Politics, Punditry & Peace

Trinity, Mother Nature, and Two Weeks on the Road

Change, Election 2018, Mothers & Others, Travel, Uncategorized

I am eating breakfast at a Fairfield Inn in Tucumcari. And drinking coffee. Lots of coffee. I would like to make it home today. Sticking to the Interstate route, 40 to 25 to 10 adds an hour to the trip. So I’m getting on US 54 and heading SW cutting across New Mexico until I hit I10. We will see if I get tired and want to stop before Tucson. I’m getting an early start so I’m hoping for seeing the furry crew tonight: Hubster, Buddy, Jujube, Zippy, and Randy, though Randy has no fur. Randy is a turtle. Hubster is human.

This route will take me through Alamagordo. Does the name ring a bell? It should. The Trinity Test exploded the first atomic bomb at a site near Alamogordo. This was conducted by the Los Alamos scientists in 1945. Together all this was known as the Manhattan Project.

I will be passing by historic land, history thick in the air and the fabric of the universe today. I will maintain an air of reverence for how the world changed through events and processes transpired in that sandy country.

I have previously stopped at the Clovis site in the Blackwater Draw. Been through Roswell, too, but did not stop. To my mind the fervor of fictive narratives and the mythos of Roswell has always been related to the cultural vibrations of what we loosed on the world with Trinity.

Nothing quite as world-changing apparently happened via the elections yesterday. The patriarchy, the oligarchies, the kleptocracies, the corporatocracies are all alive and moving. But the era of kratocracy is he crumbling. You cannot put the genie back in the bottle keep the Jeannies out of office. This century 1945 – 2045 has framed types of change and rates of change which are truly unEarthly and out of touch with any sort of Gaian balance.

Mother Nature. Needed now more than ever.

Women, Information, and Estates of Governance

ACT, Change, Communication, Community, Election 2018, Featured Stories, Information, KNOW, Political Selves, Politics and Government

Women require information to govern in a democratic fashion just as do men. Understanding the evolution of a government, the systems from which it emerged, is essential to preservation, and betterment, of that government. Trajectories are real aspects of living systems and exert influence on contemporary processes.

From 18th century France, there were three estates of society:

the clergy (religious heads)
the nobility (rulers)
the commoners (everyone else who is not a slave)

Among the political commentators and thinkers, the media has been labelled as the fourth estate of modern day.

In modern democracy, the three pillars include:

the legislature (makes laws)
the executive (president or prime minister)
the judiciary (the courts)

The media has been labeled as the fourth estate of modern society.
The Fifth Estate, which has been labeled citizen journalism, has beeen broken down, I would argue incorrectly, into two types of journalism. The first being an extension of The Fourth Estate and the second as some sort of standalone pillar. In fact, to take the property analogies of estates and pillars of society one step further, I contend that information that can stand alone apart from a voice that speaks it, as is the case in a pamphlet, a book, or a digital transmission is the beam, brace, or buttress that makes pillars on estates into the cultural home in which we live.
Living systems, and we live within and are a part of a living system, are open systems.

I am not going to go any deeper into systems theory, self- organizing systems, or cybernetics, (but I would note, as an aside, that if you want to understand systems science through a woman’s eye, look at some Lynn Margulis quotes.)

Life requires change and the ability to bring in new elements and energy, as well as to delete, turn-off, or store-away other elements and processes, including tinformation paths and flow.
The transitions we are experiencing in the world are becoming more and more dramatic as we are living on the fulcrum of a tipping point where we cannot long balance; change will happen and the slightest actions, or inaction, by individuals can and will change the direction, the trajectory, of the path upon which we will find ourselves.
We do not know how this will all shake out. New technology brings new behavior. Gutenberg could not have known, nor could Martin Luther, that when Luther posted his 95 Theses, 500 years ago, that others would find his words so moving that they would use the new tech of the printing press to print and distribute hundreds, then thousands, of copies of Luther’s discussion points in what was literally the first viral post.

Women’s voices are strong, and the distributed nature of the digital web is quite feminine and whether we are using hashtags (#meto #timesup #shepersisted) or writing our own theses, we are engaged in public communication as people have been since the first humans gathered around an evening fire. Citizen journalism is a good thing if done with care. Most of us know which people we can rely on to give us good information. We know which bloggers, editorial writers, and cartooniswts we can trust to base their works, including opinion pieces, to be based in fact. How those facts are interwoven into “truths” are far more problematic. When we give our time and eyes to uncritically watching or reading “news” that is not reporting facts but into building viewers or followers, we are hurting ourselves and world that we communally build with our consumption and conversations.
We must, as women who are approaching 100 years of having the vote in the United States, become as responsible and careful with the information we create or share as we are with the food we give our children and families to build bodies. We are powerful and we hold the information that builds our children’s minds and our future knowledge used by our society in our hands.
Our mothers and grandmotherws figured out how to make cakes during the rationing of sugar during World War II.
We must figure out how to make our homes and businesses equally celebratory as we ration ourselves to verified information.
We must educate ourselves and navigate the current estates and pillars with a fervor that only mothers acting to preserve what they love can act.

You Knew A Rant Was Coming!

Blogging & Writing, Creekside Commentary, Politics and Government, Spirituality & Thought

Why are people so stupid? Why do people support actions and people that work against there own interests? They do you know. It is a Horatio Alger thing. Only smart people will get that reference.
Well, I chalk it up (maybe I should say chuck it up) to evolution. Yep. Most people, even really educated ones, do not understand the concept of evolution. Survival of the fittest is a rather misleading shorthand phrase. Fittest does not mean best. Fit only means having reproduced oneself biologically. If you live to pass on your traits you have been successful evolutionarily. You are fit. The fittest means leaving behind the most surviving offspring.

Intelligence is not a fit trait. At least not high intelligence. The more educated someone is the fewer children that person is likely to have. Presuming education equates at some level with intelligence, having fewer children than everyone else is going to mean there are very few intelligent people in the population.
Culture is supposed to evade this fact of life by being the way we pass on information outside of the biological dictates of genetics. Culture allows us pass on knowledge to individuals who share no family connections with us.
Basically, intelligence helps us all, but it doesn’t stop the ignorant from overpopulating the planet by at least one half.
And who am I calling stupid? You really want me to make enemies don’t you?

Well adherents of the extremist Quiverfull brand of über-patriarchal fundamentalism for one. Actually the males in this cult are exhibiting an often-practiced male animal behavior. It is the social chador American ultra-conservative American Fundamentalism.
Fox News watchers, secondly. ’nuff said.
Climate change deniers.
Namby-Pamby Democrats who try to avoid any strong and or progressive stands.
Republicans who know they are liars.

If we do not start using the knowledge we have, then well, we deserve the massive multi-system collapse that awaits us within just a few years from economic, environmental, and climatic catastrophes.

Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe is almost certainly the next chair of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. He is an idiot.
There I ranted. You can stop holding your breath now.

The Personal Nature of Politics

Blogging & Writing, Creekside Commentary, Late Boomer, Politics and Government

Those who know me fairly well, or know me over time, will know that I have strong political beliefs. Those who do not know me but have read recent pieces I have written may be surprised that I would talk politics when my brother is in hospice and his life weighs so heavily on my heart and soul.
My brother, the little brother of my family, is nine years older than me. I was born into a family of four brothers who were at various points between 9 and 18 years of age when I was born.

Nancy Hill and Brothers 1957 — Summer of 1957: Roger, Nancy, Jim, Dave, and Max

Most of us do not consciously think about family as a concept much while we are young. Family, like so many essential elements of human life, is so integral to our identities that we do not, cannot, separate the concept from our very selves. As a deviant (yes I am one, and it is okay) a psychological only, an analytical observer from an early age, and an accidental after-thought to a family, I probably think about family in relationship to culture and identity more than most people.
Roger is the only brother I actually remember as a brother, as someone with whom I remember playing. Cops and robbers – I was the robber in jail (my crib,) – Cowboys and Indians, and so on in a litany of 1950s-influenced, early-1960s game variations.
These were profound and defining memories that distinguished him from my older brothers whom I loved, but who seemed more like what was probably more typical of an avuncular relationship.
His actions, viewed from a sisterly perspective, taught me the ways of the real world.

My first political discussion was with him. I was probably about four or five years old and we were walking together up from the barnyard to chicken coop. The conversation topic was the Cold War and propaganda. I said something about how the Russians would find our farm to be a wonderful place. He laughed and said he didn’t think so.
My first awareness of global politics rending apart personal lives was with him. In 1968 he walked across a street in Hue and the television screens of a hundred thousand homes, including mine, on the nightly news, helmetless, mustached, with an M14 slung over his shoulder.
My first awareness of police targeting of individuals was when I was in high school and the local cops began a decades long vendetta to jail him, one of those purportedly whacked out vets, for pot.
I first kept silent about personal assault when I was sexually assaulted when I was 15. I could not let anyone know because I knew he that if he knew, he would kill the rapist and I did not want my brother to be executed or serve life in prison.

War, a needless war against an ideological boogeyman, communism, half-way around the world from where we lived, sliced and diced his flesh like so much meat. It hurt and hardened his psyche in a way that still breaks my heart. He was the last soldier out of Khe Sanh, horrifically wounded there during the first week of August, in 1968, six weeks after the official end of the battle.

Through him I learned that countries and the economies in which those countries operate use the children of the poor, the underclass (whether through conscription or the economic draft) as cannon fodder and regard us as little more than slaves and sub-humans. I see everything from taxation, in which we are taught to use the phrase “income tax” when we refer to wage taxes (to the exclusion of taxes on making profit from money, which is what income is) to election law and the Citizens United Supreme Court decision (talk about double speak!) that grants corporations, and the families they serve, the rights of individuals with none of the responsibilities, through this lens.
The pain and horror my brother suffered, because of war, impacted my family and all we were and are, and all we did and do, since the the late 1960s.
Women, the mothers-sisters-wives-daughters of the warriors who fight for the ruling classes and corporations, are the ones who must change our culture. The price the workers and soldiers pay to preserve a society that cares nothing for them is a high one. The price is the destruction and permanent underclass status of the families we women build and nurture.
My brother taught me this. It is political. It is personal.

My BlogHer Retrospective: The Early Experience

Blogging & Writing

This year the BlogHer Conference, that is being billed as a “Selfiebration,” returns to the place it all began 10 years ago in San Jose – Silicon Valley.

So between now and the start of the conference I will be posting about various aspects of my journey with BlogHer since I joined the online community in late 2005 or early 2006.
Back when I first traveled to California in the 70s I think I heard people refer to it as The South Bay. This was before Silicon Valley. Things change. My blogging certainly has changed through time. I started out as a pop culture demographic blogger in my first bloggy incarnation:

late-boomers — Wayback Machine capture of Late-boomers.com from 2001.

My goal way back then, 2001 and before, was to get the notion of the quite distinct groups within the Baby Boomer Generation differentiated into cohorts. I could find no one else using the term “Late Boomer” back then, so my relentless elists, newsletter and website posts at the turn of the millennium were about my cohort, which I termed Late-Boomers, who were the last half of the children born during what was called the post-WWII baby boom. I succeeded.
After that I worked for peace with the group CodePink.
Back in 2007 I still used pseudonyms on the internet. Dependent upon the site, topic, and time, I was either thewordwench, cuppakona, pinktucson, or artpax, unless I was in the virtual world of Second Life® where I was Ana Herzog. The first post I can find that I made on BlogHer.com was made as artpax:

I had started seriously questioning the utility of pseudonyms, and I was rapidly beginning to think that attempts at anonymity were silly. But a lot of bloggers I met at my first BlogHer conference were attending the conference anonymously too. I haven’t noticed that as much at more recent BlogHer events.

(It was not the first BlogHer conference that I tried to attend – I had volunteered to do podcasting at the 2006 conference before my Hubby had a hissy fit and I had to bail. Boy oh boy, that was a year full of stories – that I have as yet to tell.)

I billed myself as a political blogger at the time. I’d already run afoul of media squelching my stories. Huff Po would not allow any links to my blog due to profanity, or so they said. But I suspect that fascistic trolls has complained about blog and they banned links without even checking. I reported on stories back then that no one else was covering. The following pics and snippet of text is mine:
Even back then I was outside the Mommy Blogger mainstream, and truth be told I was a bit sad that I was, as always, outside the in-group. I should have tried to tag along with Anne-Marie, my wonderful roomie, of This Mama Cooks fame to meet some of her Foodie and Silicon Valley Moms friends. But instead I went to the parties alone and met some nice people, but didn’t really connect with anyone else. I was not able to book a room in the main conference hotel. I had just spent the last 5 months in Northeastern Indiana caring for my elderly mother and then emptying out her home after her death in late June.
Truth be told, I was a bit shell shocked; I knew I needed to attend this conference. I needed – far more than I knew -– to surround myself with smart, vital women’s energy, and there was so much of it there on Navy Pier. It lifted me up and carried me along until I could land back in my Tucson life and home and begin my non-political writing phase. That did not go very well. I did not give up my political blog until 20011.
My goal there was to help people understand that nearly all women want peace, that we had been lied to by war criminals, and that if we work together we can make our voices heard, even when the media will not cover it. I blogged, and some of the things I did (such as CODEPINK in SecondLife) were parodied on The Daily Show.

CODEPINK SL was pretty much myself along with a great supportive guy in Venice Beach, CA. I, in my Ana Herzog avatar, had disrupted military presentations in SL, and protested Newt Gingrich when he spoke on Virtual Capital Hill, and participated in anti-G8 European-organized rallies. I blogged about these adventures at: VIRTUAL PINK – CODEPINK IN THE METAVERSE. Again, I think I met some of my goals. But goals change.
The goals that began evolving at that first conference attendance at BlogHer 2007 gradually replaced many of the goals of my second blogging incarnation.
I never bought into being a vehicle for corporate porridge-sales or relentless pursuit of the pageview, but I learned that I knew a ton about marketing and that contemporary marketing was using all the suggested practices for implementation of the theory I studied decades ago when semiotic methodology was first being introduced to students beyond Departments of Philosophy. Women and our words on the internet were going to change everything. Welcome to my third bloggy incarnation. It has had some shifts, and fits and starts along the way but being a part of a womens’ voice being heard globally underlies all I do in my writing world.

Retrograde Politics in the U.S.

Blogging & Writing, Election 2016, Politics and Government

I sometimes wish I could ignore stupidity, corruption, and the various and insidious old boy networks that are everywhere I look. I try to ignore them, I really do, but politics is everywhere. And most often, or so it seems to me, the politically motivated are stupid, corrupt and play favors with abandon.
I do not think that women are any more inclined to saintly behavior than men, but when women comprise a critical mass of any governing or managing body, behavior changes. Critical mass theory exists beyond political interpretations. It just helps to describe how people behave in groups.
You can see it in Rwanda where consciously constructed unity among women helped rebuild and begin to heal the country across political divides reinforced by torture, horror, and loss experienced during and after the genocide.

Agnès Mukabaranga, a founding member of the FFRP who is still serving in the Senate, has described how redefining themselves as women first gave them greater strength in an otherwise weak position.

This is as technical as I am going to get. Behavior changes, statistically, in groups dependent upon the composition of those groups.
Promising items from a moral menu does not mean the items can be made, let alone served up in a palatable fashion. This is why blue-collar folks often vote against their own interests. It is easier to believe an overall political party pitch that aligns with how you would like things to be than to do the research to understand who has purchased the loyalty of specific politicians, political action committees, and government access.
I have been extremely upset by a couple of things I have heard said, by women, in the last few weeks. I recently told a woman that I didn’t like the person who owned a certain well-known hosting company. After I explained why I just couldn’t channel any of my funds to this guy for anything, she said, “Oh I can’t pay attention to that sort of thing or I wouldn’t be able to buy anything.” She’s right though; consistency, especially in triple bottom line matters, is difficult. But I cannot understand, no matter how hard I try, why a bit of effort made within the realm of political economy is so distasteful to so many women and blue collar workers.

Perhaps a critical mass of women would make a difference?

The other disturbing interaction happened when I previously had gotten fed up to the gills with stupidity and politics and people supporting companies that outsource everything and will not pay their employees a living wage or provide full-time employment so the taxpayer picks up the check for fail-safes when basic needs cannot be met. I said that I see no reason for me to be providing corporate welfare so corporations can rake in obscene amounts of profit which then does not circulate back into the economy but rather is squirreled away offshore and out of the country only to then have to pick up the bills for basic health and welfare of these same companies employees. In response to this a friend from childhood informed me that no one can find a job where she lives, and everyone shops at Wal-Mart because people can no longer afford the gas to drive to the next biggest town where there are stores other than Wal-Mart. The lack of understanding here was sad, but not unexpected, but what was said next was horrifying. It was that she would much rather, and that we should, pay for sterilization of the stupid, loud-mouthed people screaming about needing their money now, with which she had interacted with in a combined social service waiting area. I was horrified to hear such vile ideas from someone with whomI grew up.
These extremes of wealthy and erudite women who lack the time and inclination to allow their pocketbooks to speak and rural, blue-collar/high-school educated women who do not have the money or inclination to allow their pocketbooks to speak are extremely disturbing in their similarity.
What will it take for women to wake up and take an interest in the politics of the nation and our political economy? Do we have to return, as parts of the country already have, to the days of having our daughters and sisters die with blood pouring from between their legs in back alleys from the lack of access to full reproductive care? Do we allow the people who are to represent and act on our behalf in Washington, D.C. to tank our economy and the world’s, and create a global depression, because they will not put their political parties and political campaigns long enough to do the people’s work? Do we allow media to coordinate their coverage of the story of the day and allow this coverage to be made up of mimeographed talking points that slither from the mouths of agreed upon spokespersons pledged to loyalty by their corporate masters?
If we don’t stop this crap right now, there is no one to blame but ourselves. Surely we are not going to allow ourselves to walk any further along the path to bloody revolution between warring factions.
I can’t bring myself to write about apps for Halloween, or recipes for fall, like a good little Stepford blogger. How can we act? What will it take to get you to act? What should I do?
——–
Wilber, R. 2011. Lessons from Rwanda: How Women Transform Governance. Solutions. Vol 2, No. 2. pp. – –

Oliver, p. 1985. A Thoery of the Critical Mass. I. Interdependence, Group Heterogeneity, and the Production of Collective Action.

Politics, Punditry & Peace

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