the fundamentals. But on the other hand, the fundamentals are in place, housing is down, credit is tightening and most middle class people are watching their quality of life slide so that we are quite confident that the projected outcomes are highly probable if the government doesn’t act in its own interests to change the status quo.

Les Aaron

A Victory for Democracy

We Beat Out The Coal Lobby!....

We've done it. We've turned around the Ole Boys Network that has been advocating more and more coal as a solution to the Energy problem in our coastal state.

Who says a handful of people can't do something?

We started with just a few of us. We used what we knew to get the word out. And that "word" helped to build t coalitions of the concerned all over the state.

We worked with local professors. And we encouraged some of our College experts on wind energy to stand tall. We set up conferences and presentations beginning with our small part of the State and then joining in with others who became supporters. We wrote letters, put together editorials, talked it up, got the local conservative papers to pay attention and created so much noise for our size, that eventually the candidates for governor and the existing governor started to sit up and pay attention.

The original votes which were said to replicate the past--the coal lobby is big in our state--were postponed and a lot of new hearings and testimony took place. And the people's interest increased in proportion to the exposure we got.

The verdict is in: The small guys won.

We are going to have our offshore wind energy.

We are going to build windmills using as a model the system operating now in Denmark. This will be the FIRST Offshore Wind Energy facility in AMerica and, hopefully, a model for all future wind energy projects--which we see as the future of alternative energy in the United States...

These are not the old-fashioned conventional windmills, these are giant aesthetically designed structures that are as tall as the Statue of Liberty and they only depend on one thing, an ample supply of wind which our area is known for...

When the complete project is completed, we should be able to generate all of the electrical energy needed by the state with reserves that could be sold to lower users prices within the state.

It is a time to celebrate.

But even more, there is a lesson here for all of us.

Even if we don't have the numbers, the money or the political influence, we can get people to pay attention to our message if we work hard enough at it. I am convinced that we can do anything if we put our minds to it.

I hope this enthuses you all for whatever causes you are engaged in.

The mountain has come to Mohammed or something like that..

Best wishes to you all while I go out to celebrate!

Glenfiddich, here I come...

WE SHARE THIS VICTORY WITH OUR OTHER DEMOCRATIC FRIENDS...

Cheers!!!

les aaron

The Coming Revolution...

I believe that the story of our generation will be published two or three years from now. It will begin: “The Bush presidency missed an opportunity to influence social change…”
And then it will touch on all of the things that this presidency did wrong in its efforts to mislead the people; not only about the Iraq war but in terms of the social upheaval that was coming that would change everything that we thought we knew and the implications of such wrong-headedness. .

Why do I say this?

Because all of the elements are in place that are pointed in only one direction and either nobody is aware of the overwhelming evidence or choose to ignore the implications, thinking that they will leave it for someone else to address.

The implications of inertia are simply awesome.

What are those implications: Social re-engineering on such a scale that we can’t even imagine what the future holds unless I miss my guess.

Nonsense, you say. Consider the pillars on which a society stands: They are some very basic fundamentals and if they are not satisfied, the society collapses. They begin with food, energy, work, shelter.

What might be the catalyst to augment such fundamental change?

You know the answer to that: Oil.

Right now, we have gone from a norm of $16 a barrel to $40 a barrel to what may become a standard rate of as much as $75 a barrel or more.

At $40 a barrel, we were pushing gasoline at the pumps to $2.00 a gallon. As bad as
$2.00 a gallon is it is history. We will not see gas prices that low for the immediate future. It is likely that within the next several years, gasoline will oscillate between four and five dollars a barrel. This has to do with things like the fact that the middle east can do what it wants with its oil and in the end, OPEC is not really our friend regardless of whether we maintain that illusion and the fact that most companies want to maximize their remaining inventories..

One thing that has kept oil prices relatively moderate is the fact that the oil producers have major investments in the west. That is changing with a redirection of assets. That is also happening in China who instead of buying western debt is investing its resources in tangible assets or investments in diversified companies. In the past, the middle eastern investors did not want to bankrupt their western trading partners; now they have so diversified their investments, that they hardly seem to care.

But the fact of the matter is what we have been led to believe is wrong: That is that the oil producers have an endless supply of oil. That is simply not true. If we put things into perspective, the oil reserves projected at thirty or forty years are really more in the range of twenty years. We knew it and we did nothing to ameliorate or even address the problem. When the reality of the real reserves are understood, there will be increasing pressure for higher prices.

Assuming that is the case, one only has to think of the impact on the very vulnerable middle class. Consider, for example, that instead of allocating twenty dollars to filling up the car, you now have to pay forty dollars for the same privilege.. That means twenty dollars a week has to come from something else to keep the average family on an even keel.

But the impact of oil doesn’t end there, most people use oil as their principal source of fuel and other fuel prices seem to be tied to what happens to oil in one way or another.

Engergy prices for home heating will also be going up. Moreover, anything employing oil or distribution costs will increase. If you buy something derived from petroleum, you will also be paying higher prices. Food will cost more because the distribution costs will increase with the increase in oil prices. Most of the cost for food is tied up in middleman costs—ie transportation, moving the product from the grower or planter or rancher to the grocery store.

At the same time, families in the Middle Class are finding that they are between a rock and a hard place. Their living costs are going up, but their salaries are not.
In fact, many are seeing their jobs taken over by robotic devices or where labor cannot be avoided, shifted to other economic areas—even outside this country—where payrolls are a fraction of what they are here.

Add to this the burden of paying higher rates on mortgages, foreclosures and other pressures resulting from the fact that many took on the kind of mortgages that would increase in time in order to buy into the housing market and now, with all kinds of collateral pressures, the families are unable to make ends meet.

Declining jobs, despite what the statistics may suggest, higher costs for food and energy, are putting the middle class into a bind for which there is no solution.
The fact is that fifty percent of wage earners are maxed out on at least one credit card and that the bulk of all homeowners have maximized the equity available in their homes and you find a potential tinderbox that is very dangerous to the social fabric of this country.

If things keep the way they are going, with the increasing dislocation of the middle class, an illegal minority that serves as a blotter to soak up peripheral or secondary jobs that normally got the middle class through the rough spots, there is no place to go.

The options are few when you find that you cannot afford to heat the house, pay the mortgage, send your kids to school, put food on the table and pay for the medicines your family needs.

If the middle class decides that it has no hope, you can expect change to happen within a shorter time frame. Hope is the determining factor along with its converse, desperation and despair. If the middle class is forced to decide between heating the house and putting food on the table, there will be revolution in this country the likes of which we have never seen before.

As of now, nothing the Congress is doing is designed to address or ameliorate the conditions for the middle class. We don’t see a serious effort to bring drug prices down or address the issues of higher energy costs. The president has ignored the opportunities to address the needs of the American people and, instead, sided on the side of business which will ultimately contribute to a foregone conclusion: Martial law or revolution. Nature abhors a vacuum.

It may not happen this year or next, but unless a way can be found to address the staggering impact of the present fundamentals on the average American taxpayer and bring some relief—and there is no indication that the leadership is even cognizant of the threats posed—this revolution will reshape the relationship between government and the people in ways that will not only stagger the mind, they will rewrite the relationship between the masses and those who govern the masses irrevocably..

At this stage of the game, however, government will not tolerate this happening and position its armies between us and them. The results may prove beyond imagining.

Yet, at this stage of the game, if we had a visionary Chief Executive, who really cared about the people, he could push through legislation that would remove the present escalating demands on the middle class and then push for longer term solutions that would have as its centerpiece alternative energy.

But this won’t happen under Bush&Company.

I have spelled out some of these challenges in my book, A Blueprint for Winning, in which I really believe that we can bring back the America we knew and define a new vision for an America that is visionary and addresses the real time needs of people restoring our country to its former greatness. It is doable. It is possible. But this is the eleventh hour and the hands of time are running down.
If we choose, instead, to pursue the inertia that is characteristic of this administration , the world will change and we will change with it and not for the good.

It is up to us and the government what happens.

Les Aaron

The Impeachment Fiasco

Everybody’s running ‘round talking about Impeaching this one, impeaching that one…
Yet very little comes of it.

In fact, I haven’t heard of one Impeachment effort that seems to be going anywhere.
Why?, I might inquire.

And I think I know the answer.
The American government is not easy to fix.
We don’t have the powers that say a Parliamentary system has where they can show a lack of confidence in a government and demand a new vote.

The only resolution we have is Impeachment.

And for one reason or another, the very idea of Impeachment seems to shake this government to its very foundations—unless of course you are the subject of it and your name is Clinton.

For reasons both known and unknown, the veryidea of Impeachment seems to suck the oxygen out of the air.

It means first casting your lot with this seemingly unsavory idea and then hearings after hearings….the iron maiden and the rack. Remember Watergate?

Well, if we are to put up this awful gang of charlatans and incompetents, it might even be worse. We might even probe into what really happened on 9/11 which would undoubtedly throw the whole government into disorder and entropy. And who can afford entropy…unless that is you are a string theorist.

Although it seems that the adjectives surrounding Impeachment are so vile, so awesomely troubling that few have gotten behind them. Ask anyone in government what specifically does Impeachment entail, and most will go, “….sure, but argh, ah, well, (in hushed tones), it will wreck havoc and destruction on our poor system…hmmm!

It may be all those things, but it didn’t stop those who claimed the moral high ground (yuke, yuke) from Impeaching Bill Clinton, probably the best and most intelligent president since Roosevelt…

So, it can’t be all that bad or that dislocating or that dangerous to our democracy.

In fact, it might even constitute a breath of fresh air.

Let’s flip back for a sec, Ford exonerated Nixon because he said he wanted to spare the country the need to go through such a process which could according to those who know ‘tear us asunder.”

But there are provisions that constitute Impeachment referred to as “high crimes and misdemeanors.” If the instigation of a phony war does not constitute high crimes and misdemeanors what precisely does? It’s surely a heck of a lot worse than sexual relations with an intern if you need a standard for comparison.

And yet we still go on like the Mad Hatter shaking our heads and trying to look as if we know what’s really going on and nothing happens.

If nothing else, this certainly qualifies as spectacle.

Les Aaron
The Armchair Curmudgeon

Gingrich, Master of Self Deception

Gingrich, Genius in his own mind.


It’s nice to hear advice on values from Gingrich, lest we forget that he is the man who divorced his wife as she lay in a hospital bed trying to deal with the realities of cancer. It’s nice to hear about morals from the Speaker of the House who used his power to get an advance to push his own book and get a big advance in exchange for selling out the FCC for the almighty buck. It is nice to hear about integrity from the man who enhanced the ideas of Nixon’s “dirty trickster,” Donald Segretti…
Do we need to hear any more about religion, morality and integrity from the man who would and has sold his soul to the Devil?

And to think this is the kind of man the conservative interests of our country would like to follow?

Doesn’t that tell you more than you need to know?

It is as if the vast body of voters who claim to think of themselves as having integrity, and morality in sufficient quantity so that they may judge us lacking, cannot even differentiate for themselves who is an honest man and who is not.

It is as if they are like the three monkees who see no evil, speak no evil and hear no evil are incapable of even understanding what evil is even when they are confronted with it.

I could see why God might want to go back to the drawing board if this is the best that came out of the the last batch claiming God’s perfection. Maybe, all of these natural phenomena are about warning us that God is ready to try again. And that wouldn’t be too hard to sort out. Kind of a divine payback for all the nasties who populate this world..
No wonder, in good sense, our founding fathers did not want religion and government to overlap.
It is a prescription for doom.

Les Aaron
The Armchair Curmudgeon

We Still Have Something to Gain...Even from the Worst Government Imaginable...

Is there nothing salvageable from Bush&Company?


What lessons we can take back from this government.

Anybody who looks objectively at this government and doesn’t get nauseous, wondering what in the Lord’s name are this government’s redeeming qualities may be missing true lesson here.

Is there anybody going to school in this day and age who can look at this government and cannot say “I can do better.” My God, Bush & Company has to be a balm for the ego for anyone who thinks that maybe he or she is not good enough!....

If this mess doesn’t offer encouragement what does?

The country is crying out for leadership and good leaders.

There is a wealth of opportunity out there for people with courage, integrity and intelligence to come to the rescue of their government and their country.

And viewed from the glass half full perspective, we may find that there are reasons for optimism.

We now know what it means to sink to the bottom of the swamp, elect unqualified and incompetent people to fill the ranks and still somehow manage to bungle through.

It is not pretty.

No, and I am sure our forebears are turning in their collective graves with the thought that what started out as such a noble idea has been so sullied by the forces of ineptitude and corruption. Even more stunning is the fact that these incompetent nincompoops don’t even realize how bad they are at what they do.

One thing is good: I don’t think we could have faired worse.

But what is perhaps more amazing is to learn how vulnerable we really are to the bottom feeders, those who only feed on the efforts of others.

And how willing our whole population is to put up with such embarrassing leadership. And that is the imponderable here..

It is as if we been sucked into Alice’s mirror and we cannot extract ourselves and think objectively any more.

If we did, we certainly would do more than we are doing to salvage the world and our own poor doddering democracy that doesn’t seem to know what it is anymore.

Yet, I cling to the idea that some good may come of all of this.

That there are young people out there who will come to our rescue even if our heroes have abandoned us…

And for a breath of fresh air, I would give anything. So, young people, the future of the Republic rests upon you.

Don’t let us down and we will try to look like adults in your presence.

Good luck! And may your kind live and prosper!

Les Aaron

The Plus Side of Global Warming...

Increasingly my favorite days don’t match up with anyone else’s.

And I’m not sure what that means but what else might you expect
from someone who thinks that Scrooge was really a nice guy…and
that snakes and bugs are fun.

I have always favored rough weather and living in the path of squalls or major storms.
I have been through hurricanes on the islands—a few set a record or two, typhoons in China, water spouts in Coastal Florida, mind-boggling ice storms in Tennessee, earthquakes in California, and blinding snowstorms in the mountains.

Now, I live in the path of nor’easters and I love them.

Is this guy nuts?

No, and I’ll tell you why: rough weather knocks the power out most of the time.

So?....

Being a news junky, it is very hard to break away sometimes so you need an act of Nature to do it for you….

And if you’ve personally never experienced a kind of pervasive blanket of quiet, you are in for a treat.

Because we live on a peninsula, we get our share of power outages; only they don’t last long enough. In the mountains, where I used to live, when the power failed, it failed. And it was serious business, because if the power stayed out you could bust a pipe in very short order.

Also, in the mountains there is a kind of darkness that most of us who don’t know total darkness may find that they can’t cope with. This is darkness where you can literally see nothing; not even when you stick your hand in front of your face.

Like I say, as long as I had my dogs with me, I was okay.

At times like that, I could start a fire in one of my fireplaces and fuel up a little lantern which would give me enough light to read by. There were no phone calls. No television. (We couldn’t get the signals where we were anyway). My fax didn’t work. My computer could not reach out to the World. For some, I’m sure, on the receiving end, it was reason to celebrate. And there was absolutely no way that anyone could pester me except driving up two miles with bottomless drops and no lights from the main road.

Like I say, I’m a news junky but that doesn’t mean I like to listen to what the news readers have to say. The worst thing that could have happened to the news was Fox and its progeny who don’t care what they say as long as it generates ratings.
It has cheapened the whole business. And spread like wild-fire.

But what is worse than cheapening the business, is that it has allowed the wrong impressions to stand; it is dishonest and being exploited as a form of entertainment.

When I listen to the news, I don’t want entertainment, I want to edified, educated, informed;not spoken to as if I were an idiot incapable of differentiating fact from fiction.

This gives me reason to comment on what was once a good news source. CBS has been in a furor lately cause their ratings are sinking.

And well they should considering the crap that they pass off as serious news.

If you were to take notes, I doubt whether you would find more than two and a half minutes a night devoted to what’s happening in the rest of the world.

And if that doesn’t just isolate us, what does?

So thank you Nature for the occasional break—a time when my blood pressure comes down and I can wipe the gathering foam from my lips. I know I’m not missing anything.

Who knows, maybe Nature doesn’t like the news either.

Les Aaron
The Armchair Curmudgeon

Anatomy of a Superpower...

What Goes On in DC, Stays in DC

You would think that any red blooded American citizen would be foaming at the mouth about now, or shouting something from the top of his lungs about not taking it anymore or simply apoplectic. But guess what? None of that is the prevalent reality.

It seems that like Las Vegas, whatever happens in DC stays in DC. Does this mean that nobody cares? Who would care once you’ve been exposed to the reality. It gets pretty gloomy quickly when you realize that the business assistants write the bills that their bosses don’t read; then they get voted on with approbation while nobody knows what they approved. Eventually, some violation of the bill works its way into Court for the ultra conservatively justices to probe and pick at until they come to a conclusion which usually has something to do with Roe vs. Wade, stem cell research or some other personal decision. It is all really too confusing and depressing. If you looked at what went on, you would really believe that government has something to do with what we believe, the values we embrace and whether we feel like even having children.
.
The fact of the matter is that Washington has lost face; not to mention credibility..
All people know is that we have a war going on that is killing American boys and girls and nobody can seem to come up with an answer that works or is even very logical and, if they did, the president would consider them ‘commies’ and veto it.

They also know that there is some lackey called Alberto Gonzales who can’t remember what he had for breakfast and should be on meds rolling around in some retirement home and not endangering poor, honest citizens.

Occasionally, too, they read about the vice president surfacing only long enough to shoot someone in the face and then smile sweetly saying things are going great in Iraq.

All the rest seem to exist to justify what they are doing by stonewalling or blaming democrats, which is easy to do since the democrats can never seem to get their acts together. Tony Snow, the chief spokesperson who has cancer incidentally, looks askance at those environmentalists who thinks that if this government cleaned up the air and water, maybe he never would have gotten the big “c” in the first place. But no way, Jose, this is not a government that is very good at connecting dots.

All in all, it’s a pretty bad overview of what is considered government—a place where the president is a Monarch and delights in sending America’s jobs to third world nations, and, in exchange, importing cumquats for national secrets.

We say in news conferences that our biggest potential enemy is our great friend while they quietly build big rockets that could destroy us with the technology they have stolen from us. Should we tell anyone they’ve already won since we don’t bother to make anything anymore and have morphed into a Colony status, considering that we export our scrap and import manufactured goods and hold a sweeping trade deficit of something like 65 billion dollars a month—and still don’t seem to get it.

In the meantime, our president holds hands with an Arab prince because that Arab prince has lots of money which came from our middle class which he uses to underwrite terrorism which is used against us. This forces us to upgrade our military budgets in order to add more bombs and ammo to our already staggering inventories to keep the Right Wing military and industrial establishment happy.

It would all seem to come out okay if it were not for the fact that this staggering burden tends to fall on the back of the middle class who has been denigrated to minimum wage jobs that sacrifice its very health and longevity in the face of all kind of disasters, natural and otherwise, that seem to have evolved from our neglect of everything that doesn’t turn an immediate profit for a friend of government. You figure it out!

No wonder I can’t stand government.

Les Aaron

WHo's Going to Tell the Tourism Board?

Who’s going to tell the Tourism industry?


I told my wife not to make any big plans for December 21, 2012.
You see, that’s the date that very savvy Mayans’ calendar ran out.
What I mean there is nothing scheduled on December 22, 2012 on the Mayan calendar.
No, there are not trying to save on paper, or in this case rock. More likely, they are trying to tell us something…

That wouldn’t worry me so much were it not for the fact that the Mayan calendar seem to be uncannily accurate on predicting the future. They came up right on a whole bunch of projections.

Of course, this gives the religious zealots a good argument for saying I told you so when it comes to the End of Times or what they refer to as the Raptures, a very strange part of the bible that the whacko’s seem to have made their own. I’m not too impressed with zealotry, per se, so I kind of file all of this stuff in the rotary file under my desk. None the less, I do tend to feel a little feel a little brain surge when I learn that it is not only the Mayan calendar and the zealots who are converging on the Armageddon scenario, there’s a whole waiting list that seems to say don’t make too many plans for 2012; or, alternatively, if you have something to do, better do it ahead of time. I mean like a family reunion or a cruise or some other deal you’ve been putting off for the next five years.

I don’t know how to put this gently but when I was living in Eastern Asia, I learned about a pretty famous text that goes back even before the Egyptians. It’s called the I Ching which is kind of an elaborate book of prophecies with which you can gauge the future. …

Using the I Ching is kind of neat. It involves charting your own kind of horoscope based upon the toss of three coins six times. Each time, you toss, in a head and tails type of scenario. You either scribe two short lines or one large one depending on what comes up.. And you go through that six times until you’ve created a kind of personal chart. Then you turn to the I Ching and look up your chart which could be one of 64 set of possible prophecies…Everyone who uses it says it’s uncannily accurate.

One day, a mathematician realized that you could use the I Ching to plot out a whole range of possibilities and then attempt to correlate them with what actually happened to see how accurate the I Ching really is; only you guessed it you could only go as far as you guessed it, December 21, 2012.

Okay, okay, you say it’s circumstantial.

Let’s look elsewhere: Let’s shift to the Oracle of Delphi. You guessed it. The Oracle of Delphi who had an uncanny ability to predict the future refers to the end of the world somewhere around the year 2012.
We might take that with a grain of salt if the Oracles had predicted the attack on Rome by Africans on elephants and their eventual defeat and the rise of Constantine, even identifying him by name, eight hundred years before his time.

The implication in one of the Oracles prophesies was that there would be great tumult around 2008, hmmm? Wars and Natural events that would seem to grow in intensity until there was….well, I guess you can gauge the outcome.

You see the astral signs one derives from reading the charts is that on 2012 there will be a conversion of all the planets. The Mayans, for example, believed that there was something approaching a black hole in the center of the Galaxy and when we lined up all the planets there would be a cataclysmic event.

Does science laugh at this projection by what is thought of as an ancient people.

Heck no, they say that the Mayans are right; that according to their computers, the planets will line up and they have observed a black hole in the center of the galaxy.

What’s worse, Albert Einstein, in one of his papers, suggested that it was possible that if and when the planetsline up, there could be an event that takes place that happened only once before—a shift in the poles with the north pole becoming the south pole, etc. which would lead to all kinds of natural disasters.

This has turned me into a believer; I am only not going anywhere on December 21, 2012, I am going to bury myself into the safest place I can find with a year’s food and water reserves with the Parker Brothers and Scrabble and all the books I’ve been promising to read for years but haven’t. I am also going to take my tapes and a sunlight generator which I am sure they will have by then…

If all of that talk of the End of Days doesn’t get you whacky, I just discovered that it goes back to even that master magician of King Arthur’s Court, Merlin. As it turns out, there really was a Merlin who lived around 400 CE, accounts of whom were assembled in around the 11th Century. It seems he was some kind of wild man with a great record for predicting the future. He was right about so many things that people started taking him seriously, very seriously. . You guessed it. 2012 again!

By now, I’ve had enough and I am definitely cutting out my Christmas trip.

In fact, I’ve started taking this thing so seriously that I am planning on having one continuous party from now to then And then around June 2012 start maxing out my credit cards and buying all the things I’ve denied myself all these years. . Then go for a three month trip to Las Vegas where I will take in every show and order the biggest steaks on the menu and drink all of the best concoctions in the world…

So, if the world does come to an end, hey, I won’t feel like I’ve missed out on anything. And if it doesn’t, I will probably have learned a whole new repertoire that I can practice until it does….

Les Aaron