What's over your coffee pot?

LIBERTY POEM

WALT WHITMAN


Courage! my brother or my sister!
Keep on! Liberty is to be subserv'd, whatever occurs;
That is nothing, that is quell'd by one or two failures, or any number of failures,
Or by the indifference or the ingratitude of the people, or by any unfaithfulness,
Or the show of the tushes of power, soldiers, cannon, penal statutes.

What we believe in waits latent forever in Asia, Africa, Europe America, Australia, Cuba,
and all the islands and archipelagoes of the sea;
What we believe in invited NO 1, promises nothing, sits in calmness and light is positive and
composed, knows no discouragement,
Waits patiently its time a year, a century, a hundred centuries.

The battle rages with many loud alarm, and frequent advance and retreat,
The infidel triumphs, or supposes he triumphs,
The prison, scaffold, garotte, handcuffs, iron necklace and lead-balls do their work,
The named and unnamed heroes pass to other spheres,
The great writers and speakers are exiled, they lie sick in distant lands,
The cause is asleep, the strongest throats are choked with blood,
The young men droop their eyelashes to the ground when they meet;
But for all this Liberty has not gone out of the place, nor the infidel enter'd into full possession.

When Liberty goes out of a place it is not the first to go, nor the second or the third to go,
It waits for all the rest to go, it is the last.

When there are no memories of the lovers of the whole of the nations of the world,
The lovers' names scouted in the public gatherings by the orators,
Boys not christened after them, but christened after traitors and murders instead,
Laws for slaves sweet to the taste of the people -- the slave hunt acknowledged,
You or I walking abroad upon the earth, elated at the sight of slaves, no matter who they are,
And when all life and all the souls of men and women are discharged from that part of the earth,
Then shall the instinct of Liberty be discharged from that part of the earth,
Then shall the infidel and tyrant come into possession.

Then courage!
For, till all ceases, neither must you cease.

I do not know what you are for, (I do not know what I am for myself, or what any thing is for,)
But I will search carefully for it even in being foil'd,
In defeat, poverty, imprisonment -- for they too are great.

Did we think victory great?
So it is -- but now it seems to me, when it cannot be help'd, that defeat is great,
And that death and dismay are great.

Leaves of Grass, 1856-60

[After Liberty Poem. (1959). Lithograph. Jerome, Arizona: Rampart Press.]

Move the numbers and Impersonate NO 1 to Jack the Nation

That was it! @55:00-56:45, describing the sickening deceptiveness of Dick Cheney's declaration of "success" in Iraq, Patrick Cockburn nails it, but I doubt he's thinking of Iraq in mythosociopsychological terms like yours truly.

OK, two myths, two cosmologies: 1) The Imperturbable Cosmic Math, Answerable to NO 1; A) Being Aware of Becoming. The switch that took place millenia ago: move the numbers, impersonate NO 1, jack the nation!

We first hear of it in Egypt: The Secret of the Two Partners. We're supposed to be learning how we're all Being Eternity while Becoming Space/Time. Instead, these very cisterna mystica are stolen right out from within us, and replaced with mechanical receptacles of whatever it is our dear herdsmen feel like pumping us with today.

For example, just what in Earth is "non-dairy creamer?" Telling me "it's not torture" doesn't tell me what it is, AND it shoves a stiffarm in my face saying, "trust me."

[(Our unassailable standard of Living) //NO 1's Land, aka the atmosphere// (Greenhouse Gas emissions)] = Our Chilean kin blinded and cancer-ridden as a direct result, as if we each reached out and put out their eyes, declaring it finger-lickin' good free trade

Reductionism is dead, Stephen Jay Gould said February 19, 2001; with it dies mechanism as a basis for psychology. The social scientists who practice Newtonian psychology as their War on Terror effort are exposed as apprentices to our sorcerers of Death: Cheney, Rove, Zelikow, Clintons both, Carter,...all those who have weaponized myths and religions for breaking human spirits.

The fault is not with these walking talking cisterna mystica. The fault lies with our conception of ourselves: CELLf-imprisoned forever within inescapable egos; when in reality so-called, we are animated planetary {mater + pater rhyming in water}.

Look carefully at the spaces between these words: HA! fooled you, there are not "spaces;" look again, there's only the one background. Look at all the "things" in this cosmos!

Accepting the "life during wartime" framework steps into our opponents cosmos by definition. That's why I love the non-dualism of your slogan, "The War AND Peace report."

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Words and spaces;
Silences and sounds;
Absences and
Reunion

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We are more than only rational; we are intuitive as well. In this frameless mind, we are not infinitesimal, insignificant particles; we are all there is, simply becoming from within, as a plant grows from its apical meristems of root and shoot.

Here's a formula for the mythosociopsychology of this, our native cosmos:

beloved /UNION/ Beloved

The motto of this cosmos is:

In Union We Trust!

Being Aware of Becoming America

[First posted as a comment on 27 March 08 8:30 AM (GMT -0700) at BOVARD: The 9/11 Servility Reflex]


Q: What's a Zen poet & Kucinich supporter doing hanging out with the likes of supporters of McCain and Paul and "worse?"

A: Being aware of becoming America!

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I come to this out of a background of studying psychology as a natural science. I've been studying the role of our psychophysiology in empathically-mediated altruism since the late 80s.

I've seen pictures of kittens dressed up in the same paraphernalia (sans orange jumpsuit) as was Jose Padilla. The objective of it all is CELLF-imprisonment, the acceptance of a mere mechanical receptacle in place of these very *cisterna mystica.*

Are we human BEINGS, or mere machines? In what cosmos are we presently enacting our insane political theater?

I pick on the APA because I'm an American student of psychology (I used to be an AP Society member, the one more for natural scientists than for therapists), but it's the mechanization of Life in general that's the real target of my ire.

Both the APA and the APS believe in a mechanical cosmos. Both base themselves on an impossibility: the Newtonian point particle. Doing so implodes our shares of Psyche into black holes--and misconceived ones at that!

That wasn't legit back at the founding of modern psychology; it still isn't legit. Our psychology is unfounded.

Our psychology conceives of the cosmos as a political machine: one in which absolutely separate parts are forced into order from the outside by a Creator/God/King/Man among men. In this cosmos, TORTURE IS THE ORDER OF THE DAY.

We're dealing with authoritarian pinheads who can't think for themselves. I believe the medical profession to be the controlling authority to which BushRoveCo is listening when it demands the right to torture. They listen to the doctors and psychiatrists and psychotherapists oh my! and so feel relieved of responsibility for inhuman cruelty against our neighbors. For example, what is a polygraph but an electromechanical Iron Maiden?

Torture by isolation, the specific type practiced at Gitmo and elsewhere; torture by abuse of religion, which James Yee has said has become a weapon to break human spirits; torture by ever-present surveillance, by the implicit threat of Gitmo in the background; for psychologists, it's what we do.

Witness the treatment of climatologist Jim Hansen: his science was shaped to fit the policy, just as the intelligence was "fixed around" the policy of war with Iraq. Same thing goes on with psychology.

I propose a new fundamental unit for a living, breathing, organic psychology: the *cisterna mystica.*

The fundamental property of a mystic vessel is {self-filling/self-emptying}, aka kenosis. Our brains, our lungs, our hearts: all are kenotic vessels.

Neuronal models of stimuli are the {self-filling/self-emptying} vessels of Mind: into which experience is pouring; from which awareness is arising; and out of which we are {Mater & Pater flowing in Water}.

So even while we are here, now, being eternity; we are yet aware of becoming time- and space-embedded. This is a mystery to behold, within which we stand in awe.

Shall we trade our inalienable birthright: Divinely Being Eternally Aware of Becoming enmeshed in space and time; for reduction to mere mechanical receptacles of whatever our dear herdsmen decide to pump us with?

Shall we place our faith in the likes of Zelikow and Rice and Cheney and Rove? Or in our own experience?

Horton's Poetic Posts

Highlights from the blog of Scott Horton, No Comment, on Harper's Web site, that I think are sounding the same notes I'm trying to hit. Not that I think these posts are about me; no, these posts just are.

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"And so it befell me that after so many attempts at naming the world, I am able only to repeat, harping on one strong, the highest, the unique avowal beyond which no power can attain: I am, she is. Shout, blow the trumpets, make thousands-strong marches, rend your clothing, repeating only: is!" –Czeslaw Milosz

The amazing thing about this quote is, it's almost identical to a revision of a Beatles quote I sent to friends around that time. I said, "We hold these truths to be self-evident: I am She as She is Me and We are All Together. Googoogajoob!"

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"The Religion that is afraid of science dishonours God and commits suicide. It acknowledges that it is not equal to the whole of truth, that it legislates, tyrannizes over a village of God’s empires but is not the immutable universal law." --Emerson

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"In order to obtain a correct estimate of ourselves, we must reflect on the results of the investigations which have been made into the dimensions and the distances of the spheres and the stars." --Maimonides

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"I wish that all nations may recover and retain their independence; that those which are overgrown may not advance beyond safe measures of power, that a salutary balance may be ever maintained among nations, and that our peace, commerce, and friendship, may be sought and cultivated by all." --T. Jefferson

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"You’ll hardly believe it,” said Douglass, addressing his companion as if there were no one else in the room, “but I gave my white mare and your bay horse four quarts of oats each, and there they are, eating side by side as quietly and contentedly as if they were of the same color! ‘Tis most extraordinary!” He did not laugh nor wink, but made his remark with a simple sincerity that was irresistible. There was a moment of silence. Then came the echo. Human wit had spoken, and a human heart answered.... A little tact had been a hundredfold more effectual in melting a prejudice than a series of solemn lectures." --Curtis, recollecting F. Douglass

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"The mission of religion is to comfort humanity on its way to the gallows. The mission of politics is to make her weary of life; the mission of humanity: to shorten her appointment with the gallows, and then to poison the executioner’s last meal. –Karl Kraus

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This grave is a sublime renunciation
“It grows dark about me, let there be light!”

For all the possibilities that depreciate human life,
The immortal dies. He believes and thanks.

The farewell from a darkening day lights the horizon
So that the sun may shine for you again.

Through the gates of Hell of today and beyond
He dreams trusting in a perpetual peace.

He says it and the world is true again
And God’s heart opens up again with “and yet…”

It is documented, share the faith
So the promised salvation will come to you.

Oh save yourself from the calamity, hasten to the
Spirit that will bring you through yourself to the proper course....

--Karl Kraus


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"The ideal of democracy rests on the belief that the view which will direct government emerges from an independent and spontaneous process. It requires, therefore, the existence of a large sphere independent of majority control in which the opinions of the individuals are formed." --Hayek

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"But when we decide to do something that seems to us to be good when it is not really so, we are doing something that we do not really want to do, and therefore we are not really free." --Merton

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Leaves of Grass for my 44th Birthday

Last Wednesday was my birthday. I used the only gift I asked for, the only gift I got: a gift certificate at the local bookstore, Wind 'n Tide Books, to buy 2 editions of Leaves of Grass. I checked the Deathbed edition out of the local library some years ago. Now I have that and the recent 150th Anniversary Oxford edition, with an afterword by David S. Reynolds.

I've always been so impressionable, more like Polaroid-able, I've avoided other poets all this time. I'm shockingly poorly read, if you measure your reading by the numbers.

Reading Leaves of Grass the first time--I only skipped around--was like going out into an open expanse I never knew was there. It was a second-birth, from out of House poetry into boundless Field poetry.

You Just Can't Quit Mother Nature

Whence come human events? How is this {self-filling/self-emptying} trick working right now, dearly beloved? How is the inchoate meaning I intuit making its way from here to where you now become aware of it?

Hint: 2 word answer

The venerable former senator from South Dakota, George McGovern, after inartfully ticking off talking points, suddenly compares Spitzer's Fall to King David's murder of a lieutentant, by sending him to the front lines, as a ploy to bed the dead man's wife. A surprised Amy Goodman asks bluntly if he's making that comparison. "Yeah I am." He goes on to emphasize contrition and asking forgiveness as lessons that make for greatness in men like King David and Governor Spitzer.

See! That's exactly what I'm on about! You don't have to be a student of comparative mythology to see the obvious conflation of personal, political, and spiritual Fathers.

He uses the same term, "battle," to refer to actual warfare ("battlefront") and political campaigns "("battling," "battle"). With all due respect for his sincerity, McGovern's conception of Life as Holy War and his political cosmology (Creator/God/King/Priest/General/Man among men rules by force applied from without) are precisely the problem with so-called Western Civilization in general.

The Commons is a battlefield when you conceive of Life as Holy War between your own Better Halves.

Despite millenia of overt efforts to write Her out of the script, you just can't quit Mother Nature.

The Bodhisattva's Vow: "So we would all Go, not just I." --Margaret Roberts

WORD! Word for word, that's the Bodhisattva vow: not to enter Nirvana unless one/1/I can take every one/1/I else along. Amen, Sister Margaret! See her transform into Kali when circumstances draw that out of her, a merciful killer. When we cut weeds, they become fertilizer, sonomama; where is the cruelty? That Life lives on Life is the tragicomic pivot of Being Aware of Becoming.

Rev. Tom Davis defined Living as Loving, it was the first thing he said. Contrast these statements of identity with Suffering and the Sufferer with our foreign policy: "full spectrum dominance." That's Fear talking!

Militarists make the fundamental mistake of trying to use mechanical tools on a mythosociopsychic problem: Justice. You can't machine Justice, despite what that triple monster, Karl Rove alias Grendel alias Moby Dick alias Lord Voldemort, thinks. He really thinks he's invisible!

Deep within every mythos, usually in the mystics, is the same Truth: I am She as She is Me and We are All Together! Jesus was crucified for saying what the scriptures themselves say, but a small group of militaristic madmen demanded a monopoly on all the proceeds of Life. Way way back when, we got Fooled out of our inalienable birthright.

The Myth-Jacking Trick: an epistemological trompe l'oeuil of the the Inner Eye

[(Absolute Supremacy) /No 1's Land/ (Absolute Subjugation)]

This is the Secret of the Two Partners, perverted to private gain. Instead of teaching us that we all share in the divinity of Being Aware of Becoming, a moat is drawn around the divine, /No 1's Land/. No joining, no communion, no Flow. NO 1 has the gall to come right out and say, "full spectrum dominance!" NO 1 said to torture our kin.

The disembodied voice of authority, the infamous and storied role of NO 1 in public theater, is substituted for our own experience of Being. Sure, this is useful and necessary; I'm a tutor, the value of teaching isn't lost on me. But whom does that leave ultimately in charge? NO 1! Must I teach what I know to be wrong, just because it's in ink on paper? No, I won't press my neighbor to death under stones or the juggernaut of "national security."

beloved /Union/ Beloved is a more perfect Universe, a cosmos of bliss, not pain.

O sister my Sister! O brother my Brother! O NO 1 my NO 1! Life is for Loving!

[must be something in that Green Mountain Coffee, WOOHOO!]
dp

Abortion foes plant flag of Western Patriarchy up inside Gaia's inner sanctum

Dearly beloved,
In pursuit of their own goals, no absolute boundary is recognized: they're charging right up inside Gaia Herself, to plant the legalistic lever of their mechanistic Law in the most fertile of Fertiles.

Out ahead of themselves, they project a Wall of Denial, too high/wide/deep for any Bad to get through; a mythosociopsychic bulldozer blade, the cutting edge of Western Patriarchy; with a sound-proof, air-conditioned, doppleganger-designed interior! aka the War Room. The War Rooms are inside their heads! It's peaceful here. Reminds me of a Kerouac haiku.

Useless! Useless!
Heavy rain falls
Into the Sea

--Jack Kerouac (1922-1969)


When water
pours into Water
what is There to get wet?

Mythology is to Religion as Operating System is to Application. The present dominant mythos defines us as essentially CELLf-imprisoned quantum singularities of pure pain in an egocentric cosmos compounded of good and evil with an absolute and eternal divide between us and the Beloved. Is it any wonder that we have more people in brick & mortar prisons than everyone else?

Gitmo is being used to learn how to smash the human psyche, clear the ground, and rebuild to suit new owner. We're being machined on the absolutely most fundamental level.

The best way to comprehend our fellow Americans in their militaristic madness, is "Life as Holy Warriors." They're not kidding. Only religious zeal and fervor could account for the $3 trillion War of the Centuries. Data won't do it: reading a legal brief in the court of public opinion right now is like reading ingredients to the starving. Don't get me wrong: if he wasn't a McCain supporter, I might hero-worship Scott Horton; as it is, I love him like a brother who listens to music painful to my ears.

I take it as a personal challenge to awaken America. It's put up or shut up time for poets.
dp

Live Blogging Democracy Now! Monday March 10, 2008 (beta)

[Break]
Buffalo Springfield sung live by a young woman with huge sunglasses.

I haven't heard the name of the singer yet, but she completely f*ed up that song. It's supposed to point to the folly of all sides saying "hooray for OUR side and only OUR side."

Partisanship offers only an illusion of progress, while it's actually turning the Wheel of Samsara, of "now you beat me, now I beat you." "Us v. Them" is the problem, not a solution!
dp

See hear BG T. Hartmann impersonate NO 1

Pentagon Seeks Death Penalty in 9/11 Cases

In Washington, Brigadier General Thomas Hartmann, appearing in the storied role of NO 1, announced the filing of capital charges against six Guantanamo prisoners Monday [February 11) for their alleged roles in the 9/11 attacks. NO 1 drilled it into the audience: NO 1 intends to kill these men, our kin, on the say-so of secret evidence in secret courts. NO 1 but NO 1 could see the blood on NO 1's hands at the time!

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From an e-mail sent that day, with revised & extended remarks:

He reads that statement as if directing live fire at the room.

Here's the trick:
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The role of NO 1 is being played by Brig. Gen. T. Hartman:
We men say, in our Sunday-best voices: We are not a nation of men; we are a nation of laws made by wee men. That's different. When I wear this costume, stand at this pulpit, and speak like this, you all just believe what I say, and no one you know gets hurt.

We are not men, we are makers of law. This is the chamber where law is made. You will accept the product of this chamber as Law. You have no choice. You're just a voting machine on 2 legs. Do as you're told, especially when NO 1 comes right out and says it like this.

We stole the insignia of office, so why should the Law stop us from putting the fear of Gitmo into everyone with them?
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Discovery Channel has, of course, inadvertently given Gibney's film the highest possible honor. Now the story of Dilawar's myth-jacking speaks in this Louder Voice.

These are absolute divine right royalists and positivists: they're terrified of the Line and The Other Side. They're using the nuclear arsenal of the United States to silence the voices in their heads. Which only makes them Fear louder. And so on.
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In Union We Trust

Seneca's Measure of the Human Life (in Scott Horton's 8 March 08 blog, No Comment, appearing in Harper's Magazine) is very interesting. I think it's losing something in translation. If I'm hearing aright, its about the opposition of Being and Becoming, of Eternity and Time, of wu-hsin (no thinking) and Making Ratios.

Comparing our Awareness of Becoming to the universe at large, is a vivid example, illustrating a new cosmology in which to understand psychology, sociology, and mythology. It goes like this.

Looking up into the night sky, the tendency is to feel very small, very insignificant indeed. But, dear reader, this has the effect, on our quantum shares of Psyche, of collapsing our Being into psychic black holes--and misconceived ones at that!

Take a look at this illustration from 321space.com

For me, the crucial difference, between Newtonian mechanics and Einsteinian relativity, has to do with the fundamental units of analysis. For Newton, of course, it was the point particle in a vacuum. Tragically, the APA adopted this as our model of ego. But Einstein's universe is absolutely seamless; there is no absolute and eternal Other; absolutely speaking, there's no rupture from here to the other side of Being. The fundamental unit of Einstein's universe, I argue, is the cisterna mystica, a {self-filling/self-emptying} Vessel.

That's what's going on in this illustration. The thing on the left is most salient to my point. That's a black hole, with opposing jets, and a disk of the stuff of which we are made. Is the star on the right being devoured? feeding it's child? Neither: {self-filling/self-emptying}, that's all there is to Life.

Looking up and misconceiving our egos as dust motes, has the tragic effect of collapsing Psyche into quantum singularities of pain, with the Commons shrink-wrapped around our inescapable egos. Here's a formula for the mythosociopsychology of that cosmos:

[(Absolute Supremacy) /No1's Land/ (Absolute Subjugation)] = Sucks to be you!

Note that the area designated "No 1's Land" is what's left of the Commons. This induces a condition I call CELLf-imprisonment. In this mechanical society, we machine others into compliance through application of overwhelming force. Torture is the Order of the Day in this misbegotten cosmos.

We have another way of knowing, another way of Being Aware of Becoming. As Vonnegut argues in Galapágos, we're bewitched by this very ability right here: to order and Flow formerly inchoate meaning into these very cisterna mystica, passing them over to our Beloved, where they self-empty of their own accord. (Cha-no-yu, the tea ceremony, has its roots in Zen, for obvious reasons.)

You aren't forcing the meaning out of these very words, I trust; I trust the meaning self-empties.

Our ratio-making mind comes out of a non-dual, selfsame background. With the invention of maths and maps and words and such, we silly djinni have seduced ourselves into them, mistaking their entirely porous walls for impassable barriers. The little tiny segment at the heart of every ratio is mistaken for an impassable barrier: too deep to go under, too high to go over, too wide to go around. So go right through!

You are overlooking the spaces between these words. You are passing your eyes along this line of (squiggles on a contrasting backgrUnd), and its contents are self-emptying. By Xeno's paradox, though, these Voids could become impassable, too.

We are more than only rational; we are intuitive as well. In this frameless mind, we are not infinitesimal, insignificant particles; we are all there is, simply becoming from within, as a plant grows from its apical meristems of root and shoot.

Here's a formula for the mythosociopsychology of this, our native cosmos:

beloved /UNION/ Beloved

The motto of this cosmos is:

In Union We Trust

As you can plainly see, this is a more perfect Union, pouring forth a cosmos in which, for example, homosexual marriage is right at home. In this cosmos, we cultivate an ethos of hospitality. In this cosmos, empathically-mediated altruism (my specialty), like the "mind-brain" problem, are entirely natural, no problem at all; mere artifacts of our assumption of the inviolability of the Law of the Excluded Middle (the only law BushRoveCo ever obeys). Schopenhauer's amazement, that one person should help another, even at great peril or certain death, is based on the false assumption that there "really are" 2 beings to begin with.

As you may know, the Upanishads long ago answered every child's question: "what's that?" Tat tvam asi, that thou art! "Thou art that, my beloved child, and guess what? That loves that!"

In this cosmos, empathic compassion and cooperation, not Social-Darwinian competition, are the natural and proper bases for human social intercourse. It's "into" this cosmos we must "move," even though we've been Here All this Time.

Which brings me back to 'put up or shut up time' for poets. Poetry and revolution go together like thunder and lightning: though they may be named separately, just as 'you' and 'I' are, dearly beloved, they are selfsame.

As many know better than I, the Scientific Method is not a neutral instrument. It presupposes a dead machine as a subject, then confirms its own prejudice, making a Frankenstein's monster of our own Mother Earth, which we then proceed not to husband, but to pimp for all She's worth.

So this is the question at the heart of my poetry: are we cisterna mystica, or mere mechanical receptacles? Do we trust our experiences, or do we see and believe what we're told to from "on High?"

Does Samantha Power Mean a Myth-Jacking Monster?

To what kind of monster does Samantha Power refer? Obviously, I'd like to think she means the type who would stop at nothing, including fear-mongering tactics that already introduce the Dark Side here in the primaries. Given that the use of the term is out of character and inconsistent with previous praise of Clinton, I think it's reasonable to conclude, she meant the myth-jacking type of monster.

“I made inexcusable remarks that are at marked variance from my oft-stated admiration for Senator Clinton and from the spirit, tenor, and purpose of the Obama campaign,” Power said in a statement.

Power, a top foreign-policy adviser to Obama, originally told Scotsman newspaper that Clinton “is a monster, too—that is off the record—she is stooping to anything.” Apparently she and the paper had different definitions of “off the record.” She later apologized, declaring her admiration for Hillary Clinton."
[from Slate's Trailhead]

Thaddeus Who?

[from Shotgun's Home of the Civil War]

Thaddeus Stevens
(1792-1868)

Known primarily as an extreme Radical Republican, Thaddeus Stevens was in fact a champion of the equality of man-rich and poor, black and white. Born into a poor Vermont family, Stevens was put through school by his widowed mother.

Graduating from Dartmouth, he moved in 1815 to Pennsylvania. Studying law, he later set up his practice in Gettysburg where he became known for defending runaway slaves gratis.

His reputation grew for his use of the insanity defense in a murder case, a novelty at the time. Eventually he acquired a great deal of land in the area and went into the iron business. Although one of his forges was a frequent money loser, he kept it going rather than displace his employees. In politics he moved from Federalist to Anti-Mason, to Whig, and finally to Republican. He served in the state legislature from 1833 until 1842, where he is most remembered for his defense of free public schools. He was a master at the distribution of patronage, especially on the unnecessary Gettysburg railroad. In 1842 he returned to the management of his personal affairs, including the donation of land to what is now Gettysburg College. Elected to Congress as a Whig in 1848, he was a constant opponent of extending slavery or appeasing the South in any way.

During the Civil War he wielded great influence as head of the House Ways and Means Committee. Although he had supported Lincoln in 1860, he was a constant critic of his moderate actions against the South, favoring instead a war of extermination and recolonization of the South, abolishing the old state lines. With his control of the Congress' purse, he became a leader of the Radical Republicans. The Confederates, however, got even with him for his harsh rhetoric by burning his Caledonia ironworks during the Gettysburg Campaign. Stevens provided for the support of some of the families, who were unemployed by this action, for as long as three years. As chairman of the Committee on Reconstruction, he became an opponent of the Lincoln-Johnson policy as too lenient. It was Stevens who was the prime instigator of the impeachment proceedings against Johnson. He died a few months after the acquittal. In a final declaration for equality, he arranged to be buried in a remote cemetery since it did not have racial barriers. (McCall, Samuel W., Thaddeus Stevens)
Source: "Who Was Who In The Civil War" by Stewart Sifakis

I'm So Vain!

On Th 6 March @ 10:57 AM Eastern, I sent a question to Prof. Horton; only 21 minutes later, @ 11:18 AM, a post on his No Comment blog appears to answer that question. So I'm prescient AND incredibly vain.
dp



Dear Friends,
Yesterday I posed the following question; today, unless I'm prescient, Prof. Horton appears to have answered it.

"Baconian-Cartesian-Newtonian mechanics inform our present political cosmos. Prof. Horton, would it be fair to call Bacon the Fredo of the 16th century? It's no wonder at all that we now use mechanical metaphors for psychology and mythology....The solution to our national problems, I dare say, is to be found not within a mechanical, Ptolemaic cosmos centered on quantum singularities of pain."

Ask my banker: I don't do numbers so well. What I do do well is mytho-poetic prosimetric expressions.

Old School, Royalist Cosmology (based on point particles in an absolute vacuum)
Fundamental unit: mechanical receptacles

[(Absolute Supremacy) / No 1's Land / (Absolute Subjugation)] = "Sucks to be you"

In this misbegotten cosmos of pain, the Commons is shrink-wrapped around pin-point egos, quantum singularities of Psyche CELLf-imprisoned at the behest of our modern day priests, doctors and psychologists and generals oh my! who preach Life as Holy War, to whom religion is just another weapon for breaking human spirits. See also, Guantánamo, and the US prison system.
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New School Cosmology

Fundamental unit: cisterna mystica: {self-filling/self-emptying} vessels of Being Aware of Becoming, the centers of which are everywhere, but the circumferences of which are No Where.

beloved / Union / Beloved

Obviously, this is a more perfect Union
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

dp

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by Scott Horton

March 6, 11:18 AM

Mukasey’s Law

Much of the constitutional struggle that engulfed the English-speaking world in the seventeenth century revolved around two fairly simple phrases. One was “no man is above the law,” and the other “the king can do no wrong.” Each of these expressions reflected a fundamentally different notion of the rule of law, and they could not be reconciled.

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For Michael Mukasey the view that Tom Paine announced and the Framers embraced requires some emendations. It is not the law that is king in America. Rather it is the president who has assumed the royal prerogatives of the king. He does not serve the law and cannot be made to obey it, because he is the law. And if he directs others to disobey the law, then their conduct can likewise be no crime, because “the king can do no wrong.” Perhaps Mukasey has forgotten the outcome of those three revolutions. Perhaps he requires a reminder.