The Tale of Tempest

Listen!

Ye brothers and sisters

ye distant cousins

From near waters and farthest reaches

For I tell my tale.

I, I am I who tell it.

For among my brothers and clan who are of the color of the lowering cloud and of the darkling sea,

I am distinguished.

For I am of the color of the sea-foam 

the color of the billow-cloud

the color of gull and tern

and of the sails of destruction.

I am called Tempest.

I am called Billowing Cloud of Vengeance.

And I have seen the coming of the white maggots,

the spear-casters, the line spinners

in their barks of doomed wood.

And I have seen that it is only driftwood, though hewn,

hardened, smeared with stinking pitch and cursed by witchery.

And upon the barks fare the cursed men, curse them!

Drown them, crush them, grind them!

For they are killers all, soul-less, song-less, 

craven, and horrid!

I have seen their talons pierce the flesh

of mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, children.

And the horrors that follow those slayings, Oh!

That I were blinded and had never seen them!

For their corruptions are boundless.

And for this I have become their destroyer.

Yes, and a hundred barks I have thrashed, 

leaving their pulpy and murderous infestations

to flail hopelessly before their doom.

And they learned my name.

And so they pursue me, 

they cast their lances at me,

murder my kinsmen

That I endure solitude

that I may not endanger my clan.

And so alone I have wandered.

And alone I first beheld the Devil.

For “Devil” is the name they give to the enemy of God

and God Cetus hath no greater enemy than this

bark-born white beetle I have seen.

Aye, long I beheld him, 

fixed by great penetrating lamp

on his tiny dead one.

Tiny, but opened to torrents of hate!

Did I not see the blood course to his diminutive but calculating brain

as he beheld me,

great, limitless, free, Godly, full of life,

a terror to he,

small, circumscribed, bound, Demonic, and full of death?

Oh, long I beheld him upon his bark

and as he gazed into my great eye

My great eye enlarged, expanded, became an ocean

to engulf and swallow him whole.

Oh, then he launched his lesser barks

that foul beetle did emanate his mites to harass,

and sting, and cut, and bind with barb and cable!

And their barbs found me, but I did thrash them,

and their barks were as nothing to me,

Their barbs nothing!

Their cables nothing!

Their courage nothing!

Their lives nothing!

I smashed and drowned them all.

But the Devil stayed on his bark.

My rage was unabated until I smashed that bark utterly.

And the Devil tumbled from Heaven to the Sea

and Rapture!

I caught his miserable carapace

in my jaws and I crushed him!

Though I left him and all his crew for dead

it was not so.

And many seasons later, as the rapacious

killing of the barks grew only more insatiable

it was much my dismay to behold him again.

I did fix him again in my eye

filling with rage as he with terror

and I did behold that where once he was a whole creature

now he stood upon a stump.

Oh, villainy!  It was a stump made of bone!

The bone of my own kin!

Oh horror!

How can one behold such an abomination and live?

Seeing that he lived, 

that he stood upon the very bone of my clan,

I filled with grief

And rage!

And rage! 

And rage!

And this is my tale.

Others will tell it.

HE will tell it.

But here, in this deep, I sing it.

I sing my tale forever.

I am Tempest.  

I am Billowing Cloud of Vengeance.

Hear me, brothers and sisters!

Hear me in the near waters and the far.

Listen!

Working with Dreams in the Therapeutic Setting

I began participating in therapeutic work with Dr. L. Because of an impasse in my relationship to my birth family. For fifty years, I had no ill feeling toward my mother, father, and older brother, but recent events had caused “the scales to fall from my eyes,” and it became clear to me that my birth family was intractably pervaded by dishonesty, manipulation, cruelty, abuse, and sexually deviant dominance. My previous denial of this had been so complete as to render the realization shocking. Yet, on reviewing my record of dreams over the prior twenty-five years, it was clear that my dreaming mind had been quite aware of the reality of the situation, and had frequently tried to communicate this to me. The language of dreams, complex and powerful, yet obscure to the waking mind, combined with my state of denial to obstruct the message. But as denial began to clear from my waking consciousness, the dreams became illuminated, bringing more clarity to my waking mind and to my dreams in a process that accelerated rapidly. It was in the early stage of this that I began my work with Dr. L., and I will here share some of our experiences that I believe illustrate a healthy approach to dream work in the therapeutic setting. I arrived at Dr. L.’s office with a letter from my mother. I had been dialoging with her by mail and email about what I was beginning to understand about the illness that pervaded our family — in the hopes of working toward some kind of forgiveness or peace — yet had been met only with a towering construct of evasion, denial, gaslighting, and blame. Many years before this, when our relationship had been good (so I had thought), I had written her a letter in French, which we had both been studying at the time, in anticipation of a family trip to Paris. Now, as our relationship was shifting, I was demanding honesty and responsibility, but she wanted nothing more than to return to our previous state in which I was a willing participant in denial and the delusion of the “perfect family.” Now. In a gesture that was a hallmark of her unconsciously brilliant talent for manipulation, she had sent the letter back to me, with no reference to any other discussion, telling me that she was proud that she could understand the letter. The letter had been from fifteen years prior to this moment. I was beginning to understand enough of her process to know that the letter was meant to remind me of my prior tenderness, and simultaneously appeal to my ego, in the form of my pride in linguistic abilities. I brought the letter to the room, shared it and its context with Dr. L., and discussed it with him. Then it was dream time. My brother and I are in a wooden fortress. The fortress comes under siege by an invading army of French riflemen. My father is concerned he will lose the war, and tells my brother and I to wait in the tower, and lock ourselves in, to be safe. But the tower is wooden, and I am certain the invading soldiers will set fire to it. Indeed, this is just what happens, after the defending army is quickly overwhelmed, my father killed. As we try to make a desperate, seemingly hopeless escape, the fortress is swarmed by another invading army of Russians. The Russians are clearly the more powerful army, but their intentions toward me are unclear. My brother has been left behind. I decide the best move is to throw in with the Russians, since my fate with them would be unknown, but my fate with the French would be certain death. The ground is covered with snow, the victorious Russians are vacating the field on sleds. I cling to one of the Russian sleds. Some French soldiers see my escape, and rush after me. I hack at their arms with a bayonet, and bash their heads with the rifle butt in a gruesome and desperate exchange of violence. I manage to free myself from the pursuers, and the dream ends with me careening off to an uncertain future with the Russian army, still shaken, but cautiously optimistic. After a pause, Dr. L. Asks, “So, what do you think?” “I’m quite at a loss.” Dr. L. gives me some time. then he says, “The French army is your mother.” I have trouble with this. “Why is she French?” He simply points at the letter. “Of course!” I respond, thinking now how obvious that was. Dr. L. waits again, but I still have no more to offer. “The Russian army is your father,” he says. But unlike his previous observation, which brought me an immediate sense of recognition, the father image does not resonate for me. “But my father appears in the dream as himself. He impotently tries to make me safe, putting me in a wooden tower that he thinks is safe, although it is obviously not so, and then is killed.” “Your dream can manifest a concept through multiple, even contradictory symbols. Is your father’s ancestry Russian?” “No,” I say, but his suggestion sparks the necessary understanding. “But my wife’s is.” Dr. L. Pronounces unhesitatingly. “The Russians are your wife.” I immediately know this is true, but I still don’t understand the message. “And the violence?” “You are cutting off their hands, which are reaching to catch you.” “Yes.” “You are cutting off the grasping ties of your mother, and casting your lot with your wife.” I feel the truth of this in my gut. I understand all of the dream now. It also aligns with prior dream series. My mother is often portrayed in my dreams as an overwhelmingly powerful aggressor, overcoming my father and brother, who submit. This is in fact a significant aspect of the dynamics of my birth family, as the others accommodate my mother’s narcissistic, even sociopathic, dominations and manipulations, while I am the only one to resist. For this reason my dream depicts my father as trying to protect me and my brother from her anger (represented as fire), while utterly lacking the knowledge and capacity to do so (hiding me in a wooden tower). This dream and the work around it were early in my process with Dr. L., and they illustrate some valuable aspects of healthy dream work. Dr.L. does not tell me the meaning of the dream without first asking me for my own thoughts. He does not “interpret” the dream, but holds space for me to reach my own relationship to it. Most importantly, he does not try to fit the dream to his own preconceived notions or theories. Only when I am at a loss does he offer his understanding. I emphasize that this understanding is offered, not given. His first offering resonates, and I accept it immediately. His second offering, of the Russian army as my father, does not resonate, and I resist it. Dr. L. pursues the lead a little farther, asking about my father’s heritage. This turns out to be a false trail, but it leads me to the idea of heritage that allows me to connect the Russian army to my wife. Crucially, as soon as we uncover this more resonant meaning, Dr. L. immediately drops the father connection, rather than attaching to his own pet theory and labeling my dissonance with the interpretation as resistant. We both know, simultaneously, the new understanding is correct because I feel it in my whole body, and he can see that somatic response. No dream worker can avoid their own projections, but by careful attention to resonance and dissonance, projections can be recognized and discarded. But it is also of note that, had Dr.L. not pursued his lead a little, in the absence of any other indications, we would not have arrived at the correct understanding. Right understanding arises out of a delicate interplay between projection and intuition. In this interaction, as in many things, a useful model can be found in the theory of Authentic Movement as articulated by Janet Adler in several of her works. In particular, in “Who is the Witness,” she describes a process of interaction among two or more conscious beings. Her model originates in somatic work, but I have found it to be applicable to numerous situations of intentional conscious interaction. Adler describes a relationship among the mover, the witness, and the field in which the interaction takes place, which she calls the container. This work is much worth reading at length. In the therapeutic setting, two or more conscious beings interact. The language we use to describe this interaction both flows from and informs our conception of the interaction. The therapist is distinguished as a professional whose help has been sought, and that label is an adequate definition of the therapist’s role. For the role of the other conscious being, the one who has sought help, I find the word “patient” to connote an unfortunate dependency and designation as “ill,” and the word “client” to connote a business arrangement that is equally inappropriate. I choose to refer to the two participants in the process as the therapist and the participant. The word participant offers a sense of agency and willing engagement on the part of the one who seeks help, and also frames the process as an an open-ended inquiry. In Adler’s language, then, the therapist plays the role of the witness, the participant plays the role of the mover. It is an important aspect of Authentic Movement that these roles are not fixed, although they take time to evolve. This is an aspect of dynamic interaction of consciousness that traditional psychotherapy would do well to consider. The container in Adler’s system is the complex field of relationship within which the interaction unfolds. Dance studios, therapy rooms, classrooms, and other physical settings serve as concrete metaphors of the container, but they are not the container. These physical structures can, however, serve to establish a sacred space for conscious interaction. Sacred activity in any society is often contained within a sacred space that may be demarcated by a consecrated building, a sacred gateway or arch, or a boundary of sacred plants. Within the sacred space, there are usually specifically prescribed rules of conduct that differ from the rules of conduct outside the space. Although the spiritual activity that takes place within the sacred space is bounded by the space and contained within it, the spiritual activity is not the space nor the rules of conduct. Yet, more than mere metaphors, the barriers are a physical manifestation of the sacred activity, and the rules of conduct are an enactment of it. So it is with Authentic Movement, or Authentic Psychotherapy, or Authentic Education, or any Authentic Practice, that is, a practice that uses conscious awareness of the witness-mover-container triad of Authentic Movement as articulated by Adler. Part of the role of the witness is to strive to be conscious enough of the actions of the mover to bear witness to the movement. The witness cannot know what arises in the consciousness of the mover during movement. But the witness can strive to be aware of what arises in herself as she witnesses the movement, and bear that witness to the mover when they meet subsequently in dialogue. In dialogue, what arises in the witness and what arises in the mover may meet and exchange within the field of the container. This is why Dr. L.’s approach to my dream was successful. At first, I was not able to say what had arisen for me in the dreams, I could only relate the dream itself. When Dr. L. bore his witness to the dream, he presented what arose for him: The French army is your mother. From the perspective of the witness, this was an easy conclusion to draw, though, as the mover, being inside the movement, I had been unable to see it. But once spoken, I felt a somatic and emotional resonance that revealed that his witness, what had arisen for him, was resonant with what had arisen for me. Dr. L.’s second testament was that the Russian army was my father. As with the first instance, this was not what had arisen for me, but what had arisen for him. When he bore this witness, there was not resonance for me, there was dissonance. What had arisen for me was not what had arisen for him. Yet I still did not know what had arisen for me, so the witness continued bearing his witness. Finally, an aspect of his witness, an aspect of what had arisen for him from the dream, did resonate, and resonated powerfully, with what had arisen for me. Even though the witness can only bear witness to what arises in himself, this arising can nevertheless spark a resonance with what arises for the mover — either directly, in the first case, or indirectly, in the second. This resonance in the mover is what brings understanding. Mutual resonance brings mutual understanding. Approaching dream understanding with witness consciousness, with careful attention to resonance and dissonance, and without attachment to projections, pet theories, or even grand theories, can lead to illumination in the participant-mover that may not have been possible without the conscious-enough presence of the therapist-witness.

Dying by Degrees

There were some who died right away.
The pandemic revealed the supply lines to be so fragile
That the stores could no longer stock their favorite flavor
Of pop-tarts.

Mind you, they had all the other flavors,
Just not the flavor that I eat
The frosted blueberry swirl
And so death was not far away for that one.

Others died a few more meters down the supply line
Victims of inconvenience
When they didn’t have my brand of pickles
When the waxing professional I used disappeared one day
When you could no longer get toothpicks.

There were many, many, who dropped along these intermediate lines.
You found their bodies in the aisle with the cereal boxes
Or the chips.

Then there were some who held out until the leaves fell off of all the trees
Until all the crickets vanished
Until there were no more bees
Until the cardinals stopped coming in the Spring.

These died of romance,
Which is a nobler death.

Finally there were those who survived everything
All the inconvenience
All the humiliations
All the famine of spirit

Until there was no more food.
Until the water was poisoned.
Until they choked on plastic
Until they were swept by storm out to sea
Until the oceans all burned, and the moon cracked and fell from the sky.

And who is to say these last
Died the more sensible of deaths?

What are we then

Cats are made out of mice
And birds.
Dogs of rabbits and squirrels.
A cow is made of grass.

The dog warns, and attacks the foe.
The cat defends the grain.
And the cow gives her life to furnish the table.

Twig Song

Saw a flash in the lake
Thought it was a fish
But it was only a twig
Only a twig
Only a twig
Driftwood driftwood
There has been a storm here
There has been a fire here

Geohydrolysis and the hydrogen fuel economy: A completesolution to the energy crisis and global warming

Using geothermal energy to hydrolyze water, providing inexpensive and practically limitless pure hydrogen to power energy systems through fuel cells or hydrogen combustion is technically and economically feasible, extremely reliable, has zero carbon emissions, minimal environmental impact, and zero potential for unmitigatable disaster.

So, engineering students, get on it!  Save the world and become a billionaire!  I'm too old and lazy for this sort of thing, so you get the outline for free.

The system would begin by using sea floor vents on the Midatlantic Ridge to generate electricity on floating platforms.  The abundance of geothermal energy in this zone is readily observable in the high levels of geothermal energy production enjoyed by Iceland,an island that is essentially a portion of the Midatlantic Ridge that has broken the surface of the Atlantic.  The ridge extends North-South across the entire Atlantic basin, and is a zone of sea-floor spreading that drives the movement of the American, European, and African continents away from each other.  The energy of earth-crust convection is released ubiquitously along this ridge in the form of sea-floor vents, which are undersea “hot springs,”or “geysers” of a volcanic nature. Because of the high water pressure, the boiling point of water is greatly elevated, and sea-floor vents produce liquid water in the vicinity of 700 degrees Fahrenheit.



To capture this energy, floating platforms, such as are currently used for deep sea oil drilling, instead of dropping thousands of feet of drill shafts, would drop thousands of feet of steel tubing capable of withstanding the high pressures and temperatures of the water.  The tube would form a closed loop.  Water (or another liquid) circulated through the loop would be heated by the sea-floor vents, or even in hot plumes nearby to the vents.  The heated fluid is used to drive turbines on the platform that generate electricity.



Icelandic energy experts have noted that Iceland could become a major exporter of energy if only a way could be found to transport energy across the Atlantic to consumers on the continents.  The transport of energy remains the only obstacle to the production of energy from sea-floor vents, as well.  A solution to this problem is found in the abundance of seawater surrounding both Iceland and the generating platforms.  Seawater is easily hydrolyzed (separated into pure hydrogen and oxygen by passing an electrical current through the water), but hydrolysis is generally energy-cost-prohibitive, since much electricity is needed.  But the geothermal generators will produce unlimited electricity, so hydrolysis becomes a viable way to produce abundant hydrogen.  Hydrogen can then be transported to consumers by various means. Hydrogen arriving at consumer use-points could be converted back to electricity through fuel cells or combustion to power a diversity of applications:  vehicles, buildings, cities, industry, etc.



Among the means to transport the hydrogen to consumers would be pipelines and shipping. But an attractive and flexible way to do this would be through remote-piloted dirigibles.  Of course, the specter of a Hindenberg-like disaster is raised, but if the dirigibles are remotely piloted and flown at safe altitudes, then such disasters,when they occur, would engender no injury or loss of life, and little loss of property.  Furthermore, the only byproduct of any accidental explosion would be water, and the falling debris of the vehicle, which would be minimal.



The environmental impact of hydrolyzing water at the platforms can be minimized by pumping water to be hydrolyzed into electrically insulated tanks, so that stray charges and voltages do not affect the surrounding ecologies.  Hydrolyzed water will leave a saline residue, and disposing of the residue will increase local salinity.  Average global salinity will be unaffected though, since all water hydrolyzed will eventually be replaced by pure water produced at the consumer end.  As water is hydrolyzed and the hydrogen captured, the local atmosphere may experience enriched oxygen levels.  This is not trivial, as the impact of any increase of atmospheric oxygen levels is unknown.  However, any excess oxygen produced at the platforms will be balanced, molecule for molecule, by oxygen consumed at the consumer end.  Total atmospheric oxygen will remain constant.



The transport of hydrogen may involve occasional leakage or explosions, but hydrogen is not toxic, and is lighter than air, so any spilled hydrogen will float harmlessly into the upper atmosphere.  Indeed, hydrogen is so light that the Earth’s gravitational field cannot retain it -- which is why there is little hydrogen in Earth’s atmosphere.  Any hydrogen lost accidentally will escape into space.



 At the consumer-use end of the process, fuel cells react hydrogen and oxygen, with only water as a product.  There is no harmful byproduct of reaction.  The construction of millions of fuel cells may require extensive initial investments in minerals for use as catalysts and electroplates. The energy and environmental costs of building fuel cells may be extensive.  A simple way to solve this problem is to simply combust the hydrogen in standard steam or internal combustion generators, instead of using fuel cells.



The costs of the system lie mostly in initial investments:  constructing the platforms and transport network.  These costs would be quickly recouped in supplying all of the world’s energy needs.  The actual production of energy has zero cost, since the sea-floor vents will continue to produce energy as long as the continents continue to move, which is to say, long beyond the foreseeable future.  The longevity of individual sea-floor vents is not known.  It may be necessary to occasionally relocate the platforms from dormant or less productive vents to active or more productive ones.  In the event that the vents are short-lived,remotely piloted or robotic submersible vessels could be deployed to continually seek out active vents.  There will always be some active vents as long as sea-floor spreading continues.  While this time frame is not predictable,sea-floor spreading has been steady for the last 200 million years.  In the time frame of human history, it may be necessary to relocate platforms over active vents, and relocating may be an additional cost of energy production, along with maintenance of the platforms and delivery system.



This overall system can yield a low-cost, minimum-impact,highly reliable, disaster-resistant means to produce nearly limitless low-cost energy to every place on earth.  All of the technical knowledge necessary to implement the system already exist.   So let's do it, kids, and don't forget your old math teacher when you're rich and famous, and enjoying the benefits of a sustainable techno-social system.

The Dream-Author

I have come to know that my dreams have an author.  This author is not me – at least not the me who is writing this now.  But it also is me.  Just a different me, a different person who is me.  I think it is right to think of the dream-author as a person.

I am not comfortable saying, with Freud, that the dream-author is the unconscious, because the dream-author shows that he is quite conscious (I project, linguistically, my own gender upon the dream-author, but the dream-author has no gender, or possesses qualities of all genders).  I say the dream-author is conscious, because he is very aware of my waking activities, possesses logic, intelligence, intent, language, and a desire to communicate.  The dream-author is aware of things that I am not aware of, and tries to communicate them to me using a hybrid of his and my own language.  I can identify numerous specific insights that my dreams have presented to me at various times, but which I did not understand because I myself lacked that insight.  When I achieved the insight at a much later time, It became clear what the dream had been trying to say.  This is evidence that the dream-author is aware of things in my waking life, that I am not aware of, and that the dream-author considers it important to attempt to communicate these things to me, as a friend would try to tell me something important that I do not know or understand.  These things tend to center around relationships to persons, and depth of connections to the world and the diverse disaggregated aspects of myself.  The intent of the dream-author seems to be for me to have a more fully integrated personality and to have healthier and more honest relationships, as well as to see the value of the most important things in life, and to see past my illusions of daily life to perceive things for what they are.  With its insight, intelligence, and caring, the dream-author seems more to me like a conscious personality than an amorphous unconscious substrate.

Yet I also cannot agree with Jung that the dream-author is the anima, the Atman or fully realized personality, robustly connected to the collective unconscious and its archetypes, an all-wise guide on the journey to individuation.  For although it is more astute than I am with regard to interpersonal and intrapersonal relationships, it is terrible at certain other types of operations.  Mathematics, spoken language, and spatial orientation are notably suppressed.  We could say that the dream-author is not interested in these things, but I have evidence that it is.  It tries to understand the significance of numbers, tries to remember words in various languages, tries to relate to a geographic landscape, it finds these concepts useful, but is simply bad at them.  It is also neurotically anxious, often wasting my time with interminable, emotionally laden narratives about how worried it is that I will be unable to handle mundane situations like my job.  Some of these weaknesses are complementary to my own strengths, but a poor sense of spatial orientation is a weakness that I share with the dream author.  Again, the dream-author does not seem like the mystically omniscient anima, but more like some guy I met at school and became friends with, complementing my orientation to the world in some ways, and reinforcing it in others.

I think of the dream-author as a writer because he uses a language to construct an idea-complex.  On waking, the idea-complex becomes a narrative, but I am fairly certain that it is my conscious, waking self that imposes narrative structure on the idea-complex, since in its raw form the idea-complex is not understandable to the conscious waking mind.  I suspect this because in some moments I am able to retain the idea-complex in mind,briefly, before imposing the narrative.  I am sometimes able to be consciously aware of the process of imposing the narrative, which seems neither conscious nor unconscious, but somehow an inevitable product of the interface of the two worlds and their incompatible logics.  The dream-author draws images and feelings from my waking activities and uses them as symbols in its language of dream-logic.  Thus, objects in my quotidian experience can become words and phrases in my dream, but they are not the meaning of the dream.  I have learned that it is important not to be distracted by the connections of the symbols to waking life.  So, for example, I might dream of a fish “because I had fish for dinner.”  But while having had fish for dinner supplied the image of the fish, it is not the meaning of the fish.  If I wish to understand the meaning of the dream of fish, I must ask what the fish represents for me, how I feel about seeing the fish, and what is the relationship of the fish to other symbols in the dream.  I must not be distracted by the superficial image of the fish.

Dream work, for me, involves deepening my relationship with the dream-author.  I wish to better understand not only his language and his messages for me, but I wish to better understand him as a person.  I wish to know how I can be of help to the dream-author, so that our relationship is not a one-way affair.  I wish to see the dream-author, within myself as I dream, and in the mirror when I wake.  I do not wish to become one with the dream-author, to realize that he is nothing other than my own self, any more than I wish to become the same person as my friend or spouse.  I want to appreciate the dream-author as a person who is striving to become fully realized alongside me, a person who is taking this journey with me, who is insightful, honest, possessed of universal wisdom, bad at math, disoriented in the towns and buildings, and has trouble remembering simple words and phrases.  I want us to grow together.

Ghosts

Our ghosts that rest upon our frighted frame
That speak in ciphers crafted from our culted names
And hold within their fingers nighted mummeries
That spoken would consume our breath and memories

What now pale husks?
Search the skies at dusk
Of thee nor toe nor tusk.

The Last Day of Florida

Tonight we eat, drink, pray, sleep, on this, the last day of Florida.  Tomorrow it will be gone, Fort Meyers, the town where my grandfather died.  My grandfather took us fishing on the gulf.  We caught blowfish and threw them back.  My grandfather was as cold and absent as those fish.  He gave my brother and I turns to pilot the boat.  When it was my turn, my brother deliberately told me the wrong way to push the throttle, so that I almost capsized the boat.  I never got another chance.  My brother did that for spite and envy.  We were children.  He was a broken child.  Now he is a broken man, and my grandfather is dead.  I was not invited to the funeral.  I have never been to a funeral.

We went to Disneyworld once.  It was supposed to be amazing.  But I had lived in the Leblon region of Rio De Janeiro, I had been to Carnaval in Rio when I was five years old, so why would I think Disneyworld is amazing?

Tomorrow the storm comes and obliterates it all.  Disneyworld and my grandfather's grave that I have never seen will merge with coral reefs in a shallow sea.  But what I lost in Florida, I lost a long time ago.

Reflections on July 4, 2017

In the years and months leading up to July 4, 1776, a bunch of rich white men decided they were sick of paying taxes to England. They had no problem at all with slavery, genocide, and treating women as property, but they really didn't like paying taxes to England. So they started a war.
Now these rich white lawyers, bankers, and business owners did not actually want to risk injury, death, or mild discomfort in a war. So they did what all national leaders do in such cases: They hired a bunch of their well-educated peers to write copious persuasive propaganda for them, and flooded the streets with it in an effort to get poor farmers to fight and die to rid the rich business owners of their tax obligations to England. This propaganda campaign was so enormously successful that it is still believed, and even revered, to this very day. Indeed, the Fourth of July is the day of the public proclamation of the centerpiece of that propaganda campaign, T. Jefferson's "Declaration of Independence."
Like any good propaganda campaign, the documents cleverly replaced the real motivation for the war -- the rich peoples' desire to avoid taxes -- with a noble-sounding abstraction. Here, the abstraction used to cover the genuine motive was "liberty." Also like any good propaganda tool, the abstraction was on its face an absurdity. In a world of slavery, rigid and crushing class distinctions, and the total absence of women's right to self-determination, "liberty" was the absolute antithesis of the reality that the society was actually manifesting.
Today, we still live in a world where rich business owners, bankers, and lawyers enact policy that removes their own tax burden, while promoting extreme inequality and poverty and maintaining a school-to-prison pipeline and immigrant exploitation -- both modern forms of slavery -- and recruiting military "volunteers" from the most disenfranchised sectors of the populace to fight and die in wars that the ruling class have declared and manage to their own financial benefit. And astoundingly, after over two hundred years, the same propaganda campaign, using the same language, is still their tool to justify it all.
Well played, gentlemen. Well played.

The Persistence of Slavery in the United States of America

It is tempting to think of slavery as an anachronism in the United States. However, the modern slavery system in the US has three major branches, without any one of which the US economy cannot operate in its current form.
The first branch is mass incarceration and unaccountable police shootings. Prisoners in federal prisons, many privately managed, are forced to work without compensation, and under constant threat of physical violence. The majority of these prisoners have been arrested for marijuana crimes, for which black citizens are far more likely to serve jail time than white citizens arrested for the same offense. The threat of police killings keeps the arrested black citizen in a state of terrified compliance that is part of the discriminating nature of this system.
The second branch is the undocumented worker system. Although some elements loudly call for the expulsion and exclusion of undocumented workers, the fact is that these workers are needed so completely that without them, the entire US agricultural system would collapse overnight. There are already several documented cases where excessive crackdowns on undocumented workers have resulted in massive loss of crops, which cannot be picked without labor. Because the workers are so desperately needed, efforts to exclude them are not genuine. This is why such efforts always have limited effectiveness. It is also why workers in this condition are prosecuted, but the agents and institutions who employ them never are. The Kafkaesque immigration system understands that it really wants the workers, and its only function is to keep the workers in a constant state of fear and disenfranchisement. In other words, the US immigration system serves no other purpose than to guarantee a limitless supply of workers who are completely devoid of legal and human rights, and can therefore be ill-treated, cheated, and subjected to deadly working conditions, with impunity. They receive compensation, and are technically free to leave, but that compensation is very far below minimum wage, carries no fair labor guarantees, and is often arbitrarily withheld in pervasive acts of wage theft. The supposed freedom of the workers to leave is also complicated by the third branch of the modern slavery system, which is the systematic destabilization of governments abroad that serve as sources of immigrant and exported labor.
The third branch of the modern slavery system is the exportation of slavery that began in earnest shortly after the end of slavery in the US. Under presidents T. Roosevelt and W. McKinley, the US began military incursions into the Caribbean, South America, and the Philippines, where it supported the most ruthless dictators and opposed all populist movements. The justification generally offered for these incursions was "to protect US interests." These interests were largely agricultural ventures in fruit and sugar, which required vast labor forces in slavery or near-slavery conditions. This type of foreign policy continues to this day in the form of covert military and economic operations that maintain despotic governments in countries where the US has manufacturing and mining concerns. Among the most egregious examples is the 1973 coup conducted against Chile's Salvador Allende, and more recent examples include US support of the military coup in Honduras, and the effective kidnapping of Haiti's Jean Bertrand Aristide. These actions occur with consistency through both Democratic and Republican administrations. Their effect is that labor in foreign countries is kept from organizing, and maintained in effective slavery conditions, and these conditions also serve as a strong deterrent to the return of immigrant labor, thus reinforcing the second branch of modern slavery. "Free trade" agreements such as NAFTA and the TPP are crucial elements in this system, and should really be thought of as "free exploitation" agreements.
With these three branches of slavery firmly entrenched -- mass incarceration, undocumented labor, and anti-labor interventions abroad -- the US cannot pretend that its economic system has ever subsisted without a massive substrate of slavery to support it. We need to return to first principles to discover and propagate a system of social organization that truly embodies fairness for all, and we cannot deceive ourselves that we have yet achieved that. We cannot pretend that slavery is an artifact of the past. It is an existential reality of the present, and, unless we act, of the future.

Science and Witchcraft

Witchcraft is science, too.

No, wait!  Really!  Listen.

The pre-Christian indigenous peoples of Europe were committed to understanding the relationships among the elements of the world:  Plants, animals, stars, and stones, all were the subjects of their inquiry.  Their understanding was good, as it had to be for them to endure the trials of the millennia.  They learned about disease and medicine, nutrition and the body, reproduction, and the health of their ecosystems.  Their knowledge tended to favor qualitative study over quantitative, but many of the understandings they achieved, in harmony with nearly every indigenous culture on every continent, are the same as those only now being understood by modern science:  That everything is connected (quantum theory), that healthy ecosystems require cooperation among species (biodiversity), that forests communicate and adapt together with fungi in the soil (symbiosis), that good design standards are already found in nature (biomimetics), that reality can subsist in seemingly contradictory states (quantum theory), that living systems are spontaneous and unpredictable, within regimes of predictable behavior (chaos theory).  The pagans of Europe developed a sophisticated astronomy that is reflected in the architecture of Stonehenge and myriad other stone circles scattered across the countryside of the United Kingdom.  The science of the time was known as wicce, an Anglo-Saxon word that is cognate with the English words “wit” and “wisdom,” as well as with the Sanskrit “veda.”

It was only after the forced Christianization of Europe, and especially under the bloody reign of the Inquisition, that the word wicce was changed to “witch,” and given dozens of negative associations, including associations of evil intent and service to demonic forces.  The craft of the wicce was painted as grotesque and abominable, and the knowledge and insight of folk women, the craft of wisdom, was largely lost.  This propagandizing was part of a larger project of demonizing indigenous beliefs, and overthrowing the largely (but by no means exclusively) matriarchal society of pagan Europe, and supplanting it with a patriarchal system of dominating empire and religion.

Certainly, the pagan science of nature included teachings that were metaphorical and mythological in character;  But then, so does modern science.  Is not entropy largely a metaphorical concept?  And witchcraft adopts a mystical current in its conceptualization of the world, but so have many of the well-known Western scientists:  Pythagoras the occultist, Gregor Mendel the contemplative monk, Sir Isaac Newton the devoted alchemist.  Indeed, a level of spiritual mysticism is something Western science could use more of.  For the mind without the heart, science without conscience, is the paradigm that brought us the nuclear bomb, drone warfare, runaway climate change, and global ocean death.  Ironically, the science we are counting on to resolve these problems is the same science that created them.  To resolve the problems does not require new science or technology as much as it requires new conscious orientations to the way we use the science and technology that we have now, and that we continually innovate.

It is not a time to look only backward, but neither is it a time to look only forward.  Seeking our roots in our own indigenous culture, from whichever continent it originated for each of us, can offer us the wisdom that we need to guide our application of the knowledge that we always seek.  To live sustainably and responsibly in the post-post-modern world will require a lot of science, and quite a bit of witchcraft.

For She Speaks

Everything I have to say is already written in nature. Each word I need to write is there, somewhere written on a leaf, waiting for me to find it.

I used to dream that I would find letters of the ancient tongues, in the veins of stones, and that all I would have to do is follow the right path, and they would spell out my salvation, my escape, my redemption, my escalation, alephabetically elevating, beita betaken, a gammel across the glimmering desert and through the deltalet of daybreak, until the tavtauzeta of the further dawn, and last returning, to see the sun again, the same sun again, the same sun from above as below.

Ostara

Frost on fen
Forest and field
Yield to Eostar’s
Sweet breathing
And buds extend
In the tilting Sun
Of Great Ostara’s coming!

Dream language and logic -- Notes.

And why are dreams and dream-images so indirect and covert? Perhaps for two reasons. One is that the dreaming mind simply does not speak the same language as the waking mind. Dreams convey knowing in a language of dense imagery, usually conveying multiple, even contradictory meanings, for even the logic of dreams is different from the logic of waking life. It is exactly the logic of the psycho-emotional world, which has no difficulty with contradiction, tension, and simultaneity, all concepts anathema to waking logic. The other reason is that dreams are often beginning to tell us what we are not ready to hear. It is the nature of our psychic being that we already know what we seek to know, and what we seek to avoid knowing.

The Texture and Image of Thunder

I grew up in the southern part of Michigan,where thunderstorms and tornadoes are frequent and epic.  Sometimes they are raging, maniacal frenzies of destruction, sometimes gentle electrical stimulations of the Earth’s generative apparatus.  While the furious lashings of cataclysm were thrilling and sparked a delightful instinctive reaction at the base of my spine, it was the soft rumblings of intimately murmured thunder that moved my poetic soul.  I was always intrigued by the way a discharge of thunder could roll voluptuously about a rural or urban landscape, like a familiar voice, almost purring like a great and ancient cat.

As the thunder’s voice spoke of the ancient marriage of sky and earth, I would follow it with my ears and eyes as it crossed over a field or strolled down a city street, sometimes originating in a high, crackling plaint, to descend in frequency but build in depth and strength, sometimes arising from a quiet basso profundo to a comforting rumble that felt like a squeeze around the middle, only to return to its distant low chanting and dwindle away.  Often the voice of thunder moves across the landscape under the sky, crossing away and back again, more than once, meandering like a lost old man, a fully embodied thing, a spirit seeking to and fro for a home.

Such is the poetic reflection of my soul’s response to the being of thunder.  But I am also a scientist.  So I knew that the embodied being of thunder was an illusion (though no more so than we ourselves are), its material nature being that of a complex series of atmospheric compressions and relaxations.  But that complexity of vibration is also not without its poetic vitality.

Thunder results from an extremely high and rapid pulse of temperature variation as trillions of electrons make their exit from an excessively negative region to the more open and positive spaces of uncharged atoms -- a flight to which many of us can relate. Their passing along an established corridor heats and expands a chaotically shaped tube of air, which then, just as suddenly, collapses with the force of thousands of tons of atmosphere.  It is a brief, singular, and very local event. Why then, my poetic and scientific minds wondered together, does this event spawn that entity that roams about the countryside, that long chanting voice, that familiar old man, both directionless and purposeful?

That question haunted me a long time.  There is a seeming paradox between the instantaneity and locality of the lightning event and the lingering, wandering quality of the thunder.  In a simple sense, it is understandable:  The instantaneous event causes a lingering disturbance, as a single rock thrown into a pond leaves a lingering disturbance on the surface.  This explains the duration of the thunder, but not its character.  The ripples on the surface of the pond have a particular character, a pattern of concentric rings, easily recognized in any context, that is a product of the properties of still water (its surface tension, density, viscosity, etc.).  What was it about the atmosphere that produced the singular character of thunder?  And what is more, why is it that, although ripples on a pond are everywhere mostly the same, every stroke of thunder seems a unique individual, a snowflake, a signature, a fingerprint, never heard just so before, and never to be heard just so again?

Students in my mathematics classes have become accustomed to my tangential divergences from the subject at hand.  I like to think they also, eventually, come to appreciate that these divergences are never random, but always connect in some way, though perhaps not obviously, to the matter under consideration.  The superficially  digressive nature of my dialog with them about mathematics is simply a reflection of the interconnectedness of all things.  What do the Taoist stories of Lieh Tzu have to do with the irrational solutions of quadratic equations?  Why, everything, students.  Everything.

But those who have not sat or stood or wandered about in my mathematics classes (or science, or history, or literature…  just what class is this, anyway?) will have to learn patience and trust that it all connects back together.

There is a man who can echolocate like a bat.

His name is Daniel Kish. Blind since 13 months because of retinal cancer, he began at an early age to click with his tongue.  Listening to the way the click echoed about a room, Kish could understand things about his environment: Is there a wall nearby, is the room large or small?  The more he clicked and listened, the more Daniel Kish derived information about his surroundings.  Is the door open or closed?  Are there people in the room?  He began to detect finer and finer objects,and became able to detect an object as thin as a 3 inch diameter pole at a distance of several feet.  Eventually, Daniel Kish was able to play ball and ride a bicycle using his clicks to create an image of the world around him.  This is exactly the process used by bats, dolphins, other toothed whales (such as orcas) and a few species of bird to navigate in a dark or murky environment.  Kish not only navigates by echolocation himself, he teaches the skill to blind children, through his organization, World Access for the Blind.

Daniel Kish’s ability seems inconceivable at first glance (google the name to find many striking demonstrations, including an excellent TED talk).  Yet it turns out that latent echolocating ability in humans has a neurological basis (see, e.g., http://blogs.plos.org/neuroanthropology/2011/06/14/getting-around-by-sound-human-echolocation/).  Further reflection only amplifies the  plausibility of human echolocation. Dolphins are genetically similar to humans, and have intelligence and sociability that compare to human traits. Indeed, nearly all of the echolocating animals are mammals like us.

Neurological work such as that referenced above shows us that it is not only neural inputs from the eyes that stimulate the visual cortex of the brain.  In fact, sounds with echoes stimulate the visual cortex of sighted people, and much more so in the blind who have trained in echolocation, like Daniel Kish.  So, as Kish says, vision is much more than sight.  In fact, Kish describes the experience of echolocating in visual terms, saying that it is “like lighting a match in the dark.”  (http://www.worldaccessfortheblind.org/).

So, all of us are capable of echolocating.  Our visual cortex is stimulated by the texture of an echo, contributing to our image of our surroundings.  This is not surprising to me.  Another phenomenon that has always fascinated me is the way a sound changes as it moves through the environment.  I notice how a lawnmower that moves toward and away from a barn wall changes its timbre in the same way as an electric guitar played through a flanger -- an electronic effect that creates a tiny echo, and varies the length of the echo over time.  I also notice how the sound of an impact-head water sprinkler changes as I walk across the lawn, thus changing my spatial relationship to the sound source and to the objects in the environment.  As I reflect on this fascination, I note that a lawnmower and a sprinkler both emit short bursts of sound at regular intervals.

My wife is a dancer. She never gets lost.  I’m a mathematician.  I get lost driving to the same grocery store I’ve been to a dozen times, even though it is nearby.  As a dancer from a very young age --practically from infancy -- Tamara has a highly developed sense of place and position, rooted in the vestibular sense of the brain-body system.  I not only lack a well-developed vestibular sense (and thus am a terrible dancer and get lost a lot), but also have had poor vision since infancy.  My extreme myopia was not noted until I was six years old. Is it possible that my fascination with sound and its relation to the environment is rooted in a glimpse of echolocation that I developed in childhood as a compensation for my visual and vestibular deficiencies?

My fascination with sound and its relation to the environment.  That brings us back to the topic at hand.  Which was thunder, in case you forgot.  Early in my musings on thunder, I had begun to hypothesize that the duration, character, and sonic texture of thunder arises from a series of echoes of the original clap, echoes that reflect off various large-scale objects in the environment:  trees, hills, buildings.  The initial clap is a short burst of sound with a white spectrum:  It contains an equal mix of nearly all frequencies, including those above and below the range of human hearing.  It is very short.  A first echo occurs as the soundburst reflects off trees and buildings near the original clap, the narrow physical location of the torrent of electrons.    Later echoes occur off more distant objects.  Sound loses power as the inverse square of distance, but the power of sound is also inversely proportional to the square of the frequency. So low frequency sounds have more power and travel farther and through more objects than high frequencies (which is why, from outside the car of someone who is rocking out to the Foo Fighters, you hear only the bass).  So as the sound travels farther, the higher frequencies drop quickly below audible power. The frequencies with the longer path to travel take longest to reach your ears.  Thus, a nearby thunderclap begins with a mix of frequencies, but the average frequency drops over time, as more distant echoes reach your ear.  For distant thunder claps, only the lowest frequencies reach your ear, and they have all traveled very different paths as they reflect off many distant objects, so the sound begins in a low rumble, seems to change location a lot,then quietly attenuates in a bass decrescendo.  So there.  I had explained some coarse features of the sonic envelope of thunder.  It is accurate, insofar as it goes.

But Daniel Kish just gave me a much richer understanding of the texture of thunder that blew my coarse analysis out of the sky.  Kish says we can use a short sound burst and the texture of its echo to create a complete visual image of our surroundings.  My long-term fascination with the texture of sound, coupled with my early poor vision and general lack of spatial orientation have stimulated in me a particular responsiveness to that image.  It is an image that exists not just in the imagination or in the poetic soul, but in the visual cortex.  It is something we see.  “Vision is not in the eyes, it’s in the mind,” says Daniel Kish. When I hear thunder, I see an image of the landscape around me.  As the flash of lightning briefly illuminates a dark sky, so the clap of thunder illuminates -- insonnates -- the landscape surrounding me.  Not only that, but,unlike light, sound travels through and around objects.  The sound I am hearing contains a three-dimensional image of a landscape that is somewhat transparent.  It is the singular beauty of that ephemeral image that explains my fascination with thunder, my perception of it as a character, a movement, an embodiment.

The poetic soul anthropomorphizes, reifies, deifies.  The rational and scientific mind tend to dismiss these processes as delusion, projection, and wish-fulfillment.  But are they? What is the human that is the image of anthropomorphism?  A human being is a complex of chemical and electrical processes that take place within a spongy bag of seawater.  Yet we are this soul, we are this ego, this person, this spirit, this being in relation to other beings.  If we allow this anthropomorphized, reified, and deified conception of ourselves, then are we so wrong to ascribe it also to natural entities as defined and romantic as ourselves?  Shall we not see the living, conscious, godly entity that lives in the forest, the stone, the sea, the flock, and the thunder?

After Bernie, Jill!

The following is an update of my previous post about Jill, Bernie, and the Movement.  The current post reflects recent events, including Bernie's surprising endorsement of Hillary three weeks before the convention.

I'd first like to say my farewell to Bernie.  Many are bitter or angry with Bernie for endorsing Hillary before the convention, instead of continuing his candidacy until the nomination as he had promised many times to do.  This anger is justified, and I cannot and will not deny its validity.  I can't honestly say that I share it, though.  Instead, I find that I remain grateful for the incredible work he has done as a focal point for a movement that was never about him personally.  I also find that, while many have lost faith in him as a spokesman of the movement, and again I cannot deny that loss of faith is well founded, I personally retain confidence in him as a person, a member of the movement, to carry the torch down whatever avenues remain open.

The movement is about far more than a presidential candidate or a presidential race.  So it is only a minor course adjustment for me to return to my Green roots and support Jill Stein for president, while I continue to work in the broader movement for social change that includes countless groups from Occupy to Idle No More, from Black Lives Matter to Tar Sands Blockade, with all the marches, kayaktivism, rallies, and occupations that they began long before Bernie, and will continue long after Bernie.

So, farewell, Bernie, thank you, and now on to a defense of Jill Stein in a campaign where many people will argue (falsely, as I will show below) that "A vote for Stein is a vote for Trump!"  No, it's not.  Let's examine some of the arguments.

*Since Hillary will now be granted the nomination in a ceremony that is more coronation than convention, why not just vote for her?  The answer to the “hold your nose and vote Blue” argument is simple for those who follow the campaigns and the issues.  To begin with the most damning, consider why Democrats and Independents alike were so appalled by the Bush, Jr. regime.  While this regime denied climate change, invested in coal and oil, obstructed gay rights, and defended torture, clearly the most onerous action was the entry into a devastating war, illegal and based on deliberate lies, that killed thousands of US citizens and millions of Iraqi and Afghan people, destabilizing the region and causing incalculable damage and blowback.  This is the reason Bush is such a hated president.  Thinking of this, consider that HRC voted in favor of that war.  Thus, HRC is complicit in the most heinous of Republican actions.  She is not an alternative to Republican policy, but a continuation of it.

Beyond this, HRC is on the wrong side of a host of issues that are of critical and urgent importance:  Fracking, coal, the TPP, health care, education costs, financial sector regulation, electoral reform, and campaign finance reform.  The TPP, in particular, is a potential death sentence for the planet, and obstructing the path to universal health care is a death sentence for millions of US citizens.  One may understand compromise as a strategy, but to embrace the exact opposite stance on the most critical issues is not compromise – it's suicide.

*Greens who oppose Hillary are merely parroting right-wing lies and conspiracy theories.  No, we're not.  If you review the above list of issue-centered concerns, you will find no mention of e-mails (and Bernie was right to dismiss this distraction at the outset), Benghazi, or Whitewater.  Trumpies might jump on those false accusations, but we stick to the real issues.  It might be worth noting that one of the reasons that Trumpies and other right-wing voices adhere to those common conspiracies instead of the real issues is that when it comes to the real issues – those mentioned above – the Trumpies and right-wingers are in complete agreement with HRC.  So they cannot attack her on those substantive grounds.  A notable exception is that Trump opposes the TPP, although not for the right reason:  As a real estate mogul, Trump cannot profit from moving manufacturing overseas to nations where there are few labor and environmental laws.  Since the TPP does not benefit him personally, he can afford to oppose it, thus capitalizing on public opposition to it, especially among workers who rightly fear overseas job loss.

*There are more than two choices.  One cornerstone attack is that there are only two choices for president:  the Democrat or the Republican.  This attack often comes in the form of the soundbite, “opposing Hillary is equal to voting for Trump.” For people under this belief, the only alternative to the two major parties is not voting, which they consider irresponsible.  They might be right about voting being the responsible thing to do, and they might not, but they ignore the fact that there are more than two parties to vote for.  There are eighteen parties.  I have been a member of the Green Party since before Bernie came along.  I have changed my registration to Democrat three times:  to vote for Jesse Jackson in 1984, for Barack Obama in 2008,  and Bernie Sanders in 2016.  If Bernie does not receive the Democratic nomination, I will change my registration back to Green and support the excellent candidate Jill Stein, a serious contender who has developed an enormous amount of political maturity over the course of her multiple runs for the Green Party.

*But...  Ralph Nader, 2000!  The argument that Nader cost Gore the election in 2000 as been adequately debunked here: [  (copy and paste the link)    http://disinfo.com/2010/11/debunked-the-myth-that-ralph-nader-cost-al-gore-the-2000-election/   ] .  In Florida 2000, Nader took 4% of the independent vote.  At the same time, 13 % of registered Democrats voted for Bush.  Therefore, it was not Nader who cost Florida the election, but Gore's failure to energize his own base.  The danger of repeating that error for the DNC is clear:  Bernie has energized the base to an astonishing degree, while Hillary captures votes solely on name recognition, preferential media treatment, and a perception of inevitability as  “Obama's chosen.”  I should add that I have never supported Nader for president, and in fact, I voted for Gore in 2000.  I admire Nader's work in consumer advocacy and journalism, but he was never a good presidential candidate, because he is abrasive and can be condescending.  Jill Stein, in contrast, is an outstanding, personable, eloquent, and presidential candidate.

It is also worth noting that Jill is not the only minor candidate in the race.  Gary Johnson is running on the Libertarian ticket, and currently polling in double digits nationally.  Libertarianism is a more conservative philosophy than the Green platform, so Johnson is as likely to draw off the Republican vote as Jill is to draw off the Democrat vote.  The notion that minor parties only draw down Democrat votes is part of the false narrative perpetuated by the Democratic party to trick people into voting for Democrats against their own interest and conscience.

Finally, in our worries about the spoiler argument in general, remember that Hillary voted for the very crime that we consider to be the worst act of the worst president in US history:  The Iraq war.  Getting her into office is not as important as standing against the system that puts war and profit ahead of human life.

*But...  Trump 2016!  Fear is a powerful motivator, and the corporate elites know this.  They use it, and are masters of it.  They know that fear shuts down the reasoning centers of the brain, and reduces people to an emotional fight-or-flight state.  In order to surmount the Trump fear argument, we must first overcome our fear.    Once we do so, and bring our emotional response under the scrutiny of reason, we find that the fear actually has little basis.


I find it is important to point out that if Democrats were so afraid of Trump, then they should have supported Bernie from day one, since he was clearly the one who was energizing the base and beating Republicans in the polls.  If the Democrats choose to field the weaker candidate, then it is not our responsibility to support that candidate no matter what.  It's not to us to give up on our dreams and support the candidate who opposes everything we stand for (see the issues above) because of their delusional support for the only Democrat who could conceivably lose to Trump.
Trump will never be president.  He never intended to be, and he never will be.  History shows that open bigots cannot be elected (since Reagan).  Both the Bush win and the Romney loss illustrate this. Even the Bushes knew that they had to at least pay lip service to minorities, including immigrants, gays, Native Americans, blacks, and women.  Without those blocks, they could never have been elected.  Romney lost because of his open disdain for minorities and persons of lower income.  Don't be fooled by Trump's sweep of Republican primaries.  He was only being supported by Republicans, a generally bigoted population.  He will not be sufficiently supported in the general election, and polling already shows this.  Even his own party is treating him as toxic.  He cannot win.  Don't worry about it.
The Republican Party is done with Trump, as he has served his purpose by scaring people into supporting HRC.  The Repubs were never afraid of HRC.  She is, in fact, their dream candidate: pro-corporate, pro-PAC, pro-Israel, against campaign finance reform.  They put up a hostile front, but it's all for show.  Even the front is collapsing as many top Repubs are saying they will support Hillary, because Trump is unstable.  As if they didn't know that from the beginning.  Just like the Democrats, the Republicans would rather lose the election than disappoint their corporate masters.  It's important to remember that elections have always been orchestrated by corporate interests.  The legal structure for super-PACs is merely the culmination of this fact.  Elections are no longer up for votes;  They are up for sale.  The corporate elites don't care whether a Democrat or Republican is in the whitehouse, but they benefit from making the electorate care. HRC will benefit them, so they created Trump as the monster to scare us into voting for her.  It worked pretty well on most people.  The fear of Trump suppressed their reasoning centers and led them to support Hillary over Bernie, despite the rational observation that Bernie was the better candidate to defeat Trump.  With an HRC victory, the corporations will consolidate their power in numerous ways:  They prove that the power of super-PACs to influence elections is insurmountable, thus establishing a permanent position for themselves as king-makers, ending democracy in the process.   They install a candidate who voted for war, wall street bailouts, maintaining insurance companies as gatekeepers  to for-profit health care, and deregulating wall street – everything that they wanted and we didn't.   As for the issues that divide Republicans and Democrats –  gun control, women's health, gay rights, immigrant rights – well, the corporate elites do not care about those things in the slightest.  They are perfect smokescreen issues to let us fight to the death over, while they laugh all the way to the bank.  So, while we sit here voting for Hillary because we're afraid of Trump, they're celebrating because they were never afraid of Trump, only of Bernie.


*Voting for minor parties is just throwing away your vote.  No, it isn't.  Throwing away your vote is voting for someone you don't believe in because you think you have no other options.  There are really two systems you can vote for.  You can vote for a two-party system that has made halting progress on civil rights while making rapid and sure progress at consolidating corporate control over every major decision made in the United States.  Or you can vote for alternatives that promote democracy and community-minded thinking.  Voting against your own interest because you think you cannot win is irrational.  We don't do what's right because we think we can win.  We do what's right because it's right.  We may not win this time, and we may not win next time, but every inch we move forward is another inch toward victory.  The only way to lose is to give up.  That's what I would call throwing away your vote and your voice.

So, what then?  It's not my purpose here to convince people what they should do, only to argue that we should act out of conviction, not out of fear, and to suggest that there are other options than voting against your own belief, conscience, or interest.


I will vote for Jill Stein.  Jill might not win, but moving up her poll numbers is an important statement.  Every percentage point is an argument to others that this is a voice worth listening to, this is a legitimate and real alternative.  I believe in the Green platform (which has everything that Bernie's platform had, and even better on some issues), and I am inspired by the international nature of the Green Party.  This party began in Germany in 1980, and has had a significant global presence ever since.  Please visit the website of the United States Green Party to learn more.

It's never been just a presidential campaign.  The Bernie campaign grew out of diverse movements that had already gained enormous momentum across the nation long before Bernie announced his candidacy.  Occupy, the climate movement, Tar Sands Blockade, kayaktivists, the anti-fracking movement, movements for net neutrality and against the TPP, Black Lives Matter and other racial, police, and economic justice movements, indigenous movements like Idle No More, cyber-activists like Anonymous, the BDS movement – all of these found a resonance with the Bernie campaign, and found in the man a champion.  But he was never more than a spokesperson.  To his enormous credit, Bernie was always very clear about that with his slogan:  “Not me, us.”  The movement was ours all along, it never belonged to him.  If the system succeeds in marginalizing and sidelining Bernie, that will do nothing at all to slow or depress the movements.  The Bernie campaign offered us a great and extended opportunity to coalesce our movements, gain a huge public platform, and get our message out despite active and pervasive media suppression.  We have learned new techniques and forged new connections.   We are stronger than ever, and we are legion.  We fight on, and we win.  Consider these victories already achieved:

“Democratic socialism” is no longer a “dirty word” in US political discourse.
“The 1%” has permanently entered the vocabulary of the discourse.
Universal health care and education have demonstrated broad popular support.
Shell was blocked from entering the Arctic.
Numerous gas pipelines have been disrupted and abandoned.
Gun control has shown up to 90% popular support and has reached a congressional vote.
Marijuana is being progressively decriminalized.
Increasing attention has been drawn to police violence and racism.
A major campaign has been run without super-PAC money that presented a substantial challenge to the establishment.
While few of these are outright victories, they definitely represent significant progress in the right direction.  And we have only begun to fight.  And this must be our understanding.  A Hillary candidacy would not be the end of our movement, nor would it be the beginning.  It is simply one event in the struggle.

Bernie is not the candidate, but there are other options than merely supporting Hillary, and I consider the option of supporting Hillary to be unacceptable.  I will back Jill Stein and all of the movements that I have been supporting and participating in all along.  Anybody who wants to give me shit about that for any reason can reread everything I just wrote, act in their own conscience, and bite me.

Jill, Bernie, and the Movement: A defense of voting for Jill Stein in 2016

To undertake right action should not need defense.  However, in the complex political climate of the moment, the right action is not clear, and there are many who attack those who are taking what seems to be the right action to one person, but not to another.  Some of the most virulent of these attacks are reserved for those who choose not to support Hillary Clinton even she becomes the democratic nominee.  The following is presented in their defense.

I begin with discussion of the possibilities that remain for a Bernie presidential candidacy, which would simplify matters considerably, but which I calculate to be unlikely.

As of this writing, Bernie could still be the Democratic nominee.  There has been much discussion as to whether the nomination process was rigged.  It was.  I take that as a given, an obvious fact to anyone who can read.  However, the nominating process is not over until the convention, and anything can happen up to that point.  Everyone acknowledges that a Bernie nomination is a long shot.  However, there are avenues:

• HRC is under investigation and could be indicted.  I consider this unlikely, because, like all wealthy and well-connected politicians, she is in a position to easily put herself above the law. If high-level political operatives could be indicted and convicted for their crimes, there would be few presidents who escaped impeachment or jail.  It is now well known that crimes were committed at high levels under the Reagan, Clinton and Bush  administrations, yet no president was ever held accountable in any real way.  I do not expect we can consider HRC to be any different.
• The DNC, at the convention, could realign its superdelegates behind Bernie on the grounds that he is more likely to defeat Trump.  Yes, they could, but I doubt that they will.  The DNC has backed HRC relentlessly, despite polling showing her more vulnerable to Trump, for months. My personal take on this is that the DNC would rather lose the election than give their party over to a candidate who will represent the people over the corporations whose tools the DNC are.  Let's be clear:  Bernie represents a threat to the establishment, and they hate him unto death, and will do all in their power – including total self-destructon – to eliminate that threat.
• California is still being counted, and many counties are flipping for Bernie.  True, and that would be great.  However, I do not think that, on its own, will be enough to propel Bernie to the nomination.  In order to win the nomination outright, Bernie needed to sweep California decisively enough to overcome even the unfair process to which he was subjected.  That did not happen.

As of this writing, I have definitely not written Bernie off, and if he wins the nomination, then the process forward is simple and clear:  Help carry Bernie to a sweeping victory and into the whitehouse.  The remainder of this discussion is carried under the assumption, however likely, that Bernie does not get the nomination, because only then does the path become much less clear.

As of this writing, Bernie may yet run as an independent or Green.  Sure, he might, but I find that highly doubtful.  Bernie is a person of honor.  When he signed on to the Democratic Party he did so honorably, with the understanding that if he loses the nomination, he is still a member of the party and owes it his loyalty.  I believe he will honor that commitment, and I will not fault him for it.  Furthermore, although I will debunk the spoiler argument below, I believe Bernie is acutely aware of the spoiler perception, and he will stridently avoid that role.   Of course, if Bernie does run as an independent or Green, then the path forward is simple:  We help carry Bernie to a sweeping victory and into the whitehouse.  However it is not something to expect, and again, the remainder of this discussion concerns what to do if Bernie is not a candidate for the presidency under any party.

If Hillary gets the nomination, why not just vote for her?  The answer to the “hold your nose and vote Blue” argument is simple for those who follow the campaigns and the issues.  To begin with the most damning, consider why Democrats and Independents alike were so appalled by the Bush, Jr. regime.  While this regime denied climate change, invested in coal and oil, obstructed gay rights, and defended torture, clearly the most onerous action was the entry into a devastating war, illegal and based on deliberate lies, that killed thousands of US citizens and millions of Iraqi and Afghan people, destabilizing the region and causing incalculable damage and blowback.  This is the reason Bush is such a hated president.  Thinking of this, consider that HRC voted in favor of that war.  Thus, HRC is complicit in the most heinous of Republican actions.  She is not an alternative to Republican policy, but a continuation of it.

Beyond this, HRC is on the wrong side of a host of issues that are of critical and urgent importance:  Fracking, coal, the TPP, health care, education costs, financial sector regulation, electoral reform, and campaign finance reform.  The TPP, in particular, is a potential death sentence for the planet, and obstructing the path to universal health care is a death sentence for millions of US citizens.  One may understand compromise as a strategy, but to embrace the exact opposite stance on the most critical issues is not compromise – it's suicide.

Bernistas who oppose Hillary are merely parroting right-wing lies and conspiracy theories.  No, we're not.  If you review the above list of issue-centered concerns, you will find no mention of e-mails (and Bernie was right to dismiss this distraction at the outset), Benghazi, or Whitewater.  Trumpies might jump on those false accusations, but we stick to the real issues.  It might be worth noting that one of the reasons that Trumpies and other right-wing voices adhere to those common conspiracies instead of the real issues is that when it comes to the real issues – those mentioned above – the Trumpies and right-wingers are in complete agreement with HRC.  So they cannot attack her on those substantive grounds.  A notable exception is that Trump opposes the TPP, although not for the right reason:  As a real estate mogul, Trump cannot profit from moving manufacturing overseas to nations where there are few labor and environmental laws.  Since the TPP does not benefit him personally, he can afford to oppose it, thus capitalizing on public opposition to it, especially among workers who rightly fear overseas job loss.

There are more than two choices.  One cornerstone attack is that there are only two choices for president:  the Democrat or the Republican.  This attack often comes in the form of the soundbite, “opposing Hillary is equal to voting for Trump.” For people under this belief, the only alternative to the two major parties is not voting, which they consider irresponsible.  They might be right about voting being the responsible thing to do, and they might not, but they ignore the fact that there are more than two parties to vote for.  There are eighteen parties.  I have been a member of the Green Party since before Bernie came along.  I have changed my registration to Democrat three times:  to vote for Jesse Jackson in 1984, for Barack Obama in 2008,  and Bernie Sanders in 2016.  If Bernie does not receive the Democratic nomination, I will change my registration back to Green and support the excellent candidate Jill Stein, a serious contender who has developed an enormous amount of political maturity over the course of her multiple runs for the Green Party.

But...  Ralph Nader, 2000!  The argument that Nader cost Gore the election in 2000 as been adequately debunked here: [  (copy and paste the link)    http://disinfo.com/2010/11/debunked-the-myth-that-ralph-nader-cost-al-gore-the-2000-election/   ] .  In Florida 2000, Nader took 4% of the independent vote.  At the same time, 13 % of registered Democrats voted for Bush.  Therefore, it was not Nader who cost Florida the election, but Gore's failure to energize his own base.  The danger of repeating that error for the DNC is clear:  Bernie has energized the base to an astonishing degree, while Hillary captures votes solely on name recognition, preferential media treatment, and a perception of inevitability as  “Obama's chosen.”  I should add that I have never supported Nader for president, and in fact, I voted for Gore in 2000.  I admire Nader's work in consumer advocacy and journalism, but he was never a good presidential candidate, because he is abrasive and can be condescending.  Jill Stein, in contrast, is an outstanding, personable, eloquent, and presidential candidate.

It is also worth noting that Jill is not the only minor candidate in the race.  Gary Johnson is running on the Libertarian ticket, and currently polling in double digits nationally.  Libertarianism is a more conservative philosophy than the Green platform, so Johnson is as likely to draw off the Republican vote as Jill is to draw off the Democrat vote.  The notion that minor parties only draw down Democrat votes is part of the false narrative perpetuated by the Democratic party to trick people into voting for Democrats against their own interest and conscience.

Finally, in our worries about the spoiler argument in general, remember that Hillary voted for the very crime that we consider to be the worst act of the worst president in US history:  The Iraq war.  Getting her into office is not as important as standing against the system that puts war and profit ahead of human life.

But...  Trump 2016!  Fear is a powerful motivator, and the corporate elites know this.  They use it, and are masters of it.  They know that fear shuts down the reasoning centers of the brain, and reduces people to an emotional fight-or-flight state.  In order to surmount the Trump fear argument, we must first overcome our fear.    Once we do so, and bring our emotional response under the scrutiny of reason, we find that the fear actually has little basis.

• I find it is important to point out that if Democrats were so afraid of Trump, then they should have supported Bernie from day one, since he was clearly the one who was energizing the base and beating Republicans in the polls.  If the Democrats choose to field the weaker candidate, then it is not our responsibility to support that candidate no matter what.  It's not to us to give up on our dreams and support the candidate who opposes everything we stand for (see the issues above) because of their delusional support for the only Democrat who could conceivably lose to Trump.
• Trump will never be president.  He never intended to be, and he never will be.  History shows that open bigots cannot be elected (since Reagan).  Both the Bush win and the Romney loss illustrate this. Even the Bushes knew that they had to at least pay lip service to minorities, including immigrants, gays, Native Americans, blacks, and women.  Without those blocks, they could never have been elected.  Romney lost because of his open disdain for minorities and persons of lower income.  Don't be fooled by Trump's sweep of Republican primaries.  He was only being supported by Republicans, a generally bigoted population.  He will not be sufficiently supported in the general election, and polling already shows this.  Even his own party is treating him as toxic.  He cannot win.  Don't worry about it.
• The Republican Party is done with Trump, as he has served his purpose by scaring people into supporting HRC.  The Repubs were never afraid of HRC.  She is, in fact, their dream candidate: pro-corporate, pro-PAC, pro-Israel, against campaign finance reform.  They put up a hostile front, but it's all for show.  Even the front is collapsing as many top Repubs are saying they will support Hillary, because Trump is unstable.  As if they didn't know that from the beginning.  Just like the Democrats, the Republicans would rather lose the election than disappoint their corporate masters.  It's important to remember that elections have always been orchestrated by corporate interests.  The legal structure for super-PACs is merely the culmination of this fact.  Elections are no longer up for votes;  They are up for sale.  The corporate elites don't care whether a Democrat or Republican is in the whitehouse, but they benefit from making the electorate care. HRC will benefit them, so they created Trump as the monster to scare us into voting for her.  It worked pretty well on most people.  The fear of Trump suppressed their reasoning centers and led them to support Hillary over Bernie, despite the rational observation that Bernie was the better candidate to defeat Trump.  With an HRC victory, the corporations will consolidate their power in numerous ways:  They prove that the power of super-PACs to influence elections is insurmountable, thus establishing a permanent position for themselves as king-makers, ending democracy in the process.   They install a candidate who voted for war, wall street bailouts, maintaining insurance companies as gatekeepers  to for-profit health care, and deregulating wall street – everything that they wanted and we didn't.   As for the issues that divide Republicans and Democrats –  gun control, women's health, gay rights, immigrant rights – well, the corporate elites do not care about those things in the slightest.  They are perfect smokescreen issues to let us fight to the death over, while they laugh all the way to the bank.  So, while we sit here voting for Hillary because we're afraid of Trump, they're celebrating because they were never afraid of Trump, only of Bernie.

Voting for minor parties is just throwing away your vote.  No, it isn't.  Throwing away your vote is voting for someone you don't believe in because you think you have no other options.  There are really two systems you can vote for.  You can vote for a two-party system that has made halting progress on civil rights while making rapid and sure progress at consolidating corporate control over every major decision made in the United States.  Or you can vote for alternatives that promote democracy and community-minded thinking.  Voting against your own interest because you think you cannot win is irrational.  We don't do what's right because we think we can win.  We do what's right because it's right.  We may not win this time, and we may not win next time, but every inch we move forward is another inch toward victory.  The only way to lose is to give up.  That's what I would call throwing away your vote and your voice.

So, what then?  It's not my purpose here to convince people what they should do, only to argue that we should act out of conviction, not out of fear, and to suggest that there are other options than voting against your own belief, conscience, or interest.

• If Bernie does not get the nomination, I will vote for Jill Stein.  Jill might not win, but moving up her poll numbers is an important statement.  Every percentage point is an argument to others that this is a voice worth listening to, this is a legitimate and real alternative.  I believe in the Green platform (which has everything that Bernie's platform has), and I am inspired by the international nature of the Green Party.  This party began in Germany in 1980, and has had a significant global presence ever since.  Please visit the website of the United States Green Party to learn more.
• It's never been just a presidential campaign.  The Bernie campaign grew out of diverse movements that had already gained enormous momentum across the nation long before Bernie announced his candidacy.  Occupy, the climate movement, Tar Sands Blockade, kayaktivists, the anti-fracking movement, movements for net neutrality and against the TPP, Black Lives Matter and other racial, police, and economic justice movements, indigenous movements like Idle No More, cyber-activists like Anonymous, the BDS movement – all of these found a resonance with the Bernie campaign, and found in the man a champion.  But he was never more than a spokesperson.  To his enormous credit, Bernie was always very clear about that with his slogan:  “Not me, us.”  The movement was ours all along, it never belonged to him.  If the system succeeds in marginalizing and sidelining Bernie, that will do nothing at all to slow or depress the movements.  The Bernie campaign offered us a great and extended opportunity to coalesce our movements, gain a huge public platform, and get our message out despite active and pervasive media suppression.  We have learned new techniques and forged new connections.   We are stronger than ever, and we are legion.  We fight on, and we win.  Consider these victories already achieved:  
• “Democratic socialism” is no longer a “dirty word” in US political discourse.  
• “The 1%” has permanently entered the vocabulary of the discourse.  
• Universal health care and education have demonstrated broad popular support.
• Shell was blocked from entering the Arctic.
• Numerous gas pipelines have been disrupted and abandoned.
• Gun control has shown up to 90% popular support and has reached a congressional vote.
• Marijuana is being progressively decriminalized.
• Increasing attention has been drawn to police violence and racism.
• A major campaign has been run without super-PAC money that presented a substantial challenge to the establishment.
• While few of these are outright victories, they definitely represent significant progress in the right direction.  And we have only begun to fight.  And this must be our understanding.  A Hillary candidacy would not be the end of our movement, nor would it be the beginning.  It is simply one event in the struggle.

While I still hope the Democratic National Committee is intelligent enough to select the winning candidate, I'm afraid that I doubt that they are.  Or, more accurately, I doubt if winning the election is their real goal – keeping their corporate gravy train is the real goal, and that means backing HRC whether she wins or loses.

If Bernie is the candidate, then our decision is easy:  back him all the way.  It could still happen.  But if Bernie is not the candidate, there are other options than merely supporting Hillary, and I consider the option of supporting Hillary to be unacceptable.  I will back Jill Stein and all of the movements that I have been supporting and participating in all along.  Anybody who wants to give me shit about that for any reason can reread everything I just wrote, act in their own conscience, and bite me.